Attack of the Seventh Carrier Read online

  Attack of the Seventh Carrier

  Peter Albano

  © Peter Albano 1989

  Peter Albano has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1989 by Zebra Books.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  For charming, delightful Teresa

  Acknowledgments

  The author makes the following grateful acknowledgments to:

  William D. Wilkerson and Dennis D. Silver for advising on the many problems facing the pilots of antique aircraft;

  Master Mariner Donald Brandmeyer who gave freely of his time to counsel on the proper handling of a ship in port and at sea;

  Mary Annis, my wife, for her careful reading of the manuscript and thoughtful suggestions;

  Robert K. Rosencrance for generously lending his technical and editorial skills in the preparation of the manuscript.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter I

  The early morning air at nine thousand feet struck as if it had been blown off of the polar ice cap. Hunching down in the gunner’s cockpit with the cold wind sucking the air from his lungs and ripping the breath from his lips in white banners, Lieutenant Brent Ross wished he could close the canopy of the ancient Nakajima B5N — the Tora II. But with Oberstleutnant Kenneth Rosencrance and his Arab assassins reported combing the skies of the western Pacific, a man’s momentary carelessness could be his last moment of existence. Reacting to the bitter cold like all men who are convinced they are freezing to death, the young six-foot-four-inch blond giant tried to contract and shrink himself within his brown, fur-lined flying suit, turtleneck US Navy sweater, and grossly oversized foul-weather jacket. But the vicious cold caught at his clothes with icy fingers and seeped insidiously down his collar, intruding in the tiny areas left unguarded between gloves and sleeves and froze his cheeks and nose. Frigid air even probed beneath his tightly strapped helmet like slivers of icicles and his eyes felt dry as sand, the gale whipping the moisture away, causing him to blink constantly. He ached to lower his goggles, but, they interfered with his peripheral vision, so they remained high on his forehead.

  Brent cursed and crossed his arms across his chest, gripping his biceps with massive hands and rocked as he pushed gently on his footrests. Yielding to the gentle pressure, his swiveling and tilting seat revolved smoothly on its circular steel track, its dozen ball bearings rolling so smoothly they felt liquid. The young lieutenant’s scan was that of the trained aerial observer; short, jerky movements of the head, never allowing the eyes to be trapped by the glaring morning sun, a spectacular display of cloud formations or sea birds drifting on rigid pinions. Over the years, he had developed the knack of depending on his peripheral vision to detect distant objects as tiny as fly specks that would often be imperceptible to a direct, intense stare. Strange how this technique worked; but it did, and all experienced pilots and observers used it.

  Swinging from beam to beam and glancing ahead, Brent Ross scanned the length and breadth of the aircraft and wondered how such an anachronism could still club its way through the skies over forty years after the end of World War II and half a century after it had been assembled at the Nakajima Aircraft Factory. “Truly, a wonder of its time,” the Tora II’s tiny old pilot, Lieutenant Yoshiro Takii, had said proudly one afternoon on the hangar deck. And then gesturing as he led Brent around the big aircraft. “Ahead of its time — nine-hundred-eighty-five horsepower Sakae 11 engine, variable pitch three-bladed Sumitomo propeller, retractable carrier-stressed landing gear, integral tankage, Fowler flaps, stressed skin construction, and folding wings. Much superior to the Douglas TBD and the British stone-age death-trap Fairey Swordfish.” Stiffly, he had reached up and proudly patted Tora II lettered on the huge cowling. “Wrecked Pearl Harbor twice and sank Lexington, Wasp, Hornet, Yorktown, Repulse, Prince of Wales, Hermes, and dozens of others. And then contritely, “Sorry Brent-san, did not mean to offend.” Brent had assured the crestfallen little man he had not, despite a roiling, empty feeling deep in the pit of his stomach.

