Chapter 1: The First Incident and the Events Leading Up to It.
-Washington D.C. Nov 1st 1994.
A car drives up Independence ave. It is black with tented windows and government plates. It passes the Capitol building. Congress is in session, but this is not it's destination. It continues onward passing the Washington Monument and then past The Lincoln Memorial and finally crossing over the Potomac River.
It arrives at the Pentagon and stops at the main entrance. A young Officer in a Navy uniform steps out of the vehicle and crosses over to the back passenger door. He opens it and holds the door open standing at attention. As his passenger steps out he salutes. The passenger is an older man bearing all the trappings of an Admiral in the United States navy, with the one notable exception of a patch on his right upper arm. The atypical patch is an indication of a specialized branch of service.
Without a word the Admiral climbs the steps of the Pentagon and starts making his way through various security checkpoints. He presents his badge indicating his security clearance at each checkout without incident. The guards keep the conversation to a minimum, but dutifully salute the admiral as he passes by.
The Admiral makes his way to the department of naval intelligence and finds an envelope waiting for him in the message box on his desk. He is not surprised to find it there. He happens to be good friends with his superior and was well aware of what was coming. He opens letter and finds it is exactly what he had been anticipating; his new orders. Despite knowing what they would say, he none the less read through the contents carefully. He grimaced slightly.
When he was finished he folded the letter and put it back into the envelope. Without wasting a moment he proceeded back out of his office and toward the nearby stairwell. He could have taken the elevator, but he preferred to stretch his legs instead. He made his way down until he found himself in the archives in the lower levels.
At the check in desk of the archive the Admiral found a young clerk sitting reading a book. He appeared to be engrossed in whatever he was reading because the old man was standing right in front of him before he even looked up. When the young man finally did notice him, he was a little frightened to be caught so unawares. When the clerk put his book down the admiral was surprised to see it was about naval history. he noted by the bookmark that the clerk had not gotten very fair into it yet.
"How can I help you sir?" The young man ask.
"Yes, I am Admiral Marcus Ryan. Are you the only one here?" Ryan inquired.
"Ah, Yes sir" The clerk replied.
"Very well then, I will require your services." Ryan informed him. "I need to pull all the records and reports from the UNGCC files. Your name is?"
"Ah, it's Penwood sir." The clerk replied. "Did you say all of the UNGCC files sir? That's encompasses an entire section of archive sir."
"Yes, I am aware of that son." The Admiral smirked. "You'd better get started, we are going to be at it for quite a long time. Please bring me the oldest files first and the rest in order from there."
"Oh, Yes sir." Penwood started to get up.
"And would you be so kind as to point me in the direction of the largest table down here?" Ryan added. "I'm going to need lots of space."
"Yes Sir, just around the corner you will find just what you need." Penwood replied.
"Very good." Ryan noted the location. "Bring the files there. I will also some paper and something to write with."
"Yes sir, you will find everything to need in the alcove just there." He point to a place just behind the Admiral Ryan.
Minutes later Admiral Ryan had settled into the chair was looking down at a file labelled in big red letters: 'THE FIRST INCIDENT AND THE EVENTS LEADING UP TO IT.'
"Sir?" Penwood was standing next to Ryan, he had not heard him. "I noticed the name 'Ryan' was listed on the file. Did a relative of yours contribute to this report?"
"No son." Ryan smirked. "If you search through the contents of this file you will find I-witness statements made by a very young seaman by the name of Marcus Ryan." Penwood looked confused. "You see, I was present for a lot of the events outlined in this report. It's not a mistake that an old man like me was assigned to sift through these dusty old records.
"Oh, I see." Penwood replied nervously, not knowing how else to respond.
"Since you're going to be helping me out with this I might as well let you in on my little secret. I have been ordered to put together comprehensive report that is to be presented to the U.N. Security Council." Ryan explained. "But I need to widdle it down to just the essential information.
Penwood looked impressed.
"There were a lot of young fellows at the time who could have told you what they saw back then, but now a days our numbers are getting a little thin."
"We are lesser as a whole for that sir." The young man noted. Ryan could tell he really meant it, because the young clerk seemed a little embarrassed when he smiled at him.
"Ha, I like you Penwood. That's why I'll tell you another secret. It would have gotten me in a lot of trouble back then, but well, suffice to say, we are well past that now."
