Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  Good, thought Hidaka.

  “Name!” he barked out, first in Japanese, then in English.

  The man coughed and gagged on his own bile. He appeared to be trying to answer, so Hidaka only gave him a slight nudge with his boot.

  “Name. And rank. And position aboard this vessel.”

  The man, who was dressed in soiled tropical whites and sandals, of all things, squinted at Hidaka as if trying to focus properly.

  “Moertopo,” he answered. “Lieutenant Ali Moertopo, executive officer.”

  He spoke English, then. Hidaka was quietly relieved.

  The man, Lieutenant Moertopo, finally focused on Hidaka’s pistol. He seemed genuinely surprised, and somehow affronted.

  “What is going on?” he demanded with more authority in his voice than Hidaka cared for. “Who are you, and what are you doing aboard this ship?”

  The demands were delivered in a weak, faltering voice, but there was no mistaking the challenge inherent in their tone. Hidaka flushed with anger that someone so obviously low-caste could think to presume upon him in such a fashion, but Admiral Kakuta had chosen him well for this mission. He swallowed his own indignation, carefully holstered the pistol, and dropped a handkerchief onto the man’s chest.

  “Clean yourself up, Lieutenant,” he said. “You look a mess.”

  Moertopo thanked him, somewhat doubtfully, and wiped the vomit from his face and neck. His movements indicated to Hidaka that he was in considerable pain. It never registered on his face, however, granting him some esteem in the eyes of the Japanese officer.

  Moertopo looked around slowly, taking in the bodies of his shipmates, laid out on either side of him. They were breathing and twitching, but would clearly offer no assistance.

  “You have not answered my question,” he said in English.

  “My name is Hidaka. I boarded your ship with a rescue party three hours ago. Your shipmates are alive, but appear to have been incapacitated. You would have to tell me how that might be, Lieutenant. I am afraid I have no idea.”

  “You are Japanese, yes?”

  Hidaka nodded, noting that the information neither alarmed nor upset his prisoner.

  “We were on station, just north of the main task force, carrying out antisubmarine drills,” Moertopo said.

  “Why?” asked Hidaka. “And which task force?”

  Moertopo gave him an odd look, as if the question had been meant to mock him.

  “Why indeed?” he said, bitterness evident in his voice. “The Caliphate has no submarines. And the Americans certainly wouldn’t trust us to protect them from the Chinese. It was laughable. They just wanted to get us out of the way.”

  “The Americans?”

  “Sorry, the Multinational Force. But yes, basically the Americans. They said it was because we couldn’t link properly to their CI network, but the truth is they simply don’t trust us.”

  Hidaka wished he had some idea what the man was talking about, but he didn’t let his confusion show. This Moertopo seemed quite happy to discuss state secrets with him, despite the fact that he seemed to have been allied in some way to the United States. Notwithstanding the pressures of time, Hidaka would need to play this very carefully indeed.

  “Can you stand?” he asked. “Would you like some tea?”

  The man nodded gratefully. Hidaka clicked his fingers at a sailor, who hurried over to help Moertopo into the armchair. After some hasty instructions the crewman set about drawing another two mugs of tea. Hidaka took a plain chair from the wardroom table and spun it around to face Moertopo. He sat to bring himself down to eye level with his subject.

  “Lieutenant Moertopo,” he said, forming the name carefully, “this task force, was it heading for Java?”

  “Of course,” the lieutenant replied, gratefully sipping his tea. “The president himself insisted that we play our part in any operations taking place in our home waters.” As he spoke, a measure of pride worked its way through the layers of illness and discomfort.

  “And you were sailing from?”

  “Dili,” he said and then, “East Timor,” as it became obvious Hidaka was confused by the answer. “We were training in preparation for deployment.”

  “Lieutenant Moertopo, you will have to excuse my ignorance, I have been at sea for many months. But I must say, your ship has me baffled. I have never seen its like before.”

  Moertopo snorted in a thin imitation of good humor. Obviously the effort taxed him severely.

  “That is not surprising . . . I am sorry . . . Mr. Hidaka.”

  “Commander. Go on.”

