Chapter 2: The First Incident.
"So, the fleet completed its mission to intimidate the Japanese, what happened next?" Penwood asked.
"Well, as the task force sailed back to port, things on the Houston were normal for the most part." Admiral Ryan explained. "There was, however, a lingering tension in the air. A subtle disquiet no one could quite put their finger on. I assumed it was simply battle-nerves. No one was sure what the reaction from the Japanese would be. We were still in neutral waters and there was the possibility of being attacked. We had just provoked them after all. Maybe they would do nothing, maybe they would retaliate. There was nothing we could do but wait to see how things shaked out. All I knew at the time was there was something bad in the air and most of the crew was on edge."
"The feeling only started to fade for me when I sat down in the mess hall. I met up with a good buddy of mine named Joe Meyers. I'd known Joe the entire time I'd been in the navy. Straight from the beginning of bootcamp until that moment. We were lucky enough to have been assigned to the same ship. He was in the bunk above me in bootcamp and we hit it off right away. He must have been the cockiest S.O.B. I'd ever known. A good guy, but more smug and self-assured than any man ever had a right to be. I both loved and hated him for that. Oh, and did he ever love to talk. I don't think I'll ever love a woman as much as he liked to hear the sound of his own voice." Admiral Ryan chuckled. "The ladies loved him though. They ate up his confidence. It probably didn't hurt that he was a handsome fellow, the blond and blued eyed bastard."
"Anyways, Joe was a couple years older than I was and I suppose I looked up to him. He always looked out for me. I remember while we were still in boot, I told him I wanted to be a navy pilot and he talked me right out of it. He said that he had a buddy who was a camera operator who recorded carrier takeoffs and landings. He'd seen way too much footage of planes either crashing and burning or falling off the side of the ship. He said that it was way too dangerous of a job for a young fellow like myself. Joe insisted that I should stick with him on the deck. He went on and on about it at length. By the time he was done, I concluded that he was perhaps just afraid of heights himself, but he had also managed to make me re-think climbing into a cockpit. He should have been a used car salesman. Being the smooth talker that he was, he could probably convince a carpenter to buy pet termites." Admiral Ryan smiled.
"As we sat and ate, it occurred to me that Joe was immune to the unrest that was gripping the rest of the crew. He carried on like his usual self, jumping from topic to topic as he ate. I mostly just listened to him as usual. He was pretty confident that the Japanese would simmer down and behave themselves now that they had seen our ships in action. I wasn't so sure. Even with Joe's overwhelming optimism, I couldn't shake the underlying feeling that something wasn't right."
"It took nearly two weeks to make it back to our home port in the Hawaiian Islands. By the time we did, our mission had made headlines around the world. While it was fairly well-received in countries like France and England, who had lost countrymen in the attacks on shipping, it certainly did nothing to dispel the tensions between us and the Japanese. They still denied any involvement in the attacks and claimed that our ships and aircraft had violated their coastal territory. To be fair, we may have. We certainly got closer than we were meant to." Admiral Ryan noted.
"Still, even with that blatant provocation, there was no blood in the water, and we had not damaged anything they owned. Thus, the situation had not escalated drastically at that point. The Japanese did deploy a fleet of their own to the area, but our forces had long since gone by the time they arrived, and they knew it. It was just political posturing on their part to avoid looking weak. And effort to save face. After that, the world anxiously waited to see if there would be more attacks."
"Despite not having actually done much, the sailors from our task force were given a hero's welcome when we arrived back at port. Joe made me go out with him to the local nightclub, just off the base grounds that night. Though I was very underaged, the uniform made it pretty easy for me to get in. Soon after, I tried my first taste of alcohol. Unfortunately, I had no tolerance for the sauce at the time. The last thing I remember was Joe talking to some local girl. By the end of the evening, I was being carried into the base hospital with an acute case of alcohol poisoning. Some first outing that turned out to be."
"Ha, what happened next?" Penwood asked with a laugh, relating to the story on some level.
"Well, when I woke up the next morning, I had a needle in my arm pumping in fluids from a tube, and my head felt like it had been split open. My first thought was how I was going to punch Joe right in his perfect smirking face the next time I saw him. I felt terrible, and I probably looked worse. It took me a little while to collect my thoughts and acclimate myself to my surroundings. It didn't take me too long to figure out where I was, but no one was with me. After so many weeks of constantly being around a boatload of guys, it was jarring to be completely alone. And there was something else off-putting."
