Designated Targets

by John Birmingham

  “The One-oh-one?” she said softly. “Do you think he’s still driving it, Amanda?”

  The intel boss shrugged. “Could be, Skipper. Who can tell, nowadays?”

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, NORTH QUEENSLAND COAST

  Riding at anchor, the pair of contemporary American torpedo boats were invisible from the main shipping channels, and nestled in under a thick, tropical mangrove canopy, they had reasonably good topside cover as well. His men thought it would have been nice if they’d had a beach to relax on, and maybe some sweet-lookin’ dolls to while away the long, hot afternoons, but you couldn’t have everything.

  Unless you were on one of those superships, of course. They came with their own dolls, and chilled air, and movies like you wouldn’t believe. Word was they had comfier bunks than the swishiest hotels.

  Lieutenant John F. Kennedy had stayed in a few swish joints before he’d signed up for the navy, but he hadn’t had the pleasure of a visit to the Clinton or the Kandahar, or even the British or Aussie ships, which were rumored to have heads where the toilet water swirled down the opposite way. At least that’s what Leading Seaman Molloy said, and he’d been on the Astoria at Midway, so he was the closest they had to an expert on all things related to the time travelers.

  Kennedy mopped the sweat from his forehead and neck with an old gray cloth and tried to tune out the drone of the crew’s voices. It was only late spring in this part of the world, but the days were already oppressively hot under the canvas shade they’d rigged up. He was working through an attack plan with Lieutenant George “Barney” Ross, and although he could appreciate the crew’s endless conversation about the sexual practices of women in the twenty-first century U.S. Navy, it was becoming distracting.

  “They’ve been slipping small barges through the passage, here and here, usually after midnight,” Ross said, roughly circling an area on the map that lay between the two officers on the flying bridge. “We’re going to have to move on from here tonight, anyhow. So why not try our luck where the reefs get nice and tight for them?”

  Kennedy slapped idly at a mosquito that was buzzing around his ear. “Our turn to lead off, Barney?”

  His friend smiled. “Sure you won’t get run over in the dark?”

  “Eyes like a cat, my friend. Like a cat!”

  “The morals, too,” Ross replied, grinning. “Okay, you take us out. We’ll—”

  Kennedy could never be sure, but he thought the crew reacted even before the alarm sounded. They’d been training so hard that their ability to anticipate one another was almost spooky. Before he consciously understood what was happening, men were charging to their battle stations. The ship’s twin 50s were manned and ready, all the canons were tracking, including the 40 mm Bofors mounted aft, and a 37 mm antitank gun way up on the bow, flanked by a set of 30 cal machine guns and a deck-mounted mortar. The boat’s supercharged V-12 engine, a Packard 4M-2500, was snarling furiously even before Kennedy got his helmet on, which was about the same time the boat’s chief came stomping up, yelling at everybody to calm down and stow their peckers away.

  “Over there, Mr. Kennedy,” said Chief Rollins, pointing to a low, black shape that was heading toward them like a speedboat. It was flying an outsized Australian ensign.

  Kennedy grabbed a pair of binoculars. Through the glasses, his first impression firmed up. It was about the size of a speedboat and powered by an outboard, but a very quiet one. He still couldn’t hear it, in fact. There were five figures seated inboard, two of them women, for sure, and all of them carrying rifles of some kind—although he’d be damned if he knew what type. They looked big enough to stop an elephant.

  “Goddamn,” he muttered. “Chief, better tell the men to put their pants back on. Looks like we have polite company for a change.”

  George Ross was nearly dancing from foot to foot beside him. “Are they—?”

  “Yup,” said Kennedy, “they are.”

  The sound of the outboard reached them only when the boat was about twenty-five feet away. Chief Rollins whistled in admiration as it bumped up against the side of the torpedo boat. “She’s a beauty,” he said.

  “Thank you, Chief,” one of the women said as she effortlessly hauled herself up over the side. “I take it you mean the boat, right?”

  Rollins hardly knew where to look, and Kennedy could see why. The woman was handsome, even striking, and her eyes sparked with a mischievous humor. She was dressed in some sort of dark blue coverall that did cover all, but still gave the men of both PT boats plenty to think about.

