"So, Kakuta," rumbled Isoroku Yamamoto. "You have broken radio silence again."
"Yes, Admiral…"
At this point, Kakuta's nerve failed him. He groped for the right words to carry them through the next few minutes, and nothing came. The roar of the Panther's engine filled the warm, close space. He was acutely aware of the vibration of the airframe and the eyes of the men around him, boring in, urging him to speak. But what could he say that would not mark him as a lunatic? The right form of words. That was all he needed. Their refusal to take shape in his mind was absolutely maddening. He might never…
"Admiral Yamamoto."
It was Hidaka.
"Who is this?" Yamamoto demanded.
"Lieutenant Commander Jisaku Hidaka, of the Ryujo, sir. I am accompanying Admiral Kakuta on this mission. It was on my initiative that we undertook it."
"No!" mouthed Kakuta as his subordinate bared his neck to the blade. The dishonor of allowing one's inferior to accept blame for such a perilous scheme-he might never live it down.
"So," snarled Yamamoto. "Another mutineer. Or are you just a maniac, Commander?"
"You will think us both maniacs, initially, Admiral. But we have come as saviors. If we speak falsely, let the spirits of our ancestors bear the shame."
"Oh, they shall bear a heavy burden of shame, believe me, Hidaka."
"I believe not, Admiral. You were steaming toward defeat and catastrophe. We can avert that, if you will just hear us out."
"I am listening. No doubt the Americans are listening, as well. The whole world is waiting on you, Lieutenant Commander Hidaka."
"Here we are now, entertain us," Moertopo sung under his breath.
Hidaka shot him a withering look. The reference meant nothing to him, but the potentially disastrous effect of that one line of English did not bear thinking about.
"Admiral Yamamoto, begging your pardon, but we shall not even attempt to explain ourselves over the radio. It would be futile. We shall be over your position in approximately twenty minutes. We shall maneuver to land in front of your forward eighteen-inch turrets. I am informed it will be a very dangerous approach. The pilot requests that you adjust your heading in order to place the wind across your decks."
"It will be more than dangerous," exclaimed Yamamoto. "It will be fatal. You cannot land a seaplane on a battleship. I am warning you. I will have you shot down if you approach the Yamato."
"We are not in a seaplane, and we can land without damaging the Yamato. Please do not shoot us down. You will soon understand. Hidaka out."
He drew his fingers across his throat, motioning Moertopo to sever the link.
The commander in chief was cut off mid-rant.
Admiral Kakuta stared at him as though he had just lost his mind. Nobody spoke to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto like that.
Hidaka gestured helplessly.
"From what I have heard, the Admiral is a gambler. So am I."
Yamamoto's mouth opened and closed. Opened and closed. But no sound emerged.
Perhaps they could land on the Yamato after all. That thing, that giant insect in which Kakuta had so quickly navigated across fifteen hundred kilometers of fog-shrouded sea-and at night! — it seemed to hang in the air as if suspended from a thread. No. No it didn't seem to hang in the air. It simply did hang there.
The seas were running at two and a half meters. The bulk of the Yamato would pass through a single wave as though it were composed of nothing more than smoke. But over the long haul from Hashirajima the ceaseless roll of the northern Pacific had imparted a long and rhythmic plunging motion to the sixty-five-thousand-tonne battleship. Yamamoto, who had quietly ordered the ship brought around when he had finally laid eyes on Kakuta's mysterious "seaplane," stood transfixed in the freezing night air as the pilot hovered over the forecastle. The aircraft dipped when the bow dipped. Rose when it rose. It was almost as though the pilot were dancing with the hulking behemoth beneath his wheels.
Admiral Yamamoto, Captain Takayanagi, all of the officers who had assembled on the high walkway were mesmerized, watching to see if the strange wingless plane would falter, to be slapped from the sky by a rogue surge of the deck. How the pilot could see through the darkness and the typhoon of spray thrown up by that huge propeller was anyone's guess.
