Aboard the USS Fitzgerald
THE DOOR TO THE infirmary opened slowly and Ben Wa quietly stepped in.
It was dark inside, the only light coming from the gaggle of equipment set up around the room’s only occupied bed. The bed was covered with an oxygen tent, and was lousy with tubes and wires running inside the plastic sheet. Many more strings of sensors and connecting wires were strung out above.
Underneath it all lay Yaz.
Ben had visited his friend several times already that day, but now it was obvious that things were getting worse. The comatose officer was wheezing with each breath, and his face had turned even paler. There seemed to be a larger tube sticking into his mouth now, and he had IV lines in both arms and even one in his leg.
Never realizing it would be this bad, Ben quickly turned away from the bed; just seeing Yaz in such a condition felt like a punch in the gut.
He retreated from the room to find the ship’s two doctors just on their way in.
“He’s getting worse, isn’t he?”
The doctors looked at each other and then nodded grimly.
“His condition is deteriorating,” one finally said.
Ben just shook his head. “And you still have no idea what’s wrong?”
“If I had to put a label on it, I’d say it resembled the worst case of shell shock on record,” one doctor said. “Whether it’s the result of an accumulation of combat-related stress or whether something triggered it, there’s just no way to determine.”
Ben bit his lip. He knew both doctors, and both were excellent. He trusted them, knowing they would not pull any punches.
“Is there anything any of us can do?” he asked them.
Again they shook their heads.
“Nothing,” one replied.
Over the Pacific
JT Toomey checked his fuel gauge again and grimaced.
They were already halfway through their reserve fuel, and still had more than a hundred miles to go to reach the Task Force.
Even though he’d be able to set the Seagull down on the ocean, the last thing he wanted was to wind up in the extremely vulnerable position of floating out in the middle of the Pacific with no fuel, little firepower, and no way of getting where they had to be.
Unless we paddle, he thought glumly.
Hodge was in the rear compartment, throwing out anything nonessential to lighten the load and thus help stretch the airplane’s fuel. Already their auxiliary radio and power pack were gone, as were the spare toolboxes, several jumpseats, and the extra strut assembly. The effort was helping, but not by much.
“I can think of about another 180 pounds we can get rid of,” Toomey grumbled under his breath.
He was referring to Wolf. At the moment, Toomey would have liked nothing better than to bounce the caped comic book character right out of the aircraft—the weight displacement would probably be just enough for him and Hodge to make it back to the Task Force.
The mysterious ship captain had said not a word—not even a thank-you—since they hauled him aboard and pulled his ass out of one very big fire. Instead, he had crawled up to the very end of the compartment and was now sitting there, head in hands.
Hodge climbed forward again, carrying Wolf’s weapon with him.
“It’s an old Browning BAR,” Hodge said, inspecting the large gun and its lengthy ammo belt. “These things get hot—it’s a wonder he could even fire it. His hands must be burned to a crisp.”
“Guys like him don’t even feel that stuff,” Toomey replied. “They really don’t feel anything.”
“Well, he’d better include us in his will or something,” Hodge said, strapping back in. “Because if it wasn’t for us, he’d still be …”
Suddenly, Hodge couldn’t finish the sentence. Toomey looked over at him and saw the young man was simply pointing straight up through the canopy, his mouth open but silent in utter astonishment.
Toomey looked up and felt his own jaw drop.
“Jesuzz, we’re dead now,” was all he could say.
Directly above them, cruising at around ten thousand feet, was a formation of airplanes so huge it actually blotted out the early morning light.
“God damn, what the hell are they?” Hodge finally managed to spit out.
Toomey already knew the answer. They were Zeros.
Although it would all but deplete their fuel, Toomey put the Seagull into a dive, putting as much distance as possible between him and the swarm of Zeros. By the time he got the seaplane to just barely five hundred feet, the main body of the formation was passing right overhead.
“There must be five hundred of them,” Hodge said, not yet over the initial shock of spotting the aerial armada.
