Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  Her boat chief Roy Flemming appeared at her side. “I hope this turns out to be for the best, Chief,” she said.

  Flemming gently clamped one of his meaty paws on her shoulder—he was the only person on the boat she would allow to take such a liberty. They had served together for a long time, and he was as much a favorite uncle as anything else.

  “Don’t worry yourself overly, skipper. Remember what these bastards did at home, and in Hawaii. Some people are just in desperate need of being killed.”

  The blue triangles separated from the thin black lines representing their guidance wires.

  “Seekers active. Targets still locked, Captain.”

  “Thank you, weapons…” She caught Flemming glancing at her apprehensively. “I know Chief, I know. I’ve got no sympathy for them. Kill ’em all, I say. Still, I just wonder if we’re gonna be back up here in a few years’ time, facing off with the People’s Democratic Republic of Nippon because of this.”

  “If that’s the case, we’ll just have to kick their arse, won’t we.”

  “CI indicates one minute till impact.”

  D-DAY + 40. 14 JUNE 1944. 2341 HOURS.

  HIJMS YAMAMOTO, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  He hadn’t really thought much would come of it. It had been a moment’s foolishness. Madness really. He couldn’t expect the enemy to treat with him after the savageries of the last four years. Even Admiral Kolhammer, an outsider, and a man he had studied—as far as it was possible—in the finest detail. Even he could not be expected to step outside of the rigid demands of military command, to act independently. Not for something as fundamental as this.

  Yet Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto kept dipping his good hand into the pocket where he kept his personal flexipad, furtively checking to see if he had received a reply. He hadn’t cleared the contact with the general staff. Had not mentioned it to anyone beyond the Emperor, in fact. He had reached out to Kolhammer, unofficially, man-to-man, in the desperate hope that he might be able to avert the cataclysm he was certain was now inevitable.

  He had no way of knowing whether or not the message had even gone through.

  He leaned forward now and placed both hands on the edge of the map table in the Yamato’s operations room, surveying the abysmal situation. The Americans were estimated to be close to launching their strike on the Marianas. He had no idea what the Soviets were going to do about Hokkaido. He didn’t even know if they had committed all their naval forces to the failed mission. The army was in general retreat throughout the Dutch East Indies, or had been bypassed completely by MacArthur’s land forces.

  The operations staff moved quietly around him, nobody daring to speak. Would they now head south to the Marianas, to face certain defeat against Spruance and Kolhammer? Or did they need to remain here, ghosting about the Home Islands, as insurance against another Soviet thrust? And what possible help would they be when Stalin sent planes with nuclear bombs, to avenge his humiliation in Okhotsk?

  His mind was a blur as he tried to keep all of these questions suspended in his imagination, hoping that some brilliant stratagem, some unforeseen correlation of events and actions might suggest itself to him.

  His flexipad buzzed and he almost dropped it as he tried to haul the device out of his pocket with his crippled, shaking hand.

  It was Kolhammer.

  It had to be.

  Yamamoto stared at the screen where a message was indeed waiting for him. But it made no sense. The message title read: SOVIET A-BOMB FACILITY.

  Before he could open the file two gigantic explosions rang throughout the body of the Japanese flagship. Yamamoto was flung into the low metal ceiling, breaking his shoulder and cracking a cheekbone, and he slammed back down and smashed his face on the edge of the map table.

  D-DAY + 40. 14 JUNE 1944. 2344 HOURS.

  HMAS HAVOC, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  “Good work, Ms. Wilkins.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Second salvo away.”

  Willet felt the submarine shudder with the energy of the launch as another eight heavy torpedoes spat out of the tubes and began their terminal runs. She was no longer concerned with watching their progress, though. The boat’s Combat Intelligence had set the firing sequence, and the Nemesis processors had tracked the initial launch to the point of impact. Diagnostic software agents poring over the data feedback detected a few glitches with the guidance mechanisms, but nothing lying outside an acceptable margin of error.

  Every warhead had detonated as intended, a few meters under the keel of its target. The results were spectacular.

  On the main display, which was running real-time vision in high-definition color from a virtual height of two thousand meters, it looked as though the ADCAP war shots had broken the backs of the two carriers. Willet distinctly saw them lift a good few feet clear of the water amidships, while the bow and stern merely tilted back up toward the fatal rupture.

  “Like snapping a twig,” Lieutenant Lohrey said.

  CPO Flemming pointed at the two battleships. Their greater mass had absorbed the kinetic blows with more success, but they were still badly damaged. “More like a big fucking log for those two,” the chief muttered.

  “Mmmh,” Willet responded absently. “Weapons. Override the CI and designate both Musashi and Yamato for another two hits.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Captain. We have four destroyers heading in our direction. Throwing depth charges.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Knox. Attack profile?”

  Her chief defensive sysop took a moment to consider the pattern of the destroyers’ movements and weapons launches.

  “They don’t know where we are, ma’am. They’re making a guess based on the placement of our shots. They’re pretty good, actually. But it’s still only a guess.”

  “Okay. Helm, take us down to two hundred meters. We’ll make our away around to the far side of the target group and launch our next sequence from there.”

