Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  Granted, he was also proposing to attack Hashirajima and give the Japs a taste of their own Pearl Harbor. But to King’s studied eye, the whole thing looked like fantasy. They were sending one lousy Australian submarine to hit the Combined Fleet in the Home Islands, while the rest of their force would be split up between an attack on a couple of POW camps. It made no sense at all.

  Singapore was deep in the heart of the empire now. You didn’t just sail in and tie up at the yacht club before popping into Raffles for drinks. And this POW camp at Cabanatuan on Luzon—it was miles inland. They were talking about evacuating thousands of prisoners. King would dearly love to get those boys back, but this wasn’t the way. This was fucking madness.

  He could barely control his urge to slap the data slate from Roosevelt’s hands. The president was engrossed in one of their goddamn movie presentations. A neat little cartoon pitch about how they planned to win the war. It was enough to make you wretch, after what they’d done at Midway.

  “Are you going to let them go ahead with their plan, Mr. President?” asked King. The tone of his voice told Roosevelt that his navy chief didn’t think that was even remotely a good idea.

  Roosevelt fell back in the chair and struggled to find a comfortable position.

  “I take it, Admiral, that you would not.”

  “No, sir. If I had my way, I wouldn’t be letting them out of my sight.”

  Roosevelt peered out into the darkness of the White House lawn. Even with the lights down it was difficult to see past his reflection in the windowpanes.

  “They’re talking about destroying Yamamoto’s fleet before it puts to sea again. Do you think they can do it?” he asked. “Your honest appraisal.”

  “I have no idea, sir. We couldn’t, and I don’t know that I’d be happy letting these bastards off the leash to try. You know about the sort of personnel they’re carrying. That’s a hideous can of worms, right there.”

  Roosevelt levered himself around to face King more directly, pushing his elbows into the armrest and lifting his crippled body a few inches. He grunted as he settled again.

  “Admiral, that’s an argument for another day. My good lady wife is already in my ear, carrying on about integration, and I fear she won’t rest until I sign an executive order turning half of your navy over to her suffragette friends.”

  Seeing the expression that contorted the admiral’s face, Roosevelt had his first good laugh in weeks.

  “Relax, Admiral. I’m joking. Eleanor doesn’t get everything her way.”

  Though the tension ran out of King’s shoulders, as he slumped back into his own chair, he still looked worried. “So this plan,” he said, “I have a feeling you’re going to approve it.”

  “Your intuition is correct. If we can destroy the Combined Fleet, we go a long way toward winning this war. And they say they can do it without losing a single man. I’d deserve to be impeached if I said no to that.

  “As for this rescue mission, I admit, it looks shaky on paper. But having seen what happened to those men, the pictures of them in those prison camps, I couldn’t live with myself if I turned down a chance to save them. And I’d have their families coming over the fence to get me.”

  “That’s why Kolhammer sent you those pictures, sir,” King said, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. “To force your hand.”

  Roosevelt smiled like an old wolf.

  “I know. He’d make a good politician.”

  The admiral tried another tack.

  “They’re asking us to divert a hell of a lot of shipping capacity to their little adventure,” he pointed out. “MacArthur, for one, is going to have to wait for reinforcements in Australia. He’ll howl like a stuck pig.”

  “He always does,” Roosevelt countered, waving away the point. MacArthur’s good opinion counted for little with him. “And anyway, he’s already assented. Not that he had any real say in the matter.”

  King was unable to contain his surprise, and in turn his annoyance.

  “I hadn’t been told that MacArthur knew anything of this,” he said.

  “I only found out myself two hours ago, when he cabled me his approval of the operation.” Roosevelt shook his head in wonder at the man’s gall, dealing himself into the hand when he wasn’t even at the table.

  King looked like he’d stepped in something nasty whenever the subject of MacArthur came up. “I suppose he got one look at those marines and their equipment and decided to put them in his back pocket,” he said.

