Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  So the young man pressed the Tsushima vintage binoculars to his eyes and scanned the obsidian blackness that lay beyond the windows, with the zealous devotion of a true believer. Even without the glasses that saw in the dark, or the ghost planes that floated just over the mast and took pictures that could see right through a man’s uniform, even without the death beams and super-rockets of the gaijin, he still would bring honor to his ancestors. He would—

  “Shimatta!”

  The clouds parted for a second and let through a shaft of moonlight as bright and clear as a searchlight. And roaring toward him through the small oblong of illuminated ocean were two enemy vessels.

  PT boats!

  Shinoda screamed out a warning to the officer of the watch, turned his head away for just a second, and lost sight of them completely as the broken clouds knitted back together again. Chaos erupted on the bridge as Klaxons sounded to bring the crew to general quarters. Someone was yelling at him to explain, someone else was stabbing a finger at the skies, insisting that super-rockets were flying toward them. Curses and shouts reached him from the open decks, where men hurried to the ship’s sad little battery of 4.7-inch guns.

  The floor began to tilt as they came around to bear down on the heading where he’d last seen the boats.

  “We’ve been spotted,” Kennedy said with such detachment that he surprised himself.

  “Pity,” Lohrey said, staring into the pearly glow of her data slate. A dense mosaic of data and images was quickly filling all the available space. “Helm, bring us around on two-two-five,” she said. He heard her voice through the strange cushioned pads that covered his ears, as though she were talking on the phone.

  “We’ll see if they got a lock on us, or just a sneaky peek,” she added.

  Kennedy spun the wheel, and on the slate in front of him caught a glimpse of the other boat biting into the swell on a new heading, just as the rush of the first shells screamed overhead. He felt and heard them explode behind them. His men held their fire, not wanting to give away their new position.

  “He’s changing course, but blind,” said Lohrey. “He got lucky, that’s all, and it won’t last. Follow the strobe in, Skipper, and let ’em have it.”

  Star shells burst in the air behind them with a muffled whump, and suddenly the sea was alight with a fierce white blaze of light. The pictures from the battle-cams disappeared momentarily, until Lohrey adjusted the filters. Kennedy bored in toward the target, heedless of the new danger. It was a straight shoot-out, and whoever got off the first good hit would win.

  The engines howled at the outer limits of their power, driving the boat across the light choppy waves in a series of long, loping jumps from one wave crest to the next. The sound of the hull as it smacked down was massive and hollow, a series of booms that threatened to shake them apart before the Japs could land a blow.

  On screen he saw the first two fish leap from the tubes on the other boat and go racing away, just a second before the word launch flashed up in front of him.

  “Fire!” he called out, hoping that the funny little headset he wore was turned on and working.

  His own torpedoes launched. The long finger of a searchlight swept over them as all his machine guns opened up to put it out. He swung the boat around in a viciously tight arc as shells exploded in the seas around them, raising plumes of salt water that fell on his decks like heavy monsoon rain. Lohrey was braced in a corner of the wheelhouse, her head tilted at a strange angle, as though she were daydreaming. She could have been staring off into space, but with her eyes hidden behind the goggles, he couldn’t tell.

  “Hit!” she called out a split second before he felt the double crump of two torpedoes detonating about a thousand yards away. A few seconds later, the same sound, even closer, as two more struck home. The panel display split, showing two images of crippled ships. While he watched, secondary explosions tore along the aft section of one of them like a string of giant firecrackers. Then one volcanic eruption of fire and light blew the entire ship apart, whiting out one half of the split window. The supersonic blast wave reached them within a heartbeat.

  It was like hitting a wall. Everyone was thrown off their feet. The boat slewed around, uncontrolled for a moment while Kennedy wrestled with the wheel.

  “New targets, Lieutenant,” Lohrey called out in a strangled voice. She was nursing an arm that dangled lifelessly.

