Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  “So what are we gonna do about this fucker?” Jones rumbled. “I don’t think I can remember a man more in need of sanction than this evil little shit.”

  Kolhammer watched the weeping man cross himself, climb to his feet, and walk away from the Boy Scout Memorial. High above them two contrails traced the flight of a couple of jet fighters. Skyhawks probably. He thought he could just make out the delta-winged silhouette.

  “I don’t know, Lonesome. You’re right that hanging’s too good for this little bastard. He’s a living, breathing argument in favor of Sanction Five…”

  “But?”

  Kolhammer chewed his lip. “But, as much as we have a claim on him, the ’temps have a stronger one. Look at this place, would you. I don’t know that I’ve ever been anywhere sadder than this. Don’t know that I ever will. I passed sanction on Hidaka, but I’m thinking that for once, their way might be better than ours.”

  The Eighty-second’s commander examined the tips of his polished shoes. An original Humvee and its driver waited for them back at the entrance to the cemetery. Jones lifted his head and stared out across manicured lawns, their gentle slopes covering a heinous crime.

  “Do you even know how we would have sanctioned him?” he asked. “He’s not some raghead jihadi. If we stitched him up in a pig carcass before killing him, he’d just think we were weird.”

  Kolhammer nodded. “I had some people working on it. Chances are, we’re going to be dealing with a few of Tojo’s finest at level five when we get back out there. It’s one of our little eccentricities the ’temps are happy to indulge for now. I think they believe it spreads an exemplary terror among the natives.”

  “They weren’t always so happy about it,” said Jones.

  “Not all of them, and not always,” Kolhammer conceded. “You’re right. I reckon they used to think we were monsters. But it’s amazing the difference a few years and a couple of standout atrocites can make, isn’t it? I don’t recall anyone bleating about Ono’s human rights when your boys put the blade on him for all this.” He swept one hand around to take in the cemetery and everything beyond it.

  “But you think they’d want to deal with Hidaka themselves.”

  Kolhammer didn’t answer for a while. Like Jones, he had been deeply affected by the cemetery. In a way, they were responsible for it. This had never happened in their world. From a distance, the two men probably looked like pallbearers contemplating the load they were about to lift.

  “I promised Roosevelt we wouldn’t go off the reservation,” Kolhammer said.

  “He knows about the Quiet Room?” The big marine’s eye’s widened in surprise.

  “No. As far as I can tell, it’s never leaked. He didn’t mention it by name when we spoke about Ivanov. But there was no doubt that we were being put on some sort of notice.”

  Jones folded his arms and pursed his lips as he took this in. Kolhammer recognized it as his Deep Thought routine. A couple of Jones’s best men and women had been drafted as Roomies, with his full knowledge and consent. If anything, he was more enthusiastic than Kolhammer about reshaping this world into something more amenable to their way of thinking. Given the shit he’d had to put up with, it was understandable. “Okay,” he said. “So, Hidaka? Do we take him into the Room, or not?”

  Kolhammer looked past his friend’s shoulder to the mass of flowers and medals heaped up around the Boy Scout Memorial. What would they have done? he wondered.

  “Give him to the ’temps,” he said at last. “But not straightaway. If we can’t go to Sanction Five, we can at least get a little medieval on his sorry ass.”

  “Okay,” Jones agreed. “I’ll countersign.”

  D-DAY + 23. 26 MAY 1944. 2212 HOURS.

  KO‘OLAU RANGE.

  Hidaka had heard all about the barbarity of these people. It made sense. Their parent society was degenerate and so, having hailed from its future, they would naturally be even more thoroughly debauched than the gaijin of his time.

  He sat on the edge of the wooden cot, his hands cuffed with some sort of light plastic tie that dug painfully into his wrists. He tried hard not to shiver from the damp chill of the cave, lest they imagine he was shaking from fear. Two of the soldiers-he knew now they were just marines, not assassins-kept their weapons trained on him. They wore combat goggles and never moved, except to strike him once when he attempted to stand up and go to the toilet. They had made him foul himself instead of allowing him that dignity.

  They were animals. Much worse than the Sutanto’s Indonesians or the Frenchmen on the Dessaix.

  He knew from having read the reports out of Australia what fate awaited him. These Emergence barbarians would not bother with a sham trial and formal execution. They would soon take him outside and shoot him in the back of the head. If he was lucky. Perhaps they would torture and disfigure him until he begged for mercy, as they had with Ono, forcing the man to shame himself in front of his comrades and his ancestors, indeed in front of the whole world. After all, in their eyes he was a “war criminal.” He almost laughed at the poisonous irony of it, except that would only have earned him another swipe across the face with the butt of a weapon. These animals thought nothing of burning entire cities, and yet they had the audacity to accuse him of “a crime against humanity.”

  He had to wonder, though, why it was taking so long. Surely they couldn’t be planning to torture him? He had been cocooned up here in the mountains forever. What could he tell them about anything? All his plans to lead the resistance from this dank little fortress had come to nothing. He was worthless as a prisoner.

  And, he thought, as a man.