  “Commander. We’re the last of the old Parchim-class missile corvettes, purchased in bulk from the East German navy in the nineteen nineties. They’ve been refit—”

  “Excuse me,” Hidaka interrupted. “Did you say the nineteen nineties?”

  “Yes. I forget the exact year. It was before I was born. But President Habibie bought thirty-nine of them. Most rusted away for want of funds to maintain them. Saboteurs destroyed some early in the war, but the Sutanto and the Nuku escaped. Did you know we carried the president himself and his family away from Tanjungpinang to Singapore?” Moertopo asked proudly.

  But Hidaka wasn’t attending to the question. He was staring at the young naval officer in sheer disbelief.

  “No, I did not know that, Lieutenant,” he said distractedly. “Do you know your current location, roughly?”

  Moertopo shrugged. “You would know better than I, Commander. Clearly you haven’t been unconscious for Allah knows how long.”

  “Yes, yes, but roughly.”

  “Somewhere in the Wetar Strait I would hazard. Near the rest of the task force. Tell me, have you all been affected? Is the Nuku okay?”

  Hidaka was truly flummoxed. He shook his head in a distracted fashion. “The Wetar Strait, you say?”

  “Yes. But enough of this pointless questioning—we’re just wasting time,” Moertopo said as he struggled to get to his feet. “I should see to my shipmates. We may need to consult your surgeon, or the Americans, if they haven’t been attacked, too. Do you know if they have? Or what sort of weapon it was. A neural attack maybe.”

  “I am sorry, Lieutenant. What sort of attack?”

  “That would mean that it was the Chinese, not the Caliphate,” he said, not really helping Hidaka at all.

  The commander’s heart was racing now. He had often wondered how he might fare in combat, and now he had reason to doubt his own courage. He was becoming increasingly unnerved by this encounter. Gooseflesh was crawling up his arms, and he shivered involuntarily.

  “Do you know the date today, Lieutenant?”

  Moertopo glanced at his watch. “It is the fifteenth today.”

  “Of?”

  Lieutenant Moertopo gave Hidaka a quizzical look.

  “Of January.”

  “And the year? Please . . . humor me.”

  Moertopo shrugged and, without being sure why, glanced at his watch again.

  “Twenty twenty-one.”

  “Shit,” said Lieutenant Commander Hidaka.

  But he said it in Japanese.

  12

  HIJMS RYUJO, 2358 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  Admirals don’t normally answer summons from lieutenant commanders. But Hidaka had been so inured to censure, so insistent that Admiral Kakuta make the trip to this Sutanto, that the commander of the Second Carrier Striking Force had relented.

  So it was that he found himself on the bitterly cold flight deck, cloaked in fog, when the strange lights appeared.

  All of his doubts about Hidaka’s mental stability evaporated when the giant mechanical dragonfly materialized out of the gloom. Instead, Admiral Kakuta had reason to doubt his own sanity. A monstrous insect was the only image he could conjure up in the face of the abomination. It approached with a sort of thudding buzz, and hovered over the deck. A great gale blew away the fog. An icy, knifing wind painfully lashed at his exposed skin. Grit, spray, and even oil from the deck
stung his eyes, forcing him to turn away.

  As he huddled, shamefully, against the polar blast, he tried to sort his impressions into some comprehensible form. It had to be an aircraft of sorts. Not a dragonfly or a demon. But it had no wings, and the blurring of the air above the blinding lights suggested a propeller of some type.

  Kakuta felt it settle with a slight thump on the deck, and immediately the frightful sound tapered off to a dull roar and an odd, mushy, thudding. He thought he heard a high-pitched whine and the sounds of hydraulic equipment. The shouts and curses of the Ryujo’s crew were blessedly familiar, even if they betrayed astonishment and distress. When the admiral felt it was safe to straighten up, he turned to face the thing squarely. There were two men in the . . .

  Cockpit?

  He assumed it had to be.

  A man in an oversized white helmet, his face obscured by a dark lens, occupied one berth. Ensign Tomonagi sat beside him. The junior officer scrambled out quickly as the massive propeller . . .

  Yes, most certainly a propeller!

  . . . ceased its rotation altogether. The ensign was shaking, no doubt with excitement and more than a little fright, at having been strapped into a plane without wings.

