Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  Lord forgive me for the things I have wrought on this world.

  “Did you have a hard time putting them together?” Spruance asked, jogging him back to reality. “I can’t imagine that you had the blueprints just sitting around somewhere.”

  “No,” Kolhammer answered. “Not exactly. That’d be like you keeping the plans for a Sopwith Camel on board the Enterprise. But we had a lot of relevant technical material, and some corporate memory spread across the Multinational Force, too, including some pretty grizzled old salts who’d actually worked with the Skyhawk early in their careers. Aussies and New Zealanders mostly, but a couple of Lonesome’s aeronautical engineers on the Kandahar. There was one master chief called Madoc, he was like some sort of obsessed fan of the things. And we had a Malaysian crew chief who was on detachment to us. He was a big help. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think.”

  Spruance patted the fuselage just below the muzzle of a 20mm cannon. “Like riding a bicycle?”

  “Same principle, I suppose.” Kolhammer shrugged. “But it helps when you’ve got all the processing muscle we brought. And a blank check with the president’s moniker.”

  Spruance nodded.

  The Skyhawks were the navy’s new glamour weapon, but for the moment they could only fly off the Clinton. It would be another three months before the first Hawaii-class flattops capable of handling them would come into service. In the meantime propeller-driven Corsairs and Skyraiders would do most of the navy’s dogfighting and tactical bombing. Kolhammer wondered when the leapfrogging would end, and technological development would settle down into a steady curve again. When they all caught up with the next century, he supposed.

  For once, the flight deck wasn’t frenetically busy with landings and takeoffs. A squadron of the Clinton’s Skyhawks was flying CAP out of Hickam Field for the next few days, working in with Super Harriers from the Kandahar’s VMA-311 group, as the 21C Marine Corps fliers trained up their contemporary colleagues. The Clinton’s battle group hadn’t berthed in Pearl, which was fully occupied by Spruance’s other task force elements. Instead they’d pulled up about six klicks offshore, and Spruance had flown out by chopper to inspect them.

  The loose knot of naval officers walked forward for a hundred meters or so, past another six Skyhawks chained down along the starboard rows. Heat shimmered up from the nonslip deck.

  “It’s an incredible-looking force, Admiral,” Spruance said. “You can be proud of the work your people have done.”

  “I am, sir,” Kolhammer replied. “It’s a hell of an achievement, really. But it’s a job half done. There’s the fighting to come yet.”

  He let his gaze traverse the task force, of which the Clinton was but a part. When they sailed, Spruance would lead the entire fleet from the Enterprise, which had been refitted with both AT and some twenty-first technology taken off the Leyte Gulf, 3CI stuff mostly—equipment to improve his communications, control, command, and intelligence capabilities. Almost thirty ships lay around them, including three carriers and the heavy littoral assault ships, the Kandahar and her new sister ships, the Falluja and the Damascus—which looked much like carriers to the casual observer.

  Four contemporary heavy cruisers and two Iowa-class battleships with extensive AT retrofits provided the big-bore artillery, although Kolhammer was certain they’d be restricted to shore bombardment once they reached the Marianas. If it got to the point of trading shells with the Yamato, something would be seriously wrong. The Siranui lay about a thousand meters to port, her flags limp in the hot, humid air. Like the Clinton, she’d been retrofitted, after firing off all her missiles during the assault on Hawaii in late ’42. She now carried a very basic harpoon-style antiship missile, designated ASM-1 and called the Barracuda. Kolhammer’s Skyhawks, the remaining Harriers, and the Siranui’s missile bays were the reason he never expected to get within range of the Yamato’s long guns. She’d be sunk long before she ever saw the force that was coming after her and the last of the Imperial Japanese Fleet.

  A few hundred meters behind the Siranui, a Halsey-class guided missile destroyer swept past a couple of vintage destroyers, almost appearing to taunt them. She was “Old Navy,” not Auxiliary Forces, but that didn’t stop her lording it over the Fletcher-class rust-buckets as she passed them by. Spruance halted in his walk toward the bow just to take in the sight.

