Read Online One Man's Justice by Akira Yoshimura - Free Book Online Page B

officers stood staring at the red lamps on the map of Kyushu stretched across one wall. The lights indicating the Fukuoka metropolitan area remained on, as did those representing the Kanmon Strait, confirming that the smaller force of ten aircraft had reached its predicted target.
    Takuya sat motionless, staring at the map on the wall in front of his desk. Although the sky above the headquarters building was swarming with enemy planes, and the area around their safe haven was probably engulfed in flames, the atmosphere within the operations room was almost transquil. As the officer in charge of anti-aircraft intelligence, Takuya focused his attention solely on imparting information about the movements of enemy aircraft, and to him there was no difference between planes directly above and planes attacking a more distant region within the defensive perimeter.
    Anti-aircraft batteries and searchlight units along the Kanmon Strait coastline had been reinforced in late May, and reports were now coming in that these units were engaging the Superfortresses dropping mines in shipping channels. Two hours after the initial sightings, these bombersseemed to have finished dropping their mines and had turned back south. Around the same time, reports began to come in that the force that had targeted Fukuoka had started to move in a southerly direction. The Superfortresses had clearly completed their mission and were heading back.
    One by one, red lamps went out as the smaller force of intruders headed south from the Kanmon Strait, then joined up again over Hita city with the main force which had ravaged Fukuoka, and changed to a course directly south-east. A short time later the aircraft were detected crossing the line between Hosojima in Miyazaki prefecture and Sukumo in Kochi prefecture. Similar reports followed from the listening-points covering the line between Aojima farther down the Miyazaki coastline and Sukumo over in Shikoku, confirming that the bombers were about to disappear across the Hyuga Sea, heading back toward Saipan.
    Orders were issued to give the ‘all clear’ for all areas of the Kyushu region, and only then was Takuya at last able to leave his desk. The enemy planes were officially recorded as having left Japanese airspace at 3.37 a.m., seven hours and forty minutes after the original intrusion.
    Takuya wanted to see for himself what the situation was outside the confines of the operations room, and the lack of incoming reports meant in effect that he was finished for the night, so there was no reason not to slip away for a short time.
    Delegating the remaining duties to his subordinates, Takuya hurried out of the room and down the dimly lit corridor. The moment he opened the double steel doors he was consumed by a deafening roar. Each breath of thesuperheated air seemed to scorch the inside of his lungs. Everything on the outside – the trees, the headquarters building, the ground – was bright red. Powerful gusts of wind lashed the branches of trees, and singed leaves danced across the ground.
    Takuya stepped away from the doors and ran a few paces to the edge of the backyard, where he stopped, riveted by the terrifying scene before his eyes. Huge swirling towers of flames reached skyward from a seething conflagration covering an almost endless expanse below him. One thunderous roar followed another, resounding like waves crashing into a cliff, hurling sheets of fire and angry streams of sparks into the night sky. The barracks just to the west of where Takuya stood had been razed, and a frenzied swarm of soldiers were using hoses and buckets to throw water on to the headquarters building. The men were all tinged red, like everything else in this inferno.
    Takuya had heard reports of cities being devastated by incendiaries, but the destruction he was witnessing far surpassed anything he had ever imagined. Like masses of towering whitecaps soaring up from a tempestuous sea, myriad flames pressed upward