  The first depth charges went off, but they were a long way distant, like the thunder of a late-summer storm you know from experience will pass by without harm.

  D-DAY + 40. 14 JUNE 1944. 2348 HOURS.

  HIJMS YAMATO, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  That damn woman, again.

  An entire division of the Imperial Japanese Navy had devoted itself to the study of Captain Jane Willet and her submarine the Havoc. Yamamoto had ordered it after her attack on the anchorage at Hashirajima had gutted the Combined Fleet. As soon as he heard that a submarine had crept in and crippled him again, he knew.

  Willet.

  The torpedoes had struck like the twin hammers of a vengeful god, their power great enough to wrench seventy thousand tons of iron plating and armor out of shape. Already the deck had begun to list to starboard. It was only slight, but it was noticeable, and it was increasing.

  Pandemonium had broken out on the lower decks. Not panic as such, but a rushing, half-desperate haste to respond to a new crisis that was clearly greater than anything the ship and her crew had yet been required to face. Men came up hard against each other in the companionways as they hurried to their stations. A drum solo of deep-seated explosions shook the ship again.

  “You must hurry, Admiral.”

  The young officer, a sublieutenant, took him by the arm.

  Yamamoto slowly and deliberately removed his hand.

  “No, Lieutenant. You must hurry. This is most important. Take this,” he said, holding out the flexipad. “You see the information on the screen. The location there. Latitude and longitude.”

  The youngster, who looked as though he’d never had to scrape a razor across his chin, nodded. His eyes were bulging.

  “Do you have a pencil and a notepad? Give it here, boy. Take this note to the radio room. And make sure this message gets back to Hashirajima. These coordinates. This information. And my instructions. Understand?”

  The lieutenant nodded. Clearly he was more fearful of failing the grand admiral than
of drowning, if the ship went down.

  “Go then. Go! Do not fail.”

  The young man saluted and took off running up the slanted deck.

  Do not fail, thought Yamamoto. What a bitter irony it is that such a thing should be my last order.

  D-DAY + 40. 14 JUNE 1944. 2352 HOURS.

  HMAS HAVOC, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  The third and fourth torpedoes exploded under the Yamato’s keel with spectacular effect.

  The previous strike had fatally wounded the giant, fracturing her spine beyond hope of repair. When the following shots arrived they detonated, as before, a few meters under the keel. The pressure wave again lifted the monster battleship partly out of the water, and as it came down, the actual explosion ripped into her damaged innards. With a tearing screech, she split and a sixty-five-meter-long section of the stern tilted ninety degrees, lifting her screws clear of the water.

  Willet watched dispassionately as the section quickly knifed down into the depths. The greater bulk of the dying vessel was still afloat, but surely not for much longer. Hundreds of men swarmed over the upper decks and threw themselves into the churning waters.

  Similar scenes repeated themselves throughout the Japanese fleet, which was now in complete disarray. Both of the conventional carriers had already gone down. The Musashi, like her sister ship, had been cleaved in two. Six heavy cruisers were in their final throes.

  “Captain, that converted carrier, the Ohka ferry, is boogying to the south. I can get a target lock in just a few minutes.”

  “Thank you, weapons. Just hold on a second. Mr. Knox. What do you have on your threat boards?”

  “The destroyers still haven’t found us, ma’am. But there are about a dozen of them, throwing depth charges everywhere. It’s a bit like flying over Baghdad or Damascus, with everyone shooting into the air. Somebody might get lucky.”

  Willet made a show of weighing her options. “All right, then. I think we’ve earned our pay for today. Helm, let’s blow this Popsicle stand. Wouldn’t do to get nailed by a random shot.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” the helmsman replied.

  But Willet wasn’t really paying attention. She was watching the Nagano slip away.

  34

  D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 0710 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). ALAMOGORDO AIR FIELD, NEW MEXICO.

  The last B-52 ever built rolled off the Boeing assembly line in 1962, thirty years before Caro Llewellyn was born. They were still kicking ass sixty years later, when she was flying Raptors off the Big Hill for a living. The air force had been intending to keep them in service until 2050, at which point the youngest of the airframes would be coming up on ninety years old. Of course, being a navy flier, that meant shit to her.

  Or it had until Manning Pope had opened a can of wormholes and dragged Caro’s sorry carcass all the way back to 1942. Now, sitting in the pilot’s seat of a brand-new B-52 Stratofortress waiting for clearance to open the throttles and get the hell out of Dodge, or out of Alamogordo Air Field at any rate, she shifted uncomfortably in her new Army Air Force flight suit and tried not think about the Escher-print metaphysical detour her life had taken that day off East Timor. A year ago she’d been transferred without consultation into the newly formed Strategic Air Command, given the temporary rank of colonel in the Army Air Force, and dropped into the middle of the New Mexico desert. And these undeniably weird contortions in her personal fate were all of infinitely less consequence than the mission she was about to lead: the dropping of three atomic bombs on Nazi Germany.

  New Mexico had been a real head spin. There were a lot of uptimers stationed out there. Nearly a thousand at her reckoning, which gave them some say in determining the culture of the place, but only some. There were thousands more ’temps, and nearly as many of them were civilians as military. It felt very different from the Zone, where she’d been working on the A-4 program, but it was also a world away from the rest of the country.

