Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  So this was it.

  Homma unbuttoned the flap on his holster and stepped out onto the little balcony. He raised his pistol to squeeze off six shots. The officers and orderlies on the floor below and in the offices to either side of his opened up with small arms. The antitank rifle sounded with a much deeper boom, and he was sure he saw the round strike the angled glacis plate of the lead vehicle. An extra-long spark streaked off the camouflage paint.

  The turret guns erupted, and he was immediately thrown to his feet as the entire building seemed to shudder backwards under the impact. Plaster fell from the ceiling, and windows shattered. The noise was deafening, and painful. It filled the whole world, forcing him to drop his sidearm and jam his hands over his ears.

  He could feel the cannon shells demolishing the floors beneath, and expected to die as the building simply fell in on itself.

  Instead, he rolled over, ready to crawl downstairs and die with some honor among his comrades, only to find himself staring into the face of his assassin.

  The man appeared in the doorway without warning. He looked huge, looming over Homma in his bulky armor. His was white, but most of his face was hidden behind goggles that were so perfectly mirrored, all the general could see in them was a distorted image of himself.

  He clawed around for the pistol he’d dropped as the soldier raised one of the two weapons he was carrying. It was black, and oddly shaped, with two metal spikes poking—

  He jumped as the spikes fizzed across the room and embedded themselves in his chest. He noticed wires leading back to the device.

  And then the world turned black.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Homma came to in a different room. No. A tent.

  He had no idea of how long he had remained unconscious. The tent was lit by glowing tubes, so perhaps night had fallen.

  He lay on a cot. It was a simple structure of canvas and wood, but strange machines sat on a trestle table to his left. Somebody spoke in English. He tried to focus through the pain of a blinding headache and the sudden realization that he was a prisoner.

  More shame. Unending, unutterable shame.

  Hard, callused hands held him down. His head was clamped in a lock and wrenched backwards, exposing his neck. He felt a cool metallic object press against his jugular and then a sharp sting.

  He passed into darkness again.

  Battalion Intelligence Officer Major Annie Coulthard stepped back from the prisoner.

  “Give him a minute or so, sir.”

  “Thank you, Major,” said Colonel Jones.

  While they waited, Brigadier Barnes and Colonel Toohey, the Australian commanders, countersigned the data scrip authorizing Homma’s field punishment, and handed it to Jones. The Marine Corps officer added his own signature and passed the flexipad back to Corporal Britton.

  The clerk saluted and left the five officers alone. Jones, Barnes, Toohey, Coulthard, and Lieutenant Stafford, who would act as interpreter.

  “Your people did some good work, today, Mick,” said Jones. “It was a hell of a thing, watching those old A-Ones go tear-assing through the brush again. I haven’t seen anything like that since Iran. It really took me back.”

  The Australian brigadier nodded gruffly, but it was clear that he wasn’t in the mood for banter. He had just come from the prison camp.

  Combat medics had choppered in right behind the assault and set up triage on site. The worst cases were being treated by Marine Corps and 2 Cav medics at the local hospital, but it was unlikely that many of the original inhabitants would survive the ordeal. A couple of hundred at best, out of a town of thirteen thousand. WCIU investigators from the Clinton had already begun exhuming the bodies of hundreds of contemporary Allied servicemen and -women who had been exterminated after the fall of Bundaberg, and buried in a series of mass graves some distance outside of town.

  Jones could see that Toohey was struggling with the urge to place his gun upside the general’s head and just pull the trigger. But although they had already signed the warrant authorizing his execution, it would be some time before Masaharu Homma was taken to the edge of one of those mass graves. He was a high-value prisoner who would spend months being interrogated before meeting his ultimate fate.

  “I think we should be okay to start the interrogation, now,” announced Major Coulthard.

  “Go ahead,” Jones told her.

