Jones thought he’d stick with AK. It was like Coke or Pepsi. Why fuck around with the original?
“Thank you, soldier,” he said, handing the weapon back to the quartermaster with very mixed feelings. He’d only been issued with his G4 on the eve of deployment to Timor, but he was getting ready to miss it like hell. It was a magnificent killing piece, but there was no point in even thinking about trying to build one here. They were going to be years just getting the electronics up to speed. Not to mention the ceramics, the alloys, all the materials science that was thus far beyond the abilities of a very primitive industrial base.
Hence the AK-47, preferred weapon of rag-headed punks from southern Thailand to Addis Abbaba.
It was a depressing thought.
The supply sergeant just saluted and disappeared out of the tent, into the harsh light and subtropical humidity of Townsville. This was another place Jones had thought himself familiar with. Up in the twenty-first, he’d transited the joint a couple of times a year on his way to and from Southeast Asia. The Marine Corps had leased a massive training range nearby, and from 2010 onward, an MEU had been rotated through the Townsville barracks every two years.
This Townsville had been a sleepy backwater, a cattle town and a minor port before the Japanese had taken it. Now it was just another burnt-out ruin. The airstrip and the docks had been repaired, though, and the Kandahar’s battle group lay just a few miles offshore—although battle group was probably too dignified a phrase for the sorry collection of odds and ends gathered around the slab-sided assault ship and her tenders.
The Enterprise was out there, still sailing under Spruance, along with the old cruisers Pensacola and Salt Lake City, the Littoral Assault Ship Ipswich and a destroyer screen stitched together from surviving U.S., Free French, and British Commonwealth forces. Jones had known shower curtains that’d offer more protection. But if Hawaii was going to be retaken, those ships would have to be the ones to do it.
Their chances would be greatly improved when the Siranui arrived in twelve days.
He pulled his cap down over his eyes, wrapped a pair of sunglasses around his face, and tried not to think of what might happen on the islands over the course of twelve days. He also tried not to think about the news that his brother-in-law might have come through the Transition on the Dessaix. He’d only met Philippe Danton once, at the wedding, but he’d seemed a nice enough lad. He couldn’t bear thinking about him getting caught up in this unholy mess. Was he still on the ship? Jones hadn’t even known he’d been part of the Task Force until this morning. Was he helping the Japs? Or did he have a hand in the obvious sabotage of the Lavals? This bullshit was now a personal fucking nightmare as well as a professional one. The colonel pushed his doubts down to where they couldn’t bother him anymore. It wouldn’t do to waste time worrying about shit he couldn’t change. If Danton had come through alive, chances were he was part of the reason the Dessaix’s missile strike had aborted, at least in part. The Eighty-second’s commander had more pressing issues to deal with. As he emerged from the supply tent, the two guards—both ’temps—snapped to attention.
Very few civilians remained in Townsville. A massive garrison was growing quickly on the ashes of the old town, however. Acres of tents breathed slowly in the hot, humid air, which smelled of diesel, sweat, and burnt offerings. A “Negro” battalion, the Ninety-first Engineers, was busily running up more permanent structures, adding the sound of their hammers and tools to the grunt of bulldozers clearing away rubble, deuce-and-a-halves delivering men and matériel, choppers thudding back and forth to the Task Force, and men and women cursing and laughing, shouting orders, and talking shit.
Jones returned the sharp salutes of a couple of privates from the Ninety-first as they passed by. He wasn’t sure, but he suspected they’d gone out of their way to cross his path and get his attention. Behind the mirrored blades, his face was unmoved as he walked on, but he couldn’t help the stirring beneath his breastbone. Those men were proud, and not just of their uniforms. His company clerk had to field hundreds of requests every day for transfer into the Eighty-second, from men like that. He was sorry that he couldn’t take them, but they would need at least two years of retraining before they were ready to join a squad and carry a G4.
Or an AK-47.
Jones arrived at his Humvee, still shaking his head.
