Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  Kolhammer folded his arms and let his chin sink onto his chest. He looked very unhappy.

  Mike Judge spoke up from the other side of the bloc. “I’m guessing that great minds think alike, Admiral. To me, that looks like a hell of a lot of engineering work for something as lame as a Nakajima One-One-Five. Even a hundred and fifty of them. You want my five cents’ worth, Yamamoto’s got some evil jack-in-the-box just waiting to pop out of those holes and make us jump.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kolhammer grunted. “Could be. Ms. Montgomery, what’s the latest vicious gossip on the Japanese, uh, tokkotai? Is that the right term?”

  “Yes, sir. From tokubetsu kogeki tai, or special attack units. Captain Willet sent a burst from the Havoc a few hours ago, a report about a couple of midget submarines, probably Kairyu-class analogs, that blew themselves up under a Russian-sorry, a Soviet-troop carrier off Sakhalin Island. She’s also logged one large wave of Nakajima One-One-Fives, which flew up out of Hokkaido, probably from Hakodate, and threw themselves onto a couple of Soviet divisions. Caught them in a choke point. Damn near wiped them out, too. But that’s it, so far.”

  “What about rocket bombs? Ohkas, or whatever they called them last time,” Kolhammer asked. “Any chatter about them yet?”

  “No, sir,” Montgomery answered. “Quiet as a mouse. A bit like that Sherlock Holmes story. The one where the dog didn’t bark. Makes you wonder, if you’re so inclined.”

  Captain Mike Judge leaned over the holobloc, examining the island like a three-dollar bill. “You could fit a lot more on that island than the Nakajimas Denny’s counted. And they’re all out in the open, well, sorta. They’re all under that netting in those sunken pits. Does make a man wonder, what’s the point of driving so many big goddamn holes into that mountain if you ain’t got jack worth hiding down there.”

  Kolhammer nodded. “I agree. Brenna, I’d like to put a request through to Admiral Spruance to have Denny’s recon patrol penetrate the inner perimeter of that mountain facility, whatever the cost.”

  “Sir,” she replied in a clipped voice. If so ordered, the men were almost certainly going to die.

  Kolhammer looked even more unhappy than he had a few minutes earlier.

  “I wish I had some of Lonesome’s guys in there,” he muttered.

  D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1136 HOURS.

  USS KANDAHAR, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  The message-a simple e-mail-had been sent anonymously, and Jones hadn’t thought to look at it until it was too late.

  Three months after the congressional hearings into the second sneak attack on Pearl Harbor had concluded that the Japanese had received some assistance from unknown members of the crew of the Dessaix, a ’bot cleaning out his message stacks found the unopened note from his brother-in-law, Sublieutenant Philippe Danton. Monique’s little brother, whom he’d met only once, at the wedding, had been named as a possible collaborator in the Japanese attack, and perhaps even a saboteur. A few fragmentary signals between the Dessaix and Yamamoto’s fleet, picked up before the Japanese had reestablished emission control, implied that one of the Frenchmen on board had turned on his erstwhile comrades after disrupting the missile strike, and Jones had known, down in his bones, that it had to be Philippe.

  Such evidence as was available all pointed to his involvement in thwarting Hidaka’s attack. But still the committee had returned an open verdict, saying that nothing could be settled until after the war, when the enemy’s own records might be inspected. It had taken all of Jones’s moral strength not to see that as insult directed at him. God only knew there were plenty of people who were more than happy to characterize it as a strike against his own reliability.

  Now, as he sat in his small cabin on the Kandahar, finalizing his personal affairs in preparation for what promised to be a terrible slaughter, a couple of lines of text floated on the small screen in front of him, threatening to unbalance the frail equilibrium he had sought to achieve between his personal ill feelings about the ’temps-or some of them, anyway-and his loyalty to and love of the corps and the country he had served all of his adult life.

