Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  “At least I recognize that,” he smiled, indicating the periscope.

  “We still use it,” said Willet, “but not much. We do most of our business via the bloc.”

  “And your business will be in Hashirajima,” said Nimitz.

  “If they’re at home. We won’t be going right in, so we won’t be able to use the torpedoes. But we’ll deploy a drone to light up the targets for us, then we’ll slam them with hypersonic cruise missiles. They drive themselves into the body of the target vessel and then go supernova. It’s quite a sight. Like a tiny sun has materialized inside the hull. Makes a hell of a mess. My weapons chief can brief you fully, if you wish. But all you really need to know is that one missile will kill a battleship or an aircraft carrier, or you get your money back. The Japs, they won’t have clue what hit them. If they’re real quick thinkers, they might just realize something’s wrong, and then they’ll be dead.”

  “And I take it you have this stealth business, too,” said Fraser.

  “We have a full range of stealth protocols and countermeasures. But most of them are redundant in this environment. The material coating our skin will simply absorb the primitive sonar available in this period. We could be sitting directly under a contemporary sub hunter, having a keg party, and they wouldn’t have a clue. It’s not fair, but then, you know, tough shit.”

  Nimitz was beginning to suspect that Bull Halsey would warm to this blunt female.

  “You seem very motivated, Commander.”

  Willet’s face didn’t soften, but her posture did, just marginally.

  “My great-grandfather was captured in Malaya, sir. He died on the Burma railway in 1943. The Japs caught him trying to escape, killed nine of his mates right there in front of him. Then they tied him to a tree and used him for bayonet practice. But right now, he’s in Changi. I never knew him, of course. But I loved my granddad, and I remember him crying when he’d talk about his father. I’d like to give him back his old man.”

  Captain Francois mashed the palms of her hands into the balls of her eyes, trying to rub out the feeling of hot sand. She hadn’t slept in twenty-six hours, and it was beginning to affect her judgment. She would need to get some time in the rack very soon. But first she had one more cut to make.

  She leaned forward, her lower back aching, and scanned the list again. The screen showed a register of every patient she might—just might, mind you—be able to transfer from the fleet’s shipborne hospitals to Pearl’s more primitive shore-based facilities. She needed to free up another 150 beds to accommodate the critical cases they would likely pick up in Singapore and Luzon.

  She just didn’t see how she could do it without killing at least seventy or eighty patients.

  “What a fucked-up way to earn a dollar,” she grumbled.

  Perhaps the burn case off the Astoria? They’re used to dealing with burns here. Perhaps he could go ashore.

  She reached out to click the mouse and consign the man to dark ages medicine.

  “No,” she sighed, stopping herself. “He’d die for sure.”

  She spat a quiet curse at the ceiling of her office and went back to the start of the list.

  At her elbow lay another file, one she pored over compulsively when she wasn’t working on the patient lists. It was the results of her postmortem examination of Anderson and Miyazaki. It included the DNA profiles of the men who’d raped the Leyte Gulf’s captain. She felt sick every time she read it. But she was convinced that if Anderson and Miyazaki were to have justice, it would come from their own people. Not from someone like “Buster” Cherry.

  There was something else about the case that she hadn’t discussed with anyone. It brought back memories. Not just of the war crimes she’d worked for the UN in Srebrenica and Denpasar, but also of her own rape, at the age of seventeen.

  Margie Francois had been a premed college freshman when a bunch of drunken jocks had jumped her as she walked back to her dorm from the library, late at night. She’d never told anyone about it. There were times when she still felt ashamed.

  Kolhammer stood in the bridge of the Clinton, watching the activity down on her flight deck. Hundreds of men and women toiled around the clock to prepare her for war. The feeling recalled the days before the Transition, when they were still preparing to deploy into the Indonesian Archipelago.

  He was still getting by on only four or five hours’ sleep. There was so much to do. The Multinational Force was battered and much reduced, but it was still the most powerful fleet of ships on the face of the earth at this time. He had the Kandahar and the two ships of her MEU intact. The torpedo strike on the marine flattop had been patched up well enough to put her back to sea. The Kennebunkport and the Providence had come through relatively unscathed. HMS Trident lay at anchor just abaft of them, and the Siranui beyond her. She was now crewed by Japanese and American sailors, the latter mostly coming from the Leyte Gulf. Those Japanese who did not feel they could fight against their forebears, about 80 percent of the crew, would await her return on shore.

  He couldn’t see the submarine Havoc. She was prowling the approaches to Midway.

  The Australian troop carrier Moreton Bay had been patched up and quickly fitted out as a hospital ship. The four hundred members of the Second Cavalry Regiment who had been on their way to Timor in her were now squeezed into the monohulled assault ship HMAS Ipswich with their armour.

  And of course, there was the Clinton.

  Only one of her catapults had been repaired. She had but four jet fighters in one piece. Nearly three-quarters of her combat power was gone, wiped out at Midway, and her corridors were much less crowded. They’d buried so many of her complement at sea.

  But like her murdered namesake, the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States, she was a hard-charging, life-taking bitch who’d crush anyone or anything that got in her way.

