War of the Sun

by Maloney, Mack;

  “That sounded interesting,” Cook said to one of his officers, a lieutenant named Sean Higgens. “Very lifelike.”

  Higgens smiled wryly. The joke was that all the explosions going on around them were not lifelike. All of them were, in fact, fake.

  They were standing under a cliff the top of which held one of a half dozen or so emergency exits from the interior of Shuri Mountain. The Cult guards had already fled inside—they’d been spooked by the first series of fake explosions—closing and locking the huge, camouflaged door behind them.

  The entranceway was one of two main targets for the JAWs team. The other was approximately a half mile away, at the western base of the mountain. The two entranceways had been determined to be those closest to the places inside the mountain factory where the slave laborers were kept. An important part of the overall Okinawa operation plan was the safe release of these unfortunates. It was the mission given the commandos of the JAWs team.

  Unlike their comrades from the 104th, the JAWs team was presently operating on a part of the island where the guns of the New Jersey could not reach. The heavy jungle in the area on the western edge of Shuri even made air strikes difficult. This is why the JAWs team appreciated Hunter’s efforts to arrange for some psy-ops to assist them.

  The “explosions” were merely flashpots igniting, the deafening rumbling nothing more than recordings piped over dozens of speakers set up in the area. The deception was the work of the stranded movie crew, specifically the special effects people. The F/X crew had wired the target zone two nights earlier, placing the fake charges and speakers around the little-used entranceways. When the New Jersey’s guns first opened up on the eastern edge of the island, the F/X men began activating their charges, visually and audibly mimicking a heavy cannon barrage.

  As soon as the JAWs team made it to their objectives, the F/X men activated the second series of fake explosions, hoping to discourage any Cult reinforcements from coming near the operation zone. So far the plan had worked.

  Cook checked his watch. It was 0725. Time to get moving.

  He gathered his officers around him. Along with Higgens were Warren Maas, Clancy Miller, and Mark Snyder, all veterans of the JAWs previous campaigns, including the capturing of the Fourth Reich’s American headquarters in Football City. This plan called for Snyder and Miller to take twenty men around to the second entranceway while Higgens, Clancy, Cook, and the remaining JAWs troopers concentrated on the one above them.

  The problem was that the slave laborers had no idea the rescue attempt was about to be made. There had been absolutely no contact with them, if indeed any were still alive inside the beleaguered mountain. Even their nationalities were, for the most part, unknown.

  Snyder and Miller counted off their detachment and departed. Cook, Higgens, and Clancy waited for another five minutes and then began to move up toward the large bolted set of doors.

  One minute and a charge of SEMTEX later, the doors were open. There were no Cult troops anywhere near the opening. In fact, all the JAWs men saw was a long, very dark tunnel which curved down away from them and smelled heavily of cordite.

  Leaving a guard at the door, Cook, Clancy, Higgens, and a dozen commandos entered the tunnel, their only light in the pitch black from Cook’s field flashlight set on dim. The deeper they went into the tunnel, the thicker the smell of smoke filling the air. Explosions deep underground could be heard, and also the whine of propeller engines, even though they were nearly on the opposite side of Shuri from the entrance to the hidden airstrip.

  They moved quickly and quietly for about ten minutes before they saw a light at the far end of the tunnel, about 200 feet away. They could hear shouting and even screaming as they moved toward the light, guns raised. The scream of prop engines was even louder.

  About twenty-five feet from the opening, the group stopped and only Cook and Clancy went forward. They crept up to the edge of the tunnel to find they were looking out on a vast brightly-lit cavern. Below them were several hundred people who had to be Cult slaves. All were women and girls, all were kneeling in long rows, barely clothed, many of them visibly trembling. At the far end of the cavern was a squad of black-uniformed Cult soldiers, many of them displaying long, shiny swords. An officer was standing ramrod straight in front of these soldiers, hastily reading something in Japanese from a document.

  Cook and Clancy didn’t need a translation to figure out what was about to happen. It was clear the soldiers were being given orders to slaughter the women.

