Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  Before he could help himself, he wondered idly what Julia was up to. He shut down the thought before it could go any further. She was somewhere on the east coast of Australia, covering MacArthur’s defense of the Brisbane Line.

  And apart from that, he really didn’t want to know.

  3

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, THE BRISBANE LINE

  The last mortar round nearly fucked her video rig, but Julia got the little Sonycam back online by slamming the data stick into its port a couple of times. It wasn’t a recommended fix, but it’d worked before. A small window in her battered Oakley combat goggles flickered into life again, the scene around her in the foxhole emerging from a blur of white noise.

  Five men lay in the shell crater, protected from most of the Japanese fire by a huge granite outcrop halfway up the slope of Hill 178. Two of them were dead. Unable to directly target the rest, the Japanese had been dropping mortars all around, but the rock formation would provide just enough overhead cover to protect them for a few minutes—until the odds caught up with them.

  One of the men had died when a nearby eucalyptus tree had been shattered by the blast of a small mountain gun; a foot-long splinter of wood had speared into his throat. The other guy, they had no idea. He was just dead, and he didn’t have a hole in him.

  Julia let her gaze slide down the slope, the Sonycam zooming in and out, taking in the wreckage of the shattered company. Less than two minutes earlier, over a hundred marines had been creeping up through the darkened scrub, toward the Japanese positions just below the crest of the hill. They had moved silently and with a speed that had surprised her, calling to mind a platoon of Gurkhas she’d once covered in Timor.

  These marines were ’temps, fighting without body armor, remote sensors, or tac net. Three rifle platoons of older prewar volunteers. She’d interviewed many of them over the past few days, and now, in the space between two ragged breaths, their lives passed before her eyes. At least a third of them were dead, and near as many so badly torn apart by the Japanese claymores as made no difference.

  She breathed out against a wave of overpressure as another packet of high-explosive bombs bracketed their hideout. Shrapnel rattled against the granite overhang, and the familiar scramble to check for wounds mechanically repeated itself, with each man who was able to instinctively patting himself down where a superheated shard of metal might have tugged at a sleeve or sliced so cleanly through living tissue that no pain or shock had yet registered.

  Each quickly cupped his balls, she noted, in fear of the Wound.

  Cocooned in her titanium-weave reactive matrix armor, her own responses deadened by ten years of this bullshit, Julia Duffy logged the screams of the dying for recall as she checked her machine pistol. No damage. The best part of a full clip jacked in, alternating penetrators and dumdums with a single tracer round three from the bottom to warn her when it was time to reload. She’d taped two clips together, for grease. A little trick some of the marines had quietly copied from her.

  She sucked a mouthful of chilled Gatorade through a rubber tube that emerged from the padded collar of her coveralls. Something heavy fell into their midst, and Julia nearly jumped out of her skin.

  It was a koala, its fur burned to black tar and weeping red skin. It keened pitiably as smoke curled from its charred body. The marines regarded it, and her, with horror as she drew her sidearm, a SIG Sauer P226, and put one round of Nytrilium fragmentable hollow point into the animal. It blew apart like an overripe tomato.

  “Jesus Christ,” someone croaked.

  She looked at the men and essayed the faintest of shrugs as a furious eruption of small-arms fire broke over them.

  In the distance on the slope above them, someone gave a shrill shout. “Banzai!”

  “Ah, shit.”

  Julia glanced quickly in the direction of the sergeant who’d just cursed, measuring his likely response to what was coming. She didn’t know him. The chaos and madness of the ambush had thrown them together. The man looked to be a good deal older than his two buddies. She couldn’t guess at his actual age, though, through the gore and dirt, but his eyes looked like pools of dead water.

  “You ever shoot anything besides a stuffed toy?” he spat at her with unexpected vehemence.

  She didn’t reply, but moved her selector to three-round bursts, unsafed the weapon, and drew her knife from its scabbard. Satisfied that she could get to it in a hurry, Julia sheathed the evil-looking blade.