  The blanket he’d hung as a blackout curtain twitched aside, and three figures entered. He couldn’t help himself. Before he could control his reaction his eyes widened in shock. It was the giant black barbarian-the marine called Jones. And the famous Kolhammer right behind him! What could this mean? Did they intend to carry out the-what did they call it? — the “sanction” themselves? He’d heard that about those, too. Their death squads in Australia had been made up of all ranks, even the highest. He assumed the same had been the case in Hawaii, but he’d had no way of confirming it, isolated from events as he was up here.

  “Get up,” Kolhammer said.

  The man’s voice was harsh and deep, reminding him of Grand Admiral Yamamoto. Hidaka climbed to his feet with difficulty, ashamed of his nakedness, his poor physical condition, and the running sores on his legs and feet. They would not allow him any clothes to cover himself.

  “You are Jisaku Hidaka?”

  He nodded, flinching from a cracking blow that never came. More shame heaped upon unutterable shame.

  “You know who we are?”

  He stood as straight as he could. “Admiral Kolhammer and Colonel Jones,” he said.

  “General,” the black man corrected him.

  “Congratulations,” he said with as much scorn as he could muster. “But I shall wager that you promoted yourself, Colonel. I doubt that your countrymen would be so generous to a nigger.”

  He grinned, pleased with himself for the first time in many long months. They knew he spoke English, but they couldn’t have been prepared for his mastery of their colloquialism, or the unpleasant realities of their adopted society. His satisfaction lasted all of half a second, until Kolhammer stepped forward and drove a fist into his face. The blow was powerful, knocking him off his feet and through the air. He flew over the wooden cot and fell in a tangle among the beds lying next to it. White, scalding-hot pain filled his head, and he could no longer breathe through his nose.

  “You will keep a civil tongue in your head, or I will have it cut out. Do you understand?”

  One of his guards was already holding a dagger. Hidaka nodded, sending spikes of pain through his head and neck again. He crawled back to his feet. The knife disappeared back into its scabbard like a marvelous conjuring trick. He waited for them to do whatever it was they did before murdering their prisoners. But nothing
happened.

  “You can consider yourself a lucky motherfucker,” Jones said. “We caught you, but you’re going back to Pearl and we’re turning you over to Admiral Spruance’s folks. They’ll deal with you their own way.”

  Hidaka’s head wobbled, and he thought he might lose consciousness. “Why?” he asked. “You do not take prisoners. Not prisoners like me, anyway. You just kill them.”

  “Oh, don’t tempt me,” Kolhammer said. “You’re right, we would normally sanction you under protocol five of the standing rules of engagement. And believe me, by the time that was done with, you’d wish we had just put a gun to your head. But other people have a claim on your sorry carcass. And we’re giving you to them.”

  “No,” he said, his voice breaking. “This is not fair. I cannot become a prisoner. Not after the shame I have already brought upon myself.”

  Hot tears welled up in his eyes. He blinked them away impatiently. Kolhammer and Jones seemed surprised. But what would they know of bushido? After all the dishonor he had brought upon his name, to be cheated now of death’s release-it was unbearable.

  Even with his hands cuffed he launched himself at Kolhammer, but he had covered only half the distance across the cave to him when a freight train slammed into him and drove him backward. He struck the wall painfully and looked up, expecting to see the admiral advancing on him like a common brawler. Instead, to his horror, a woman stood in front of him, the third American who had come through the blackout curtain. He had ignored her, thinking her some minor functionary. She bent down over him and released the uncomfortable plastic restraints.

  He moved to push her aside and she broke his arm, snapping it at the elbow.

  Then she went to work on him.

  D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 0902 HOURS.

  CINCPAC, PEARL HARBOR.

  “What do you mean you’ve got him? How?”

  Admiral Ray Spruance stared at Kolhammer as though he’d grown an extra head.

  “Lonesome’s mountain troop was on a training run through the Ko‘olaus. Just stretching their legs after the voyage. They picked up his trail. Figured they’d stumbled across another holdout. Tracked him. Bagged him.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” said Kolhammer. “Luck of the Irish.”

  “Master Chief Vincente Rogas is Irish?”

  “Could be Black Irish…I suppose.”

  Spruance frowned, not appreciating the joke, as he shuffled the photographs of Hidaka on his desk at fleet HQ in Pearl. “And these injuries?”

  “He fell down,” Jones said, from the chair next to Kolhammer.

  Spruance leveled a cold eye at him.

  “A lot,” Jones added with a poker face.

  “Has he complained of being beaten?” Kolhammer asked.

  Spruance looked vaguely troubled. “No. No, he says he fell down a lot, too.”

  Kolhammer dared not look at Jones. Spruance eyed them like a principal with two of his most difficult students, who also happened to be his main hope for the pennant. It was midmorning, the day after Jones’s mountain troop had stumbled across Hidaka-that much at least was true. They were meeting in a prefab hut that substituted for Spruance’s office while permanent facilities were being built-or rather, rebuilt. His office, like theirs, was a mix of old and new. A flat-panel display took up a big piece of real estate on the old wooden desk while paper maps of the Pacific theater were pinned to corkboard on all of the walls. His phone was a heavy old-fashioned lump of black Bakelite with a rotary dial, which sat next to a Siemens C65 flexipad. In the window behind him Kolhammer could see a flattop being nuzzled into its berth by a small flotilla of tugboats. It looked like the Intrepid.