“Are you kidding?” Toomey replied. “There’s at least a thousand of them. I know Hawk ran into a handful of them the other day—but who could build this many of these fucking things?”
“Same people who built all those battleships,” Hodge replied.
The Seagull was bucking and creaking as they plowed through the thick, turbulent air just above the sea. Their only chance was to stay as low as possible and hope that they weren’t spotted.
But as it turned out, they already had been seen.
Suddenly Toomey looked up to find Wolf towering over him.
“Give me my weapon,” he was saying, in his icy Scandinavian accent. “We are about to be attacked.”
In the next moment, all hell broke loose.
The first thing Toomey remembered was that the canopy glass suddenly shattered away. The next thing he knew, he had a lapfull of glass and the wind was blowing straight into his eyes. A second later, a distinctly green-colored Zero flashed right off their nose, its cannons still blazing away. Another Zero was right behind it. Its barrage caught the Seagull on top of the left wing and strut, absolutely perforating it. Normally the wing would have contained some fuel, but the aircraft was so low on gas, no fire was able to break out.
A third Zero was now bearing down on them at eleven o’clock. Toomey looked down at his hands and for the first time realized they were covered with blood. At the last moment, Hodge yanked the steering column to the left, probably saving their lives as another barrage of cannon shells raced by, just missing them.
Toomey put his hands to his face and saw that he was suffering from many small cuts as opposed to one large gash. But his relief was only momentary. Another stream of cannon shells ripped through the cockpit a second later—the third Zero was following them down, its guns blazing.
Despite the murderous fusillade and the steep dive, Wolf had managed to stay on his feet and was even firing his BAR out of the broken canopy at the attacking Zero.
Even amid the blood, bullets, and confusion, Toomey was able to yell out to Hodge, “I told you—he’s fucking nuts!”
Hodge wasn’t paying that much attention, however. He was trying with all his might to pull the steering column back up before they smashed right into the water, now just a hundred feet below. With much pain, Toomey grabbed onto his own column yoke and together they were able to level out the seaplane at the very last moment.
But now they could see more Zeros breaking off from the swarm and diving on them like bloodthirsty bees, ganging up on the all but helpless critically wounded Seagull.
Toomey had been in tight situations before, but this was the worst. He turned and looked at Hodge, who gave him a kind of shrug that said, “Well, this is it.”
A second later, two more sprays of flaming 20mm shells slammed into the airplane, causing it to shudder down to every bolt and nut. The right wing was now aflame. The engine was sputtering. And three Zeros were coming at them dead on.
Good-bye cruel world, Toomey whispered as the trio of Zeros opened up all at once. Then he tightened his chest and began to close his eyes, waiting for the fatal blow.
That’s when he saw the Harrier.
As the survivors of the battle would later tell it, the Harrier jumpjet had suddenly appeared from nowhe
re.
One moment, the airspace just above the deep blue ocean was filled with a dozen angry Zeros mercilessly pursuing the stricken seaplane, and the next, two, then three, then four of those Zeros were going down in flames, trailing a stream of smoke and debris in their wake.
One second the Harrier was no more than ten feet off the tail of a Zero, blasting it to Kingdom Come with its cannon pod guns; another second and it had screeched to a hover and was letting loose a pair of Sidewinders. Rocketing forward again, it maneuvered two fleeing Zeros in such a way that they collided, exploding in a ball of suddenly-fused flaming metal.
Within ten seconds, everything was peaceful again inside the Seagull. It was filled with holes, and smoking in more than a dozen places, but miraculously, it was still airborne.
Toomey and Hodge could barely recover from the shock of what had just happened. It seemed so unreal that they were still alive. They watched in shock and awe as the Harrier, having disposed of the attacking Zeros, was now in a screaming climb, heading right for the heart of the huge formation of airplanes, its cannons firing all the way up.