  “Possession is nine-tenths of the law, Admiral. They’re in his theater. And I’m surprised at you. You’re always trumpeting the case of Japan over Germany. If they can catch the Japs at Hashirajima they’ll cripple Tojo. After that, well, I thought you’d want to get your own hands on Kolhammer’s ships for the Pacific, too.”

  King tried to look insulted, but failed. Roosevelt smiled again.

  “I’m approving the operation, Admiral. Let Kolhammer run it his way. We’ll worry about the niceties afterward. This business in Honolulu with the murders and the riot, I fear it’s a taste of more to come. If these characters can pull this off, it will create a reservoir of goodwill, and I suspect we’re going to need every drop of it.”

  37

  USS KANDAHAR, 1238 HOURS, 13 JUNE 1942

  The planning room of the USS Kandahar was only a third the size of the Clinton’s main conference center, but marines are a hardy bunch, quite capable of working up a major op without the benefit of buffet service or an espresso machine. For many of the 1942 personnel, a mix of Marine Corps and navy officers, this briefing was their first real exposure to a twenty-first-century environment. A few of them struggled to maintain their focus in the face of numerous distractions, both technological and human. Lieutenant Commander Black felt fortunate to be one of the few who’d already begun to adapt to the situation.

  The officer who delivered a short history lesson on the original liberation of the POW camp at Cabanatuan on Luzon was Lieutenant Gina De Marco, a strikingly pretty blond woman who already had a reputation among Black’s contemporaries as a ball breaker.

  Sure enough, a wolf whistle greeted her when she took the podium. If she was supposed to giggle and blush at that provocation, somebody was in for a shock. Lieutenant De Marco fixed the offender with a frigid stare.

  “Do you have a particularly small penis, sir? Is that why you feel the need to compensate for your inadequacies with this behavior? If so, let me assure you, it didn’t work. You still have a very small penis, and now you look like an idiot, too.”

  De Marco’s shipmates exploded into hoots of laughter. The whistler and his buddies didn’t really know where to look, and settled on a range of more or less shit-eating grins as their response. The lieutenant’s microcelebrity grew just that little bit more potent.

  She continued without further interruption, silencing the room with her grave delivery.

  “The death toll for American personnel at Cabanatuan in June of this year will be five hundred. In July it will reach eight hundred. There are also civilian prisoners being held, many of them women who have been or will be forced into sex slavery by the Japanese.”

  The uniformly white male audience of ’42 personnel squirmed quietly as the flatscreen behind the Lieutenant segued through dozens of archival images of the death camp, including some of white “comfort women.” Sitting in the second row, Lieutenant Commander Black found the images disturbing, as he was meant to, but he was also unsettled by the methodical, dispassionate way in which the beautiful young woman went about her briefing. He didn’t need to ask whether all the young women of the future were so confounding. He already knew from personal experience.

  Black shook his head at the memory of Julia crippling that guy in Honolulu.

  He still didn’t know how he felt about it. She was the most challenging and vibrant woman he’d ever met. But sometimes he found himself wondering what planet she came from. She shared with De Marco an ability to deal dispassionat
ely with the most gruesome of subjects. It was kind of off-putting.

  The pretty lieutenant was still talking, and he dragged his attention back to the briefing.

  “In nineteen forty-four the Army Rangers who rescued the POWs from the camps had extensive help from local guerrilla forces, which we can’t expect because of the confused situation on the ground in Luzon. However—”

  Dan found himself wondering whether this woman had ever kicked a man half to death. If you got past her beauty, she certainly looked competent enough in her camouflage fatigues.

  “—the rescue was accomplished with the loss of only two Rangers, Corporal Roy Sweezy and Captain James C. Fisher. One of the prisoners died of a heart attack during the extraction.”

  The screen behind the lieutenant filled with still photographs taken by combat photographers from the 832nd Signal Service Battalion, who had accompanied—or would accompany—the Rangers on the rescue mission to Cabanatuan. The images drove all thoughts of Julia from Dan Black’s mind. Like his fellow officers he gaped in horror at the skeletal, nearly inhuman creatures who stared out at them.

