“But sir,” he said haltingly. “This can’t be correct. If that’s Eugelab, then—”
“Then we haven’t moved after all,” said Harada. “We haven’t moved at all and it’s still 1943. Where’s the Kazahaya?”
“There, sir.” Fukada pointed off their bow, where the WWII Oiler was still holding position at anchor near the edge of the lagoon.
“By all gods and kami,” said Harada. “If we haven’t moved, and those ships are real…”
“They came to us!” Fukada’s eyes were wide now. “Sir, maybe they found a way to get through to us. Who knows how? Maybe this is a rescue mission.”
It wasn’t, as Admiral Kita was soon to find out aboard the Kaga.
“Admiral, sir, we have two contacts off the port side of the ship. They just appeared on radar.” Chief of the Watch, Kenji Omani, pointed out the ships he was seeing, and Admiral Kita squinted, clearly unhappy.
“Contacts? That looks like Atago is out of position. What are they doing over there?”
“No sir. There’s Atago, maintaining station abeam of Akagi, just as she should be.”
“Con—we have a secure radio transmission, and the ship ID is DDG -180. It’s Takami!”
Admiral Kita was a no nonsense, professional officer, young at just 45 years to have the position he now held, but already graying at the temples. He was a rising star in the new Japanese Navy, the Kaijō Jieitai, and one who had seen the coming of this war with China as inevitable. When Takami was reported missing on her return voyage from those exercises with the Australians, he strongly suspected that she had been ambushed and killed by a submarine, though even after an extensive maritime search by units of the Australian and Indonesian fleets, not a single trace of the ship had been found.
Then events had made it impossible to prosecute that search further. China was firing missiles at Taiwan, and it would only be a matter of days before they aimed them at Japan. The “incident” off the Senkaku Islands had confirmed his worst suspicions. A Chinese Submarine had fired on the light frigate Oyoko, and one of the ships here with him today had settled the score, the missile destroyer Kirishima, commanded by Captain Kenji Namura. He had destroyed the Chinese sub, which was later identified as the Li Zhu.
Then the Chinese planes had come seeking vengeance, and his equally capable carrier Captain, Shoji Yoshida, had launched fighters from the decks of Akagi, the first group of F-35Bs ever to fly a real combat sortie for Japan. The Chinese air force had learned they were not quite a match for the Silent Eagles and hidden Lightning in the sky that day, though their reprisal sent the dread Dongfeng missiles into the sky to strike Naha airfield on Okinawa. It had been a limited but pointed attack, the first time a foreign nation had delivered ordnance against the Japanese homeland soil since WWII. Yet this was nothing compared to the escalating conflict with the United States.
China had taken out an American spy satellite with lasers. The US retaliated with hypersonic missiles on the launch sites, an attack that had penetrated deeply into the Chinese mainland. The Great Red Dragon then took the unprecedented step of launching a missile over the west coast of the US, initiating an EMP attack that caused widespread disruption of the electrical system. While the real damage was not as serious as first believed, it struck a chilling note in the dark symphony that was now playing on the world stage. The weapons of this third war were more potent that anything mankind had ever seen. When the Americans had tested Ivy Mike, even as early as All Hallows Eve of 1952, they released more raw killing power than all the bombs and shells fired throughout the entire Second World War.
And Ivy Mike had done one more amazing thing—it had sent Admiral Kita and his entire task force into the hole it time it had opened, a tunnel boring into the past even as it reached into the distant future. Kita’s ships just happened to be in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, and something in the gravity exerted by one of their kinsman, JS Takami, pulled them inexorably back in time to the year 1943.
The hour, day and year they would soon find themselves in would shock Admiral Kita to the core. There was Takami, looking well and alive, and the first thought that hit Kita’s mind was that the ship had been assigned some top secret assignment, and that had been the real reason for its disappearance. Now it had obviously been ordered to make this rendezvous, but he would soon find out that the real truth of this situation was even stranger than he could possibly imagine.
“Sir, we’ve confirmed there is no equipment malfunction on our end. I have reports from Kongo, Kirishima and Atago, and all their equipment checks out. The problem has to be upstairs.” Lieutenant Hayata eyed the ceiling, but he was meaning to look well beyond it, beyond the atmosphere in fact, where the satellites they would communicate with would be making their silent orbits. “We’ve lost all command level links, sir—GPS is down too.” He handed the Admiral a status board, which Kita eyed briefly before nodding.
Two ships had just appeared, seemingly out of thin air. One he knew and their own long lost destroyer, Takami, the other was as yet a mystery. At that moment, Captain Harada walked in through the main hatch to the bridge, saluting, and that mystery would soon become sheer madness. Fukada followed him like a shadow, for the two were the heart of all that had happened here, and the only men really responsible.
Kita looked them over, then extended a hand to the Captain. “You’ve been missed,” he said with a warm smile. “And I hope you have some news for me about all that.”
“Yes sir,” said Harada. “Might we meet in your stateroom?”
“Very well.”
They were meeting aboard the task force flagship, Kaga, and as they walked, the Admiral gave them a running briefing of their situation. “Strange,” he said, “but we’ve lost all comm-links with Yokohama. Can’t reach Sasebo either, and all our satellite connections are down—GPS, the works. How are your links?”
“The same,” said Harada.
“I don’t like it,” said Kita. “Things have been pretty wild the last few days, particularly after that tit-for-tat between China and the US. I can see how we might lose some of these links in an emergency, but all of them? We can’t raise anyone in Japan—Kure, Maizuru, Ominato—silent as mice.”
Fukada was exhilarated with what had happened. Yet now he realized the difficulty of what they had to do here. In truth, even they did not really know what had happened, but there was Kaga, and here was Kita, a man both these officers knew well, and respected.
“Alright Captain, what were your orders? No one told us to expect company. Where were you—lurking in a bank off fog out here somewhere? You just appeared on our screens a moment ago, and that’s damn strange. For that matter, what’s that other ship at anchor out there?”
“Sir,” said Harada. “I’m afraid we’ve quite a tale to tell here. As you know, we were returning from that joint operation with the Australians, and had just passed through the Sunda Strait…”
“1943?” The Vice Admiral looked at Captain Harada, somewhat aghast that an officer of his experience and maturity would even suggest such a nonsensical thing. “This is no time for levity, Captain. The silence on all our comm-links is deafening. The homeland could be under attack at this minute.”