  Coulthard turned on the two cameras. She spoke directly into one of them. “I am Major Annie Coulthard, battalion intelligence officer with the eighty-second MEU. With me are my commanding officer, Colonel J. ‘Lonesome’ Jones, Colonel Michael Toohey, and Brigadier Michael Barnes of the Australian Second Cavalry regiment, and an interpreter from the Southwest Pacific Headquarters, Lieutenant Andrew Stafford, USN, contemporary.”

  Coulthard moved aside and adjusted the focus to sharpen up the image of the prisoner.

  “This is General Masaharu Homma, commander of the Imperial Japanese land forces in Australia. He was captured at the Battle of Bundaberg, on October tenth, nineteen forty-two, at roughly sixteen-thirty hours. Colonel Jones and Colonel Toohey have already authorized Sanction Four summary field punishment of General Homma for crimes against humanity. Execution of the sentence has been delayed to allow the prisoner to be interviewed.

  “The prisoner is a Japanese male, age fifty-five, roughly seventy-six kilograms in weight. He was disabled for capture with a one-second minimal charge from a Texas Instruments Model Nine-forty-two taser. At twenty-forty-five hours, on October tenth, nineteen forty-two, I administered ten cc’s of Trioxinol Five to the prisoner. It is now twenty-forty-seven hours. The interview has begun. Lieutenant Stafford is working from a list of questions prepared by me in consultation with General MacArthur’s Intelligence Liaison at SWPA in Brisbane.”

  “You are General Masaharu Homma?” asked Lieutenant Stafford in Japanese.

  “The black barbarian. The giant,” replied Homma in a weak voice.

  Stafford repeated the question twice. Homma agreed with him after the second try.

  “And you are the officer responsible for the extra-judicial killing of contemporary Allied personnel, and the incarceration and killing of the population of this town?”

  Homma shook his head. “I have not killed anyone.”

  Stafford rephrased the question. “Are you the commander of the Imperial Japanese forces in this town?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did those forces, under your command, execute Allied officers and enlisted men when they took control of the town?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did those forces incarcerate civilians?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did those forces execute civilians?”

  At that Homma seemed to lose focus. He closed his eyes and his head drooped to one side. A thin line of drool stretched from the corner of his mouth to the pillow.

  Major Coulthard tapped him lightly on the cheek, pushing his face back toward the glo-sticks. “Did Japanese forces execute civilians in this town?”

  “There was resistance,” Homma whispered, his voice cracked. “Much resistance.”

  “Did Japanese forces execute civilians because of this resistance?”

  “Yes.”

  The interview continued in this fashion for over an hour. Jones had seen plenty like it before. He knew that if it was him on the cot, with ten cc’s of T5 in his bloodstream, he’d be giving up whatever was asked of him, too—state secrets or his wife’s bra size, it wouldn’t matter.

  Just after midnight, Stafford asked Homma about the convoys. “Why did you bring Chinese soldiers to fight here?”

  “We did not.”

  “There were Chinese soldiers on your troopships.”

  “Not soldiers,” said Homma. “Prisoners.”

  “Why were there Chinese prisoners on your troopships?”

  “They were targets,” said Homma.

 
; “Decoys?” asked Stafford.

  “Targets, for your rockets and death beams.”

  Stafford translated the reply.

  “Decoys,” Jones muttered to Brigadier Barnes. “They were never meant to set foot on land.”

  The Australian just nodded.

  Jones leaned over and whispered into Coulthard’s ear. “See if you can get him to tell you what the fuck he was doing here, anyway. I think this whole invasion was a fucking sideshow.”

  Coulthard checked her watch. “I’ll need to boost the dose in ten minutes, sir. We should wait until then. He’s beginning to resist the drug.”

  Homma was shaking his head, refusing to talk about the Chinese anymore. Stafford switched the angle of his attack, asking the general why the army had let itself be duped into quitting China.

  Homma looked like he was attempting to bristle, but nothing came. Just a sigh. “Yamamoto,” he said quietly.

  She knew she was going to be haunted by this place for months, if not years to come. Bundaberg was one of the worst atrocities she’d ever been witness to. The tiny hospital was overwhelmed. They’d begun to set up emergency facilities at a nearby high school, but had to find a new location when it became obvious that the Japanese had used the place as a torture and interrogation center.

