Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  “Acknowledged,” said Sheehan.

  Lieutenant Nguyen stretched her neck and back muscles. Her seat was comfortable, but she’d been sitting in it for hours.

  She watched her main screen as the two contemporary destroyers piled on speed and hove to. The ships were visible in four separate windows.

  “They’re placing themselves between the threat and the convoy,” said Sheehan.

  “What’s the point?” asked Nguyen.

  Sheehan patted her on the shoulder.

  “You really don’t have salt water in your veins do you, Lieutenant?”

  HMS TRIDENT, 2143 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  “What are those ships doing?” Halabi demanded.

  She was in the CIC, below the waterline, but she could see the destroyers on any number of screens through the center.

  “Their job, Captain,” said Rear Admiral Sir Leslie Murray.

  “No, they’re not. Tell them to resume position. I can’t have your bloody ships tearing all over the ocean. Everybody holds position and everybody gets to go home in one piece.”

  The mood in the CIC was thoroughly unpleasant. Sir Leslie was entirely to blame for that. He’d insisted on coming, even produced a cable from Winston Churchill ordering him aboard the Trident. Halabi had relented, against her better judgment, and had been regretting it every day since.

  A Welsh voice rang out. “Contacts will be within visual range of the convoy within five minutes, ma’am.”

  “Targets acquired and missiles on the rack, Captain.”

  Halabi was disinclined to waste two perfectly good antiair missiles to bring down a couple of canvas-and-balsa-wood kites. She ignored Murray’s irritating presence to her left and thought it through. They were deep in Japanese-controlled waters. The aircraft had probably been vectored onto them after coast watchers had spotted the convoy. They were passing through one of the most populated archipelagos in the world. This wasn’t really a stealth operation.

  Halabi checked the mission clock on the main screen.

  The advance teams were already on the ground in Singapore. They’d been there for nearly a day.

  “What’s going on, Halabi,” said Rear Admiral Murray. “Are you going to see off these Japs or what?”

  “Tell your ships to resume their position and please sit down where I told you, Sir Leslie. We’re about to get busy.”

  She returned to her command seat and took one last look at the disposition of her forces. Sir Leslie was, with much bad grace, speaking into a microphone, telling the captains of the Rockingham and the Sherwood to resume their previous stations.

  “Four minutes until they see us, Captain.”

  “Weapons,” she called out.

  “Aye, ma’am!”

  “Power up the autocannon, high-explosive antiaircraft ordnance, and slave to the Nemesis arrays. Sensors!”

  “Aye, ma’am!”

  “Try get a lock with the long-range mast-cams. Let’s get a peek at them.”

  The young technical officer leaned to his task, which wasn’t all that easy in the steep swell. He linked the gyroscopically mounted cameras to the Trident’s radar in order to establish an initial contact, but with that achieved it was down to his dexterity with a trackball to achieve a laser lock that captured the aircraft for the camera.

  A window on the center’s main screen, which had been filled with static, suddenly cleared. Grainy video of two big, four-engine, prop-driven planes filled it.

  “That’s a couple of Emily flying boats, Captain,” said Rear Admiral Murray. “Recon planes.”

  The clicking of fingers across keyboards became faster and a touch louder. The buzz of voices picked up a little.

  “Weapons,” said Halabi. “Estimated time to fire mission?”

  “Twenty-three seconds, ma’am.”

  “Guns hot.”

  “Guns hot, Captain.”

  Halabi ignored the video, concentrating instead on the screen at her side that rendered the battlespace into animated form. Blinking icons that represented the two aircraft kept moving toward them and flashed blue for another twenty seconds. Then they turned red with a ping.

  “Fire,” said Halabi.

  The weapons boss punched two buttons. Halabi felt and heard the autocannon cycle through a brief burst of shell fire. It sounded like a very short, frenzied drumbeat, less than a second.

  “That’s it?” asked Murray, somewhat incredulous. “You’re sure you got them.”

