No one had ever thought to look, not even Fedorov, for there was so little time in the heat of all these events, and so much data to reabsorb. He had focused on trying to analyze what had changed in the history they were now sailing through, and why, but a flip through a geologic reference to see what the earth itself had been doing had never occurred to him. Perhaps he simply assumed that these “acts of god,” the storms, earthquakes, eruptions of the earth were all riveted in the chronology, destined to take place at their appointed times, but, as we have already seen, they were not.
The weather was so fickle that it could simply not be so harnessed. The wind would go where it wished, heedless of time’s ledgers and the urgencies of human endeavor. The storm that delayed Halsey and hastened the arrival of Neosho had been early, speeding the gritty Admiral into that confrontation with the Kido Butai, and sending Neosho to her fiery fate. That simple weather event had a considerable effect on the outcome of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, though no one ever took the time to finger the wind as the real culprit that day.
The interval from the 1800s to modern days is but a wink in geologic time, so to have two major eruptions so close together like Tambora and Krakatoa was strong evidence that the barrier islands were rumbling to life, the earth there shaking, even as it has in modern times, producing some of the largest earthquakes ever recorded on the planet.
Eruptions on this scale could radically alter the flow of events in the history they affected. The dire and weighty matters of war and strategy produced volumes in the brief outbreak of violence that was WWII, but relatively little has been written on the life changing powers possessed by these fiery mountains, and the restless angry Gods that hunched beneath their glowing cinder cones.
Vladimir Karpov might be one man who came to respect their power, for he had his entire battlegroup blown over a century into the past when the Demon Volcano erupted in the midst of a wild mêlée at sea in 2021. If he thought about that event, he might lay the blame for the massive fractures now rippling through the halls of fate and time right at the base of that volcano. For if that eruption had not occurred, nothing of his strange displacement to 1908, and the long confrontation with Admiral Togo’s fleet, would have ever happened. The Altered States that were now rewriting the history of WWII would have never taken place. Was it fate that he found himself aboard Kirov at exactly that place and time, the will of the great god Vulcan, or mere happenstance?
Whatever force had moved the levers that day, it was moving again in the Sunda Strait, awakening from long troubled sleep, rumbling to life beneath the turbulent seas where uniformed men now steamed about in the rising swells on small metal ships, flinging even smaller hunks of metal at one another, and calling it history. The lines they would inscribe in that book would be nothing compared to the epic now about to be written by the Demon in the waters off Java that morning.
It was something that was never supposed to happen now. The violence inherent in that fractured spot in the crust of the earth was already supposed to have vented its wrath in 1883, but it had not done so. If Fedorov had taken the time to look, he might have discovered the grim possibility that was now rumbling to life. He might have learned that, for reasons he could never fathom, the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 had never occurred in this time line, but better late than never, it was going to happen now, and it would change the entire course of these events.
Aboard Illustrious, Mountbatten was settling into the Captain’s chair on the bridge with his early morning tea. Charles Lamb was sitting in his plane and ready to go find the sunrise, but he would never see it that morning. Something else was rising, from the depths of the earth, slowly throwing open the gates of hell itself.
Krakatoa was about to explode….
Part VI
The Gates of Hell
“Hell is empty, and all devils are here.”
Chapter 16
It began at 06:40, on the last day of February in 1942. The vague misgivings, thrumming vibrations in the air, and dull and distant rumblings soon produced a vast column of what looked like white steam, rising up and up, a massive veil over the Sunda Strait. In the little gun duel that was then under way, every man on either side with a view to the south and west took notice, some standing spellbound as they watch the rapid ascension of the steamy white cloud. High up, perhaps over 11,000 meters, it caught the wind, its top sheared away and smeared across the dull grey sky.
On the shore where the Japanese had landed on Java, the small, once bustling port of Anjer had long since ceased to be the little paradise of Palm and Banyan trees, with the sweet trade winds laced with spices. First came the headlong rush of soldiers and refugees coming over from Oosthaven on Sumatra, swelling over the quays and docks, hastening inland on the roads to Serang and Batavia to the east. Ships came and went, pulling up anchor and then putting out to sea, for the enemy was said to be very near.
At night, the dark silhouette of a Dutch gunboat lurked off shore, then fled north around the stony Cape Merak. Soon the silver grey night saw those glassy seas broken with the coming of over fifty transports, their holds laden with troops and equipment, the Japanese 2nd Infantry Division had finally arrived. Destroyers churned in the waters to the west of the landing site, soon to be challenged, first by the probing of the ill-fated Jupiter, and then by the larger task force led by Captain Agar on Dorsetshire. But he had been too late to prevent those landings, and now the old village Kampong huts were burning from the fires of war, and the dull tramp of Japanese infantry had swept over the sandy shore as they pushed inland, driving off a company of hapless Dutch defenders, and then the hasty defense mounted by the Beds & Herts.
When that vast column of steam vented up into the sky, the last gleaming light of the moon illuminated the silken white veil, and the moon itself fell like a massive blue pearl into the troubled waters of the Sunda Strait, as if fleeing from what was now to come. It set behind the island group that had sent this first warning up, and any man who gazed west was awed by the sight of the tall conical island, backlit by a violet haze that deepened to scarlet indigo at the level of the sea. The soldiers gawked for a time, then were urged on by the harsh throated orders of their officers. They had an invasion to see to, and no thought of what was now about to take place had entered any of their minds.
That morning, in the dark interval between moonset and the coming of the sun, the last of the landing parties cast off their lines, and anchors were pulled up on the transports. The first squadron was already heading north, hastening away from the rising sound of naval gunfire resounding from the west. Three of their guardian destroyers were already engaged, and out in the strait, a line of three more were hastening west like the winds they were named for, Harukaze, the Spring Wind, Hatakaze, the Flag Wind, Asakaze, the Morning Wind that was now about to become the breath of hell.