Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said, unable to stop repeating herself. A flood of tears and nonsense burst from her as his arms stiffened then relaxed, and pulled her into his chest.

  “So am I,” said Black.

  Damiri didn’t understand at first. Kolhammer seemed to be leading a convoy of dozens of ships, many more than had been in the force off Timor, but a brief laser-linked message from the carrier explained the presence of so many contemporary vessels. It made no difference to his plans, he decided. He might just kill a few more unbelievers, and there was nothing wrong with that.

  Smoke plumes from the older ships filled the sky as they drew closer. The beautiful, lilting prayers of his shipmates drifted up from below as they prepared to enter Paradise. The few Japanese on board had been banished below decks and he supposed they were making whatever arrangements their false god-emperor required of them. With so few of his former colleagues volunteering for this mission, the Japanese had been invaluable in keeping the ship running at a very basic level, and in coordinating arrangements with their own departed comrades on the three IJN vessels.

  Out of respect for their help, Damiri had asked if any wished to surrender their will to Allah in the last hours of their life, but all had declined. He shrugged. There was no saving some people.

  To still the drumbeat of his heart as the fatal moment drew closer, Damiri stepped out of the bridge into the fresh air and took inventory of the “damage” to the ship. Bullet holes, torn metal, scorch marks, shattered glass, broken masts and one particularly impressive shell burst had convincingly scarred the Sutanto. She looked like a veteran warship now—just the sort of thing to impress stupidly sentimental Westerners who, of course, could not know that Yamamoto’s engineers had meticulously crafted every scratch and dent back at Hashirajima. Before packing the ship to the gunnels with high explosive.

  He wondered how closely the Americans were reading the bogus ship’s log he’d zapped over to them as soon as they drew into laser-link range. The answer came within a few minutes.

  “Have you seen this, yet?” asked Commander Judge.

  The lanky Texan was leafing through a printout of the Sutanto’s log on the bridge of the supercarrier.

  “Nope, not yet,” Kolhammer said. “Something up?”

  He watched on screen as the Sutanto passed the lead ship in the convoy, Halabi’s stealth destroyer, HMS Trident. True to form, the Brits turned on a full salute. Just as typically, the Indonesians responded in a really half-assed manner, with almost nobody on deck to return the gesture. Although, given how badly shot up the boat looked, he could understand that.

  “Ask the Sutanto to come around onto our heading,” he said. “We don’t need them threading their way through the convoy. They’ll run into someone for certain.”

  As an ensign relayed the order, Judge walked over chewing his lip.

  “It says here they only woke up five days ago, Admiral. Damiri has no idea how long they were out, but it couldn’t have been that long, could it? They’d have died of starvation or thirst.”

  Kolhammer eased himself up out of a slight slouch. The Pacific stretched away forever under a diamond-hard sky. Not a single cloud floated over the dozens of ships beating their way back to Pearl.

  “Well, what’s the elapsed time on the ship’s clock?”

  Judge flipped over a couple of pages. He never looked happy dealing with hard copy.

  “A hundred and thirty-three hours,” he said. “Close enough to six days, which don’t work for me, since we’ve been here for weeks now.”

  Admiral Spruance joined them from his perch by the lee helm.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Kolhammer chewed his lip.

  “Ensign, why is the Sutanto still coming on? She should have changed her heading by now?”

  “Sorry, sir, they have the orders.”

  Judge examined the printout as though he’d been handed a three-dollar note.

  “I guess there could have been temporal as well spatial distortions,” he conceded, without much enthusiasm. “If the Nuku ended up on top of that mountain, I guess these guys could have been thrown out of sync, you know, timewise.”

  “You don’t sound confident, Commander,” said Spruance. “Can I suggest we ask them to stop before they get even farther inside our lines?”

  Kolhammer checked the screen again. The Indonesian ship was much closer than he’d expected.

  “Have they increased speed?” he asked.

  “Goddamn,” spat Judge.

