Kamikaze
| Kamikaze |
| Special X [12] |
| Michael Slade |
| 2006 : Canada |
About the Author
Criminal lawyer
MICHAEL SLADE
has acted in over one hundred murder cases. His specialty is the law of insanity. He argued the last death penalty case in Canada’s highest court. Backed by his forensic experience, Slade’s Special X and Wyatt Rook thrillers fuse the genres of police and legal procedure, whodunit and impossible crime, suspense, history, and horror. Slade was guest of honor at both the Bloody Words crime convention and the World Horror Convention. As
Time Out
puts it, “A thin line separates crime and horror, and in Michael Slade’s thrillers, the demarcation vanishes altogether.” Slade was guest speaker at the international Police Leadership Conference and several RCMP regimental dinners. As
Reader’s Digest
puts it, “The Slade books have developed a strong following among police officers because of their strict adherence to proper police procedure.” For the stories behind his plots, visit Slade’s Morgue at
www.specialx.net
.
Connect with Slade at
www.facebook.com/MountieNoir
and
https://twitter.com/MountieNoir
.
Also by Michael Slade
Headhunter
Ghoul
Cutthroat
Ripper
Zombie
Primal Scream
Burnt Bones
Hangman
Death’s Door
Bed of Nails
Swastika
Crucified
Red Snow
KAMIKAZE
Michael Slade
KAMIKAZE
All Rights Reserved © 2006 by HEADHUNTER HOLDINGS LTD.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
Published by Headhunter Holdings Ltd.
Originally published by Penguin.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Everyone talks about fighting to the last man, but only the Japanese actually do it.
—
FIELD MARSHAL WILLIAM SLIM
We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.
—
GENERAL CURTIS E. LEMAY
Zero Hour
Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
December 7, 1941
Like a swarm of hornets buzzing in from the north, the Japanese planes dove out of a Sunday morning sky to bomb and then strafe the hangars and aircraft that lined the bottom edge of the A-shaped runways at Hickam Field.
“Tora! Tora! Tora!”
While Commander Mitsuo Fuchida repeatedly signaled the code word “tiger,” meaning “total surprise,” back to Admiral Chuichi Nagumo on the
Akagi,
flagship for the strike force, Corporal Joe “Red” Hett was shaving in his digs on the Hawaiian air force base. Having spent Saturday night at liberty in the bars, brothels, dance halls, and clubs of Pearl City, the airman was nursing a hangover from consuming too much booze at a late-night poker party in the new enlisted men’s beer hall, dubbed the Snake Ranch.
“Damn Marines!” Hett muttered on hearing the first boom. “Some trigger-happy jarhead must’ve let one go.”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
As the coral foundation beneath the barracks shuddered, Hett cut his cheek.
The flyboy glanced at his watch beside the sink.
7:56.
Then the concussion from a closer blast crashed the ceiling fixture to the floor.
The “Red” in Red Hett was a reference to the fiery hue of his hair, which was almost as crimson as the blood that now streaked his shaving cream. At this moment, Joe wore khaki trousers and loafers, and had U.S. Army Air Forces dog tags strung around his neck. Bare-chested, he sported the deep tan he’d earned from goofing away his days off on the sands of Waikiki. That’s where he was destined now—to doze in the sun and wake up to an eyeful of wicked wahines in skimpy beachwear. What better peacetime posting was there than this?
BOOM!
The Hale Makai Barracks, Hickam Field’s newest structure, was a huge, octopus-like complex with wings jutting in all directions. It served as quarters for more than three thousand enlisted men. So violent was the explosion caused by the direct hit on the mess hall at its center that it blew soldiers out the windows of the upper floors. On the ground floor, the bomb scattered diners, tables, chairs, and trays of grub, and shrapnel killed thirty-five men as they gulped down their bacon and eggs. Machine-gun bullets rat-a-tat-tatting through shattered windows ricocheted off metal footlockers to perforate bunks. By the time Red Hett, razor still in hand, got down the stairs and out the
door, blood-spattered survivors in tattered clothes were already crawling amid the rubble or staggering around in a daze.
Chaos!
As his eyes adjusted to the glare, Joe caught sight of a young GI, a Colt .45 flapping in a holster on his hip, dashing hell bent for leather along the road between the barracks and the hangars that bordered the airfield. He was obviously on guard duty.
