Genda could hardly hide his jubilation. He’d been far from sure he could persuade the older man that this was a needful course. Rear Admiral Onishi hadn’t been able to see it. But Yamamoto, as his mutilated hand showed, was of the generation that had fought the Russo-Japanese War, the war that had begun with a surprise Japanese attack on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet at Port Arthur. He was alive to the advantages of getting in the first punch and making it count.

Yamamoto was. Were others? Anxiously, Commander Genda asked, “Are you sure you can persuade the Army to play its part in this plan?” Without Army cooperation, it wouldn’t work. Yamamoto had rubbed Genda’s nose in that. He hated the knowledge. That those Army blockheads might hold Japan back from its best-its only, he was convinced-chance to fight the USA and have some hope of winning was intolerable.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto leaned forward a few inches. He was not a big man, and it was not a large motion. Nevertheless, it made him seem to take up the entire room and to look down on Genda from a considerable height when in fact their eyes were level. “You may leave that to me, Commander,” Yamamoto said in a voice that might have come from a kami ’s throat rather than a man’s. Genda hastened to salute. When Yamamoto spoke like that, who could doubt him? No one. No one at all.

COAL SMOKE BELCHING from its stack, the locomotive pulled into the railroad yard at Esashi, in northernmost Hokkaido. Behind it, the troop train rattled and clattered to a halt. Corporal Takeo Shimizu looked out the window and shook his head. “It’s not much like home, is it?”