Black Wind

  The new insight into the code allowed us to anticipate the Japanese move on New Guinea and stop them in the Coral Sea before they got to Port Moresby. It gave us warning of the assault on Midway. Instead of getting suckered into the trap they were planning for us, we were ready and waiting for them when they arrived. We whipped their asses at Midway and they'd been on the defensive ever since. All because of Jimmy Doolittle's one-way flight over Tokyo.

  I suddenly realized that Sam was speaking to me. It seemed they had got into that favorite wartime question: Where Were You When They Attacked Pearl Harbor? I gave him a quizzical look and he repeated his question:

  "I said, you were right there at Pearl during the attack, weren't you, Frank?"

  "Saw the whole thing, from start to finish."

  "That where you got hurt?" Ahern asked, nodding toward my scarred-up right arm.

  I held it up and looked at the pair of nickel-sized scars, one on top, one on the underside. The docs put me up at the naval hospital on base and did what they could for my arm, keeping the wound open and draining so it healed from the inside. I got away without an infection, but I still couldn't make a tight fist—my ring finger wouldn't flex all the way.

  I'd had to answer an awful lot of questions from the security people. It was humiliating as hell, but I told them the truth: A Japanese agent had come to my house and stolen the maps of the harbor. He nailed me to the tree to keep me from following him.

  Nobody asked me about my wife and I didn't volunteer anything. I had learned to stop thinking about Meiko. If I had just enough booze in me, it was almost as if she never existed. But what I hadn't learned to forget was the sight of the flames and the smoke and the earth-jolting thuds as those ships blew up on that clear, quiet Sunday morning. I held myself at least partly responsible for every name on the long casualty lists. I couldn't blot those guys out. Not yet, at least.

  "Got this not far from the harbor," I told Ahern.

  "I was on the other end of the island when they hit," he said. "Manning a radar station."

  "Yeah? Where?"

  "On Kahuku Point. We were checking our mobile rig against the army's Opana station."

  "On Sunday morning? Didn't you pick up anything?"

  "You bet we did." His youthful face became animated. "We were supposed to close up shop at 7:00 A.M., but just as we were about to shut down, we caught this huge blip on the screen about a hundred forty miles north, three degrees east, and coming our way. It looked like a lot of planes. We figured it was that squad of B-17s we were expecting, but just to be sure, we checked with Opana and they had it, too."

  "Didn't you call it in?" I said, feeling myself tense up.

  "Sure. Called it in to ONI and to the plotting center."

  "And nobody did anything?" I could not believe this.

  "You got it. They told us, ‘Don't worry about it.' So we didn't. But just for practice we followed them until we lost them in the hills, at about 7:40."

  "Shit!" I said. "You had them! God, you could have warned the harbor!"

  Ahern slumped back in his chair. "I know that now. But we thought they were ours. We reported it and were told to forget about it. What could we do after that?"

  "Nothing," I said. "But Jesus! To think we could have had almost an hour's warning—"

  "We could have had more than that," Sam Knapp said.

  "From whom?"

  "The Japs themselves. Their Fourteen Part Message."

  I waved him off. "The attack was already well under way when those sneaky bastards delivered their lousy declaration of war."

  "Right," Knapp said with a knowing smirk. "When they delivered it…”

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means we had it intercepted, put through Purple magic, and typed up long before they marched into the State Department."

  "Bullshit. How the hell do you know?"

  "I was assigned the ONI office in DC when the Japs attacked. Scuttlebutt was that we'd had the first thirteen parts of the Fourteen Part Message deciphered since 1900. Heard the same thing from a friend in the army's Far Eastern section over at G-2. They told me it looked bad. Said they didn't know what the fourteenth part would say, but after reading the first thirteen, it didn't matter. The Japs were breaking off relations. It was war."

  I was getting interested now. "You mean to tell me all this was deciphered and typed up by seven o'clock Saturday night?"

  "That's what they tell me."

  "And you just sat on it?"

