The alarm clock bomb was ticking loudly now, and the second hand sweeping ever closer to a chaos that would soon become all but uncontrollable. Within minutes of the attack, the ringing of telephones from Beijing to Vladivostok to Honolulu to Washington DC chimed out their warning on one desk after another.
A new storm was coming to the Pacific, and the first darkened squalls had flashed the lightning of war over its restless waters. It would begin there in a squabble for undiscovered oil, one tiny lit fuse that would soon ignite many others. The real war would be fought where the crude already ran thick, in the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mexico, and the vast new superfields of Central Asia in Kazakhstan.
Part VI
“…The release of Atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one…He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”
Chapter 16
Kamenski flipped slowly through the book, quietly shaking his head within as he did so. It was the History of the Japanese Navy in WWII, and he had come here to the library in Vladivostok to chase an itch he had been scratching for the last twenty years. He had learned a great deal about a mysterious incident in the Coral Sea that the history never fully explained. The Japanese had tried to cover things up, but as the years went by, more and more evidence slowly came to light. Something has happened, like a ripple of lightning across the blackened storm clouds of war. Something came out of the Indian ocean and struck through the heart of the Japanese offensive in 1942 like a steel javelin.
It started off the coast of Melville Island, where he had read reports made by coast watchers that the Japanese had engaged an Allied surface ship running east away from Darwin. The problem was that there were no allied warships worth the name in Darwin at the time, and no one seemed to be able to identify what this ship was. Yet the Japanese had pursued it through the Torres Straits and into the Coral Sea, expending the considerable power of their entire 5th Carrier Division to do so, and leaving the battleship Kirishima a half sunken wreck on the coral reefs of the strait. He remembered the text he had read on the incident, still vague and non- specific: “Unaccountable losses sustained by Hara’s Group prevented them from reinforcing Yamashiro’s carriers at a vital moment, and the Americans were therefore able to deal with each arm of the Japanese offensive in detail.”
Unaccountable losses? That was all that was to be said about this after eighty long years? Then the mystery deepened when Admiral Yamamoto split his heavy covering force for the counter invasion of Guadalcanal and sailed west into the Coral Sea…aboard the battleship Yamato. That was most unusual. The Yamato was the symbol of Japan’s prestige and power at sea, named for the ancient homeland itself. What could have possessed Yamamoto to commit it to action like that? And more-what sent it back to Kure harbor a broken and damaged ship? That had been kept very secret by the Japanese. In fact, it was never known that Yamato had been engaged and sustained heavy damage until well after the war.
Something mean and powerful had sailed those waters. Something capable of defending itself from an entire carrier air wing and then bludgeoning the most powerful battleship the world had ever seen. Even now the details of that battle were very shady. It still remained a mystery. The initial accounts were that Yamato struck a mine off Milne Bay, and then this was revised a few years later by an American historian who claimed The USS Sea Dragon was returning to Australia from her third war patrol in the South China Sea and came across the Yamato, promptly putting two torpedoes into the mighty ship.
Kamenski took both versions of that history with a grain of salt, particularly when he managed to dig up hidden records of the damage sustained by Yamato. One of the guns on an aft turret had been put out of action and replaced with a barrel that had been originally machined for the Shinano. She also had extensive fire damage above the water line on her superstructure, damage that could only have been produced by large caliber weapons. There had been snippets of reports of naval rockets used in an engagement, which in themselves were very odd, and then he came across something that stunned him, a photo of two Japanese engineers holding up a piece of charred metal where an engraved serial number was quite evident.
Kamenski kept that number in his head for many, many years, but he could never run it down until the year 2020. He was more than a curious old man. He had spent forty years in the service of his government, with posts in the Navy, and in intelligence as well. He still had access to things a normal person would never have seen, and he had been going over some weapons production information for the new navy Moskit-II missiles when he came across the number-the exact same number he had carried all those years, and it was assigned to a missile that was mounted on none other than the battlecruiser Kirov, the very same ship he had taken Alexi to gawk at in the harbor that afternoon.
He knew that this was most likely mere coincidence, but made his phone call just the same-to his old friend Inspector Gerasim Kapustin, in town that week and aboard Kirov at that very moment. Was missile number 110720-12 still in inventory he had asked? No it was expended on trials, came the answer, and yes let us get together Sunday for dinner.
Kamenski did not know what difference that little tidbit of knowledge would make, but he knew he had asked the question for some reason, perhaps buried deep within his unconscious mind where it still sifted and churned through all the data and photos, and other puzzle pieces he had been playing with over the years. What could hold off Admiral Hara’s fleet and Yamamoto’s on top of it? He was beginning to think he knew. His grandson had told him all about it that very same morning…
Then there was the cruiser Tone, the odd crumpling on her hull after she returned from that same war patrol. He stared at a faded old photo purporting to picture a sailor from that ship in the moment just before he committed seppuku. Oddly, out of a crew of some 800 men, there had been 346 reported suicides! Tone had been called the Ghost Ship ever thereafter, and any man who ever served aboard her had reported strange visions and restless nights at sea, fitful sleep and night terrors. Her former Captain, Sanji Iwabuchi, had also committed seppuku, just as the American army closed in on his final positions in Manila.
The cruiser Haguro had been reported sunk that same month, in that very same week, but no reason was given. She was merely listed as “lost to enemy action off Mellvile Island.” It was all very strange but remained nothing more than an old man’s fancy until that Sunday evening dinner when he sat down with Gerasim Kapustin.
“Have a look at this photo,” said Kamenski showing his friend the book. “Yes I’m an old fool, but doesn’t that look oddly familiar? If I didn’t know any better I would say it was a part of a stabilizing fin on one of our Moskit- IIs.”
Kapustin smiled, looking over the top of his reading glasses to peer at the photo, and noting the caption. It was dated to 1946. “Yes, it’s is a very strange coincidence, but I’m glad you are still the same curious old man you always were, Pavel. When you called to ask about that missile I wondered what you were up to. Well listen to this, my friend…” He looked around the restaurant, though the two man had selected a private corner table and had little fear that anyone might overhear them. “Speaking of serial numbers, another weapon was also fired during the weapons trials for Kirov, or so we just discovered, and its number ends with the character X.”
