Axis of Evil

Chapter Eleven: Dead Man’s Hand

HIMS Yamato

Japan

20^th April 1941

Admiral Yamamoto, commander of what remained of the Combined Fleet, stared down at the operations plan with a sense of doom. It hadn’t been drawn up by Genda, his trusted ally and subordinate, but by someone in the Army Department. Like a lot of Army plans involving the Navy, it looked good, but Yamamoto knew that it had serious flaws. He shuddered whenever he thought of the near-disaster that sending Marines into Shanghai had been, and whenever he considered the proposal for a direct sea-borne invasion of India…

He shook his great head, wishing for a moment that he could find happy relief and peace in suicide. Many of the moderates in the peace faction had done so – he suspected that a few had been helped on their way – and he was the only figure of any significance left. Still, he had little influence left – just enough to change the plan slightly – and after the Battle of the Indian Ocean he had very little influence left. The propaganda had claimed that battle as a victory, and they’d certainly hurt the British badly, but Yamamoto knew the truth. With four fleet carriers and several battleships gone, to say nothing of the ships that had been picked off as they straggled home after the battle, the Combined Fleet had almost been destroyed.

“You seem pensive,” a female voice said. Yamamoto relaxed into her massaging fingers as Ambassador Yurina dug her fingers into his shoulders. They’d become lovers after the battle in a private alliance for sanity, but both of them were realistic enough to know that they had failed – and badly.

“It’s going to be a disaster,” Yamamoto predicted. He waved a hand at the plan. “Even if we win, the cost will finish us as an organised force.”

He meant the navy, his faction. Even those in the navy that disliked him respected him. If the navy hadn’t closed ranks more than once, fending off army assassins, he would have been dead long ago. He wished, not for the first time, that he could just see the Emperor. If he had ten minutes alone with Hirohito, ten minutes with the Emperor, he was confident that he could convince him to end the war as he had done in the original time line.

They’re claiming he’s ill, he thought. The head of the militarists, insofar as they had a head, was controlling the Royal Palace with a battalion of infantry, defending it against all threats, internal or external. Japan had suffered a military coup – and no one had noticed.

“I assume that you still can’t get into the Emperor’s Palace?” Yurina asked grimly. She was his equal; a fact that few Japanese men acknowledged. His wife had been killed by an assassin’s bullet, aimed at him. “There’s no hope that the Emperor will intervene?”

“I don’t think he is receiving good advice,” Yamamoto said wryly. “They’re so determined to deal two blows, and aid our Soviet allies to deal a third, that they’re ignoring logistics or anything practical.” He waved a hand at the map. “This is the result.”

“You can’t simply disobey orders?” Yurina asked hopefully. “I mean… this is suicide, and suicide for nothing.”

Yamamoto stared down at the plans. Like all army plans, particularly after the revelation of the future disaster at Midway, it was simple. At a certain date, the force of the Japanese Army now being assembled in the Dutch East Indies, backed up by as much air power as they could maintain in the region, were going to throw themselves across the ocean and to Australia. If there weren’t nearly forty future warships in the region – the Australian government having been putting huge pressure on the British to keep them near Australia – it might have had a chance, once the Australian Navy had been destroyed, which it had. Yamamoto had planned that part of the operation himself, and it had been very successful indeed.

God bless democracy, Yamamoto thought with unintended irony. The Australian public, seeing their glittering navy destroyed with casual ease, had responded by pressuring their parliament to keep them safe – however it was done. Prime Minister Menzies had reacted in turn by pressuring the British commander, an Admiral Turtledove, into keeping his ships, even the thrice-damned invisible submarines, near Australia. Yamamoto shuddered to think of all the army’s tonnage that had been lost, ferrying troops to the East Indies, but they had succeeded.

“How do they plan to get around the fleet?” Yurina asked. He felt her firm breasts press into his back as she moved her hands lower, working out the kinks in his spine. “Sabotage?”

Yamamoto shook his head, relaxing into her ministrations. That had been his first thought, but the careful network of agents within Australia had revealed that it was impossible. The ships that had docked – and they were never docked for very long – were heavily guarded, by men who could see in the dark, like cats. A couple of attempts to steal uniforms and infiltrate the shipyards had failed miserably, just badly enough to convince Yamamoto that there was some way of identifying a person that Japanese science was too primitive to know about, let alone duplicate.

“Perhaps we could slip a few commando teams in,” he said, but he doubted it. Since November, Japanese submarines had started to vanish in the waters around Australia. It had taken several months to realise that the British had established a sonar network around the entire continent. No, the teams on the surface would have to work with what they had.

“Perhaps you should tell me what the Germans want,” Yurina said, as she pulled him away from the table. “It can’t be that bad?”

