Weapons of choice

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto flexed his injured left hand. He had lost two fingers many years ago in the battle at Tsushima, and he was troubled every now and then by phantom pain in the missing digits. The discomfort was so much a part of him that he did not attend to it with his conscious mind. That was beset by a multitude of problems arising from the events of June 3.

A cursed miracle was the only way to describe it, an inexplicable event that smashed the American fleet at the same time as it delivered untold power into their hands. It still felt to him as if the whole world had been tipped off its axis and now wobbled precariously, threatening to spin completely out of control.

As for the Indonesian vessel, the technical aspects of their amazing find were in some ways the least challenging. Given enough time, engineers like Brasch would unlock every secret contained within that ship. No, it was the historical ramifications that would prove the most challenging, the most dangerous. Who was to tell the emperor how this conflict was destined to end? And who would tell Hitler of his ordained fate, dead by his own hand three years from now, his body burned beyond recognition to keep it from the Communists who would enslave half the Reich?

Well, Brasch would have that unhappy task, he supposed. Yamamoto did not envy him. It was undoubtedly a death sentence.

Yamamoto peered out the porthole at the farms that climbed the sides of nearly every hilly little island dotted throughout this part of the Inland Sea. Atop each hill sat batteries of antiaircraft guns hidden beneath thick camouflage netting. Anchored all about lay nearly 150 ships of the imperial fleet.

The admiral quickly abandoned the small glimpse of the outside world, returning to his desk, which was buried under thousands of pages of paper-reports from the team examining the Sutanto. Most were technical updates, the latest explanations of some astounding new technology. Set to one side however, was a pile of documents Yamamoto found even more disturbing than the report about the superbombs. This smaller set of papers represented the findings of his intelligence officers who had been assigned to trawl the ship's so-called "electronic files" for historical information.

Therein lay a description of his own death, shot down by American fighter planes over New Guinea. That was a macabre curiosity, but in fact of no great concern to the admiral. Not when measured against the larger picture that had emerged of the course this conflict was supposed to take, and still would, in his opinion. Every misgiving he had ever expressed-about the folly of warring with both the United States and the British Empire-had come to pass.

Or would come to pass.

From the top of the pile he plucked the time line he had ordered drawn up. He could see that in a less than a fortnight Tobruk would fall to Rommel, but his advance would peter out at Alamein within a month, and vast tonnages of American firepower would begin to crush the life out of the Afrika Korps. On the Fourth of July, the very first U.S. Army Air Force operations over Europe would commence with attacks on Dutch airfields being used by the Luftwaffe. Soon enough the skies over Europe would be full of Yankee bombers and fighters.

At the end of July, Japan was supposed to advance on Port Moresby in New Guinea. He had seen the plans himself. But that would mark the farthest expansion of the empire. Australian troops would soon hand the army their first defeat on land.

On August 9, Vice Admiral Mikawa was to destroy an Allied cruiser squadron at Savo Island. But that could not happen now, because the Allies must surely know of it. And, of course, some of the American ships fated to perish there had already been destroyed.

It was confounding in the extreme to try to untangle these knotted threads of fate and circumstance. But one thing was becoming clear: the trend of events could not be allowed to proceed on their appointed course. Unless he was able to conceive of some master stroke, unless the Axis high command could be convinced to abandon their strategic follies, all was lost.

Yamamoto's stomach burned with acid as he reread the most unsettling dossier of all: an incomplete but deeply troubling account of China's rise to power under a Communist regime and the long, dark shadow that cast over a declining Nippon in the next century. Even if they laid down their arms and begged the Allies for mercy this morning, annihilation at the hands of the Mongols seemed inevitable.

No. Yamamoto could not let that come to pass.

He picked up his stateroom phone.

"Get Hidaka and Brasch, and that Moertopo creature. Bring them over here at once."