Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “And Miss Duffy, I’m sorry if I was out of line with you, you know . . . when things was turning to shit up there.”

  Julia raised a bandaged hand and demurred. “It was a busy day at the office, Sarge. I’ve had worse. But how are you doing? I see they got you a gel sleeve on the chopper. That’s good. You’ll probably keep the leg.”

  Snider perked up at the news. “Better than that, Miss Duffy. It’s a fuckin’ million-dollar wound. I’m going home. Won’t be dancing too many foxtrots from now on, but who really gives a fuck, eh?”

  Julia pulled up an empty ammo crate and insinuated herself into the circle of wounded men. She slipped off her backpack and leaned the MP-5 up against the wall. Snider gave her a quick introduction to all of them, bar one, whose name he didn’t know. The man introduced himself as Corporal Robert Payne, a Canadian artilleryman who had been standing near a howitzer when a shell exploded in the tube.

  “You know, Sergeant,” said Duffy, “You might just dance the foxtrot again after all. It’ll take a while, but knee reconstruction wasn’t a big deal up in my day. And most of the senior Task Force medical staff have been pulled off active duty and put into teaching hospitals. Of course, I gotta tell you, the fuckin’ foxtrot is never coming back.”

  Duffy waited until the men’s laughter and ribbing died down before speaking again.

  “Sarge, do you think you could see your way clear to an interview? There’s already a lot of talk about what you did this morning. You want my opinion, they’re going to turn you into a hero and send you out on the road back home, selling war bonds with John Wayne and Hedy Lamarr.”

  Sergeant Snider was openly surprised to hear that. “Hedy Lamarr, you say. That’s a classy dame. You think she’d want to hang out with the likes of me?”

  “Buddy, when I’m finished, you’ll be beating her off with a stick. Matter of fact, you’ll be able to walk into a room full of Hollywood starlets and know there won’t be a dry seat in the house.”

  Snider’s friends all broke out into catcalls and cheers, and Julia made certain to grab a few lines from each of them about what they thought of his efforts on the hill.

  When she was finished she checked to make sure that the lattice memory had stored the interview, and she copied it to a spare stick, just in case.

  “There’s one other thing you could do for me, Sarge, which I’d really appreciate.”

  Snider pulled himself a little higher in the fold-up canvas chair, wincing as he did so. “You name it, Miss Duffy. I figure there’s no way I can repay you for drilling those guys.”

  “Well, in fact, there is, Sergeant. There’s some guys from Movietone who are going to be looking for you later. Could you possibly tell ’em to fuck off?”

  Snider winked theatrically. “Consider them fucked, ma’am.”

  The University of Queensland sat within a great bow of the Brisbane River about seven miles from the city center. There wasn’t much to it, thought Robertson, just hundreds of acres of open fields. The area had previously been given over to the cultivation of sugar, arrowroot, cotton, maize, and pineapples. Only one building had been completed before the outbreak of war, a grand colonnaded sandstone structure with two wings, divided by a massive clock tower that also housed an imposing atrium. Before any students or teachers had had the opportunity to move in, the Commonwealth Government had requisitioned it for the advanced headquarters of all Allied Land Forces in the Southwest Pacific.

  In August of 1942, it had changed hands again, becoming the theater HQ of the Multinational Force ground combat elements, which was to say, the U.S. Marine Corps’ Eighty-second MEU, and the Second Cavalry Regiment of the Australian Army.

  The Abrams tanks and LAVs, Bushpigs and attack helicopters assigned to those two forces did not spend much time at the HQ, having been thrown into crucial blocking positions to secure General Douglas MacArthur’s much-vaunted Brisbane Line. The line was less a natural stronghold than a strategic concession that he didn’t have the forces he needed to hold ground any farther north. It conceded about two thousand kilometers of coastline to the Japanese. To be sure, there were significant Allied forces intact and operating to the north out of Cairns and Townsville, but they were cut off from resupply and reinforcement. They were surrounded, but the Japanese in turn hadn’t managed to land enough men and matériel to snuff them out. So the forces there were effectively under siege.