Yamamoto chuckled bitterly, thinking wistfully of the peace of the grave. “They want to launch a second coordinated offensive now that the Americans have joined the war against them.” He scowled. “It was all I could do to stop the army from declaring war on America on their own and seizing the Philippines and Pearl Harbour. They want us to hit the British in India and the Australians in their homeland, at the same time as they hit the British in the Middle East in conjunction with their allies the Soviets. The problem, of course, is that we’ll never get the invasion fleet into Australian waters undetected.”

He glared across the room in the direction of army headquarters. “Their solution is simple,” he said. “The Combined Fleet will make a divisionary attack against Canada – and if we get that close I’ll be astonished – and draw their fleet out of position by operating in enough strength to deter the submarines.”

He allowed himself a moment of pathetic pride. When the best that Japan could claim was the destruction of a submarine in the East Indies, the Combined Fleet had sunk very low indeed. The wreckage of the submarine had been sunk deep below the ocean, despite the best efforts of divers and salvage teams. He scowled; he lacked any information on British production, but the Germans had indicated that the British were building more submarines… enough to overcome their concerns about losing more.

“Of course, we won’t reach Canada,” he said. “The British will have studied the Battle of the Indian Ocean as much as we have, and they won’t repeat their mistakes. The entire fleet will be sunk after making a brave show of defiance.”

“And there’s nothing to do?” Yurina asked. “You could surrender…”

He lashed out suddenly, brokenly, knocking her to the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said, as she lat there gasping. “I can’t just… surrender the fleet. No Japanese warrior would surrender…”

“Your fleet will be destroyed,” Yurina snapped. She didn’t seem too worried by the blow; he admired her strength and fortitude. An ugly red mark covered part of her face. “They’ll all die!”

“I know,” Yamamoto said. “I know that, but there’s no other choice at all. I cannot surrender and I cannot go against the orders of the Emperor.”

“The Emperor might no longer be his own man,” Yurina said grimly.

“I cannot assume that as a basis for disobeying orders,” Yamamoto said, honestly shocked. “No one would dare to hide orders from the Emperor, or change them.”

“I hope you’re right,” Yurina said. If she’d told the truth, the Japan of 2015 was far less respectful of the Emperor – he even had a female successor – than that of 1941. The traditionalists had had fits when the Germans had managed to somehow acquire more information; the horrifying news had played a part in the militarists domination of the decision-making process.

“I’m certain of it,” he assured her, hoping that he wasn’t lying. He reached out and kissed her bruise. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Going to kiss it away?” She asked, holding him. For an instant, her composure broke. “You’re sweet.”

Commander Sato knew, without false modesty, that he was no match for Yamamoto’s former right-hand man, Minoru Genda. He’d known that Genda was a far better strategist than Sato himself, while his skills were more tactical than strategic. Still, Genda had recommended seeking battle with the British fleet… and Genda had killed himself with the shame of the defeat.

The problem was nightmarish, even challenging Genda’s faith in victory before it had killed him. The Japanese had almost no counters to the advanced weapons that had devastated Admiral Kurita’s fleet, and what technology they did have was partly negated by the British technology. Their sole advantages were numbers and battleship armour, and neither were as much help as he had hoped. Yes, reports suggested that stronger armour could deflect a missile, and the Japanese had started to armour up their new ships, but he was grimly certain that the British would have expanded their own weapons as well.

He stared down at the shipping table. One concession that Admiral Yamamoto had forced out of the army was combining the army’s supply fleet with the navy’s supply fleet, therefore increasing the amount of tonnage that could be used to convoy men and supplies across the empire to the bases in the Dutch East Indies. The army’s commander, General Homma, wanted six full strength combat divisions; Sato knew that that was utter nonsense. At best, four combat divisions could be moved across the Timor Strait and the Torres Strait, directly into the zone that the Australians had to know where the invasion force would land.

“If we’re lucky, we can move the other divisions afterwards,” he said, and knew that they would not be lucky. Even with the tricks the Germans had sent them, they would give the game away the moment they sailed; the British radar coverage was hellish.

“The Japanese solider can carry any burden,” Colonel Shindo snapped. The army colonel, a militarist down to his boots, had wanted to march right across the centre of Australia, a suicide trip for the army. Sato had talked him out of it, wishing that General Homma had seen fit to send someone more… adaptable.

“The Japanese soldier will have to live off the land,” Sato said. He tapped the map at the north of Australia. “They will seal this crossing, Colonel, and cut the men off. That’s why the priority is to get ashore, which is why we are not attacking Darwin directly.”

“If we engage the Australians directly…”

“We’ll lose time and the battle,” Sato said. Colonel Shindo gripped his sword; Sato prepared to fight. Pitched battles between army and navy were becoming more common. “The Japanese fighter has more soul than his counterpart, but he is also on the end of a long supply line that can be cut at several different points – and they will throw everything they have into cutting that line.”

He held Colonel Shindo’s eyes, pleading for him to understand. “You might take Darwin in a pitched battle, Colonel, but you would burn up a lot of your own ammunition, supplies and tanks – if we can get any ashore – in the process, and then they would destroy you on the ground. The priority is to get ashore in strength, and then prepare the march around the continent.”