"Oh, ok." Penwood was not sure where he was going.
"Anyways, I was a bright kid growing up, but I also had a bit of a knack for finding trouble too. Mischief was my constant companion. I gave my mother more sleepless nights than a kid ever has a right to." His smile widened a bit more with that last sentiment. "I graduated high school a full year early, which made my mother all sorts of happy. She thought I'd be able to do anything I wanted to with my life. She thought for sure I'd be off to college with my grades, but I was labelled as somewhat of a hell-raiser you see. Some of the more unsavory behaviors in my permanent record closed a lot of doors for me. Still, I think it surprised the hell out of my mother when I enlisted in the navy at the age of 16. I could have waited a few months and signed up legally when I was seventeen with my mother's consent, but I knew I wouldn't get that out of her and I was never a very patient boy in any case. I wanted to be like my old man, live a life full of adventure. I knew a guy who could doctor my documents to make them look legit. My father had died young just a few years earlier and that motivated me to get out and see the world. My family was poor, so there were few others options other than joining the navy."
"If you enlisted, how were you able to attain the rank of Admiral?" Penwood asked. "I didn't think that was possible."
"It's not." Ryan replied. "I joined the academy some years later when I figured out I liked the navy life and decided to go career."
"Why didn't you just join the academy straight away?" Penwood inquired. "Surely going in with a higher rank would have been to your advantage and you had plenty of time."
"Well, to understand my reasons for enlisting you have to understand the state of politics at the time. This was near the end of 1938 and the world was a powder keg just waiting to go off. I was young and dumb and wanted to see action right away. I knew if signed up for the academy I'd be stuck there for four years missing out. The trouble in the world was the peace following the Great War left many nations feeling unsatisfied. They were either missing their piece of the victory pie in spoils or felt victimized by unfair treaty stipulations. This was especially true for both Japan and Germany. Also Italy too to a lesser degree. But these feelings were slowly stewing, leading towards another conflict. Like most things, it started small. Italy invaded of Ethiopia in 1935. I remember my history teacher saying that the League of Nations would step in and intervene. He said that they'd set things right, but European politics interfered and when all was said and done the only thing that came of it was showcasing just how ineffective the League was at solving problems. The League ended up dissolving entirely in the years that followed, but that's a whole other can of worms."
Admiral Ryan took a sip from a cup of coffee Penwood had brought him earlier.
"Anyways there was also the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. At first, most people saw their movement simply as a natural reaction by the German people against an unjust treaty. A lot of Americans felt the treaty of Versailles was too harsh, but it quickly became apparent that the Germans had more in mind beyond just standing up for themselves. They were quickly building up momentum and heading somewhere bad. In 1936 they supported the fascist Spanish regime in the Spanish Civil War and through a great deal of material support, and volunteers, helped them win. That same year they reoccupied the Rhineland in west Germany, which was supposed to have been a demilitarized zone. Two years later they annexed the country of Austria and then did the same to the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Emboldened by the limited response from other European powers, they decided to annex the rest of Czechoslovakia the following year. They were on their way to annexing territory from Poland when fate decided to intervene."
Ryan paused to sip again.
"In 1938 a red-tailed comet appeared in the sky and marked the beginning of a new era of human history. No one knows where it can from. Can you imagine? It just suddenly appeared in the sky one day. Astronomers were baffled. 'The harbinger' is what they later came to call it. It was like a red tear streaking across the sky, a foreboding sign of things to come. It was gone the next day, but in it's place the world was hammered by a massive and sudden meteor shower. As it turned out, Germany was hit the hardest. Their new energetic leader was killed, along with a number of his supporters in the Riechstag building. The German high command was practically wiped out overnight and that derailed most of their plans. It was one of the greatest mysteries of the century. You see, the building had been leveled like so many others in Berlin and around the world at the time, but impact pattern was different from other locations. Stranger still, while there was a meteor found at the center of the crater, it was found to be unlike any of the other fragments found in the rest of Germany. It had a metallic core and even more odd, it was magnetic. In Germany, there was initially suspicion of sabotage from a either rival nation or a dissident group from within their own ranks. There was a highly publicized investigation to get to the bottom of it. However, after months of questions and research they didn't turn anything up. Aside from the unique qualities of the meteor itself, there was little evidence to support any accusations beyond the incident being an act of God."
