Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  Moertopo stood beside and slightly behind Commander Hidaka in the planning room of the Yamato, a huge space to the eyes of somebody who had been confined to a comparatively tiny ship like the Sutanto. Before them lay a large table with a map of the Pacific covered in little wooden boats and flags, symbolizing the disposition of hundreds of Japanese naval vessels, surging across the empty wastes of the northern Pacific. Now, apparently, they were in disarray, and the men responsible were facing a solid wall of dark uniforms and darker faces.

  Overhead, lights glinted off Yamamoto’s shaven head as he listened to Kakuta and Hidaka attempt to explain themselves. The grand admiral’s face remained utterly impassive, but the men around him glowered with increasing degrees of incredulity and umbrage. When Kakuta finally fell silent, a terrible, ticking stillness blanketed the gathering.

  “And you, Lieutenant Moertopo. What say you of all this?” asked Yamamoto at last in thickly accented, but otherwise flawless English.

  Moertopo, who had quickly downloaded everything he could find on Yamamoto and Midway from the Sutanto’s Fleetnet storage banks, wasn’t surprised by the man’s grasp of the language. He now knew that Yamamoto had studied at Harvard, and later worked in Washington. But he was nevertheless shocked at being spoken to directly by the supreme commander of the Combined Fleet. He had been rather looking forward to keeping his opinions to himself. Hidaka prodded him forward.

  “What do you want me to say . . . sir?”

  “Do you really expect me to believe that you are from the future?”

  “No.”

  “Then why waste my time with this fiddle-faddle?”

  Moertopo thought he understood the slant of the question, even though it had been phrased so oddly.

  “I do not expect you to believe it. But it is true. I was born in nineteen ninety-seven.”

  “I see.”

  The room again fell into uncomfortable silence.

  “And how did you come to be here?” asked Yamamoto after a short interlude.

  “I do not know,” Moertopo answered truthfully. “But here I am.”

  “And here your friends are, too, the Americans,” Yamamoto stated flatly.

  “You believe that?”

  “Our radio intelligence has detected a very large volume of traffic from the Midway area. A battle has been fought there. But not by us.”

  Moertopo quickly scanned the faces behind Yamamoto, hoping for some sign of how to play this. All he found, however, was a wall of anger and suspicion.

  “We picked up those signals ourselves,” said Moertopo. “It appears that the Americans have hurt each other very badly.”

  Again, his answers brought no measurable response from Yamamoto or his staff. Moertopo had been hoping that they might tip a couple of flexipads onto the table, maybe a history book or two and couple of pirate video sticks—he’d even managed to locate a copy of Tora Tora Tora—after which the locals would offer him a nice warm sake and couple of horny geisha girls to welcome their new best friend to the original axis of evil.

  Yamamoto purred in a deceptively friendly tone, “Tell me, Lieutenant, what was supposed to happen, before the interference of you and your friends.”

  “The . . . they’re not my friends,” Moertopo stammered. “I copied files to these flexipads if you want to read them, or watch them,” he hurried on. “I have documentaries. There are some good ones there. The World at War. And Victory at Sea. I have the Tom Cruise miniseries. I could—”

  “I am not interested in your toys, Moertopo,” growled the Admiral. “I want you to tell me what was supposed to happen next.”

  Hidaka leaned over to whisper something, but Yamamoto cut him dead with a glare.

  Moertopo had studied the archival material on the flight down. He was well enough acquainted with a scratch history of the Pacific War to deliver the briefing that had been asked of him. But he was certain these arrogant dogs would tear him apart as soon as he spoke. The way he understood it, they wouldn’t—didn’t—believe they could lose until well after their butts had been well and truly kicked. It was hopeless. He was trapped. Until a thought occurred to him.

  “You were right,” he said.

  Yamamoto’s wide, Buddha-like face regarded him dispassionately. “What do you mean?”

  Moertopo picked up the flexipad that sat on the table in front of him and quickly brought up a bookmarked page. “When you spoke to Prime Minister Konoye in nineteen forty,” he explained, “just after he had signed the treaty with Hitler and Mussolini, you said, If I am told to fight, regardless of consequences, I shall run wild for the first six months or a year. But for the second and third years I have utterly no confidence. You always thought that war against the United States was national suicide.

