Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I

by John Birmingham

  “Oh, really?”

  “But you do not understand—”

  “I understand that you are irritating me, Damiri, and slowing down progress.”

  The Indonesian planted his hands on his hips. Men swirled around them, carrying boxes and computer screens and chairs on wheels. There was very little elbow room in the confined space, and Hidaka was jostled a couple of times. This added to his ill temper.

  “Have you not read the e-mail I sent you?” Damiri asked.

  Hidaka sighed volubly. “I swear, Damiri. You and your e-mails. You are trying to bury me alive in them. What is it this time? If you’re still insisting on five breaks a day to worship your ridiculous God, you can forget it. Once is enough. He’s all-seeing. He’ll understand that you’re busy.”

  Hidaka was a little startled when Damiri poked a finger in his face and spat out furiously, “If you had read my e-mail, you would understand that, far from complicating your struggle against the Americans, Allah—praise be His name—could deliver you your victory.”

  Hidaka was tired and growing impatient. He was aware of the sly grins that appeared on the faces of the Indonesian sailors around him. Sub-Lieutenant Damiri’s sudden conversion to religious conviction was widely thought to be a sign of his difficulty in coping with the events of the past weeks. He’d also suffered a nasty blow on the head, and the other Indonesians seemed to think it had left him testy and irrational.

  Hidaka looked at his watch. If he wasted much more time with this loon, it would disrupt the schedule. He made to brush him off, but Damiri grabbed his wrist and held tight.

  “Just hear me out,” he said. “I know how you can use this ship to destroy Kolhammer’s fleet. But you’ll have to stop stripping her down like this.”

  Hidaka had been about to draw his revolver and shoot the insolent dog in the face, but he stayed his hand.

  Damiri inclined his head toward the door of the small Combat Information Center.

  “Not here,” he said. “In private.”

  Pleased with the rate at which the trucks were leaving the dock, Yamamoto was about to make his excuses and catch a few hours of much-needed sleep. More Germans were coming tomorrow. Personal emissaries from Hitler, this time. He still had to put the final touches on the message he wanted to send back with them.

  He’d been anxious all day and most of the night. His neck was stiff from craning around to search the sky for American missiles, even though Moertopo had said there was no chance he’d ever see them coming.

  The Combined Fleet remained at anchor in the darkness around them. Apart from the stars, the only lights visible were the hooded headlamps of the trucks. Yamamoto had borrowed a night vision headset to examine the other ships around Hashirajima. The carriers and great battleships slept behind their torpedo nets. They looked invincible, but he knew their armor plate would prove no better than a silk veil if Nimitz came upon them with his new weapons.

  Surely that day must be drawing close.

  Just a few more hours cooped up like chickens for the slaughter, he thought, and then they’ll be away.

  They sailed on the morrow. He could hardly contain his desire to be gone from the anchorage. As familiar and homely as it was, Hashirajima was such an obvious target. Moertopo had told him it was sure to be struck. And soon.

  The admiral bade Brasch and Moertopo farewell and was just turning to leave when he heard Commander Hidaka calling up to them from the Sutanto. Yamamoto peered into the night, but couldn’t make him out.

  “I think he wants to talk to you,” said Brasch.

  Perplexed and more than a little irritated at the prospect of losing more sleep, he frowned and waited. The young officer came running up to him with an Indonesian in tow.

  “Admiral, Admiral! You have to hear this. Damiri here has an idea that might just rid us of these new Americans.”

  “Really,” said Yamamoto, not bothering to hide the surprise or the doubt that he felt.

  Moertopo, he noticed, had gone rigid, as though he had been electrocuted. The Indonesian commander turned to him and hissed as the others approached at a trot, “Do not trust this man, Admiral. The journey here has addled his mind. And it was no good to begin with. He is a fanatic, or has come to imagine himself so.”

  Yamamoto heard Brasch laugh a few feet away.

  “When will you understand, Moertopo? You have fallen in among fanatics.”

  Hidaka drew up a few feet away and bowed. He was puffing. The other man was younger and thinner. It was difficult to make out his features in the dead of night, but it looked like he sported a wispy beard, and he had a look of wiry muscularity about him. Before anyone else could speak, Moertopo stepped forward and slapped the man.

  The other Indonesian laughed, and spoke in his native language. “You are a dog, Moertopo. You were a dog for Djuanda, for the Americans, and now for these infidels. If you lay your hand on me again, I shall cut it off.”

  “That’s enough,” barked Yamamoto. “What’s going on here? If you’re about to drag me into some squalid mess room quarrel, I’d advise you to think again.”

  “My apologies, sir. I am Sub-Lieutenant Usama Damiri,” the thin man said in English. “And I have held my tongue long enough while this fool”—he pointed at Moertopo—“has lain about like a scabrous dog in heat.”

  Hidaka was forced to block Moertopo’s path as he lunged forward.

  “Do that again, and I will cut you down where you stand,” said the Japanese officer. “Your comrade here has been of more help in the last three minutes than you have managed since you woke up.”

