Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  The forensic laboratory of the War Crimes Investigation Unit was familiar turf to Captain Margie Francois. She’d been attached to two such units during the previous fifteen years, earning a medal from the United Nations Human Rights Commission for her work in identifying the members of a “special purposes” battalion of the Iranian army, which was active during the second Iran–Iraq war. The purpose of the battalion had been to spread terror among subject Iraqis by a program of systematic rape.

  Francois was first and foremost a Marine Corps combat surgeon, but she was also cross-trained as a special victims investigator. She had the graduation certificate from Quantico and a mass of emotional scar tissue to show for it.

  As the wait for Detective Cherry dragged on, she worked hard at damping down the first sparks of her temper. There were six people in the morgue with her. Dr. Brumm, from the coroner’s office in Honolulu. Assistant District Attorney Crew, standing in for the district attorney. Lieutenant Commander Helen Wassman, formerly the medical officer on the Leyte Gulf. Ensign Mitsuka, surviving senior officer on the Siranui. And Captain Hugh Lunn, from the Clinton’s Legal Affairs Division, who doubled as the head of the War Crimes Unit when it was operational—it wasn’t at this point, but Lunn was there as the senior legal affairs officer in the task force.

  They were all waiting on Cherry.

  The morgue wasn’t meant to hold so many observers, so the space was cramped. They all wore masks, but only the doctors, Francois and Wassman, were gloved and gowned. The “ ’temps,” Brumm and Crew, had arrived together, but seemed uncomfortable talking in front of the Multinational Force personnel. They were obviously ill at ease in Mitsuka’s presence, and Francois suspected they hadn’t been too happy riding in the backseat while a couple of chicks drove the postmortem process, either. But the look of dismay on Dr. Brumm’s face—at the array of unusual lab equipment—was reason enough to disqualify him from a hands-on role in the postmortem.

  The naked bodies of Anderson and Miyazaki lay on stainless-steel benches in the middle of the room. The Japanese officer rested stiffly on the table nearest to Francois. His toes were pointed straight at the laboratory door, as if he were diving into a pool. Gravity had pooled his blood, giving the underside of his corpse a bruised appearance that contrasted with the waxy yellow color, turning noticeably to green, elsewhere on his body.

  Anderson was posed more dramatically. One fist was clenched and her right leg was drawn up toward her stomach. Her left leg was bent backward at the knee. It had obviously been broken with great force. Her dark skin meant that the green tinge of putrefaction wasn’t as immediately evident, but she still looked unreal, like a posed wax model. Everybody in the room avoided staring at her private parts. Something terrible had been done there.

  Francois checked the clock again. Fifteen minutes late. She could feel her face coloring with anger. She didn’t know either victim personally, but she always took this shitty sort of business personally. It was why she’d turned down so many requests to participate in other war crimes investigations over the years. It dredged up memories.

  “Detective Cherry was shot in the leg last year,” said ADA Crew. “He finds it hard to get around.”

  “And they couldn’t send anybody else?” asked Francois, barely controlling her irritation.

  Crew shrugged.

  “They’re shorthanded. A lot of cops joined up the day after Pearl. Cherry caught the case. It was his turf the stiff . . . the bodies washed up on.”

  Francois was about to snap a comment at Crew’s indelicate choice of language when Detective Cherry came through the swing doors.

  Jesus Christ, what a bag of shit, she thought.

  “Sorry I’m so early,” the cop said with a lopsided grin.

  Francois had never seen a man so obviously teetering on the edge of a massive coronary, and a stroke, and liver failure, and God only knew what else, all at the same time.

  His limp was pronounced, but that was the least of his problems. The man’s fingers were yellowed with nicotine. He had a paunch that fell about nine inches over his belt. His breathing sounded like a something a dying animal might squeeze out when crushed to death by a boa constrictor. His face was livid, the color of bad blood and meat sickness. And he stank. She wasn’t sure which was the worse, the sour sweat, or the stale haze of cigarette smoke and alcohol fumes that followed him into the room.

  “So,” grunted Cherry, nodding at the bodies. “The happy couple.”

  “Buster, please,” Crew said quietly.

  Wassman and Mitsuka both stared at him, appalled.