  “Got them,” he called back as the navigation screen reappeared on the panel in front of him. He spun the wheel until he’d lined up the flashing blue arrowhead, which designated the bow of the 101, with the red line, along which the battlespace arrays of the HMAS Havoc wanted him to launch his next attack. Or something like that. The details were beyond him now. All he knew was that he had to follow the red line at top speed and trust in some glorified box of nuts and bolts about two hundred nautical miles away, which apparently knew more about these things than he did.

  He desperately wanted to snatch aside the blackout curtains and have a good long look at things with his own two eyes, rather than relying on the battle-cams. As long as he didn’t think about what he was doing, it was simple enough to follow the schematics on the screen, but if he gave even a moment’s consideration to the situation, it all got very scary—driving a boat at top speed through a burning formation of enemy ships, with torpedoes and cannon fire filling both the air and the water.

  LAUNCH.

  The word flashed up, and he relayed the order again.

  “Fire!”

  The aft tubes spat their loads into the water, and he wrenched them around on a new heading that appeared on the panel. All his guns were firing now, the big twin 50s thrashing away like jackhammers over the ripping snarl of the 30-caliber turrets. The 37 mm antitank gun barked, and the Bofors mount thundered. The uproar was so great, he wondered how anyone heard his orders, even with the little wire microphone sitting so close to his lips.

  A distant boom, like the cracking of a mountain.

  Lohrey’s voice, strained but not shouting. “We just lost a transport. It must have been carrying ammunition or something.”

  ALL TARGETS SERVICED.

  Kennedy eased back on their speed and asked Lohrey if she knew where Ross’s boat was. She propped herself against the bulkhead, reached across her body, and used her good hand to pull the injured arm over to where it could rest on a raised knee.

  “Broken elbow,” she explained before he could ask. “I’ve medicated myself.”

  The flexipad was sheathed in a clear plastic pouch on the bad arm. She used a pencil of some sort to input the query and nodded to his panel. Kennedy looked back and realized that now he had a top-down view of the whole area. Three ships were ablaze and going down, with hundreds of tiny figures streaming over their sides. A small box of text floated next to each of them, marking them as the two destroyers and a troopship. A couple of large floating pools of wreckage and smoke and burning oil marked the points where the other ships had been completely destroyed. They were tagged as FLOATING DATUM POINT 1 & 2.

  PT 59 was surrounded by a flashing blue box as it described a long elliptical course around the nearest FLOATING DATUM POINT. Kennedy reached over to tear down the blackout curtains, so he could see where he was going at last.

  “You may find it easier to leave them up,” said Lohrey. “Havoc is sending a burst downline now, nav data to grab us up some prisoners.”

  As the words left her mouth, the skipper’s slate reformatted into another top-down perspective, with an inset window magnifying a small group of survivors swimming away from one of the sinking troopships. A red line plotted the suggested course to pick them up. It avoided the danger of sailing too close to the crippled vessels, which might yet explode, but seemed to run right through masses of struggling swimmers.

  “Can that be right?” he asked.

  Lohrey considered the image for a second, before nodding. “You’ll think me unladylike, Lieutenant, but you should just get on with it. We want t
o clear this area as quickly as possible. Havoc says there are hostile aircraft within the threat bubble. They’ll see the fires.”

  Jack Kennedy struggled to keep the distaste off his face. She was suggesting he open the throttles and ride over the top of dozens, if not hundreds, of survivors. Most of whom might not even be Japs, if that Nguyen lady was right.

  “Can you patch me through to Barney Ross on this thing? It’s secure, right?” he asked, tapping the headset.

  She played with the flexipad and nodded.

  “Barney, you there? It’s Jack.”

  “I can hear you, buddy. That was great driving before. And good shooting, too.”

  His friend’s voice was so clear, he might as well have been standing right next to him in a quiet bar.

  “Barney, I’ve got to pick up the prisoners now. You want to get going, and we’ll catch up. There’s bogeys about.”

  A short, hard laugh told him that PT 59 wouldn’t be going anywhere until her sister ship was ready to cut out, as well.

