“All I know, from the last orders I received, was that we were to get back to port. Then all hell broke loose. What was this man doing out here? I wasn’t aware the army had anybody that high up in this region.”
“He says they were way down above Banten Bay when their ship was taken by a tsunami from that eruption. They both went into the drink and managed to grab onto that broken raft.”
“But we’re 70 kilometers north of Banten Bay.”
“Looks like they had a pretty rough ride sir. They must have been pushed all the way up here by that tsunami.”
Captain Harada sighed. He was a careful man, and the fewer unanswered questions in front of him, the better. “Very well… I’ll go down and have a look at them. I need to see Chief Engineer Oshiro. We’ve got to get the ship back on her feet. We barely have engine and steerage control. Everything else is down, and we can’t raise anyone else either. Gods are angry today, Doctor. Whatever happened out there, it’s created a real nightmare. Give me ten minutes and I’ll see you in the sick bay.”
“You are Captain of this ship?” The man squinted at Captain Harada, his eyes still red and swollen from the ash and seawater, face haggard, though he was a portly man, with a substantial belly. The Captain bowed politely.
“You are safely aboard the Takami,” he said. “I am Captain Takechi Harada. What has happened to your ship?”
“That I cannot tell you,” said the man. “I was swept overboard… wait—what did you say your name was?”
“Harada, Itto Kaisa, Captain of the First Rank.”
“Itto Kaisa? Don’t you mean Kaigun-daisa? And how very strange, another Harada. My Deputy Chief of Staff is from that family. Perhaps you are a distant relative? In any case, I am Rikugun- Chūjō, Lieutenant General Imamura, Commander of the 16th Army now conducting these operations. You have done us a very great service, along with that sailor in the other room who helped keep me from drowning on that raft. I owe the navy a great debt. Thanks to you and your ship, I was fortunate to survive, but it is imperative that we reach a friendly port as soon as possible. I must ascertain what is happening on Java.”
Doctor Hisakawa said he was talkative, thought the Captain. Yet the more he looked at this man the stranger he felt. There was something about him, stirring some old memories to life. He stared at the man’s uniform, seeing the prominent gold stripe, well soiled now, and the two silver stars on his shoulders. But he knew something of the Army ranks as well—a Lieutenant General should have three stars, and they were supposed to be gold on green.
“Where are you from?” the man asked.
“Sendai,” said the Captain.
“How strange, Miyagi Prefecture, I grew up there as well. I still miss the trees on Jozenji Dori. I always loved to walk there. In the winter they would shimmer with a thousand lights for the Pageant of Starlight.” The man forced a wan smile. “Yet I have traveled far and wide since then. This war will likely take me even farther before it is over, but I should not complain. I could have been a meal for the sharks out there, assuming any will survive in that hell. It was terrible… the sound… the sea…that terrible darkness.”
The Captain nodded. “From what we can determine, Krakatoa must have erupted, and very suddenly, right there in the middle of the Sunda Straits. There was nothing in any report or communication to indicate a hazard there, or any state of elevated alert for that volcano.”
“Nature will do what it wishes, we must simply try and stay out of its way.” The man frowned. “That’s what my Deputy Chief of Staff would always tell me. I’m afraid the 2nd Division on Java was on the wrong side of that advice. The casualties must have been very heavy from that tsunami. Well, I put it there, and so I suppose I must bear the responsibility.”
“2nd Division? From Camp Asahikawa? They had units out here? We were not informed.”
That confusion aside, the Captain was deeply struck by what the other man had just said, not for any sense of its eloquence or wisdom, but it was something he had been told long ago—by his grandfather. ‘To live a long and happy life, a man must be wise, lucky, but also careful enough to stay out of nature’s way.’ He tilted his head to one side, looking at the man very closely. A powerful sense of recognition swept over him, and now he realized it was the uniform the man was wearing. It reminded him of his grandfather’s old army uniform—yes—even the rank insignia was much like that on this man’s shoulders.
“Be thankful you are in the navy, and with nothing more to worry about than the doings on this single ship. In the Army, things have been very much different since this business in China started. I was Deputy Chief of Staff in the Kwantung army once—sorting out all the messes that other Generals would create. Things were not so bad in the Kwantung. No volcanoes there. Now I have a mess of my own making to sort out, so you must get me to a friendly port right away. I must make my report on what has happened directly to the Imperial General Headquarters. It looked like we had things running very smoothly, but who could have expected this?”
Captain Harada, blinked, quite surprised.
“Imperial Headquarters?”
“Yes, a stuffy place full of sour old men, if you want my opinion, but they will need to know what has happened, and Combined Fleet as well, if they don’t already know it. We must have lost many ships in that tsunami, and I’m afraid we won’t have much left of 2nd Division now. We will have to pull reserves from Nishimura’s troops at Singapore. A brigade of the 5th Division is already forming up—excellent troops. I had that division a year or so ago, and they fight like tigers.”
“Well… General… We were headed for Singapore when that volcano blew. I don’t think we caught the worst of it. I suppose we were lucky after all, and managed to stay out of nature’s way. Yet my ship still took damage—nothing all that serious from what the engineers tell me. It is simply a matter of time before we can get everything up and running again. In the meantime, I’ll be making way with some caution here. It isn’t only nature we have to worry about. The Americans and Russians have just had a good fight in the North Pacific, and something tells me things will be going from bad to worse here soon. Odd thing… this is the second mountain to blow its top this week. Something in the Kuriles erupted three days ago, and all of Hokkaido is under this same goddamn ashfall.”
At this the General seemed quite surprised. “I had not heard that,” he said.
“Yes… Well sir, we’ll get the decks swabbed and be on our way soon enough. In the meantime, try to get some rest.”
“Just a moment Captain… Did you say the Americans were fighting with the Russians?”
“That is what we heard, and both sides lost ships, if the rumors are correct.”
I see…. And where did you say you were heading?”
“Singapore.”
“Impossible! Shouldn’t you rejoin the Western Screening Force? We will need to get to Balikpapan, or perhaps Makassar. Singapore is out of the question. That is Nishimura’s command now. Yamashita was brilliant, but sadly, he failed to finish the job.”
The Captain had started to edge towards the hatch, but he stopped again, turning his head. “I suppose I could get you up to Balikpapan, but why in the world is the army sending units there with all this trouble on Taiwan?”
That was going to end up being a very long story, and one we have heard before in this saga. It was going to be two men talking at cross purposes at first, each one failing to understand what the other was really saying. Yet if Captain Harada was listening closely to what this man was telling him now, he might have heard things that would have alarmed him a good deal more than those nostalgic memories of his grandfather. It seemed more was shaken than the earth, sea, and sky when Krakatoa vented its wrath. Pavel Kamenski might have had something to say about the unsettling nature of such massive explosions, and if Anton Fedorov had been in that room, he would have certainly picked up on the things the older man was saying about Yamashita at Singapore, and the 2nd Division on Java.