  “And you were right. It was. Three years from now the Americans will drop a bomb on Hiroshima, where you attended the Naval Institute, if I remember correctly.”

  Yamamoto nodded.

  “This was, or will be, a special bomb. There was only one dropped that day, but it exploded with a force of more than fifteen thousand tonnes of TNT. Not kilograms, Admiral. Tonnes. It killed seventy thousand people instantly and destroyed most of the city. It was called an atomic bomb. They dropped another on Nagasaki, two days later, and Japan surrendered unconditionally. You didn’t live to see it, though. The American’s shot down a plane carrying you on . . .”

  He checked the flexipad again, gaining confidence from the stunned silence.

  “On Sunday, April eighteen, nineteen forty-three. Over Bougainville.”

  “Lies!” someone cried. But Yamamoto raised his hand and stilled the protest.

  There. The cat was out of the bag now. Moertopo wasn’t sure what the long-term results would be, but at least it appeared he’d saved himself from being weighted down and tipped over the side of the ship. He had read more than once of how captured American fliers had suffered just that fate at the hands of these primitive oafs. And they considered themselves the pinnacle of martial civilization!

  “It appears,” Yamamoto said, “that a heavy blow has landed on the Americans tonight. What is to stop us continuing east to finish the job?”

  Moertopo was physically and emotionally worn out. He couldn’t contain a small, wan shadow of a smile. “The power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima,” he answered, “is nothing compared to the weapons they have brought with them. With your permission I shall speak my mind now, Admiral Yamamoto. You were right to oppose this war. You would have lost it. You will still lose it, no matter how badly damaged the Americans are by the events tonight. If just one warship from Kolhammer’s force remains afloat, it would be enough to sink every carrier you have. You can avoid the disaster that would have befallen you. You have that opportunity. You should grasp it with both hands.”

  This time Yamamoto said nothing. His eyes glinted like two small opals.

  Moertopo drew deeply but furtively on the clove cigarette. The embers at the tip burned brightly for a few seconds, casting a dim red glow on the base of the empty bunk above him. He was unsure whether the Imperial Japanese Navy enforced a nonsmoking policy, but he was reasonably certain they had not yet invented smoke detectors, so fuck them.

  He and Hardoyo were being accommodated—or detained, to be perfectly accurate—in separate cabins far apart from each other. They hadn’t been badly treated or abused. Indeed, the reception for Kakuta and Hidaka had been much sharper. For the moment, the Indonesians were regarded as a curiosity and a potential asset. When that changed, he knew, he’d better have an exit strategy locked down. Or something of great value to trade for his skin.

  The sweet notes of the cigarette induced a lonesome melancholy in the Sutanto’s executive officer. An intensely childlike desire to run for home overwhelmed his confusion and anxiety, while compounding deeper feelings of desolation and irrecoverable loss. He was surprised to find his throat tightening as hot tears welled in his eyes. Moertopo quickly jammed a knuckle into his mouth, lest th
e guard outside his room hear him. The grief built in intensity until there was nothing to be done but to give himself over to it, curling into a tight fetal ball on his bunk and fighting to draw breath between the great racking sobs that overpowered him. It was as though he were being pummeled underneath a tsunami of wretched sorrow.

  In time, a few minutes at most, the seizure passed, leaving in its wake a bleak emotional landscape. He lit another cigarette and raised it between shaking fingers. He drew in a sharp, shuddering breath. As stupidly soothing as this clove cigarette was, Moertopo turned it in his fingers, examining it with a frown. It was emblematic of all his problems. The company that produced this before the war had been a monopoly. In the year before he was born, it had been handed over to an idiot son of the president, who had added the profits from that corrupt transaction to his already formidable business holdings. Both the son and the old man were gone within three years, swept away by the blast wave of the nineties’ financial meltdown. The cigarette company reverted to its original and natural owners, the armed forces, which generated 70 percent of its budget from commercial enterprises, most often monopolies.