  The Cult soldiers turned as one and with the click of their boot heels raised their phalanx of swords above their heads. Many of the women in the first row of prostrate slaves began whimpering. Death was just seconds away.

  In an instant, Cook and Clancy had their M-16s up and firing, not at the Cult soldiers, but at the rows of lights on the ceiling of the vast hall. Their combined fusillade KO’d most of the lights, and short-circuited the others. Within two seconds, the entire cavern was plunged into darkness.

  The men of the JAWs team quickly flowed into the cavern, down the metal stairs to the floor of the hall below. They were yelling at the women to stay down, that they were being rescued, but many of the slaves were too frightened to move in the first place.

  The JAWs men found themselves crawling over the frightened, screaming half-naked women, their NightScope-equipped guns picking off the Cult blackshirts one at a time. Some of the Cult soldiers chose to skewer themselves rather than face a bullet, but others fought ferociously. Hand-to-hand combat broke out all over, the JAWs troopers battling sword-wielding Cultists with rifle butts and small arms.

  The fighting was sharp and bloody, but it was over in a matter of a minute—temporarily, at least. As the last of the surviving Cult blackshirts fled the chamber, the JAWs team rounded up the women and began hurrying them up the stairway toward the exit. Shots were now being fired at them from deeper inside the mountain, a sure sign that more Cult troops were on the way.

  Two of the JAWs troopers ran ahead to the opening, making sure it was still secure. They made radio contact with the other JAWs team who had run into a similar execution ceremony, but with a much larger group of slaves, possibly as many as three thousand. They were now streaming out of their exit and fleeing into the jungle. There were also reports that other exits had been opened by the slaves themselves, further emptying the Cult’s subterranean chamber of innocents.

  By the time the Cook-Clancy-Higgens team reached the entranceway opening with 600-odd female slaves, the F/X team had already activated their last series of fake explosions.

  Using the ersatz explosions as cover, the JAWs team slipped into the jungle too, shepherding their rescuees safely out of harm’s way.

  According to JT’s map, he was looking at a place called Iko Shima.

  It was an amazingly square island about 210 miles south of the southern tip of Okinawa.

  Unlike that smoky place, Iko looked like a prime piece of pristine Pacific real estate. Clear air. Lots of beaches. A cooling mountain. Lush jungle growth. Everything seemed perfect and natural.

  Everything except the huge Cult air base.

  He’d tracked the Zeros for nearly an hour, staying high and far behind them to avoid detection. At 53 minutes into his flight, the huge formation of Zeros began breaking up and diving out of their 15,000-foot cruising level. Soon the eighty or so Zeros began orbiting the small postage stamp of an island. The place was probably six or seven square miles in all, and at least one-third of that was taken up by the vast triangular parking areas that had obviously been constructed for the newly-built Okinawa Zeros.

  Just as predicted, the place had only three runways, each running parallel to the one edge of the huge triangle. There were three separate oil storage tank farms, one at each corner. There were even three separate control towers.

  The bad news was that the place was ringed with hundreds of antiaircraft weapons—fixed SAM sites, mostly, many surrounded by AAA batteries and some smaller mob
ile missile units. JT felt his heart sink a notch. Their job would have been much easier if the Cult had neglected to provide for air defense for Iko as they had done completely on Okinawa.

  He keyed his lip microphone and sent a coded message back to the air control center on the Fitzgerald.

  “Delta Green Flight to Task Force Command … we’ve got stormy weather. Repeat … stormy weather.”

  Hunter was orbiting very high about thirty miles east of Iko Jima twenty minutes later.

  He and JT had already worked out their strategy. They couldn’t possibly hope to wipe out all of the Zeros on the island—the eighty from Okinawa had now joined approximately 400 or so on the ground. Their only chance was to damage the air base to such an extent that it would be inoperable.

