[What Might Have Been 03] Alternate Wars Read online

  Time to go.

  Lieutenant Akaji disliked having to reprove subordinates; he wished, heartily, that his small raiding force did not include Private Miyake.

  In the matter of obeying orders, Miyake simply did not try. Back from reconnaissance with Corporal Yamagiwa and Privates Suyama and Arimura, Akaji found the impromptu shelter warm, its driftwood fire banked. Perhaps two hours, it had burned.

  Which meant that Miyake had lit fire as soon as he was left alone. Even though, in these latitudes at this time of year, for hours enough twilight lingered to show smoke against sky. Let alone the smell of it, should Americans walk nearby, above.

  The man had no excuse. Here at the bottom of the ravine, roofed by decades’ growth of tundra moss, no wind came; padded clothing gave warmth enough. But Miyake was an obdurate man.

  He had almost cost their lives, let alone the mission, even before they reached Amchitka’s shore. Perhaps halfway between the submarine and the looming headland, the inflated raft pitching in harsh swells, Miyake inexplicably stood. In saving him from immersion they came close to capsizing.

  And as all had been told, life expectancy in Arctic waters was less than twenty minutes, padding or no.

  Akaji felt his spirit sink. A sacrifice mission should be a glorious venture. If only this man were assigned elsewhere! Or, Akaji’s demon whispered, he had fallen into the sea…

  Miyake was of some use; now he heated rations and sake. As they ate, Akaji reviewed matters. It was their second night ashore. During the first they collapsed and hid the liferaft, then sought shelter. Tundra moss bridges clefts and smooths contours; it was Corporal Yamagiwa who espied, where the headland’s bluff met the ravine’s mouth, an overhang of moss which could be undercut to provide entrance.

  Through the underlying tangle of dead moss and roots, with much effort the five made a tunnel up along the ravine’s bottom, nearly forty yards to a place where the banks widened. Here they chopped and pushed and flattened vegetable debris to open a cave: barely five feet wide and four high, but nearly eight lengthwise. And with good, fresh water running down the center.

  Overhead lay several feet of solid, untouched growth. Except for the one ragged hole, not wholly clear but thinned enough to allow the escape of smoke.

  They lay less than a half mile from the nearest American huts. But if caution were adhered to—if Miyake would heed restraint—the enemy might as well seek them on Paramushiru!

  And tonight’s reconnaissance had found for Akaji the Americans’ communication lifeline. He did not know why it must be interrupted at this time, only that he had been ordered to do so.

  How to disable it was the question. Bullets had not worked. The exposed part of the steel box, roughly the size of a small trunk, was possibly the lesser portion; pushing and prying could not budge it. And when, deeming it safe, Akaji directed Yamagiwa to fire at the box’s padlock, the rifle bullets ricocheted without effect.

  In the area between box and shoreline, where water cut a gash down the bank, it was young, eager Suyama who discovered several feet of exposed cable. Handlamp taped to emit only a slim pencil of light, Lieutenant Akaji inspected the find.

  A large, heavy cable: its outer sheath, under tattered wrappings of tarred jute, consisted of almost a dozen spiraled steel finger-thick wires. Like the padlock, it withstood rifle fire. The final attempt splattered lead against Arimura’s helmet; an inch lower would have taken his eye.

  Sipping the last of his cooling sake, Akaji sighed. Next and soon he would lead two of his men to the rolling tundra above and reconnoiter the nearby American unit. To find targets for ingenious sabotage, the more effective if unsuspected as such.

  He would take Suyama and Arimura, leaving Corporal Yamagiwa to ensure Miyake’s behavior.

  From the messhall it was maybe eighty yards to Operations. Two huts sat side by side, dug into the hillside at the rear. Entering the longer one Buster went past the locked crypto room and the desks—captain’s, chief op’s, and unit clerk’s—to the teletype shop, where he hung up his parka.

  The shorter Quonset alongside was all Operations; at its rear a covered hallway connected the two. The hallway leaked some.

  Entering Ops from the back, Buster saw the Adak and Attu cable gear to his right, across from the teletype machines for Post HQ, Navy, Air Command and Navy Weather, all idle this time of night. In between sat the cable amplifiers and power bays, the trick chief’s desk, and the oil stove. The Quonset’s walls, brown fiberboard, showed drab under a single row of fluorescents.

