Turning Point (Kirov Series Book 22)

by John Schettler

  “Be thankful you are in the navy, and with nothing more to worry about than the doings on this single ship. In the Army, things have been very much different since this business in China started. I was Deputy Chief of Staff in the Kwantung army once—sorting out all the messes that other Generals would create. Things were not so bad in the Kwantung. No volcanoes there. Now I have a mess of my own making to sort out, so you must get me to a friendly port right away. I must make my report on what has happened directly to the Imperial General Headquarters. It looked like we had things running very smoothly, but who could have expected this?”

  Captain Harada, blinked, quite surprised.

  “Imperial Headquarters?”

  “Yes, a stuffy place full of sour old men, if you want my opinion, but they will need to know what has happened, and Combined Fleet as well, if they don’t already know it. We must have lost many ships in that tsunami, and I’m afraid we won’t have much left of 2nd Division now. We will have to pull reserves from Nishimura’s troops at Singapore. A brigade of the 5th Division is already forming up—excellent troops. I had that division a year or so ago, and they fight like tigers.”

  “Well… General… We were headed for Singapore when that volcano blew. I don’t think we caught the worst of it. I suppose we were lucky after all, and managed to stay out of nature’s way. Yet my ship still took damage—nothing all that serious from what the engineers tell me. It is simply a matter of time before we can get everything up and running again. In the meantime, I’ll be making way with some caution here. It isn’t only nature we have to worry about. The Americans and Russians have just had a good fight in the North Pacific, and something tells me things will be going from bad to worse here soon. Odd thing… this is the second mountain to blow its top this week. Something in the Kuriles erupted three days ago, and all of Hokkaido is under this same goddamn ashfall.”

  At this the General seemed quite surprised. “I had not heard that,” he said.

  “Yes… Well sir, we’ll get the decks swabbed and be on our way soon enough. In the meantime, try to get some rest.”

  “Just a moment Captain… Did you say the Americans were fighting with the Russians?”

  “That is what we heard, and both sides lost ships, if the rumors are correct.”

  I see…. And where did you say you were heading?”

  “Singapore.”

  “Impossible! Shouldn’t you rejoin the Western Screening Force? We will need to get to Balikpapan, or perhaps Makassar. Singapore is out of the question. That is Nishimura’s command now. Yamashita was brilliant, but sadly, he failed to finish the job.”

  The Captain had started to edge towards the hatch, but he stopped again, turning his head. “I suppose I could get you up to Balikpapan, but why in the world is the army sending units there with all this trouble on Taiwan?”

  That was going to end up being a very long story, and one we have heard before in this saga. It was going to be two men talking at cross purposes at first, each one failing to understand what the other was really saying. Yet if Captain Harada was listening closely to what this man was telling him now, he might have heard things that would have alarmed him a good deal more than those nostalgic memories of his grandfather. It seemed more was shaken than the earth, sea, and sky when Krakatoa vented its wrath. Pavel Kamenski might have had something to say about the unsettling nature of such massive explosions, and if Anton Fedorov had been in that room, he would have certainly picked up on the things the older man was saying about Yamashita at Singapore, and the 2nd Division on Java.

  At that moment, however, the urgent business of the ship would pull Captain Harada away, though the encounter left him with a very strange feeling. For his part, the Major General might be forgiven for not knowing there was no Japanese destroyer by the name of Takami. That was the name of a mountain, and most destroyer class ships in the IJN were given poetic sounding names associated with wind, sky, sea, clouds, waves, frost or mist. Mountain names were typically reserved for bigger capital ships like heavy cruisers, and sometimes carriers. Kaga and Akagi bore such names, as they were special ship conversions born from older battlecruisers.

  Yet there was Takami, real as the grey rain still falling on her decks, and she was a very special ship indeed, though not one a man like Hitochi Imamura would ever be familiar with—not one even Admiral Yamamoto could name. Her full designation was JS Takami, and there was a third letter after her hull type, DDG-180….

  Part VII

  Down the Rabbit Hole

  “ ‘If you think we're waxworks,’ he said, ‘you ought to pay, you know. Waxworks weren't made to be looked at for nothing. Nohow! Contrariwise, if you think we're alive, you ought to speak.’ ”

  ― Lewis Carroll

  Chapter 19

  Neither Pavel Kamenski nor Anton Fedorov were at hand on the bridge of Takami that day to deftly explain what had just happened. If they had been there they would have said that the incredible power of that eruption must have ruptured the time continuum yet again, and that Takami was just in the wrong place at the wrong time in 2021 when it rounded Cape Merak and started into the Java Sea. The ship had been on a small international maritime patrol with the Australian Frigate Anzac out of Darwin. They escorted the LHD Canberra back to Darwin, conducted brief maneuvers in the Timor sea for ASW training, and then Anzac departed, also returning to Darwin.

