The Nicholas Linnear Novels (90 page)

There was no humor in him now as he leaned his elbows on the metal bars of the top rail. The sea hissed by far below them.

Despite himself, Nangi felt a terrible despair engulfing him. “Then there can be no doubt. The war is surely lost, no matter what the Imperial Command tells us.”

Gōtarō turned to him, his eyes bright amid the shadows of the carrier’s many tiered superstructure. The proximity to so much reinforced metal was chilling, coming as they did from a culture intent on building structures of wood and rice paper. “Have faith.”

At first, Nangi was not sure that he had heard the other man correctly. “Faith?” he said after a pause. And when Gōtarō nodded, said, “Faith in what? Our Emperor? The Imperial Command? The
zaibatsu
? Tell me, which of our many traditional icons shall I bow down to tonight?” He heard the bitterness in his voice but he did not care. This night, so far from home, so close to the utter alienness of the battle lines, seemed meant for a venting of emotion long bottled up.

“Greed got us into this mad war,” he rushed on before the other could answer his rhetorical questions. “The blind ambition of the
zaibatsu
who persuaded the government that Japan was not a large enough area for their empire. ‘Expand, expand, expand,’ they counseled, and the war seemed like a superb excuse to carve out the niche we had long been seeking in Asia.

“But, Gōtarō-san, answer me this: Did they attempt to get a sense of our enemy before the attack on Pearl Harbor was ordered?” He shook his head. “Oh, no, no. Not a jot of ink was put to paper, not a moment of research was applied.” He smiled grimly. “History, Gōtarō. If they had known—or understood—anything about American history, they would have perhaps been able to anticipate the response to their attack.” Nangi’s gaze dropped, the fierceness went out of his voice. “Now what will happen to us in the end?”

“Have faith,” Gōtarō said again. “Trust in God.”

God? Now Nangi began to understand. He turned toward Gōtarō. “You’re a Christian, aren’t you?”

The big man nodded. “My family does not know. I cannot think that they would understand.”

Nangi stared at him for a time. “But why?”

“Because,” Gōtarō said softly, “for me there is no more fear.”

At 04:15 on the morning of March 13, Nangi was summoned to the captain’s cabin for a briefing. Dressed smartly in his pressed uniform, he moved down the silent narrow corridors up the ringing metal companionways. He might have had the entire carrier to himself. The
kami
of the ancient Shōgun seemed to walk with him, a descending line of invincible
samurai
with the wiles of the fox, the strength of the tiger.

That he, of all the men on board, should be summoned seemed a clear sign of his
karma.
Though he disagreed with the war, his soul still belonged to Japan. Now that they were in the thick of it, what frightened him was the specter of defeat. Perhaps he was to be a part of the new strategy; perhaps the war was not yet lost.

He rapped softly on the captain’s white-painted door with his knuckles, then went in. He was surprised to find Gōtarō there as well.

“Please be seated, Major,” Captain Noguchi said after the traditional formalities had been dispensed with. Nangi took a chair next to Gōtarō.

“You know Major Sato,” Noguchi said in his clipped tones. His bullet head bobbed. “Good.” A steward appeared, bringing a tray of sakē. He set it down in the center of Noguchi’s desk and departed.

“It is the middle of March in what we all fear may be the last year of the war.” Noguchi was quite calm, his eyes boring into first Nangi, then Gōtarō, magnified through the circular lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. He was a powerfully built man who emitted confidence and energy. He had intelligent eyes beneath heavy brows, a wide, thick-lipped mouth, and odd, splayed ears that stuck out from his close-cropped head like mushroom caps.

“The European playwright Shakespeare wrote that these days are the Ides, an evil time.” Noguchi smiled. “At least they were for Julius Caesar.” He spread his long, delicately fingered hands on his desk top. “And perhaps they will be so for the Allies.”

He had the habit of looking directly at you when he spoke instead of away as so many of his fellow upper-echelon officers did. Nangi felt instinctively that this was one source of the confidence he instilled in his men.

“Within the month the cherry blossoms will again come to the slopes and valleys of our homeland.” His eyes blazed with light. “The enemy threatens the extinction of the cherry blossom as he threatens our very lives.” His chest heaved as if he had gotten something hard and ugly off his mind.