  A small, perceptible jolt ran through everyone on the bridge who’d ever had to face a jihadi suicide run.

  “What’s happening?” asked Spruance, who couldn’t help but notice the tension.

  “Sound to general quarters,” ordered Commander Judge. “We have a possible suicide run. All hands brace for impact.”

  “Comms,” shouted Kolhammer, “patch me directly into the Sutanto right now.”

  Telltale static crackled over the loudspeakers as the Sutanto’s obsolete communications net linked to the Clinton.

  “Damiri, this is Admiral Kolhammer. Come to a full stop right now. Are you reading me? Come to a full stop right now or we will fire on you.”

  “Turn it off,” said Damiri. “All ahead full. Allahu akbar!”

  As the ship leapt forward he braced himself, imagining the eruption of white water at her stern. He was surprised to find himself a little scared, but he took solace in the confusion and fear that would now be gripping the Americans.

  The Clinton rushed closer with every second. He smiled, at the wallowing buckets of iron around him. They seemed to groan at the seams as they poured on steam to escape.

  “Look, my sheik, look!”

  A wide, beaming smile spread over Damiri’s face as he saw two ships collide about a thousand meters away. The sound of the impact reached him as a terrible grinding of steel against steel and he fancied he could even make out the screams and cries of the infidels as they reeled in fear. He smirked.

  Shock and awe, indeed.

  A missile roared overhead and he ducked without thinking, even though the gesture was pointless. The nearest ship, some sort of passenger liner, he thought, blew apart with a bone-shaking explosion.

  “Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar!”

  He heard the ghostly, whispering crack of hypervelocity caseless ammunition as it passed harmlessly through the air above the tip of the ship’s broken mast.

  “They cannot depress their guns far enough, my brothers. Praise God we shall all be in Paradise soon,” cried Damiri.

  Kolhammer’s mouth was a thin, white line chiseled into the granite face of a cold mountain. Alarms sounded throughout the ship and every sailor in the bridge was bracing for the detonation while trying to perform half a dozen emergency drills at the same time. He could feel the deck of the giant ship tilting as she poured on the revolutions and tried to accelerate away from the suicide boat.

  He did a quick calculation on just how much explosive material you could pack into a vessel of that size, wondering whether the armor sheath could withstand the blast. Probably not, if Damiri rammed them.

  The sea around him was a maelstrom with dozens of ships heading in all directions. Reports of collisions and near collisions flashed up on screens and sounded through the loudspeakers every few seconds. Judge shouted orders to the bridge crew. Spruance had quietly wandered over to the strip window with his hands clasped behind his back while the crew called out updates in the strained tones of men and women trained to die at their stations.

  “Trident coming around, sir. No missile lock yet.”

  “Kandahar is blocked, Admiral.”

  “Kennebunkport does not have a clear field of fire.”

  “CAP is sixteen kilometers out, no target lock.”

  “Comanche lifting off the Kandahar.”

  A dark shape flashed with a vicious buzz. Kolhammer was about to ask what the hell it was when Spruance called out over the din.<
br />
  “It’s a Wildcat! Off the Enterprise.”

  The antique fighter roared down the length of the Clinton’s flight deck, waggling its wings in a salute. It reached the bow and immediately opened up with all six machine guns. Kolhammer frantically flicked between a dozen battle-cam views on the nearest screen before he found a top-down view of the old F-4F boring in toward the jihadi boat. White light twinkled along the leading edge of its wings. Long, ropy strands of gun smoke trailed behind. Thousand of rounds of good old-fashioned fifty caliber whipped the midnight-blue sea around the Sutanto into a fury of white water. The first shells bit into the metal skin of the ship, and the pilot adjusted the angle of his shallow dive to keep the fire pouring into the decks. Shards of red-hot metal erupted from the small superstructure as the Sutanto shuddered under the assault.

  The gap between the Wildcat and her prey closed rapidly.

