Fortunes of War (34 page)

“I want a complete written report, Kimura, as soon as possible. I will send it to Tokyo.” The colonel turned his back so that Jiro couldn't see his face.

Jiro walked on toward the dispersal shack.

They couldn't all be dead. Surely some of them had ejected safely. Sasai, Ota, Miura…

As he walked, Jiro Kimura wiped away tears.

 

When Cassidy and Elitch got back to the squadron, Paul Scheer was sitting with his feet up on the duty desk, smoking a cigar. He gave them a beatific smile.

“Hear anything from the others?” Cassidy snapped.

“Nope. I watched the discs from your plane and mine. I'm pretty sure they're dead.”

“You look awful damned crushed about it.”

Scheer refused to be flustered. He puffed on the cigar a few times, then took a long drag and exhaled.

“Colonel, it's like this: If I were dead and Fur Ball were sitting here instead of me, I would want him to have a cigar. I would want him to savor this sublime moment. If I could, I would light the cigar for him.”

Scheer stretched out his arms and yawned. “Best goddamned two minutes of my life. The very best.” He sighed. “The sad thing is that it's all downhill from here. What could possibly equal that?”

Scheer slowly got to his feet. As cigar smoke swirled around his head, he hitched up his gun belt, reached into his unzipped G suit and scratched, then helped himself to a swallow of water from a small bottle. Opening the desk drawer, he extracted two cigars and held them out.

“One each. This was our stash, Hudek's and mine. When you smoke them, think of Fur Ball and Foy Sauce and the Preacher. Three damned good men.”

Cassidy and Elitch each took the offered cigars.

Paul Scheer strolled out of the room, trailing smoke.

When he was lying in his bunk that evening, Jiro Kimura could not sleep. The morning fight kept swirling through his mind. After a while, he got out his flashlight, pulled the blanket over his head, and wrote a letter to his wife.

The train was barely an hour north of Vladivostok when it derailed. Isamu Iwakuro felt the engine and cars lurch. He had spent his adult life working as a locomotive repair specialist, and he knew.

The car he was in, the second behind the last locomotive, went over on its side and the lights went out. The car skidded for what seemed to be a long time before it came to rest.

Inside the car, civilians and soldiers and their baggage were hopelessly jumbled. Someone was screaming.

Iwakuro managed to get upright and clamber over several seats toward the door, all the while shouting for everyone to remain quiet and not panic.

Then the explosions began. Steel and smoke ripped through the shattered railroad car.

Antitank grenades!

The explosions popped like firecrackers. All up and down the train, he could hear the hammering of the grenades. And he could hear machine guns, long, ripping bursts.

Something smashed into his shoulder and he went down. Another explosion near his head knocked him unconscious.

When Iwakuro came to, he could see nothing. Night had fallen, although he didn't know it. At first, he thought he was blind. His shoulder was bleeding and hurt horribly, so he knew he was alive. He felt his way over bodies, searching for a way out of the railroad car. He saw a bit of light, finally, just a glimmer from a distant fire.

Somehow, he managed to crawl through a hole in the floor of the railroad car, which was still on its side.

To his right, away from the engine, he saw that one of the freight cars was burning.

Iwakuro crawled directly away from the train. When he had gone at least fifty meters, he sat and tried to bind his coat around his shoulder.

He was sitting in the grass, moaning ever so slightly, when someone shot him in the back.

Rough hands rolled him over. A flashlight shown on his face.

Now someone grabbed him by the hair and rammed a knife into his neck. Isamu Iwakuro filled his lungs to scream, but he was dead before the sound came out.

The man who had shot Iwakuro finished cutting off his head. He dropped it into a bag with six others. His orders were to decapitate every body he found.

 

Two hundred miles east of Honshu
Admiral Kolchak
was at periscope depth, running at six knots on a course of 195 degrees magnetic. Through the main scope Pavel Saratov could see an empty, wind-whipped sea and sky.

After a careful, 360-degree transit with the scope, Saratov ordered it lowered. The navigator was bent over the chart table when Saratov joined him.

“How fast do you want to go, Captain?” As was usual aboard
Admiral Kolchak
, the navigator asked the question in a low, subdued voice.

“I want to keep a good charge on the batteries at all times,” Saratov answered, automatically making his voice match the navigator's. “We must be able to go deep and stay there to have any chance against the Jap patrols.”

“We are in the Japanese current, bucking it. We would make better time if we got out of it to the southeast, then headed southwest.”

“Stay in it, right in the middle. We're in no hurry.”

“Do you really think they are looking for us?”