  Francois could feel the moment turning into a circus. Then she thought, Buster Cherry? Oh, for fuck’s sake. She was going to find it real hard warming up to this asshole.

  “If you’re all right, Detective, we’ll start. You can prop yourself up on that stool if you need to.”

  Cherry bristled at the suggestion. He folded his massive arms and shook his head.

  “Don’t you worry about me, Doc. I mighta slipped over my fighting weight, but I’m not about to feed the worms just yet.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that crack?” snapped Wassman.

  Cherry shrugged, a slow movement that shifted a hell of a lot of shoulder meat around under his crumpled suit. “It’s just an expression, sister.”

  Francois took a deep breath before speaking.

  “Lieutenant Commander Wassman is a U.S. Navy combat surgeon, Detective. Not your sister.”

  Cherry smiled. His teeth were nearly as nicotine-stained as his fingers.

  “Like I said, Doc. Just an expression. You ladies might want to lighten up, if you’re gonna make a habit of this kinda work. Send you to the fucking nuthouse otherwise.”

  The atmosphere in the small theater was growing palpably worse. Captain Lunn pushed off the bench where he’d been leaning and said, “Why don’t we get to work.”

  Dr. Brumm and ADA Crew nodded and mumbled their agreement. Francois held Cherry’s gaze for a second, her eyes cold and level, before turning her back on him and flicking a control switch to power up the morgue’s video cameras.

  “This is Captain Margaret Francois, United States Marine Corps. I am about to begin the autopsy on Captain Daytona Anderson, formerly the commander of the USS Leyte Gulf.”

  Francois named everybody else present for the benefit of the recording before going on.

  “I’ll commence with a visual examination of the subject. Anderson was a forty-two-year-old female of African descent. DNA matching with U.S. Navy data has confirmed that she is the subject of this postmortem examination. For the benefit of local authorities, this information has been matched with dental and fingerprint records. The body has also been positively identified as that of Captain Anderson, by Lieutenant Commander Wassman, medical officer of the USS Leyte Gulf.”

  Francois paused. Brumm and Crew had been briefed on the role of DNA in forensic investigations. They were willing to take it on trust. Cherry had insisted on the dental work and prints. She couldn’t quibble with his belt-and-braces approach, but it smacked to her of game playing.

  The cop had leaned himself up against a bulkhead and was watching her intently. Francois bent back to Anderson’s body.

  “The head of the subject shows signs of trauma inflicted with a blunt weapon. The left eye has swollen closed, the skin is broken, and a small dent is visible in the forehead. The subject’s jaw appears on initial examination to have been broken by a separate blow, delivered from the opposite direction, that is, from the right-hand side. Ligature marks are clearly visible on the neck. Two entry wounds from large-caliber bullets sit over the subject’s heart. Her right hand shows signs of cadaveric spasm. The fist is clenched tightly and knuckles of the first two fingers appear to be displaced, possibly as the result of a defensive blow she delivered while extant. The subject is wearing a ring on the third finger of the right hand.”

  Francois reached up and pulled down a large, fluorescently lit magnifying len
s on a jointed metal arm. She waved Brumm and Crew over to examine the ring, which loomed as large as a baseball in the looking glass.

  “If you gentlemen would care to study the ring, you’ll see that small shreds of meat have been trapped within the irregular facets. It’s possible that she struck her attacker. If so, we can retrieve DNA from the sample.”

  Detective Cherry suddenly heaved himself upright.

  “Whoa! How do we know she hit the guy who necked her? I hear they had a pretty willing fucking brawl on that ship of hers. She might have clocked half a dozen guys. Maybe your fucking crime labs are better than ours, but you still gotta get beyond reasonable doubt, don’tcha?”

  Francois nodded. “That’s right. I said it’s possible that she struck her attacker. That’s all, Detective.”

  Cherry subsided. “Okay,” he said. “Because, you know, she could have gone upside the head of her boyfriend over there.” He waved a meaty paw at Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki’s corpse. “The whole damn thing’s probably a lovers’ tiff.”

  “Hey, just a minute—,” said Wassman.

  Francois ground her teeth and placed a restraining arm on her colleague.

  “Detective, I can assure you that Captain Anderson was not having a relationship with Lieutenant Miyazaki.”

  Cherry rolled his eyes.