  Kennedy signed off. This time he did pull down the blackout curtains, and he looked out onto the burning oil slicks with abhorrence distorting his features. The screams of dying and injured men reached him faintly over the industrial noise of buckling metal and exploding munitions. He could see the flashing navigation schematics at the lower periphery of his vision, but he kept his eyes fixed on the waters in front of his boat.

  “What the hell’s he doing?”

  “He’s threading his way through the survivors,” said Willet, watching the minor drama on the Intelligence Division’s monitor. “Mr. Grey, bring all of the Nemesis arrays online, and keep Lieutenant Lohrey updated on the threat boards via the live link.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” replied her exec.

  Willet had been crouching over the display for the last twenty minutes, and now she stood up. She stretched her back muscles but never once took her eyes off the feed from the Big Eye drone.

  She’d wondered whether Kennedy might do this, endanger himself and his crew rather than run down a few men he’d been trying to kill just minutes earlier. It said something about the ’temps, or maybe just about him, that the war hadn’t yet coarsened their spirits completely.

  She envied him, in a way. She’d lost almost any feeling she might have had for her enemies when her sister was beheaded on camera by Moro Front guerrillas in the Philippines, ten of her years ago. Corina had been a field-worker with the Save the Children Fund when she was kidnapped from a village she was assessing for a new water treatment program and a microcredit loan scheme. The guerrillas had murdered her and two doctors from Médecins Sans Frontiéres, doing so “live” on the Web.

  When Filipino and U.S. Special Forces arrived at the village, they discovered another atrocity that hadn’t been broadcast. Everyone in the hamlet who’d been tended to by the “infidels” had been executed, including children who had been treated for cataracts. They’d had their eyes put out with burning sticks. It was the only time in her life that Willet regretted joining the submarine service. For weeks, she’d been tortured by a violent desire to sink her fingers into the throat of the man who’d killed her baby sister. “Captain?”

  The Havoc’s commander drove away the haunted memories. It’d been a long time since she’d thought of her sister in anything but the most positive terms. Years of therapy had taught her how, but now the defenses she’d erected seemed to be creaking—and threatening to collapse.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Grey. Go on,” she said.

  Her exec didn’t embarrass her by asking if she was all right. He simply relayed the update. “Lieutenant Lohrey reports that they’re picking up the prisoners now, Captain. There are two aircraft, probably Japanese flying boats, inbound for their position. ETA nineteen minutes.”

  Willet nodded, an old melancholy pain settling around her heart. “Tell them to get a move on.”

  It was just about the worst thing Moose had seen since that night on the Astoria, when the other ship had suddenly “appeared” right inside his own.

  Lieutenant Kennedy was stomping up and down the decks, a machine gun in his hand, cursing like Moose had never known him to before. He’d had to shoot a Jap who tried to fire a flare pistol into his face when they pulled alongside him, although to Moose’s way of thinking, he should have known that was going to happen. The Japs, they’d sooner swim into the mouth of a shark than surrender. You could tell which ones they were, too. Anybody trying not to be rescued was a fair bet to be working for their ratfuck little Emperor.

  These other guys though, Chinese and Koreans according to the lady officer, they were a mystery to everyone. They couldn’t swim over to the boat fast enough, and now there was maybe a hundred or more of them jammed up against the hull, all thrashing and yelling and carrying on like Charlie Chan gone loco.

  Lieutenant Kennedy said they were only supposed to get six of them, but they’d all been crying out “America number one!” and “Japan bad, USA good!” And what with them clawing at each other to get up over the sides, there had to be nearly twenty on board already, and soon there’d be almost no room to move. Moose had spent all his time on cruisers before he got moved to the little mosquito boats after Midway, and he was sort of worried they might capsize at any minute, given how much extra weight they had to be carrying.

  Chief Rollins was yelling at him to get the prisoners’ hands tied up. Mr. Kennedy was yelling at Miss Lohrey that this was the dumbest fucking idea anyone ever had. Some dripping-wet Chinese guy was trying to hug Moose as he tried to cuff some Japanese guy who’d had all the fight shot out of him. And then someone else was calling out that the planes would be here any minute, and then one of the ships they’d torpedoed went up in this gigantic fucking bang that lit up the whole ocean and guys were screaming and crying and the next thing he knew there was a real long burst of machine-gun fire and then a long, long second of quiet, before someone said, “Holy shit.”