  Buster glowered at the stove. It sat where you couldn’t run an oil line; fuel had to be carried by hand. And Smitty, the chief op, had laid it on his maintenance crew to keep it filled.

  It was a chore Buster didn’t appreciate: running oil from a stand-mounted barrel into the can, wind blowing much of it onto his pants. One night he’d stood, looking across to the blinking red lights of Baker Strip, the bomber runway, and caught himself thinking it was a town over there. Really crazy…

  He found Thorne feeding reversals into the Adak cable apex and adjusting the artificial line’s external resistor boxes to reduce the imbalance kicks, drawn in ink on moving paper ribbon.

  Two-way cable circuits used a double Wheatstone bridge; each end sent into an apex and received across it, balancing the cable against a heat-stabilized artificial line. To read the tiny incoming pips through the much greater sent signal, that balance was crucial. The slightest change of sea temperature, or a chip of oxidation growing in a soldered splice, could throw it off.

  This part, Buster knew. The rest, signal shaping and all, building the received twitches into enough of a square wave to fool a teletype machine: those things left him stumped.

  Luckily for him, once the shaping was set up it stayed put.

  The Aleutian cable ran eight such legs end to end: Whittier-Kodiak-Cold Bay-Dutch Harbor-Umnak-Atka-Adak-Amchitka-Attu. Then a simpler rig on to Shemya. Whittier connected to Alaska Command near Anchorage via Alaska Railroad lines and ACS local loops.

  There was no way anyone could tap submarine cable.

  With Adak down, perforated tape from Attu was piling up; tape to Attu, it looked like, had all gone out. Nothing clacked but the Attu reperf and monitor printer; Silent Yokum and Frank Chmielevski, tonight’s operators, sat with coffee, nodded hello, and looked bored. Scooter must be in the crypto room, working. Or maybe taking a nap. Morgan grinned; security had its uses.

  He walked over to Thorne, who had been to cable school and knew his business; the man looked around, saying, “I’ve got most of it; you should have it up to traffic pretty soon.”

  “Sure. Have yourself some sack time.” Thorne left. Buster checked the resistor dial readings against the last log entry. Thorne had changed the head-end balance appreciably and was working down the cable. Careful not to throw a big surge and maybe break the thin glass siphon pen, Buster fiddled.

  Thorne was right; in a few minutes Buster flattened the two remaining peaks to mere wiggles. He ran the reversals up to signal speed. No bad spots, so he patched the circuit back to normal and sent QUICK BROWN FOX tape. From Adak, Buster’s old drinking buddy Slim Barger responded with his own test tape. Solid both ways; they put the circuit back to message traffic.

  Looking at his useless info copy of Harriman’s latest to Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower frowned. Book code again. Maybe what Moscow said to Washington was none of his business—and compared to Marshall and MacArthur, certainly he was the new boy in school. Still, when Averill talked over his head to George so obviously, he felt slighted.

  Eisenhower shrugged. Sooner or later, Mac would take the Japs’ measure. Then the European Theater of Operations would get the attention it merited. And he with it.

  With Adak restored, Buster went across to the shop. He was adjusting relays when Silent Yokum the trick chief came to tell him the oil had run out. Always on graveyard! Buster shucked on his parka, picked up the five-gallon can and went outside.

  Th
e wind was beating seventy; Morgan walked crouched. Up the slope to the oil dump and over to the rack. He held the can to the tap and pushed the handle, but no oil came.

  The damn barrel was empty!

  He rolled it off and went for a full one. But by himself he couldn’t get one free without bringing down the whole stack.

  He went back inside. Silent Yokum being a sergeant and all, Buster braced Chmielevski. “Shemmy? I need some help.”

  Shemmy wasn’t Frank’s pet nickname, but it beat some he’d had. You take what comes. He got his parka and followed Morgan.

  It seemed to him he was running in bad luck. Like going to shower with the shampoo his folks sent him and pouring almost half before he smelled it for bourbon. Which ran fifty bucks a fifth off the merchant marine, a month’s pay for a buck private.

