Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  Maloney stood with his mouth hanging open, like he’d been caught with his pants down. But Jones meant every word of it and the colonel must have known, because he flashed a quick, sour glare at the civilian woman before returning to his position.

  A split-screen display dominated the Clinton’s CIC. Real-time footage beamed back from Manila sat next to a CGI map of the same area with dozens of targets and mission objectives highlighted by flashing tags, alphanumeric codes, unit designations, and small icons. Admiral Spruance had no real idea of what it all meant, but at least he could see the burning hulks of Japanese ships in the harbor, and the dazzling emerald brilliance of more fires spotted throughout the city.

  “It’s fuckin’ amazing, don’t you think?” muttered Admiral Halsey, sitting next to him in the old antisatellite work bay.

  “What, the movies themselves, or what they’re showing?” asked Spruance.

  “The whole fucking thing. I mean, look at the way they hit those Jap positions in Manila. It’s like needlepoint or something, when you think of what the Nazis did to London with the Blitz.”

  “But the Krauts meant to tear up the city,” said Spruance.

  “True enough.”

  Halsey leaned over from the comfort of his chair. The medication they’d given him had effectively cleared up his shingles, and his mood had improved as rapidly as his butt. But Spruance knew him well, and the look in his eyes gave him away.

  “What’s up, Bull? You don’t look entirely happy. The Japs are dying like flies out there. I thought you’d be in a downright festive mood.”

  Halsey glanced around the busy Combat Center. As much as you could be left alone in such a crowded, frenetic place, they were, at least for the moment. Kolhammer and Judge were across the room, busy coordinating the simultaneous strikes on Manila and the camps at Cabanatuan. Lieutenant Thieu was away, attending to requests from some of the reporters who’d gone out with the marines.

  Spruance shook his head at that. He was used to war correspondents making a nuisance of themselves at the front, but he simply couldn’t believe how deeply involved—or what did they call it, “embedded”—these people seemed to be. He doubted if you could tell some of them apart from the units they covered.

  “I was just wondering,” Halsey said quietly, “whether this was the right way to use these guys. I mean, look at what they’re doing. They’ve only got so many of these super-rockets and magic bullets. Do you think a glorified prison break was the way to go?”

  Spruance mulled over the question as he watched a flight of helicopters fan out over the city—the fat ones, which meant they were troop carriers. Smaller, faster gunships buzzed around them like angry wasps, swooping down on any resistance and hosing it down with rocket and cannon fire. They must be going for the railway yards, he thought.

  “I don’t know, Bill,” he said. “You saw what happened to those boys, not to mention the poor women they used as camp whores. I don’t know what the right thing was. But I do know that these people have a mania about leaving their own behind. They’ll lose fifty men just to get one back. It’s like a sickness for them. I doubt we could have stopped them from doing this even if we’d wanted to.”

  Lieutenant Thieu returned, threading his way through the banks of computer monitors and battle stations. Spruance watched a screen that showed one of those Super Harriers, zipping across the big night sky, only to stop in midair, turn around, and unleash a stream of rockets on some target at the wharves.

  Halsey leaned over before Thieu made it into earshot.

  “Yeah, but the thing is, Ray,” he said, “we ain’t their fucking people, are we?”

  The industrial jackhammer of the LAV’s autocannon abruptly ceased as the hatch swung open and the section poured out onto the street. Julia spat out the wad of medicated gum she’d been chewing and checked her heads-up display to make sure she was recording. She flicked her personal weapon to three-round bursts, laid her thumb on the safety, ready to click it off as soon as she was clear of the vehicle, and nodded quickly to Private Bukowski. She’d already decided to hang her story off what happened to the heavy-weapons specialist over the next few hours. Bukowski was cool with that. He wanted to send his granddad a video of himself in battle. Grandpa Bukowski had won—or would win—a Bronze Star in Korea.

  Her combat goggles, a topflight set of Ray-Ban Warpigs, automatically adjusted to changing light conditions as the blast door of the armored vehicle split open and the frenzied stabbing light of the battle rushed in. She flinched as a line of tracer fire flicked across the opening, and reached out for a grab bar as Bukowski recoiled into her.