  The Trident’s commander pointed to the flatscreen in front of them. “Quickly, Sir Leslie, or you’ll miss it.”

  The Royal Navy liaison officer turned back to the video coverage. At that instant both planes disintegrated in a sudden and silent eruption of fire and light. The long, heavy-looking hulls detonated into a dozen pieces before dropping away as the wings folded up like a book snapping shut, and the last of the debris dropped out of shot on the screen.

  “You were asking if I was certain,” said Halabi.

  “My mistake,” said Murray, who had been subdued by the spectacle.

  “Signals, what did they get off?” Halabi called across the CIC.

  “Just a brief transmission, Captain. Less than two seconds.”

  She gestured to the technician to play it on the CIC speaker system. A hiss of static flared and dropped away as a Japanese voice said a few calm words before being cut off in midsentence.

  AIR STATION TWENTY-THREE, SUMATRA, 2155 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  The Japanese squadron had trained exclusively for night fighting since 1937. Ironically, and much to the men’s disgust, their special skills had kept them out of the most important battles of the war so far. There had been no call for them because the American and British fliers couldn’t take their pathetic oxcarts into the air at night, so there was no enemy to oppose. Squadron Leader Murata had insisted on training at the same fever pitch, however, even after it became obvious to them that they would most likely never fire a shot in combat.

  As he sat in the cockpit of his Zero, the engine growling, a line of firepots stretching out in front of him down the crude runway of pressed dirt, Captain Murata’s heart raced. Not with fear, but with the fierce joy of a samurai who has spent his life preparing for combat. None of his men was quite sure what was steaming down the strait, and their airplanes were not, strictly speaking, designed for attacking surface ships. But he was sure they’d still give a good account of themselves with their 20mm cannon.

  He’d order the ammunition changed, to include a heavier load of incendiary tracers. If you pumped enough of them into a tanker it would go up like a giant bomb. At least so they hoped. This, too, was a theory that had never been tested.

  His ground crew chief banged on the canopy, and Murata pulled it shut over his head, only slightly muting the engine’s howl. He examined his instruments with the aid of a small flashlight fitted with a red bulb that wouldn’t degrade his night vision. Everything was as it should be. He pushed the throttle forward. The chocks came out from under his wheels, and he immediately began to bump up and down in the padded seat as he rolled along the slightly corrugated runway.

  He gripped the stick, increased his speed, and dropped the flaps as the firepots blurred into one long yellow streak in the darkness outside the cockpit. Acceleration pushed him back into the seat.

  He flicked a switch to turn on the blinking red lights at his wingtips. The rest of the squadron would follow these lights up into the sky. The tiny strip of light that was their airfield fell away below. The other planes strung out behind him, small snorts of blue flame coughing occasionally from the engine cowlings. Only moments after takeoff Murata spotted the three Imperial Japanese Navy destroyers, far ahead of them in the strait. If he could spot three relatively small vessels like that so quickly, there was little doubt he would find this mystery convoy before long.

  Murata hoped the air controllers had done their job. It wouldn’t do to be shot down by his own navy as he flew over them. But he needn’t
have worried. His Majesty’s Imperial Japanese Navy was the finest in the world. Murata’s squadron roared over them without incident.

  He took a moment to appreciate the scenery in this, his last few minutes as an unblooded warrior. The world was a patchwork of shadows and deeper darkness. The island of Sumatra was a black void to his left, a line of mountains discernible only where the stars disappeared, cut off by the highest ridges. The waters of strait unfurled below like a great, wide ribbon of lesser blackness, shot through with diamonds as small waves threw back shards of light from the half-moon, hanging like an ancient blade in the night sky.

  It took them less than an hour to reach their objective.

  Murata waggled his wings, signaling to the other Zero pilots that they should form up on him and prepare for a strafing run. Below them, in the strait, the spreading wakes of the big, slow-moving ships taunted him. They weren’t taking evasive action. They weren’t firing at him. They must be asleep, he decided.

