Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “Hickham? Isn’t that where the Raptors are based?”

  “Were based. They’re fucked.”

  Julia felt a surge of anxiety in her friend’s behalf. “Jesus, Rosanna. Get yourself out of there now. The Japanese are coming for sure.”

  “I know,” said Natoli. “This place is on the edge of a panic spiral. But there’s no getting out. It’s pure chaos, Jules.”

  “Is Curtis all right?”

  “He’s fine. He was with me. And our fat shadow, too.”

  Julia was going to ask, but Rosanna carried on without a break.

  “I’ll tell you about that later. Look, I’ve got to go, Jules. I’ll file every three hours, as long as the link is up and I have access. Raw footage. You can produce me for a change.”

  Rosanna attempted a brave smile, but Julia could tell it was forced. Happiest in an editing suite, her friend wasn’t a field reporter. She’d never had embed training. And there she was, stuck in the middle of the ocean, on a small island that was about to become a battleground.

  “File every hour,” said Julia. “Then I’ll know you’re okay.”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ll see you soon,” Rosanna promised; then she cut the link.

  Somehow, Julia doubted it.

  26

  THE PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS

  The sight of so many aircraft forming up and heading out, to further reduce the enemy’s defenses, should have brought joy to the grand admiral. After all, it was rare in war to be given a second chance.

  But Yamamoto had not yet fully recovered from the shock of seeing Hidaka on the little movie screen, disheveled and covered in blood, telling him that one mutinous Frenchman had nearly wrecked the entire plan. Indeed, he may well have done so. They hadn’t yet determined how much damage this barbarian Danton had wreaked, and they wouldn’t know for certain until their own planes flew over the islands and reported back.

  Unlike his initial reaction to the Emergence, Yamamoto wasn’t incandescent with rage, not this time. For the admiral, rage came from the sudden, unexpected destruction of certainty. And in his heart, he hadn’t been at all surprised by this development.

  After Midway, nothing seemed to surprise him anymore. If somebody had walked in and told him that Charles Lindbergh had been elected president of the United States, or that a race of super Nazis had suddenly emerged in southern Africa, he doubted he would raise an eyebrow.

  So his primary reaction to Hidaka’s untimely news was a feeling of sickening free fall, which he fought to keep to himself. He could only wonder if the world would ever return to the certainties of just a few months previous.

  The mood on the bridge of the great battleship Yamato mirrored his own. Perhaps if Hidaka had been able to report a complete success, it would have been different. The officers and crew might yet have been seized with the fevers of victory, celebrating as they had during the first few months of the war. But now, they all seemed to wonder if their doom was approaching, and whether or not a squadron of F-22s might still come shrieking toward them at two or three times the speed of sound.

  Pounding through the Pacific toward their objective, the Combined Fleet looked unstoppable. Yet in the face of the weapons the Americans now possessed, his cruisers and carriers were little better than origami trifles.

  The officer of the watch announced that the last squadron of dive-bombers was away. Yamamoto did not bother to get up from his chair to watch them disappear into the vanishing point, far to the east. But he was quietly gratified to see some of the junior officers excitedly whispering to each other and pointing as the attack got under way. Regardless of any trepidation they might be feeling, they could not contain their enthusiasm to have at the Americans.

  It was good, he thought. His Majesty would be well served by these new samurai.

  Following their example, he put aside his own concerns. The warrior who drew his blade without confidence was doomed. Hidaka said the missile strike had done an enormous amount of damage, and his own air assault would surely add to the Americans’ woes.

  “Captain,” he said, sitting a little straighter in his command chair, “signal the fleet to redouble its vigilance. There will be enemy submarines in front of us. And a counterattack from Midway remains possible.”

  The bridge crew took their lead from Yamamoto’s renewed vigor. Backs straightened. Orders were barked out just a bit more crisply. Everywhere he looked, he saw evidence of Japan’s finest young men, willing to die in the service of the empire.

