Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  MacArthur grunted and nodded his agreement again.

  “—but the greenest marine in our task force has an innate understanding of our war-making capacity, which it will take you some time to fully comprehend. And, as I have explained, we do not have much time.”

  Judge paused and waited on MacArthur’s response. He was surprised by the man’s gaunt appearance, but reminded himself that MacArthur had only recently escaped Corregidor, where he’d shared the same privations as his men during the siege. Deep fissures raked his hollow face, and the skin hung slack beneath his chin. He was thinking openly, the play of his thoughts so apparent on his face that no one spoke. He looked up at the three visitors and sighed. “You know, millions died pointlessly in the last war because those charged with its prosecution hadn’t learned the lessons of our own Civil War,” he said.

  “We don’t have many lessons to teach you, General,” Judge offered to smooth over the difficult moment.

  “No, but I hope you have a few for those bastards in Tokyo.”

  The flexipad emitted another double beep and a long chirrup. Flash traffic.

  “Excuse me, General. Do you mind?” asked Judge. “This will be urgent.”

  MacArthur nodded his assent. A knock sounded at the door as Judge consulted the pad. An adjutant handed MacArthur a slip of paper and a black-and-white photograph. The general’s eyebrows shot up when he read the note.

  He handed it to Prince Harry, who was sitting closest to him. The prince mouthed an obscenity when he read the document.

  Mike Judge didn’t mouth or whisper anything.

  He said quite clearly, “Motherfucker!”

  His colleagues turned sharply toward him, and MacArthur was jolted out of his own reverie by the outburst.

  Judge shut down the pad with a sour look creasing his tanned features.

  “Anderson and Miyazaki, two of our commanders back in Hawaii, General, they’re both dead,” he announced. “Murdered.”

  Jane Willet was obviously shocked by the news, but Judge noticed that neither MacArthur nor Prince Harry reacted as sharply as he might have expected. Then he noticed the look on MacArthur’s face. His heart, already thudding from the news out of Pearl, lurched again. Something else must have happened.

  “It’s the Nuku,” said Harry. “She’s turned up, and the Japs have got her.”

  29

  PARLIAMENT HOUSE, CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA, 2032 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

  There were few wartime friendships more unusual than that between General Douglas MacArthur and the Australian prime minister, John Curtin. Watching the two men together, Paul Robertson could never quite shake himself of the feeling that theirs was a partnership doomed to succeed.

  MacArthur was an imperial figure, an overweening egotist, a favorite of the far right in America and a demonic character in the imagination of the left for his role in using troops to smash a demonstration by unemployed veterans and their families in Washington during the Great Depression.

  Curtin was a labor organizer and left-wing politician who’d been jailed for opposing conscription during the Great War. Much less a firebrand than a man of unassuming stillness and modesty, he provided MacArthur with the one thing the general could never hope for at home, unconditional support and dependence.

  Robertson, a well-traveled banker who’d given up a lucrative career to serve as Curtin’s principal private adviser, shook hands with MacArthur in the PM’s cramped parliamentary office before taking one of the two seats in front of Curtin’s desk. MacArthur, carrying one of those fantastic machines they called a “slate,” dropped into the other.

  Prime Minister Curtin looked to be as intrigued by the device as Robertson. It was the first time either of them had encountered direct evidence of the “Arrivals.”

  “It’s a shame those officers couldn’t have come with you, General,” said Curtin. “I would have liked to have met them, particularly the local lass.”

  MacArthur, holding the data slate like a royal flush in the last round of a poker tournament, brushed the gray casing and said, “Couldn’t be helped, Prime Minister. As I said in the cable, there’ve been developments. They’ve had to get back to Pearl.”

  “But we can expect them back soon, can’t we?” said Curtin. “Yamamoto is still on the loose, and there’s no American fleet to stand between him and us, now. I’d feel a lot better with one of those rocket ships here. Especially an Australian one.”