  One civilian health worker, a Rhodesian doctor named Michael Cooper, had survived his imprisonment and proved himself invaluable in triage. He told her of the appalling mistreatment meted out to the most vulnerable members of the community. Hundreds of survivors owed him their lives, but Major Margie Francois knew that wouldn’t be enough to save him from himself. He was going to spend the rest of his life mourning the ones he couldn’t save. She knew that particular level of hell only too well.

  They were standing in the entrance of a giant hospital tent as dusk fell, discussing the likely treatment needs of the surviving locals when a passing corpsman stopped to tell them that the field punishments had already begun.

  The major watched as a sickly grimace stole over the doctor’s face. His cheeks first drained of color before flushing bright red. His Adam’s apple bobbed convulsively as he struggled to say something.

  Francois placed a hand on his arm, which was twitching with nervous tension, or possibly exhaustion.

  Cooper croaked at her. “We were told that the uh . . . procedure . . . was open to the public.”

  “Why don’t you go have a look, Doc,” she said softly. “It helps. Sort of. Helps me sometimes anyway. You’ve done more than enough here. Go on, if that’s what you want.”

  She gripped his arm a little tighter. “But if I was you, I’d be getting some rest, too. You look like a man on the edge of collapse. You’ve earned a break.”

  The Rhodesian shook his head. His eyes were a thousand miles away. “No, Major,” he said, “I’ve earned the right to see justice.”

  “Okay, then, take this,” she said, handing him a stick of gum packed with a very mild stimulant. “It’ll get you through the next two hours, but then I’m going to send a corpsman to make sure you get some sleep. Two hours, Doctor. I mean it.”

  He agreed to follow her instructions, and shambled out into the dark. Francois watched him go.

  The snap of gunfire was already drifting over the ruins of the town, from the main enclosure of the liberated prison camp. About two hundred survivors had gathered there to watch the rather unceremonious retribution being exacted on their behalf. She didn’t need to see it herself again. She’d briefly attended a Sanction 4 execution earlier in the day.

  No drumbeat accompanied the condemned men to their final moment. No holy men of any faith administered the last rites. The prisoners’ hands were cuffed behind their backs with plastic ties. They were led or dragged over to a deep trench that had been dug in the center of the playing field by a mechanical excavator. The simple charge of “a crime against humanity” was read out to them. They were forced to kneel at the mouth of the pit, and a single bullet was fired into the back of each prisoner’s head by a man or woman, officer or enlisted, who had been rostered onto field punishment detail for that day.

  Jones and Barnes divided the task equally between their commands. As a medical officer, Francois was one of the few who had the right to claim exemption from the duty, and as long as she had worthy lives to save, she generally exercised her right.

  But later, standing in triage, surrounded by a pile of bloody rags that had been cut from the body of an eight-year-old boy who was now in surgery, having a gangrenous leg amputated, she felt the black heat rising inside her head again. It made her wish she’d gone with Cooper.

  What the hell is wrong with people that they’d do these things—to little kids?

  It was the same fury that had driven her to the edge of reason back at the prison camp in Cabanatuan, when she’d capped off five Japanese guards and their commander. She’d earned a reprimand from Jones for that—for carrying out a Sanction 4 punishment without a properly cosigned authority. But none of those women was complaining, and she wasn’t losing any sleep over it.

  “Major Francois. I need your okay to release the battalion store of amoxicillin, ma’am. It’s the last we’ve got.”

  She wrenched herself out of the spiral of dark thoughts that was threatening to drag her under. A corporal was holding out a flexipad and plastic pen.

  “Sure,” she muttered, more to herself than to the corporal; then she signed out the last of their broad-spectrum antibiotics. They had originally been intended for the Chinese internees at the caliphate’s detention centers on Java, back in twenty-one.

  “Major Francois, ma’am,” another voice called out, “we just lost those ’temp surgeons flying up out of Brisbane, ma’am. Their plane crashed on takeoff at Archerfield.”