Ryan took a final sip.
"Overall the outcome was that Germany as a whole remained a rising power, but it's aggressive foreign policy became more tempered while they attempted to rebuild and held election to find new leadership. Of course the meteor shower effected more than just the Germans. Along with damaging cities all across the world directly, it also seemed to spurn some nasty environmental changes. One particularly large chuck of rock impacted in the Pacific Ocean and caused tidal waves, earthquakes, and a string of volcanic eruptions along a Marianas Trench."
In Asia, there was also trouble brewing. The Russian Revolution and civil war that followed in 1918 lead to the rise of a dangerous Communist dictatorship headed by Joseph Stalin. Soviet Russia was hungry to expand westward into Europe, threatening all it's smaller neighbors. The threat of France and Great Britain declaring war if the invaded Poland was about the only thing keeping them in check. The Germans had also initially made a non-aggression pack with them, but their new administration abandoned that treaty in favor of European stability. They recognized the Soviets as the greater threat and there policies switched to trying to counter their efforts.
In the Far East, the Empire of Japan had conquered Korea and the Northern part of China and were fighting a war with the Chinese Nationalists and Communists to conquer the rest of China. The Russians and our own Government supported China against them, which was inching us closer and closer to a conflict with them. Tensions were already mounting before I graduated, but after I enlisted things got even worse.
Ryan paused.
"Well, that leads us to this, doesn't it?" Ryan tossed The First Incident file on the table in front of Penwood. "Open it."
Penwood obeyed. The first thing he noted was a picture of a commercial freighter. It had a note under it. It read: Last known photo of the Eiko-maru.
"We didn't realize the significance at the time." Ryan said as Penwood read through the small article outlining the disappearance of the ship. "She just vanished without a trace. The Japanese company who owned the ship sent another to investigate, but it disappeared too. That's when tensions started to spike. One random Japanese vessel going missing was one thing, but for two to vanish in the space of a week was unusual and given the high tension that already existed between us they suspected the ships may have been attacked by a submarine."
"Matters grew worse a week later when a convoy of three US cargo ships bound for China disappeared in the same area. One of them managed to get off a distress signal indicating they were under attack, but the message was cut off before it identified who was attacking them. Our government assumed it was a Japanese retaliatory attack, but there were no survivors that could confirm it."
"With the count of missing ships up to five, both sides started to mobilized their navies. At this point I was out of boot camp and stationed in San Diego. After the convoy attack I was assigned to the cruiser USS Houston. Two days later, it was deployed to the naval base in Hawaii. A few days after that, the worst disaster yet occurred. A British passenger liner went missing with the same M.O. as the other attacks. There were American passengers on board as well a people from various European countries. In total, about 2000 civilians disappeared along with the ship. This was a major international incident and the final straw in Washington."
"In response, President Roosevelt ordered the Pacific fleet into action. U.S. Naval brass responded by deploying the Huston along with about forty other warships into the waters where the disappearances had taken place. They were convinced it was a submarine or a pack of submarines responsible. Our objective was simply to hunt them down. The fleet spit into three parts and the Houston was part of the task force to search the area where the first incident had taken place. It was in international waters, but it skirted some Japanese held islands. This was part of Washington's plan. There was a recently established Japanese military outpost located nearby on Odo Island. They wanted them to see our show of force.
"Our Cruiser, along with USS Chicago, led a pack of destroyers into a picket line to sweep the area while the Battleships Arizona and Nevada hung back with the carrier Yorktown. All the while fighters and bombers were scouting the area flying combat air patrol missions to spot any submarines that might attack the fleet. They never spotted spotted any."
"Once the destroyers were in position we proceeded to depth charge the entire area methodically. If there were any subs hiding below before we got there, there certainly weren't any after we were done. The operation went off nearly without a hitch. When we turned the Houston back to rejoin the main fleet one depth charge that initially failed to explode did so nearby our starboard side. It rocked the boat and sent a pillar of water up and over the deck. Luckily for us it was still far enough away that it did little harm. There were no causalities, but it did cause minor damage to the hull and a slight oil leak. It was nothing that would prevent us from pressing on and returning to port for repairs. It simply meant we would trail a bit of oil in our wake. We sailed back to Pearl confident of victory, or at least of having show our strength."