  The crescendo of Japanese rifle fire seemed to build in an infinite curve that merged with the kiai-scream of the charge and the cries of the shattered marine company on the hillside below. It was a vision drawn straight out of Hell. Small groups of men huddled around blasted tree stumps, the momentum of their advance completely spent. The false promise of safety offered by the scraps of cover was enough to fix them to the spot where they were soon to die. The dead lay everywhere, closely entwined, their bodies grotesquely violated by blast effect and speeding metal. One man still moved. He tried to drag the top half of his body back down the slope, clawing at the scorched earth to heave his torso away from the red smear of rag and bone that had been his legs. Julia’s eyes took in the information, the shreds and tendrils and obscene tailings that dragged from the stump where he now ended—but no part of her connected it to the humanity of the dying creature. She wondered if she knew him.

  “Banzai!”

  “Fuck fuck fuck!” cursed the sergeant in the hole with her.

  He was shaking like a frightened dog, and what little color had been in his face drained away now.

  “Cover me!” he yelled as the leading edge of the charge appeared where they could see it from their shelter. He stripped four grenades from his belt, primed them, and pitched them into the descending horde. The grenades detonated in a condensed drum solo, ripping a thirty-meter hole in the Japanese line, which staggered almost to a halt.

  Julia smacked one of the other two marines on the shoulder and gestured for him to turn around and cover their rear, before training her Sonycam back on the sergeant just in time to see him scramble from the shell hole and rush at the enemy. He fired long bursts from a Thompson submachine gun, and plucking still more grenades from his webbing, he threw them into the ranks of Japanese, bizarrely reminding Julia of a rioting anarchist outside a Starbucks.

  “Come on! Come on! Get moving!” he called back at the small knots of marines farther down the hill.

  Julia was struck by the scene of this one, aged, slightly potbellied white man, surrounded by dozens of stunned Nipponese soldiers. It could have lasted only half a second, but it looked like something out of an old movie, as if the enemy were standing completely still, just waiting to be mowed down.

  Then she realized her own weapon was up and pouring fire into them, as well. Shouts reached her from below, but of a different pitch and timbre to the sounds of terror that had come from there before. Rallying cries gathered more survivors than she thought possible as the light of more grenade explosions glinted off the steel of at least two dozen American bayonets, suddenly moving at speed again toward their targets.

  Julia stayed hidden behind the rock so she could remain fixed on the vision of the sergeant, who had run out of ammunition and was swinging his machine gun like a club, staving in the heads of two enemy soldiers just before his left knee disintegrated in a dramatic spray of blood. He dropped with a strangled scream, and instantly two more Japanese were on him, their improbably long rifles raised like farm tools, the bayonets aimed at his body.

  Julia zoomed in on the attackers. Her goggles read the microlight targeting dot square in the center of the nearest man’s T, and she squeezed the trigger. The gun coughed three times in rapid fire, the recoil dragging the muzzle up slightly, as she knew it would. All three rounds hit. Two dumdums and a penetrator.

  Enormous gouts of lumpy red mist exploded from the soldier’s back, spraying his comrade, who was also hit and was spinning around under the impact. The penetrat
or had passed clear though the rib cage, lungs, and spinal cord of the first man, beginning a supersonic tumble as it exited, before striking the left shoulder of the second. As the second attacker fell away, Julia flipped the selector back to single shot and drilled another round through his head. The body jumped in that heavy, lifeless way she knew all too well.

  “Hey! Hey! Over here!”

  The shouts came from close behind and were almost consumed in the roar of rifle fire. Duffy spun around, losing sight of her subject, some deeply buried instinct causing her to flip the selector to full auto. The other two marines were emptying their magazines into a platoon of Japanese that had appeared on the far side of the giant rock. The muzzle of her gun swung up and began to spit long tongues of fire. A dozen men shuddered under the impact of the augmented ammunition. A streak of yellow light shot out, the tracer, thumping into the chest of an officer who had been racing at them, brandishing a samurai sword. He effected a near-perfect backwards somersault, a little Catherine wheel of smoke tracing his path through the air.

