Solomons

The witching hour creeps over the Solomon Islands like a shadow at sunset, and merely seconds after the turn of the day come blips on the radar displays. Tonight they have appeared to the south of the southeastern-most island in the chain, San Cristobal; given a reasonably fast pace of thirty knots, they could hit the shallows within the hour. By now, it’s no surprise to the operator that they’ve appeared well within the maximum range of the radar network’s coverage. The enemy’s ability to defy physical laws and literally boil out of nothing is their defining trait, after all.

He hesitates only long enough to see if the quartet of dots disappear completely on the next pass, hoping in vain that perhaps those dots are nothing more than a doomed flock of gulls attempting to use the array as a perch. But by the next sweep of the array, the clustered dots have multiplied into a huge cloud some dozens strong, all obscured by a thickening mist of foul weather, and although this is also par for the course, it sends a chill down his spine as he attempts to imagine what a force of such size might look like in person: a screening chevron of several dozen destroyer and cruiser escorts, all arranged around a core of majestic battleships and imposing aircraft carriers as angry wings of patrol and attack aircraft zip through the fogbanks around them. He has only seen such overwhelming force in movies and pictures, and he hopes that such an armada will never appear here, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.

Fortunately, the third sweep turns up hundreds of dots, almost all of which are obscured underneath a thick blanket of interference. Some of the strong “contacts” are as close as mere meters away; others are somehow within the landmass of the island. He can’t help but heave a small sigh of relief at that. Once again, the overload of the monitors is nothing more than the witchery they’re long familiar with.

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~

Flipping open a translucent safety covering, he thumbs the bright red switch underneath it. That small motion ignites a throbbing red light high on the room’s wall. Painted under it and its many clones in coastal lookouts and forward operating bases on the islands for hundreds of miles around is “ALERT” in a half-dozen different languages, three of which are spoken by billions of people around the world and the others by no more than a few hundred thousand. Here within the Guadalcanal central command center there is no sound to accompany the alarm lights, but from a mere stone’s throw away outside in Honiara’s harbor to the Choiseul FOB hundreds of the miles to the northwest, klaxons have begun wailing to rouse men and spirits alike from their rest.

“Squalls have come over the sea of Kay-Sef-Un,” he says to the other operators in the room. “I saw four ghosts of the drowned before the fog rolled in.” Those words are nothing like what a foreign professional might say, but the pidgin they speak amongst themselves lacks words such as “jamming”, “sector”, or “Abyssal”, and loanwords even as simple as the sector code are awkward and uncomfortable. Only when the warchief finishes her launches and returns to the command center will they switch to formal English.

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~

As his compatriots nod and redouble their attentions towards their own displays, scanning their own sectors again and again in case K7 is merely a diversion—and the enemy has proven itself capable of feints before!—he prepares to pass the information to the archipelago’s guardian spirits. Generations ago, their forefathers did this very same job with their naked eyes and gifted binoculars, hiding in dugout fishing canoes and jungle looks to report sightings of Japanese ships. The Solomon Islanders of today still fulfill the same basic role, for just as in the past they lack any real capability to meet the foe in head-on battle. They have guns now, but they are decades old, and the few ancient machines of war that they have acquired, whether through means legal or illicit, have even fewer men capable of operating them.

But they do not feel ashamed of their helplessness as their ancestors once did, for mortal men on earth were never meant to fight a foe without flesh or soul.

Only after planning his words out in his head does he key his headset. He is broadcasting to the seaplane patrols first, for the warchief will handle organization of the naval assets herself. “Central to all units,” he barks into his headset’s microphone, his accent almost British from the tutors and tapes they’d learned from. “Radar pinged four contacts in sector K7. Nearest likely target for them is northwest, on the southwestern San Cristobal shore. Consult the landing maps, you’ll see the spot marked there.” As the months and sorties had stacked up and the Abyssal doctrine of night transport missions became clear, the spirits asked each island’s residents to mark the unused and uninhabited natural harbors of their homes. “Central to Yardbird, ETA until eyes are on target, over.”