  “You okay, Specialist?”

  “Fine, ma’am. Somebody else got clipped up front.”

  The two lines of marines, which had momentarily bunched up, surged down the ramp. Duffy slapped Bukowski on the back as he stepped off. A cramped shuffle brought her to the exit, where she found the body of Colonel Maloney, half his head torn away by a piece of shrapnel. He’d tumbled off the edge of the incline. One leg had folded up underneath his deadweight; the other had caught on the edge of the ramp and now pointed skyward. He wasn’t wearing his helmet.

  “Dumbass,” said Duffy.

  Bukowski’s voice came over the sound channel. “Say what?”

  “Didn’t mean you. Meant him.”

  “Oh, right. Yeah.”

  The specialist suddenly swiveled at the hip and poured a stream of light-cannon fire into a window across the street. Duffy was jolted into the moment. They were assaulting across a wide boulevard. Half the section, with Chen in the lead, was storming toward the colonnaded entrance of a grand colonial building, pouring selective fire into the upper-story windows. Nobody except Bukowski was firing on full auto. Discrete three-round bursts of tungsten penetrators chewed up masonry and wooden shutters, smashing glass and pulverizing brickwork.

  A line of tracers lashed at them from another building two doors down. Duffy saw a trooper stagger under the impact. He sank to his knees for a few seconds before two other marines appeared to help him back to his feet and over the exposed cobblestone roadway.

  Again Bukowski turned fractionally. The heavy gun rig slung at his hip turned with him. Duffy saw the muzzle elevate fractionally. His wrists flexed, and a short snarling volley of 20mm slugs punched through a sandbagged revetment on the top floor of a neoclassical mansion a hundred yards away. A dazzling spark traced the flight path of the shells. Duffy refocused the lens on her video rig, pulling in tight on the French windows the marine had targeted. Streams poured from ruptured sandbags as smoke rose from within the darkened recesses of the room. A disembodied human hand twitched on top of one bag.

  Bullets zipped past her, uncomfortably close. Her C/T-weave armor was the best that money could buy. Better than Marine Corps standard issue, in fact. But you could still get yourself righteously fucked up in a free-fire zone like this. Duffy unsafed the MP5 and quickly panned up and down the road. It was a quick and dirty scan. She’d use an intelligent editing suite to clean it up later before laying down her own commentary.

  She knew in broad-brush detail that they were swarming the divisional HQ of the Japanese command, that most of the enemy’s strategic assets were already just scrap metal and charred meat. But beyond that, like the men and women around her, she knew only what she could see with her own eyes and imaging rig.

  They were still taking sporadic, but reasonably intense small-arms fire from the surrounding buildings. It seemed more opportunistic than directed. Marines occasionally shuddered or tumbled as rounds hit them and their armored padding dispersed the kinetic energy. She knew from personal experience that it still felt like getting whacked by a Louisville Slugger. Sometimes, in the background, she’d hear a scream or gurgle over the platoon comm channel as somebody caught a bullet or a piece of shrapnel in the face or throat.

  Gunships ripped overhead, pouring autocannon fire into pillboxes on street corners, popping Hellfire missiles through windows, a
nd raking small concentrations of Japanese troops who periodically attempted desperate charges across open ground. She’d seen worse. Damascus was way tougher than this. That had been like the whole fucking city was out to kill you.

  Bukowski had moved ahead, and she had to hustle to catch up. He took the steps at the front of the big white building at a run, leaping over the bloodied form of a prostrate Japanese soldier. Duffy was lining up to jump over the corpse when it unexpectedly rose from the dead, rolled up onto one knee, and leveled a ridiculously long rifle at the back of the marine’s head.

  “Bukowski, look out,” she yelled.

  The marine began an instinctive dive to the side as the guard fired. Duffy saw the big man’s helmet jolt, but he kept on moving.