  His voice betrayed a deep anxiety. He’d been catching hell from Churchill over his decision to bring home two battle-proven Australian divisions, as insurance against the threat of a Japanese invasion. The British wanted to send them to Burma, of all places!

  Robertson knew the PM had suffered terribly for the decision, harangued by London and prodded by Washington to do as they wanted, not as he thought best. And when he’d faced down the demands from Churchill, there was the even greater stress of actually waiting for thousands of Australian troops to make it home across waters infested with U-boats and raiders and Japanese carriers. Robertson had more than once found the PM alone in this office, doubled over in pain. It was as if the responsibility of leading the country through its darkest hour was eating him from the inside out.

  MacArthur leaned forward and rapped the desk with his fist.

  “I’m going to move Heaven and earth to get those forces sent here as quickly as possible, Prime Minister. It would help if you could cable the president in support. After all, there are some Australian units attached to this Kolhammer’s force. They should be here in this theater, placed under my command.”

  Robertson suppressed a smile at MacArthur’s choice of words. He composed a suitably neutral facade before interrupting.

  “These developments you mentioned, General MacArthur, I take it you mean the report out of New Guinea?”

  The American’s features clouded over momentarily. He fidgeted with the device. After a few tries he got the screen to light up and MacArthur handed the slate across to Curtin. Robertson could see there was some sort of picture displayed on the glowing face of the machine. It was a dark, midwinter’s day outside, and when lit the slate was bright enough to throw the PM’s shadow up the wall.

  “That’s a photograph taken by a long-range patrol, operating in the Saruwaged Ranges of New Guinea,” explained the general. “Commander Judge was kind enough to transfer it to this machine for me before he left. We would have dismissed it as a fake a month ago. But given what’s happened, I think we have to take it seriously.”

  Robertson watched the prime minister’s face as Curtin examined the picture. He frowned like a man confronted by an intricate puzzle. After a few seconds his eyes opened wider and he sat bolt upright.

  “Is that a . . . ?”

  But words failed him.

  “Yes, Prime Minister,” said MacArthur, “it’s a warship. Sticking out of a mountain, thousands of feet above sea level.”

  Curtin handed the slate to Robertson. It felt dense, but light. The casing was made of something that gave under the fingers, like rubber. The PM’s adviser was careful to avoid touching any of the buttons arrayed across the bottom of the case. Holding it gently by the sides, he saw a photograph of what looked like a destroyer or a frigate, with her stern buried in the ground. A few tents were clustered around the base of the vessel, and he could make out human figures here and there.

  “The men in the photograph are Japs,” said MacArthur. “They found her first and they’ve been working on her for nearly a week as best we can tell. The patrol report says they appear to be salvaging what they can.”

  “Good God,” said Curtin. “So they’ve got access to this sort of machinery, too.”

  “I’m afraid so,” MacArthur answered. “That why Judge and the others returned to Pearl. And that’s why it’s imperative we strike as quickly as possible. Kolhammer’s people are going to attack this ship in the next hour or so. But we have to assume the horse has bolted.”

  “Could they have
found any more of these ships?” asked Robertson.

  MacArthur didn’t answer immediately, giving the question some thought. Sleet blew against the windows and a minor gale howled outside, whipping through the branches of the eucalyptus trees, and stripping long ribbons of wet bark from their trunks.

  “Judge tells me they’re missing a number of ships. The scientific vessel, which they suspect to be the cause of their arrival here, was almost certainly destroyed in the process. So they doubt they’re ever going home. An American warship seems to have foundered in the polar waters to our south. One British and one French vessel apiece are unaccounted for. And there are doubts now about the location of another small frigate from a country called Indonesia. It grew out of the Dutch colony in the East Indies. That’s their boat on the mountain.”

  Curtin visibly blanched.

  “So these things could be anywhere. Under anyone’s control.”

  MacArthur took the suggestion somberly. To Robertson, he looked like a man considering an important move in a game of chess. The day was growing even darker outside, and Curtin turned on a green-shaded desk lamp to give them some more light.