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~

The moment the operator lets go of the toggle, the radio channel crackles in response as the squadron leader keys in himself, as if he had been impatiently keying his own radio before the operator had finished speaking. “Yardbird to Central, I read you Central, I read you Central,” a brash and nasal young man’s voice whoops, his words rushed and looping back on themselves in his excitement. “Standby, I say again standby ohhhh-ver!”

A minute passes as the Yardbird works on his end. In his mind’s eye, the operator can see VP-11’s squadron leader whip out the newly printed landing charts, his eyes jumping from red mark to red mark as he makes a dozen complex multi-variable navigational calculations in his head without so much as a slide rule for assistance, rattling off orders to the rest of his charges patrolling with him. A hundred miles away from the command center and thousands of feet high, one of the shadows cast by the clouds in the faint light of the crescent moon suddenly grows weary of the company of its mates, parting ways with them by turning and banking towards the barely shining sea below. Another twenty miles away from that shadow, another one similarly estranges itself from its established patrol route; thirty miles in the opposite direction, a third shadow follows.

~

“Yardbird to Central, Yardbird here. One of VP-11’ll be combing through the south end of K7 in less than ten minutes, got lucky, less than ten minutes until eyes on target, we can already smell the umbrella they’ve put up.” Without so much as stopping for breath, he keeps his radio keyed as he rambles straight onto his next idea. “Two more of us’ll be there northwest-ish of it and sweeping southeast in less than twenty, maybe even fifteen, the rest of us’ll be all balled up in thirty, all eight of us in thirty. Got in touch with VP-12, they’re reversin’ their patrol pattern and coverin’ for us, sweepin’ south side for stragglers’n’runners, say again, searchin’ southeast of K7 as chasers. VP-13 and -14 ain’t in no position to respond before it’s all over or we miss them bug out, so they’re stayin’ right where they are, y’know, in case we get another visit up north while we’re busy. We got some whirlybirds on the way already, right? Hey, lemme talk to Central-Actual!” The operator takes advantage of Yardbird’s pause to pick up a pen and start scribbling on a nearby notepad, only barely managing to preserve the huge amount of information the flight lead just dumped on him. “Oh, right. Ummm, uh, over.”

The operator feels one corner of his mouth lift up, enjoying a rare moment of smug superiority as he reflects that he, with only a scant few hours of radio training woven into months of radar operation apprenticeship, has better protocol than someone with years of experience. “Central to Yardbird, you are the first we contacted directly with the news. We just hit the alert, so Shrike Wing should be off the ground and en route within the next ten minutes. As for Central-Actual, sorry to disappoint, but it’s still just us in the bunker, over.”

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~

Once again, the channel crackles as soon as the operator releases his mic, but it’s not Yardbird’s yowling voice this time, too rough and monotonic where his was clear and melodic. “Goku to… Central,” it pants faintly over the radio. It is a young girl’s voice, a tremulous soprano ragged with exertion and clearly resigned to its lack of dignity over comms. The operator has to turn the volume knob on his headset to hear her more clearly. “Solid copy… on Yardbird’s report. The pack and I are cruising now… emergency war power towards the cove. Unless there are enemy scout planes up there… God help us… then we should be able to hide there before being spotted… over; Goku to Yardbird,” she instantly transitions, refusing to unkey her radio and let the loudmouthed flyboy take over the channel. “The air-to-air radar you just had installed… no problems with it yet, yes?”

“Of course! I mean, our night sight’s great, but bein’ able to keep track of each other without havin’ to pester Central every five minutes is real nice!” Until today, several operators had to do nothing more than keep track of the seaplanes in real time. “And I almost wanna see them try and ambush us with some night fighters, the new fire control should show’em a thing or too.” He’s clearly puffed up with pride at the latest upgrades. How the Curtiss’s improvised bells-on-collars, cobbled out of scrap metal and consumer electronics, translate into radar capability is beyond the operators’ kenning—but then again spirits have never been much for logic.

“Even so… when you make contact… verify whether or not they have… catapults or not. The transports last week had catapults too… planes were already gone, though, and we never saw them. I smell something more… than the usual transport fleet tonight.”