"I wasn't sure if it was just a symptom of my first hangover, but I noticed something very strange that morning outside my window. For about an hour straight, I saw birds flying by. There were hundreds, if not thousands of them, flocking together and all flying in the same direction. It looked as though they were leaving the island of Oahu, going east to the next island over. It was really bizarre. I've seen birds migrate before on the mainland, but this was something different. Generally, when birds flocked together, they were of the same species. What struck me as particularly odd was the variety in this grouping. There was a little bit of everything I'd seen on the island in it. I had not been stationed there for very long, so I thought maybe that was just how things worked in Hawaii." Ryan frowned recalling.
"I didn't have much time to think it over though. There was a knock at my door, and before I had time to even say, 'come in', a young nurse was in my room. I'll tell you this much son, what a sight she was to see. I think my heart might have skipped a beat, or maybe even two, at first glance." Admiral Ryan paused, remembering the details of her face with his mind's eye. "I must have gone a little haywire upstairs because she asked me something that simply did not register. She must have thought it was medically related, because before I knew it, she was looking over the I.V. drip, checking to make sure there was nothing wrong with it. I felt a little embarrassed about it to be honest. She looked over the line and took my hand to see if it was leaking from the needle stick. I lost a breath as her hand touched mine. I suddenly felt like I was sitting under a heat lamp. I prayed that her eyes stayed down on her work and not notice my blushing."
"Well, nothing seems to be wrong here." The young nurse announced. My ability to understand English had apparently returned to me. I had a second to catch a breath. "You must still be trying to get your land-legs back under you, sailor." She went on, looking up and smiling at me.
"Uh, yeah. I had a bit of a rough night... I think... I don't actually remember much of it." I admitted, jokingly, returning her smile.
"I bet." She chuckled back. "I was here last night when they dragged you in."
"Oh… I'm sorry, I hope I wasn't too much trouble."
"Don't be, you were a model patient. You did not complain or make a peep the whole time really." She explained to me. "And you're the only person in this whole ward, so you've quietly kept me company my whole shift. I think you were pretty much dried out by the time they got you here, so there have not been any messes to clean up. Otherwise, you have not been overly demanding thus far."
"Oh, I'm glad."
"That reminds me, your buddy said that he was going to check up on you today." She added. "He left with a young lady after dropping you off last night."
"That sounds about right." I grumbled irritably, thinking about how Joe must have abandoned me there. "I should report in before I'm missed, Mrs...?"
"Miss... Baxter, but call me Shauna." She smiled at me again. "I think we'd better wait for your I.V. to finish before cutting you loose. It'll help get some of that green out of your cheeks."
It was about that moment I realized my uniform was sitting on a chair next to the bed, clean and neatly folded. I immediately came to the revelation that I had, in fact, been changed into a hospital gown while I was unconscious and not wearing any pants. I felt ice run cold in my veins as I wondered if Shana had been the person who stripped me down to my buckskins."
"What's wrong?" She had noticed the unsettled look on my face.
"Well, I was just wondering how long the I.V. still had." I lied, saying anything I could to avoid tipping my hand to what I was really thinking about. "I don't want to be labeled as AWOL."
"Oh, Joe said that he was going to smooth things over with your C.O." Shauna noted helpfully.
"He did?" I cringed at the thought. Our commanding officer, Captain Turner, was a newly promoted, strictly by the book, skipper. He had already cast an unfavorable eye towards Joe and me as a pair of unruly young sailors that needed to be straightened out. While the Houston was out on training exercises, a tub of strawberry ice cream had mysteriously gone missing, and Captain Turner had the entire ship searched from top to bottom trying to find any evidence of who had taken it. Joe and I had not left any to be found, but he had always suspected us. Now we had given him the perfect opportunity to come down on us hard. I knew I was going to be in real trouble once I reported back in.
"It'll be ok." She seemed to sense what I was thinking. "Things usually turn out better than how it goes in our heads. You made a mistake that is minor in the scheme of things." My fear started to melt away in the light of her reassuring smile.
"You know, you are very kind, and I think..." CURRRGGGKKKKKKkkktttttt!
I was stopped dead, mid-sentence. I had been interrupted by an intensely intrusive noise coming from out the window in the harbor. The sound was thunderous and rattling. Drowning out all the other noises in the area. It sounded somewhat like a train when it first starts moving. A thunderous clattering of metal on metal. This was louder, longer, and somehow different though. It was so deafening that it echoed across the entire harbor. If anyone had still slept in those early hours of the morning, they weren't anymore.