  The American rubbed at his West Point ring as he spoke.

  “It’s possible,” he conceded. “Judge was less concerned about the British and French vessels than the Indonesian one. He said those ships could look after themselves. But he said that the Indonesian ship, the Sutanto, didn’t have, uhm, Combat Intelligence, I believe he called it. It’s like a machine that can fight the enemy even when the crew is incapacitated. So the Japs could conceivably capture them. On the other hand, the Indonesian boats are much less capable.”

  There was something profoundly disturbing in that line of argument. It sounded to Robertson like a sales pitch.

  “But surely the danger of the Japanese getting their hands on these ships lies as much in the knowledge they contain,” he said.

  Holding up the data slate, he went on.

  “I understand these machines are a bit like having a whole university at your fingertips. What’s to stop them or the Germans from learning how to build superweapons like the ones that destroyed the American fleet at Midway? Granted they couldn’t leap right into the next century. But they could give their scientists and manufacturers a hell of a boost.”

  Prime Minister Curtin slowly rubbed his face with both hands. He was a picture of despair. MacArthur took in the questions without visible anguish, but neither did he exhibit any of his usual confidence.

  In the end he could only shrug.

  “We have to strike first.”

  LONDON, 2301 HOURS, 10 JUNE 1942

  The dispatch from Her Majesty’s man in Hawaii arrived at Admiral Sir Dudley Pound’s club late in the evening. The first sea lord received the long typewritten note from his man in Pearl Harbor, Rear Admiral Sir Leslie Murray, just before midnight. Pound had suffered from quite terrible headaches for some time, and an absolute blinder was keeping him awake when the Royal Navy courier arrived with a brown leather briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

  Pound took delivery in the club’s library. He wasn’t the only member who was padding about at that time. Many of the older members found their repose had been so badly disturbed by the war and especially by the bombing of London that they slept in fits and starts at all hours of the night and day. A few of them dozed in soft leather armchairs. One had nodded off over a copy of The Times, which had spilled onto the rich Turkish carpet where it lay until spied by a passing servant. Another had propped open Livingstone’s original African journal on his lap, but had fallen asleep halfway down the Zambezi River. A couple of retired brigadiers, one of whom had been quite handsomely shot up with the New Zealanders at Gallipoli, pushed chess pieces around a board in the far corner.

  Sir Dudley was deep into his third brandy of the evening when a footman showed through a young man from Naval Intelligence. Quietly grateful for some work to distract him through the graveyard hours, Pound thanked the officer and broke the seal on the dispatch from Sir Leslie.

  Three paragraphs into the report he snorted a mouthful of brandy through his nose. With remarkable understatement the Royal Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Pacific Fleet gave a detailed account of the arrival of Kolhammer’s task force.

  “I must report a most unusual event in the Pacific theatre,” the message began, before describing in quite spare prose the destruction of the American fleet and a British carrier HMS Fearless. Murray relayed the astounding capabilities of the arrivals in equally detached terms, but it was clear to Sir Dudley that his stiff upper lip failed him when it came time to report on the individuals who had arrived in the ships.

  “A most remarkable bunch,” he wrote. “A more confronting collection of half-caste upstarts and hysterical women you would not find outside a whorehouse in Cairo!”

  Murray recommended in closing that the British ship HMS Trident, which had arrived with Kolhammer, be reassigned immediately to the Home Fleet and staffed by reliable men drawn from the present-day Royal Navy. Some of the twenty-first-century personnel could, of course, be kept on to provide whatever training and familiarization was needed. The CO, Captain Halabi, was a curiosity at best, and a disaster-in-waiting at worst. Murray’s opinion was that she and her crew would be of little use in a high-intensity theater of war such as the Atlantic. Allowing himself what seemed to be a moment of wit, he wrote that their major utility seemed to be to act as a warning concerning England’s future immigration policy. He suggested that perhaps a position might be found for them in the coastal patrols of the various West Indian colonies. After all, so many of them seemed to hail from there.