“Aerodrome, Colonel?” his driver asked.
“Thanks, Shauna. But we need to swing by Second Cav and pick up Colonel Toohey first. I’m giving him a lift to Brisbane.”
Jones allowed the motion of the vehicle to lull him into a drowsy state as they motored over to the Australian camp. He’d been off the stim for a couple of days, but his sleep patterns would take another week to settle down. He’d almost dozed off when his flexipad began to ping at him. He nearly missed the call, as he started to half dream about a pinball game he used to play on his old Pentium as a teenager.
“Sir. Colonel Jones, sir. You’ve got a call coming in.”
Jones was a little embarrassed to be caught out, and found himself uncharacteristically apologizing to the driver. He must have been really out of it.
He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and took the call, a live link from the Kandahar. It was Major Francois, the battalion surgeon.
“’S’up Margie?” he asked.
“We got him, Colonel. We got the fucker who killed Anderson and Miyazaki, back in Pearl.”
Suddenly Jones was wide awake.
“I can’t believe I missed this!” she said angrily. “I set this whole fucking system up just to scan for this one thing, this one fucking thing, and then when it works, I’m too fucking lazy to check back and see. Meantime this asshole’s been living high on the hog. I just can’t believe it.”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Doc,” said Jones, looking over her shoulder at the computer screen in her quarters back on the Kandahar. “It looks like you’ve got, what, four and a half thousand messages there, and eight hundred are marked priority one. You were busying saving lives. The dead can wait.”
She looked like she was about to beat on herself some more.
“I knew Anderson,” he said, cutting her off. “She’d come back from the grave and give you an ass-kickin’ if she thought you put a Band-Aid on someone with anything less than perfect care, just because of her.”
“Well, what are we going to do, then?” Francois asked, turning self-recrimination into angry indignation.
Jones looked at the name on screen, and was lost for an immediate answer. “I don’t know. At least not right now. It’s going to be sticky. We’ll need to talk to Kolhammer first.”
Francois looked as if she was going to go for his throat. Or someone else’s—
“Belay that, Major,” he warned her. “You go taking a potshot at this guy before you’ve got him dead in your sights, and he will get clean away. You’re not the person to do this, anyway. Not after Cabanatuan. You’re compromised.”
The surgeon’s face flushed bright red and then drained of all color as her anger imploded into a small, dense ball of rage. Jones knew his chief medical officer all too well.
“Listen, I know you were the ranking officer. And I know you exercised your prerogatives under Sanction Four. But then, I know what that means, and accept it as valid. Almost nobody outside the Task Force will agree, Margie.”
“That’s just fucking politics, and you know it, Lonesome.”
“That’s right, and if we’re not careful, politics are going to fuck us just as surely as bombs and bullets. We are going to deal with this, but not by charging in and capping this asshole as though we’ve got a perfect right to do so.”
“But we do!”
“Not here, we don’t. Now, sit down, chill out, and give me some time to think this through. I’m already late for a meeting with MacArthur. We’ll talk about this tomorrow. But we do not, under any circumstances, go off the reservation with this. You understand?”
“Yes, sir,�
�� she grumbled.
It was the grumble that let him know he’d convinced her. She was always a sore loser.
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS
His old man always said, never do someone a really big favor—they’ll never forgive you for it. Jones had reason to recall that pearl of wisdom as he listened to MacArthur in the old sandstone bank building that housed the HQ of the Southwest Pacific Area Command.
The Über-temp looked like he was going to bite right through the stem of his corncob pipe when he greeted the Multinational Force leaders who’d flown in for the crisis talks. Thirty or more officers squeezed into the bank’s former boardroom. They represented all the services of all the different Allied Forces in the Pacific theater. And they mixed more readily with the men and women of Kolhammer’s Task Force than would have been the case a few months earlier. There was nothing like spilling a little blood to bring people together.
