Chapter 2 The Deep

Callahan hit the water like a stone. The cold was immediate and absolute — a shock that stole his breath and filled his lungs with panic before he could fight it. He kicked upward, his hands fumbling for the ripcord on his parachute. His fingers found it, pulled it, and the canopy bloomed above him with a violent jerk that nearly wrenched his shoulders from their sockets. For a moment he hung there, suspended in the blue sky, looking down at the ocean that had just tried to kill him. The water was a brilliant turquoise near the surface, darkening to indigo as it dropped away into the abyss. And there, floating in that abyss, was the wreckage of his bomber — pieces of aluminum and fabric and fuel drifting on the surface like the remains of something that had never been meant to survive. He dragged himself free of the harness and looked around. The ocean was empty except for debris — floating fuel, torn fabric, a life raft inflating in the distance. The sky above was blue and indifferent. The B-24 was gone, swallowed by the Pacific, and with it went half his crew. "Callahan to any station. This is Lieutenant James Callahan. Do you copy?" He keyed his survival radio, but the only response was static. The water had shorted something in the transmission, or the antenna had torn off in the impact. He clipped the radio to his life vest and began to swim toward the raft, which was now about thirty yards away and drifting slowly in the current. The ocean was warmer than he expected, but the cold was already seeping into his bones through his flight suit. He thought about the men who had gone down with the plane — Miller, the engine specialist; Hernandez, the waist gunner; and three others whose names he was already struggling to remember. Ten men had boarded LZ-47 that morning. Seven were gone. Three remained, floating in an orange raft that seemed pitifully small against the vastness of the Pacific. He reached it and hauled himself over the inflated collar. Inside were three men — Sergeant Marcus Webb, the ball turret gunner, whose face was pale and drawn; Private First Class Tommy Chen, the radio operator, who was clutching a broken arm in a crude sling made from a tear in his flight suit; and Corporal David Reyes, the tail gunner, who was muttering something in what sounded like Tagalog. "Status report," Callahan said, forcing calm into his voice. He had been in enough crashes and combat situations to know that panic was a luxury they could not afford. "We got four in the raft, sir," Webb said. "I saw Miller go down with the plane. I saw Hernandez too. The rest — I don't know. The water was full of debris. I couldn't —" He stopped, his eyes distant, already retreating into the kind of shock that came after traumatic events. "Chen, can you reach your radio?" Callahan asked. Chen shook his head. "Left it with the plane, sir. Or it went into the ocean with me. Either way, it's gone." "Reyes, any word from your observations?" "Four alive, sir. Maybe five. Saw a parachute catch in the trees on the island. Could be anyone. Could be nobody." Callahan nodded grimly. Of the ten men who had ridden in LZ-47, seven were dead or missing. He was one of four who had made it to the raft, and he had the rank and the responsibility to keep them alive. The question was not whether they would survive the crash — they had survived that. The question was whether they could survive what came next. "Then we wait," he said. "We stay with the raft. We signal. We survive. And if anyone comes for us, we decide whether they're friend or enemy." The island — Iwo-koa, if intelligence had been right about the name — was perhaps two miles offshore. Callahan could see the treeline, the white sand beach, the crude jungle path that led inland. And he could see movement. Small figures darting between the trees, dark uniforms, the glint of rifles. "Japanese," Webb whispered. "We are surrounded." "Stay down," Callahan ordered. "Stay quiet. They may not have seen us yet." But they had. Within minutes, a longboat was cutting through the surf, and six Japanese soldiers were wading through the shallows, their rifles raised. Callahan raised his hands above his head, then lowered them slowly and signaled his men to do the same. The lead soldier said something in Japanese, sharp and questioning. Callahan shook his head. "No habla," he said carefully. "We are Americans. Soldiers." The soldier looked at him for a long moment, then gestured for them to follow. They were marched through the surf, up the beach, and into the jungle — but not toward what Callahan expected to be a prison camp. The soldiers moved with urgency, not cruelty, and when they reached a hidden clearing, Callahan saw something that made no sense. A submarine. Not a fishing vessel, not a coastal defense craft — a full-sized military submarine, sleek and black and bearing no markings he recognized. It was docked at a concrete pier that had been carved into the jungle cliffside, and around it were men in uniforms that were Japanese but wrong — cut differently, colored differently, bearing insignia Callahan had never seen before. The lead soldier pushed Callahan toward a man standing at the pier's edge. The man was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing the uniform of a Japanese naval officer but with no rank insignia on his collar. His face was hard and angular, his eyes dark and unreadable. "You are American?" the man asked in perfect English, accented but fluent. "Yes," Callahan said. "Lieutenant James Callahan, United States Army Air Forces. We were shot down." The man studied him for a long moment, his gaze piercing, as if measuring Callahan's worth in some scale unknown to the lieutenant. "I am Captain Kenji Sato of the Imperial Japanese Navy. And you, Lieutenant Callahan, are exactly the kind of witness I needed." "Witness to what?" Sato's expression darkened. "To the war that neither of our navies wants to admit is happening. Come. The water is not safe for men like us. Not anymore."