Dragon

perform coastal patrols. The rest went into kamikaze squadrons.

Okinaga was deeply disappointed. He would have gladly given his life for the Emperor, but he accepted boring patrol duty as a temporary assignment, hoping to be called for a more glorious mission when the Americans invaded his homeland.

As the lone aircraft grew larger, Okinaga didn’t believe what he saw. He rubbed his eyes and squinted. Soon he could clearly make out the ninety-foot polished aluminum fuselage, the huge 141-foot wings, and the three-story vertical stabilizer of an American B-29.

He stared dumfounded. The bomber was flying out of the northeast from an empty sea, 20,000 feet below its combat ceiling. Unanswerable questions flooded his mind. Where had it come from? Why was it flying toward central Japan with one engine feathered? What was its mission?

Like a shark knifing toward a bleeding whale, Okinaga closed to within a mile. Still no evasive action. The crew seemed asleep or bent on suicide.

Okinaga had no more time for guessing games. The great winged bomber was looming up before him. He jammed the throttle of his Mitsubishi A6M Zero against its stop and made a circling dive. The Zero handled like a swallow, the 1,130-horsepower Sakae engine hurtling him behind and beneath the sleek, gleaming B-29.

Too late the tail gunner sighted the fighter and belatedly opened fire. Okinaga squeezed the gun tit on his control stick. His Zero shuddered as his two machine guns and two twenty-millimeter cannons shredded metal and human flesh.

A light touch of the rudder and his tracers ate their way into the wing and the B-29’s number-three engine. The cowling ripped and tore away, oil poured through holes, followed by flames. The bomber seemed to hover momentarily, and then it flipped on its side and spun toward the sea.

Only after the choked-off cry of the tail gunner and his short burst of fire did the Demons realize they were under attack. They had no way of knowing from what direction the enemy fighter had come. They barely had time to recover when the shells from the Zero ate into the starboard wing.

A strangled cry came from Stromp. “We’re going in!”

Dennings shouted into the intercom as he fought to level the plane. “Stanton, jettison the bomb! Jettison the goddamn bomb!”

The bombardier, wedged against his bombsight by the centrifugal force, yelled back. “It won’t fall free unless you straighten us out.”

The number-three engine was blazing now. The sudden loss of two engines, both on the same side, had thrown the plane over until it was standing on one wing. Working in unison, Dennings and Stromp struggled with the controls, fighting the dying aircraft to an even keel. Dennings pulled back on the throttles, leveling out but sending the bomber into a flat, sickening stall.

Stanton pulled himself to an upright position and popped open the bomb-bay doors. “Hold it steady,” he yelled futilely. He wasted no time adjusting the bombsight. He pushed the bomb release button.

Nothing happened. The violent twisting motion had jammed the atomic bomb against its tight quarters.

White-faced, Stanton struck the release with his fist, but the bomb stubbornly remained in place. “It’s jammed!” he cried. “It won’t fall free.”

Fighting for a few more moments of life, knowing that if they survived they must all take their own lives by cyanide, Dennings struggled to ditch the mortally wounded aircraft in the sea.

He almost made it. He came within two hundred feet of settling the Demons on her belly in a calm sea. But the magnesium in the accessories and crankcase on number-three engine flared like an incendiary bomb, burning through its mounts and wing spar. It dropped away, ripping away the wing control cables.

Lieutenant Okinaga slipped the Zero off one wing, spiraling around the stricken B-29. He watched the black smoke and orange flame curl from the blue sky like a brush stroke. He watched the American plane crush itself into the sea, followed by the geyser of white water.

He circled, searching for survivors, but saw only a few bits of floating debris. Elated at what was to be his first and only kill, Okinaga banked around the funeral pyre of smoke one last time before heading back to Japan and his airfield.

As Dennings’ shattered aircraft and its dead crew settled into the seabed a thousand feet beneath the surface, another B-29 in a later time zone and six hundred miles to the southeast set up for its bomb run. With Colonel Paul Tibbets at the controls, the Enola Gay had arrived over the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Neither flight commander was aware of the other. Each man thought only his aircraft and crew was carrying the first atomic bomb to be dropped in war.

Dennings’ Demons had failed to make its rendezvous with destiny. The stillness of the deep seabed was as silent as the cloud that settled over the event. The heroic attempt by Dennings and his crew was buried in bureaucratic secrecy and forgotten.

Part 1 

Big John

1

 October 3, 1993

Western Pacific Ocean

THE WORST OF the typhoon had passed. The mad thrashing seas had subsided, but the waves still climbed the bows and came green and leaden over the decks, leaving a welter of foam behind. The thick black clouds broke apart and the wind died to a gusty thirty knots. To the southwest, shafts of sunlight broke through, painting blue circles on the tumbling swells.

Braving the winds and spray, Captain Arne Korvold stood on the open bridge of the Norwegian Rindal Lines passenger-cargo liner Narvik and aimed his binoculars at a huge ship wallowing dead in the whitecaps. She was big, a Japanese auto carrier by the look of her. Her upper works stretched from blunt bow to a perfectly squared stern, like a rectangular box laid horizontal. Except for the bridge and the crew’s quarters on the upper deck, there were no ports or windows on her sides.

She seemed to have a ten-degree permanent list but rolled to twenty as the swells smashed into her exposed port broadside. The only sign of life was a wisp of smoke from her stack. Korvold grimly noted that her lifeboats had been launched, and a sweep of the restless sea failed to find any sign of them. He refocused the binoculars and read the English name spelled out beneath the Japanese characters on the bow.

She was called the Divine Star.

Korvold returned to the comfort of the central bridge and leaned into the communications room. “Still no response?”

The radio operator shook his head. “Nothing. Not a peep wince we sighted her. Her radio must be closed down. Impossible to believe they abandoned ship without a distress call.”

Korvold stared silently through the bridge windows at the Japanese ship drifting less than a kilometer off his