Chapter 26 The Second Front

The dawn came up red over Iwo-koa, painting the water the color of old blood, and Callahan watched it from the conning tower of the Shinsengumi with the flat, tired eyes of a man who had stopped counting mornings. Months of patrol had worn the edges off everything — the fear, the wonder, the anger. What remained was routine, and routine was its own kind of armor. It kept you moving when your mind wanted to stop. Sato climbed up beside him with two cups of tea, a ritual they had developed in the weeks after the First's ultimatum. He handed one across without a word, and they stood together in silence, watching the sun climb over the island where a B-24 had once fallen out of the sky. "You did not sleep again," Sato said. "Sleep is a luxury," Callahan said, and he heard the echo of the First's voice in his own words, an old habit he could not shake. "We have contacts." He passed the sonar report across. Three signatures, shallow, moving in formation — American hulls, or close enough to count. A submarine and two escorts, running a hunting pattern along the eastern approaches to Iwo-koa. They were hunting Japanese submarines. What they would find, if they stayed in these waters long enough, was something no briefing officer had ever prepared them for. "They are sitting on the corridor," Webb said, joining them on the tower with his shirt dark with engine oil. He had been below, coaxing a failing pump back to life. "The same corridor the harvesters used last week. If anything comes up that seam, they will be right in front of it." Callahan turned the problem over in his mind. The corridor was a deep channel where the Deep Walkers' scouts had been observed traveling, a natural highway through the shallows. They had charted it, marked it, avoided it — and now a green crew in an American submarine was parked across it like a man sleeping on a railroad track. "We cannot warn them," Sato said, reading his thoughts. "Any transmission we make identifies us. Any transmission we make tells our own navy that we are alive, that we are here, that we are not the men they buried." Reyes said nothing. He stood at the rail, his rosary moving through his fingers, his eyes on the water. He had been quieter since the trench, since the voices, since everything. They all had. "We could shadow them," Webb offered. "Stay deep, stay between them and the corridor. If anything comes, we drive it off before it reaches them." "And if the harvesters come in numbers?" Sato asked. "Then we have a fight on our hands either way. At least this way, we choose the ground." Callahan stared at the sonar screen for a long moment. The American contacts moved in their patient, hunting circles, utterly unaware that they were the prey in someone else's hunt. He thought about the men inside that hull — boys, most of them, the same kind of boys who had flown beside him in the B-24. Boys who did not know that the ocean they sailed was full of something older than the war. "All right," he said. "We shadow them. We stay deep, we stay quiet, and we pray they move on before the deep takes an interest." They dove at full dark, the Shinsengumi slipping beneath the waves with a silence that had cost Sato two years and a dozen dead engineers to perfect. Callahan manned the sonar himself, listening to the American submarine's screws the way a man listens for a heartbeat in a dark room. The escorts moved overhead, their propellers a steady, reassuring thrum. For two days, nothing happened. The American patrol turned north, then east, and Callahan began to hope they would simply leave. Webb had begun to relax. Reyes had stopped praying aloud. Then, on the third night, the sonar screamed. The contact came out of the corridor at forty knots — fast, low, and moving with a precision no living thing should have. It was a harvester, one of the smaller Deep Walkers, the ones that moved in coordinated groups and stripped a hull clean in minutes. And it was not alone. Behind it, the sonar bloomed with a dozen more, all converging on the American submarine. "Surface them," Callahan ordered. "Now. Give them a chance." "We cannot —" Sato began. "We are going to surface them," Callahan repeated, "or we are going to sit here and listen to men we could have saved die over the hydrophones. Which is it?" Sato's jaw worked, and then he nodded. The Shinsengumi rose, breaching the surface a thousand yards from the American submarine, and Callahan killed the running lights and went to the deck with a signal lamp. The American periscope turned toward them. For one terrible moment, Callahan was certain they would be fired upon — an unidentified black hull surfacing in the night was exactly the kind of target a green crew was trained to shoot first and identify never. But the periscope held, and held, and then the American submarine began to dive, and the signal lamp in Callahan's hand dropped to his side. "They are going under," Webb said. "They are diving straight into it." "Then we go with them," Callahan said. The battle that followed was fought in the dark, at depth, without a single shot being seen by the surface world. The Shinsengumi and the Deep Darters cut through the harvesters' formation, their torpedoes leaving trails of blue-white light that carved the water into a cathedral of fire. The American submarine, trapped in the middle, fired blindly and somehow, impossibly, drove two of the creatures off. When it was over, four harvesters drifted down into the abyss, and the American submarine, its hull scarred and its crew shaken, limped east toward Pearl Harbor with no idea what it had survived. Callahan stood on the deck of the Shinsengumi as the sun came up, watching the American hull vanish over the horizon. Behind him, Webb was stitching a cut on his own arm with the calm of a man who had done it a hundred times. "They will report it," Sato said. "They will report an unidentified submarine that surfaced, fired on them, and drove off an attack they cannot explain. Someone in Washington will read that report, and they will file it with the other reports that do not make sense, and they will forget it." "Until they do not," Callahan said. Sato nodded slowly. "Until they do not." Callahan looked at the sonar screen, at the empty corridor where the harvesters had come from. For the first time, he understood the shape of the war they were fighting. The Deep Walkers were not raiding the surface for food. They were thinning the herds, culling the weak, preparing the ground for something that was still coming. The surface war and the deep war were becoming one war. And the forgotten squadron, hidden between them, could not save everyone. They dove again at noon, into the deep, into the dark, and the ocean closed over their heads like a door closing on a room full of secrets.