  My Dearest Brother

  I hope you get this message, for I do not think we shall ever meet again. You will know by now that my ship has arrived here, but we were captured by the Germans during our incapacity after the Emergence…

  Jones frowned at the word, but having materialized in the Atlantic and been taken prisoner, Philippe would have used the Axis terminology without thinking. He read on.

  I have little time. I am watched so closely by the Nazis I could not send this message before now, and even now I cannot send it directly. I have encrypted a pulse to go out with the launch of the missiles on Hawaii. I can only pray it finds a Fleetnet node somewhere and eventually finds you. I have done what I can to impair the fascists’ plans but I fear it is not enough. There is no more time. When they discover what I have done my life will be forfeit, but I shall do what I can before the end. I do not know if you will ever see Monique again but if you do, please make her understand that I did not dishonor my family or the Republic. Vive la France. And good-bye, brother.

  Philippe

  Stony-faced, keeping the tightest rein on his emotions, the commander of the Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Brigade opened two encrypted files that were attached to the mail. In the first he found a list of names: the crew of the Dessaix and brief notes explaining the fate of each man after their capture. At a glance it looked like most had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo for refusing to cooperate. A few, like Philippe-with the consent of their CO, Captain Goscinny-had pretended to work with the Germans in order to have a chance at sabotaging the vessel. Only his brother-in-law had survived long enough to sail into the Pacific.

  In a separate section, Philippe named a handful of crewmembers who had genuinely gone over to the enemy.

  The second file was a technical log of all the actions carried out by Philippe and the other saboteurs. It was mostly beyond Jones’s understanding, but it seemed impressively long. It made him wonder what might have happened without their interference.

  Poor kid, he thought. It must have turned pretty fucking ugly on that boat when Hidaka realized what had gone down. He sent a quiet prayer to his brother-in-law before closing the e-mail and its attachments.

  He hadn’t even realized Philippe was on the Dessaix until a couple of boxheads from ’temp Naval Intelligence turned up in the Zone to ask him about it. There was nothing to be done now but send a copy of the message to Kolhammer and Spruance, with a letter asking that they make sure it got back to the relevant authorities in Washington and London, where the French government-in-exile still had its headquarters.

  But then, after a moment’s consideration, he opened his address file and pulled up an address for Julia Duffy. She’d written some good stuff about that business with Margie Francois sanctioning those camp guards in the Philippines. And she’d gone into Hawaii with the battalion when they took it back from the Japanese. She was a good embed. She could be trusted, and she wasn’t beholden to the chain of command. Not like the admirals.

  General J. Lonesome Jones knew he could trust Kolhammer and Spruance. But the guys above them?

  As if.

  After all, look what had happened when Francois came to him with that DNA match on Anderson and Miyazaki’s killer. They’d taken it to Kolhammer, who’d taken it right up the chain, and he’d been assured at every step that it’d be dealt with.

  The bottom line? Two years on and the murdering prick was not only walking free but living off the fat of the land.

  Jones grunted in disgust.

  He knew that Kolhammer had made the case his personal jihad, but he also knew that in the end it hadn’t counted for anything. The ’temps weren’t about to have one of their heroes perp-walked, not on this one.

  There’s no way the thing would have been so completely smothered if the victims hadn’t been a nigger and a Jap. Well, there might be nothing he could
to do for them, but at least he could prevent Monique’s little brother from swinging in the breeze.

  And with that thought, he hit the SEND button.

  D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1422 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  “Holy shit,” Kolhammer said.

  He’d just sat down in his stateroom to a late lunch of stale ham sandwiches and a cup of coffee when he read the e-mail from Jones.

  “What’s up?” asked Mike Judge, who was also taking a ten-minute break, the only downtime they’d get for the rest of the day.

  Kolhammer shook his head and sniffed.

  “Lonesome was cleaning out his accounts and he found an old note he’d missed. Here. Have a look.”

  The touch screen was too big to swivel, forcing Judge to walk around the desk in the admiral’s office.

  “Yeah. Okay. Holy shit is about right,” he said after scanning the message.