  Little wonder, then, that as Indonesia began to disintegrate under the onslaught of radical Islamists, the generals and admirals had reacted less like professional military men than as the ham-fisted, profiteering mafia they actually were. Moertopo cursed the fools and robbers who had delivered his country into slavery beneath the heel of the Caliphate. But mostly he cursed them for so mismanaging their affairs that he should end up here, in the belly of an iron behemoth, decades before he was born, when he could have been safely tucked up beneath the wings of the Americans.

  If only they had trusted him.

  But then again, he admitted, why should they?

  The Sutanto was little better than a pirate ship. And in a dismal insight, Lieutenant Ali Moertopo realized his only hope lay in embracing that.

  15

  USS ASTORIA/LEYTE GULF, 0331 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Slim Jim Davidson hadn’t ever seen anything like it. Not even at the World’s Fair in New York, before the war. The future was here, and it was a fucking treasure trove. If it weren’t for Chief Mohr riding his ass like a chariot driver he’d have stowed away enough loot to set himself up for life.

  He’d already grabbed and stashed away two of them electrical books, three electrical watches, one pair of goggles—also electrical—and a pistol that looked like it’d stop a bull elephant. The hand cannon he understood. The watches, sort of. They had to be like something out of Dick Tracy, radio watches or something. But the other stuff, that was a mystery. He just took them because he recognized a first-class score. There was just something about those gadgets that cried out, Take me Slim Jim. I’m yours. At some point he was going to have to drop the loot off and start again. Or else Mohr was certain to get wise.

  But it was worth the risk. That’s why he’d allowed himself to be “volunteered” by the chief for the gruesome business of cleaning up the body parts that lay throughout the dense labyrinth created by the intersection of the two cruisers. The confusion and darkness created endless opportunities for profit. One of the watches, for instance, had just “slipped off” a severed arm and into Slim Jim’s pocket as he cleared out a niche where the Astoria’s electrical storeroom met a small crew cabin on the Leyte Gulf.

  It was hotter than hell down here, maybe even hotter than Alabama in high summer, which Slim Jim knew from personal experience was worse than being trapped in the Devil’s own butt hole. In July of ’36 he’d done three months on a road gang just outside Montgomery. At the time he’d sworn never to get himself into that sort of trouble again, but here he was, picking up dead meat, Chief Mohr kicking his ass, Moose Molloy stepping on his toes, the Imperial Japanese Navy hell-bent on killing him, and now this crazy bullshit thrown in for good measure. He’d be a damn fool if he didn’t take what little chance he had to profit from these unpleasant circumstances.

  And Slim Jim’s mama didn’t raise no fools. Sharpies, grifters, and one crooked jockey, for sure. But no fools.

  Slim Jim’s normal approach to a job like this would have been to affect an impression of grim industry while goofing off at every turn. But now he hurried to fill his burlap bag with its obscene cargo and the occasional item of plunder, trying to look like the world’s busiest little beaver. Moose Molloy, who was working beside him, droned on without letup, his tiny pea brain grappling with the night’s events. Slim Jim upheld his side of the conversation only when necessary. His mind worked furiously behind a mask of barely contained disgust.

  Oxy cutters blazed around them, burning narrow passageways through the tangled mass of iron. The air stunk of ozone and corruption. Slim Jim’s back hurt from the deadweight collected in his sack. His throat was parched dry, his tongue furry, and he was covered in cuts and bruises from banging against twisted metal in the dark. It was, he thought, worse than that fucking road gang. At least they’d had fresh air. But he stuck at the joyless task long after he’d normally have found an excuse to escape.

  “I can’t wait to see the mess on this ship,” grunted Moose as he pulled at something wedged between two imperfectly fused bulkheads. “They got so many mess men on this ship they must have a mess as big as the Enterprise. You remember when we snuck on board for their Christmas party that time, Slim Jim? How big that mess was, with all of them niggers? I never seen so many of them before.”

  “They’re not mess men,” Davidson answered as he pocketed what looked like an electric fountain pen. “Look at their uniforms, you lunkhead. They’re officers, some of them. The dames, too. And the captain’s a broad and a Negro.”