“He is valiant!” Wolf was screaming in Toomey’s ear, as he watched the jumpjet ascend into the thick enemy swarm. “He is truly a great warrior…”
But now neither Toomey nor Hodge was paying attention. They were too busy trying to control the airplane. For not only were they on fire, smoking and full of holes, they were now completely out of gas and going down.
“Hang on!” Toomey yelled above the racket of the smashed and shattered cockpit. “This is going to be rough …”
Twenty-nine
BEN WA AND THE captains of the USS Cohen and the USS Tennyson were gathered on the bridge of the Fitzgerald, scanning the southern horizon with high-powered binoculars.
What they were looking for almost defied a rational explanation—at first, anyway.
The radar men on the Fitz had picked up an over-the-horizon indication about twenty minutes before. It showed an unidentified object moving very slowly toward them, traveling barely twenty-five feet above the water. Though it was moving too slow to be an antiship missile, Ben scrambled two of the battered strike planes to intercept it. Their pilots had just radioed back to say that whatever it was, it didn’t pose a hazard to the Task Force.
Just the opposite, in fact.
The ship captains saw it about a minute later. For the first time in a long time, a smile came to their faces.
What they saw was the Harrier, ass-end first, moving toward them in a near-hover, a long line trailing from its extended front landing gear. At the end of this heavy line was the Seagull, filled with holes and smoking, but somehow still afloat and being towed by the Harrier. Toomey, Hodge, and the rescued Wolf were all visible sitting inside the blasted-out cockpit.
“Talk about backing in,” Ben said, relieved as they all were that four very important members of the Task Force had returned relatively intact.
It took about ten minutes before the carrier could slow down enough to meet the strange pairing. Hunter circled above while Toomey, Hodge, and Wolf climbed out of the smoking hulk of a seaplane and up onto the carrier’s aft access walkway.
No sooner were they safe than the Seagull’s right tail strut broke, causing the seaplane to capsize. It went wing over, quickly filled with water, and disappeared beneath the waves.
Toomey stopped climbing up the walkway long enough to watch the seaplane go down.
“See you, old buddy,” he thought.
Three hours later, six men were sitting around the CIC conference room table. They were barely talking, and their faces were somber and showing extreme concern. It had not been a pleasant discussion.
It was the captain of the Tennyson who finally broke the tense silence.
“Well, I guess we’ve got a very big problem here,” he said, understating the immense gravity of the situation.
“We’ve got two very big problems,” Toomey said. “I just don’t know which one is worse, a place that can build dozens of battleships or a place that can manufacture thousands of Zeros.”
The meeting had begun two hours earlier with Hunter’s chilling report on the underground fortress/aircraft factory on Okinawa. This was followed by Toomey’s equally-stunning recounting of finding the massive shipworks, a report which was verified and elaborated in spots by the extremely sober Wolf.
“Shocking” was not the word for all the bad news—“back-breaking” would have been a better term. Or “disheartening.” Because no one in attendance, nor anyone involved in planning the Japan raid, had ever dreamed the Cult possessed the brains, brawn, and know-how to create two such military-industrial complexes, both of which were clearly the largest of their kind in the world at the present time.
“Big ships. A lot of airplanes. Both problems are equally bad,” Ben said. “The question is, what can we do about either of them?”
“How can we do anything?” Toomey asked. “We’re low on everything except toilet paper and bullets. We’ve got a bunch of shot-up old airplanes that can barely fly. And these crews didn’t exactly sign on for any extracurricular activities.”
“We don’t have to worry about the crews,” Ben said. “It’s organizing any kind of resupply effort that’s almost impossible. If we start chattering all over the airwaves trying to get a lot of reinforcements out here, we’ll give away both our position and our intentions damn quick. Sure, Jones might be able to rapid-deploy some people and material out to us, but by the time they get ample numbers here—enough people and stuff to handle just what we are contemplating here—we might all be at the bottom of the ocean.”