  “He copied it to Julia Duffy at the Times, as well,” Kolhammer noted with more than a little chagrin.

  “I saw. Do you blame him, though? It’s a personal letter. Sort of. And he took a lot of shit over Danton. Probably figures there’d be someone somewhere wanted to hush this up, for whatever reason. Politics, you know.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  Kolhammer chewed joylessly on the sandwich. Unlike Mike Judge, he knew that Jones was probably thinking of something more than his brother-in-law’s reputation, and by extension his own. Besides Jones, of all the uptimers, only he and Margie Francois knew about the DNA match that related back to the murders on Oahu, just after they’d arrived. Of the ’temps, Nimitz knew, because Kolhammer had taken it to him, demanding justice.

  But Nimitz was dead. Before he’d died, though, he’d extracted from Kolhammer a promise that the admiral would deal with this through channels. Kolhammer had no idea how far Nimitz had taken it, but right now the case was still sitting, undisturbed, in Washington. In his darkest moments he had considered opening a file in the Quiet Room back in the Zone, but signing off a sanction on an American citizen without the benefit of a trial was a step too far.

  “I think I’d better call him,” Kolhammer said, shaking himself out of his reverie.

  D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1429 HOURS.

  USS KANDAHAR, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  “It’s got nothing to do with that rapist motherfucker,” Jones said.

  “I wouldn’t hold it against you if it did,” Kolhammer replied.

  Mike Judge had left him to it, carrying away the remains of their so-called lunch. Kolhammer hadn’t dicked around when he’d called the marine officer, asking him why he’d thought it necessary to cut the press in on the Danton e-mail.

  “She’s not just press, she’s one of my original embeds. I trust her.”

  “And not me?”

  “That’s unfair, Admiral. You’re tied down by politics. Marge Francois got a clean match on his blood and semen. As good as a needle in the arm, where we came from. And you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. That file is sitting in somebody’s bottom drawer back in Washington, stamped TOO FUCKING HARD, and meanwhile he’s rolling around the country copping blow jobs from movie stars.”

  Kolhammer kept himself still, stifling the urge to drum his fingers on the desktop where Jones could see and hear his frustration via the video link.

  “You might want to recall, Lonesome, that Ms. Duffy was a big part of creating the guy.”

  Jones nodded on screen. “And she’d send him to Hell in a goddamn New York minute if she knew about that match.”

  Kolhammer couldn’t argue with that. He knew Duffy well enough after two years to be able to understand her on a professional, if not personal, level. He doubted that even Dan Black had really known what went on deep inside her heart. He leaned back and showed Jones his open palms, conceding the other man’s point.

  “Lonesome, it was a personal communication. Granted, it was about military concerns-but I’ll stand behind your decision to release it. It’s not like you sent her the attachments, after all.”

  “No, it’s not. And thank you.”

  Kolhammer shook his head.

  “You don’t have to thank me. You have a right to expect my support, and you haven’t always had it when you needed it, the last few years.”

  It was Jones’s turn to shake his head. “You’ve had your own battles to fight, Admiral. That shitty business with Hoover and his pet congressmen. The Zone. The Old Navy. I haven’t been looking for you to get my back because I knew you had a full-time job watching your own.”

  Jones’s image loomed in the monitor as he leaned toward the camera.

  “Just so as we’re clear. I don’t blame you for the Anderson-Miyazaki thing, either. I know you went to the mat. It was almost like they were using it as a lesson.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Do you really want to go there?”

  “Probably not, but go on.”

  “I don’t think the little prick was alone. Our War Crimes people said there was evidence of at least four attackers. And as big as he is now, I don’t think he could have avoided the payback unless he had someone protecting him. We don’t even know how he came to cross paths with Anderson and Miyazaki. There was a curfew, if you remember. And that drunken asshole they assigned to the case was like a fucking caricature of a bad cop. He was never gonna make it happen. You want my opinion, someone let the ’temps smack a few of our guys down. Make sure we understood who the big dogs were.