  And Moose looked over and saw Miss Lohrey standing at the edge of the boat with one arm in a sling. In the other, she had an old tommy gun, with a drum mag just like the ones his dad said Capone’s men used to have, and goddamn if she hadn’t just emptied the whole fucking thing over the edge of the boat and into the guys swimming below. Well, maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she’d shot it into the air or something. But then maybe not, because the Chinese were swimming away from the boat now, ’cept for a whole bunch of bodies that just bobbed up and down on the water leaking blood everywhere in the warm orange light of the oil fires.

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS

  “Jesus Christ. She killed them.”

  Rachel Nguyen’s stuffy little room had become unbearably hot and close. They’d watched the relayed vision of the pickup with mounting concern as more and more survivors crowded around the PT boat. As they formed a thick carpet of thrashing limbs and bobbing heads, the men around her murmured that it was all going wrong, that they couldn’t possibly get away before the planes turned up and spotted them. MacArthur himself had just told everyone to pipe down when the female officer from Willet’s submarine grabbed a gun off a sailor, walked over to the edge, and opened up on the densely packed mass of floating men.

  On the screen, the 101 was now moving again, motoring slowly through the disbursed survivors, but nobody said anything until MacArthur spoke up.

  “What the hell just happened, Commander?” he asked, turning away from the screen to offer Rachel his full, glowering visage.

  She looked at him quizzically. “From what I could see, the mission was in danger of failing, General,” she said. “Lieutenant Lohrey acted to regain the initiative.”

  MacArthur’s face was a dead mask. He gave away nothing of what he was thinking. But the men around him weren’t so well controlled. Rachel caught some of them staring at her like she had suddenly grown a second head.

  “I can see,” she said quietly, “that you disapprove.”

  10

  PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII

>   The old girl was a ghost ship, or she felt that way to her new skipper.

  Captain Mike Judge squinted against the glare of the midday sun and tried to feel the heartbeat of the USS Hillary Clinton. Dozens of screens functioned around him, constantly updating the reports on the state of the great warship. But Judge had spent nigh on six years of his life aboard this vessel, in one role or another, and he fancied that he could still feel something that the circuits and plasma screens couldn’t tell him.

  His darlin’ was lonesome.

  She’d lost a quarter of her complement to the tragedy at Midway. Another two thousand had transferred Stateside, into the research and training facilities that Kolhammer was building in the Zone and at Fleet in San Diego. Pilots without planes to fly now found that their engineering studies were a national asset of such value that they were banned from frontline combat. Systems operators and engineers, programmers and flight technicians had ceased to perform any duties at the sharp end of conflict. They, too, had been reclassified out of harm’s way and into hundreds of lecture rooms and laboratories.

  The Clinton echoed to their absence.

  She ran on a skeleton crew now. Her fuel–air explosive catapults were beyond patching up again. With no spare parts left, and no prospect of manufacturing them in the near future, she couldn’t hurl her few surviving warplanes into battle. A pickup squadron of eleven SeaRaptors constituted her entire strike arm, and half of those had been rebuilt from parts scavenged off fighters wrecked beyond all hope of repair. Most of her AWACS wing had been attached to the Eighty-second MEU in the South Pacific. The rest were stationed on shore with the F-22s and a couple of in-flight refuelers. The heavy lift choppers, the search-and-rescue birds, the Seahawk troop transport, and Apache ground-attack squadrons had been split up and repositioned all across this part of the globe. Some were here in Hawaii; others were in California, being reverse-engineered as part of a hundred or more programs to accelerate contemporary weapons systems and technology. The bulk had gone to MacArthur down in Australia. It said a lot about the weakened state of the Clinton that she was effectively running away from that fight, which was the main game in the Pacific theater for the moment.