  “Captain Jane Willet, commanding HMAS Havoc,” she declared, and snapped a salute directly at Kennedy without having to enquire which of them was the captain. Even without a shirt, and with his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, she seemed to recognize him—But of course she would, he thought. Kennedy felt the strangeness of the moment, meeting someone who seemed to know all about him—who probably knew more about him than he did himself, in some ways. He’d been able to avoid some of the personal ramifications of the Transition hiding away and fighting down here in the mangroves inside the Great Barrier Reef. After Midway, and the attacks on New Guinea and Australia, there’d been no time to indulge in undergrad fantasies of “what-if.” He’d been promoted; then his boat and his men had been thrown into the firestorm and ordered to make the best of it. Now, he felt like his mind was stretching and twisting in a completely unnatural fashion. He hadn’t felt it so strongly in months.

  “I’m Lieutenant Kennedy,” he said, returning the woman’s salute. “And this is Lieutenant Ross, the skipper of the other boat.” Kennedy searched his memories of the chaos after the Transition. “The Havoc, eh?” he said. “I guess you’d be the ones launched those rockets at Yamamoto’s home base? Sank two carriers and a bunch of cruisers?”

  “We are,” said Willet, squinting in the fierce tropical sun. Kennedy had noticed that most Australians seemed to walk around with a permanent squint.

  Lieutenant Ross stepped forward eagerly, cutting his friend off. “It’s an honor, Captain Willet. And a privilege.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” replied the submariner. She appeared somewhat taken aback by his earnestness. Kennedy smiled to himself. He doubted there was a man anywhere in the navy who believed in this war as much as his friend.

  Ropes dropped down to secure Willet’s launch as another pair of her shipmates came over the side of the 101: a second woman, smaller and a few years younger than Willet, and an old salt who wouldn’t have looked out of place on Kennedy’s boat. The captain introduced the woman as her “intel boss,” Lieutenant Lohrey, and the guy as her own chief, Chief Petty Officer Roy Flemming. He was grinning hugely, and paying almost no attention to Kennedy or Ross. He only had eyes for the boat.

  “If you’ll excuse me, this doesn’t look like a standard early-series Elco, Lieutenant. You got a lot of mods here.”

  Kennedy smiled again. “You mean the armaments? Yeah, well, the welds on some of them are still warm.”

  Willet’s boat chief walked over to the nearest cannon, the forward-mounted 37 mm can opener, and stroked it with a loving air that Kennedy recognized only too well. His own chief had been inordinately proud of the refit, which the squadron had done on their own initiative back in Pearl, using a bare minimum of information cribbed from a copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships of World War II that had arrived with Kolhammer’s Taskforce. They didn’t have any superrockets or death beams to play with, but every man on the 101 was certain they’d turned the old girl into a really formidable fighting ship.

  “You didn’t really see this sort of configuration until late forty-three, forty-four,” said Chief Flemming. “You know, pound for pound, the old PT boats were just about the heaviest hitters of the war.”

  “You’ll have to excuse, Roy,” said Willet. “He’s an enthusiast.”

  Kennedy had climbed down from the flying bridge to the deck, where the last two Australian sailors had come aboard. Their coveralls were much thicker
than the other three and seemed heavily padded. They wore some sort of protection at their knees and elbows, which reminded him of athletic cups, of all things. Each carried a pair of mysterious black tubes slung across his back. Their headgear resembled German helmets, and their eyes were hidden behind goggles that reflected his image like a mirror. They never stopped moving their heads, scanning the tree line and the mangroves like hunting dogs. They didn’t smile much either.

  Willet saw him checking them out. “Sorry, we don’t mean to be rude, Lieutenant. But you’re way behind enemy lines here. And good manners are always the first casualty of war.”

  Kennedy shrugged it off. He was acutely aware of being caught half-naked, but neither of the women seemed at all interested. Perhaps the rumors were true after all. “Well, Captain,” he said, “visitors are always welcome. But I assume you’re here on business.”

  “We are.” She nodded. “How would you like to do me a big favor?”

