He looked up at the tension in the cable running through the crane above him; just a bit more, and they’d have it fully tightened. He could only watch in anguished anticipation as Godzilla’s final dorsal fin extended, and a bluish light began to accumulate inside the creature’s mouth, each excruciating second feeling like an eternity.
Akitsu was already standing by on the bridge with his hand on the switch, ready to deploy the mechanism as soon as Noda gave him the signal.
Godzilla reared its massive body back to unleash its heat ray once more.
But just then, the cable running from the crane drew taut.
“Okay!” Noda shouted. “Hit it!”
“You got it!” said Akitsu, flipping the switch.
All at once, the 46cm explosive shells hanging from each of the Freon gas cylinders exploded underwater, creating a massive air pocket directly beneath Godzilla. Then, just as it was sucked down into the cavity, powerful streams of pressurized gas began jetting out from each of the ten cylinders, enveloping the beast in an effervescent haze. With the bubble membrane complete, Godzilla lost all buoyancy and went into a state of free fall, plummeting down to the bottom of the sea with astounding momentum.
“Did we do it?” said Koichi, watching from high above in his Shinden. He couldn’t believe they’d actually managed to pull off Noda’s Freon gas plan without a hitch.
On deck, a pair of watchmen were monitoring the cable’s depthometer:
“Current depth: 1,500… 2,000… 2,200… 2,500! Target depth reached!”
Deep beneath them, the Freon cylinders emptied the last of their gas.
And as soon as the bubbles dissipated, an unfathomable amount of water pressure slammed against every millimeter of Godzilla’s body—crunching its joints, constricting its muscles, and extinguishing the light from its dorsal fins all at once.
The men of Yukikaze peered down into the water with bated breath, with the lapping of waves against the side of the ship the only sound.
The cable was still firmly attached.
Eventually, one of the deck hands called up to the bridge wing where Noda, Akitsu, and Captain Hotta were standing to give the announcement: “I can confirm. we’ve sunk Godzilla, sirs!”
Akitsu just stared down into the water in disbelief.
“So then… Is it actually dead?” he mumbled.
But not a moment later, there came a powerful tug on the cable—the force of which caused the men on Yukikaze to lose their collective balance as the ship listed to one side.
Godzilla seemed yet to have survived, even with its body under such enormous pressure.
“Pesky little son of a…” Akitsu muttered.
“Had a feeling it wouldn’t be quite so easy,” said Noda. “Looks like we’ll have to use our backup plan after all.”
Noda rushed inside and flipped the switch on the rapid-rising flotation device.
All at once, the pressurized inflation units atop each of the Freon gas cylinders burst into gigantic balloons—each the size and shape of a ten-meter life raft—creating a flower-like pattern around Godzilla’s waist. With the power of explosives, the balloons were able to push back against even the deep-sea water pressure as they inflated with an ultra-high pressure gas, pulling Godzilla’s massive body back toward the surface. As it rose higher, and the water pressure lowered, allowing the balloons to inflate larger and faster by the second—rapidly accelerating the creature’s ascent.
Now the beast was being dragged up toward the surface with nearly the same speed at which it sank. And as it did, turbid white tumorlike growths began to break out all over its hide—starting from the parts of its body that had most recently taken damage and then subsequently been regenerated.
The men at the observation booth on deck read from the depthometer:
“Current depth: 1,200… 1,100… 1,000…”
Godzilla was in pain—so much pain, all inflicted in such a short span of time by Yukikaze directly above it. As the creature was dragged up to the surface, there was nary a thought in its decompression-addled brain. Only a seething, compulsive hatred.
All of a sudden, the cable that had been hoisting Godzilla back up to the surface came to a complete stop.
“Target no longer ascending!” yelled the deckhand. “Current depth: 803 meters!”
Up on the bridge wing, Noda clutched his head in his hands.
“No, no, no!” he shouted. “Why did it stop?”
His curiosity would soon be sated, however, when the mangled remnants of several giant balloons soon rose up to the surface, many of them shredded to pieces.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me…” said Akitsu. “It ripped them off?”
“Yukikaze to Hibiki!” Captain Hotta shouted into his radio. “Full speed ahead! We’ll drag Godzilla up by pulling in opposite directions!”
