Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  Jones had been hoarding matériel for weeks now, farming out tactical and even strategic strikes to the ’temps, who’d been strengthened by a long list of quick fixes and catch-ups, such as those napalm tanks now slung beneath the local ground-attack aircraft. It was a two-way street, though. He’d just read a report of a marine company cut to ribbons by a string of claymores a few hours earlier. They’d have been completely wiped out if one of their sergeants hadn’t rallied the survivors and charged right into the enemy force, which was racing downhill to finish them off.

  The command bunker had gone very quiet for a minute when the microburst packet from that reporter’s Sonycam had filled one of the screens on the video wall. Every marine in his Battalion HQ had at least four years’ combat experience. Most of them had a lot more. There’d been some unkind talk about what a bunch of pussies and amateurs the ’temps had turned out to be, and Jones was certain he could feel some embarrassment in the room as the footage of that unholy, disorganized blood swarm filled the screen.

  It was every bit as bad as anything he’d known in Damascus or Yemen. And these guys, with the exception of the embed from the Times, were fighting old school. No body armor, medevac, spinal inserts, or tacnet. It was like something out of the Dark Ages.

  As he watched now, the thunder of massed artillery rolled over them; that was the barrage he had initiated just a minute earlier. Hundreds of old-fashioned high-explosive shells screamed through the air, their firing sequence controlled by an old laptop computer and designed to drop the entire load simultaneously. Hearing that rumble, he nodded in satisfaction. Air control had three dozen planes stacked up, ready to drop on the Japanese like hawks as soon as the artillery was done fucking with them. Hopefully, the New Zealanders wouldn’t have much to do beyond picking off the survivors.

  They’d given up investing much energy in trying to grab live prisoners. These guys had turned out to be worse than Hamas jihadi. It was like every one of them kept a grenade in his loincloth, just to avoid capture and to take a few gaijin with him.

  The ground shuddered as hundreds of shells struck home.

  Jones stifled a sigh as a bone-deep lassitude swept over him. It had nothing to do with sleeplessness and fatigue. Not a fatigue of the body, at any rate. He was tired in his soul. As the first flight of Kittyhawks dived away to unload their shiny new tanks of napalm on the unseen, screaming survivors of General Homma’s shattered envelopment, Jones fought an urge to just walk away. For the briefest moment, the only thing keeping him at his post was a replay of Julia Duffy’s video package on a small screen at an untended station.

  Jones couldn’t help but stare at the sergeant who had saved his entire company from annihilation. The commander of the Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Unit was certain the man would earn a high honor for his actions. Perhaps the highest. The evidence of the video was irrefutable. He had turned that small battle from a disaster into a most unlikely victory. But that wasn’t what caught Colonel Jones’s attention. He knew that man from somewhere. He just couldn’t place it.

  A quick scan of the theater-wide threat boards informed him that nothing was about to go pear-shaped in the next few minutes. He pulled out his flexipad and called up the brief report from the action on that hill about two clicks away.

  Nothing.

  Oh, well. Time’s a-wasting. He grabbed his G4 and helmet and called over Sergeant Major Harrison, his senior enlisted man. They were due to tour the perimeter, but the image of that ’temp sergeant, swinging his old Thompson machine gun like a baseball bat, just would not leave him alone. He’d lay money on the barrelhead that they’d met before. Christ knew where, though.

  “Sir!” barked Harrison, who had been chewing the ass off a corporal from B company, no doubt for some minor sin. Aub Harrison was nearly as enthusiastic about ass-chewing as his battalion commander, which made the Eighty-second a very dangerous place to walk around with your ass hanging out for no good reason.

  “Grab your shootin’ irons, Aub,” said Jones. “It’s time for us to take a stroll.”

  He threw a glance back at the screen as they left. The sequence was replaying, and the marine was heaving a couple of grenades up the hill again, firing his machine gun from the hip with his other hand.

  He looked angry, and Jones had that infuriating feeling that he was this close to remembering where they’d met. But then he was out the door and into the light of the day.

  CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA

  There would be a terrible drought in the 1980s. And another at the turn of the century. El Niño they called it, although why you’d name a drought was beyond understanding for the Australian prime minister.

  “It’s not the drought, sir,” his adviser offered helpfully. “El Niño refers to the weather pattern which apparently causes our droughts.”

  Paul Robertson, the former banker who’d been recruited to the PM’s staff, thought the old man looked very ill, as bad as he’d been when he’d recalled the Sixth and Seventh Divisions from the Middle East back in March. They knew now that he would die in July of 1945—or at least he would have in the normal run of events. A doctor from the Australian component of the Multinational Force had run all sorts of gizmos over the PM, and had even inserted some kind of pellet under the skin of his right elbow that was supposed to help him cope with the stress of his office. But to Robertson, John Curtin looked like he might not make it through the night. No matter what wonder drugs they gave him, he was being eaten alive by the war.

  “I suppose the Japs will find this information useful when they take over the place,” he muttered bleakly, dropping the briefing memo back onto his desk. “Although I’ll be buggered how they expect to grow rice here.”

  “They won’t be growing any rice here, Prime Minister. You know that,” said Robertson. “They’ll be beaten here. Driven back through the islands. And burned alive in their own cities. Probably a lot quicker than would have happened originally. We had that uranium dug up and shipped off to the Yanks double-quick. They’re working twenty-five hours a day on this A-bomb of theirs. And they’re not going to waste time running up blind alleys like they did—or would have—the first time. They have a room full of computers now. It could be less than a year before they test the first warhead.”

  The prime minister, a former journalist, sketched a thin, humorless smile. “Everybody is working overtime to build their own bombs, Paul. I don’t imagine for a second that Hitler and Tojo haven’t stripped all the computers off the ships they found. And I think the Japs are here partly because they covet our uranium—”

  Robertson made to object, but the PM waved him away.

  “Oh, I know, I know. They’re going hell-for-leather to deny the Americans a launchpad for their counterattack in the Pacific. They can get uranium from the Russians now, anyway. Neither they nor the Germans can hope to compete with the Yanks in the end. They just don’t have the industrial base needed to win a race to the bomb—” Curtin rubbed at his red eyes with a shaky hand. “—but they are here, on our soil, killing our people.”

  “We’re beating them.”

  “No. We’re killing them. But we’re not beating them yet. They’re not in retreat from MacArthur’s bloody Brisbane Line. They’re dying on it. But there’s a hell of a lot of people trapped behind that line, and I’ll wager pennies to pounds that they’re dying a lot harder than Homma’s men. It’s not even propaganda that the Japs treat their captives worse than animals. It’s history now.”

  Robertson couldn’t argue with him on that. It had proved impossible to suppress the knowledge that had come through the Transition, and after a couple of futile attempts by the Commonwealth censors, they hadn’t bothered trying any longer. For once they hadn’t had to invent stories of the bestial nature of their enemies. The Nazis and Imperial Japan already stood condemned by history, and even by the testimony of their own descendants.

  He had seen newsreels of some of the English-speaking German and Japanese personnel who’d a
rrived with Kolhammer. They were touring the U.S. on a war-bond drive, and had proved themselves to be more than effective campaigners against their own countrymen. The Germans in particular, as he recalled, attacked the Third Reich with almost messianic zeal. The two Japanese sailors were a little more restrained, but no less emphatic that the militarist government of their homeland had to be defeated and replaced with a modern democracy.

  It made Robertson’s head spin every time he thought about it, and he was grateful to be so busy. He wasn’t responsible for giving Curtin military advice. Originally he’d been assigned to the PM’s office to help smooth the transition from a state-based to a federal taxation system. But that had been temporary, and now he’d agreed to a permanent appointment, helping the government deal with the economic implications of the Transition. His brief covered everything from planning for future droughts, through to simple trademark issues. Before joining the PM in his surprisingly small, dark office, he’d been on the phone to the American ambassador, trying to convince their cousins across the Pacific to prosecute some five-star grifter by the name of Davidson who’d lodged patents for more than half a dozen inventions that would have been developed by local businesses.