  “Oh, a Neeegro, excuse me, Professor. Anyhow, I know that,” Moose protested. “I was there, remember?”

  “Goddamn! This thing weighs a ton,” cursed Davidson as he hauled the bag through another tight crawl space. The effort left him breathless and shaking. He leaned against a bulkhead by Molloy to rest.

  “Hey, Moose,” he said quietly when he’d caught his breath. “Listen. I wouldn’t go calling ’em niggers to their face if I was you. Or nips or broads or nothing.”

  “But that’s what they are!” Molloy protested.

  “Maybe,” Davidson conceded, “but they’re officers, too, a lot of them. And officers stick together. I been around. I seen a few things. Just ’cause the black man’s been set lower than us doesn’t mean he likes it. These guys coming here? It’s trouble for everyone. For the Japs if they get a taste of those guns and rockets like we did. But for us, too, I reckon. And when trouble blows in, a smart guy keeps his head down, waits for it to pass. When it’s gone you can see how things lie.”

  Around them the noise of rescue and salvage created a din that covered their conversation. Davidson didn’t exactly think of Moose as a friend. He didn’t exactly have any friends. But Moose stood six-four in his bare feet and could probably kill an ox with his right hook. He made a good ally for someone like Slim Jim, who’d always relied on ratbastard cunning to make up for his less-than-intimidating physique. If he was going to work an angle on this, he didn’t need to have the big ape messing things up for him by mouthing off to the new guys.

  “You think about it, Moose,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “You ever meet an officer didn’t think the sun shone out of his ass? It’s because in their world, it does. And there’s nothing you or I can do about it. I don’t know how that bitch got to be captain of a ship like this, but you can bet she thinks she deserves it.”

  “But that just can’t be,” Moose argued plaintively.

  “It doesn’t matter!” Davidson said, cutting him off sharply. “What should be and what is almost never turn out the same. I should be lying back in a big feather bed at the Waldorf getting my dick sucked by Rita Hayworth. But I’m stuck here covered in blood and shit wondering what the hell happened to the laws of fucking nature this morning. You take my advice, Moose, one of these bastards says boo to you, you just tell ’em yes sir
no sir three bags full sir. Even if it’s some broad looks like she should be cleaning the toilets in a fucking speakeasy.”

  Moose was silenced by the vehemence of his best friend’s delivery. And everything Slim Jim Davidson had just said ran 100 percent contrary to what his daddy, Moose Sr., had raised him to believe. But of course, Moose Sr. wasn’t here, up to his ass in dead meat and craziness. And Slim Jim had looked after him ever since they’d fetched up in the same quarters. He reluctantly agreed to heed the advice.

  “That’s all right then.” Davidson nodded. “Now I gotta take this shit topside and get rid of it. I’ll see you soon.”

  And with that he hauled the big, oozing bag away, all the time thinking of where he might stash the treasure he had hidden within it.

  Captain Anderson ran her fingers along the join between the two ships. The nanotube sheath armor of the Leyte Gulf met the rivets and iron plating of the Astoria perfectly. She supposed they had bonded at the molecular level.

  “How long, Chief?” she asked.

  “They’ve got the pumps running full bore in the Astoria, Captain. We’ve sent over what help we can, but unless we get her to a dry dock in the next eight to twelve hours, we’re both going down.”

  “There’s not a dry dock in the world could fit them in,” Anderson pointed out.

  “That’s true,” conceded Chief Conroy.

  “And we’d tear both ships apart making any kind of speed to get there.”

  “Reckon so.”

  They had gathered in a small group on C deck of the Leyte Gulf, where the portside corridor was entirely blocked by a section of the Astoria. The deck tilted forward perceptibly beneath their feet, as the stealth cruiser’s bow was dragged down by the growing weight of the other ship. The structural integrity of the Astoria was failing. A large fissure had opened up just aft of the nexus with Anderson’s ship and the sea was flooding in, gradually overwhelming the pumps and the efforts of a three-hundred-man bucket brigade.