But clearly, he could. With one last skillful dip, the craft settled onto the deck and the roar died away as the pilot cut power to the engine. As if by sorcery, giant propeller blades materialized above the cockpit, revealing how this miraculous device stayed aloft. A dozen sailors ran forward with ropes to lash the thing to the deck.
KRI SUTANTO, 0237 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942
"Ensign Tomonagi, come quickly, the captain is stirring."
Tomonagi followed the crewman back into the wardroom of the Sutanto, where the man whom Moertopo had identified as the ship's commanding officer was indeed throwing off his coma-like unconsciousness.
Tomonagi's stomach heaved, and a thin, greasy film of sweat quickly lacquered his forehead. But Commander Hidaka's instruction has been quite explicit.
"You two, quickly!" he barked at a couple of his own sailors. "Grab him and follow me."
A handful of Indonesian ratings who tried to help with their skipper were roughly forced back by armed guards.
"We shall take care of him," Tomonagi declared. "Go back to your duties."
None of them understood a word he said, but the tone was unmistakable. Reluctantly they stood by as their captain was carried from the room, his body convulsing in the arms of the sailors who bore him away.
Tomonagi led the small party out into the fresh air and over to the plasteel safety rail. He looked around for witnesses but apart from another Japanese sentry, there were none. He nodded at the sailors, who heaved Captain Djuanda over the side. They heard the impact very clearly as his body hit the icy waters. There was no scream.
HIJMS YAMATO, 0328 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942
Lieutenant Ali Moertopo didn't know enough about Admiral Yamamoto to be awed. His flagship, the battleship Yamato-now, that was awesome. But the man himself just looked like another pissed-off sushi chef. He'd come to recognize the type. It appeared as if they were all over this ocean.
Moertopo stood beside and slightly behind Commander Hidaka in the planning room of the Yamato, a huge space to the eyes of somebody who had been confined to a comparatively tiny ship like the Sutanto. Before them lay a large table with a map of the Pacific covered in little wooden boats and flags, symbolizing the disposition of hundreds of Japanese naval vessels, surging across the empty wastes of the northern Pacific. Now, apparently, they were in disarray, and the men responsible were facing a solid wall of dark uniforms and darker faces.
Overhead, lights glinted off Yamamoto's shaven head as he listened to Kakuta and Hidaka attempt to explain themselves. The grand admiral's face remained utterly impassive, but the men around him glowered with increasing degrees of incredulity and umbrage. When Kakuta finally fell silent, a terrible, ticking stillness blanketed the gathering.
"And you, Lieutenant Moertopo. What say you of all this?" asked Yamamoto at last in thickly accented, but otherwise flawless English.
Moertopo, who had quickly downloaded everything he could find on Yamamoto and Midway from the Sutanto's Fleetnet storage banks, wasn't surprised by the man's grasp of the language. He now knew that Yamamoto had studied at Harvard, and later worked in Washington. But he was nevertheless shocked at being spoken to directly by the supreme commander of the Combined Fleet. He had been rather looking forward to keeping his opinions to himself. Hidaka prodded him forward.
"What do you want me to say… sir?"
"Do you really expect me to believe that you are from the future?"
"No."
"Then why waste my time with this fiddle-faddle?"
Moertopo thought he understood the slant of the question, even though it had been phrased so oddly.
"I do not expect you to believe it. But it is true. I was born in nineteen
ninety-seven."
"I see."
The room again fell into uncomfortable silence.
"And how did you come to be here?" asked Yamamoto after a short interlude.
"I do not know," Moertopo answered truthfully. "But here I am."
"And here your friends are, too, the Americans," Yamamoto stated flatly.
"You believe that?"
"Our radio intelligence has detected a very large volume of traffic from the Midway area. A battle has been fought there. But not by us."
Moertopo quickly scanned the faces behind Yamamoto, hoping for some sign of how to play this. All he found, however, was a wall of anger and suspicion.
"We picked up those signals ourselves," said Moertopo. "It appears that the Americans have hurt each other very badly."