  It wasn’t right for him to let them down with maudlin displays of anxiety.

  Lieutenant Wally Curtis just couldn’t believe it. He had thought of the jet planes as indestructible. And yet there they were, every last one of them, totally fubar. A dozen or more piles of burning wreckage.

  Hickham Field was littered with scrap metal and human body parts, but most of the crash crews and fire engines were clustered about the tarmac where the F-22s from the Clinton had been parked. They were all gone, except for two that had been up in the air when the missiles came over. And he’d heard they had been banged up when they had to land on a normal road surface, because there was no undamaged runway anywhere that could take them. The undercarriage of one had collapsed when it fouled in a big pothole, and the other had clipped a power pole and just about torn off a wing.

  That was the scuttlebutt, anyway. He hadn’t seen it himself, and as Rosanna kept telling him, unless you actually saw it happen, it probably didn’t.

  Well, he’d seen this happen hadn’t he? Curtis had thought he’d never again see anything to equal Midway, but this came close. They’d driven in to Hickham, flashing three different types of ID at the guard post, which was too busy to check them properly, anyhow. The base was a write-off. It was hardly recognizable as a working facility.

  Rosanna was too busy filming to answer any of his questions, so he turned to Detective Cherry instead, which was pretty strange when he thought about it, because the policeman was supposed to be following them.

  “You think the Japs are gonna invade, Detective?”

  Cherry laughed, but it was a sour, shriveled-up sound. Curtis didn’t think there was any humor in it at all. “Sure, kid. You sucker-punch a guy this good, you gotta give him a good kickin’ while he’s down. Finish him off if you can. That was their mistake the first time around. They shoulda finished us back in December last year.”

  “What should we do, then? I tried to get back to my unit, but it’s just a big crater now. I couldn’t find anyone at Pearl.”

  “Forget Pearl,” Cherry said. “The Japs are gonna be over to bomb the rubble soon enough. You know how to fire a gun, boy?”

  “I did basic,” Curtis protested, feeling as if Cherry was somehow disregarding his martial prowess.

  The detective let go another one of his humorless laughs, as a series of explosions destroyed a hangar full of Wildcat fighters a couple of hundred yards away. Curtis flinched and ducked, but Cherry hardly moved. Rosanna swung her little movie camera around to take in the new action.

  “Basic, huh?” Cherry said. “Well, that’s good. Killing a man is pretty basic, when you get right down to it. Put a bullet in him. Or a knife. Put your hands around his neck and choke him to death. You think you could handle that, son? Killing a man right up close like that? Smelling him as he shits his pants and calls out for his mama?” Cherry’s eyes were lifeless as he spoke. In a way, it was more disturbing than if he’d been ranting.

  “I can handle myself,” Curtis replied weakly.

  An air raid siren began to wail before the cop could reply. Curtis spun around, almost describing a complete circle before he spotted the danger: dozens of planes coming in from the west, diving toward the airfield out of the late afternoon sun.

  “Rosanna!” he yelled. “Run.”

  They all ran, heading for a slit trench twenty yards away. About a hundred others hand the same idea as the first bombs began their whistling descent.

  Both Rosanna
and Cherry surprised him. She by jumping into the shelter and then popping right back up to film the attack while others cowered on the floor. Cherry by the speed with which he covered the distance to safety, and then by pulling his service revolver and taking potshots at the Japanese planes.

  The policeman wasn’t the only one doing that. A crackle of rifle and pistol fire grew into a minor torrent as men, and even a few women, opened up with small arms. Curtis felt less than useless, having no weapon to shoot. He crouched and hurried over to Rosanna’s side. She had turned, and was now filming down the trench, capturing the resistance to the bombardment.