  “Please don’t tell me she had a little man waiting for her at home.”

  Francois gave him a poisonous look. She paused the recording, waited for just a beat, and then spoke again.

  “Captain Anderson was gay.”

  The three locals were visibly perplexed.

  “Are you saying that she was a happy individual?” ventured Dr. Brumm.

  Captain Lunn rubbed his eyes and shook his head. Wassman swore under her breath.

  Francois prayed for the patience to get her through this.

  “Captain Anderson was a lesbian,” she said.

  She expected astonishment, even embarrassment, but in fact she herself was surprised when Detective Cherry actually laughed.

  “Three strikes, hey? A nigger, a broad, and a rug muncher. Christ, what the fuck happened to America?”

  27

  HONOLULU, 1534 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

  Down at Wo Fats, the bar and grill favored by the chiefs and warrant officers, Eddie Mohr nursed the second of the two beers he was allowed to purchase on any given day, and held court. Half a dozen Old Navy men had gathered around him to hear him tell of the Astoria’s bizarre fate.

  “It was like crawling through a fucking Chinese puzzle box in there, I’m telling you,” he assured the doubters. “You never seen anything like it your whole goddamn life. And these guns they got, tear a man to pieces like a fucking grizzly bear they would, but they hit steel or wood and it’s like getting dusted by some dame’s powder puff. That’s what they call the bullets, powder puffs. A fucking obscenity, if you ask me. They got Bud Kelly with one of them. Turned his fucking head into something looked like chopped liver.”

  “Fuckers,” somebody muttered. Mohr wasn’t sure who.

  “Well,” said Pete Craven, “he was never that pretty a sight to begin with.”

  A few, sad smiles acknowledged the point. Craven, a heavily tattooed former longshoreman, now serving on the Enterprise, raised his glass.

  “To Chief Kelly.”

  Half a dozen thick voices responded, “To Chief Kelly.”

  Around them the familiar chaos of Wo Fats roared on, as eternal and reassuring as the sea itself. Men cursed and bellowed. Beer steins clinked and sometimes crashed. The turntable spun and speakers crackled and blared with the hits of the day, “Goodbye Mama I’m Off to Yokohama” and “Let’s Put the Axe to the Axis.” A handwritten poster announced a special showing of Andy Hardy’s Double Life throughout August at the Marine Canteen.

  Mohr tapped himself another Camel out of the pack resting amid the confusion of empty glasses, cigar and cigarette butts, and spilled beer.

  “Did I tell you about the well-deserved knuckling of Seaman Finch?” he asked nobody in particular.

  Pete Craven blew a thick, blue stream of smoke down at the table.

  “Only about four times so far,” he said. “You heard she got topped, didn’t you, Eddie? That Anderson broad. The nigger. And someone interfered with her, too, they reckon.”

  Mohr’s beer stopped halfway to his lips.

  “You’re shitting me! That was her? Fuck! I heard one of their dames washed up on the beach with a Jap, but I never woulda thought it was her.”

  He took a meditative pull on the stein.

  “Jeez, that’s a fucking pity, you know. She wasn’t so bad, that Anderson. For a black dame.”

  The other men at the table didn’t visibly react to the statement, but their silence spoke for them. The fact that such a thing as a black female captain even existed was a source of amazement and not a little disbelief to those who hadn’t been there. That she’d then turned up dead, and “interfered with,” was kind of interesting. But Eddie Mohr sitting in Wo Fats, looking upset and glum, and saying that he thought she was all right, well that was downright disturbing.

  The silence at their table seemed to balloon outward as the background roar suddenly fell right away. All around them, heads began to turn toward the front door. Soon the only sound Mohr could hear was the crackling of the speakers as Sammy Kaye crooned “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

  Mohr stood up, craning to see over dozens of ugly, shaven boxheads in front of him. He could just make out the silhouettes of three figures near the front of the bar. He guessed from the cut of their uniforms that they were off one of Kolhammer’s ships. He was surprised. They were supposed to keep to themselves at the Moana and the Royal. As he pushed his way through the crush of thick, sweaty bodies, a hunch began forming. A few seconds later he’d confirmed it.