  He smiled.

  They simply could not be allowed to proceed as if they cared nothing for the might of imperial Japan. Murata took a deep breath, centering himself in his hara. The Zero became more than just a machine. It was a divine blade, an embodiment of the emperor’s will. Descended from gods, destined to take dominion over the lesser peoples of the world, the spirit of the blessed Emperor Hirohito rode with him in this plane. Murata could actually feel the presence of divinity as he plunged down on the prey.

  Then an explosion rocked him.

  Ah, awake at last, white man.

  For one brief shining moment, he knew the rapture of the samurai. Nothing could deflect him, the emperor’s sword, from slashing into the enemy. Not high-explosive shells, nor twisting lines of tracer. Not 20mm Oerlikon cannon, or Bofors mounts, or even the bark and cough of five-inch guns on the enemy destroyers.

  He almost laughed with glee, and then . . .

  Murata gasped.

  The explosions weren’t flak bursts. They were the planes of his comrades, disintegrating in dirty, orange balls of flame. Within seconds the sky was empty, save for the burning wreckage tumbling toward the sea. Murata’s eyes bulged at the sight. Wings sheathed in flame fluttered downward like cherry blossoms. Strangely beautiful cascades of fire rained down as aviation gas ignited. He was certain he saw the nose of a Zero, the propeller still turning. It flew past him like a blazing comet.

  He had time to wonder why his own plane was suddenly so hot.

  And then he was consumed in a fiery maelstrom.

  The focus of activity in the Trident’s CIC shifted from the antiair division to antisurface. Halabi brushed past Sir Leslie, jostling him slightly on her way over the small group of workstations. The Royal Navy’s representative to Hawaii said nothing. He’d been silenced by the brutal efficiency with which Halabi and her crew had wiped out the Japanese squadron. The Zero had achieved a mythical status every bit as powerful as the RAF’s own Spitfire. To see them swatted away like flies was a rather confrontational experience for the rear admiral.

  “Excuse me,” Halabi said as she brushed past him again.

  “Yes, of course, Captain,” he muttered in a distracted fashion. He watched, fascinated, as Halabi clasped her hands behind her back and considered the feed from the drone they had hovering above the three Japanese ships a few hundred kilometers ahead. The screen was split into two panels displaying low light and infrared. The enemy ships were steaming toward her at what must be their top speed. White water boiled at their sterns in the pale opalescent green of the low-light video, while hot smoke poured from the glowing stacks amidships of each vessel on the infrared window. Murray had trouble believing the God’s-eye view of battle on the huge screen in front of him.

  The destroyers were tagged as Hostiles 01 through 03. Flashing icons marked the spot where the Zeros had died. A time hack over the island of Singapore read 2321, indicating the amount of time the SAS had been on the ground.

  Halabi could kill the destroyers now, but she said that she wanted to close with them, placing her own ships closer to their objective before alerting the Japanese to the fact that a major force had made a forced entry into their waters.

  “Designate them, Mr. McTeale, and launch on my mark.”

  The Trident’s commander turned briefly in Murray’s direction. “You can watch the missile launch on the display, Admiral. Just there in front of you.”

  Rear Admiral Murray stared at the monitor, where a movie showing the activity on the upper decks was running in black and white. It seemed rather pointless to him—the Trident was mostly featureless. As he was about to turn away, however, a hexagonal cap flipped open. An Indian-looking chap at a bank of nearby controls spoke up with a flawless Surrey accent.

  “Hard target lock confirmed. Firing in three, two, one . . .”

  Murray watched the screen again. White smoke and flame jetted from the silo and a dark bolt shot out with surprising speed. He heard the rocket’s takeoff as dull thunder that echoed through the hull.

  The image switched instantly and he found himself viewing the Trident as if from another ship. The screen filled with a panoramic view that clearly showed a long, curving finger of smoke climbing away into the night sky.