  Julia popped the dry clip, flipped it, and snapped home the loaded magazine. Her heart beat like a jackhammer. It seemed impossible to draw breath.

  She fired at the swarm of their attackers again, her arms aching from the tension in her rigid muscles. The attack faltered and broke, and then dozens of marines slammed into the survivors. Their full-throated roars mingled with her own snarls and the kiai of the enemy. She distinctly heard the wet, ripping thud of a long knife spearing into human flesh, but could not place it anywhere in the mandala of blood and savagery that swirled all around her.

  A cry, a scream with a familiar tone. A Jap was in the hole with them, scrambling on top of one of the marines. They wrestled like large, awkward children in the dirt. Raking and biting. The other American thrashed beside them, trying to reattach his mangled jaw. Julia was on top of the intruder without knowing how she’d crossed the distance, the knife already in her hand, her thick gloves gouging at the eyes of their would-be killer. Wrenching back his head to expose the throat. She stabbed the blade in to the hilt, and her world disappeared in a red wave as hot blood jetted out onto the goggles, leaving her just one small window in the upper right-hand quadrant of her visual field—the feed from the Sonycam, on which she watched herself slaughter the man who struggled in her hands like a wild animal.

  Two thousand meters away, Colonel J. Lonesome Jones was crouched over in his command bunker, a cramped dugout with a roof of logs and rammed earth, the interior lit by glo-tubes and two dozen computer screens feeding tac data from the drones circling high above.

  The battalion was stretched thin, covering an area of low hills and light scrub at the western base of a soaring tabletop plateau with sheer granite sides. Forward observers for the Crusader guns had been choppered up there along with a small security detail. Between the ’temp forces, the Eighty-second’s ground combat element, and the Australian Second Cavalry Regiment to the northwest, Jones had bottled up the advance of three Japanese divisions on MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane.

  It had been a turkey shoot at first. Thousands of enemy soldiers had ridden down the thin two-lane “highway” on bicycles. They’d done something similar in Malaysia, if he recalled his history correctly. But in Malaysia they hadn’t had to contend with a battery of computer-controlled howitzers firing time-on-target along their precise line of advance. After losing the better part of two regiments to the Crusaders, the Japanese had got off their bikes and begun to press forward on foot through the bush.

  They had died in there, too. Surveillance drones picked them out of the background clutter, and a fearsome nighttime barrage by three hundred antique howitzers—American, New Zealand, and Australian guns under MacArthur’s command—chewed them over. It was a vindication, said MacArthur, of his Brisbane Line strategy.

  Jones’s men and women were paying for it now, though. Thirty-seven KIA so far, some from hand-to-hand, but mostly through the inevitable fuckups. Two days ago, a squadron of Liberators had bombed them by mistake, wiping out the better part of a platoon at the edge of his base area. That had finally and irrevocably poisoned an already strained relationship with MacArthur’s command. In response, Jones could only say his prayers to thank the good Lord that the ’temps—as they called the contemporary forces—missed most of what they aimed for, although he did tell MacArthur, off the record, that in future any contemporary air assets that came within five thousand meters of the Eighty-second without clearance would be target-locked by his air defenses as a precautionary measure.

  It hadn’t been a pleasant conversation.

  His intelligence chief, Major Annie Coulthard, broke into the memory. “Colonel, we have movement in the scrub to the northwest, eight and a half thousand meters out, across a one-thousand-meter front. I make it a regimental force, advancing on a direct line toward the New Zealanders on Hill One-forty-nine.”

  Jones could see the advance on a bank of flatscreens, some carrying real-time drone footage, others displaying schematic CGI with tags identifying the disposition of friendly and enemy forces.

  “We got an envelopment under way?” asked Jones.

  The S2 worked her touch screen, zooming out, dragging the focus box to either side of the red column that was advancing on the small hill held by the depleted Kiwi battalion. Jones could see the place in his mind, a shattered landscape of gray ash and blackened tree stumps where everybody was coated in a layer of dark charcoal that gave both the Maori and white pakeha soldiers the appearance of black ghosts crouching in their gun pits. They were going to have a hell of a time holding off a frontal assault by a Japanese regiment.