“You can bet your life on it.”

Askold leaned over the table. “How do you plan to go in, Captain?”

“I have no plans. We must see what develops.”

“Getting out?”

“God knows. We will see.”

“What will you see, Saratov?” The voice boomed in the little room. Esenin was right behind them. As usual, he was wearing the box, a gray metal box about three inches wide, five inches long, and an inch deep. It hung on a strap around his neck. Since the boat had submerged at Trojan Island, he had never been without the box.

“We will see if we can get out of Japanese waters alive,” Saratov said.

“Don't be such a pessimist. This is an opportunity of a lifetime to do something important for your country.”

“For you, General, perhaps. These men have already struck a stupendous blow for Russia.”

“Don't be insubordinate,” Esenin snapped. “You are in a leadership position.”

“I'm in command of this vessel, and I won't forget it.”

Esenin looked into the faces of the men in the control room. Then he turned to Saratov and whispered, “Don't push me.”

 

A P-3 came that night. The sonar operator heard it first. The watch officer called Saratov, who was lying down in his stateroom, trying to sleep.

The plane went by about two miles to the south, flying east.

“He's flying a search pattern,” the navigator said.

“Probably,” Saratov said, “but the question is, Are we inside the pattern or outside of it?”

The sound of the plane disappeared. After a few minutes the watch team relaxed, smiled at one another, and went back to checking gauges, filling out logs, reading, and scratching themselves. Esenin had stationed one of his armed naval infantrymen in the control room. The man was trying to stay out of the way, but in a compartment that crowded, it was impossible. He had to move whenever anyone else moved.

Saratov eyed the man. He was in his mid-twenties, said almost nothing, obviously understood little of what went on around him. Was he a real naval infantryman? Or was he something else? Apparently, he had never before been to sea, or had he?

The P-3 returned. It went behind the submarine a mile or so to the north, headed west.

“We're in his pattern,” the navigator said.

“Hold this heading. In about ten minutes, we'll cross his original flight path. He'll search behind us.”

That was the way it worked out. Still, the XO and the navigator looked worried.

At midnight, when the captain gave the order to snorkel, the XO wanted to discuss it. “Sir, the P-3s can pick up the snorkel head on radar.”

“We must charge the batteries, Askold. If we cannot do it here, we will never get into the mouth of the bay and back out.”

Askold bit his lip, then repeated the snorkel order to the chief.

As luck would have it, within thirty minutes the sub entered a line of squalls. Heavy swells and rain in sheets hid the snorkel head. The rocking motion of the boat, just under the surface, made the sailors smile. They knew how rough it was up there.

Saratov drank a cup of tea in the wardroom while Esenin and his number two, the major, silently watched. Then Saratov went to his cabin and stretched out on the bunk.

He couldn't sleep. In his mind's eye he saw airplanes and destroyers hunting, searching, back and forth, back and forth…

 

The sonar operator called the P-3 sixty seconds before it went directly over the submarine. The duty officer immediately ordered snorkeling stopped and the electric motors started. The plane went by, fifteen seconds passed, then it began a turn.

“He's got us,” the watch officer said. “Call the captain.”

Saratov heard that order as he came along the passageway. “Take it down to a forty meters,” Pavel Saratov said after the chief reported the diesel engines secured. “Left full rudder to one zero zero degrees.”

“Left full rudder, aye. New course one zero zero.”

Esenin came to the control room. A moment later the major arrived, just in time to hear the sonar operator call, “Sonobuoys in the water.” He began calling the bearings and estimated ranges of the splashes as the navigator plotted them.

“Let's get the boat as quiet as we can, Chief.”

“Aye, Captain. Slow speed?”

“Three knots. No more. And go deeper. Seventy meters.”

“Down on the bow planes. Up on the stern planes,” the chief ordered. The
michman
on the planes complied.

Saratov looked at his watch. The time was a bit after 0300.

“P-3 is coming in for another run, Captain. He sounds like he's going to go right over us.”

“Keep me advised.”

“Steady on new course one zero zero.”

“Keep going down, Chief. One hundred meters. Somebody watch the water-temp gauge. Let me know if we hit an inversion.”

“There should be an inversion,” the duty officer muttered, more to himself that anyone else. “This
is
the Japanese current.”

“P-3's going right over our heads.”

“Come left to new course zero four five.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Saratov noted Esenin's facial expression, which was tense. The major, standing beside Esenin, looked worried.

“One hundred meters, Captain.”

“Make it a hundred and fifty.”

“One fifty, aye.”