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~

Goku’s pack of PT-boats will be visible even during a new moon—[i]especially[/i] a new moon. Water churned by propellers creates phosphorescence, meaning that if they wish to travel at high speed the huge wake left behind will be clearly visible from any aircraft overhead. And unlike destroyers, their lack of air radar for either early detection or ack-ack fire coordination combined with their complete lack of armor makes them impossibly vulnerable to a simple strafing run with nothing more than a few machine guns.

“Yardbird to Vegeta,” the youth’s voice cackles in reply. “I guess I can help you out there. After all, ‘I can’t let anyone else other than me to be the one to defeat you!’ Ain’t nothin’ but clouds for now, but if I see a plane that ain’t ours, you’ll be the first to know.”

A moment of confused silence follows as the bemused PT-boat attempts to digest the misattributed quote. “Goku to Yardbird… who is… Vegeta?”

Another female voice chips in, excited as any teen about her favorite pastime: the destroyer Yuudachi. In terms of experience, she is one of the senior few spirits that were raised even before a formal organization was established, a hardened veteran of literally dozens of sorties, and yet she’s also one of the few that still have zero understanding of concise radio transmissions. “Oh, man, he’s, like a bad guy, and you think he’s all evil at first? But then it turns out he’s actually kinda a good guy, he’s just always obsessing over becoming stronger and more powerful. He’s sooooo cool!”

Goku only makes a confused noise in response. “Yuudachi… what do you mean? What nation’s service… does he report to?”

Yardbird groans right back at her. “No, no, that’s not what she means. Anyways, you’re not Vegeta, I mixed up their names, [i]I’m[/i] supposed to be Vegeta, you’re Kakarot.”

“But… Sanchi… Sanchi said that my name sounded better as ‘Goku’—”

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~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZGQzXCbrGo

The trademark squeal of a particular whistle aborts the tomfoolery as the only person in the Solomons with that priority protocol punts the derailed conversation off of the airwaves. “Central-Actual to Yardbird, come in, over.” Her voice is ice-cold and scalpel-sharp, and the operators cannot help but swallow as their throats dry in instinctual fear.

“Ah, uh, Yardbird to Warchief!” Flustered and caught off guard, he accidentally uses the islander’s pidgin name for her, and the operators cannot help but wince in sympathy for his incoming scolding. “Go ahead!”

“That’s ‘Central-Actual’ to you! Say it properly next time, guttersnipe!” Her voice deepens with bass tones, slamming the eardrums with an impossible amount of force, yet it somehow maintains its female screech. It is a legion chorus that brings to mind the howling winds of a hurricane, the kind that swallows up ships without a trace and demolishes entire villages as casually as a giant treading on ants. She pauses for a second, but it seems Yardbird has decided that discretion is the better part of valor and no response from him follows. “Central-Actual to Yardbird, Yuudachi!” Warchief continues. A huge [i]thud[/i] and [i]whoosh[/i] comes through in the pause between sentences as another freshly-armed Zuiun seaplane—a design the spirits of the seaplane tenders in the harbor had painstakingly rebuild to replace the original, toothless Shiuns that had proved a liability again and again—blasts off the rails of its catapult into the night sky. “We are on [i]alert.[/i] That means you [i]can the chatter[/i]. Now is not the time to be talking about your favorite bootleg cartoons. Over.”

“S-sorry, I d-didn’t, like, mean to be rude, or anything,” the Japanese destroyer stutters, thoroughly chastised.

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~

There’s a short silence, probably a sigh that Warchief keeps off the airwaves, before she continues. “Central-Actual to Yardbird, Yuudachi, Yuudachi. Zuiuns are en route to the San Cristobal shoreline right now, designation ‘Yodel’. They’ll be loitering there along with Shrike Wing until you make contact.” The Zuiuns are, like the scrounged Soviet-era helicopter gunships of Shrike Wing currently scrambling up and out of San Cristobal’s interior, too small and lightweight to carry any kind of payload that would seriously threaten a destroyer. Instead, their job is to sweep the shallows along with Goku and the rest of her fellow PT-boats and intercept the wave of landing barges the Abyssals will surely have deployed. “Yuudachi, how long until you link up with Walke on the east side of San Cristobal? Over.”