  “Here we go, sir,” said Coulthard. “Two clicks farther west, sir. Another column. Five-hundred-and-fifty-meter frontage, give or take. Battalion-sized force, moving on the double. Probably hoping to infiltrate through that blind valley along the creek bed.”

  “No prep fire?” asked Jones.

  “None yet, sir. I think we took them all out. But it’s a laydown that they’ll set up those dinky little mortars as they get closer. Maybe even one of their mountain guns.”

  “Okay. Give ’em a heads-up over on One-forty-nine. The bush has already been burned out over there, so we can hit ’em about . . . here,” he said, tapping the screen at a couple of natural choke points. “Set up some close air support just in case. And stay sharp, Major. These fuckers just will not stay ass-whupped. Could be they’re shooting for a divisional envelopment. If they knew the limits of our coverage, they’d go for it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The tempo in the dugout picked up, background chatter rising, the snap of fingers on keyboards quickening as the effects of Jones’s orders spread out through the command post. On a screen to Coulthard’s left, he could watch a video feed of ground crew around his own attack helicopters as they suddenly picked up their pace. A virtually identical scene repeated itself over at 2 Cav, except that the gunships were Arruntas, not Comanches. There was no cam coverage of the aerodrome at Brisbane, but he knew that as soon as word passed down the landline, the same burst of frenetic activity would take place there, except this time the aircraft would be old Kittyhawks and sad little Wirraways, refitted for ground attack using napalm; just one more ghastly development that had arrived before its time.

  Jones turned away from the small drama that was about to play itself around Hill 149 and took in the theater-wide view. It was nothing like he’d been used to back in 2021. Drone coverage was minimal, and there was no satellite feed, of course. No satellites. He had access to two AWACS birds, safely lurking a hundred miles or so in the rear. A couple of long-range SAS patrols and Marine Recon were buried deep behind the Japanese front line and reporting by microburst. But that was about it.

  He felt naked, even though he knew, or at least he hoped, that his own view of the battle was godlike compared with that of his opponent, General Homma. He could never really be certain what technology had leaked across to the enemy, bu
t they were running a full ECM suite, and Homma didn’t seem to be packing much beyond a few flexipads used for communications. The encryption software seemed to be commercial and dated, at least by his standards; some Microsoft piece of crap that had been hacked to death about ten years beforehand, subjectively speaking. The pads had probably been used for games or VR porn on the Sutanto.

  Still, even without the war-fighting technology that Jones had at his disposal, the Japanese were still here, weren’t they? As Lenin once said, quantity has a quality all of its own, and three months ago they’d poured enormous quantities of men and material first into New Guinea and then into northern Australia, using MacArthur’s island-hopping tactic before he had a chance to use it himself. Jones doubted that they could have been stopped were it not the rapid deployment of the Multinational Force’s ground combat element to bolster MacArthur’s defenses. As soon as the first reports sorted themselves out, it was obvious the enemy had finally decided on how to respond to the strategic shock of the Transition. They were going to try to swarm the Allies with sheer weight of numbers. The Germans looked to be preparing for something similar in Europe, having shifted the bulk of their forces west after agreeing to terms with Stalin.

  Jones had more immediate problems to deal with, however. High strategy could wait. Six large flatscreens had been linked to provide a workable video wall that displayed theater-wide data, and it wasn’t family-friendly viewing. There were seven divisions of Imperial Japanese troops infesting the eastern coast of the Australian continent, four of them pressing down on MacArthur’s much-vaunted Brisbane Line. Jones didn’t think they’d break through, and the Havoc had cut off any chance they had of reinforcement, but when the killing was done with, he didn’t imagine he’d have much of a force left, either. Both his guys and 2 Cav were starting to run uncomfortably low on war stocks, and although they brought other strengths to the field, when you ran out of bullets, you weren’t much of a soldier anymore.