  JT’s Tornado carried a weapon designed for just that: it was a weapons dispenser pod attached to the hotshot airplane’s underbelly. Inside were packed 600 bomblets, each the size of a ping-pong ball. Though diminutive in size, each bomblet packed a wallop equal to several sticks of dynamite. They were also weighted in such a way as to blow downward on impact, driving themselves into a concrete runway and cratering it.

  Hunter was carrying a different kind of anti-runway bomb. It was a French-built Super Martielle. Half-bomb, half-rocket, once launched, the weapon powered itself straight down, striking the concrete with enough force to drive into it at least six feet. At that point, the warhead would explode, leaving a crater that could be as large as twenty-five feet across.

  The problem facing them was that they would have to attack the base and create substantial damage—all in one pass. To loiter over the target for very much longer than that would put both of them past their bingo point, as well as at the mercy of the vast arrays of AA weapons.

  Hunter went in first. He selected the northernmost runway; several of the recently landed Okinawa Zeros were still parked on its end. He was down to fifty feet and screaming across the base before the Cult gunners had any idea what was going on. Just as on Okinawa, the defense system on the island, though elaborate, was slow to respond. This told Hunter something very important: obviously the hardware was there to do the job. Apparently the training and readiness for the troops manning the high-tech weapons was lacking.

  He deposited the Super Martielle halfway down the 800-foot runway, its warhead boring into the concrete and exploding as advertised. Because traditionally the Zero A6M needed a longer than usual takeoff run, the midshot had rendered this airstrip unusable.

  Hunter opened up with his nose cannons on his pullout, scoring a barrage of hits on the control station for the runway’s oil storage facility. The air was filled with AAA fire by this time, but Hunter was able to twist the F-16XL straight up with enormous acceleration, causing all of the AA shells to fall short.

  At the same time, JT was sneaking in from the west. His weapons pod crackling with flame and smoke, he neatly dispensed half his load of bomblets on the north-south airstrip, then banked to the right as only a Tornado could do at such a low level and dropped the rest on the west-south strip. He, too, had his nose cannon firing throughout the bomb run, strafing a control tower and a fuel truck parking area. Unlike Hunter, he stayed low, below the AA fire going off all around him, and exited the area to the southeast.

  He and Hunter formed up about six miles off the island. They had one last duty to perform before scooting back to the Okinawa battle zone. Hunter had to take a recon photo image of the base for poststrike assessment.

  But when he did and checked the results, he realized that although he and JT had indeed made all three runways unusable for at least several days, they had apparently arrived just minutes after a large force of Zeros had taken off. Hunter knew this by studying his infrared scan. Not only could the device detect objects giving off heat on the ground, but it was also able to detect “heat ponds”—pools of heat left behind by an aircraft which had warmed its engines on a certain spot and had now departed.

  His IR scan showed at least 200 airplanes had been on the island as little as forty minutes before. He radioed the grim news over to JT even as they formed up again and headed eastward at full throttle.

  Both pilots knew there was only one place the 200 Zeros were heading.

  Thirty-six

  FOR LIEUTENANT KAWISHI WAKI, this was to be his final day.

  He was flying the lead airplane in the first wave of a formation containing more than 200 Zeros. Each wave contained twenty airplanes, and as they were now in the preattack formation, each wave was separated from the next by about ten miles.

  The Zeros carried no weapons—no torpedoes were strapped under the fuselages, no machine-guns decorated their wings. Rather each was packed with nearly a ton of high explosives, most of it located in a compartment just behind and below the pilot’s seat.

  They were from Iko Jima. They had launched within an hour of receiving word that Okinawa was under attack. For many of the pilots, it would be their first test in combat. Nearly all of them were actually pilot-trainees, men hastily instructed in how to fly the Zeros out of Shuri and over to Iko.

  In a short ceremony before they left, their commander exhorted them to do their duty. He also made it quite clear that each Zero was fueled with just enough octane for a one-way trip. There was no discussion. The pilots were ordered to thank their commander for sending them on this death mission, a long bow from the waist and a mumbling of words. Then they tied their hachimakis around their foreheads and each received a shot of sake.