  Her momentum carried her right up to the steps and there was no chance of avoiding a collision. She didn’t have time to raise and fire her weapon, so she dipped a shoulder and crashed into the Jap with as much force as she could focus, projecting her energy right through him. He flew forward about two feet and slammed into the top step. She struggled for her balance, lost it, regained it and found herself on top of him, stamped her leading boot on top of his thigh and rammed a knee into his face. His head snapped back and as she sailed right on over his body she pointed the MP5 straight down, squeezing the trigger. She didn’t even hear the muted cough of the discharge as three rounds of 9mm hollow point sliced open the guard’s torso. Blowback splattered her goggles with gobbets of hot offal that glowed a bright opalescent green in low-light amplification. She felt a dull but massive impact on her hip, from a ricochet she guessed, then the ground came rushing up at her and a much hotter, searing pain exploded in her shoulder as she slammed into concrete and snapped a collarbone.

  “Son-of-a-bitch!”

  “Y’all right, Ms. Duffy?” Bukowski hauled her up by her good arm. “Thanks, too, ma’am. Owe you one.”

  “We’ll call it quits for the gum,” she said. “How’s your head.”

  The marine pinched the side his helmet where a bullet had glanced off. Duffy switched to infrared for second. The track mark stood out in glowing pink.

  “My circuits are okay,” said Bukowski. “How’s your shoulder?”

  A violent crash of gunfire from upstairs drowned her out. She was about to try to speak again when a long burst of firing and the double crump of two grenades shook the building.

  Lieutenant Chen’s voice came in over the platoon’s dedicated tac net.

  “Top floor secured. No prisoners taken.”

  The video feed wasn’t live, which made it infinitely worse. The signal came through on a fifteen-minute delay, and from the looks of the firestorm running through the streets of Manila, that was long enough for anything to happen. Lieutenant Commander Black wanted to turn away from the screen, to shut off the rush of chaotic savagery that swirled around his woman. He wanted to run from the Media Center and hop a chopper into the city to yank Julia right out of there.

  Rosanna had him seated in front of a huge fat screen devoted exclusively to a delayed feed from Julia’s squad. She furiously worked a keyboard and touch screen next to him, chopping footage, assigning it to dump bins for editing later, tagging significant sections, adding her own initial comments. Without an organization of her own to report to, she’d volunteered to stand in as Julia’s producer. Black was impressed with the furious intensity she brought to the job. She was every bit as focused as one of Kolhammer’s bullet-eyed warriors. But she was also every bit as emotionally removed. He’d tried to talk to her a couple of times when Julia appeared on screen, but she’d cut him off.

  “Shut up for now, Dan. Talk later.”

  When the squad burst from the LAV and onto the boulevard Dan flinched, and his gut went tight. He clearly saw Colonel Maloney lose half his face. His heart hammered faster than it had at any time during the fight to Midway. He felt wretched, impotent, and ashamed of himself for sitting comfortably in safety on board the Clinton while Julia charged into the Japanese line of fire. When he saw her tackle and shoot the guard, he thought he might lose control of his stomach.

  Natoli, excitedly cursing under her breath, hammered the keyboard until she’d isolated a video feed from Private Bukowski in a little pull-down window on the screen.

  Dan Black hardly recognized the savage, gore-soaked creature he saw in there. But he knew it was Julia.

  He’d been happy with the way he had adapted to the arrival of Kolhammer’s ships. He prided himself on the ease with which he’d accepted the impossible, and adjusted to the demands of these strange people. But now he found himself staring, uncomprehendingly, at the snarl of rage and bloodlust that flashed across his lover’s face, and at the cold self-possession he found in the eyes of her friend, sitting in the chair next to him.

  Who the hell are these people?

  42

  CAMP 5, CABANATUAN, 0219 HOURS, 21 JUNE 1942

  “How we doing, Amanda?” asked Flight Lieutenant Harford.

  Hayes’s voice responded inside his helmet, cutting through the dull thud of the rotors. “Three hours of fuel, ten minutes till insertion . . . You boys get that? Time to get funky.”

  The five Navy SEALs and Major Pavel Ivanov, of the Russian Spetsnaz forces, checked their harnesses and weapons loads.