  The fury of the attack increased so much and with such speed that Curtis thought the sound alone was going to kill them. He tried to shout at Rosanna to duck down, but the crash of gunfire and the storm of exploding bombs all around them made it impossible to communicate. Fire trucks that had been pouring water onto the burning SeaRaptors were suddenly obliterated by a stick of bombs. Massive roiling balls of filthy orange flame engulfed the tenders, and the firefighters who had stayed with them. One truck was lifted high into the air, turned over slowly like a spitted hog, and smashed back to earth, crushing two men and a woman who’d been running for cover.

  Curtis didn’t know what weird sense cut in to save them, but he grabbed Rosanna and pulled her down a split second before a Zero roared overhead, strafing the trench line and turning dozens of defenders into chopped meat and splinters of bone. Rosanna was screaming and clawing at his face, trying to get to her feet again as another Zero on a strafing run chewed up the trench. Hot soil and pieces of tarmac poured in on them as Curtis used his body weight to press down on the reporter and keep her safe.

  “You’re going to get killed!” he yelled over the uproar.

  “We’re all going to get killed, you stupid sonovabitch,” she cried back.

  Curtis felt someone grab the collar of his torn shirt and haul him up off Rosanna. He was powerless to fight back.

  It was Cherry, passing him a rifle. The stock was shattered and sticky with gore. “I admire your spirit, trying to get laid at a time like this,” said the cop, “But your country could use a little help, too, Casanova.”

  The volume of fire pouring from the trench was a fraction of what it had been, now. Curtis saw why when Cherry turned away. Nearly half the soldiers and air crew were dead, shredded by the cannon and machine-gun fire. The floor of the trench was covered in a thick, semiliquid gruel. Curtis felt his gorge rise and his stomach contract. He vomited up everything he’d eaten for lunch.

  “That’s the spirit,” Cherry called back at him. “Spit in their fucking eyes.”

  IN TRANSIT TO WASHINGTON

  About the only thing to recommend the Connie was the lack of restrictions Eastern had on using electronic equipment while in flight. Kolhammer was able to stay hooked into Fleetnet for most of the trip to Washington. The link was tenuous, and prone to dropouts, but as long as he was content to take compressed data bursts, rather than a live feed, he was fine.

  Nothing else was fine, though.

  His Secret Service shadows were back. Agents Flint and Stirling, by order of President Roosevelt. At least they didn’t crowd him, as they had when he first arrived.

  His slate beeped with updates every few minutes. Tellingly, most of them didn’t come directly from the remaining Task Force units in Hawaii. There weren’t many remaining Task Force units in Hawaii. But there were at least ten journalists from the Clinton who could provide real-time coverage from the islands, so the link had been maintained largely to provide for them. They were allowed to access Fleetnet to file, but on the condition that their raw footage became the property of the Task Force.

  Mike Judge had a team of analysts on the Clinton raking the coverage and repackaging it for military use. That was a lot like what used to happen at home, anyway. An almost embarrassing percentage of so-called intelligence was lifted straight from the news media, only to have it returned to them as “inside information.”

  Kolhammer stretched out his cramped legs in the surprisingly roomy wicker chair of the Lockheed Constellation, and scanned the latest reports from Hawaii. Judge’s people had confirmed that Lavals, almost certainly coming from the Dessaix, had struck at a number of points around the islands. The missiles hadn’t done nearly so much damage as they could have, partly because some had malfunctioned, or been sabotaged, and partly because the rest hadn’t been used to their best advantage.

  It was a moot point, however. Enough damage had been done to render the island indefensible against any Japanese force that included the Dessaix or a ship of similar capability. Follow-up strikes by carrier-based Japanese planes had focused on further degrading the islands’ air defense net, but those strikes had been unnecessary, as far as he could tell. The piles of twisted, white hot metal, which had been the Clinton’s surviving fighter wing, were all Yamamoto needed to see. With those gone, and the Dessaix at large, it was only a matter of time before the Rising Sun flew over Hawaii.

  There was little point in turning the Clinton around and sending her back. Without a working catapult or fighter wing, she was just a target, not a threat.

