Chapter 3. 1945 Operation Jitensha (Bicycle)
6.
 Except for a speck on the horizon, and a cloud above that speck, the South Pacific Ocean tended into infinity in all directions.
World War II raged around the globe, but this moment on a late April day seemed silent and primordial, as if mankind did not yet exist. The only killing was by a pelican snatching a sardine, with a muted splash, and flying off.
That distant speck was the mountainous coast of Peru.
Tropical sky sweltered ominously in a gray-blue haze. Wind brought alternating whiffs of distant, rotting jungle and chalk-dry highlands. The ocean surface heaved and sank in ever-shifting crests and troughs laced with yellowed foam. Sunlight stabbed into resistant water. Shifting hills of heavy water looked translucent near their thundering, collapsing tops with kelp and splinters of wood tumbling over.
A periscope suddenly sliced through the water's surface in the direction of Peru. The looking-glass left a knife-cut wake of swirling foam. Ten minutes of cautious scanning, plus coded messages from several spy ships disguised as fishing vessels, eased for the moment any fear of Allied patrol planes in the area. A steel conning tower broke through and heaved up above the water. Gliding at a smart 10 knots, a vast torpedo shape breached amid rips and tears of flying jade sea water. Acres of dark steel plating glistened as sheets of sea water clung momentarily by their own tension, and then crashed down like broken glass.
Japan's largest submarine, one of the mammoth I-400 class, rode on the surface like a building lying on its side—399 feet long and four stories tall. She carried a crew of 145 sailors and thirty officers, scientists, engineers, and technicians. As soon as she breached, a hatch atop the conning tower opened. Several petty officers with binoculars rushed out. They threw themselves chest-first against the rails to begin scanning for enemy activity.
Operation Jitensha (Bicycle) was on. It was late in the war, Japan was losing, the situation was desperate, and dangerous action must be taken.
Diesel generators roared to life. Thick bluish gray smoke smelling of burned oil drifted away over the waves. A large hydraulically powered deck hatch swung open toward the tower. A rectangular opening now gaped. From the opening's shadows rose a steel elevator platform. On the lift stood a ring of sailors and in the center, tied down by its floats, was a sea plane.
High up on the sail, the boat's captain and several intent Army scientists watched the proceedings avidly. They would momentarily begin reporting back directly to the High Command in Tokyo about the operation's progress.
The platform rose until it completed the final twenty-foot stretch of a 115-foot flight deck along the top of the boat's spine. The several I-Class subs of the Imperial Japanese Navy were, in effect, underwater aircraft carriers designed for long-range operations against the U.S.A. On this mission, two of the ships had sailed to Peruvian ocean waters on a top secret germ warfare mission. Both subs had steamed rapidly near the surface. They had false superstructures to disguise them as tramp steamers, although a flyover by an Allied patrol plane, at just the right angle of light, might have spotted the enormous bulk under the surface. Now this sub's companion boat had refueled her and then turned north for a suicidal mission (the Panama Canal, but she would be sunk before getting near enough to send her own planes aloft to bomb the locks).
Aboard the remaining I-Class, technicians unfolded the unmarked Comet float plane's wings. The pilots tested the plane's new 1,560 hp Mitsubishi Kinsei-62 14-cylinder, two-row radial nose-mounted engine—revving it in test bursts. When all was ready, sailors unyoked the wheels from the deck plates.
Pilot and navigator nodded to each other under their long, glass-paneled canopy. The pilot waved and grinned at the deck crew. Sailors lined up and saluted. The pilots returned the salute. Moments later, a 85-foot-long pneumatic catapult sent the plane careening into the air. Yawing and pitching uncertainly for a moment, the Comet straightened out. Pulled by its powerful engine, the plane climbed at 2,000 feet per minute.
High over the Pacific Ocean, the Comet, having climbed to just under 35,000 feet (seven miles), leveled off, and raced toward the interior of South America.
The pilots maintained radio silence to avoid being picked up by Peruvian defense forces. The government of Manuel Prado had recently severed ties with the Axis Powers and seemed ready to declare war on Germany and Japan, in return for U.S. support in Peru's war with neighboring Ecuador. Far below, grayish water gleamed in the morning sun. The sun shone in a clear blue sky marked only with thin, distant clouds. The thin coastal strip, or Costa, loomed ahead one moment, with the steep slopes of the Andes Mountains a few miles back. The land ahead was one of the most arid on earth, despite its proximity to the Pacific Ocean.
The Comet flew at full cruising speed, 300 mph given the pontoons, on a bearing of east by northeast. The aircraft seemed to gobble miles as it shot toward the hulking mass of the Andes, which loomed ahead, swathed in a thin cloud layer. They crossed the coastline near Puerto Caballas and immediately flew over the Nazca Valley with its enigmatic line drawings scratched for miles into the sandy soil. Shooting straight ahead, the propeller plane roared into the heart of ancient Inca territory, toward the lost empire's most deeply guarded and dangerous secret.
The unmarked, enigmatic plane flew past the ancient capital of Cuzco, to the south a bit, and then almost over the high sanctuary at Macchu Pichu. Soon, the Andean highlands lay behind, and now came the slope down into the jungles that would eventually lead to the Amazon Basin where half the rivers of South America drained into the Amazon River and out into the South Atlantic. But this was still Peru, which contained the westernmost expanses of dense jungle whose eastern extents lay in Brazil.
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