“What?” said one of the other men on the bridge. “Even with both our ships combined, there’s no way we’ll have enough horsepower to lift that thing!”
“We’re out of options! We have to try everything we can!”
Yukikaze and Hibiki split off in opposite directions, full speed ahead, to pull the cable taut and again lift Godzilla up from the depths. But just as the crew member had pointed out, their steam turbines weren’t nearly up to the task. Soon, the vessels were making no forward progress whatsoever, the excess output from their engines doing little more than drumming up choppy seas behind their sterns.
Eventually, there came a shrill, metallic creaking sound.
“The crane won’t hold at this rate!” shouted a worker from the Toyo Balloon Company—mere seconds before said crane split in half from the tension and toppled over. After narrowly escaping its fall, he and his fellow employees simply looked at the broken crane—then at the shredded balloon fragments—with solemn, mournful expressions.
Even pulling as hard as they could, and kicking up a massive spray behind them, the two destroyers were now effectively treading water.
Operation Wadatsumi would be a failure, cut short in its final stretch. And Godzilla had no doubt recovered from the damage dealt by their sinking maneuver at this point—meaning the cable that connected the Yukikaze and Hibiki to the beast was now an active danger to them both. Should the beast decide to drag them down beneath the waves, or simply hold them in place while it fired its heat ray from underwater, like it had done to Takao…there would be nothing they could do. Nowhere they could run.
Chances were, not a single one of them would survive. And then Godzilla would climb ashore and wreak havoc upon the mainland all over again. But with no other options available to them, Noda and the others could only watch in agonized suspense as their boats tried and failed to haul the cable up from the tumultuous seas.
“The engine won’t last much longer!” cried a voice, practically screaming through the speaking tube from down in the engine room.
Was there nothing else they could do?
Having made it this far, and come so close to pulling it off, it would be far too pathetic to simply lie down and die at this point, leaving their fates to Godzilla’s whims.
Just then, a familiar voice rang out from the boat’s internal speakers:
“This is Fuji Maru from Yokohama Tugboats! We’ll do what we can to help!”
It was a voice Noda and Akitsu knew all too well.
“This is Mizushima speaking,” it said. “Are you there, Captain?”
“You’re shitting me!” said Akitsu. “Is that you, kid?”
“You bet your ass it is!”
One by one, several other voices came flooding through the speakers:
“This is the Toyo Maru, also from Yokohama Tugboats! We’re here to assist as well!”
“This is the Nikko Maru, from Toyo Steamships! Just tell us what to do!”
“Shiokaze Maru No. 3, at your service!”
Unable to believe their ears, Noda and the others rushed out onto the bridge wing to see a veritable fleet of well over a dozen tugboats heading straight in their direction.
“How’s that for a liability, huh?” said Mizushima, sounding quite proud of himself.
Mouth agape, Akitsu pulled off his hat and swung it against the breeze.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he said with a giddy smile. “Talk about a sight for sore eyes!”
Captain Hotta couldn’t contain the excitement in his voice either.
“All right, you tugboats—come get in line!” he exclaimed. “Let’s see if we can’t haul this sucker in, shall we?”
The crew members were practically jumping for joy as they prepared the ropes. Before long, both Yukikaze and Hibiki each had more than ten tugboats tied to their bows, ready and waiting to serve. Though they were each quite small individually, tugboats were specifically designed for the purpose of transporting larger ships just like this and had the horsepower to match. As their high-powered engines kicked into gear, their fleet of tiny vessels began to slowly pull the two warships apart, each of them kicking up a massive spray of seawater in their wake.
“The depthometer’s moving again!” cried the watchman.
“Come on!” Akitsu shouted from the bridge wing. “Get up here, damn you!”
And then at last—Godzilla’s massive frame breached the surface of the water.
The beast’s hide was covered in hideous blisters due to the sudden change in pressure, which only made it look far more monstrous than ever before. Like the deep-sea fish that always preceded Godzilla’s appearances, its eyes had turned a watery white and were bulging slightly out from their sockets. Godzilla writhed in agony as the two fleets pulled the cable tighter around its waist, as if they meant to sever the creature clean in two.