  "Hell no," Knapp said, his face reddening. "Not me. I learned this later. I hear Commander Kramer took a copy right over to the White House. It was in Roosevelt's hands by 10:00 P.M."

  I did some fast calculating: 10:00 P.M. Eastern time was almost sixteen hours before the first shot was fired over Oahu.

  Sixteen hours!

  If we'd had Purple magic at Pearl, we would have had all that time to get the ships dispersed and ready to fight.

  "How about the final part?"

  "The whole message was transcribed and circulating around the State Department by 7:30 Sunday morning. That's fact, not rumor."

  That was 2:00 A.M. at Pearl. Still plenty of time to get the fleet ready for battle.

  "Why didn't anybody tell us?" Ahern was saying, his face slack with astonishment. "How come nobody warned us?"

  "Because it never happened that way," I said, as much to convince myself as the kid. "It's all hearsay. It's wild bullshit that gets started when bored guys sit around in ward rooms and mess halls, and monitoring stations"—I paused to let that last one sink in—"waiting for something to happen."

  "I guess you're right," he said slowly, then grinned. "Sure. Who'd believe of FDR'd leave the whole Pacific Fleet sitting in the harbor if he knew the Japs were coming?" He looked over at Knapp. "Right?"

  Knapp shrugged. "Only telling you what I heard."

  The talk drifted on to other matters, most especially how I was going to spend my week's leave in Hawaii. I smiled, made comments, nodded when appropriate, but my mind wasn't on the conversation or my coming leave. I was thinking about what Matsuo had said to me on Halewa Heights after he nailed me to that tree. The final part of a declaration of war has already been sent to our Washington Embassy.

  The neat way his words dovetailed with Knapp's paranoid ramblings now made me more than a little uncomfortable. It opened the gates and let out all the old questions that had plagued me all through 1941: Why weren't we given enough air recon ability? Why didn't the Honolulu DIO have a Purple magic machine? Why were all of Captain Zacharias's warnings ignored? Why had he been stowed out of the way aboard a heavy cruiser? Why were so many ships allowed to sit in port at once amid so many danger signs like the change of call signals twice in the preceding month, the burning of codebooks, the "disappearance" of Carrier Fleets One and Two?

  On and on they went until I physically shook them off.

  It didn't matter. It was all over and done with. No one would ever know for sure—least of all me—so why lose sleep over unanswerables?

  I took a long pull on my canteen.

  * * *

  I was supposed to have been airborne by four in the afternoon, but the PBN-1 sent to pick me up developed engine trouble on landing. We didn't get into the air until well after sunset.

  But I was finally on my way. I was the only passenger on the plane, and before I settled down for a nap, I gave the island one last good look. Balajuro was shrinking behind me, a lopsided ring of tarnished gold and onyx set in dark water streaked with silver moonlight. I wouldn't miss it for the week I'd be away. One island, like one day, seemed pretty much like any other out here in the Western Pacific.

  As I turned away from the window, something in the air down below caught my attention and I looked back. A tiny cloud had appeared over the island. It looked innocent enough, hovering there a few hundred feet above the edge of the atoll's coral-rimmed lagoon, but something about it struck me as wrong.

  It was black.
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  There's no such thing as a black cloud. Smoke can be black, but clouds are water vapor and reflect the light around them. On this perfect night, with a near-full moon over the eastern horizon, that cloud should have been silvery white. Clouds can look black from the ground when there's enough of them to block out the sun or moon, but I was above this one and it was black. Intensely black. I looked for signs of a fire below on the island but saw no flames and no trail of smoke leading up to it.

  And the cloud was growing.

  Even as I watched, I could see it enlarging from within. It looked almost as if this black substance was being pumped into the air through a hole in the sky. Its surface heaved and boiled as if racked with some terrible inner turmoil.

  Fear rippled along my skin as the temperature in the cabin seemed to plummet. This was more than just a meteorological curiosity. Its blackness was too intense, too hungry. It seemed to devour the moonlight around it. Something was terribly wrong down there.