  He trained his binoculars on the old Enterprise. She was as much a scene of activity as the Clinton. He wasn’t sure that he agreed with Nimitz’s decision that she accompany them, but he didn’t feel he could argue against it. If nothing else it gave them more carrying capacity, and they’d need it. They were looking to bring home nearly twenty thousand prisoners.

  “Penny for your thoughts, sir?” asked Commander Judge.

  Kolhammer lowered the glasses.

  “I just hope we can pull it off, Mike,” he said. “We’re doing the right thing. I’m sure of that. But there’s any number of things that can go wrong.”

  “That’s right,” said Judge. “Can and probably will, when the shooting starts. But it’s like you said, Admiral. It’s the right thing.”

  Dan Black came awake to the smell of freshly brewed coffee. For one terrible instant he thought Ray Spruance was about to subject him to another mug of his terrible java. Then his head cleared and he remembered he was in bed at the Moana, not in his bunk on the Enterprise. The room was still, but a figure was coming toward him.

  “Here, get this into you, Daniel. We’ve got to get back to Pearl in an hour.”

  Julia pushed the coffee toward him before opening the curtains. The reporter was already dressed in the jeans and hiking boots she seemed to prefer. He had been hoping for a little roll before heading off, but she was all business.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, Dan, but we’re both shipping out today, and my call is a little earlier than yours. I figured you’d want a brew to wake up.”

  “There are better ways to wake up, darling.”

  She ruffled his hair affectionately, but without a hint of sexual playfulness.

  “There are,” she agreed, “but we’ve got to get to work.”

  His heart tripped over in his chest.

  “You’re going to work? You got your job back in New York? I was hoping we’d be able to see more of each other.”

  Julia was halfway through a big mouthful of coffee, which Dan’s slightly panicky outburst fo
rced her to cut short.

  “Just be cool,” she gulped. “I’m not going to New York yet. They still haven’t let us contact our offices, those of us who actually have them. No, I’m going out with the Clinton.”

  Dan fumbled in the dark to set his cup down on the bedside table. His eyes were adjusting to the dark, and he could see the defiant set to her arms.

  “You’re going into combat?”

  “I have no idea where we’re going. They’ll tell us just before we need to know. But Kolhammer decided he wants us there. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I guess.”

  “But—”

  Julia made a chopping gesture.

  “Let’s not do this scene, okay, the one where you tell me it’s no place for a woman, I could get hurt, you’re only trying to protect me.”

  “But all those things are true.”

  “They’re not. Not all of them.”

  “But—”

  “No. Dan, I’ve seen more combat than you. End of story. I’m touched that you feel strongly enough to be an asshole about it, but if you and I are to have any sort of future, you’ll have to accept that it’s me you’re with. Not your idea of me, and what I should be. I don’t know what’s coming, but I know my job. Ninety minutes from now I clock on again, so drink up. We’ll split a ride back to Pearl. They’re sending a couple of Humvees. They’ll be downstairs in half an hour.”

  Dan Black was in free fall. He had never been spoken to like that, had never even heard of a woman speaking like that. Julia stood there in the dawn an intruder, raking at the secret places in his heart.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  She didn’t even give him the benefit of a slight hesitation.

  “No, Dan, not yet anyway. I’d like us to live together for a while first. See how we go with the daily grind when we don’t have all this bullshit to keep us entertained. If we’re still fucking like rabbits at the end of that, ask me again.”

  “You want to live in sin?”

  “Yeah. It sounds really sexy when you put it like that, doesn’t it.”

  He was completely unbalanced by her. Women weren’t supposed to bat away a proposal of marriage. That’s not how it worked in the movies. They were supposed to collapse into your chest and burst into tears. Julia was stuffing her running shoes into a gym bag and Dan wondered if he might actually get teary. Up to now he’d always suspected there was nobody special for him—and then she’d stepped through a rupture in space and time.

  “I think I’m falling in love with you, Julia.”

  She stopped stuffing the bag and came over to sit down next to him, placing a hand on his thigh.

  “Dan, you think that because we’ve shared an intense period of excitement, where we found ourselves physically attracted, and then intrigued by the strangeness that sits just under our similarities. We’re sexually compatible. I suspect we’re emotionally and intellectually well matched, too. And before your face gets any longer, it’s a two-way street, I think I’m falling in love with you, too.”

  They nearly missed the ride back to Pearl.

  38

  HMAS HAVOC, 2003 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  The control room of the Havoc was unnaturally quiet as the navigator, Lieutenant Malcolm Knox, manipulated a dozen icons on the meter-wide touch screen at his workstation. Without GPS satellites, the task of position fixing was much more difficult. The sub’s inertial navigation processors could place them with reasonable accuracy about three hundred nautical miles south of the Japanese home island of Shikoku, but Captain Willet wasn’t a reasonable woman. She’d often said that without GPS coverage the modern military couldn’t find its own arse with both hands in a small, well-lit room. The joke had come back to bite her.

  “How’s that fix coming?” she asked the navigator.

  “Just scanning for the last beacon, ma’am.”

