Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  She gave CPO Toohey a small gray plastic rectangle. He waved it under a computing machine Black didn’t recognize. It must have read the information on the stick somehow, because the screen lit up.

  “Whoa! We got us a celebrity!” The chief grinned. He was a tattooed old sea dog who would have fit right in on the Enterprise. “This is a premium piece of tail you got yourself, buddy. Authorized for deployment with main force infantry units. Rated to cover close-quarter combat. And cleared for tactical briefings up to and including the Classified Level Oh Three.”

  “Thank you, Chief,” Duffy cooed, smiling broadly. “Your check’s in the mail.”

  That just irritated Black all the more. Julia had been on his back about the way he spoke to the women in the Multinational Force, even though he was a goddamn paragon compared with most of the other guys. And here was this lughead talking about her like she was some kind of bar girl, right in front of her, and she fucking joked right back at him!

  But he kept his mouth shut, because he didn’t trust his boiling temper.

  The armory was a hive of activity. He had no idea what units most of the men and women who were checking out weapons and armor belonged to. Why they even had an armory like this on a carrier was a mystery to him. But even if they had a legitimate reason to tool up, he didn’t see that a lady reporter had any call to be down here. No matter how tough she liked to think she was.

  As Black fumed, the long lines of troopers moved through. An amazing array of guns and equipment came over the counter. The chief ran his eyes down the text on the screen, nodding and grunting as if he’d found a great buy on a used car.

  “Hey, you embedded with the Hundred and First for South Yemen,” he said to Julia, during a brief lull. “My brother was in that. Jeez, what a fucking circus that was.”

  “Got shot in the ass by one of the clowns,” said Duffy.

  She was doing this on purpose now. Black was certain. And Chief Toohey seemed to be playing along.

  “Okay, Ms. Duffy. You taking body armor?”

  She nodded. “Brought my own on board, back in Darwin. You should have it in there somewhere. Serial number’s on the data stick. It’s a Brooks Brothers, T-nine carbon-titanium weave, size ten.”

  “I woulda said size eight.”

  “You’re too kind, Chief.”

  Dan rolled his eyes.

  He noticed that one of Julia’s fellow reporters had fronted the counter a few spots down. He seemed to want nothing more than a flak jacket and helmet.

  “You gonna take a personal weapon, Ms. Duffy?”

  “Do bears shit in the woods?”

  “I’ve heard rumors to that effect. Okay, I can let you have a cut-down AR-15, but not the grenade launcher.”

  “How about a G-4?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. You’re not rated for that.”

  Julia chewed her lip. Dan was ready to explode. This was nuts, the whole thing, her going in with the marines, the body armor, the guns. What sort of a reporter was she?

  An unemployed one, for starters.

  “You got an MP-5 back there, Chief Toohey? They don’t get in the way when I’m working. But they do have a knack for bringing unpleasant encounters to a quick end.”

  “Indeed they do, ma’am.”

  Toohey tapped a flexipad with his pen. It beeped once.

  “How many mags you lookin’ at, Ms. Duffy?”

  “Four, thanks. Taped in pairs. If I need any more, we’re all in trouble. Dumdums would be super, if you got ’em.”

  The flexipad beeped as he tapped it again.

  “Sidearm?”

  “Mac 10.”

  Beep.

  “Knife?”

  “Got my own. But I could use an empty helmet. I’m gonna load up with a Panasonic Twenty-three Hundred minicam rig. It snaps right in where one of your tac sets would go.”

  Beep.

  “Okay, then, just gimme a second I’ll grab your gear.”

  Toohey disappeared into the storeroom.

  “Go on, Dan. I can see you’re going to blow steam out of your ears if you don’t say something.”

  Black controlled his temper with great difficulty.

  “I don’t see the point, is all,” he said, his jaw tight.

  Julia shrugged. “You wouldn’t. It’s my job.”

  “You don’t have a job. You keep saying that yourself, about a thousand goddamn times a day.”

  “That’s right,” she said, pushing off the scarred counter with a cold fury suddenly lighting her eyes. “I don’t have a goddamn job. I have nothing here. Nothing! Except that I know how to move around a firefight without getting my ass blown away.”