  Then another: “Major Francois, we’re going to need you in surgery, ma’am. That antitank round fucked up Bukowksi a lot worse than we thought.”

  It felt like she’d stepped through a portal into purgatory: the coppery stink of blood, the stench of putrescent flesh, the stink of voided bowels, the screams, the sobbing, the madness and horror that were her natural working environment.

  Her flexipad beeped and pinged with constant messages, queries, demands for action, and solutions to impossible problems.

  The human part of her wanted to walk away. But Michael Cooper hadn’t given up, and he had faced a much more daunting challenge.

  “Get me some more surgeons,” she told the orderly who’d delivered the bad news out of Archerfield. “We’ve been training hundreds of them down in Sydney and Melbourne. We got fuckin’ surgeons to burn.”

  Then she turned to the runner who’d been sent to bring her back to the operating room.

  “Tell them I’ll suit up in five,” she said.

  She unclipped the flexipad from her belt and ignored the hundreds of messages stacking up in her in-tray. She fired off quick, brutal messages to half a dozen people who were dragging their feet at various points between here and Brisbane. She told them to get their thumbs out of their asses and send her the drugs, dressings, and personnel she had asked for when the battalion left the Brisbane Line. She threatened to personally shoot anyone who didn’t do exactly as she ordered.

  The stories about what she’d done at Cabanatuan lent the threat some real heft.

  Just before she headed back to the operating theater, she grabbed a passing corpsman and tasked him with finding Dr. Cooper in exactly one hour. “Knock him out with a taser if you have to,” she said. “That man needs to get some rest. Hell, we may need him back here before long.”

  She ignored the insistent beeping of the flexipad. It had been doing that ever since she’d jumped from the rear of the LAV and run toward the first cries of “Medic!” hours earlier.

  There were close to nine hundred unanswered routine vidmails and e-mails in the lattice memory of her pad. There was only one she would later regret failing to get to in time.

  21

  THE WOLFSCHANZE, EAST PRUSSIAr />
  Despite the unmasking of von Stauffenberg and his murderous cabal of plotters, the führer still felt safest at the Wolfschanze. In truth, this was a testament to his personal bravery, and strength of will.

  Of course, Himmler mused, the assassin’s bomb that would have been planted there in July of ’44 would never materialize. He had made sure of that. Anyone even remotely connected with that act of treason had already been killed. As had their extended families, their friends, and any possible accomplices. He had even eliminated some whose names were not found in the Fleetnet files, but upon whom suspicion fell anyway.

  His Mercedes hummed through the thick stands of pine and birch that made up the Goerlitz forest, where elk and wild horse still roamed free, through the steep-sided valleys and troughs carved out by massive glaciers in the distant past. As they sped along the road to the bunker complex, the SS chief felt his spirits lifting for the first time in months.

  Thankfully, the worst of the traitor-hunt was now behind them. Rebellious elements of the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine had been brought to heel with exemplary severity. Some useful men had been lost, it was true. And he was the first to admit that it was more than possible that innocent blood had been spilled. But the revelations furnished by the Emergence demanded resolute action. The vengeance of the Black Angels, falling on those who would have failed the führer, had been swift and terrible to behold—as history demanded that it must be.

  And there was still so much to do. There was a war to be won, against much greater odds than anyone would have admitted only a year ago. But just as the Emergence had brought frightful knowledge of criminals acting in league with Jewish and Bolshevik plotters to destroy the führer’s legacy, so, too, had it yielded the means of thwarting their schemes—and of defeating the corrupt democracies.

  The heavy, armor-plated sedan gracefully powered out of a long, sweeping turn, allowing him to catch sight of Kaltenbrunner’s limousine, just a few hundred meters ahead. Himmler still considered his Security Service chief a very lucky man. According to the records, some doubt had hung over his actions at the end of the war in die andere Zeit, the other time. Fortunately for Kaltenbrunner, the records were inconclusive, and nobody could pin down quite what he had done. Ultimately, he was saved by his performance on the gallows.