  Rising tensions with the action over Taiwan and the sharp engagement in the Pacific involving the US 7th Fleet had prompted the Allies to mount small security patrols like this with local assets in various theaters of the Pacific Region, and Takami had been stationed at Singapore. When Japanese fighters got pulled into the engagement off Hokkaido, tensions rose considerably. Being Japan’s newest and most capable Aegis Fleet Defense Destroyer, Takami should be home now, yet caught overseas when hostilities began, the ship was ordered to return to Singapore to form the heart of a new task force there. They skirted the southern coast of Java, transiting the Sunda Strait before it all happened. They simply sailed right out of the world they were born to, and would never be seen there again. Kamenski might have called it a gopher hole, but it was more like a sink hole in time, or a temporal fissure caused by that eruption in 1942.

  Perhaps it was just happenstance that Takami sailed right through that fissure, which came and went, sometimes there, sometimes not. It may have required the ship to be at just the right angle and alignment, at just the right location and at an exact speed to work its magic that day, much like the strange alignment of another similar fissure along the stairwell at Ilanskiy. No one could really explain it, but there it was, and that sink hole swallowed the ship whole, dragging it inexorably back towards the source of that fissure, the detonation of Krakatoa in 1942.

  The tension on the bridge was very thick, as heavy as the night around them, and as threatening as the low growl of the beast that had blasted its way up from the depths of the earth. Captain Harada could simply not make sense of what he was hearing, though he was grateful that Chief Engineer Oshiro had finally rebooted the ship’s systems, and they were fully active now. All vital stations were manned and ready, Sensors, CIC, Damage Control, the bridge crew alert, if somewhat edgy.

  Lieutenant Fukada was standing very near the Captain’s chair now, and the two men were discussing something in low, hushed tones.

  “Once we got systems up, SPY had contacts on every heading. There must be nearly 100 ships out here, most down near Jakarta and along the north Java coast.”

  “There wasn’t that must sea traffic before that volcano blew its top. What’s the story here?” The Captain seemed very flustered. He liked things all lined up, every shift well assigned, every eventuality contemplated and prepared for, but this was a situation that no one on that ship could have ever expected.

  “Could be search and rescue operations underway down there,” said his XO. That coastal area would have been hit very hard by the tsunami. Shipping could have been coming in while we wer
e down and dark.”

  “What about submarine threats?”

  “Too much subterranean noise. It’s just loud as hell with that eruption under way. No way I can put Nakano on that station with a headset, good as he is. We’ll have to rely on the computers sorting the signals out.”

  They had moved above a group of low lying islands north of Jakarta, once called Batavia, and the devastation they saw there was complete. The tsunami had been high enough to sweep completely over those islands, and they were little more than barren specks in the sea now, with every sign of life gone. With radar back up, they could easily see and avoid other ships in the vicinity, and the Captain put on some speed, steering 060 northeast towards Borneo. He was looking for open sea, trying to get out from under that ashfall, but it remained thick enough to preclude any thought of air operations with the single SH-60K helo aboard.

  What bothered him most, however, was the discussion he had with the General they had fished out of the sea. Nothing the man said seemed to make any sense. Who was this man? He looked as though he had been pulled right out of the last war, uniform and all. Once things settled down, he confided his uncertainty to Fukada.

  “I’m not sure what to make of our senior survivor,” said the Captain. “He says he’s commander of the 16th Army out here. Ever hear of that?”

  “We’ve got five Armies,” said Fukada, “and we don’t number them. They just have regional names.”

  “He was talking about troops from our 2nd Division being on Java.”

  “Java? That division is in the Northern Army, stationed up on Hokkaido.”

  “Right… Camp Asahikawa. I have friends there.”

  “I think we’ve got a 16th Mech Infantry Regiment in the 4th Division,” said Fukada, “but there’s no way it would ever be on Java. Maybe this fellow is playing games?” Fukada folded his arms.

  “He sure sounded convincing. All he could talk about was getting field reports from forward deployed units, arranging reinforcements from Singapore, as if some kind of big operation was underway down here.”

  “Kyou ki no ookami. Sounds like one crazy wolf. Are you really going to ferry him up to Balikpapan?”

  “I’d sooner fly him there, or some other medical facility, but that isn’t going to happen in this ashfall. For now, we’d best forget about him and sort our situation out. So far we’ve no signals traffic on regular channels at all, and no satellite uplinks.”

  “Why don’t I have Ensign Shiota monitor regular radio bands?”

  “Put her on it. We ought to hear some news, unless that volcano is washing our those bands as well. Those damn things can kick up their own weather.”

  Of course, the Executive Officer’s suggestion only made things worse, for the only news they heard was rather dated. Just to cover every base, the Captain went to the ship’s library to look up 16th Army… and there was General Imamura, right there in black and white photographs, right down to the uniform the man in his sick bay was wearing! The details of the man’s career were all laid out, and he was indeed Commander of the 16th Army… but in 1942, and the troops and divisions he had mentioned, the operation also underway, were all a part of the invasion of Java in February, 1942.

  The Captain sat on that for an hour, thinking Fukada must have been correct when he called the man a crazy wolf. But like any dangling thread, unattended task, or misplaced item, he could not rest until he had it in place. So he went back down to the sick bay to speak with his Chief Medical Officer, Lieutenant Hisakawa.

  “Take a look at this photograph,” said Harada. “Then tell me that isn’t the same man in there asleep on your cot.”