  “Anything for a lady.”

  Willet gave him a lopsided grin. “That’s what I hear.”

  Kennedy wasn’t sure which was louder, the laughter from his shipmates or the rush of blood in his ears as he flushed with embarrassment.

  The four officers repaired to the now very cramped flying bridge, while Chief Petty Officer Flemming disappeared on a tour of the boat with Collins. Willet’s security detail took up positions fore and aft and politely refused to talk to anyone. Sneaking a look at them occasionally, Kennedy wondered why they didn’t faint from heat exhaustion. They were entirely cocooned within their strange battle dress.

  Willet caught him looking once as he wiped at the sweat from his own neck.

  “The suits are thermopliable, Lieutenant. They’re much more comfortable than you or I at the moment.”

  Kennedy nodded absently, then turned back to the amazing devices that Lohrey had produced from a backpack. The data slates, as she called them, were about the size of a large book, and not much thicker than a packet of cigarettes. One of them displayed about a dozen graphs and readouts that made no sense at all to Kennedy and Ross. Willet explained that this was a live link back to her sub, feeding her updated intelligence. The pictures in the other data slate made a lot more sense, but were hard to believe.

  “This is a real-time feed from a Big Eye drone we’ve got shadowing this Japanese convoy,” Lohrey explained. “It’s sitting way above the ceiling of any air cover, but as you can see, there’s none to speak of anyway.”

  The two torpedo boat officers had been briefed on the capabilities of the Multinational Force, and when he’d joined the ship’s complement, Leading Seaman Molloy had kept everyone entranced for days with stories about the Leyte Gulf and the Astoria. But to experience the future firsthand, that was something else altogether.

  The slate taking the feed from the surveillance craft—Lohrey called it a drone—was full of movies, obviously shot from somewhere above the Japs. One large frame, showing all five ships, dominated the screen. Surrounding it, five smaller “windows” carried live images of each individual ship. Lohrey played with another device, a flexipad, and the images danced around, the focus zooming in until it was like they were floating just above the deck of one of the ships. Kennedy could see hundreds of uniformed men there. It looked to be seriously overcrowded, perhaps a sign that the Japs were having transport problems. On one of the destroyers he thought he recognized the signs of an antiair drill in progress.

  “These are good kills, gentlemen,” said Willet. “But not good enough to justify burning up a couple of my combat maces. We can lead you guys right onto them, though. You can hit them tonight. There wouldn’t be much moonlight anyway, but our weather radar says the cloud cover is going to be thickening up, too. You up for it?”

  “Hell, yeah!” said George Ross.

  Kennedy was just as eager, but he didn’t leap in as quickly. “Captain Willet. These, uh, slates are amazing, but we don’t know how to use them. Are you planning on leaving anybody with us?”

  “I’ll be staying,” said Lohrey. “And I’ve brought some night-vision gear in the launch. We’ve got holomaps of this whole coast, and we’ve already planted beacons to take a solid position fix, so the lack of GPS won’t be an issue.”

  The Americans stared at her with blank incomprehension.

  “Trust me,” she said. “It’ll be cool.”

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA COMMAND,

  BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA

  Hundreds of kilometers away, Lieutenant Commander Rachel Nguyen sat in a small, fourth-floor office of a colonial-era sandstone building, the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur’s Southwest Pacific Area Command. There was no air-conditioning, and her workstation pumped out enough heat to make the room extremely uncomfortable, even with the windows thrown open and a couple of old wooden fans spinning at top speed. Indeed, she suspected that their tiny motors probably dumped more heat into the room than the fans took out. Mold had discolored the walls and ceiling, and the smell of uncollected garbage drifted up from the alley below.

  She was oblivious to it all, though, her attention focused only on the three Bang & Olufsen flatscreens arrayed across the huge desk at which she sat. Two officers from MacArthur’s Intelligence Division sat in with her, an American major and an army captain from New Zealand. They were both ’temps, and although they outranked her, they deferred to her technical expertise, which meant that neither of them was comfortable using a wireless mouse. Or any kind of mouse, for that matter.