Yuudachi hesitates, either from not having done the navigational calculations yet or from lingering shyness from her public embarrassment. Instead, the American destroyer in question keys in to answer for them both, rescuing her Japanese companion from a second scolding. “Walke to Central-Actual. I will fall into Yuudachi’s wake in five minutes,” she reports, her tone as business-like and no-nonsense as ever. “We’ll have radar sighting of K7 a few after that when we turn around the island’s coast; say twenty minutes total until we hit engagement range, adding another five minutes if they’re headed northwest as we’ve conjectured, over.” Unlike the modern-era arrays, the spirits seemingly have zero problem seeing through the Abyssal’s shroud with their own ancient equipment.

“Central-Actual to Walke, Yuudachi, solid copy, over,” Warchief replies. “Central-Actual to Samidare, Maury, Amatsukaze, link up at E5. Report with your ETA in that order, go ahead.”

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~

“Samidare to Central.” Light and feminine, different from the effusive, energetic Yuudachi yet with its own kind of energy; [i]bubbly[/i] in such a subtle way that the operators can’t help but unconsciously smile. “Forty minutes, over.”

“Maury to Central!” A gruffer woman, practically growling with frustration. “I’m an hour out. Gonna be late to the action, over.”

“Amatsukaze to Central.” Another quieter voice, but unlike Samidare’s, there’s something subdued and sad about it. “… twenty minutes.” One of the operators raises an eyebrow. That’s as close if not closer than Yuudachi and Goku, yet Amatsukaze is supposed to be even further out than Maury in her patrol pattern.

“Central to Amatsukaze.” Surprisingly, there’s hardly any bite to Warchief’s voice now; it is sympathetic, almost soothing. “I saw what you were doing this morning. Are you where I think you are?”

“Amatsukaze to Central,” she replies flatly. “I have no excuse.”

What comes next, though, is not the tongue-lashing that the operators expected. “You’re lucky tonight’s contact is south, and not to the north,” Warchief sighs. “Really lucky. Link up with Yuudachi and Walke instead. We’ll talk about this afterwards.” Those last three words are simultaneously of forgiveness and a gentle reassurance that she’ll survive tonight’s engagement. “As for you two; Samidare, Maury, disregard. Make it to K7 as fast as you can at your own pace.” With three destroyers now outnumbering the enemy’s two—the two transports are armed, but mainly with hastily bolted-on and juryrigged, high-angled and low-caliber AA batteries, nothing that should give a destroyer much trouble at range—there’s no need for Samidare and Maury to flank together for their own safety. Samidare will be safe enough blindsiding two outnumbered destroyers by herself.

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~

The trio of destroyers give three quick ‘Wilco’s, and then Warchief’s management is done for the moment. “Central to all other units. Maintain your current patrols and keep your eyes sharp. Central out.”

The interior of the command center does not remain quiet, however. With the radio transmissions over for now, the operators return to discussing wavelengths, bearing, frequencies, and signal strength. The jargon is an enigma for anyone outside their circle, even to other radar operators. For months they have tried everything they could to work around for the Abyssal shroud. Now, they’re testing the latest version of procedure they’ve been refining for weeks; instead of attempting to filter through the noise, they will listen intently to the noise itself. Their repeated contacts have led them to understand that the “interference” has its own unique patterns of strength, density, speed, and bearing; if fully understood and catalogued, it should be as distinctive as any radar profile or screw pattern.

As listening posts and radar arrays all throughout the island chain begin shutting down and resetting to fit their newly inputted specifications, one of them takes advantage of the new silence to pass the time with errant conversation. “You know, I was reading an Ah-Meh-Ree-Cahn book the other day, about the white man’s perspective of our grandfathers’ war,” he says lightly, as if they were doing nothing as unusual as gutting the catch of the day. “These voyages the drowned ghosts make, they are very much like what the yellow men did. The ‘Toh-Kee-Oh Ecks-Puh-Ress’, they called it.”

~

“What’s a ‘Toh-Kee-Oh’?” another one of them asks, eliciting sighs from the rest of the men in the room. He is the youngest in the room, almost a boy. The continuation of his formal schooling is not nearly as important as his youthful aptitude for modern electronics and displays, but at times like this his lack of worldly knowledge has the rest of the operators sighing with resignation. With barely a hair on his cheeks or chin, it’s doubtful that he’s even begun appreciating the opposite sex yet; not that there are any assigned as staff to this walled-off and gated harbor in the first place. None that aren’t spirits, at any rate, and even if that wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle, only one of them is an age to carry children anyways: the warchief herself, and she is far too gaunt and haunting for any man to think her anything but a guardian from beyond. To look at her as a woman to court would be as unnatural as attempting to rut with a whirlpool.