Colonel Shindo glared at him. “If we do that, we will give them time to build up and redeploy against us,” he snapped.

Sato scowled. The hell of it was that Colonel Shindo was right; it would give the Australians and their British masters time to get ready. “We would face that in any case,” he said, and knew that he was right. “The army would have to defeat theirs in a pitched battle… and then take Australia and force Britain out of the war.”

He turned back to the navy’s plans. As Yamamoto had said, they were glorified suicide plans… and it was his job to make them… less suicidal. The plan was simple; the Combined Fleet would head for Canada and draw off the British ships, which would hunt the Japanese across the ocean. When the British got into firing range of their missiles… the partly rebuilt Combined Fleet would be blown out of the water.

“Perhaps we could charge at them,” he mused, before dismissing the idea.

“You navy men are cowards,” Colonel Shindo said. It was a common view among the army rank and file, who hadn’t been told about the defeat. It would have only upset them. “Why don’t you seek a glorious decisive battle?”

Now it was Sato who clutched his sword. “Because we would lose,” he said. Ignoring the army man, he studied the map; there were vast tracts of sea for the combined fleet to hide themselves in. If the fleet headed for Canada, making certain that the British knew that it was there, and then changed course, they might manage to stay under the British horizon. He picked up the German information and nodded; without the hell-spawned AWACS aircraft, the British were more limited in their radar.

“You could at least die gloriously,” Colonel Shindo sneered.

Sato ignored him, wondering if the rumours that the army had dreamt up the plan to get rid of the navy were true. The Combined Fleet had been seriously reduced in prestige, and it needed a victory. He looked up at the map again; one trick that he could pull would be to send some submarines down to the path that the British ships would have to follow to return, and then leave them without any engines at all. If the submarines were lucky, they might get just one clean shot…

“And you’re without your carrier aircraft,” Colonel Shindo said sharply, trying to refocus Sato’s attention. “What do you think you can achieve?”

“The carrier aircraft will be slaughtered on the decks,” Sato said. The best of the remaining Kido Butai pilots, including the now obsolete night-flyers, had been transferred to the East Indies. Some of the newer trainee pilots had been transferred to the carriers; the only two remaining fleet carriers and the handful of converted and escort ships. Sato knew that few of them had questioned the move, or thought to ask why the ‘winning’ Japanese Navy had seen fit to let them have the run of the carriers. They were too proud of their chance to serve Japan; none of them had anything like enough training.

He shook his head. It didn’t matter, he knew; the pilots were all doomed. The British missiles would destroy the carriers before they even got a chance to launch their aircraft; thousands of tons of carrier blown out of the water before they had ever had a chance to serve the Emperor.

“Poor men,” he muttered, ignoring Colonel Shindo’s snort. He felt sick.

Ambassador Yurina rubbed the bruise on her cheek and winced. She didn’t blame Yamamoto; she knew that the powerful admiral was feeling the stress. She also knew that he wouldn’t do the only thing that could stop Japan from inevitable defeat. Launching a Navy Coup was the only possible solution… and it was impossible.

Yurina smiled to herself, grimly, bitterly. The Japanese of this era refused to take a woman seriously – some of the army men she’d met had boasted of their ‘fun’ in Nanking – and it had allowed her some small success at building a network of intelligence. So few men believed that she could think that they were quite happy to discuss matters of national security with her, including the defences around the palace. A German had warned them that the British might send in the paratroopers… and so an entire infantry division was dug in around the palace, preventing anyone the Army Minister refused to clear from entering. Hirohito was a prisoner inside his own palace, she was certain.

She rubbed her cheek again. She knew one other fact; Yamamoto was intending to lead the final mission himself. She’d tried to warn him that even if by some dark miracle the Japanese did manage to take Australia, the British wouldn’t give up. She knew that the Japanese were unable to do what was necessary to win; take the British factories that produced arms and armour. She also knew Hanover, the new Prime Minister; a war would give him time to consolidate his own position.

And there was the final dark fact. Yamamoto had offered her the choice between sailing on the Yamato to certain death, or remaining behind. She knew that if she stayed, she would fall into the hands of the militarists – those who had already judged her a worthless traitor. Her fate would be nasty and brutal; rape and then execution. Enough militarists were angry with Yamamoto to wish to hurt him from beyond the grave; if they had killed his family they would certainly not hesitate at killing his lover.

Yurina hugged her legs, curled up on the bed, and stared into darkness. She knew that she’d made a mistake in coming; she wished that she’d protested more against the revisionist history that claimed that the entire war had been a misunderstanding. She ran her hands along her legs, knowing that they would not be so smooth after the army men had finished with her.

Alone in the darkness, Ambassador Yurina made her choice… and prayed for the strength to follow through with it.