  “These are the defenders of Corregidor, gentlemen,” said Colonel Jones, taking over from De Marco. “Your comrades and our forebears. Thousands of others did not make it. Some were killed during the siege of the island, but most died on the forced march into captivity and during years of internment in the death camps. There is nothing we can do for the men who are gone, but there are thousands of our people we can still save.”

  Black wondered whether he was the only one in the room who noted the colonel’s use of the phrase our people. More than a few of his contemporaries had been mouthing off on the way over about having to work with Negroes and Mexicans and uppity women, completely oblivious to the hovercraft crew that contained examples of all three. Black was surprised at how tiring he found the endless gripes on the subject, and wondered how Kolhammer’s people managed to keep a lid on their temper.

  The briefings continued for hours, finishing late in the day with an address by a female “combat surgeon.” “We’ll need more transport,” said Captain Francois, “enough for about twenty to thirty thousand men. And most of them will be in very poor shape, so we can’t just toss them into the hold of a troopship. They’ll need something better than that if they’re going to survive the return trip.”

  She stood in the briefing room of the Kandahar, five hours after Lieutenant De Marco had opened the session. The air in the room felt close and stale to Black, even with the air-conditioning running. Papers and coffee cups littered the floor, and normally crisp uniforms were becoming disheveled. The planning session was taking so long because of the need to constantly explain basic issues such as in-flight refueling to the “temps.” Black wasn’t sure how he felt about being called a “temp.” It didn’t sound very dignified.

  “The good news,” Francois continued, “is that the sort of care they’ll require is intense, but very basic. There’s not much apart from some drugs and megavitamin and mineral supplements that we’d need to add to the amenities you already have for treating the sort of malnutrition and illness we’re likely to see. What we need from you are medics and lots of berths on big comfortable ships.”

  Nimitz raised his hand to speak.

  “Excuse me, Doctor. I can deal with that right away. We have a lot of converted liners that have just finished ferrying troops to New Caledonia and Australia. They moved about fifty thousand men, and their equipment. They might fit the bill. They’re not as luxurious as they once were, but they’d be more agreeable than a hammock in the hold of a Liberty ship.”

  “That sounds just fine, Admiral. What about medics?”

  “We’ll round them up,” Nimitz promised.

  Rachel Nguyen was growing accustomed to these strange conferences that were as much history tutorials as intelligence briefings. This group was smaller than many she’d spoken to over the last few days and was composed entirely of twenty-first-century Special Forces—SEALS, SAS, Marine Recon. They should have been a more intimidating audience, but unlike some others they accepted her right to be here. Whatever she had to say, they wanted to hear.

  She keyed a control stick, and the wallscreen split into four sections.

  “These are the best contemporary overheads we have at the moment, gentlemen. As we draw nearer, we’ll have drone coverage to verify their accuracy, but the ’temps who’ve just been there vouch for the Singapore maps, and the images of Cabanatuan are drawn from official DoD archives, so we’ll take them on faith until we have real-time vision.”

  She clicked the controller again, filling the entire screen with the prison camp in the Philippines.

  “This camp is a former army base,” she explained. “It’s surrounded by flat open ground and lies eight kilometers from the village of Cabanatuan, which we can assume contains a heavy concentration of Japanese army units. It sits astride a major transport axis from Manila, and the camp itself is often used as transit base for Japanese army units.

  “You can expect a strong garrison in the town, between three and five thousand strong with armor and artillery support. The Ranger unit that originally liberated the camp in nineteen forty-four moved from American-held territory on Luzon through the Japanese lines and deep into their rear areas. They had extensive help from local guerrilla forces, which we cannot assume even exist yet. And I guess I don’t need to point out that there is no American-held territory in Luzon at the moment.”

  HMAS HAVOC, 1435 HOURS, 13 JUNE 1942

  Nimitz and an aide climbed down the well of the submarine Havoc, to accept a somewhat casual salute from the Australian captain. Unlike some of the Multinational Force commanders, she hadn’t bothered to change out of her gray combat coveralls.