  “Amazing,” he said to himself. “Bill would have been proud, although he would have liked to have a carrier named after him. Or at least a cruiser.”

  He tore his gaze away from the sleek, dangerous-looking warship and turned back to Kolhammer. “Have you been out to the cemetery yet, Admiral?”

  “Not yet, no. I was planning on taking a private trip out there later. I haven’t even made it ashore yet.”

  Spruance nodded and began walking back toward the ship’s island superstructure. On the Clinton it had the appearance of a raked-back shark fin. Kolhammer had seen the next generation of American carriers being built back in the States, and they imitated this radar-baffling design, as well, although contemporary materials science wasn’t yet up to synthesizing the advanced RAMskin that coated the Big Hill’s island.

  As they walked back past the jet fighters the dull thudding of a helicopter reached him. He saw Jones’s command Huey, an uptime original, coming in from the Kandahar for the O Group conference.

  D-DAY + 23. 26 MAY 1944. 0302 HOURS.

  KO‘OLAU RANGE.

  Fire demons chased him through his dreams, massive slump-shouldered ape creatures, covered all over in flames, except for two small black pools for their eyes.

  The former Japanese governor of the Hawaiian Islands awoke with a shudder on the fold-up cot. It was nighttime and pitch black. He fumbled beside his bed for one of the last of the light sticks. Finding the little plastic tube, he bent it until something inside it snapped and flooded the sleeping chamber with soft green light. An old army blanket hanging across the cave at a natural choke point prevented the light from leaking out and giving him away, although any observer would have to be right inside the valley to see it anyway.

  Hidaka shook his head to clear the memory of the nightmare. He’d suffered from vivid dreams ever since the Americans had returned. Their initial assault was so powerful, so paralyzing in its violence, that he sometimes feared it had unhinged him. He was never meant to fight on land. He would surely have done better on the bridge of a cruiser or a battleship.

  He swung his legs over the side of the cot and felt around with his toes for the sandals he had been wearing. It was chilly and damp in the cave and he started to cough, as he always did on waking up. He wheezed almost constantly, but for some reason it was worse when he slept on his left side. Perhaps that lung was infected.

  He slipped his feet into the wooden sandals and pulled a blanket around himself as he stood up. He checked his watch: three in the morning.

  The nightmares often woke him at this time. It was when the first rockets had struck, destroying the encampment at Pearl Harbor and killing thousands of his men in the opening moments of the battle. Try as he might, it was impossible to rid himself of the memories. The fire demons of his fevered sleep were incarnations of the men he’d seen burned alive by some kind of incendiary bombs. If he lived to be a hundred, which was unlikely, he would never forget the horror of seeing one man, completely wreathed in liquid flames, melting away like candle wax.

  The area he’d blocked off as living quarters was quite roomy, if Spartan. He had intended to run an insurgency campaign from here, so it had been fitted out accordingly. Ten empty bunks, for other officers who never made it, lay beyond his. He had maps of the islands, radio equipment, and food and weapons stores to spare. If only a few more had reached this hidden fortress. If only his protection detail had survived. They were all good men and even with just a handful of them, he could have caused havoc for the Americans. Instead he was reduced to hiding out, waiting for the moment when he might contribute something other than infamy to the empe
ror’s cause.

  Hidaka fired up a small gas oven and put a pot of water on to boil. He would have some green tea and noodles and ponder his dilemma some more. Perhaps he might even be able to get back to sleep before the dawn.

  While the water was heating he played around with his flexipad, flipping through the radio stations in a desultory manner. Those few still on the air at this hour were mostly broadcasting slow dance tunes. At least there was no music from the future. He always found that harsh and unsettling.

  He consoled himself with memories of the short time he’d been the absolute ruler of Hawaii, the way he had smashed all resistance, the luxury of playing God with vanquished foes who had thought themselves so very superior to the “little yellow men.” He stirred the water and poured off a cup to make his tea, then added a packet of dried noodles and powdered pork flavoring to the pot. He treasured the memory of Nimitz being led to his execution, and lingered over the details of the many comfort women he had taken in the officers’ facility at Diamond Head. It had been a wonderful thing, to crush the spirit of the enemy as thoroughly as that, to have his way with some gaijin slut while her man was forced to look on. He grew hard just remembering.