Again, his answers brought no measurable response from Yamamoto or his staff. Moertopo had been hoping that they might tip a couple of flexipads onto the table, maybe a history book or two and couple of pirate video sticks-he'd even managed to locate a copy of Tora Tora Tora-after which the locals would offer him a nice warm sake and couple of horny geisha girls to welcome their new best friend to the original axis of evil.
Yamamoto purred in a deceptively friendly tone, "Tell me, Lieutenant, what was supposed to happen, before the interference of you and your friends."
"The… they're not my friends," Moertopo stammered. "I copied files to these flexipads if you want to read them, or watch them," he hurried on. "I have documentaries. There are some good ones there. The World at War. And Victory at Sea. I have the Tom Cruise miniseries. I could-"
"I am not interested in your toys, Moertopo," growled the Admiral. "I want you to tell me what was supposed to happen next."
Hidaka leaned over to whisper something, but Yamamoto cut him dead with a glare.
Moertopo had studied the archival material on the flight down. He was well enough acquainted with a scratch history of the Pacific War to deliver the briefing that had been asked of him. But he was certain these arrogant dogs would tear him apart as soon as he spoke. The way he understood it, they wouldn't-didn't-believe they could lose until well after their butts had been well and truly kicked. It was hopeless. He was trapped. Until a thought occurred to him.
"You were right," he said.
Yamamoto's wide, Buddha-like face regarded him dispassionately. "What do you mean?"
Moertopo picked up the flexipad that sat on the table in front of him and quickly brought up a bookmarked page. "When you spoke to Prime Minister Konoye in nineteen forty," he explained, "just after he had signed the treaty with Hitler and Mussolini, you said, If I am told to fight, regardless of consequences, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year. But for the second and third years I have utterly no confidence. You always thought that war against the United States was national suicide.
"And you were right. It was. Three years from now the Americans will drop a bomb on Hiroshima, where you attended the Naval Institute, if I remember correctly."
Yamamoto nodded.
"This was, or will be, a special bomb. There was only one dropped that day, but it exploded with a force of more than fifteen thousand tonnes of TNT. Not kilograms, Admiral. Tonnes. It killed seventy thousand people instantly and destroyed most of the city. It was called an atomic bomb. They dropped another on Nagasaki, two days later, and Japan surrendered unconditionally. You didn't live to see it, though. The American's shot down a plane carrying you on…"
He checked the flexipad again, gaining confidence from the stunned silence.
"On Sunday, April eighteen, nineteen forty-three. Over Bougainville."
"Lies!" someone cried. But Yamamoto raised his hand and stilled the protest.
There. The cat was out of the bag now. Moertopo wasn't sure what the long-term results would be, but at least it appeared he'd saved himself from being weighted down and tipped over the side of the ship. He had read more than once of how captured American fliers had suffered just that fate at the hands of these primitive oafs. And they considered themselves the pinnacle of martial civilization!
"It appears," Yamamoto said, "that a heavy blow has landed on the Americans tonight. What is to stop us continuing east to finish the job?"
Moertopo was physically and emotionally worn out. He couldn't contain a small, wan shadow of a smile. "The power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima," he answered, "is nothing compared to the weapons they have brought with them. With your permission I shall speak my mind now, Admiral Yamamoto. You were right to oppose this war. You would have lost it. You will still lose it, no matter how badly damaged the Americans are by the events tonight. If just one warship from Kolhammer's force remains afloat, it would be enough to sink every carrier you have. You can avoid the disaster that would have befallen you. You have that opportunity. You should grasp it with both hands."
This time Yamamoto said nothing. His eyes glinted like two small opals.
Moertopo drew deeply but furtively on the clove cigarette. The embers at the tip burned brightly for a few seconds, casting a dim red glow on the base of the empty bunk above him. He was unsure whether the Imperial Japanese Navy enforced a nonsmoking policy, but he was reasonably certain they had not yet invented smoke detectors, so fuck them.
He and Hardoyo were being accommodated-or detained, to be perfectly accurate-in separate cabins far apart from each other. They hadn't been badly treated or abused. Indeed, the reception for Kakuta and Hidaka had been much sharper. For the moment, the Indonesians were regarded as a curiosity and a potential asset. When that changed, he knew, he'd better have an exit strategy locked down. Or something of great value to trade for his skin.