  They toasted in unison to the spirit of Aja, downed the rice wine, and climbed into their cockpits.

  Then, one after another, they flew off Iko Jima and headed north and east.

  Lead pilot Lieutenant Waki didn’t even know the nationality of this enemy they’d been sent out to kill. Their commanding officer never bothered to tell them. All he knew was that he was but one cog in millions within the enormous industrial and military giant known as the Asian Mercenary Cult. And now someone had attacked them, someone trying to prevent advancement, to hinder production, to stop flow.

  And Lieutenant Waki had been ordered to give his life to stop it.

  Aboard the Fitzgerald

  Ben looked into the CIC’s long-range radar screen and counted 200 airplanes in all.

  They were coming out of the southwest, flying in ten waves of twenty each, and at the moment the closest wave was about thirty miles from the Task Force.

  He immediately sent word to Wolf, who had already activated the New Jersey’s massive antiaircraft arrays. At the same time, the captains of the Tennyson and the Cohen were told to prepare for an aerial attack.

  The eleven fighter jets lined up on the carrier’s deck were ready for launch. One by one, they were catapulted off the Fitzgerald, each one quickly gaining altitude and heading for the oncoming enemy armada.

  They met them head-on about two minutes later.

  Hunter had briefed the Fitz’s pilots on tactics to use when dealing with the slower-moving Cult planes. It proved to be time well spent. Attacking with superior speed and agility, the jets plowed through the first formation of unarmed enemy planes, nose cannons at full bore. With their unprotected explosives compartment needing only the slightest spark to erupt, the cheap, flimsy aluminum Zeros began exploding all over the sky.

  Soon the air was filled with twisted, fiery chunks of steel, glass, and flesh, all falling into the calm waters of the Pacific below.

  The eleven jets never let up—they continued to pounce on the Zeros, many of which were valiantly flying on. After three passes though, the Zero formation finally disintegrated. Now the jets were able to blast away at the individual enemy pilots breaking away from the pack.

  Within two minutes, the Fitzgerald’s pilots had expertly broken the enemy’s first wave, destroying all twenty enemy planes.

  But no sooner had they accomplished this than another wave of twenty Zeros came into view.

  Once again the jets tore through the chevrons of enemy planes, mercilessly fi
ring and scoring kills at will. Once again the Zeros began exploding and falling. Indeed, the biggest danger for the jet pilots was avoiding all of the flaming debris that had filled the sky. These twenty Zeros were dispatched in less than a minute.

  But then another twenty arrived. And after that wave was dispersed, another appeared. And after that, there was another. And another. And another. On and on it went for nearly fifteen minutes, the jet pilots shooting the bomb-laden yet completely defenseless Zeros only to have twenty more appear.

  It was a turkey shoot in all senses of the term, but it would not be a total victory for the United Americans. For although the jets continued to shoot down the Zeros, they were all running low on fuel and ammo.

  And that had been the Cult’s plan all along.

  After twenty minutes of the aerial slaughter, Tornado One was forced to return to the Fitz. The Viggens were close behind, as were the Orao and the Fiat. The Alpha jets were able to stay for about twenty-five minutes, the Morat about a minute more. In the end it was the A-4 and the Strikefighters that lasted the longest, but even their larger fuel tanks began to run dry.

  They managed to scatter the eighth wave of Zeros, but then were forced to return to the Fitz.

  The antiaircraft crews on every ship were ready when the first line of surviving Zeros appeared high above the Task Force about ten minutes later.

  The chevron of propeller planes quickly broke and one by one came screaming down at the four ships.

  The gun crews opened up. Dozens of 40mm Bofors, two-pound Pom-Pom “Chicago Pianos,” Phoenix Gatling guns, 5-inchers, and heavy machine-guns let loose at once.

  The wall of fire put up by the ships—especially by the New Jersey—was frightening. So many explosive-packed Zeros were blowing up above the Task Force, it looked like a fireworks display.

  But for Cohen, it wasn’t enough.