  Kakuta had been enraged that a simple recon task had put them hours behind schedule, but his fury was crimped off by the appearance of the craft. Something very unusual had happened out there.

  “Ensign. Explain this!” he barked at Tomonagi.

  “I cannot, sir,” the ensign replied. “Commander Hidaka has all the information. He sent me to assure you that your presence on the captured destroyer is vital.”

  “But what is this thing? And who is that pilot?” Kakuta demanded.

  “It is called a helicopter,” Tomonagi said, having some trouble pronouncing the word. “And the pilot is a Flight Lieutenant Hardoyo. He will take you back to the Sutanto.”

  Kakuta examined the machine with a very wary eye. The fog and darkness gave its queer lines a sinister appearance. Dozens of men were gathered around it, though at a safe distance, their breath pluming in front of them as they swapped wild theories about its origin. The pilot waved to one or two, who pointed at him.

  “Lieutenant Commander Hidaka is juggling with hot coals,” said Kakuta. “He should be back here reporting to me, so we can continue toward Dutch Harbor with all speed. The operation has no margin for delays like this.”

  Tomonagi drew a breath. He was shivering visibly. “Commander Hidaka says you will not believe his report unless you are there to see with your own eyes what he has found. He asked me to tell you that he does not believe the attack on Dutch Harbor, or even on Midway, will proceed once you have had the chance to inspect the vessel yourself.”

  Kakuta’s anger, subdued by the arrival of the “helicopter,” was bubbling over again.

  “And you, Ensign? What do you believe to be our correct course of action? To follow Admiral Yamamoto’s direction, or that of Lieutenant Commander Hidaka?”

  Tomonagi didn’t answer immediately. Despite the lethal cold on the exposed flight deck, a single trickle of sweat still ran down his face.

  “Admiral. I have seen inexplicable things on that ship. Certainly I am not able to explain them. But Commander Hidaka is convinced the course of the war will be changed by what we do here in the next few hours, not by what happens at Midway. And I am sorry, but he also wishes you to know that the Americans have broken our codes, and have known about Operation MI for weeks. They are lying in wait.

  “But he says that is now irrelevant, too.”

  Tomonagi flinched as he spoke those last words.

  “What!” exploded Kakuta. “Why did you not tell me this immediately?”

  The young man apologized profusely, bowing as deeply as he could without actually banging his forehead to the flight deck.

  “If that is true, we must inform Nagumo and Yamamoto at once,” cried the admiral.

  Captain Tadao Kato, the skipper of the Ryujo, stepped up from behind. “Begging your pardon, Admiral, but we have the strictest orders, already breached once, to maintain radio silence. And we have no confirmation of this wild tale. We could imperil the entire plan with one transmission.”

  Kakuta felt trapped. The evidence of that outlandish aircraft, sitting just a few yards away, confirmed that Hidaka had discovered something of great import. But Kakuta’s mission was of paramount consequence, too. The attack on Dutch Harbor was necessary to draw the remnants of the American fleet away from the center of the Pacific, leaving Midway open to attack. Without that feint, the entire gambit might simply collapse. He was already behind schedule, and now Hidaka wanted to drag them farther into the mire.

  Yet he trusted the man’s judgment as he did his own. That was why he had assigned the investigation to him in the first place. And this thing in which Tomonagi had arrived! It was obviously an aircraft of great power and sophistication. Its very form threatened violence, and he had seen with his own eyes how it hovered in the air like a gigantic hummingbird.

  “I will go then!” he snapped, exasperated beyond measure. “But Captain, if you have not heard from me within one hour, forge on with the original plan. It will mean I have fallen into a trap, and must be abandoned along with Hidaka.”

  “One hour,” confirmed Kato.

  Twenty-five minutes later a small, booklike electric gadget Ensign Tomonagi had brought across from the Sutanto flared into life. It had been resting against a window of the Ryujo’s bridge, continuously scrutinized by Tomonagi, who had remained with the Ryujo on Commander Hidaka’s direct orders.

  “Captain! Captain Kato!” cried Tomonagi. “It is Admiral Kakuta.”

  Kato looked over his shoulder at first, thinking his superior had somehow snuck back aboard the ship. But then his eye caught the glow of Tomonagi’s electric book, and the captain found it difficult to suppress a gasp of surprise. Kakuta himself seemed to be floating within.