  The press made great play on “the new Tobruk,” and “the new Bastogne,” even though the latter hadn’t happened yet. But that was just propaganda—what Colonel Jones called “spin.” Small teams of Special Forces were operating up and down the coast, disrupting the Japanese rear areas with great effect, and the reports they sent back of atrocities against the civilian population were enough to reduce the prime minister to tears in his private moments.

  The PM was staring at a map in the briefing room—a lecture theater that had yet to hold its first class. Paul Robertson, his principal private secretary, wondered what the other men and women in the room saw in that map. MacArthur seemed fixated on his great defensive line, the arc of Allied Forces blocking the Japanese drive south. Jones and the senior 2 Cav officer, Brigadier Barnes and his SAS colleague, Major Horan, undoubtedly saw hundreds of miles of exposed Japanese flank, just begging to be ripped open. He knew that General Blamey, the contemporary Australian land force commander saw twenty thousand miles of largely indefensible coastline. New Zealand’s senior representative General Freyburg probably saw the distance that remained between the leading edge of Japanese expansion and his homeland across the Tasman Sea.

  As for the others, about a dozen staff officers, two of them women from the Multinational Force, the former banker had no idea.

  “We are attriting the enemy into defeat,” MacArthur insisted, repeatedly flicking the screen that one of Brigadier Barnes’s young ladies had set up. Robertson wondered where he’d picked up that terrible word—attriting. “He’s bleeding out, I tell you, gentlemen. He cannot sustain these losses and he cannot be reinforced. We don’t want to risk upsetting this excellent arrangement by letting Colonel Jones and Brigadier Barnes go gallivanting across the countryside. Their remote-sensor coverage and fire support are in large part responsible for denying Homma the city. Every time he moves, we hit him. Soon there will be nothing left to hit.”

  Barnes remained silent and unmoving, but Jones bowed his head and rubbed wearily at his eyes. “General,” he rumbled in a deep bass voice. “We are not going to remove all of the surveillance assets from the line, nor the Crusader guns. They will remain in place and be staffed by our specialists to make sure you retain full coverage. But we can roll up the Japanese in a fraction of the time if we get our armor on the move, and around into their rear.”

  MacArthur’s thinly compressed lips warned of an explosive retort, but Prime Minister Curtin calmed him down with a gesture. “General, you’ve had my full support at every point in this campaign, but I must tell you I am not willing to allow these animals an extra day’s grace. While we sit here jawboning, they are torturing and raping and murdering with impunity, up and down the coast.”

  MacArthur was becoming visibly angry, but he maintained a better working relationship with Curtin than he had with anyone in the Roosevelt administration. “Prime Minister, I can understand that,” he said in a placatory tone. “But it won’t be that much longer. We can—”

  “If I might, Mr. Curtin.”

  Everyone turned to face Brigadier Michael Barnes. High spots of color flared on MacArthur’s cheeks at being interrupted so abruptly, but the Australian continued in his flat nasal accent.

  “This morning we received an encrypted burst from a long-range SAS patrol around Bundaberg. You need to see this.”

  Barnes thumbed a control wand, and the theater map disappeared, replaced by a movie, quite obviously shot in stealth. The cameraman—or woman, Robertson supposed—was lying in scrub, on a raised position overlooking what appeared to be a schoolyard. A nu
mber of civilians, maybe three dozen of them, were being bruted into a rough circle by a platoon of Japanese soldiers.

  Major Horan provided a commentary. “This vision was taken by a four-man patrol. The Japanese have established a major garrison and staging post at Bundaberg, which had a prewar population of approximately thirteen thousand people.”

  As the officer spoke, seemingly without emotion, two soldiers in the movie clubbed an old man to death in front of the other prisoners. Robertson felt ill just watching it. The PM’s face twisted with revulsion. Most of the time travelers, he noted, did not react with anything like the same intensity, although Brigadier Barnes’s jaw muscles were moving slowly, as though he was grinding his teeth.

  “The civilian population have been separated from the small contingent of Allied personnel who were based in the town, all of whom, as best we can tell, have been executed. The civilians are being held in a large open area on the banks of the Burnett River. During the day they are employed building earthwork defenses. There is very little food or water, and casualties are estimated at thirty percent to date.”