  First flying with the old man in the Mediterranean on a mission to Tel Aviv, Brent had learned to respect the ancient pilot who was perhaps still the best single-engined bomber pilot in the world. One of the original members of carrier Yonaga’s crew, Yoshiro Takii had withstood the ship’s unbelievable forty-two-year entrapment at Sano Wan on Siberia’s Chukchi Peninsula. After the great carrier’s breakout, he had flown in the vortex of the ship’s rampage down from the Bering Sea and led a squadron in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Then the terrible fighting against Colonel Moammar Kadafi and his murdering hoodlums in the Mediterranean and western Pacific that had decimated Yonaga’s air groups — battles that dispatched the spirits of many brave samurai to the Yasakuni Shrine, including Yoshiro’s navigator and best friend of more than a half century, Ensign Morisada Mochitsura. Brent had been on that mission and been only three feet from the navigator when he bled to death after being hit by a half-dozen 7.7 slugs.

  Slowly Brent revolved his seat and raised his scan high over the tail plane. They were about a hundred miles north of Saipan and were on a southerly heading — a course that would bring them over Saipan and its neighbor, Tinian, in about forty minutes — if the navigator who was seated in the middle cockpit was correct. A young ensign transfer from the smashed Self Defense Force, Ensign Takashiro Hayusa — a big, strong lad from a farm on southern Kyushu — had been brought up on the highly computerized navigational devices of the micro-chip age. Equipped with superannuated equipment from the thirties, the B5N forced its navigator to resort to sextant, stopwatch, an air almanac and pencil, and paper computations to figure latitude and longitude. Perhaps still more important, his dead reckoning was suspect, Brent convinced Hayusa did not have a feel for the set and drift to which an aircraft could be subjected by the capricious winds of the western Pacific. Brent sighed. If they were to return safely to carrier Yonaga, they would need luck and favorable smiles from God, Amaterasu, Allah, and whatever other deities dwelled in the infinite skies.

  With a flash of theatrical brilliance, the sun suddenly broke from behind scattered blobs of morning clouds and bathed every horizon with long, probing fingers that brought to mind Japan’s sobriquet, “land of the rising sun.” Despite the cold, the bloody fighting, the lack of sleep and fatigue, Brent Ross loved flying and the many breathtaking delights nature reserved for the few men who dared to enter this most private sanctum. This morning was no exception. Overhead, the clear sky was like an inverted cup painted heron’s-egg blue while far to the south and west, gray clouds massed and rolled, sweeping in monstrous, terrifying mushrooms and anvil heads across the sky, flashing with internal lightning angrily as if to battle one another. Here, an aircraft could lose its wings. Below, as far as he could see, the flat plain of the sea stretched in radiant blueness to the great circle of the horizon, the sun catching the feathery tips of the chop and reflecting like a tray of blue diamond chips.

  He glanced at the wing tips less than thirty feet away, and the miracle of flight overwhelmed him. Over two miles high, freezing to death under layers of wool and fur, he was a gnat suspended in an infinite void. There was nothing between him and extinction except a pair of thin-skinned wings, frail formers, spars, stringers and wires, and a fifty-year-old engine. He could see the wings bend up and then snap down as the bombe
r charged through invisible barriers of turbulence, could feel the whole structure vibrate with the strain, the seat tremble. He was witness to more than a triumph of human skill, it was a miracle. Abruptly, the young lieutenant was seized by a mournful thought: How insignificant was man in these limitless dimensions where he hung motionless and time and distance had no meaning. An intruder. A speck of dust, transient and gone in a blink.

  Takii’s tinny, rasping voice in his earphones shocked him from his reveries. “Gunner, we are approaching our patrol area. Load and lock.”

  “Load and lock,” Brent Ross repeated into his microphone. With quick, practiced motions, the young lieutenant unsnapped the upper strap of his harness, stood, released the Nambu’s well lock and pulled the Type 96, 7.7 millimeter machine gun from its well, releasing the locking lever. Bracing his feet against the footrest and gripping the double pistol grips, he swung the perfectly balanced twenty-four-pound weapon from beam to beam and from the vertical to the horizontal. He nodded with approval. It was like moving a feather. A line from one of Emperor Meiji’s most famous rescripts came to mind, Death is as light as a feather. He chuckled to himself as he thumbed a spring-loaded latch, raised the top cover, exposing the feed mechanism. As usual, the belt had been pulled through the receiver, but the armorers had not seated a round in the firing chamber. The belt was perfectly aligned and showed a mix of projectiles, color-coded alternately red and blue for antipersonnel and armor piercing with every fifth round-tipped yellow for tracer. He snapped the cover shut and grabbed the cocking handle on the right side of the weapon, pulled back hard, and released. Ringing metallically, the spring pulled the handle back and the bolt snapped back into place. Brent knew a round was seated in the firing chamber.