  “I’ll admit the resemblance,” said Hisakawa. “But taking it any further is plain stupid.” A former university professor in Japan, the man was not given to flights of fancy, and he had seen enough of the world’s misery in his profession to be the grim realist he was. During an accident three years earlier on fleet exercises, a helicopter had experienced engine failure on landing and came down very hard on the deck of the helicopter destroyer Izumo, where he had been stationed at the time. When they brought the injured flight crew in, he took one look at the co-pilot and immediately pronounced his wounds would be fatal. That kind of bedside manner was unusual for a healer by profession, but it was Hisakawa, who could be a hard, difficult and blunt man at times.

  “Call me stupid then,” said the Captain. “But you know better than that, Doctor. The man isn’t a wax figure from a museum. Have you spoken with him at length? Believe me, the longer you do, the more you realize something is wrong.”

  “Well considering that we just pulled him out of that ash laden sea, it doesn’t surprise me. He’s likely suffering post-traumatic stress. You can’t place any faith in what he might babble out under these circumstances. What he needs now is a good hospital in Singapore.”

  That’s how it would go in the beginning, until the men dressed up like wax figures multiplied around them at an alarming rate, in ships out of museums, many which should have long ago been resting on the bottom of the sea. The officers and crewmen of Takami all knew of their ancestors in the navy, the ships they took to war, as much as any US sailor might know of Halsey and the USS Enterprise. It was a very slippery path now, and it led to only one place, a rabbit hole of madness, impossibly deep, and a wonderland of nightmare which would become a crucible for each and every man and woman aboard.

  Way would lead on to way as Captain Harada began to walk that path. Along the way he would come to question his own sanity on more than one occasion, but reality has a very hard bite, particularly when it shows up as a surface action task force off the southern coast of Borneo. They had to come about 600 kilometers northeast of Krakatoa to get out from under that awful blackness, the light of the sun completely blotted out in all directions from the eruption. It had forced Mountbatten to withdraw to Perth, and also prompted Nagumo to take his carrier task force well up into the Makassar Strait off Balikpapan. That was where the Western Screening Force had fled when the eruption drove them deeper into the Java Sea, just as Takami was probing north for clearer skies.

  Prevailing winds from the southwest had driven the worst of the ashfall up over Sumatra and into the lowermost portion of the South China Sea as it approached Singapore. They had radio intercepts of heavy ashfall in Singapore itself, adding more misery to the refugee crisis Percival was struggling with. Then they got the strangest report, of renewed fighting on the Island of Singapore, and news of Japanese troops breaking through to the city.

  Without Montgomery’s 18th Division, and the tough Anzac troops, the steamy General Nishimura had taken advantage of the chaos and darkness to launch a surprise attack. The Indian Division posted astride the road from Kranji to the city could not hold, and Nishimura’s Imperial Guards broke through, following their remaining tanks to the city, supported by the 18th Division. Percival was unable to salvage the situation, and would now make his appointment with a Japanese prison camp, the event a sad echo of what should have happened a month earlier. Now Singapore was Nishimura’s problem to govern, and he would rule there with a very hard hand.

  Bewildered by what they were hearing, consistent across all radio channels they could tune in, and being unable to reach any level of the command structure above his pay grade, Captain Harada was in a real quandary. His equipment was finally running, but his men did not reboot so readily or without some distress, nor did he. Rumors began to fly, with talk of calamity and war, with a heavy dose of confusion over the entire scene. When they heard news that the Makassar Strait and Celebes Sea were largely clear of ashfall and darkness, that became the best course he could set. The fact that it was on the sea road home to Japan also weighed in the Captain’s decision. Nothing made sense any longer, and he instinctively wanted to return to the certainty of navy life back home, but it soon brought him close to the precipitous edge of bedlam.

  They saw the ships on radar this time, edging closer to have a look. Harada had it in his mind
that they could be other ships in distress, for they seemed to be gathered listlessly in one place, steaming at a sedate 10 knots southeast of Balikpapan. The ash was finally clearing, though it still left a dull haze over the entire scene. They got close enough to use the optics, but that only made things worse. Fukada was soon convinced he was looking at a pair of old heavy cruisers from the IJN. He knew their silhouettes well, as he had built the models as a hobby for many years, and had several on the shelf of his cabin.

  “By god,” he breathed. “Captain, that’s a Mogami Class cruiser out there or I’m a goat!”

  And we all know where the story went for them soon after that little discovery. It was a progression, a madness that so many others on either side of the time line had gone through in these events, a creeping psychosis that hardened in their brains to a realization that they were no longer in the world they had been in when they left Singapore. There was surprise, astonishment, denial, even anger in the mix of emotions as they debated what they were seeing, what they were asking themselves to now believe.

  Yet the world around them was going to be entirely too convincing, too consistent in its insanity—every radio transmission, every ship encountered, every other human being they would ever see there from that moment on, would all stand implacably on the side of the only impossible conclusion they could come to. It would not be something any man among them could dismiss, and along with that, there would not be a single vestige of the world they had come from to balance the scales on the other side, where all they had now was awful doubt, fear, uncertainty, and a quiet rage against the folly of what they were being forced to believe.