“Ah, ‘Toh-Kee-Oh’ is the name of the yellow chieftain’s city up north, the biggest city on all their islands,” the senior operator explains. “They would take food and ammo from there and bring it to their camps here. Always at night, preferably on moonless or stormy nights, to try and sneak past the planes and patrols of the white man.”

“But Toh-Kee-Oh is to the north, and it is a city of men, not ghosts…” The youth trails off, obviously working with maps inside of his head. “The ghosts of the drowned, they always come from the east or the south. There is nothing about this that deserves the name ‘Toh-Kee-Oh Ecks-Puh-Ress’. It is a poor name. Let us not mention it to the spirits. If it was an auspicious name, they would have chosen to use it themselves.”

“And the ‘Toh-Kee-Oh Ecks-Puh-Ress’ brought food to keep men alive,” another man cuts in. “And we’ve all seen the pictures of when we defied the spirits’ warnings and opened one of those containers.”

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~

“Yes, yes, we were the ones who MADE the pamphlets, broadedcasted the radio announcements. ‘Do not open unidentified containers. Report them to your local base for proper disposal.’ There is no one on the island who does not know that.” A few months ago, a suicidally curious bunch of youths had swooped in on jetskis and made off with one of the floating cargo cans, probably in some hormone-fueled stunt to impress the ladies with a trophy. The next morning, their jetskis were found beached next to their skeletons, with all their flesh melted from their bones and the opened, empty can sitting innocently in the sand beside them. “What needs must the ghosts of the drowned fulfill? They do not eat.”

“Yet there must be a reason that we have never found an unaccounted-for drum in the daytime, despite the dozens, hundreds that they throw into the sea. Are we so sure there is nothing that needs feeding on our lands?” one of them asks them all, his voice quiet. “Think of the thousands of warriors who died fighting on this island alone. Their families are not here to feed them in their afterlives. A tower of stone and a grassy field are hardly sustenance.”

That grim note kills the conversation for a minute, then two. By the third minute, though, the operator is confident enough to continue his story. “Well, a few nights ago I overhead the spirits talking about the sorties they have been running. They were using the yellow man’s name for it, I believe?” He snaps his fingers and hisses. “Bah, it was some—“

The crackle of the radio simultaneously cuts him off and answers for him. “Yeaaaaaaahhhhhh baby! Yardbird to Central, you boys gave some damn fine directions, all units, it’s the Rat Transport Convoy, ladies and gentlemen—“

The transmission suddenly cuts out. One minute passes, then two. “Central to Yardbird, come in, over.” Another minute. “Central to Yardbird, what’s your status, over!”

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~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL-HQBjF6oc

The radar network finishes rebooting just in time to catch the Abyssal shroud recoiling on itself like a living being. The mists on the display thin as the new code they’ve thrown together does its work, reading the fog itself to reveal four distinct Abyssal contacts right where they’d expected: just barely outside the red-marked cove. For a single sweep, there’s a strangely clear and crisp fifth mark amongst them, but then it moves onto the aerial display on the next sweep as Yardbird pulls up and out of his bombing run. The operators in the room crane their necks to catch the action unfold on that particular monitor, watching one of the Abyssal’s dots turn muzzy and heavily irregular. On the next sweep, a few, smaller dots have seemingly budded off of it: shallow-drafted transport barges launching from their parent transport. Yet on the next sweep they’re not forming their usual, orderly shore-bound chevron. Instead, they’re erratically and haphazardly moving away in all directions, like insects scattering from an upturned rock.

“—ahahahahAHAHAHAHA! Sorry about the wait! Had to make a pass while I could, opportunity was too good, there’s so much light coming off the fires I’m almost afraid to stick around. I’ll say again, come on down here, the water’s boilin’ and the party’s started; us Black Cats have found the Rats!”

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