There… Churchill had spread as much frosting on the cake as he could, though Wavell was wise enough to know the real reasons for his transfer. In spite of a feeling of letdown, with this coming right in the middle of a crisis, he also felt that he needed a change. He was weary, more than he had ever been here in the desert, and perhaps the move would be good for him.
“Very well,” he said at last. “You’ve a way of holding my coat that is quite charming, Mister Prime Minister, but as I have in my mind nothing more than service to the Empire, I will gladly go wherever I am needed. May I ask who you have in mind for Middle East Command?”
“Alexander will return from Baghdad tomorrow, and Archie, it isn’t so much that we think a change is needed here. Alexander’s a good man for this sort of thing, and he can take up the reins here easily enough. But I was thinking of sending him to India, and he’s not quite right for that post, even if he has had experience there. The Japanese ran him out of Rangoon, and nearly captured him in the process. Now they’ve pushed us all the way back into India. Slim’s a good man over there, and we thought you were the best man to step in now and sort things out. Understand?”
“Of course,” said Wavell.
And that was that, another of those unforgiving minutes that would reset Wavell’s life from this day forward.
Part VIII
Friends and Enemies
“Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
Chapter 22
“You mean to say you joined these people—took up sides? You’ve actually engaged in combat here?”
“It was inevitable,” said Harada, trying to sort through the fallen dominoes in his mind. “We went through the same shock you just experienced. We discussed our situation, realized where we were and what we might do. Then decided to try and approach the IJN to see if we could dissuade them from proceeding with this war.”
“We had no choice,” said Fukada. “This ship only has so much fuel. We had no way of knowing how we might ever get home—to our own time. So when that fuel ran out we’d just be sitting there, a warship dead in the water like a duck in a pond. Who was going to give us that fuel, the United States Navy? Were we to throw in with them? How would any of us ever have gone home to Japan again after that?”
Admiral Kita thought about that, suddenly understanding what these men had been through. Here he was, caught in the very same web that had ensnared them, and faced with the very same choices. They had checked all their charts, and there was no mistaking that island out there, Elugelab, the place that Ivy Mike vaporized long ago. They had overflown Eniwetok as Harada had advised. It was not the modern base they knew, and there, at Parry Field, was the small seaplane base that Japan had set up soon after their initial occupation. They had boarded the tanker Kazahaya, seen the curious crewman, interviewed the ship’s Captain. It was just as Harada said it would be. Everything they heard and saw would confirm the impossible conclusion that they were no longer in their own time.
How this could have happened was the next question, the mind reaching for understanding that it would never really find. It could not be answered. The clues were there in those aerial contacts that came from seeming nowhere, F-84 Jet aircraft lost in the dizzy upwelling of doom, the seething column of Ivy Mike as it rose into the sky. They were there, then gone, as if they had only slipped briefly into this world of 1943 before returning to their own era. Why time would grant them such license could not be known. Why she would have instead pulled all these ships into the vortex that opened when Ivy Mike exploded, could not be known. It had simply happened. It could not be reasoned with, explained, or ever understood, but now it was reality, and one the Admiral would have to face, along with every crew member in his task force.
“We went to Yamamoto,” said Harada. “We thought that if we could get to someone like him, and convince him of the futility of this war, then we might build a better future for Japan in our time.”
“You actually spoke with him? Isoroku Yamamoto?”
“We did, and his Chief of Staff, Admiral Ugaki. That one is hard as steel. Yamamoto listened to us. I even showed him the end of this war in our ship’s library. Yet one thing led to another…”
“There’s something else you need to know,” said Fukada, casting a dark glance at Harada. “We aren’t alone here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we are not the only ship from our own time to appear here. Crazy as it may sound, the Russians are here as well.”
“What?”
“Remember that ship that went missing in the Norwegian Sea just before we deployed for those exercises with the Australians?”
“You mean the Russian battlecruiser? Yes it went missing, then it showed up again in the Pacific, until that Demon Volcano in the Kuriles blew it to jigoku.”
“Yes sir—Kirov. Well, it wasn’t sent to hell, nor even destroyed in that eruption. We think it blew the ship right through time, just as Krakatoa did for us.”
“But Krakatoa never erupted in 1943,” said Kita, “and it didn’t erupt in 2021 either.”
“It did here, sir. Damn thing nearly wiped out the 2nd Sendai Division, just as it was landing on Java. There was ashfall for six months. Who knows, maybe these massive explosive events disturb time—open holes in spacetime—and they extend in both directions, to both the future and past. I’ve tried to imagine how it could happen, as if I was on the top floor of a high rise, and a bomb went off three floors below. It knocks out the floors in both directions and… things fall through. We just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. As for Kirov, the ship is here, and it’s been here for a good long time. We know, because we fought the damn thing.”
“Here? In the Pacific?”
“Correct,” said Harada. “In fact, there’s a good deal more you need to know, and it’s going to be every bit as crazy as the rest. We’ve discovered that the history here has already been radically altered. It looks like the Strike North faction in our government prevailed long ago, because the Japan of this day has not only occupied Manchuria and the coast of China, but it’s also taken Vladivostok, most of Sakhalin Island and other parts of Siberia all the way up to Chita, beyond the Amur River.”
They told Kita everything they had learned, and then explained what the Russians had been doing with their ship, threatening Japan to recover their lost territories, and actually engaging the IJN in open combat.
“The Russian ship sunk the Hiryu?”
“Yamamoto told us so. The missile tech understandably came as quite a shock to them. So when he saw what we could do with our own missiles, he asked us to go up against Kirov. We did what we could, but that’s a formidable ship. We tried to ambush them before they knew we were here, and got off all eight of our Type 12s, but they stopped them. Then they threw a good deal back at us. I can now vouch for the American SM-2s, though it cost us 33 missiles, and we had to use the laser system too. They threw a hypersonic missile at us as a final warning—probably a Zircon.”
Admiral Kita shook his head in utter dismay. “Zettai ni! Dôshiyô, dôshiyô, dôshiyô!” It was a Japanese expression of exasperation, akin to a panic of the mind as it tried desperately to grasp at a solution to something.“I’m sorry sir,” said Harada. “We know exactly how you must feel. We all went through it. In fact, we polled the crew before we decided to approach these people here, and they were all in agreement. Some had reservations, perhaps all of us still question what we’re doing here, but when the Russians showed up, it was either us… or them. They’re enemies in our own time, and now it seems they’re enemies here as well. ”