Final impact

Before him the Sea of Okhotsk was congested with ships large and small, none of them moving at any great speed. A few gun flashes lit the surface of the waters, giving him a chance to get a fix on his prey, a large flattop vessel in the center of the flotilla. Then the twinkling of small-caliber gunfire and the flare of the big-bore guns spread across the Russian fleet, lighting up the world in front of him.

As scared as the pilot was-and he was very scared-a part of him felt strangely detached. It was the part that caused him to smile sadly and to stroke his daughter’s doll with one gloved, trembling finger-but only ever so briefly. He had to keep both hands on the stick to avoid a catastrophic loss of control, so close to the end.

The roar of the engine seemed much louder, and every vibration of the airframe shook him to his core. His mouth was dry and he wished that he could have just one last sip of water.

Antiaircraft shells began to burst around him, buffeting his plane with great violence. Two close explosions shook his daughter’s doll loose from where he had fixed it on the console.

“No!” he cried.

It seemed a much worse thing than his approaching death. Uemura did a quick calculation. The target vessel was now lit up by dozens of guns throwing a storm of metal into the air in front of him. He was about thirty seconds from impact.

He cursed, gripped the control stick with all the strength in his right hand, and leaned forward to grope around as best he could for Motoko’s doll. He felt the plane veer down and gave a tug on the stick.

A quick glance over the dashboard.

The Russian ship was getting much closer, and growing ever larger.

He grunted in frustration, almost crying.

Then he had it in his hand, and a beatific smile spilled across his face as he raised the doll to his cheek. It was like being kissed good-bye by his daughter.

Lieutenant Uemura gripped the controls in both hands again. He pushed the nose down toward his objective. Motoko’s little doll crushed up against the stick.

The carrier was rushing at him.

An insane velocity.

No time for-

The voices of his officers bellowing orders down the chain of command betrayed an edge of real panic as the kamikaze swarm raced toward them. The enemy was coming in at much greater speeds than in the previous attacks. Almost three times as quickly.

The Stormoviks of the combat air patrol had closed quickly with them, only to find themselves firing at empty space as the rocket planes swept past. Admiral Yumashev cursed his lack of jet fighters, but there simply hadn’t been time to develop a carrier version of the MiG-15. It hadn’t been done in the world on the other side of the Emergence, either, forcing the Soviet navy to crib from the British carrier planes they had impounded as part of convoy PQ 17. Hence the striking similarities between his Stormoviks and the British Sea Hurricane.

The predawn gloom was banished entirely as every gun in his fleet opened up. The head of the flying column had already begun to spread out, however, with dozens of rocket-propelled bombs peeling away to throw themselves onto their victims. The noise was head splitting, with hundreds of cannons and machine guns pounding away, all of it laid over the scream of the Japanese engines.

One, two, three of the attackers detonated in midair. But dozens more speared through the burning debris.

“Steam, I need steam,” someone called out.

Yumashev’s eyes bulged as four of the flying demons drove themselves down into the body of the Moskva’s sister ship, Kiev. His heart sank into his boots as the carrier died within a cyclone of high explosives. Any hope that her great mass might absorb the damage was forlorn. The first three blooms of fire swallowed her up just before the fourth and last attacker dived in and blew the entire ship to pieces with a roar that he felt inside his chest from over a kilometer and a half away.

Yumashev opened his mouth to tell the fire control officer to coordinate a fleetwide defense of the capital ships, but it was too late. The words died at the back of his throat as he saw five of the Japanese rocket bombs heading directly for him.

He had time enough to register that the planes appeared to be painted white before the first one-now just a streak, a blur across his visual field-stabbed down into the flight deck directly in front of the carrier’s island.

D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0402 HOURS.

HMAS HAVOC, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“Holy shit!” Willet said.

“Yeah, there’s nothin’ like a good piece of hickory,” Master Chief Flemming muttered.

“Sorry, Chief?”

“Gratuitous classic reference, ma’am.”

Willet shook off a confused look and turned back to the main display, where the second of Yumashev’s two flattops had disappeared within a catastrophic series of blasts.

“Analysis, Amanda, as soon as poss’.”

“How about ‘better them than us,’ Captain?” Lieutenant Lohrey answered.