“At this very moment, the mechanics are preparing another kind of cherry blossom for you two majors. I see the perplexed look on your faces. I will explain.”

He got up from behind his desk and set about pacing back and forth in the small cabin as if he was beginning to generate too much energy to be held to a sitting position. “We have precisely one hundred fifty planes on board. All—save one—are Mitsubishi G4 M.2e bombers. The ones the enemy calls ‘Bettys’ in an inexplicable form of derision.”

His closed fist slammed the desk, making the tiny cups quiver and rock where even the sea could not. “But no more! Not now that we have the Ōka!”

He turned toward them. “One of our Mitsubishis has been modified. Beneath its fuselage is another, smaller craft: a single-seat midwing monoplane of a length of just over nineteen feet and with a wingspan of sixteen feet, fifteen inches.

“The Ōka will be borne aloft by the Mitsubishi mother plane. At an altitude of 27,000 feet the two craft will separate. The Ōka will be able to cruise up to fifty miles at an effective airspeed of two hundred thirty miles per hour. When it comes within sighting distance of its target, the pilot will cut in its three solid-fuel rocket motors. The craft will then be flying at almost six hundred miles per hour.”

Noguchi was standing directly in front of them now, his cheeks red from the height of his emotion. “For a period of nine seconds, the Ōka will have a total thrust of 1,764 pounds. A great rush of momentum and then…” His head lifted up and his eyes went opaque as his lenses caught the light, reflecting it back at them in a dazzle. “Then you will become the avenging sword of the Emperor, opening up the side of an American warship.”

Nangi remembered this quite clearly. Noguchi did not ask either of them if they understood. But of course they did. The Ōka was a rocket bomb, manned for supreme accuracy.

“Yamato-dama-shii,”
Noguchi said now, returning to his seat behind his desk, “the Japanese spirit will be our bulwark against the superior material force of the Allies. That and the Ōka attacks will quickly demoralize the advancing enemy. We will blunt their coming attack on the Philippines.”

Noguchi began to pour the sakē, handed a gleaming porcelain cup to each of them and, lifting his, made this toast: “A man has only one death. That death may be as weighty as Fuji-yama or it may be as light as feather down. It all depends on the way he uses it. It is the nature of every Japanese to love life and hate death, to think of his family and care for his wife and children. Only when a man is moved by higher principles—by
junsuisei
, the purity of resolve—is this not so. Then mere are things which he must do.”

They all drank together. Nangi saw that there were tears in the corners of Gōtarō’s eyes. At the time he supposed they were because of either his Christianity or his ignorance. What Captain Noguchi had used for their fond farewell, masquerading as his own words, Nangi recognized as an excerpt from a letter famous in Chinese history. It had in fact been written in 98
B.C.
by Ssu-Ma Ch’ien.

Noguchi put down his cup. “You two are privileged to be the first to war test this new and devastating weapon against the Allies. You are the first two recruits in what will come to be known as
Shimpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai:
the Divine Wind Special Attack Force.

“This is your opportunity to follow in Major Oda’s footsteps, to become a reincarnation of
shimpū,
the divine winds of 1274 and 1281 which drowned the invading Mongol hordes, rescuing Nippon from their destruction.”

Both Nangi and Gōtarō—indeed everyone in the Japanese Imperial Navy—had heard the story of the pilot Ōda who had taken his Ki-43 fighter into the side of an American B-17 bomber, tearing the larger airship in two, thus saving an entire Japanese convoy. He had been a sergeant then. In death he had been promoted twice.

“Major Sato,” Noguchi was saying now, “you have been selected to guide the first Ōka to its flaming destiny. Major Nangi, you will pilot the mother ship.” He glanced down at a sheaf of papers. “We have been informed of an Allied sighting: a battleship and a destroyer, the vanguard no doubt of a larger fleet, heading toward the Marianas. The destroyer is your target. The ships are now”—he consulted his dispatches again—“three hundred fifty miles southwest of the island of Guam. When you leave this cabin you will go directly abovedecks. Your flight gear will be waiting for you. You will take off at 05:30. I will be in the conning tower to observe you firsthand.”

He stood up. The briefing was over.

The predawn air was chill with a gusting inconstant wind quartering in from the northeast. Nangi and Gōtarō, clad in their flight suits, walked across the vast expanse of the carrier’s open deck. Before them loomed the hump-bellied shape of the twin aircraft, as disfigured as a leper.

