第72章 The Flags Assemble

The world's attention arrived before the island did, which was fitting, because the world had been practicing. Halloway ran the incoming traffic like a quartermaster running a fleet train — cipher in the forenoon, flags at noon, the long-range circuit after supper — and each evening she read the summary to the chart room in the level voice of a hydrographer reporting soundings, while outside the hull the lesson went down into the dark and the Apprentice's three falling notes counted something none of them said aloud. The navies were converging. Not on the Kairyu — on the idea the Kairyu had become, which was worse and more useful. Rask signaled first, from a northern cruiser making its leisurely way down from the mandate islands with the river-name destroyer as escort: his government had ratified his settlement retroactively, which surprised him, he admitted, more than its opposite would have; the Apprentice remained transferred to no flag; and he closed with a sentence Tanabe read twice to be sure of it: my gunnery officer's wife has begun teaching the cathedral choir your notation, and I am informed the acoustics are better than the doctrine. Hollis came in person, or as close to in person as an admiral came now, transferring by seaplane to the Meridian at midday and coming across in her motor boat with two staff officers and a case of papers he set on the chart table like a man laying down cards he had been dealt against his will. "Captain Tanabe." He looked older than his signals sounded, which she had learned was the ordinary direction of that particular discrepancy. "Washington, London, and the treaty secretariat have agreed on three things and disagreed on everything else. The agreements: no occupation of the island, no instrumentation without your endorsement, and no weapons within fifty miles without a signal this ship countersigns. The disagreements—" he opened the case, and did not open it very far, "—are about what happens if the ring finishes whatever it is doing before anyone's parliament has debated it." "Then their parliaments should have sung sooner," Ellison said, from her corner, not looking up from her traces, and Hollis accepted the point with the nod of a man who had stopped being startled by this ship's company somewhere around the ice. The disagreement that mattered wore no flag at all. A task group had sailed from a major southern base eleven days earlier — a heavy cruiser, two destroyers, and a fleet tug, names withheld from every circuit Halloway could tap, orders sealed — and its track, plotted from fuel and store returns by intelligence officers who were becoming, Halloway observed, connoisseurs of other people's logistics, converged on Iwo-koa inside four days. Whose group it was depended on which ministry was asking; the phrase secure the feature appeared in three separate leaks wearing three separate classifications, and the fact that all three used the same verb told Halloway more than any of the documents meant to. "They are not villains," she said, folding the plot. "They are the part of every navy that arrives when the singing stops being deniable. They will have orders written by men who have read none of the journals, based on summaries prepared by officers who read only the summaries. And they will arrive, Captain, at approximately the moment the sixth door opens." She looked up. "We should decide what they find." Tanabe decided it standing, because some decisions she could no longer make sitting. "They will find a lesson in progress," she said. "That is the whole of the plan, gentlemen, and I am aware it sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. It is the only thing that has ever worked. We will be on station, in international water, outside the reef, conducting a musical instruction with a machine of no flag and a mining ship of withdrawn claim, and when the task group arrives with its sealed orders, it will arrive inside the sound, the way Rask did, the way all of them do." She looked at Hollis. "I will want your countersign ready, Admiral, and I will want it honest." "It will be both," Hollis said. "It usually is." Voss signaled the same night, from her university chair in the north, through relays that crossed half the planet to reach them, and hers was the message that changed the arithmetic. She had spent the months since the evacuation reworking the ice records Callahan had accepted into the archive, and the reworked records said one thing plainly: the hand's-breadth gap under the re-formed barrier had widened. The beginning-note no longer rested in it. The First had passed the note on — south and west along the ring, door to door, at the accelerating tempo Sano's plots had already measured from the other end — and the convergence of the two relay lines, the one running out of the Antarctic and the one running out of the trench country, fell upon Iwo-koa within seventy-two hours of the convoy's own estimate. "We assumed we were racing the ring to the island," Sano said, pinning the crossing curves over the chart until the island sat in the center of a spider's web of bearings. "We are not racing it, Captain. We are riding ahead of it as its herald. Every mile we close, the interval shortens behind us — new doors keep enlisting, every port choir that learns the true version feeds the tempo, and the metronome is speeding up because the song is getting stronger, not weaker." He straightened, and his voice carried the careful evenness of a man refusing his own excitement. "Revised estimate, both sources agreeing: the beginning-note arrives at Iwo-koa in sixty hours. We arrive in fifty-eight. That is our entire margin, and it is shrinking daily, and there is nothing we can do about the shrinking except arrive singing, which happens to be the plan anyway." The wardroom laughed, a short surprised sound, the laugh of men discovering they were not afraid, and Tanabe let it live for exactly as long as laughter was worth and then gave her orders for the approach, and they were characteristically plain. Meridian to stand off the reef two miles with her big sonar listening floor-ward; Apprentice to enter the lagoon if the depth allowed and otherwise hold the opening like a sentry; chapel line rigged for shallow water, which Ishikawa had never attempted and began that night to redesign aloud to anyone who would listen, including the galley; landing party to be selected at dawn, because whatever the war had left on that island in 1944, someone who had dropped it ought to walk up to it and say so. Callahan heard the orders from the passageway, where he had learned to wait without seeming to, wrapped in his blankets with the frost that never left his collar now despite the latitudes. He came in and put one cold finger on the chart, on the green speck three hundred miles east of Truk, and left it there a moment, the way a man touches a grave marker or a doorbell. "I bombed it on the ninth of October," he said, to no one and everyone. "Twenty-six years. I have owed that island a visit since before most of you were born." He took his finger away. "I will want a boat at first light, Captain. And I will want nobody to carry anything for me, because the day I cannot walk up a beach is the day Maeda wins the argument he has been losing all year." Maeda, summoned by the duty messenger at 0300, read the note in Callahan's handwriting — one line, rationing be damned pending the captain's counter-order — and wrote beneath it, small and defeated and honest: approved under protest, conditions attached, God go with the old man. At 0540 the lookout sighted land, low and green on the northwestern horizon exactly where twenty-six years and a boyhood of nightmares had placed it, and the convoy altered course together for the last hundred miles, three hulls in formation, singing ship to water at dawn as though approaching a house where someone lay sleeping, and the island, as if it heard them coming, sent up a thin column of morning cloud straight from the lagoon, like smoke from a chimney where somebody had just risen to look out a window.