  Seven hundred meters.

  Six hundred.

  Five hundred.

  Smoke and flames streamed from a dozen breaches in the ship’s plating.

  Four hundred.

  Three hundred.

  The Wildcat’s guns ran dry and the plane peeled away.

  Nothing happened for two seconds, and then the Sutanto went up in a stunning eruption that Kolhammer felt in his guts as the pressure wave slammed into the Clinton. His ears popped painfully. Vision swam. Gray spots bloomed. Sailors tumbled to the floor and the great, titanic mass of the supercarrier trembled with the shock. She rose up a little as if riding over a wave, and then plunged down again, intact and safe.

  The Sutanto was gone, and with her the little aluminum monoplane that had saved them all.

  Well, not all, Kolhammer realized as he straightened up.

  The blast wave had been strong enough to tear apart two nearby liners and a hospital ship. Another two civilian vessels had collided in their panic to get away, and one of them was going down quickly. Secondary explosions tore through the crippled liners. Oily smoke and flames poured from the foredeck of the hospital ship and the sea for miles around was in turmoil with dozens of ships, modern and contemporary, scattering to the four points.

  “Damage?” cried Kolhammer.

  Commander Judge scanned a nearby screen, glancing out the blast windows as though he didn’t trust the data over the evidence of his own eyes. Video coverage from drones stationed overhead and feeding from mast-mounted cams through the modern ships began to appear on screens all over the bridge.

  “Jesus, it went off like a baby nuke.”

  Kolhammer couldn’t tell who’d said that. One of his people, he supposed, given the reference.

  “We came through without major structural damage,” Judge reported. “But we’ve lost three surface assets and another two are in danger.”

  “Projected casualties?” demanded Kolhammer.

  “Heavy. Five to six thousand. Search and rescue are under way. No threats on the board. We’re scanning clean to eight hundred kilometers.”

  “Okay. Round ’em all up before we’re scattered to Hell and back.”

  Kolhammer became aware that Spruance had made his way over from the window. He looked shaken, but not nearly so much as Kolhammer himself felt.

  “What the hell was that?” asked Spruance.

  Kolhammer wasn’t sure how to explain what had just happened. In the end he could only slump into his chair as the adrenaline backwash sluiced through his system, leaving him shaky and on edge. He threw his hands up, a small gesture of impotence.

  “That was the future,” he said.

  EPILOGUE

  The meeting of the Japanese war cabinet went late into the night. It wasn’t a happy affair. Some faces were conspicuously absent. Many had perished at Hashirajima, and even though Yamamoto had repeatedly urged the imperial general headquarters to clear the anchorage, in some eyes he knew that he was somehow to blame for the disaster there. He didn’t care. Some of these fools needed shooting in the ass before they realized what being at war really meant.

  Still, even he had to admit some surprise at the raids on Luzon and Singapore. Not at the scale of destruction that had rained down on the emperor’s forces in those places, but at the strange choice that Admiral Kolhammer had made. Yamamoto had half expected him to sail right into the anchorage of the Combined Fleet and sink every single ship there. Moertopo said he was more than capable of doing just that, and Yamamoto didn’t doubt it for a moment. As an alternative he had wasted precious resources on strategically insignificant targets. It was curious, but the grand admiral didn’t make the mistake of dismissing the action as mere folly. It revealed much about the nature of his new enemy and was thus something to be very carefully thought about.

  Why would they do such a thing, when they could conceivably shatter their enemies instead? Did it say more about the men they were fighting, or the world they had come from? Was it a weakness he could exploit?

  Still, these were questions for another day. At that moment ministers surrounded him, demanding to know how it was possible that the Americans had simply sailed into the heart of the empire and carried away their countrymen.

  “Because we could not stop them,” said Yamamoto, somewhat impishly.

  The cabinet room exploded at that, but he waited them out and eventually calm returned.