  I lost sight of Balajuro and the cloud as the plane angled away toward the east. I jumped up from my seat and hurried to the pilot's cabin. It took a little doing but I convinced him to bank around to the south for one more look. As Balajuro hove into view, I gasped.

  The cloud was huge now. The entire lagoon was covered and it was spreading over the jungle.

  "What the fuck is that?" the pilot said.

  I reached for his radio. "I don't know. But I'm going to call down and find out."

  I got Ahern on the air.

  "Yeah! Of course we see it. Some freak typhoon. Never seen one come up so fast. You'd better get moving—see if you can outrun it."

  "Ev!" I shouted into the mike. "That's no typhoon. It's only over Balajuro—like it's sitting on the island."

  "What?" I heard him say through a burst of static. "It's blowing like hell down here. You can barely—" More static, then: "—feels so cold, Frank. And there's something funny about this wind. Aw, it's no use—"

  And then the speaker filled with static and we lost him.

  "What do we do now, sir?" the pilot said.

  The question startled me. I realized I was the ranking officer on the plane. Not a position I wanted, but nothing I could do about it now.

  "Keep circling. But keep clear. I don't want to get any closer to that thing than we are now."

  "Don't worry about that, sir," he said.

  I looked at his face and saw my own unease mirrored there. Something about that cloud poked at the most primitive levels of the brain. Every instinct screamed, stay away.

  "Maybe it'll move on," I said. "Then we'll go down."

  But it didn't move on. It continued to spread inexorably over the island, hovering there. I expected to see flashes of lightning or feel the plane buffeted by storm winds, but all was calm. Too calm. The cloud was settling as if to smother the peaceful little atoll.

  I got on the air to Tarawa and was finally connected to an officer with some authority. His name was Abrams and he was a captain. When I described what was happening, I heard him curse. The air was full of static, but I was sure he said,

  "Shit! Another one!"

  "Pardon me, sir?"

  "Never mind. Just stay the hell away from that cloud."

  "This has happened before?"

  He ignored my question and said, "Anybody got a camera on board?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, find out. And if so, get some pictures of that thing. I'm sending out some support."

  "Support? Support against what?"

  "Don't ask questions, Lieutenant. Just stick around till we get there."

  "Captain," I said, "I don't under—"

  "Holy shit!" the pilot said.

  I looked out at the cloud and felt my knees go weak. It had changed. It was still hugging the island like a starfish over a clam, but it was expanding upward, stretching past our altitude and on up toward the stars. It became a vertical column of black, an onyx pillar soaring into space. It seemed to reach up forever, casting a line of shadow far to the west along the moonlit surface of the Pacific.

  As we flew through that shadow, it was as if the moon had ceased to exist. I tried to swallow but my mouth had gone dry. This was beyond science and nature. We were watching a nightmare.

  And then it was gone.

  The blackness thinned and evaporated like mist in the morning sun. One moment it was there, towering over us; ten seconds later it had vanished without a trace.

  The pilot and I sat and gaped at the suddenly empty air, and at Balajuro, visible once more in the gleaming, placid surface of the Pacific. It was as if nothing at all had happened.

  I grabbed the radio mike and tried to raise Ahern but my call went unanswered.

  "Let's get down there."

  The pilot threw me a worried look. "You really think we should, sir? I mean Tarawa's sending backup. Maybe we should wait."

  I shared his reluctance, but Knapp and Ahern were down there, and so were lots of others. Their radios were out and they probably needed help.

  I pointed to Balajuro. "Down!"

  We did two fly-overs and saw no signs of life—no lights, no fires, no movement in the darkness below. I was becoming increasingly uneasy. Even if all their power was gone, someone would have waved a flashlight at the sound of our engines.

  "Land this thing." In response, the pilot veered off toward the water. "Where're you going? The landing strip's down there."