  The screens ran video coverage and data dumps received from 21C assets positioned all over the local theater—vision recorded by a marine recon squad probing the Japanese garrison at Mackay, transcripts of signal intercepts sucked up by the AWACS birds, drone coverage of the frontline battles north of the city, even media packages from embedded journalists like Julia Duffy. Rachel hadn’t spoken to the reporter since they’d briefly worked together on the Clinton after the Transition, but she followed Julia’s stories whenever she could, and had privately cheered her on as she elbowed her way into the front rank of local war correspondents. She was as big a name as Ernie Pyle now. Somewhere behind the dozens of open windows, Julia’s footage of the ’temp marine sergeant who’d turned the ambush earlier that day was running in a silent loop. Rachel had downloaded the feed from the local net as soon as a digital spyder alerted her that the reporter had filed. Nobody was watching now, however.

  Instead, all three officers were concentrating on a data burst from the Havoc. The submarine was patrolling just south of the Whitsunday passage, blocking all attempts by the Japanese to land reinforcements closer to Homma. The small convoy of troopships and destroyers was cautiously beating south in a large window on the central flatscreen.

  Rachel pulled in close on the largest of the transports, a captured tourist liner by the look of her. “It still doesn’t seem right to me,” she said. “There’s something, I dunno . . . It just doesn’t feel right. C’mon, you guys are the spooks. Do something spooky.”

  Major Brennan, the amiable American, just shrugged. “None of it makes much sense, Commander. The whole campaign is like the charge of the Light Brigade. They shouldn’t have done it. They took New Guinea by balls, and surprise, and sheer weight of numbers. And even then, it cost them badly. They needed at least twenty divisions to take Australia, not the seven they sent. They needed air dominance, which they don’t have. They needed secure supply lines, which they don’t have. They can’t move without you guys spotting them. They can’t reinforce the forces they did get ashore. It’s not rational. None of it looks right.”

  Captain Taylor, the Kiwi, leaned forward to squint at the screen. “I would have said it was a diversion. Like the Aleutians were supposed to be for Midway. But they’ve been here for weeks, and nothing else has happened. They’re just running their heads into a brick wall.”

  Rachel still wasn’t satisfied. She pulled the keyboard over and typed quickly for a few seconds. “I’m going to ask for a tighter frame on the b
ig troop transport,” she said. Her request flickered along fiber-optic cables scavenged from her old ship, the Moreton Bay, up to a dish on the roof of the building, which pulsed the signal into the ether. It was picked up by an AWACS flight, which relayed it to a communications drone. From there it traveled to the Havoc.

  A few seconds later, a new control panel opened up, and Nguyen tapped out another set of commands. A Big Eye surveillance drone, keeping station at seventy thousand feet above the Whitsunday passage, began its descent to ten thousand feet. Even at that height, it remained invisible to the ships below. Tiny motors whirred, lenses refocused, and new data streamed back via the relay links to Brisbane.

  Nguyen pulled in tight on the deck of the ship, where hundreds of men performed an exercise routine. But despite the activity, they appeared listless. “Not exactly ripping it up, are they?” she said.

  “It’s probably hot,” offered Brennan.

  “What about these guys?” Nguyen asked, pointing at four clusters of Japanese soldiers who weren’t doing anything. They just seemed to be watching over the other men.

  She refocused again, bringing them to a height of fifty meters virtual above the deck of the ship. “They look like guards to me. They’re carrying rifles with bayonets fixed. They never take their eyes off the men exercising on deck, so they can’t be lookouts. Take a look at the prisoners, if that’s what they are. They look Chinese to you?”

  She didn’t insult the men by making the obvious joke about them thinking all Asians looked alike. Brennan and Taylor had both spent years working in the Far East before the war, and in the time that she’d worked with them, they’d never once given her reason to think of them as anything other than the most broad-minded of souls. It made her sort of ashamed of her own assumptions. She’d wrongly figured that everyone she met here would be dumb-arse bigots. It turned out her biggest problem with Brennan was her not sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the puppet emperors of French Indochina. It had been his specialty as a visiting fellow at Poitiers University before the war.