  People started looking their way.

  “I got no fucking job. No fucking life. I’m stuck in the wrong fucking century and my fucking Prozac has run out. I am far from fucking happy.”

  “I don’t know why Kolhammer even agreed to let you go,” Black countered angrily as his exasperation finally got the better of him.

  Duffy snorted.

  “Because he knows he’s going to need a positive spin on this whole fucking disaster.”

  Kolhammer, like Halabi, had corralled his guests into the now obsolete satellite warfare section of his CIC. Spruance, Halsey, and a couple of other ’temps he didn’t recognize had sat themselves down and were taking in the feverish pace of the center while Lieutenant Thieu tried to explain how it all fit together.

  They didn’t care that the Clinton didn’t have live satellite links to the Singapore task force or the submarine standing off Hashirajima. To them, coordinated strategic strikes hitting three locations at once, and feeding back battlefield images within an hour or two, was the stuff of magic. Every movie screen in the huge, chilly cavern of the Combat Information Center held something of interest, so that they didn’t know where to focus. Tanks plowing through lines of Japanese field guns on Singapore. Storm troopers in bulky “armor” dropping out of helicopters. Jet planes roaring off the one working catapult on the Clinton. Armored hovercraft on fat-bellied rubber skirts pounding through the waves toward Luzon. Marine Corps “jump jets” settling down vertically on the deck of the Kandahar. Missiles diving into Yamamoto’s anchorage at Hashirajima.

  Even the fact that most of the Combined Fleet had disappeared didn’t seem to bother them.

  As impressive as it all was, Kolhammer knew this was lulling them into a false sense of security. It was awesome, true, but it had its limits. He was running through land-attack missiles at a ruinous rate as they degraded the Japs’ ability to resist on Luzon. He envied Halabi her mission to Singapore. Sure, it was a tight trip through some very sharky waters, but she had all of her targets grouped. He had to fire on half a dozen sites over five hundred square kilometers, and even then, without good intel, he could never be sure he’d covered all the bases.

  He approached his guests. Spruance saw him coming and nodded.

  “It seems to be going well, Admiral, except for Hashirajima, and even then, I’m not going to quibble, with two carriers sunk.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” said Kolhammer. “I’ll be a lot happier when this next phase is done. Jones is going to have his hands full securing Manila and Cabanatuan.”

  “Two minutes, sir,” a weapons sysop called out. “Feeding drone coverage to the main screen.”

  The three giant panels that formed the main display had been running recorded footage sent by compressed burst from Halabi and Willet. They winked out to a featureless blue for a fraction of a second before coming back online with three live images transmitted from drones high over Luzon.

  The smallest of the three showed a city block in Cabanatuan. Thanks to the late hour, the town was asleep. No traffic moved on its streets. It could have been a still photo, except that trees were swaying in a breeze. A complex tapestry of targeting data suddenly appeared over a large white building, as a time hack counted down.

  “What is that place?” asked Spruance.

  “Regional s
ubcommand center for two Japanese divisions,” said Kolhammer. “It’s a residential as well as an administrative compound, so the higher command elements should all be there. We’ve had Marine Recon in-country for a week, scoping it out for us.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Main garrison. It used to be a Philippine army barracks. Now the Japs are in there.”

  The time hack reached zero.

  Something flashed across the screen of the smaller window and the whole city block on which the targeted building had stood erupted in a volcanic blast. Even the drone’s sophisticated cameras were unable to cope, and the screen blanked out to white for a few seconds.

  Two heavy missiles were assigned to the main Japanese camp, which lay sixteen kilometers from the POW camp. They bore in at the relatively low speed of three hundred knots, just above the tree line.

  As Kolhammer and Spruance watched silently, a small pop-up window showed a couple of sentries squeezing off a few random shots into the dark. Alerted by the gunfire, hundreds of figures spilled out of tents and barracks buildings.

  The missiles detonated and the army camp, in which fifteen thousand men lay abed, vanished inside a colossal explosion.

