He fell silent, eyes again closed as if looking off to some distant, dark land.
“Commander Genda, we shall find their carriers and sink them.
“And this time, when we do sink them, they will not merely settle into the mud of the harbor to be restored, their trained crews taken off to be used on other ships. No, we must sink them in a thousand fathoms of water, all hands aboard, and thus destroy every carrier in the Pacific before the year is finished.
“It will be a different war now, a more terrible one,” Yamamoto said, his features fixed, cool, as if another hand of poker had just been drawn.
Two Hundred Fifty Miles West of Pearl Harbor USS Enterprise: 5:00 p.m. Local Time
Admiral William “Bull” Halsey crumpled the note that had just been handed to him by his signal officer.
The news was horrifying. Every battleship, sunk or seriously damaged by two waves of Jap attackers. Thousands feared dead, the once proud fleet a shambles, oil tank farms, dry dock, repair facilities, and more ships destroyed in a third strike. And damn all, still no one thought to track which direction they had departed to after the strike was over. For all he knew the Japs were fifty miles away, or five hundred miles away. He had been running his scout squadron ragged all day looking for something, anything.
He stood up, walked out onto the flying bridge and looked down as a Grumman Wildcat prepared to lift off, to maintain patrol over the fleet.
Where were the damn Japs? Not a single fool back on Oahu had bothered to take the time to just watch for a few minutes, to see which way the Japs had departed. Where did they rendezvous after the strike, did they run north, west, east, south? They could be anywhere within two hundred miles of Oahu in any direction... more than one hundred thousand square miles of ocean to hide in . . . but by God he would find the bastards.
“By the time we are done with them,” he snarled, “Japanese will only be spoken in hell. Now let’s go find their carriers.”
Table of Contents
PEARL HARBOR: A Novel of December 8th
Acknowledgements
Technical Note
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: Thunder on the Horizon
ONE
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
PART TWO: The Countdown
EIGHT
NINE
ELEVEN
PART THREE: The Battle of Pearl Harbor
TWELVE