  "Yes, sir. But the strip's pitch dark. No telling what I'll run into before we roll to a stop. We're safer on the lagoon."

  "Good thinking."

  The PBN-1 was amphibious; we’d be foolish not to take advantage of that.

  As the plane skimmed and settled onto the surface of the lagoon, I heard a dull staccato thumping against the lower hull. It slowed in tempo as the plane slowed, and stopped when the plane came to a halt.

  "What was that?"

  The pilot shrugged. "Sounded like something in the water."

  I got a flashlight and opened the hatch while he pulled the inflatable raft from its compartment. As soon as I leaned my head outside, I knew something horrible had happened on this little island.

  "Hold it," I told the pilot in a hushed voice as he struggled with the raft. "Listen."

  "Listen to what?" He came up beside me. "I don't hear anything."

  "That's just it. It's quiet."

  I heard the gentle lap of the waves on the coral rim of the lagoon and against the outer shore to windward, but that was all. No insects buzzing, no birds calling, no animals moving through the brush.

  "Is that bad?"

  "Damn right it's bad. I've been on this rock for a month and can't remember a single second of quiet. But now… God, it's like a tomb." I angled my flashlight down at the water. "Christ!"

  The pilot followed my stare. "Damn! Look at that."

  The water was loaded with fish—puffers, tangs, small sharks, rays, eels, crabs, squid, jellyfish, and a horde of others I couldn't identify—all floating belly-up on the surface of the lagoon.

  "Dead fish," he said in a low, awed tone. "That's what was hitting against the hull when we landed."

  I had a feeling even the coral and plankton were dead.

  "But what killed them? I've seen plenty of big storms before but never seen one leave a fish-kill like this."

  "That was no storm," I said, feeling very cold inside. "Did you see any damage when we flew over the compound? See any fallen trees?"

  "It was too dark."

  I looked around. The only thing I could see that had changed was the jungle—changed not just in its silence, but its very shape. I could see it silhouetted in the moonlight and it looked somehow different. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I knew it didn't look like the same jungle I had left earlier this evening.

  Suddenly there was a sound: a plane. A couple of them. The radio crackled to life and the pilot ran for it.

  "It's that Captain Abrams from Tarawa."

  I went forward and
took the mike.

  "I want you off that lagoon and away from Balajuro, Lieutenant," Abrams told me in clipped, official tones.

  "Sir, I had friends on the island. They may need help."

  His voice softened just a touch. "Believe me, Lieutenant, whoever was on that island is beyond anyone's help now."

  I had pretty well figured that out, especially after seeing all the dead fish, but it raised a lump in my throat to hear him put it into words. I hadn't known Knapp and Ahern long, but they’d been good men.

  "Cruise to about two miles offshore and anchor there for the night," Black Wind 327

  The pilot grabbed the mike from me. "I'm already overdue at Midway, sir."

  "Whatever orders you had are countermanded as of this moment. You are to anchor as instructed. You will both be debriefed immediately. Over."

  The pilot looked at me and shrugged. We both knew we had stumbled onto something big and now we couldn't get out.

  * * *

  Balajuro was dead.

  I had known that last night. I hadn't known just how dead.

  The Navy Department men who spent half the night debriefing the pilot and me—the pilot's name was Tom Kendall and we were becoming fast friends—aboard their flying boat were oblique as hell when I asked them about it, so I got the idea I'd be seeing something pretty grim in the morning.

  I still wasn't prepared for the reality.

  The jungle was brown. And it drooped. That was why its outline had looked different in the moonlight. All brown and wilted. The leaves and palm fronds drooped in death. The jungle looked as if it had melted and shrunken overnight.

  We coasted our PBN through the dead fish on the surface of the lagoon. Captain Abrams was waiting on the shore. He was standing in a group of about ten. A few were uniformed, but most were in civvies.

  "The first thing I want you to know," the captain said, returning our salutes as we stepped ashore, "is that everything you saw last night and everything you will see today is top secret. Everything. That clear?"