Rage of Battle

increase the anxiety of the womenfolk left behind, the condoms weren’t listed as such but as sterile surgical gloves.

On the TV monitor, Admiral Brentwood saw that the red, skull-like pictures of the storm system over the Atlantic were changing again. Red patches invaded green, the storm having moved from force six to eight since midafternoon. He wondered if Robert was out there now in the middle of it. Maybe the Roosevelt was farther north, in the Irish Sea, part of the NATO force protecting England’s western approaches. Or rather trying to.

“Admiral?”

He looked up at his secretary. Janice had the lips of a Raquel Welch and a body to boot, her curves flattered by a form-clinging emerald knit dress, the air around her redolent with the perfume of roses. His favorite flower. It struck him that she might know this, but he quickly dismissed the thought as mere conceit. She handed him a fax. “Admiral, San Diego regrets…”

“But they want the oil tankers for themselves?” he interjected, taking a file of letters she had ready for his signature.

“Afraid so, Admiral.”

“I don’t blame them,” he sighed, taking off his reading glasses, sitting back, pinching the bridge of his nose. “The only oil Japan and the Sixth Fleet’s going to get is from our West Coast, at least until Iran and Iraq stop shooting at anything that moves in the Gulf.”

“We could fax Valdez,” suggested Janice. “If there’s a lineup there, we could ask Washington to intervene and release—”

“Yes,” said Brentwood, leaning forward now, hands locked together, shoulders hunched from the long hours and stress of the job. “But if we fax Valdez to release a tanker for the Atlantic ops without going through San Diego, that’ll only get San Diego’s back up — not to mention the Sixth Fleet.”

“And Tokyo,” she added.

“You’ve got it. No — we’re all running on a scarcity of ships, Janice. Everyone thinks their operational theater problem is the most important, their problems the most serious. But if anything happens to those tankers we have on—” he put his reading glasses on, peering through the dimmed light of the overhead neon at the transparent green “Ops” board “—Convoys Eighty-Three and Eighty-Four — we’re in big trouble.” Janice said nothing, and all he could hear for a moment was the soft sound of her breathing. “Look — let’s request one tanker from San Diego. They’ll look piggy if they insist on keeping all three. One’s a compromise situation, and we can start moving it as a reserve. But double-check the draft on all three tankers, Janice— before we make the request. We don’t want to do a Levins.”

Janice laughed. “Yes, Admiral.” Levins was one of Brentwood’s colleagues in the New York Port Authority/Navy Logistics Liaison Office who had “demanded” a tanker from San Diego and had then become a laughingstock in the Pentagon and all up and down the West Coast after it was discovered the tanker he’d been thumping the desk for was two meters too wide for the Panama Canal. “Unless,” a tongue-in- cheek advisory had come back from San Diego, “you intend sailing it round Cape Horn?”

** missing page 172-173

navy, but that was always the weaknesses of other men. Just as his son Robert carried the responsibility of killing Seaman Evans aboard the Roosevelt, so his father labored under guilt, a guilt that to other men would have seemed disproportionate, to say the least. Though intellectually the admiral could see how it would be seen as nothing to other men, he could not shake the feeling of unworthiness, and it would become an even heavier burden as the war kept on, the admiral hoping that one day, somehow, somewhere, he could redeem himself.

* * *

Atop Hawaii’s island of Maui, it was afternoon, the azure expanse of sea now darkening with no distinguishable horizon in sight, blue upon blue upon blue, silver winking of whitecaps soon indistinguishable, swallowed by the glare of the late sun’s light. The uninterrupted aspect of the Pacific all about the Hawaiian Islands was a sight meteorologist Sam Ronson never tired of watching. As his four-wheel-drive Toyota took the last of the bending zigzag road up to the observatory, he flipped down the visor and wound down the driver’s window, relishing the cold, icy blast of air.

