Designated Targets

HIJMS YAMATO, THE PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS

He could not see the prize he had come to take. It was obscured by the smoke of his own giant guns, and by the burning of so many buildings and fields. But Oahu was definitely there, just ten miles off starboard, the whole island shaking under the thunder of bombardment.

The commander of the Combined Fleet did not let his feelings escape. He maintained a stern countenance and refused to join in the celebrations. But he did let his men applaud as reports came back of a sea of fire, engulfing the remains of Nimitz’s fleet at Pearl Harbor, and of airfields reduced to smoking rubble and twisted, red hot metal. Indeed, they had earned the right.

The great iron behemoth of the battleship Yamato shuddered again as her eighteen-inch batteries fired a broadside into the gray shroud that hung over the Americans’ Pacific bastion. Using the newly installed German range-finding equipment, the ship’s gunnery officers could be certain of landing their shots with remarkable accuracy. Only the Yamato had been fitted out so far, but with every volley, she sent tons of high explosives screaming through the air, to land on the heads of the defenders.

Above him, lost in the glare of the equatorial sun, hundreds of bombers and fighters pressed their attacks, sweeping in toward their prey and then returning home to the decks of his carriers by an elliptical route that kept them from being destroyed by the cannon fire of their own ships.

If Yamamoto had one regret, it was that the Dessaix’s attack had been so successful, despite the attempted sabotage. As a result, he would never engage in a decisive match with the American fleet. The U.S. would survive this defeat, and would rebuild their navy. Indeed, it would probably be infinitely more powerful than the force he had set out to destroy in December 1941. But it would do them no good. By then, they would be on the wrong side of history, and the next fifty years would tell the story of their unavoidable decline.

Another broadside. Another volley of massive, three-thousand-pound shells.

The decking tilted beneath him, and he felt the sudden overpressure as a discomforting sensation—not just in his ears, but throughout his whole body.

It felt splendid.

Yamamoto accepted a cup of green tea offered by a young officer. The steaming liquid vibrated inside the bone china cup, a small and delicate manifestation of the insensate violence tearing at the world around him.

“General Tanaga reports that the first transports are successfully away, Admiral,” said the duty radio operator.

Yamamoto thanked the lieutenant and sipped at his tea.

He was content with the progress of the assault, but privately anxious that the army should get ashore and establish control as quickly as possible. Much of the contemporary U.S. naval power had been destroyed for now, but there remained significant forces from the group that had come through at Midway. Battle damage had negated some of the threat. The Clinton, for instance, had not been able to repair her catapult system with the tools at hand, and had been retired to the West Coast, perhaps to be stripped, perhaps to be refitted. He did not know.

What was important was that she had gone. The Trident was on the other side of the world; Kolhammer’s “stealth” cruiser, the Leyte Gulf, was confirmed sunk. And the stocks of advanced weapons on the remaining ships were surely close to running out.

That was the gamble he had chosen to take.

Yamamoto closed his eyes and remembered the sacrifice made by Homma and the many navy men who had died off Australia, simply to exhaust Kolhammer’s store of weapons. For a month now, no IJN ship had disappeared inside the infernal white fire of a “plasma yield” rocket, or had been torn to pieces by hundreds of tiny bombs spat out of the belly of a “hammerhead.” None of his colleagues had been claimed by the barbarian woman on the submarine Havoc with her torpedoes that seemed to run as quickly through the water as a Zero flew through the sky.

And of course, the Dessaix had turned the Clinton’s surviving Raptors into metal confetti.

Even so, he thought, as another thirty thousand pounds of high explosive erupted from the mouth of the ship’s main batteries, he would have been happier to have delayed this moment until he could be sure. The Siranui and her treacherous crew still gave their loyalty to Kolhammer. And although the archival data indicated that the Kandahar’s air wing was not equipped with antiship missiles, how could he be sure without being able to walk through the vessel’s armory to check for himself? Midway had taught him that nothing was certain.

Unfortunately, nothing was perfect, either, and the warrior who waited until he had conditions exactly as he wanted them was in the end no warrior at all. He was a coward who would never know triumph.