  He was about to pleasure himself with the memory when he jumped at a whispered sound.

  Phhhht!

  Two silver prongs projected from his chest, and thin wires led from them back to…

  He tried to leap to his feet, but a terrible shock surged through his body, robbing him of the ability to stand. As he fell into blackness he caught sight of his assassins, three black-clad men.

  Ninjas, perhaps?

  They advanced on him, weapons raised, faces obscured behind glasses that made them look like giant insects. Hidaka was vaguely aware that his penis was erect and pointing at them as he slid into darkness.

  D-DAY + 23. 26 MAY 1944. 1101 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON.

  The meeting took place in the main conference room of the Clinton. Although it was Spruance’s briefing and should have been held on the Enterprise, he had agreed that it made more sense to bring everyone together on the much larger and better-equipped vessel.

  Kolhammer stopped counting the number of officers sitting around the huge table after twenty-five. He hadn’t been to an O Group of a comparable size in this room since the first emergency sessions after the Transition. It was a very different crew who’d gathered today, though, to work through the Marianas campaign. Jones, now a general, was still sitting next to him, and Mike Judge was acting as chairman. But the Brits, the Aussies, the French, the Japanese, and many of the U.S. commanders of his original task force were gone. Some dead. Some captured. Most just scattered to the four corners of the globe. In a perfect world Captain Willet of the Australian submarine Havoc should have been here, as she would be joining the task force later, but without satellite conferencing that was impossible. HMAS Havoc was stalking the Japanese fleet in the western Pacific.

  The dark ages really did get him down sometimes.

  A Marine Corps full-bird colonel—a ’temp, not one of Jones’s men—was describing a Force Recon mission to plant position fixers around the Marianas, so that the fleet’s gunnery officers would have solid coordinates to lay down their computer-controlled barrages.

  Kolhammer could feel the tension radiating from the man sitting beside him. Jones had his own special-ops-capable marines who were not only trained for that sort of work, but had years of experience in it to boot. But the ’temps had gone with their own people again, as they did so often when the Eighty-second was involved.

  Looking around the room, he could identify two distinct groups: Spruance’s people and the AF personnel. The latter weren’t all 21C. Most of the men and women he and Jones now commanded were ’temps, but they had volunteered for service in the Auxiliary Forces, putting paid to the caricature of the ’temps being nothing more than a bunch of boneheaded rednecks.

  On the other hand, there were a lot of boneheaded rednecks around, some of them in this very room.

  Another briefing officer, an Old Navy commander by the name of Chalmers, replaced the marine colonel at the lecturn to detail the Japanese order of battle as it was currently understood. It was another frustrating experience. Kolhammer knew Stuart Chalmers quite well. He’d acted in Dan Black’s liaison role for a while, and he was a good man. But it was exasperating having to sit and listen to him guesstimate the size and strength of Yamamoto’s forces. That was the sort of information he could have dialed up on the web in a public library back home.

  “We have good intelligence on enemy land forces,” Chalmers said. “Apart from some minor technological enhancements such as claymore-type mines, better radios, and an M-Seventy-nine-style grenade launcher, the Japanese army remains largely unaffected by post-Transition technical developments.”

  Jones snorted quietly beside him. “Commander Chalmers never walked into a fucking claymore,” he whispered.

  Chalmers carried on without seeming to notice. “However, the Japanese navy has made some significant advances in the use of radar-controlled gunnery, Close-In Weapons Systems, night-fighter operations—both submarine and antisubmarine warfare—and ship-launched missiles, probably through close cooperation with Germany, which has poured a lot of effort into rocket research.”