“The Japs are here! It’s war!” he shouted as he ran past, a modern-day Paul Revere raising the alarm.
As Joe turned to watch the guard sprint down the street, the roar of an airborne engine zoomed in from his other side. With tracer streaks leading the way, bullets stitched across the ground, throwing up puffs of asphalt dust in their wake. They drilled through the guard as red mist and continued on ahead. A Zero fighter shot by Joe and soared over its kill before the GI crumpled down dead. So close to the road was the plane that it almost seemed to be landing, and through the open cockpit, Hett got a glimpse of the pilot. With his helmeted head and square goggles, he resembled a creature from outer space. Wrapped around his brow and rippling in the breeze was a white scarf, the
hachimaki,
a traditional symbol of courage. Hell, Joe could even see the gold in his teeth!
“Meatballs,” Hett cursed as the plane began to climb. The word was slang for the Rising Sun painted on the underside of both wings.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Shiny shell casings ejected by the Zero’s guns showered the street and bounced around until motionless.
Casting aside the razor, Joe ran to the cut-down guard. The corpse lay sprawled beside a patch of green grass littered with petunia blossoms and red hibiscus. Crouching, the flyboy relieved the holster of its .45 and craned his neck around.
Sandwiched between Diamond Head to the east and Pearl Harbor to the west, Honolulu’s Hickam Field was home base for the U.S. Army Air Forces’ bombers on Oahu. From the plumes of thick, oily smoke mushrooming ominously into the sky above the anchorage, Joe knew the ships of the Pacific Fleet were sunk or damaged. Ahead of him, at the end of the barracks, the Stars and Stripes hung limply at the top of its flagpole. Nearby, a sergeant was struggling to mount a machine gun in a bomb crater. The attack had blown open the guardhouse, releasing its prisoners, and the escapees rushed to help the sarge set up the .50-caliber weapon.
Save the planes, thought Hett.
A row of double hangars lined the curb to his right. Between the tent-roofed buildings fronting the flight line, Joe saw the Zeros flash by with their wing cannons blazing and heard the shriek of dive bombers jazzing the base. Hickam had no anti-aircraft guns, no air-raid shelters, no slit trenches. The guard force was armed solely with pistols. As a defense against sabotage—the only threat contemplated by those in command—Hickam’s twenty B-17 Flying Fortresses, thirty-two almost obsolete B-18s, and
twelve A-20s were dovetailed wingtip to wingtip out on the concrete mat. Sparkling in the sunlight and easy prey, they’d be smashed to smithereens by this sneak attack if something wasn’t done.
The boom-booming and bang-banging was loud enough to rupture eardrums in the iron alleyway between the hangars. With one fist gripping the .45, Joe covered his ears as he darted for the runways. He burst out onto Mat A to find it hell in the Pacific.
Bombs fell like black rain from a cloud of high-altitude Japanese planes. Looking up, Hett had the sensation that every bomb was heading straight for him. Dive bombers off the
Shokaku
had launched the initial assault on Hickam Field while twenty-four men labored in Hangar 11 to roll out B-18s for an eight o’clock training flight. A bang-on strike through the roof had killed twenty-two outright and cut the legs off the other two. Now, as the hangar’s twisted framework licked the sun with tongues of flame and ongoing explosions blew out skylights, windows, and doors, officers and enlisted men in a hodgepodge of Sunday attire—uniforms, skivvies, aloha shirts, and pajamas—fought the fire, salvaged equipment, or tended to the wounded.
His bathrobe gaping to expose his nudity, a captain came reeling out of the smoke with blood streaming down his face, shaking his fist at the planes and bellowing, “I
knew
the little sons of bitches would do it on a Sunday! I
knew
it!”
Bwam!
He got mangled by a fragmentation bomb.
From Joe’s standpoint, the base was a sea of fire. Every swoop by a Val dive bomber took out something else: a supply building exploded in a hail of nuts and bolts and wheels; the chapel succumbed, even with the supposed protection of God; the Snake Ranch beer hall had served its last drink; the firehouse and its engines were made permanently unavailable to fight this inferno, while broken water mains uselessly spurted geysers into the air. Down, up, and away screamed the bombers, dipping so low that some struck telephone lines, then tore off with wires tangled around their wheels.