"What was that...?!" I asked nervously, frightened by the unexpected and overwhelming sound. Shauna did not know how to answer. She was just as shaken as I was. I slipped out of bed and went to the window to investigate, dragging the I.V. pole behind me. Then I opened it up and looked out into the cool morning air. I didn't immediately spot anything unusual though. I had wondered if there had been a collision between two large ships, but there were none to be found. There was, however, an odd wake in the water nearby the passage out of the harbor that led to the open ocean. The wave was big enough that when it hit the shoreline, the water rolled up farpast the normal confines of the beach and up into the grass, beyond the sand by about forty yards. "What the heck?" I sat at the window confused. "What could have caused that?" I asked myself.
"What's going on?" Shauna asked from behind me, stepping in to see out for herself.
"I honestly don't know." I answered her. "I feel like we just missed something big though."
That was when it finally happened. The moment my life changed forever. I stood there astonished and stupefied. Shauna's mouth dropped wide open involuntarily. An enormous form rose out of the bay waters. It was bigger than a battleship. Much bigger. I just stood there frozen, dumbfound by what I saw outside my window. 'It couldn't be real.' I remember thinking. 'I'm still asleep, and everything I'm seeing has to be part of that dream.' What I was seeing was impossible. But, as it turned out, it wasn't impossible. And what I was seeing was real. There was a gigantic beast rising up from the bay waters. Unspeakably massive in size. It overwhelmed the senses to behold. Both Shauna and I were too shocked to say or do anything. We could only look on in awe and terror. The power of such a thing brought a tear to my eye.
The creature stepped into the shallows, next to several docked ships, and just stood there. It was perfectly still for a few moments. Its eyes looked around, surveying the landscape, and getting its bearings. I didn't notice them at the time, but there were men on the docks who had stopped in their tracks, just under the beast's mass. Anyone within sight of the creature was staring at it not knowing what to do. The whole base stood still in shock. A forty-meter-high quadrupedal beast had crawled out of the ocean and was standing in the middle of the harbor, dwarfing everything around it. The beast looked like a dinosaur, but much too large to compare to anything on record.
The creature had six sharp horns crowning the top of its head and a single horn above his nose like a rhinoceros. Its face was long and drawn out, somewhat similar to a crocodile and it had rows of jagged, serrated teeth. Two of its teeth jutted out of its mouth, three times as long as the rest, adding a fierceness to the appearance of the beast. The creature also had an armored carapace, studded with hundreds of long and sharp spikes, much like a bed of nails. Its tail was longer than its body and was likewise covered in spikes.
Finally, after giving the terrified onlookers a good long time to study it, the creature started to move again. It opened its mouth and let out a roar that seemed to split the sky. It shook me to my core." Admiral Ryan recalled. "I remember my knees felt weak from the vibration. The men on the docks went from shock to terror in that instant. Broken out of their trance, they began to retreat in mass from the dock area and out of the path of the beast. It moved through the docked ships and onto the docks. It effortlessly smashed its way through the buildings in front of it. I could distinctly hear yelling and screaming at that point, and I fell out of my own stupor. The reality of the situation was starting to take hold. This monster was really there and attacking us. People were dying. Mass confusion and chaos was unfolding outside.
I scrambled to get my clothes on. I knew I had to get back to my ship to fight. In my haste, I unknowingly tore out my I.V. in the process. I was bleeding down my arm and onto the floor. Shauna stopped me as I tried to leave the room and threw on a hasty bandage. She asked me what we should do. I told her to make her way to the nearest bomb shelter and to stay there until it was over. She nodded and started for the door. I flew out behind her and got out of the building as quickly as possible. I realized as I got outside that I could feel the impact of the beast's massive footfalls as it trampled the base around it.
"How could something so big exist?" I asked myself, trying to regain my footing.
I turned my head and spotted the monster again. The creature had made its way to the oil storage tanks near the southern docks. It lumbered its way into them, and they exploded under its weight. I thought for sure that it had just managed to kill itself. A wall of smoke and flames engulfed the creature entirely, but to my horror and disbelief, it emerged only a moment later. It simply billowed out a huge puff of black smoke out of its nostrils like a dragon, otherwise it seemed unconcerned by the fire around it.