  Work continued down at the ship, but some of the sailors had begun to notice the confrontation.

  Moertopo turned to Yamamoto. “Don’t listen to this man, I beg you, Admiral. He doesn’t have your best interests at heart. He is unbalanced. He thinks God has sent us here to smite the unbelievers, which, I might add, includes you. He is mad, or very quickly getting that way.”

  Yamamoto turned to Hidaka for help. The commander nodded. “It’s true. He thinks his God has sent him here to atone for his sins. And he thinks we’re all heathen dogs who are doomed to perish in a—what did you call it, Damiri? Yes, a jihad. A religious war. He doesn’t deny that at all. But he says he has a way to destroy, or at least cripple the Americans. And I believe him.”

  Moertopo cursed and stalked away a few feet.

  “I cannot believe this insanity has followed me here,” he said, but nobody was listening now.

  Yamamoto regarded Damiri with a new measure of interest, if not respect.

  “Tell me your plan, Lieutenant. I hope it’s good, or you should prepare yourself to meet this God of yours.”

  Damiri smiled contemptuously. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Yamamoto could make out his face quite well now. He was intrigued to see that the young man was not at all frightened of him.

  When Damiri explained what he wanted to do, Yamamoto understood why.

  33

  KRI SUTANTO, HASHIRAJIMA ANCHORAGE, 2043 HOURS, 11 JUNE 1942

  Lieutenant Moertopo lay in his bunk, smoking a clove cigarette laced with a small amount of hashish. It was his only comfort now. The luxury quarters and flexible geisha babes had been withdrawn since that madman Damiri had replaced him in the Japs’ affections. Allah only knew what they’d do with him when the Sutanto put to sea under Damiri’s command.

  For now, he spent most of his time in here, his old cabin. He was still the senior officer. He should have been placed in Captain Djuanda’s small but comfortable stateroom, but Hidaka was in there. That wasn’t surprising. It’d been fitted out at great expense for the rescue of the president and his family from Tanjungpinang—an adventure that was literally a world away now.

  Moertopo smiled at his memories of that near disaster. It had seemed like a wild ride at the time; maybe the wildest, with the autocannon hammering at a huge Caliphate mob and every available member of the crew firing in support w
ith sidearms and grenade launchers and even a flare gun as the president had raced up the gangway. He well remembered Djuanda, the old pirate, smoking a ridiculously oversized cigar, bellowing orders at the wheelhouse crew and laughing like a maniac as he fired an antique, silver-plated Colt .45 into the murderous rabble surging up the dock. Say hello to the Virgins of Paradise, he’d yelled at the jihadi hordes. Tell them to save some pussy for me.

  Moertopo really missed the old goat. They’d had many great days. And Djuanda would have known what to do about Hidaka. Probably would have drilled him with that damn Colt as soon he’d opened his eyes. Djuanda was a good judge of a man, and never slow to use his guns when the situation demanded. He hadn’t trusted Usama Damiri, either. How could you trust someone named Usama?

  Moertopo felt ashamed at his own failure to live up to the buccaneering spirit of the Sutanto’s former commander, just as he was shamed by his reluctance to confront Hidaka over the old man’s death. An accident, the Japanese had called it. Said he’d woken up while nobody was looking and fallen overboard. He was groggy, disoriented, and the sea was heavy, with a lot of reflected waves and cross-chop making the deck quite treacherous underfoot. A tragedy, said Hidaka, a real tragedy. Moertopo had mutely agreed, even though he’d seen Djuanda keep his feet in a typhoon while drunk on a whole bottle of arak.

  A knock at the cabin door interrupted Moertopo’s litany of woe. He sighed and carefully stubbed out the cigarette. He had a buzz from the hashish, and had hoped to quietly drift off into a drugged sleep. Stripped of all but the most basic components, the ship seemed hollow to him, and he preferred to spend his time drugged and insensible to her violation by the Japanese. Grumbling, he dropped his feet to the deck and peered at the figure in the doorway. It was Damiri.

  “I have come to offer you one last chance to join us,” he said.

  “Oh, fuck off,” Moertopo said wearily.

  The other man sneered at him with a mixture of contempt and pity.

  “Look at you, Moertopo. You’re a disgrace. They will bury you with a pig’s carcass one day.”

  “Not for a long time, though,” he said, relighting his reefer. “And they won’t bury you at all, Damiri. There won’t be enough of you left. And the Japanese wouldn’t bother anyway. To them, you’re just a dog with a trick.”

  Damiri’s eyes shone with an unnatural intensity, but to Moertopo they looked utterly vacant. The maniac was already in Paradise.

  “You should seize this opportunity to atone, Moertopo. Others have.”

  Moertopo sniggered. It was only partly the hashish.

  “So you’ve found a few converts, have you? Let me guess, they’d be the poorest, dumbest, sorriest sacks of shit in the whole crew. Who’d you turn? Those Surabayan peasants from the engine room, haven’t got enough sense to wash their hands after wiping their asses; or that rock ape from Kalimantan, the one who still thinks the CIA blew up his grandfather in New York?”