  However, the usual gnawing worry of the aerial gunner nagged him and he partially opened the breech, tilted his head close to the side of the Nambu, and assured himself there was a cartridge in the chamber. Still, nothing reassured like the feel of the gun bucking in his hands. He made the inevitable request: “Gunner requests permission to clear weapon.”

  Takii made his usual response: “Granted. But do not shoot off my tail.”

  Smiling, Brent swung the weapon to the side and squeezed off a short four-round burst. The airframe bucked and a single tracer arced high and then rainbowed downward toward the sea. “Tail still intact, sir,” Brent reported solemnly.

  “Very well. Thank Amaterasu.” Brent felt the aircraft vibrate again as Takii cleared his own single fixed 7.7.

  A glint high in the sky caught the American’s eye. A bird? An airfoil? Nothing but a tiny cloud catching the sun. The Chinese orbiting deuterium-fluoride particle-beam system came to mind. A mistake that had set the world’s war-making potential back forty years. Or was it a mistake — a malfunction as the Chinese had claimed? Indisputably, their inexhaustible manpower now became one of the world’s most potent forces. Three command stations in geo-synchronous orbit at 22,300 miles and twenty low-orbiting weapons platforms at 930-mile altitudes, equipped with laser systems that homed in on both heat, infrared, or combinations of the two emissions. All communications satellites had been destroyed instantly and not a jet, not a rocket, could operate. Ignition of either meant instant annihilation from the heavens like a thunderbolt hurled by an angry god. With jets, rockets, and cruise missiles grounded junk, the waging of war did not stop, but paused while the nations searched frantically for old WW II aircraft with their laser-immune reciprocating engines and big-gunned ships from the same war and even earlier. In fact, the old Japanese museum-piece battleship, Mikasa — a veteran of the Japanese-Russian war of 1905 — had been pressed into service as a monitor, her four twelve-inch guns still finding service in the Israeli war with the Arabs.

  With the hegemony of the two super powers broken, Kadafi’s madness had spread worldwide like a new black death. He organized an Arab holy war — jihad — against the hated Israelis, and with the exception of Indonesia, brought OPEC to heel and imposed a crippling oil embargo on the West. Hard put to meet its own demands, the US could only send Japan enough oil to barely maintain its industrial plant and provide fuel for Yonaga and her air groups. An Arab battle group had been defeated in the South China Sea when Kadafi had tried to destroy the Indonesian oil fields and sink Yonaga. Now a modest stream of oil was flowing to Japan from the Indonesian fields, but, again, an Arab battle group of at least two carriers, cruisers, and destroyers was stalking the western Pacific. A powerful force, it had all but obliterated the Self Defense Force in strikes on Tokyo Bay and the Inland Sea, delivered while Yonaga was at sea attacking Arab bases in North Korea. Now the great carrier and her valiant samurai was the only force standing between international terrorism and the enslavement of Japan, and, perhaps, the entire free world. Certainly, the dominoes were set in a neat line and a leering Kadafi had his hand poised over the first one marked Japan.

  Now Yonaga was hunting the Arab force; a dozen Nakajima B5Ns and Aichi D3A dive bombers protected by high-flying echelons of Mitsubishi A6M2s — the lithe, acrobatic Zero — searching all four quadrants for the Arab battle group or newly established bases. Launching its search from a position eight hundred miles southwest of Honshu — according to the point option data on Brent’s clipboard, latitude twenty degrees, thirty minutes north, longitude a hundred sixty-one east — Yonaga’s search planes were ideally positioned to reconnoiter the Marianas and the old airstrips at Guam, Saipan, and Tinian; the Bonins to the west, Iwo Jima and Kita Jima; the Carolines to the south including Truk and Ponape; the Gilberts and Marshalls including Tarawa, Makin, Kwajalein, Enewetak, Bikini, and a half-dozen other atolls suitable for strips and anchorages. Even Wake and Midway were slated for reconnaissance by narrow, curious eyes. Ominously, Radio Saipan and Radio Tinian had both mysteriously gone off the air almost simultaneously that morning just before takeoff. An atmospheric phenomenon? A raiding party? The entire ship’s company of Yonaga had been uneasy, long memories recalling that the Enola Gay had taken off from Tinian. If something was amiss in the Marianas, the Tora II was to sniff it out.