The monster continued back into the bay waters and the fire that still clung to its body was extinguished. After it hit the water, the creature made a B-line towards the row of cruisers in front of it. I realized the Houston was the second ship in the row and the monster was heading directly towards it. I ran as fast as I could to get closer. I knew there was nothing I could do, but I needed to see what was happening. As I crested a small hill nearby the burning oil depot, I could see the main turrets on the Houston turning to fire at the approaching monster.
The guns fired as the creature got close, but they were in too much of a hurry to aim properly. Both cannons missed their mark and there was no time for them to reload for a second try. The monster was on them only seconds later. The sailors aboard were utterly helpless against it now. The monster rose out of the water and came down hard on the cruiser. The Houston's hull buckled under the weight and was breached almost immediately. The Houston turned on its side and started to sink.
'Joe!' I thought bitterly as the creature swiped its clawed paw at the cruiser behind the Houston and ripped it open too. From there, the monster moved on towards the eastern section of the base leaving the other cruisers in the line untouched. The monster came back on land and toppled even more buildings as it continued to rampage.
At that point, I realized there were men in the water from the two destroyed cruisers. I found a small boat nearby, jumped into it, and started the engine. It was a slow vessel, but I managed to get over to the survivors in the water quickly enough to make a difference. I helped the first dozen sailors on board. The small vessel filled up all too quickly though. There were still so many men who were in dire straits. Many sailors had not had time to put on life jackets before hitting the water. Worse, Joe was not among the survivors I found. I had to put that behind me though. I recognized that there was no way I would be able to get all the men still in the water aboard, but I found a long spool of rope and got an idea.
I quickly anchored the rope to a clamp on the stern side of the boat and threw it out towards the remaining men. They seemed to understand what I was planning and began to grab onto it. Before I knew it, I had about twenty additional sailors towing behind me. At that point, we were actually closer to Ford Island in the middle of the bay, so I started towards it. We passed Battleship Row. I could see the crews of the battlewagons scrambling to get them ready. Fortunately, the creature was nowhere near them. It had shattered several more buildings and reentered the bay once again moving north towards the rows of destroyers anchored there. It sunk several of them without any difficulty.
By this time, several fighter wings had scrambled off of Ford Island. I could hear their engines hum above us as our little ship reached the shore. They dove down towards the creature and began opening up on it. The sailors on my boat cheered. They were happy to see us starting to fight back. The machine gun rounds hit home but bounced right off of the monster. The creature barely seemed to take notice of them. After a second flight of fighters peppered it with bullets near its face, the creature turned its head and changed direction. To my horror, it was coming right at Ford Island. I had just helped the remaining sailors onto the beach when I realized it was approaching us. It was like a bad joke.
Not knowing what else to do, I ran towards the airbase and found an unmanned AA cannon. The machine guns from the planes had not been effective, but I thought maybe something of a higher caliber would prove otherwise. The monster lumbered back onto shore, and I took careful aim with the 40mm cannon. It took some doing to position the gun on my own, but the creature was slow by nature, and I was able to line up a shot. I gritted my teeth and finally fired. The shell zoomed out of the barrel and flew right into the creature's face. It exploded and I hooted in triumph, amazed by my luck.
The victory was short-lived though. When the smoke had cleared, I could see that my attack had done no obvious damage, and worse still, the creature had barely seemed to notice it. I sank into the firing seat, defeated. There was nothing I could do to harm it. I couldn't even slow it down. Only then did I realize how very helpless I was against the might of the monster. Futility had only been a word for me before then, but after that day, I understood what it truly meant.
I sat there as the monster continued to wreak havoc across the airfield, destroying several hangers and parked planes. I saw men crushed as buildings collapsed on them. One poor man from the ground crew was trying to pull his buddy out from under the rubble, but it was already too late for him. I thought back to Joe and I wept. Why were we so helpless against this thing? There were fires burning all over the base and oil from damaged ships filled up the harbor. The base was devastated, and I thought for sure I was going to die there. It would only be a matter of time before the monster found me.
Out of nowhere, an officer from one of the cruisers pulled me from the AA battery and told me we needed to seek shelter. As we ran across the shattered airfield, I could see that the battleships had left their moorings and were moving to catch up with the creature who had made his way to the western section of the base. The battleships formed into a battle line in the creature's path and opened fire at him at point blank range. I saw several 14-inch shells explode against the monster's hide.
Unlike earlier attacks, the main cannons from the battleships did do some damage. The creature toppled to its side in a daze. It regained its composure and retreated into the waters of the bay before the battleships could unload a second volley at it. The monster disappeared into the channel and out into the open sea.
Thus ended the first incident.