But MacArthur didn’t share the mood of reconciliation. Jones suspected he was pissed that the coup de grâce had been delivered to Homma by Kolhammer’s forces, even if they were nominally under Mac’s command now. And Jones knew for a righteous certainty that the general was seriously pissed at the deployment order withdrawing the Kandahar and her group from the Australian theater, for a counterstrike against the Japanese in Hawaii. MacArthur probably thought he’d never get them back again.
Jones had already noticed one glaring absence. Captain Willet of the Havoc was nowhere to be seen. He hoped that meant the submarine had gone hunting for the Dessaix. Even if the stealth destroyer was crewed by a scratch team of half-assed try-hards, he didn’t fancy trying to force a landing on Oahu with that ship hanging around.
The colonel felt a hand on his upper arm and was surprised to find Prime Minister Curtin standing beside him wearing a dark, slightly crumpled suit. Jones hadn’t known he was going to be there, and hadn’t seen him enter the room.
“Mr. Prime Minister, you should try out for the SAS, sir, the way you spook about.”
Curtin, who looked about five years younger than he had the last time they’d met, took Jones’s hand and pumped it a few times. “Labor Party conferences are blood sport enough for me, Colonel. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you.”
“You should be thanking your men, Barnes and Toohey, sir. They made the case for the counteroffensive.”
Curtin nodded. His eyes were watery, but that could have been from all the cigarette smoke. These people lived in a permanent fog of nicotine and free-floating carcinogens. “I’ve already spoken to Mick Barnes,” the prime minister said. “But I wanted to be sure of catching you, too. I’m not staying for your meeting. It’s all operational stuff. I have to get back to Canberra, and I wanted to visit some of your wounded before I flew out. I understand they’re at the Royal Brisbane.”
“They are, sir,” said Jones. “Major Francois is setting up shop there.”
“So I hear. My scientific adviser tells me she’s rewritten the texts for our medical schools.”
“I think she probably just copied some new ones out, sir.” Jones smiled.
“Well, we’re very grateful for everything you’ve done, Colonel. If there’s anything we can do for you . . .”
Jones didn’t openly point out MacArthur, but he did let his eyes rest on the fuming supremo for a second. “Well, not everyone is happy about our redeployment, Prime Minister. I imagine you’ve had some experience at smoothing ruffled feathers.”
Curtin sighed, “I’m the veteran of ten thousand conferences, Colonel Jones, but this may be beyond my limits. Nevertheless, I’ll see what I can do.”
“There is one other thing, Prime Minister.”
“Yes?”
“I can understand,” said Jones, “that you’d want to keep Second Cav here, but it would make my job a lot easier if they were with me in Hawaii.”
Curtin held the big marine’s level stare for a long time. Jones realized then and there that he wouldn’t want to play poker against the man.
Eventually though, his head bobbed up and down, just fractionally. “There’s no point in being a ninety percent ally, is there, Colonel?”
“No, sir, there’s not. And neither Admiral Kolhammer nor I, nor Brigadier Barnes, for that matter, think there is a realistic chance that the Japanese can make another landing in force here in Australia. We’ve got long-range aerial surveillance covering your northern approaches, and nothing is lighting up the threat boards.”
Curtin took that in and gave Jones a flat, calculating look. “But your own signals-interception people tell us there is a lot of talk on the Japanese radio channels about a second invasion.”
“Talk is cheap, Prime Minster. Men and ships and planes are not. You need a lot of them to pull off an invasion, and best we can tell, Yamamoto has all his eggs in one basket. Hawaii.”
“Do you really think you’d be able to take the islands back from the Japs? They’ll have had at least three weeks to dig in, by the time you get there.”
“That’ll just mean there’s a nicer gravesite ready for them,” promised Jones.
HIJMS YAMATO, THE PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS
He could not see the prize he had come to take. It was obscured by the smoke of his own giant guns, and by the burning of so many buildings and fields. But Oahu was definitely there, just ten miles off starboard, the whole island shaking under the thunder of bombardment.