  It was a hell of a job, dealing with the monetary implications of an invasion one moment, and with a crook who was trying to steal the plans for a self-chilling can of beer the next. But when nobody was watching, Robertson had to admit to himself that he was, just occasionally—well, not having fun exactly, but he’d never been as excited by the challenge of his old job in the bank. There he’d made money. Here he made history.

  “Prime Minister, you cannot give up hope,” he insisted. “They surprised us with the landings in Queensland because it was insanity. They lost half their troops just getting ashore, a disaster by anyone’s measure. And yes, they’ve rolled over dozens of small towns, but as soon as they hit MacArthur’s defensive line, they stopped dead—literally. They have no chance of reaching our main population or production centers. They’re terrified to the point of impotence of engaging with Spruance’s fleet because of the Havoc and the Kandahar’s battle group.

  “Yamamoto is like a drowning man desperately grabbing at anything to stay afloat. He—will—lose.”

  Curtin’s tired, watery eyes glared defiantly up at him over the rims of his glasses. “Then what are they doing here?”

  4

  MOSCOW, USSR

  The killer was well known, at least to his most important victims. Blokhin was the man’s name. He had served under the Tsar in the Great War, but had switched his loyalties to Lenin’s Bolsheviks by the early 1920s. He had been a secret policeman ever since, rising to head the Kommandatura Branch of the Administrative Executive Department, a rather bloodless title for the lord high executioner of the Soviet Union.

  Nikita Khrushchev, who would now never become the Communist Party leader, groaned as the heavy iron door swung open and Blokhin entered the room. Through the sweat and blood that clouded the vision in his one good eye, he could make out the hem of the leather butcher’s apron that was nearly as legendary as the ogre who wore it. It was said to be so heavily stained with the blood of the thousands of Polish officers Blokhin had personally executed at Katyn that it could never be cleaned. There was probably more life in that filthy tunic than remained in Khrushchev’s entire broken body.

  Blokhin spoke to a couple of NKVD guards, his flat, Slavic features hardly moving as he did so. The pair stomped over to where Khrushchev lay on the cold concrete floor and pinned him beneath their boots. The agony of their hobnails grinding into his already tortured flesh and broken bones summoned up screams the former Politburo magnate had not thought he would be able to voice. His throat was already raw from what seemed like a lifetime of screaming.

  He was dimly aware of Blokhin’s heavyset form as it advanced on him, and for one irrational moment he wondered if he might have lived had Stalin agreed to liquidate the executioner, as Beria—the head of the NKVD—had once desired.

  But that was madness. The Soviet Union had no shortage of executioners.

  After all, Yezhov—that poison dwarf—had tortured and killed unknowable numbers of enemies, only to be killed in turn by Beria. He had died begging and screaming and thrashing against his fate, and all Khrushchev had left was a determination that he would not go out like that. He knew there was no return from this very special section of Lubianka. Best then to consign his shattered carcass to the release of death with what little dignity he could muster.

  Naked, covered in his own filth, nearly toothless, his face a bruised ruin, one eye gouged out, nubs of broken bone poking through torn flesh at half a dozen places on his body—the very concept of dignity was ludicrous. But he would not beg for his life. He would—

  A small sting in his neck. He wouldn’t have noticed it amid the blizzard of pain, were it not for the fact that Blokhin had grabbed one of his torn ears just before he jabbed the needle in. This was unexpected. Death by injection. It was not standard. It was . . .

  A trickle of soft, indescribably sweet pleasure. No, it wasn’t that, either. It was . . . an absence of pain. It spread from the site of the small sting, flowing down his spine and out along his thin, scabrous arms and legs. It was like slipping into a warm bath. Even his mind, which had been as badly abused as his body, found itself floating on a summer breeze, drifting away from the horrors of his torture. The beatings remained in his memory, but now he felt so disconnected from them that they were as easily endured as the thousands of beatings and murders he himself had ordered over the years. Other people’s misery, he’d learned, was a much lighter burden than one’s own.