Until now, the Yanks had scoffed at the skill of Jap pilots, and blood was the price of that arrogance. After each Val dropped its load on a target, it veered into a figure eight to strafe the field repeatedly, winging back and forth, its guns chattering, along one cross-leg and then the other. The gunners, riding backward in the rear seats, glowered at Joe with each pass and tried to pick him off with bullets that zinged from the concrete just as they do in the movies. Meanwhile, the Zeros flashed around like silver mirrors, their aerial ballet tightly choreographed as they fanned over the bomb-cratered moonscape to rip the flight line to pieces.
Zoom, circle,
fire ...
For a moment, Joe thought one Zero was sprinkling toothpicks on the roof of Hangar 9, but then he grasped that it was sending the structure up in splinters.
One tin hangar still under construction rattled hollowly, as if stones were hitting metal, then suddenly bullets were ricocheting around inside like the balls in a pinball machine.
A blinding explosion of gasoline
foomed
up from the flight line as ground crews dodging bullets tried to haul machine guns and ammunition out of the disabled Flying Fortresses.
Foom! Foom! Foom!
Off went a chain reaction as bomber after bomber was consumed by the ravenous fire. Flaming, gibbering men were hurled away from the wrecks, flailing their arms like phoenixes desperate to rise from red hot ashes.
Acrid smoke choked Joe’s lungs.
Blasts were coming at him from both above and below ground, quaking the concrete under his shoes as the terrible concussion and the deafening pressure wave of each massive explosion blew his breath away. Through gaps in the white pall that roiled across the mat, Joe watched an improvised crew scramble into an undamaged B-17. As guns poked out of the turrets, the pilot got three engines going and taxied off across the pitted battlefield, but he was unable to coax the recalcitrant engine to kick in. Splats of lead from vulturous Zeros soon tattooed the plane’s wings.
Into the thick of this flew a dozen more planes.
The Japs are really coming now, thought Hett.
Then he wondered, Where did they get four-engine bombers?
When he recognized the new arrivals as B-17s, Joe grasped that they were twelve Flying Fortresses the base had expected from the mainland.
The crew members probably thought the approaching planes were a meet-and-greet from the U.S. Army Air Forces, until the Japanese Zeros opened up with their wing cannons.
Low on fuel and with their turret guns packed away, the B-17s had no choice but to go for emergency landings. Zeros strafed one as it ran the gauntlet down to the field, setting off magnesium flares in the radio compartment. A fire broke out in the midsection of the lumbering bomber, and as the burning plane thumped down heavily onto the runway, the tail section snapped off. As it skidded to a halt, what was left of the forward fuselage stood up like a penguin, forcing the battered airmen out to run for their lives. As they scampered across the Tarmac, a fighter pounced down and took out the flight surgeon in a withering hail of bullets.
Another Flying Fortress was also in deep trouble. Three Zeros were clinging to it like vampire bats, slamming slugs from their nose guns into its engines. Flames erupted from one cowling, then a second. Joe saw the red dot in a white star on the blue circle as the crippled U.S. bomber passed directly overhead, and that galvanized him into action.
By chance, a freelance photographer was at Hickam Field to shoot a pictorial spread on Pearl Harbor for
Life
magazine. Cowering in one of the hangars, the cameraman spied the shot of a lifetime passing right before his eyes, so he bolted from his bomb shelter to follow the bare-chested airman out onto Mat A.
As he snapped his first picture, a discus of spinning shrapnel came whirling toward him from the fiery flight line. Dropping his camera, the photographer stretched out on the concrete as if sunning himself on a quiet Sunday morning. Though his severed head and hands plopped down
next to his body, no blood appeared. So hot was the shrapnel that when it decapitated him and sliced off his hands, it cauterized his neck and wrists. The blood coagulated before it could spurt.
The sole image captured in the now broken camera was of Joe “Red” Hett standing defiantly in the open, the blasted bombers of Hickam Field ablaze beyond him. Legs astride and back arched, he was emptying the Colt .45 as fast as he could pull the trigger into the belly of a Japanese Zero above his head. Ejected shell casings spat from the pistol. His dog tags bounced off the muscles of his chest as he swiveled to give the muzzle enough lead on the plane. His half-shaven face was a symbol of the sneak attack. Outrage flashed in his eyes, and his lips snarled back from his teeth. Whatever Joe was yelling at the pilot whose head stuck out of the cockpit, those words would never see print.
The photo, however, made the next issue of
Life.
By capturing America’s reaction to the Day of Infamy, that image became an icon of the war.