  The image switched again to another wide-angle shot. Six more gray spears erupted from the deck. He felt this launch through the soles of his feet, as a small earthquake. He had no real idea what was going on, and the men and women around him gave little indication. There seemed to be a slightly increased level of activity at the dense banks of computer stations, but . . .

  Murray felt a tap on his arm. One of Halabi’s young men, an ensign, directed his attention to the giant video wall that dominated the darkened battle room.

  “That’s a full-spectrum Nemesis battlespace display, sir,” the man said quietly. “You’ve got radar, drone coverage, and over there, in the corner, a feed from the camera in the nose of the missiles.”

  To Murray, the monochrome image also seemed very unstable.

  He cast his eyes around the Combat Center.

  Every screen was attended by an operator. All of them seemed to be talking at once and somewhat to Murray’s surprise, the captain stood in the center of this ferment, calmly providing instructions without a hint of panic. She seemed almost graceful.

  “Weapons bring the hammerheads around to one-oh-four.”

  “One-oh-four, ma’am.”

  Murray stared into a large screen carrying a black-and-white movie radioed back from the camera in the nose of the lead missile.

  “Weapons, I want simultaneous hits on those destroyers. Quickly now. We don’t want any intel leakage, if possible.”

  A young black woman near Murray click-clacked at the plastic keys of her computing machine with a speed and confidence that astonished the admiral. Surely one false keystroke would doom the mission.

  Halabi appeared in front of him.

  “All done.”

  “But they’re—”

  “Watch the screen, Admiral.”

  Murray saw then that the center’s main screen had split into a confusing grid of tiled windows. Some carried jumpy, black-and-white footage of the Japanese ships. In the space of a few seconds the outline of each target swelled to fill the screen. Then all the displays turned black.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Murray. “Where did the pictures go? Were all the rockets shot down?”

  “No, Sir Leslie. Think, what would happen to the camera when the missile struck armor plating.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

  HIJMS AKATSUKI, 2348 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  Commander Osamu Takasuka surveyed the heaving ocean from his eyrie’s nest. It was only mildly turbulent tonight, with the bows knifing through meter-and-a-half waves. Still, each plunge of the ship threw plumes of water high into the air.

  Takasuka wondered what awaited them ahead. The fleet had been alive with rumor ever since the canceled mission to Midway. Some said the Russians had declared
war. Others claimed with righteous certainty that the Americans were about to capitulate. One wild tale originating with an old salt on their sister ship, the destroyer Hokaze, spoke of a gigantic whirlpool that had sucked two American carriers down to the very bottom of the Coral Sea. By the time that rumor had reached Takasuka’s ears, it had twisted itself into a perverse story that as you dropped down the funnel you could see old Viking raiders and the bones of Roman galleys on the gray floor of the seabed.

  He never failed to be amazed at the bullshit sailors were able to dream up.

  As he stood into the freshening breeze, waiting for a radio message relating what the Zeros had discovered up the strait, he thought perhaps a falling star had dropped from the heavens in front of them. He gazed at the sight, captivated by its simple beauty, until it became apparent that the bright comet trail wasn’t moving from the heavens toward the waves, but across them, toward him.

  More lights appeared, and he tried to get a fix on them through his binoculars, but the heaving motion of the ship and the shaking of his hands made it impossible. The fantastic speed of the lights struck him next, and the sense of intent that seemed to lurk behind their progress. At that point he raised the alarm.

  Bells rang and Klaxons blared but it was too late.

  Lieutenant Commander Takasuka’s existence came to an end inside an expanding globe of hellfire.

  Another four missiles shrieked over the scene on their way to Singapore.

  40

  SINGAPORE, 2351 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  The heel of a Japanese sentry’s boot pressed into the earth fifteen centimeters from the tip of Captain Harry Windsor’s royal nose. The prince’s night vision goggles were switched to low-light amplification and small-unit narrowcasting. The other members of his section, including Sergeant St. Clair and two Australian SAS troops, captured the video feed in lime green on the small pop-up window in the corner of their own goggles.