  “I don’t think they meant for things to get outta hand like they did, but that cracker asshole was a ticking time bomb. They were probably hoping he’d get himself killed by the Japs, and his buddies with him. But true or not, none of this will ever be tested, because it’s such a septic mess now it’s gotta be buried so deep nobody can ever dig it up.”

  “Jesus, Lonesome. You should have written for television or something. You really believe all that?”

  Jones threw his hands up. “What I believe is irrelevant, isn’t it?”

  Kolhammer opened his mouth to say that no, it wasn’t, but he couldn’t.

  “Okay, look,” he said instead. “On your brother-in-law, I’ve already sent a heads-up to Spruance and Pearl, insisting that Danton’s message goes onto the record. Even if you hadn’t sent it on to Duffy, I would have had it released in the Zone. So it is going to happen, one way or another.”

  Jones nodded brusquely.

  Kolhammer continued. “On this other stuff, I don’t know. There will be consequences. I can’t say what, exactly, but you’re probably right in thinking that somebody wanted us to understand our place in the world, at least as far the investigation went. Making any headway on that case was like pushing wet sand uphill. And I promise you that when I get back, if I don’t get some satisfaction, I’m gonna nuke the fucking hill. And if that gets us nowhere, then there’s always the Room.

  “Okay?”

  A shadow of a smile passed across the marine’s features. “Okay.”

  “Now,” said Kolhammer. “Last I recall, we were supposed to be at war or something. How’s that going on your end?”

  25

  D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0012 HOURS.

  HIJMS YAMATO, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  Long before the Kuril Islands appeared over the horizon, Yamamoto could see evidence of the firestorm raging around them. The first signs of the titanic battle became obvious as the Combined Fleet steamed up past the southern reaches of Hokkaido. The new Siemens radarscopes picked up faint returns from the waves of tokkotai streaming north to throw themselves on the Bolshevik invaders.

  Standing on the bridge of the mighty Yamato, peering into a deep obsidian darkness that seemed to flicker with the intimation of a great storm, he felt like a boy creeping along the edge of a volcano in which lived unknowable numbers of demons and monsters.

  He was going to his doom, of that at least he was certain. Of nothing else but that.

 
It was the third time he had sortied from Hashirajima at the head of the fleet, and only on the first occasion had he done so with anything approaching a sense of confidence-or rather hubris. That was now what he thought of his mental state before the accursed miracle at Midway.

  The attack on Hawaii, which had gone surprisingly well, thanks to Hidaka and the Dessaix, had nonetheless occasioned in the grand admiral a crisis of faith. It had been an entirely negative gambit. He’d known then that he had no hope of defeating the Allies. Even before the emergence of Kolhammer’s barbarians, the strategic weight of this struggle lay with the industrialized democracies. Hawaii was taken to buy time, and nothing more.

  Time that had proved to be worthless.

  Yamamoto steadied himself by laying a hand against the cool metal of a bulkhead as dizziness threatened to sweep his legs out from underneath him. There would be no German atomic bomb. No Japanese revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki-although to be pedantic about it, those events hadn’t yet happened. Even if the Communists had not stabbed them in the back, he doubted they could have held out against the so-called free world. The Americans and British were fanatics, not warriors as he understood the term. They would not rest until their enemies lay charred and dead, in the ruins of a hundred incinerated cities.

  “A message, Admiral.”

  Yamamoto took the scrap of paper from the earnest young lieutenant. Three seaplanes had gone missing on patrol southeast of the Marianas. They had not reported anything untoward in their last scheduled updates, but their sudden vanishing spoke volumes. Kolhammer and Spruance were moving in.

  Yamamoto could not help but feel disappointment that what would surely be his last action would not be against them. He had prepared as well as any man could, given the disparity in the two forces. The battle for the Marianas would probably have ended with the Stars and Stripes flying over the islands, but he was certain that if he had been able to deploy his defenses as he’d planned, he would have struck a heavy, perhaps even a crippling, blow against the old foe.