  “Welcome aboard, Admiral,” she said. “And Lieutenant Fraser, right?”

  The aide was unable to stop his eyes from drifting south to the captain’s breasts. He made an effort to tear his gaze away, but it was all too obvious. Nimitz had no trouble hiding his thoughts behind a mask of restrained civility.

  The admiral stepped forward to shake her hand. Were she of his own time, etiquette would have demanded that he kiss it. But Jane Willet didn’t give off an inviting demeanor. Her grip was cool and firm.

  Nimitz was taken aback by the size of the vessel. There was so much more room than he’d expected. And it was clean, too. The rank smell of confined humanity, a feature of every submarine in their own fleet, was noticeable mostly because of its absence. It added to the spacious effect. Even with the banks of instruments curving up the walls, there seemed to be enough room to dance a waltz in here.

  “We’ll do a quick tour of the Havoc, gentlemen,” Willet said, “and then my divisional heads will join us in the wardroom, where they can answer any questions. You’re standing in the belly of the beast now. This is my combat, communications, and nav center.”

  She guided them toward a freestanding block with a glowing glass top. They had expected to find maps and charts there. The positional hologram was a shock. A scaled-down representation of Pearl Harbor floated within the block. The rest of the task force and every contemporary naval vessel were also represented in there. As spectral miniatures, they floated on a blue sea surface a few inches above the Havoc.

  “It’s a wonder,” breathed Fraser. “Like a movie I suppose, Commander, but in three dimensions.”

  “Effectively,” she agreed. “The nav blocks have stored holomaps of every important ocean and littoral environment in the world. Our sensors simply place us into context on those maps. Of course, some of the most interesting holomaps are useless now because the harbors and ports in our records haven’t been built yet—a pity really, since we may be visiting a few of them. We’ve already edited Pearl’s map to correspond to local conditions.”

  The Havoc’s captain brought up a cutaway hologram of the submarine itself. “This class of submarines replaced the old Collins-class boats, which came into service in the nineteen nin
eties,” explained Willet. “They utilize the same teardrop hull shape and X rudder arrangement. They’re much bigger, though. Eight and a half thousand tonnes. Ninety-five meters in length, with a twelve-meter diameter—that’s about three hundred feet by forty feet to you.”

  As she spoke, the ghostlike submarine underwent a rapid series of inversions and optical modifications, its gray sharklike skin melting away from one end of the cigar-shaped hull to the other. Various decks and sections detached themselves and grew larger in a separate quadrant of the hologram field. Nimitz and Fraser watched, enthralled, as a chunk of the foredeck disengaged itself and twisted in space to reveal a forest of rockets.

  Willet continued. “All the extra real estate accommodates a vertical launch missile system on the forward deck and eight torpedo tubes in the bow. The tubes can launch torpedoes, of course, antiship missiles, mines, or miniature submersible vehicles for special operations work. The vertical tubes carry a full suite of much heavier sea surface and land-attack munitions, all delivered by extended range cruise missile. All sensors and weapons are totally integrated via a Nemesis Two quantum array battlespace management system, so that each of those delivery options, eight tubes and a dozen missile silos, can independently engage a separate enemy in separate theaters.”

  “Do I understand you correctly, Commander Willet,” he asked quietly. “Your submarine can attack multiple targets at sea and on land at the same time, over great distances?”

  “It could, if we had satellite coverage. But we don’t. Still, even with our reduced capacity, in this antique environment, we could sink every capital ship in the Japanese navy before they even realized their cocks were on the chopping block.”

  Nimitz frowned at the obscenity, but he let it pass without comment. He let his eyes drift over the bridge crew and their equipment. Each crewmember was stationed at a glowing screen, which they occasionally brushed with their fingertips, sometimes to no discernible effect and sometimes with obvious consequences. Nimitz watched as one young seaman danced his fingers over a screen that pulsed and flowed with different colors and shapes under the caress.