  Or the day he put gas in the stove instead of oil, and lucky somebody smelled the difference before he lit it. That’s when Smitty put the job onto Maintenance.

  Isolated duty wasn’t good for Frank. Except for the nurses and Red Cross girls you saw sitting in the officers’ section at Post Theater, there weren’t any women. Not any. None.

  He wasn’t a gash hound like the guys said. He liked girls, and they could tell he did; that’s why he’d always scored so steady. He really missed it; the Rock was driving him bughouse.

  One of these days, though, he’d get lucky….

  After he helped get the barrel loose, he waited while Morgan ran oil. Then they went back in and got the stove filled.

  Lying in mud under a truck, Lieutenant Akaji watched the Americans wrestle an oil drum onto a rack, fill a container, and return to their pair of hemicylindrical huts.

  Leading the way Akaji had brought Suyama and Arimura up to this area of scattered huts. Most would be sleeping quarters. One leaked smells of food; at its farther end a pipe led down to a fairsized tundra lake. Wading out to plug the pipe’s open end with moss, Arimura returned giggling. No great act of sabotage—yet in their peril here, good for the men’s morale.

  So vulnerable, these Americans! Given a platoon, automatic weapons, and explosives other than mere grenades, Akaji could destroy this unit, material and personnel, and be quickly safe to ground. But with only four enlisted men, it could not be.

  Reconnaissance photos marked this area as the communications unit Akaji must cripple. But how? Run from hut to hut, hurling grenades and leaving havoc? The comm center itself, almost certainly the paired huts the soldiers had reentered? But known damage was the most easily countered, and soonest repaired.

  No. The submarine cable, the circuit that could not be intercepted, was the vital link. It must be broken. And in a fashion as near to untraceable as could be managed.

  So that the Americans would not know where to begin.

  When the code clerk Denison brought Ambassador Harriman’s message, George Marshall sighed with relief. Roosevelt waved for him to do the decoding. “Tell me the gist.”

  “Yes, sir.” It didn’t take long. “Averill reports that our use of Siberian bases for refueling is approved, effective now.”

  FDR’s palm smote the desk. “Good work! Denison, code my order of this date to Alaska Command: General Buckner at Fort Richardson. Via the secure submarine cable circuit from Anchorage, he is to alert our bomber groups on Amchitka and Shemya to commence Operation Downdraft in—let me see—ten days.”

  Alarmed, Marshall cleared his throat. “That’s awfully short notice, sir, for the necessary coordination with Mac.”

  But Roosevelt had the bit in his teeth. “They can do it. And so can we. By Jove, we’ll have to.”

  Crossing the rocky stretch below the cable hut, Lobo Tex Riggins felt goosebumps. Daylight was only a promise, but in the wet muck, below the wash gully where several feet of cable lay uncovered, he spotted tracks. And not of familiar design.

  Well, this was the kind of thing he was paid to do, and two years in the Alaska Scouts had made him good at it. They called him Lobo for the way he made time over rough terrain, and how he worked when he got there. Like those hideout Japs on Attu.

  The sky was lightening; on the cable armor wires he saw shiny marks. “Bullets. Softnose.” U.S. troops didn’t carry softnose much. And the shoe tracks—he looked some more—still weren’t quite right.

  None of this said it couldn’t be some dogface with wore-out shoes and a grudge. But didn’t say it was, either.

  Lobo went up to the cable hut. Not your usual shed, like the big one at Attu with the stove in it. Here, some fruitcake put a grenade to one of those, so the Signal Corps set up a steel box—torchwelded together on the spot—half-buried, with rocks in the bottom to hold it down. And except for the washout he’d just been looking at, cables and landlines were buried, too.

  He peered closer. On the hut’s padlock, more lead smears. He frowned. Could be some dumb GI kid, shooting things up just ’cause they were handy; there’s always a lot of that.

  If it wasn’t … Lobo shrugged. Heading east, the tracked mud petered out among the rocks. So follow the shoreline around to the docks at Constantine Harbor. Either he’d catch up to somebody or he wouldn’t.

  He’d report this, do a stakeout. If there was real trouble, another Scout or two could help. Malemute Red was tied up on Norton Sound, but Afognak Pete was savvy. If Pete was out of the stockade yet. For now Lobo had four-five miles to go before he got back to HQ, for his first hot breakfast in over a week.