  Even when the guard flipped him over roughly, so that his skull hit the floor with a crack and the glare of the cell’s naked lightbulb shone into his dying eye, he did not care.

  “So, Nikita Sergeyevich, you have lost weight. The regimen here agrees with you, da?” That was a new voice. A familiar one.

  Khrushchev blinked the tears from his eye. He tried to wipe them away, forgetting his broken fingers, but the guards still pinned him to the cold floor. Each crushed a wrist beneath one boot, and they held long rubber truncheons in their hands. He didn’t care. They could do as they pleased. It’s a free country. The thought made him chuckle in spite of himself.

  “Is there something funny, my friend. Why do you laugh so?”

  Khrushchev coughed up clots of dark blood and a few broken pieces of his teeth as he regarded his latest visitor across a gulf he could not fathom. Beria stood there like a snake in human form. He had stepped from behind Blokhin, appearing without warning.

  His former friend, now chief tormentor, wore a general’s uniform and carried a small cosh. Khrushchev recognized it from previous beatings. Early on, in this new phase of their relationship, he had repeatedly wet himself when it had appeared in Beria’s thin, white hands. Now it was just a curious artifact. He didn’t even flinch when the NKVD boss took three long strides toward him and bent down to smash him across the jaw with it. An awareness of blinding pain flashed through his thoughts, but at no stage did it connect with his concerns. Then the pain faded, and he did not care that it had been visited upon him.

  Nikita Khrushchev, despite the fact that he was teetering on the edge of mortal existence, found himself fascinated. What on earth were they doing to him?

  Beria just smiled. “I can see that you are intrigued, comrade. But before I can satisfy your curiosity, I wonder, would you mind signing this confession for me? I know it has been a matter of some difficulty between us. But I thought I might seek your indulgence one last time. The Vozhd is pressing me for a resolution. You understand, my friend.”

  Khrushchev did. After all, they had known each other for years. A few years anyway, which counted for something in the charnel house known as the Soviet Union. It was Beria who had warned him off his friendship with Yezhov, just before the perverted little monster had been snatched up and fed into the meat grinder. Why, that made him close
r to the NKVD chief than poor Blokhin over there, who had once served loyally under Yezhov, and nearly died for it.

  As Beria squatted beside him and motioned for one of the guards to step off Khrushchev’s arm, the fallen Communist felt something that was akin to love well up within his breast. It was suddenly very important that he make a gesture of good faith for his old friend.

  What did it matter what had passed between them? He didn’t care that he had been made to lie in his own excrement while Blokhin and Beria beat him on the soles of his feet with iron bars. He did not care that they had tied him to a chair and beaten his legs until they were black masses, then returned to beat the bruises so that it felt like boiled water had been poured over them. It was no longer even a concern that Beria had gouged out his eye with a gloved thumb, and then crushed the ruined eyeball as it hung on his cheek.

  He didn’t shudder as he recalled the memory. He had seen worse, and had ordered worse things done.

  “What is it I’m to sign?” he croaked.

  “You forget?” asked Beria. He seemed disappointed. “It is your confession. That you worked as a German agent to undermine the defense of the Southwestern Front.”

  Khrushchev’s thoughts moved as slowly through his mind as a child’s balloon in the air of a hot summer’s day. He recalled the rout and encirclement at Kharkov only dimly. It was from his past life. Before Lubianka.

  “I do not remember so well, Lavrenty Pavlovich,” he confessed. “But I am quite certain I was not a German agent.”

  Beria smiled, a gesture that fell on Khrushchev like a shaft of spring sunlight. “It matters not. Will you do me this favor anyway? Will you sign this for me? For the Vozhd?”

  Sinking deeper into narcotic lassitude, Khrushchev was ashamed of himself for quibbling. With a great effort he took the confession in the broken claw of his free hand. The weight suddenly came off his other arm, and a fountain pen appeared. He could not concentrate sufficiently to read the document, but he had seen enough of them over the years. He knew it mattered not.