  Pound twice read the two-thousand-word communiqué, shaking his head and grunting in disbelief each time. It was nearly one in the morning when he finished, too late to check on the credibility of the story through independent sources. So he summoned another brandy and decided to send a cable directly to Honolulu in the morning. Sir Leslie Murray had obviously gone insane, and would need to be replaced.

  He hauled himself upright and lay in a course for his sleeping quarters.

  Strangely enough, he slept like a baby for the first time in months. Not even a large raid over the East End could wake him.

  Thirty-six hours later Sir Dudly stood outside the prime minister’s office, deep beneath the rubble-choked streets of London. Though well rested, he was still reeling from his meeting with the American ambassador, Mr. Kennedy. The former bootlegger had confirmed that yes, he’d received much the same information as Pound. No, he didn’t really believe it either, but what the hell was he gonna do? Roosevelt himself had sent a handwritten note, confirming many of the basic facts. And Roosevelt had always tried to keep his personal communications with Kennedy to a minimum. They didn’t get on.

  Pound waited in the cramped anteroom, watching the concrete walls sweat, while he wondered how on earth to explain all this to the PM. A young woman in a dark blue Royal Air Force uniform ignored him while she hammered away at a typewriter, producing a sound not entirely unlike a machine gun. He was developing a headache, and each clack speared into his head like a sharpened knitting needle.

  A slight tremor in his hands betrayed his anxiety.

  Churchill, still dressed in his gown and slippers, suddenly appeared at the door and took in Pound’s presence through rheumy eyes and a slight haze of gin fumes.

  “Come in, Admiral,” he said. “I hope you’ve brought glad tidings for a change.”

  Pound clutched his briefcase tightly and followed the prime minister through the door. The sound of rapid-fire typing ceased as the secretary jumped up to follow them. “Would you like your breakfast now, sir?” she asked Churchill.

  “Kippers and toast,” he barked back.

  “And would you like some tea, Sir Dudley?”

  Pound said he would, and they seated themselves as she hurried off.

  “So, Admiral, what’s this business in the Pacific? I’ve heard some wild rumors so far. I hope you
’re not here to add to them.”

  Pound took a breath and jumped in at the deep end.

  “I’m afraid you’re not going to believe me, Prime Minister, but I have to do this anyway.”

  He pulled out the dispatch from Rear Admiral Murray, and a copy of Ambassador Kennedy’s report, which the American had helpfully given him, along with Roosevelt’s handwritten cover note.

  As quickly and with as little drama as possible, he informed Churchill of the events at Midway, as he had been told of them. The prime minister’s expression grew more thunderous with each fantastic revelation. Finally, he exploded.

  “Enough! Is this your idea of a joke, Admiral?”

  Pound’s voice showed not the slightest hint of amusement. “No, Prime Minister, it is my idea of a bad dream.”

  Churchill’s head seemed to wobble on his bulbous, unshaven neck as though he were seeing the room in front of him for the first time. He pushed a piece of paper to one side, dragged it back, opened a drawer, presumably to put the paper away, and then simply crumpled it up and dropped it into a wastebasket. Pound half expected him to haul it out and start over again.

  “Well, how on earth did this happen? If it did happen.”

  The first sea lord was at a loss. Neither Murray’s report nor Ambassador Kennedy could provide him any information that made sense of the situation.

  “It appears that even these chap’s who’ve turned up don’t know how it happened,” said Pound.

  “And they have Japanese ships and German soldiers sailing with them?” Churchill mused.

  “And Russians and Italians and a couple of chaps from places I’ve never even heard of,” Pound added.

  “I see. And they’ve got them under guard?”

  “Apparently not.” Sir Dudley was just as perplexed by that as the PM.

  Churchill sighed deeply. He rubbed his eyes and then his entire face. The rasping sound of his hand on unshaven bristles was the only noise in the room.

  “I’m supposed to meet Roosevelt in Washington in a few weeks,” he said. “I suppose we’d better bring forward the schedule.”