  “Well, I suppose congratulations are in order, then,” Spruance said finally. “This news will be very welcome back home. Hidaka is the first high-value war criminal we’ve managed to capture alive out here.”

  “They don’t give up easily,” Jones said. “Same thing where we came from. Our bad boys used to just blow themselves up.”

  “Is that why you take so few prisoners?” Spruance asked coldly.

  “That’s not the simple question you think it is, Admiral,” said Kolhammer, who could tell that Spruance was quite steamed about something, presumably the injuries to Hidaka. “There’s a lot of history behind our policies. I can understand that you’d find them off-putting at first, but they’ve served us well in a war that’s run much longer than yours. And of course, we’ll be reviewing them after the end of hostilities here, when our forces are folded into yours.”

  “I think you’ll be doing more than reviewing them, Admiral. I think you’ll be leaving them behind for good.”

  “Perhaps,” Kolhammer conceded. “They were appropriate in context.”

  “And they have their uses here,” Jones added in his rumbling growl. “Otherwise I doubt Congress would have approved the extension of our rules of engagement.”

  “The Australians certainly didn’t complain,” Kolhammer said, turning to Jones. “As I understand the situation, there was a lot of public pressure to turn all the Japanese captives over to you and the Second Cav for field sanction.”

  Jones nodded. “There was.”

  Spruance gathered up the photographs of a bruised and bleeding Hidaka. “Well, as you say, everything in context, gentlemen.” He didn’t sound as angry.

  He placed the prints in a buff-colored envelope and dropped them into his top drawer. Then he turned his attention back to the two men.

  “I wonder if I might prevail upon you to be a little more circumspect in the application of field punishment when we reach the Marianas, though?” He shook his head as Jones opened his mouth to speak. “I’m not asking you to alter your rules of engagement. I’m just concerned that we don’t end up indicted for the sorts of things we criticize in our opponents.”

  Kolhammer saw genuine discomfort in Spruance’s eyes. He didn’t want to be a party to sanctioned field executions of any type.

  Jones was not so diplomatic. “We could run any sanctions through your office, if you’d like, Admiral. Have your counsel sign off the warrants.”

  Spruance paled at the suggestion. “No. No, I don’t think so, General. All I’m asking, all the president is asking, is that you don’t…” He groped for the words needed in such an uncomfortable moment. “…that you don’t…”

  “Admiral Spruance,” Kolhammer said. “We will fight the good fight. And where justice needs to be done, it will be done. But we won’t embarrass the navy or the country.”

  Spruance nodded, clearly relieved. “Thank you. And thank you for this,” he said, indicating the report Jones had brought on the capture of Hidaka.

  Later on, out in the corridor, Jones muttered to Kolhammer, “Country would probably vote us all medals if we capped off every one of those murdering assholes.”

  “No doubt,” Kolhammer agreed.

  “So then, why not just tell Spruance we authorized a Sanction Three on Hidaka? It was legit.”

  “It was,” Kolhammer said. “And if he asked directly, I’d tell him. But he didn’t. And now the blood’s on our hands. Not his. You and I can live with that. He shouldn’t have to.”

  “We told him the little prick fell down.”

  “Well, he did fall down. De Marco kept hitting him. He kept falling down.”

  Jones took that in silence, grinning just a little as they walked through a secretarial pool. Tinny music followed them from an old radio. A disco tune, “Born to Be Alive,” covered by Glenn Miller and his big band.

  “Kinda weird, ain’t it,” Jones said.

  “What?” Kolhammer asked. He sensed a change of subject.

  “The way disco, of all the possible music we brought, should be the one to catch fire here. Did you notice Hidaka had a disco station playing when we walked in?”

  “Well,” Kolhammer mused, “they’re all over the dial. And I suppose it sounds a bit like swing. Plus, it’s an optimistic sort of music. People want t
hat at the moment. Who needs death metal when you’ve got the Nazis?”

  They passed through the main entrance of the building and into the fierce white light of the morning. “I don’t see old Hidaka being much of a fan. Not after Gina De Marco tooled him up like that.”

  Kolhammer grunted quietly at the memory. The female marine had beaten Hidaka senseless while singing along to the radio. It had been an entirely punitive retribution with the primary purpose of humiliating the man and breaking his spirit. A level three sanction. They had assumed, correctly, that he would never speak of it, shamed into silence, but even if he had, it was within their accepted rules of engagement.

  “Something funny?” Jones asked.

  “Not really,” Kolhammer said as he fitted his powered shades in place. “I was just thinking of serendipity. Do you remember the exact song that was playing?”

  “Not really,” Jones said, looking nonplussed.

  “Well, I don’t know whether you heard or not. I think you were talking to Chief Rogas at the time. But Hidaka, he was sort of whimpering after she broke his arm, begging De Marco to tell him what she was going to do.”