The sweet notes of the cigarette induced a lonesome melancholy in the Sutanto's executive officer. An intensely childlike desire to run for home overwhelmed his confusion and anxiety, while compounding deeper feelings of desolation and irrecoverable loss. He was surprised to find his throat tightening as hot tears welled in his eyes. Moertopo quickly jammed a knuckle into his mouth, lest the guard outside his room hear him. The grief built in intensity until there was nothing to be done but to give himself over to it, curling into a tight fetal ball on his bunk and fighting to draw breath between the great racking sobs that overpowered him. It was as though he were being pummeled underneath a tsunami of wretched sorrow.
In time, a few minutes at most, the seizure passed, leaving in its wake a bleak emotional landscape. He lit another cigarette and raised it between shaking fingers. He drew in a sharp, shuddering breath. As stupidly soothing as this clove cigarette was, Moertopo turned it in his fingers, examining it with a frown. It was emblematic of all his problems. The company that produced this before the war had been a monopoly. In the year before he was born, it had been handed over to an idiot son of the president, who had added the profits from that corrupt transaction to his already formidable business holdings. Both the son and the old man were gone within three years, swept away by the blast wave of the nineties' financial meltdown. The cigarette company reverted to its original and natural owners, the armed forces, which generated 70 percent of its budget from commercial enterprises, most often monopolies.
Little wonder, then, that as Indonesia began to disintegrate under the onslaught of radical Islamists, the generals and admirals had reacted less like professional military men than as the ham-fisted, profiteering mafia they actually were. Moertopo cursed the fools and robbers who had delivered his country into slavery beneath the heel of the Caliphate. But mostly he cursed them for so mismanaging their affairs that he should end up here, in the belly of an iron behemoth, decades before he was born, when he could have been safely tucked up beneath the wings of the Americans.
If only they had trusted him.
But then again, he admitted, why should they?
The Sutanto was little better than a pirate ship. And in a dismal insight, Lieutenant Ali Moertopo realized his only hope lay in embracing that.
15
USS ASTORIA/LEYTE GU
LF, 0331 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942
Slim Jim Davidson hadn't ever seen anything like it. Not even at the World's Fair in New York, before the war. The future was here, and it was a fucking treasure trove. If it weren't for Chief Mohr riding his ass like a chariot driver he'd have stowed away enough loot to set himself up for life.
He'd already grabbed and stashed away two of them electrical books, three electrical watches, one pair of goggles-also electrical-and a pistol that looked like it'd stop a bull elephant. The hand cannon he understood. The watches, sort of. They had to be like something out of Dick Tracy, radio watches or something. But the other stuff, that was a mystery. He just took them because he recognized a first-class score. There was just something about those gadgets that cried out, Take me Slim Jim. I'm yours. At some point he was going to have to drop the loot off and start again. Or else Mohr was certain to get wise.
But it was worth the risk. That's why he'd allowed himself to be "volunteered" by the chief for the gruesome business of cleaning up the body parts that lay throughout the dense labyrinth created by the intersection of the two cruisers. The confusion and darkness created endless opportunities for profit. One of the watches, for instance, had just "slipped off" a severed arm and into Slim Jim's pocket as he cleared out a niche where the Astoria's electrical storeroom met a small crew cabin on the Leyte Gulf.
It was hotter than hell down here, maybe even hotter than Alabama in high summer, which Slim Jim knew from personal experience was worse than being trapped in the Devil's own butt hole. In July of '36 he'd done three months on a road gang just outside Montgomery. At the time he'd sworn never to get himself into that sort of trouble again, but here he was, picking up dead meat, Chief Mohr kicking his ass, Moose Molloy stepping on his toes, the Imperial Japanese Navy hell-bent on killing him, and now this crazy bullshit thrown in for good measure. He'd be a damn fool if he didn't take what little chance he had to profit from these unpleasant circumstances.
And Slim Jim's mama didn't raise no fools. Sharpies, grifters, and one crooked jockey, for sure. But no fools.
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