  “Sweet Jesus,” breathed Admiral Halsey. He had been briefed on the effects of the Wide Area Impact Munitions, but Kolhammer knew that to actually watch such power unleashed—especially for the first time—was a humbling, even a frightening experience. The surveillance drone refocused for a wide-angle shot just before detonation, allowing the audience in the CIC to view the blast from a virtual height of six thousand meters. It was obvious to all that nobody could have survived. Supersonic pressure waves blew out across the landscape from the blast centers, flattening trees and demolishing any structures they met for eight kilometers.

  “Is that going to hurt our men?” asked Halsey.

  “It’ll dissipate before it reaches them,” said Kolhammer.

  “This is better than ladies’ day at the country fucking fair,” Halsey said to Ray Spruance.

  “It’s only half the game, Bill.”

  “Yeah, but what a great fucking half.”

  The whine of the giant hovercraft’s turbofans was enormous, easily drowning out the snarl of the Sea Comanche gunships riding shotgun on the assault force. The sea state was benign, making for an effortless rush across the South China Sea toward the mouth of Manila Bay.

  Colonel Jones could see clearly from the small cabin of the LCAC. The fallen island bastion of Corregidor stood foursquare in the center of the bay’s entrance. It was easily distinguished from the black backdrop of the island because it was ablaze. Six subnuclear plasma-yield warheads had speared deep into the concrete carapace of the fortress and detonated, atomizing vast tonnages of concrete and steel, along with the thousands of human beings living within.

  “Damn, I’ll bet Krakatoa didn’t look half as impressive as that,” yelled the chief petty officer, who was driving the boat.

  They were still a long way out, but the conflagration seemed to fill the sky with a golden guttering light.

  “Chief Stavros,” Jones cried out amiably, “I don’t think I’ll take that bet.”

  A small supernova of fire and light blossomed from deep within the inferno. Jump jets screamed overhead, dashing in toward the coast to attack the half a dozen Japanese ships in the harbor. Jones was dimly aware of the small crew working furiously to keep them on the correct heading without the benefit of continual GPS update. They shouted course headings and detailed corrections at each other a few times every minute. At least the ride was smooth, a long gliding lope across the water.

  “Five minutes until we breach the entrance, Chief,” shouted a young sailor.

  “Thanks, Dolly. Better get buttoned up, Colonel,” Stavros bellowed over the cacophony. “Good luck, sir.”

  Jones clapped Stavros on the back, thanked him for the lift, and hurried down to the vehicle deck where his command LAV awaited him. There was no respite from the uproar of the turbofans and engines. Although it would appear as an armored behemoth to anyone who stood in its way, the LCAC itself wasn’t a combat vessel. Its task was to drop off two platoons from A Company in a half squadron of light armored vehicles.

  As Jones hustled down a corridor toward the vehicle deck, he quickly checked the flexipad that was Velcroed to his forearm. The other boats were all still in position, lying astern of his own. He strapped on his powered helmet, fitted the combat goggles, and jacked into the battalion tac net. His visual field instantly filled up with cascading streams of data. After thousands of hours of training and years of combat experience, it was a completely natural environment for him. He noted the disposition of his units, their progress toward the beach, and the condition of the enemy’s defenses without conscious thought. Small windows fed vision from the FLIR pods of the Comanche gunships. Others carried top-down footage, relayed from surveillance drones, of the dozen or so targeted sites within Manila. They were already burning fiercely, just like Corregidor. Secondary explosions erupted regularly as fuel and ammunition stocks cooked off.

  Jones wondered how many people had already died.

  “Colonel, sir?”

  Jones pulled up just short of the vehicle deck.

  “What’s up, Sar’nt?”

  Cocooned within layers of monobonded filament armor, goggles, helmet, and tac set, Gunny Harrison would have been unrecognizable to most people. But he and Jones had fought together for many years, and even if he hadn’t spoken, Jones would have known him immediately.

  “It’s the colonel sir, the observer.”

  “Maloney.”

  “Yeah. He’s not playing well with the other children.”