  The stealthed Seahawk flew low over the jungle, well below any local radar—although the chopper was sheathed in carbon-composite tiles, which would shed primitive scanning like a bride’s nightgown. But Harford was a belt-and-braces guy. He already felt dangerously exposed on this mission.

  “Three minutes,” said Flight Lieutenant Hayes as two gunships accelerated past them. The lead Comanche banked over and began to work a dense clump of bushland with rockets and miniguns. Secondary explosions testified to the presence of some sort of Japanese camp.

  “One minute,” warned Hayes, who was keeping a close eye on the combined feed of the navigation radar and SINS, the chopper’s self-enclosed inertial navigation system. Not a patch on the third-generation NAVSTAR GPS system, but it would have to do.

  It was cold in the back of the chopper. The SEAL team donned their helmets and night vision combat goggles. Ivanov leaned forward to peer around CPO Vincente Rogas and into the darkness. He switched from the luminescent lime green of low-light amplification to infrared. Immediately the heat leaking from the chopper’s engine cowling shimmered in front of him like a curtain. He adjusted the optimum range and it fell away appreciably. A cluster of buildings, blacked out, but still bleeding cherry-pink warmth into the night, appeared to the south. Flight Lieutenant Hayes’s lilting voice sounded crisply inside his helmet.

  “As we are preparing to land the captain asks that you return your tray tables to the upright position, unfasten your seat belts, and jump out of the helicopter. We’d like to thank you for flying with the U.S. Navy, and hope you will choose to travel with us again in the future.”

  “The far fucking future,” added Harford.

  “Amen,” said Ivanov.

  As the Seahawk swooped down on the compound, a platoon of the marine fire team opened up. They had been lying concealed in the elephant grass outside the barbed wire. Twelve Japanese guards perished instantly, shredded by the concentrated volley of caseless ceramic projectiles. A couple of Hellfire missiles reached through the darkness to obliterate the single guard tower.

  In the back of the big chopper, Airman Toby La Salle checked the fast rope connections as the men prepared to drop the last twenty meters to the ground. The two parties wished each other good luck, and then the small special ops team was gone. Into the black.

  The small compound housing civilian prisoners underwent what was technically referred to as vertical and horizontal envelopment. In lay terms the Japanese defenders were swarmed from all sides and above in one mad minute of psychotically violent but finely controlled gunfire and high-explosive bombardment.

  The SEAL team signaled to the marines to cease fire and dropped into the compound. First squad assaulted
the main gates, now protected only by dead men, and the rest of their unit poured through the breach. Ivanov and Rogas were already moving, running toward the first of the flimsy huts housing the prisoners. The chief grunted as a Japanese slug spun him around, but his body armor saved him and he was up again in a second. The sentry was dead before Rogas regained his feet, drilled with a three-round burst fired from the hip by Ivanov.

  A Japanese officer wielding a sword charged at them from the side of the hut. But his pants were undone, ruining the effect. The Spetsnaz officer took his head off with another three-round burst.

  Rogas kicked in the door of the hut and spun to his left, shooting another Jap who was coming at him from the darkened corner. Women began screaming.

  “Americans! We’re Americans” Rogas yelled in English. “Get down on the floor. Get down now! Anybody left standing gets shot.”

  The infrared night vision lent a nightmarish atmosphere to a scene that already recalled one of the lower levels of Hell. The women were naked, or clothed in scraps at best. They were underweight, covered in bruises, sores, and their own filth. Alternately moaning and screaming, they writhed and groped in the dark, unable to see what was happening, unlike Ivanov and Rogas. They could see at least eight Japs in the room, some of them naked, too.

  The SEALs hunted them down one after another. Shooting each man in the back of the head as he tried to crawl along the floor. When only three were left, they jumped to their feet with both hands in the air.

  “No shoot. No shoot!” one yelled.

  Rogas shot him anyway.

  Duffy had visited some stinking Third World cesspools in her time, but this place took the prize. She tried hard to keep the disgust from showing on her face. It wouldn’t be fair to the prisoners, especially not these ones.