  “Captain Kato. It is I, Kakuta.” He sounded tired now. “Please contact the fleet, and bring them around. You may use the low-frequency radio. The attack on Dutch Harbor is not to proceed. I repeat, the attack on Dutch Harbor is not to proceed. I shall inform Admiral Hosogaya myself . . . Just obey!” he added firmly, when he saw that Kato was preparing to argue.

  KRI SUTANTO, 0024 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  “Amazing . . . simply amazing,” muttered Kakuta as Lieutenant Moertopo cut the link that connected them with the flexipad on the Ryujo’s bridge.

  “The admiral expresses his heartfelt amazement at this most sophisticated machine,” Hidaka translated.

  “I suppose it must be a shock,” said Moertopo, who had been confronted by a surprise much more profound than one’s first exposure to a simple flexipad. The dermal patch on his neck held back the physical sensation of nausea, but he still felt sick in his mind.

  “Admiral, I suggest that we have some of the men go up on deck to ensure that Captain Kato has followed your orders,” Hidaka said, translating again for the benefit of the Indonesian.

  “That won’t be necessary, Admiral,” Moertopo interjected. “I can do that from here.” In a few seconds he linked to the Sutanto’s sensors and handed the pad back to Kakuta, who was then able to watch a radar image of the entire fleet, slowing and turning for home. Hidaka explained the meaning of the image that filled the flexipad screen. At this point in history, Japan had not invested deeply in radar technology. Moertopo noted with a degree of satisfaction that neither man was able hide his admiration.

  “I can get you an image of any individual vessel you’d care to observe from the mast-mounted cameras,” said Moertopo. “It doesn’t matter that it’s dark and foggy outside. The cameras can pick out your ships, anyway.”

  He took the pad back, entered a few instructions, and, just as he had promised, the screen filled with a black-and-white image of the Ryujo herself, coming around on the new heading, leaning into the swell, throwing up a prodigious bow wave.

  “Again. I am astounded, L
ieutenant,” said Hidaka with real reverence in his tone.

  “I doubt you could be more astonished than I.”

  They sat at the wardroom table, sipping fresh tea from the ship’s finest china, last used when the Sutanto had spirited the Indonesian president and his family away from the Caliphate rebellion. In deference to the Indonesians, who were dressed for the tropics, the ship’s climate control had been set to approximate a warm spring day in Bali. The Japanese had stripped off the outer layers of their arctic-weather gear but were still sweating in the heavy uniforms they wore underneath.

  The small room was much busier now, with nearly two dozen Indonesian sailors revived and attending to those comrades who were still unconscious, or cleaning up the unpleasant aftermath of their illness. The Japanese and Indonesian sailors remained wary of one another, but their officers had turned to the task of coping with the unprecedented situation.

  Lieutenant Ali Moertopo was trying hard to keep relations with the Japanese as friendly as possible. The bulk of his countrymen, including his own captain, were still unconscious and showing little sign of responding to stimulants, so he was well aware that the initiative lay with Kakuta. If circumstances had been more conducive, they might have just sunk the Japanese fleet and sailed off to Pearl Harbor, there to offer their services to the eventual winners of this war.

  Assuming, of course, that this insanity played out, and they actually had traveled back in time.

  He found he still couldn’t accept that as a real possibility.

  For the moment, though, he was content to present a mask of civility and cooperation to his captors, for that’s what they were, no matter how much buffalo shit they fed him about “rescue” parties. He’d gotten a good long look at the mouth of Hidaka’s pistol when he came to, and he remembered only too well that conceited sneer. He noted that the Japanese sailors—or perhaps they were marines—hadn’t put down their arms.

  Moertopo had offered Kakuta the chance to observe his fleet on the Sutanto’s radar only because he needed to know what sort of enemy he was up against. There appeared to be four capital ships, probably consisting of two carriers and two cruisers—or maybe battleships—and another group of smaller escorts, probably destroyers and maybe a tender. He would endeavor to interest them in a lengthy demonstration of the mast-mounted cameras, and in doing so confirm that conclusion. Captain Djuanda would need every possible scrap of information when he recovered and took command.