  Major Spencer had his ass in a sling. CINCCOM’s message, off the Ketchikan cable, was the hottest item to hit Fort Rich since the go-ahead to take Attu. But General Simon Bolivar Buckner was up at Fairbanks on a “morale inspection.” And the Alaska RR lines were out: a landslide near McKinley Park.

  These orders detailed coordination with MacArthur’s CINPAC; if they didn’t arrive on time, the whole operation was cold soup. The general was needed here at Anchorage sooner than now—and there was no secure way to tell him so.

  Spencer considered forwarding the message in Buckner’s name. But if he guessed wrong, he’d always be a major. Or maybe less.

  Pooped, Buster was glad when his relief showed up. He signed off the log and was on his way out when Captain Rodgers, the Officer-in-Charge, sent him to pick up a message from Post HQ. Couldn’t wait a half hour for the circuit to open… .

  Outside in unexpected sunshine he took a shortcut around and up the hillside, above the lake where ACS got its brown water. At HQ he ran into a lot of routine GI crap he wasn’t used to. Working around the clock, ACS didn’t have time for that stuff.

  Back to Ops he dropped the sealed envelope into the slot alongside the crypto room door. Too tired to bother with breakfast, he went straight to his hut—watching an approaching storm wall cut visibility off solid, while to his other side, forty miles away gleamed the snowy peaks of Semisopochnoi.

  If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.

  He ate half a Snickers bar, went to bed, and was halfway to sleep when Scooter came in. “Hey, you know the rumor, there’s an Alaska Scout on duty here, patrolling the beaches? That message you brought was the post commander asking for two more.”

  With coded stuff, Scooter was sometimes like a little kid.

  General Buckner returned to Fort Richardson a day early; Major Spencer met him in a jeep. Thirty minutes later Buckner’s directive was on its encrypted way. To ACS and to Whittier, then through Arctic depths to Aleutian HQ at Adak.

  As the teletype clattered, Buckner stood over its operator. “I like that cable. The one circuit they can’t intercept.”

  Sadly, Akaji considered the exquisite silver penknife, a parting gift from his wife Mayu. Of items available, only its blade was both thin and sturdy enough for the job at hand.

  In dim slit of light from his handlamp, Akaji set the tip between two thick steel wires. With Arimura’s handaxe he tapped until the blade penetrated. In fear it might miss the central conductor, Akaji held breath.

  But his next blow brought a thin blue fla
sh; jolting shock threw him headlong in the mud. Slowly he rose, unable to keep his voice steady as he said, “I believe that is far enough.”

  Now he struck sidewise; the impaling blade snapped. Akaji hammered its broken end farther, drawing momentary sparks as he drove it flush. Finding his ruined pen-knife was not easy; for long moments he held it, thinking of Mayu who had given it. Then abruptly, swallowing regret, he threw it high and far, to make a tiny splash in Arctic seas.

  “Come, Arimura. It is time we foxes scurried to cover.”

  With the detachment’s field phones all on one big party line, the one over Shemmy’s bunk rang so much that Buster was used to it. Not until Scooter leaned over and shook him did he come awake. “Adak’s gone all to hell. Thorne says grab a bite and get your ass in gear.”

  Sitting up, fumbling his clothes together, Buster got out of the sack. Thorne wasn’t a man to panic; if he said jump, he had a reason. “Okay, Scoot; tell him I’m on the way.”

  Outside, rain came in spurts, like somebody throwing it a bucket at a time. The wind was having itself a clambake. Up the path, the outhouse had tipped over again, half its guy wires torn loose. So far it hadn’t ever got away completely.

  Right now he’d use the Officers’. It was closer, anyway.

  Lobo Tex meant to get on stakeout earlier, but he loved poker and purely hated to leave a winning streak. Close on midnight, he neared the cable landing. Wind was gusting loud, but he quiet-walked anyway because he was in the habit.

  Off toward the beach he heard something, a hammering noise, so he took out his handpiece and moved quicker. Nobody there, though; he wiped the gun dry as he could and reholstered it.

  Also he had, shoulder-slung, a cased Springfield ought-three. But that one was for daylight and distance.