  “You’re clear to roll, Colonel. Good luck.”

  The voice in her earphones was female, an air traffic controller at the main tower. From the clipped, correct tones Llewellyn took her to be a ’temp, but you could never tell. Some said they could. The uptime vocabulary was generally given to more interesting profanity and was littered with the detritus of a great deal of as-yet-unrealized mass culture. But even if you took those surface elements away, there was something deeper still that separated them, an innate slackness or mental drawl of some sort that some linguists insisted on identifying in the speech patterns of everyone who’d arrived from the next century.

  Colonel Llewellyn shrugged inwardly as she pushed the throttles forward to feed more power into the eight massive underwing engines. It beggared belief, the money and manpower Uncle Sam must have poured into the task of just building those behemoths. And if you let your mind expand from there, thinking about the effort involved in retroactively constructing the giant bombers, or a rough facsimile of them, and beyond that again to the Herculean labor of the Manhattan Project itself…well, it was enough to make your head spin.

  As the plane lurched forward, the tips of its wings visibly flexed up and down. She was aware of the crew around her, performing the last of their preflight routines. She was more distantly aware of the other bombers in her squadron as they built up thrust and began to roll off the parking apron toward the long concrete runway, which was already beginning to shimmer in the morning sun. She briefly waved to the small crowd of observers gathered by the control tower and on the raked gravel garden beds in front of the airfield’s small cluster of administrative buildings. General Groves was certain to be over there somewhere. He’d spoken personally to all of the aircrews just over an hour ago, wishing them good luck and commending their actions to history. Some of the top civilians had also been present in the briefing room. She’d shaken hands with professors Teller and Oliphant, and shared a few moments with Oppenheimer himself, who seemed to be darkly amused by the squadron’s motto: “We are become death, the destroyers of worlds.”

  It had seemed like a great joke at the time. Now, as she wrestled the Big Ugly Fat Fucker down the specially constructed runway, the mordant humor was lost on her. She knew, intellectually, that there weren’t yet enough atomic bombs in existence to destroy the world, but as the scream of the jets cycled up into a painful shriek, Colonel Caro Llewellyn could not help but feel that she was about to start a nuclear war.

  D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 1415 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). BERLIN.

  It was over. He could feel it down in his meat. The Thousand-Year Reich was dying. Some part of Berlin was almost constantly in flames now. On those few occasions he ventured aboveground for more than a few minutes he never failed to spot hundreds of Allied bombers and fighters somewhere over the city. Right now, as he waited in the small courtyard of the SS safe house, penned in on all sides by high brick walls, he could tell that another raid was somewhere overhead. Possibly a bit to the north, hitting the rail junctions again. Even underground there was no escaping the destruction. In his deepest bunkers he could still feel the impact of thousands of bombs as they systemically pounded the old city to rubble and ash. Nor was Berlin the only target. With the Luftwaffe all but annihilated, every production and population center in the Fatherland was coming under relentless attack. He had no doubt that the fat criminal Churchill was behind that. He was a pig of a man and was obviously going to incinerate hundreds of thousands of innocents just so he could face his voters next year with proof of the vengeance he’d extracted for the Blitz. What a pleasure it would have been hauling him before a people’s court.

  That would never happen now, however. They were well and truly into the end of days. The brave start he’d made with the high command, calling for a full and realistic assessment of their situation, had done nothing but convince everyone that said situation was hopeless. The Kriegsmarine lay at the bottom of the ocean. The Luftwaffe was a ghost force compared with its former glory. And the army was in disarray everywhere but on the Ru
ssian front. The certain knowledge of what would happen if the Communists broke into the heartland seemed to be stiffening the resolve out there; that, the doomsday weapons, and all the men and resources stripped from the battle against the Anglo-Americans. They couldn’t be certain, of course, but his Wehrmacht generals even suspected that Churchill and Roosevelt had ordered their forces to allow significant numbers of German troops to move east. Given their utter mastery of the skies and a preternatural ability to know exactly where and when to strike, there could be no other explanation. They were going to bleed his country white in the same way they had allowed the USSR to soak up so much punishment in the Other Time.

  And they accused him of war crimes?

  He craned his neck and sniffed at a freshening breeze that somehow managed to penetrate the well in which he stood. He could smell the acrid traces of destruction on the air, but not much besides. His SS bodyguards trailed him everywhere in the small, cramped yard. It was ridiculous really. He could only move about ten meters in any one direction, but they shadowed him anyway. He checked his watch. Twenty past two. It would be time for his daily strategic briefing in an hour. They would have to move off soon, although the pointlessness of it all was beginning to wear him down. If it were not for the fact that he still had a duty to the Reich and his race, he would have made good his escape by now. Some already had, as the chaos and panic that followed the Soviet atomic strike had made it impossible to keep track of people. It was telling that he had done nothing to capture these defeatists and make an example of them. There was just no time, and resources were too scarce.

  He wondered if that was a lesson they could have learned earlier. Might the Reich have had a chance had the führer died a year ago?

  Well, there was nothing to be gained by such maudlin fancies.