  They’d placed three position transmitters on the way over, on small rocky islets for which they knew the exact holomap reference points. Willet practiced a breathing exercise while she waited for the Havoc’s quantum arrays to calibrate and align the incoming signals. She watched a small blue bar crawl across a window in the navigator’s flatscreen. When the bar was filled, a series of faint chimes sounded and Knox gave her the thumbs-up.

  “We have a firm position fix, ma’am. CI is plotting firing solutions for the drone launch.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Knox. Weapons?”

  “VLS Three is armed, Captain. Boards green. And we have the solution.”

  A soft, familiar tone sounded once as the submarine’s Combat Intelligence downloaded flight data to a Tenix Defense Industries surveillance mace.

  “Take her down to one hundred meters and launch,” Willet ordered.

  The voice of the CI, a factory default mid-Pacific accent, warned the crew to prepare for a dive. The conning tower was sealed. Nobody had gone topside when they surfaced, so there were no hatches to shut. Procedure had to be followed, however, and the officer of the watch cycled through all the CCTV cams, calling each one clear as he checked for personnel who couldn’t possibly be on deck.

  Captain Willet felt the nonslip flooring tilt beneath her feet and reached for a grab bar with practiced grace. Strapped into their chairs, the Combat Center sysops continued to work at their stations, leaning against the angle of the sub’s descent.

  “One hundred meters, ma’am.”

  “Launch the Big Eye,” said Willet.

  “VLS Three launching, Captain, in five, four, three, two, one, launch.”

  She heard and felt the discarding sabot spit out of the vertical launch tube in the forward missile bay. Her intel controller, Lieutenant Lohrey, counted off the seconds until the cruise missile discarded its casing.

  “Big Eye has fired, Captain,” she announced. “Tracking for Hashirajima. On station in seventeen minutes.”

  A quarter of an hour later and hundreds of miles away the nose of the surveillance mace split open and ejected an object that looked very much like a Frisbee. Its mission done, the missile continued on across the home island of Honshu before diving down into the Sea of Japan and destroying itself.

  The small whirring drone, a doughnut of superlight plasteel wrapped around a high-speed turbofan, deployed a series of antennae. Tiny doors swung open on the underside and long spools of microlight fiber dropped down from the ring.

  A thousand kilometers to the south, the command center of the submarine HMAS Havoc was quiet as she lurked just below the waves with a high-gain antenna deployed. The boat’s active and passive arrays were all operating at maximum return. The men and women on board were still and tense as the Havoc waited, like a predator. Signals from her telescoping mast pulsed across the sky, unheeded until they brushed past the tendrils of monobonded filament dangling beneath the drone.

  The feed from Hashirajima came online at 2021.

  “We have contact and control,” said Lohrey as two screens lit up in front of her with a live feed from the Big Eye surveillance module. One screen carried multiple windows, showing a cascading series of numbers and letters. The other displayed three video windows. Infrared, low light, and a blank rectangle for full color.

  Willet immediately recognized the outline of Hiroshima Bay and the Kure Naval District, but she waited while the CI cross-matched the incoming vision with its holomap banks.

  “Target confirmed,” said Lohrey. “I’m moving Big Eye south, Captain. We’re about eighteen thousand meters north of the anchorage. We have a tailwind of one hundred fifteen knots. Should be there inside six minutes.”

  The scene relayed back from the drone was eerily beautiful. Six separate drone-cams panned wide to take in as much of the world below as possible. Willet could see the old castle city of Iwakuni sitting astride the Nishiki River with its back to the Renka and Rakan mountain ranges. Iwakuni was a major industrial center, but the wide-angle infrared cams transformed it into something ghostly and medieval, reminding her of the fantasy novels
she’d read as a teenager.

  The Seto-naikai, as the Japanese called the five water basins lying between Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, were home to hundreds of islands. Willet silently wondered how many of them were populated at this time. Quite a few, she guessed, if only by antiaircraft gun crews, watching the skies over the home waters of the Japanese fleet. Dozens of them drifted across a large window displaying light-amplified video. They looked like small, irregular emeralds.

  Small boats were clustered around some, probably belonging to fishing communities or one of the many villages devoted to harvesting salt from the shores of the Seto-naikai. As the drone moved away from the twisting, corrugated channels and inlets of Edajima Island toward Hashirajima itself, larger vessels began to appear. Destroyers and corvettes. Oilers, seaplane tenders, and torpedo boats. Minelayers and depot ships, submarines and sub chasers. She smiled at the thought of being pursued by the latter.

  The first capital ship appeared on screen, and the Havoc’s commander whistled softly.

  “You sexy, sexy bitch. What d’you say, Chief?”

  Her senior enlisted man, CPO Flemming, leaned forward to peer at the screen.

  “Looks like a second-class cruiser, ma’am. Maybe the Kumano or Mogami.”

  Willet smiled at her chief petty officer.

  “You should really get out more, Roy.”

  “Tried to pop outside for a quick smoke before, Cap’n. Got wet.”

  Big Eye was relaying footage of more and more capital ships. But not as many as Willet had expected.

  “Have we got a full house, Ms. Lohrey?” she asked.

  “Afraid not, ma’am. Looks like some of them shot through. Only two carriers visible so far.”