Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

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 “defense force,” which had more F-18s than any country except the United States, were instructed, however, that under no circumstances must they enter North Korean air space, for this might be interpreted by Beijing as the prelude to a Japanese attack across the Yalu River into China.

The storm that had swept in over the Wash and down through England’s Southeast, creating the torrential rain that Richard Spence and his daughters had driven through on their way back from St. Anselm’s, had increased in ferocity Saturday night, kicking up so much debris that it had activated the IFRA — incoming fighter radar alarms — throughout the South of England. But early next morning it was difficult for Inspector Logan of the Oxshott constabulary to believe there’d ever been a storm. All Surrey seemed to be basking in sunlight, mists rising like steam from orchards and stubble fields.

Walking with a brisk pace, Inspector Logan relished the sudden rise in temperature that had alleviated his chronic arthritis. He could not remember the last time, at least not so late in autumn, when his tweed jacket and corduroy hat had actually made him feel so warm that he wanted to take them off, not that he would. Logan was an old-fashioned policeman and wouldn’t have been seen dead without a jacket, tie, and hat. Besides, although he was perspiring, he was determined today to make no complaint about the weather, for while the pain in his hands and knees was still there, it had abated so much that he felt ten years younger, promising himself that he wouldn’t be as irritable as usual.