“I have more flight time than you,” Nangi said. “They should have chosen me for the Ōka.”

Gōtarō smiled. “There are few like you left, Tanzan. Most of them coming up now are raw recruits with little or no training. With that in mind—with the war having so completely depleted us—do you think it a wise decision to test this flying bomb with a veteran pilot?” He shrugged his shoulders. “What possible good would it do when those who will follow, the true members of
Shimpū Tokubetsu Kōgekitai,
will know nothing.” He shook his head. “No, my friend, they have made the correct choice.”

He was upwind of Nangi; when he abruptly stopped and turned to face him, his body blocked the fierce bite of the wind from Nangi’s face.

Gōtarō produced a white square from a pocket, luminous in the werelight. “Here,” he said, “this is for you. A
hachimaki.”
He tied it around Nangi’s helmet. “There. With that ancient symbol of determination and derring-do you look just like the other meaning of
shimpū.
Do you know it?”

Nangi shook his head.

“In Tokyo these days I’ve heard the term is used in a humorous way to describe the daredevil taxi drivers.
Kamikaze.
” Gōtarō laughed. “I would have called you that in Noguchi’s cabin but it is surely too lighthearted a word for him. This is quite a solemn moment for him.”

Nangi squinted up at his friend. “And for you, Gōtarō-san, knowing what must be the end of this mission.”

“I have faith, my friend,” the big man said. “I have no thought but to serve my country.”

“They’re mad if they think this Ōka will frighten the Americans. More likely—knowing them as I do—they will laugh at it. They have no concept of
seppuku
, the warrior’s way of death.”

“So much the worse for them,” Gōtarō said, “for this has surely been a war of misunderstanding. I cannot think of what will happen to us or what may come after. I have my duty to perform. In all else, I put my trust in God.”

The wind was picking up as the high bowl of the heavens began to lighten, pitch black fading to a deep cerulean. Down low in the east, where the sea met the sky, there were already the first fugitive streaks of pink, rising.

Gōtarō reached out. “Listen, my friend, Captain Noguchi was right. We all love life; that, too, is our duty. But there are higher principles than self. That is one of the first teachings of Christianity.”

The mechanics took over as they came up on the half-tarpaulined planes. They took them through a brief but explicit tour of the tandem units. There wasn’t much to see, actually. The twin-engined Mitsubishi had been stripped down to accommodate the intrusive hump of the stubby Oka. It had also been converted so that one man—the pilot—could fly it satisfactorily.

Beneath was the
Cherry Blossom.
When Nangi poked his head inside, he was inwardly appalled. It appeared to be nothing more than a flying coffin with almost no equipment. Only a steering mechanism and a speaking tube to allow communication with the pilot of the Mitsubishi.

The mechanics explained that Gōtarō would sit in the larger craft with Nangi until their target was sighted. Then he would slide down through the modified bomb bay doors into the tiny cockpit of the Ōka. All phases of the mission were gone over in detail, and then the two majors were asked to repeat the drill. By that time it was 05:19.

They climbed into the Mitsubishi.

The sea was a sheet of flame, reflecting along its vast, rippling skin the rising of the bloodred sun. For a time all blue was banished from the sky as the lurid tendrils of light floated higher.

For Nangi and Gōtarō there was only the monotonous thrumming of the twin engines, the steady vibration. Now Nangi began to understand the desperation of his country. This was a plane he was quite used to, and the differences in flight were considerable. It had been stripped down in more ways than the mechanics had cared to mention. Of course there was no armament—that had been apparent on the ground at first inspection. But a great deal of the inner insulation of the plane was also gone. Nangi supposed that some of this was essential in order to offset the fully loaded weight—4,700 pounds—of the Ōka; there were over 2,500 pounds of high explosive in its nose.

And yet the farther he flew this “new” plane the more he became convinced that even more than was strictly necessary had been taken out. He thought of what Gōtarō had said about the sad state of Japan’s military manpower. Didn’t it follow then that the same might hold true for materiel. Were they already down to cannibalizing planes? Would that mean that by year’s end untrained teenagers would have rifles shoved into their soft fists and be cast off from the Japanese shore in rowboats to meet the advancing enemy? Nangi shuddered at the thought and made a minor course correction.