  Kolhammer had to admire Yamamoto for the focus he’d brought to Japan’s defenses, if nothing else. The Pacific War was a naval battle. As savage as the fighting had been through the island chains, the side that controlled the seas would prevail. Japan could not hope to keep up with America’s accelerating technological superiority. It simply didn’t have the industrial or research bases to compete. But Yamamoto, for all of his talk of staging a Kassen Kantai, had instead fought a tremendous holding effort since the Japanese had been kicked out of Australia and Hawaii. Whatever internal battle he’d had with the Japanese army, he’d won, because hundreds of thousands of troops had been pulled out of China and redeployed into the Pacific, not to take new territory but to keep the Allies away from the Home Islands long enough for the Axis powers to develop their own atomic arsenal.

  As MacArthur and Spruance fought their way toward Japan, it became obvious that most of the bounty from the Emergence, as the Japanese called the Transition, had gone to Yamamoto’s surviving fleet rather than to the army. Yamamoto knew that slowing the Allies’ inevitable advance on Japan meant slowing the U.S. Navy.

  It always came back to the bomb, though, didn’t it?

  Who would get there first? He didn’t believe for a minute that Germany could hope to compete with the combined industrial and scientific muscle of the English-speaking world. Not with the advantage the Allies enjoyed in raw computing power. Yet…

  The admiral pushed aside these thoughts. They weren’t his immediate concern, whereas the next five minutes of this briefing were. He gave Jones a light pat on the shoulder as he stood to make his way to the lectern. Slotting home a data stick, he nodded to Spruance, his only superior in the gathering, and waited for the PowerPoint files to arrange themselves on the screen behind him.

  “I’m going to quickly run you through some of the capabilities of the Clinton’s battle group,” he said, “and outline how these will be used in strategic support of Admiral Spruance’s plan, as well as tactical support from General Jones and the Eighty-second Expeditionary Brigade’s attack on Guam.

  “First, a strategic strike on enemy capital ships…”

  He ended up speaking for twenty-five minutes, mostly in answer to questions from the floor. Jones seemed distracted during the presentation, even taking a couple of silent messages on his flexipad. Kolhammer would have been pissed off, except that the hulking marine flashed him a private message that immediately explained his agitation. The text came up on Kolhammer’s flexipad as it was resting in front of him.

  Hidaka captured. Rogas queries Sanction 5?

  Oh shit, Kolhammer thought.

  10

  D-DAY + 23. 26 MAY 1944. 1554 HOU
RS.

  WAIPAHU MEMORIAL CEMETERY, HAWAII.

  Neither Chester Nimitz nor Bill Halsey was buried on Hawaii. Their remains had been found, after much distressing effort, and flown home to be interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

  The short rule of the Japanese had been as horrific here as it had been in northern Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Indonesia—or the Dutch East Indies. As a matter of fact, thought Kolhammer, it had probably been worse. The civilian death rate had run to 90 percent, and almost no military personnel had survived to greet the liberators. Some of the higher-ranking officers had been transported to Japan for interrogation. With them had gone anybody from the Multinational Force, civilian or military. Almost everyone else had perished in a long orgy of abuse and mass murder to rival the Rape of Nanking.

  A memorial to the dead and the missing had been erected. It stood near the ghost town of Waipahu on the site of one of the many mass graves that covered Oahu. The Japanese had used the former sugar-milling town on the north shore of Pearl Harbor’s Middle Loch as a gigantic slave camp. At least twenty-five thousand people had been interred there while they worked on clearing debris from the harbor. As they died, they’d been dumped in a series of open pits to the west of the town. Kolhammer could only imagine what a hellish sight it must have been. The death pits contained thousands of children, women, and old folks.

  War crime investigators, trained by his own people from the Clinton’s WCI Unit, had determined that at least half of the dead from the Waipahu Site had been summarily executed in the days before the Liberation—killed simply to deny them the hope of freedom.

  Kolhammer had thought himself inured to horror by thirty years of active service, most of them spent fighting medieval savages with a fetish for degrading their victims. But standing with Jones on a small rise outside Waipahu, where more than a hundred of their own people were buried, he knew that he had but a scant understanding of the evil of which humans were capable. And now he had within his power the man responsible for this atrocity.