Wolf sat up straight in his chair and cleared his throat. “I believe there is also a larger question here—that is, how is it possible that the Cult is able to continue operations like these after we’ve eliminated Hashi Pushi and his entire communications network? After all, wasn’t that our objective? To cut off the head of the snake, so the rest of it would die?”
“Although it was against our intelligence profiles of him, he must have somehow delegated authority to someone,” Ben replied. “But who? Who could possibly pick up the stick from someone like Hashi Pushi, who ruled almost totally on personality alone? I can’t imagine two people possessing such despicable yet undeniably charismatic power. And if two, then why not three? Or four? Or a hundred such personalities? Who knows where they could be coming from? It’s a frightening thought.”
“That’s precisely why it must be defeated quickly,” Wolf declared. “We must attack now. We must hurt them—now. To let these things go on, this shipbuilding, these airplanes—it would surely be suicide for us. Such military might will be projecting around the world within months.”
Another silence enveloped the room. Suddenly all eyes were on Hunter. He’d been silent for almost an hour.
He looked up, pulled his baseball cap up over his brow, and then stared back down at the table.
“I agree with Wolf,” he began slowly. “Although we are out here on a shoestring, we’ve got no choice but to attack them now, somehow, some way. To return to America and mount another, even larger effort than this, and then come all the way back out here—it would take too much time. And we know we can’t adapt any more planes for carrier launch in a short time—at least, not enough to make a difference. Plus we don’t know what the Cult troops on the West Coast would do.
“No, it’s up to us. Sure, we’re running out of everything, but we are here, now. The only real decision is where to hit first. And I believe it’s got to be Okinawa. Especially if those planes are being built for what I think they are. Attacking the shipyards runs a close second, priority-wise.”
“But you’re talking about two very tall orders, Hawk,” the captain of the Cohen said. “I mean, we’ll be behind you one thousand percent. But to launch attacks on such a well-defended, well-entrenched enemy, against such overwhelming odds? We’ll be risking every man in the Task Force.”
“I realize that,” Hunter rep
lied soberly. “But being on the wrong side of the odds is nothing new to us. With the exception of the Second Circle War, we haven’t had an advantage in men or weapons once. So what’s different now? We’ve just got to use our heads.”
He looked up to see five very concerned faces looking back at him.
“Besides, maybe there’s a way that we don’t have to risk anything,” he added.
“Well, I hope you have a plan, my friend,” JT told him. “I can’t close my eyes without seeing either a sky full of Zeros or a sea full of battleships.”
“Not yet, I don’t,” Hunter admitted. “But I do know this: it’s time to call General Jones.”
At last, everyone in the room could agree on something.
Thirty
Two days later
FOR THE FIRST TIME in what seemed like a long time, the morning dawned bright and clear over the Task Force.
By first light, just about every member of the Fitz’s crew had gathered on the flight deck of the carrier. On the Cohen and the Tennyson, too, the decks were crowded with crewmen, some drinking their morning coffee, others enjoying their first cigarette of the day.
Even the decks of the huge battleship New Jersey were alive with men, though almost all were in the middle of their daily hour of rigorous exercises.
But it was neither good weather nor physical fitness which brought so many men out into the morning. Rather they were all looking to the East.
Suddenly a cry went up, first from the deck of the Fitzgerald, and then from the Cohen and Tennyson. There were even shouts from the normally staid New Jersey crew.
Everyone seemed to be saying the same thing, “Here they come!”
A minute later, an all-black C-130 cargo plane roared overhead at an incredible speed, its four powerful engines shaking the air around it, causing just about everything on the ships to rattle.
The C-130 banked high and up to the right and began a long turn around the Task Force. Right behind it, flying even lower and louder, if that was possible, was a Free Canadian gray-blue KC-135 aerial tanker. Behind it was an escort flight consisting of two long-range A-7F Strikefighters, and two GR.1 Tornados, recently reclaimed from the Fourth Reich Air Corps. Each of the four fighters had huge fuel tanks attached to their wings as well as a bevy of air-to-air weapons.
War of the Sun Page 17