The commander of the Combined Fleet did not let his feelings escape. He maintained a stern countenance and refused to join in the celebrations. But he did let his men applaud as reports came back of a sea of fire, engulfing the remains of Nimitz’s fleet at Pearl Harbor, and of airfields reduced to smoking rubble and twisted, red hot metal. Indeed, they had earned the right.
The great iron behemoth of the battleship Yamato shuddered again as her eighteen-inch batteries fired a broadside into the gray shroud that hung over the Americans’ Pacific bastion. Using the newly installed German range-finding equipment, the ship’s gunnery officers could be certain of landing their shots with remarkable accuracy. Only the Yamato had been fitted out so far, but with every volley, she sent tons of high explosives screaming through the air, to land on the heads of the defenders.
Above him, lost in the glare of the equatorial sun, hundreds of bombers and fighters pressed their attacks, sweeping in toward their prey and then returning home to the decks of his carriers by an elliptical route that kept them from being destroyed by the cannon fire of their own ships.
If Yamamoto had one regret, it was that the Dessaix’s attack had been so successful, despite the attempted sabotage. As a result, he would never engage in a decisive match with the American fleet. The U.S. would survive this defeat, and would rebuild their navy. Indeed, it would probably be infinitely more powerful than the force he had set out to destroy in December 1941. But it would do them no good. By then, they would be on the wrong side of history, and the next fifty years would tell the story of their unavoidable decline.
Another broadside. Another volley of massive, three-thousand-pound shells.
The decking tilted beneath him, and he felt the sudden overpressure as a discomforting sensation—not just in his ears, but throughout his whole body.
It felt splendid.
Yamamoto accepted a cup of green tea offered by a young officer. The steaming liquid vibrated inside the bone china cup, a small and delicate manifestation of the insensate violence tearing at the world around him.
“General Tanaga reports that the first transports are successfully away, Admiral,” said the duty radio operator.
Yamamoto thanked the lieutenant and sipped at his tea.
He was content with the progress of the assault, but privately anxious that the army should get ashore and establish control as quickly as possible. Much of the contemporary U.S. naval power had been destroyed for now, but there remained significant forces from the group that had come through at Midway. Battle damage had negated some of the threat. The Clinton, f
or instance, had not been able to repair her catapult system with the tools at hand, and had been retired to the West Coast, perhaps to be stripped, perhaps to be refitted. He did not know.
What was important was that she had gone. The Trident was on the other side of the world; Kolhammer’s “stealth” cruiser, the Leyte Gulf, was confirmed sunk. And the stocks of advanced weapons on the remaining ships were surely close to running out.
That was the gamble he had chosen to take.
Yamamoto closed his eyes and remembered the sacrifice made by Homma and the many navy men who had died off Australia, simply to exhaust Kolhammer’s store of weapons. For a month now, no IJN ship had disappeared inside the infernal white fire of a “plasma yield” rocket, or had been torn to pieces by hundreds of tiny bombs spat out of the belly of a “hammerhead.” None of his colleagues had been claimed by the barbarian woman on the submarine Havoc with her torpedoes that seemed to run as quickly through the water as a Zero flew through the sky.
And of course, the Dessaix had turned the Clinton’s surviving Raptors into metal confetti.
Even so, he thought, as another thirty thousand pounds of high explosive erupted from the mouth of the ship’s main batteries, he would have been happier to have delayed this moment until he could be sure. The Siranui and her treacherous crew still gave their loyalty to Kolhammer. And although the archival data indicated that the Kandahar’s air wing was not equipped with antiship missiles, how could he be sure without being able to walk through the vessel’s armory to check for himself? Midway had taught him that nothing was certain.
Unfortunately, nothing was perfect, either, and the warrior who waited until he had conditions exactly as he wanted them was in the end no warrior at all. He was a coward who would never know triumph.
“Torpedoes in the water! Off the port side.”
Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II Page 44