  “Good God,” breathed the prime minister. “Are they giving any succor to the women and children, Major?”

  “None whatsoever,” replied Horan. Brigadier Barnes handed him the video control, and the officer brought up a new window within the main display. Hundreds of children, some of them little more than toddlers, were shown working in a large excavation. The focus zoomed in on two small boys scraping away at the dirt with toy shovels. Their arms were engulfed in spasms. When one stopped digging, the other appeared to encourage him, but to no avail. The picture began to shake a little, but steadied itself again. The lower half of a Japanese soldier appeared and kicked the child who had stopped working in the head. Audible gasps filled the briefing room, followed by several groans and protests when the other boy attacked the soldier, only to be run through with a bayonet.

  Robertson heard a strangled sob somewhere nearby, but he couldn’t identify the source. It may well have been Curtin. The fight seemed to have gone out of MacArthur. He was standing, his shoulders slumped, his face a picture of pure horror. Robertson recalled that the general had a son of about the same age as the boys in the video.

  Horan closed the pop-up window, returning them to the scene at the schoolyard, where Robertson was mortified to see that many of the prisoners had been killed. An untidy scattering of headless bodies lay in front of the survivors, mostly women, who were silently screaming as a boy—who couldn’t have been more than ten years old—was forced to his knees in front of a Japanese officer wielding a long sword.

  Curtin’s voice boomed out. “I think we’ve seen enough, Major Horan.”

  The screen went blank, for which Robertson would be forever grateful.

  “Was there nothing your men could do, Major?”

  The PM’s adviser was surprised to find that he himself had asked the question.

  “It’s a four-man patrol, sir, under orders to remain undetected. They have endeavoured to collect enough identifying material so that the responsible enemy combatants may be sanctioned when the opportunity arises.”

  “We’re still a long way from war-crimes tribunals,” said Freyburg, the New Zealander.

  Brigadier Barnes replied before Horan could speak. “Actually, sir, under ADF Standing Rules of Engagement, enemy combatants apprehended in the course of, or after the commission of, crimes against humanity are to be summarily executed without recourse to appeal.”

  The statement fell into empty space, the implications tumbling over and over in everyone’s minds.

  Nobody spoke for what felt a long time, until MacArthur broke the spell. “Colonel Jones, do American forces operate under the same rules?”

  The giant marine nodded his shaven head. “Something like them, General. The effect is the same. President Clinton signed an executive order in two thousand nine. Congress passed its own legislation a year later.”

  Robertson could see from the faces that the contemporary personnel and their civilian counterparts, many of whom had thought themselves well adapted to the disturbingly predatory culture of their grandchildren, were given pause to think again.

  Major Horan interrupted their thoughts. “Prime Minister, as you know, all Multinational Force elements still operate under their original rules of engagement. The guilty parties in this instance have been identified. They could be sanctioned immediately, if you wish. But it would inevitably lead to reprisals against the surviving population.”

  “Inevitably,” breathed Curtin in a very soft voice. He sighed heavily, coming to a decision. “I’m sorry, Mac, but I can’t have this. We need to act now. Colonel Jones, Brigadier Barnes, pull whatever forces you need out of the line and shut these bastards down.”

  “We’re on our way,” said Barnes.

  The glory of a subtropical spring day was a jarring contrast with the darkness of the footage they had witnessed in the briefing room. Jones and his Australian colleagues lingered under a stand of jacaranda trees, their foliage a riot of bright pink blossoms. Jones stood with his foot propped up in the doorway of his Humvee while the Australians leaned against their smaller Land Rover.

  “That was quite an ambush, Major Horan,” the big marine growled, but not disapprovingly.

  Horan shrugged. “Strategy, policy, it’s all a fucking wank. Bottom line, it’s always some poor prick trying to outrun a bullet.”

  “Uh-huh. Speaking of which, how’re your war stocks?”

  Barnes waggled his hands in a so-so gesture. “Fuel’s not a problem. We’ve got enough JP-Eight off the Clinton to last another two months, by which time the locals will have the blend right. At least that’s what they assure me.”