His union had fought vociferously against the U.S. Weather Service scheduling only one meteorological officer for the six-to-midnight watch, arguing that six hours in the high, thin, pristine air was too hard on a single observer. The truth for Sam Bronson, however, and one he was careful not to reveal to the union bosses in Honolulu, was that for his part, he wouldn’t have minded staying up at the observatory all night. He liked the solitude granted him by the astronomer, who was usually too busy to talk. For Sam, the spill of stars in the autumn sky was a sight that never ceased to awe. He wasn’t sure whether there was a God or not, but if there was, then this night sky was more evidence of a supreme being than all the holy books. Night after night he had gazed toward the heavens, transporting himself to worlds beyond. The belief that there were no other beings in the universe seemed to him as silly as the belief that there was an up and down, an idea manufactured by men merely to comfort them in the huge uncertainty of infinity.

But even if he had not enjoyed the “nocturnal star gazing,” as the astronomer on duty called it, Sam treasured this time away from his wife. She was his second and, after his first, his second biggest mistake. Sam didn’t like partying or even talking much. After two wives and four children, what he wanted was to be left alone, to monitor the anemometer for wind speed, the seismograph, and rainfall — now called “precipitation” by the TV forecasters — and to marvel at the fact that within a few thousand feet, Maui’s tropical rain forests were washed by rain that had been snow at the height of the observatory.

When he saw the stylus on the brown recorder jerk to five, registering a quake several hundred miles northwest of the outer island of Kauai, he didn’t bother putting in a call to Honolulu as the information would automatically have gone through from the observatory via the SAT/bounce feed. But when the stylus went to 6.1, he initiated a manual as well as the automatic alarm, which was just as well, for, though he didn’t know it at the time, the automatic sensors on Japan’s west coast were being “fuzzed over” by an electrical storm sweeping down from Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. It meant that Sam Ronson’s warning, via Honolulu relay and Australia’s Tidbinbilla, was the first Tokyo center had of the quake and of ensuing tsunamis, the latter so often mistakenly called tidal waves, which were heading toward Japan.

The height and frequency of the tsunamis were being excited by a hurricane, moving northwest from the Marianas with winds in excess of 120 miles an hour. When the stylus jumped from 6.1 to 7.1, every digit on the Richter scale representing a tenfold increase in force, Sam Ronson again rang through the alarm. But by now Tokyo was being hit, and though no one realized it at the time, the thesis of Tadanabu Ito, joint degree holder and Ph.D. candidate, on “Tectonics and Economics” was about to become a reality. It would make Ito famous and explain the death of over three hundred thousand Japanese as the quake, the worst in Japan for a hundred years, reduced the financial center of Tokyo, despite all the “floating base” design of its skyscrapers, to a rubble of concrete and glass shot through with enormous natural-gas-fueled fires from ruptured mains.

To rebuild meant calling in, at the very least, the interest owing on the massive loans Japan had made to the West. In particular this meant calling in loans made to Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Not yet combatants themselves, these countries and others like them who were required to repay Japanese loans in terms of raw materials could not repay even if they had wanted to, which they didn’t, because of the Soviet sub packs roaming the south Atlantic and the Pacific, their prime purpose to play havoc along U.S./Australasian/ Japanese sea routes.

The horrendous implications of such a situation had been unforeseen except for the obscure graduate student, Tadanabu Ito. His doctoral thesis on the economic and social implications of a Japan suddenly depleted of a steady supply of raw materials by natural disaster had predicted that a Japan starved for raw materials after her three-month reserves of iron ore, coal, and bauxite had run out would be a Japan open to the temptations of “military adventure.” And that Tokyo, after her experiences in the thirties and forties, would not want another war with China. The only remaining source of such materials was the Soviet Far East.

At the end of November, Tokyo’s full cabinet, with the emperor’s approval, announced simultaneously to Washington and Beijing that in retaliation for increasing Soviet bombing of her western ports and the unlawful occupation of the northern islands, its defense forces would henceforth launch “surgical strikes” against Soviet bases.

This meant Vladivostok, farther inland at Ulan-Ude, and Cam Rahn Bay in Vietnam. The pilots of the Japanese