  The Kandahar was an option, but not a great one. Jones’s forces were spread over a couple of thousand square miles, and it would take more than a week to gather and embark for any counterstrike, and they were running perilously low on ammunition.

  The Havoc had run through all her land-attack missiles. She had a small number of ship-killers left, and seemed the obvious choice to hunt for the Dessaix, but he was going to have the devil’s own job convincing Canberra to release her.

  As they approached the Rockies in near total darkness, Phillip Kolhammer examined his options and could find only one viable response to Yamamoto’s gambit.

  The Siranui.

  HONOLULU, HAWAII

  Every window in her apartment was broken, but at least the building still stood. So much of Honolulu had been flattened that Rosanna hadn’t expected to find anything but smoking rubble where her home had been.

  Cherry’s place was gone, along with his police station. And Curtis had been trying all day to find someone to report to, without any luck. He’d given up for now and decided to stick with her. The three of them pulled up outside her place in the gathering darkness of midevening. Her apartment building stood on the side of a hill, and half the island seemed to be ablaze below them.

  The time between the Japanese air raids was becoming noticeably shorter.

  “They’re closer now,” said Curtis as a few pathetic lines of tracer snaked up from the fiery cauldron that had been Pearl Harbor. Irregular flashes from exploding bombs strobed away below them.

  “You got anything to eat?” asked Cherry.

  “You gotta be kidding,” said Curtis.

  “No, he’s right,” Rosanna countered. “If the Japanese get ashore, we don’t know when we’ll eat again before relief arrives. I’ve got some leftovers in the icebox, and my oven is gas. We should eat now. We’ll need our strength. I want to pick up some batteries for my gear, too. I don’t know if we’ll get back here again, once we leave.”

  Curtis looked even more despondent. He stopped halfway up the path that led to the front door of her block. “Do you really think the Clinton will come back?” he asked.

  Even Cherry seemed interested in her answer.

  “No,” she said. “The Clinton’s out of it for now. But the Kandahar isn’t. Or that LAS with her, the Ipswich. Even if the Japanese take over, they could kick down the door and fight their way in.”

  “Unless they get sunk,” said Cherry, “by whatever hit us.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, feeling very tired. “But let’s not think about that right now. Come on, let’s get inside.”

  There was no electricity to light the place, whether from the effects of the electromagnetic pulse or from direct damage to the power grid, she couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. Cherry had brought a hooded oil lamp, looted from God knew whe
re. There was so much smoke and dust in the air that the beam was tightly defined, reminding Rosanna of a light saber. That familiar image from her childhood, which now seemed so much more peaceful than this nightmare, lifted her spirits slightly.

  Everything was relative, she told herself as they climbed the stairs to the rooms she occupied on the third floor of the Mission-style building. Curtis thought that she’d grown up in a world full of violent lunatics.

  “Miss Natoli, is that you?” a quavering voice asked. Cherry’s lamp quickly picked out a small, round white face framed by unruly strands of gray hair, peeking out over the landing above them.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Mackellar. Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Oh, dearie, I’ve been so worried. Mr. Ramsay said the Japanese had landed and were going to kill everyone and—”

  Cherry’s voice boomed out. “It’s all right, Mrs. Mackellar. I’m Detective Cherry, from the Honolulu PD, and I can assure you that everything will be okay. Now you need to go back into your apartment, ma’am, and wait for help to come. Do you have enough food to last a few days?”

  “Well, I . . . the delivery boy came this morning, just before the air raid and—oh, I hope he hasn’t been hurt—”

  “He’ll be fine, ma’am,” Cherry said, taking the stairs two at a time to get up to her. The oil lamp threw long, swaying shadows as he climbed. Rosanna saw him place a huge paw on the old woman’s shoulder and steer her back into her home. “Fill your bath with cold water, Mrs. Mackellar. And your sinks and any pots or pans you have. In case the water gets cut off. And listen to your radio—”