  Both men rolled their eyes.

  “Be nice if we had some more bladders to move it around in,” he continued. “And some heavy lift choppers to do the moving. Ammo is getting to be a worry. We’re going to have to gear down after this op. I spoke to that Robertson bloke this morning. They’ve got an arms plant at Lithgow retooling to produce a simple AK-Forty-seven clone, but using thirty-aught-six cartridges. Should have a pretty good underslung launcher, too. He’s promising a full production run by Christmas. The prototypes are ready now, if you’d like a look.”

  Jones sucked air in through his teeth. “I just wish things were that simple at home. Kolhammer’s banging his head against a brick wall, trying to get an assault rifle into general production.”

  Horan used the toe of his combat boot to dig a well in the thick carpet of jacaranda blossoms that lay at their feet. The air was almost sickeningly sweet with the scent of their decomposition. “He’s equipping the guys you’ve got to train with one, isn’t he?”

  Jones nodded. “With a Forty-seven knock-off, just like you. Weapon of choice for the third world, and that’s the comparative level of industrial sophistication we’re dealing with, even in the U.S. I think it’s going to be a long time before we see caseless ceramic again.”

  “Or GPS,” added Barnes.

  “Or VR porn.” Horan grinned.

  Jones grunted. “Colonial riffraff.”

  The dull thud of rotor blades reached them through the warm, moist air, but the sound trailed off before they were able to spot the helicopter.

  “Well, gentlemen, I suggest we get our staff together ASAP and sign off the plan for this party.”

  Brigadier Barnes fetched a data stick out of his shirt pocket and handed it over.

  “Holomaps of the route I’d suggest we take. We’ve got rail transport for about a hundred and twenty klicks. Robertson has already requisitioned the rolling stock. It’ll save on the fuel bill.”

  Jones slotted the stick into his flexipad and thanked the tank officer for the maps. “Just one thing, Mick,” he said. “How in hell do they fit you into a tank, anyway?You’re what, six-three?”

  “Six-four.” Barnes smiled. “I crouch.”

  12

  PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS />
  It was a cruel trick of the gods, allowing a magnificent warship like this to fall into the hands of a barbarian such as Le Roux.

  Commander Hidaka was an educated, well-traveled man, and he knew at an intellectual level that the gaijin were not all hairy brutes, as such. Their technical accomplishments, for one thing, had to be acknowledged. But Le Roux actually did look like a barbarian. He did not shave regularly. He stank of some ditch weed called garlic. And the uniform he wore was stained!

  Hidaka wondered how he retained the confidence of his men. But of course, these weren’t “his men” in any formal sense. They were mutineers, effectively. Little better than pirates. But for now, they held the key to Admiral Yamamoto’s grand design.

  “I think the Clinton, she is leaving now,” said Le Roux in his heavy accented English.

  “Why do you think that?” asked Hidaka, barely able to conceal his scorn.

  The Frenchman tilted his head to one side and pushed out a fat lower lip as he crossed his arms over an ample belly and examined the giant screen in front of them. “Well, this is not my specialty, you understand. The men who ran this station, they would not cooperate. But the ship’s Combat Intelligence, she tells us that a great deal of radar and energy waves they are passing over us right now.”

  Hidaka’s heart gave a sudden lurch. “We are being scanned!”

  “Yes, well, no. She is scanning for a general threat, not to locate a specific target. So she does not know we are here. The ship you tell me they lost at Midway—the Leyte Gulf—she was their Nemesis cruiser, a protector. Her sensors were more capable, much more capable. But even so, the Dessaix, she is a stealth ship, too. The Americans do not have—how do you say?—a monopoly.

  “So no, the Clinton will not see us.”

  Hidaka regarded the hairy lout with an expression of open disbelief. “And the Siranui?” he asked.

  “Oui. She is there, too.” He pointed at a window in which a colorful set of lines pulsed and undulated. “These are her sensors. They are not operating at full power. They have not, for as long as we have been observing them, and we must assume they were damaged at the Emergence.”