  Two white guys and a nigger—sorry, Negro—sorry, African American serviceman—were standing at the entrance. He could see that the confusion on their faces was quickly congealing into anger and there, a few feet away, was the cause. A Marine Corps sergeant and half a dozen of his buds were barring their way.

  “Shit,” he said to himself as he started to hustle forward. Unfortunately he wasn’t the only one with the same idea. The crowd heaved toward the scene of the confrontation, and the resulting crush actually slowed his progress. He could see the marine sergeant blocking their entrance with one arm as a phalanx of men packed in behind him.

  He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. The barman had placed a well-used Louisville Slugger on the bar.

  Mohr could feel it coming. He’d been in enough of these things to know.

  He struggled to push forward through the crush and got himself close enough to hear the exchange. One of the visitors, a white marine, was arguing with the sergeant, explaining that his great-granddaddy drank in this very bar before shipping out to get himself killed on Iwo Jima. It didn’t impress the sarge much.

  “Yeah, but your fucking granddaddy’s not here now, asshole,” the noncom declared. “And if he was, he wouldn’t let you in neither, not with no fucking nigger in tow. This is a whites-only establishment.”

  The three things Mohr remembered later were that he was sure the guy had said heshstabishment, and it wasn’t the black marine who threw the first punch. It was the guy whose great-granddaddy had just been insulted. The other thing was that the big, dumb oaf trying to keep them away from the bar was fucked from the get-go.

  He was definitely drunk, but Mohr would swear for the rest of his life that even stone-cold sober and waiting on that punch, he’d never had a chance. This other guy’s arms just sort of blurred. The sergeant’s head snapped back, teeth flying in a long high arc halfway down the back of the bar and one long gobbet of blood landing—splat!—right on the poster announcing the Andy Hardy movie.

  The room surged forward. It felt like being sucked into a big wave on a surf beach. A hundred voices roared and Mohr distinctly heard the scratch of the record pla
yer’s needle as someone dragged or knocked it across the grooves of “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Then the crowd surged right back, unbalancing a lot of them and upending those men whose footing wasn’t certain. Sailors, marines, and army noncoms all piled into one another, spilling precious drinks, tripping and stomping on each other’s feet, swinging left and right with elbows and fists to clear some room.

  The original cause of the melee at the front of the bar was forgotten or ignored by most of those present as personal insults and service rivalries sparked an all-out brawl. Mohr ducked instinctively as a bar stool flew past his head and smashed into the mirror behind the bar, adding the crash of broken glass to the patchwork of shouts, curses, exploding bottles, collapsing furniture, and a roiling pandemonium of slamming fists and thudding boots.

  About two dozen men decided to back the sergeant in his feud with the newcomers. Mohr wasn’t surprised. He figured some would be genuinely pissed at the idea of a black man having the gall to show his face in their bar. Others were hurting from the battle at Midway and looking for payback. Some were just plain ornery, and some of these guys genuinely enjoyed the prospect of a good clean fight.

  If anyone was worthy of sympathy, it was these last, poor, stupid chumps. They sailed into the fray with ham-fisted gusto, only to find themselves targeted by a focused and unforgiving type of violence with which the average American was unacquainted, even in the early days of 1942. The three men who braced themselves in the door of the bar didn’t seem to place much store in dramatic flourishes. They quickly and somewhat mechanically crippled anyone foolish enough to attack them.

  The thing that stayed with Eddie Mohr was the look on all their faces. They weren’t snarling defiance or obscenities. They weren’t scared. They just looked blank. Like they were somewhere else. They fought like machines. It was fucking Midway all over again.

  A Seabee went at the intruders on their own terms. He flipped the bottle of Royal Beer he’d been drinking, smashed it on the edge of the bar, and advanced on the trio with murder in his eyes. The ground in front of his intended victims was strewn with the fallen bodies of men who screamed and thrashed while clutching at broken elbow joints and kneecaps. They impeded the engineer’s progress sufficiently that he changed his target to the black marine, who parried the strike with compact hand block. Using the momentum of the weapon’s thrust, he turned his hip slightly and swept the engineer’s hand up level with his chin. He took control of the bottle and jerked, breaking the man’s wrist. As the unnerved attacker cried out in pain, the marine shifted minimally at the hip again, driving his elbow into the engineer’s own. The pressure shattered the joint and the man blacked out before he could scream again.