  “The Americans have made a terrible mistake,” he said quietly when he had everybody’s attention. “They have expended most of their precious weapons rescuing skeletons and camp whores. This tactical victory has cost them an overwhelming strategic advantage, as they shall soon see. I have fashioned a blade to drive through the heart of their fleet as it returns to Pearl Harbor.”

  Prime Minister Tojo spoke into the silence that followed that revelation.

  “And that is why the Sutanto left Hashirajima, Admiral?”

  Yamamoto nodded, explaining himself to everyone in the room.

  “It is why most of the fleet has left. They are to cover the withdrawal of our forces from China and the invasion of New Guinea and the Australian mainland. We will deny the Americans their base for a counterattack in the Pacific.”

  He did not react to the sharp intake of breath around the table. To this point only he and Tojo had known of the plan.

  “And what of Hawaii?” asked the prime minister.

  “I have plans for them, too.”

  “Even with these supercarriers and warships there?” barked an army general. The army had never been supporters of the thrust to expand the empire southward. To Yamamoto’s way of thinking they were fixated on Manchuria and the Communists. He had to suppress a mischievous smirk at the prospect of dragging them out of China, kicking and screaming.

  “The Sutanto will destroy the Kolhammer force,” Yamamoto promised, raising his hand against the inevitable objections. “Yes, she is one small ship, but she will sweep them away like a Divine Wind, a kamikaze.”

  “And when will we know?” asked Tojo.

  “We still have sources in Hawaii,” Yamamoto explained. “They will send word.”

  He leaned forward and smacked the table with his injured hand, slowly growling out his next words.

  “But even if by some chance the Sutanto fails, and this Kolhammer survives, we will still forge on with our new plan, because we have no choice. You have all read the reports I gave you. You know where fate will take us if we do not change our path. We have allowed ourselves to be blinded to the real danger. It does not lie in Russia or China. It lies across the Pacific in the United States, and south in Australia where they will first build up their forces. We must defeat them there before they are too strong. We must take their base at Hawaii from them. And on the last day of this war we must stand in the Oval Office and put their crippled president to the sword.

  “Because we have no choice.”

  Complete silence greeted this uncompromising speech. A dozen men stared at him, some in awe, some in shock, and some without discernible emotion. The moment stretched uncomfortably until Yama
moto began to worry that one of them might actually laugh at him. Finally, a lone voice spoke up. The army officer who had questioned him before.

  “But how?” he asked, genuinely perplexed.

  Yamamoto smiled.

  MOSCOW, 2215 HOURS, 25 JUNE 1942

  He didn’t think it was possible that a place even more fearful than the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz Albrechtstrasse might exist, but perhaps he had found it here in this surprisingly shabby waiting room. He knew that if the next hour didn’t go well he would not live to see this room again. It was entirely possible he’d simply be shot dead behind the heavy oak doors that led into the inner sanctum of the Central Committee. Perhaps there would be a secret trapdoor through which they would spirit him away to the cells. He thought that was very much their style. There would doubtless be many cells in this building.

  He did his best to appear relaxed despite the hard, uncomfortable chair on which he sat. Nobody had offered him even a simple refreshment or shaken his hand. The minor functionaries who staffed this chamber treated him with cold formality, for which he supposed he could not blame them. His country was still exterminating their people like millions of rats. Perhaps by morning that might be behind them. For the sake of the Fatherland he could only hope.

  He still did not quite believe the case he would have to argue in there. If it had just been a suggestion from the Japanese alone he would have laughed it off, but the führer himself was adamant that Yamamoto’s plan was worth the risk. Of course it was not the führer’s risk to take. It was his.

  It was all madness really. But the whole world was alive with talk of the insanity. The führer was obsessed with reading translated stories from the Allied press about events in the Pacific. For once it had driven news of the war from the front pages around the globe. And now he was here, at the very center of the storm, on a mission that would assuredly make an irrelevance of these “time travelers.” He was here and they were listening to him. That was enough to justify the risk.