  For about the tenth time Julia Duffy checked the tabs on the ballistic gel pockets in her body armor. Her feet tapped rapidly on the nonslip floor of the LAV, and she kept raising her hand to her mouth in a nervous reflex. She wanted to chew her fingernails, but her heavy black gloves got in the way. She swore under her breath again.

  “Y’all okay, Ms. Duffy?”

  The name tag on giant trooper’s body armor identified him as BUKOWSKI. From the shoulder-slung gun rig, she knew he was a heavy-weapon carrier. He certainly was big enough, she mused. Even with his helmet off, he still had to crouch over in the confines of the LAV.

  “I tapped out my Prozac,” she said. “I’m just a little jumpy, that’s all.”

  “I got some Zoloft gum, if you’d like a stick,” said Bukowski.

  “Would I!”

  Julia would have leapt out of her seat, if it weren’t for the webbing which held her in place. Bukowski fished a stick of gum out of a pocket and stretched across the width of the vehicle to pass it to her.

  “Thank you, Specialist,” she said with real gratitude.

  “Is that gum? Do you think I could have some?”

  Julia recognized the voice. It was Captain Svensden, a ’temp—one of two observers traveling in the LAV. He seemed pretty cool, but his boss, Colonel Maloney, was an asshole. Svensden sat two down and across from her, but Maloney was thankfully right at the other end of the cabin, with Second Lieutenant Chen, the platoon commander.

  Even in the dim red interior light the ’temps both stood out. They wore armor, like everyone else, but neither rested comfortably within it. Svensden fiddled with his straps and Velcro tabs. And among the dozen passengers, Maloney was the only other person besides Bukowski who didn’t have a powered helmet strapped on. The graphics gave him motion sickness, he said. A pool of vomit lay at his feet, and the air con was working hard to scrub the smell of it from the cabin.

  Bukowski was about to toss a stick of the gum to Svensden when Julia spoke up. She didn’t have to shout. She was miked up and plugged into the tac net with the troopers.

  “Better not, Captain. It’s not Wrigley’s Spearmint. It’s a drug. Probably put you to sleep, since you haven’t built up any tolerance. These guys are used to it.”

  “What’s that?”

&nb
sp; Duffy cursed at herself. It was Colonel Maloney.

  “Is somebody drinking up there? Did I hear right. And is it that woman? Goddamn, that’s all we need.” Maloney tried to untangle himself from the restraining web. Chen reached an arm across the man’s chest, telling him to sit still.

  “Get your grubby little fingers of me, Chinaman!” the colonel shouted.

  Everybody in the LAV jumped at that. A few threw their hands up to their ears to deal with the shooting pain. Maloney’s throat mike had picked up the yell and amplified it tenfold across the audio net.

  “Fucking jerk,” muttered Duffy.

  “What did you say? What did that woman call me?” yelled Maloney.

  A couple of marines ripped off their helmets. One reached over and unplugged the audio cabling that connected Maloney with the link.

  “Shut the fuck up!” he said.

  Gunny Harrison threw back the hatch. The scene inside the LAV startled Jones. A fierce argument was under way. Almost nobody had their helmets on, as per regulations, and Colonel Maloney was out of his, standing in front of that Times reporter, jabbing his index finger at her. She appeared to be laughing, when she wasn’t blowing bubblegum in his face.

  “What the fuck is going here!” Jones shouted, loudly enough to be heard over the earsplitting drone of the turbofans and the commotion inside the cabin. The LAV was uncomfortably close to the huge Avco Lycoming gas turbine plants and the main propulsion fans. Jones took a deep breath, sucking in trace odors of diesel, gun oil, human sweat, and bile from the pile of sick that dripped out of the cabin and onto his boots. He let rip with a blast that would have done his old drill instructor proud.

  “Colonel Maloney. Sit your ass down, put your goddamn helmet on, and shut the fuck up. You are just here to watch. Nothing else. We transit the beachhead in a few minutes, and people are gonna start dying. Unless you want to give me any more grief, in which case we’ll start the dying right here and now, because God help me if you endanger any part of this mission at any point I will shoot you in the fucking head and throw you overboard myself!”