  Brent shifted his weight as he continued his restless sweep of the sky and the horizon. The cockpit was built with much smaller men in mind and the muscles of the small of his back and shoulders were beginning to ache their objections to the cramped quarters and his rigid posture. As usual the young officer rubbed the small of his back, his shoulders, and thighs to stimulate circulation grown sluggish because of the cold and lack of movement. A new thought brought a chuckle to his lips. What set of insane circumstances had brought a twenty-five-year-old NIS (Naval Intelligence Service) officer and Annapolis graduate to the gunner’s cockpit of a WW II relic vibrating its way over the Pacific? His mind ran down a mental checklist: Yonaga’s breakout from her secret Arctic entrapment; the mysterious disappearance of ships and aircraft as the undetected carrier moved south toward Pearl Harbor; fruitless investigations by NIS; Pearl Harbor devastated; the mission to Tokyo Bay with Commander Craig Bell and Admiral Mark Allen to meet Yonaga and investigate her incredible story. Then the Chinese orbited their star wars system and his assignment to Yonaga with Admiral Mark Allen.

  Brent smiled as he thought of Yonaga’s captain, Admiral Fujita. Not quite five feet tall, the old man was said to be over a hundred years old. Yet he was alert, strong, quick to make decisions and, above all, a charismatic leader. His samurai would gladly die for him and often did. Brent tightened his jaw and tucked his lips under with the realization he had casually put his life on the line several times for the old man, too. The old admiral was a Svengali.

  Not only had Admiral Fujita appeared to defy time, so had all of the crew of Yonaga. True, many of the senior officers had died, but all of the crewmen Brent met seemed youthful despite their years. Admiral Allen tried to explain the phenomenon: “Holdouts age very slowly, keep their youth and vigor. No liquor, no women, and no tobacco. I know, Brent. I debriefed Sochi Yokoi after twenty-seven years on Guam and Hiroo Onoda after thirty years on Luba
ng. Physically and mentally they remain young men.” Brent had shaken his head in wonder and disbelief.

  A flash of white high and to the southeast caught his eye and broke his maundering thoughts. He unstrapped his binoculars and pulled them from their canvas case mounted on the forward bulkhead above his clipboard and between his flare gun and oxygen bottle. Raising the glasses, he thumbed the focusing knob and brought three gleaming white Zeros into precise focus. The leader of the V had the red cowling and green hood of Commander Yoshi Matsuhara, Brent’s best friend and fighter group commander. Each had a single blue band around the aft part of the fuselage, as did Tora II — the identifying stripe of the Koku Kantai (First Air Fleet), Yonaga’s air group. The young gunner felt a new surge of confidence, a reassurance all men need when they hang alone in uncertain skies like an insect dangling from a collector’s ceiling. “Yoshi,” Brent said to himself. “Hang around, old friend. We’re not flying the friendly skies of United.”

  But the agile white fighters turned abruptly and climbed toward a gathering cloud cover. Brent switched on his microphone. “Three Zero-sens at two-six-zero, high. Climbing high and into the cloud cover.”

  “Very well. I see them,” Takii said back. “Stay alert, both of you. Saipan must be just over the horizon. And Brent-san. Keep your mind on our business, not some Madam Butterfly back in Tokyo.”

  Brent chuckled. At the moment he had no Madam Butterfly. “Aye, aye, sir,” he answered. And then with mock gravity, “If my sword is broken, I will strike with my hands. If my hands are cut off, I will smash the enemy down…”

  “Very well, Very well,” Takii snapped in exasperation in Brent’s ears. “I have read the Hagakure, too. Secure the moralizing back there.”