“How deep is the water here?” the major asked the navigator, who didn't even check the chart before he answered.

“Six miles. We're over the Japanese trench.”

“So what happens if we can't lose this airplane?”

“He puts a homing torpedo in the water.” The navigator looked at the major and grinned. “Then we die.”

“Two hundred meters, Chief,” the captain said.

Passing through 170 meters, the temperature of the water began to rise. The duty officer saw it and sang out.

“Just how deep can this boat go?” the major asked the XO.

“Two hundred meters is our design depth.”

The captain missed this exchange. He was wearing a set of sonar headphones, listening with his eyes shut.

At this depth the boat creaked a bit, probably from the temperature change, or the pressure. Saratov heard none of it. He was concentrating with all his being on the hisses and gurgles of the living sea. Ah yes…there was the beat of the plane's props. He opened his eyes, glanced at the sonar indicator, which was pointing in the direction of the largest regular, man-made sound. The enemy airplane was almost overhead…now passing….

Splash! A sonobuoy. Or a torpedo.

“Deeper, Chief. Down another fifty meters.”

“Aye, Captain.”

More sonobuoys. Going away. Well, at least the P-3 didn't have the sub bracketed. The crew was searching for something they had, then lost.

“I think they have lost us, Chief. Now they'll try to find us again. Hold this depth, heading, and speed.”

A wave of visible relief swept through the men in the control room.

Saratov took off one of the sonar earphones and asked Esenin, “Those shells we welded to the deck—how much pressure are they built to withstand?”

“I don't know.”

“We'll find out, eh,” said Pavel Saratov. “You can tell them when you get home,” he added, and rearranged the earphones.

 

Atsuko Abe read the message from Agent Ju and snorted in disbelief. “How can we believe this?”

“We cannot afford to ignore it,” said Cho, the foreign minister, speaking carefully. “If there is one chance in a thousand that Ju is correct, that is an unacceptable risk.”

“Don't talk to me of unacceptable risk,” Abe snarled. Cho had been one of the most vocal proponents of taking the Siberian oil fields. Today they were in the prime minister's office off the main floor of the Diet. He normally used this office to confer with members of his party.

Abe shook the paper with the message on it at Cho. “We lost fifteen Zeros to the American Squadron two days ago. The generals believe we will be able to hold our own from now on, but that is probably just wishful thinking. The essential military precondition to the invasion of Siberia was local air supremacy. It has been taken from us.”

Cho said nothing.

“Last night two hundred civilians and thirty soldiers were killed in a railroad ambush a mere fifty kilometers north of Vladivostok. Guerillas murdered a whole trainload of people in an area that is supposed to be secure, an area that is practically in our backyard.”

Abe straighted his tie and jacket. “This morning in Vladivostok, the heads were dumped on the street in front of Japanese military headquarters.” Abe looked Cho straight in the eye. “I can prevent the news being published, but I cannot stop whispers. Corporate executives know their employees are being slaughtered. No Japanese is safe anywhere in Siberia. The executives are demanding that we do
something
, prevent future occurrences.”

Cho gave a prefunctory bow.

“The United Nations is moving by fits and starts to condemn Japanese aggression. When that fails to deter us, someone will suggest an economic boycott. The Russians are very active in the UN—they are shaking hands and smiling and preparing to nuke us. They are willing to do whatever it takes to win. I ask you, Cho, are you willing? Cho?”

“Mr. Prime Minister, I advocated invasion. I firmly believe that possession of Siberia's oil fields will allow this people to survive and flourish
in the centuries to come. That oil is our lifeblood. It is worth more to us than it is to any other nation.”

Atsuko Abe placed his hands flat on his desk. “Without air supremacy we will be unable to resupply our people in Siberia this winter. Air supremacy is absolutely critical. Everything flows from that.”

“I see that, Mr. Prime Minister.” Cho's head bobbed.

“The American Squadron at Chita must be eliminated. The generals tell me there is only one way to ensure that all the planes, people, equipment, and spare parts are neutralized: we must strike with a nuclear weapon.”

Cho blanched.

“
This
is the crisis,” Abe roared. “We are committed! We must conquer or die. There is no other way out. We have bet everything
—everything—
our government, our nation, our lives. Do you have the courage to see it through?”

“This course will be completely unacceptable to the Japanese public,” Cho sputtered.

“Damn the public.” Abe slapped his hands on the desk. “The public wants the benefits of owning Siberia. A prize this rich cannot be had on the cheap. We must pay for it. Nuking Chita is the price. We cannot get Siberia for one yen less.”

“The Japanese people will not pay
that
price.”