  Damiri’s strained, almost constipated look caused Moertopo to burst out laughing in genuine mirth. He rolled in his bunk, clutching his sides and howling. “Go on, Damiri. Go off and martyr yourself,” he managed to gasp.

  The born-again jihadi stalked out of his cabin as Moertopo subsided into a fit of giggles.

  With his role in Japan drawing to an end, and a return to the Fatherland looming, Brasch knew he should be looking forward to seeing his wife and son, but a terrible wasting of the soul had taken hold of him again. It was even worse than the depression he’d suffered on returning from the front. He felt as if it would never lift. There was no mystery to the condition. The explanation lay in his hands, in a file called BELSEN.

  Brasch had once believed he was fighting for Germany. Then, in Russia, he was simply fighting for his life. Now, after two weeks’ exposure to the Sutanto’s files, he was beginning to understand that he was fighting a losing battle for a monstrous cause that had nothing to do with the salvation of Germany at all. Germany, it transpired, would do very well without the Nazi Party. Under Hitler, however, it had become a charnel house and a byword for evil.

  His back ached and his head pounded. As he lay in his bunk propping himself against the gentle motion of the ship, he came to the desolate conclusion that while he could fight for Germany, he could not fight for Belsen or Auschwitz or Treblinka. He had no real feeling for Jews, and was as happy to be rid of their presence as not. But this Final Solution, no civilized man could support such a bestial policy. Especially not a man whose own family might one day be touched by the Einsatzgruppen.

  As a little deaf boy with a cleft palate, Brasch’s son Manfred was eminently suitable for disposal under something called the T4 program—the elimination of the physically and mentally undesirable.

  The engineer’s stomach burned at the very idea. He didn’t bother to delude himself that his own status as a hero of the Reich would protect Manny forever. He had come to understand that Germany under the Nazis would inevitably eat its own young.

  He had no idea what he could do to save his family.

  At some point he dozed off and slept fitfully for a few hours. He no longer suffered regular nightmares from the Eastern Front. Now his sleep was tormented by visions of Manny dying in an SS camp.

  An Indonesian shook him awake sometime well before dawn. He’d been sobbing into his pillow.

  He came to with a start and waved the concerned sailor away.

  There was a bottle of pills by his bed. Happy pills, Moertopo called them.

  He dry swallowed three and hauled himself up out of bed.

  “At last,” said Hidaka.

  He took a pair of Starlite night vision binoculars and moved from the bridge onto a gangway. The flying boat leapt into bright, emerald-green clarity as he put them to his eyes. The toys these little monkeys had to play with were forever amazing him. While he waited for the plane to pull alongside the Sutanto he occupied himself with the binoculars. Moertopo had told him that such things were standard issue to the marines in Kolhammer’s fleet. Indeed, he claimed their gear was much better than this. Some people in his own time, the Indonesian said, had even been “gene clipped” to see in the dark, like cats. Hidaka thought that patently ridiculous, but he would withhold judgment for now.

  He was learning that it didn’t pay to be too skeptical of Moertopo’s fairy tales.

  On the deck below, a party of Indonesians wore bulky night vision devices on their heads. The awkward-looking instruments didn’t seem to hamper them, though, as they scurried about in the dark. Their visitors climbed out of the plane and into a small motor launch that had puttered over from the docks.

  “A fine night for it, Captain.”

  Hidaka recognized Brasch’s voice. The German had come out of his cocoon again. He was a moody character. Hidaka had given up tracking the man’s intemperate emotional shifts. He hoped this positive frame of mind would last, but he held no great expectation. Major Brasch would probably swing through a few more highs and lows before they were done. At least his work ethic had improved.

  “A beautiful night, Major,” said Hidaka. “And an important one, yes?”

  “We’ll see,” said Brasch. “These SS types are prone to tunnel vision. They’ll love a lot of what they’ll see here—”

  “But they’ll hate the message we’ve brought,” the Japanese finished for him. “I don’t envy you, Brasch. Your führer has never struck me as a reasonable man. He may have you shot, just on general principles.”

  The prospect did not seem to bother him.

  “I’m just the messenger. It’s Yamamoto he’ll curse. And the admiral is beyond even the führer’s reach.”

  Himmler’s men, an Oberführer and Standartenführer—Brigadier General Hoth and Colonel Skorzeny, respectively—scrambled over the deck rail. Brasch knew nothing of Hoth, but Skorzeny was already a legend among veterans of the Eastern Front. A former bodyguard to the führer, he stood six-four and was one of those very rare individuals who led a life of mortal danger withou
t ever knowing fear. Brasch had never met him, but he could recite half a dozen stories of his exploits against the Soviets. Some of them may even have been true.

  The giant storm trooper slapped a deckhand on the back, and the sound of the blow against the sailor’s leather jacket cracked in Brasch’s ear.

  “Who is that giant oaf?” asked Hidaka.

  “His name is Otto Skorzeny. And a piece of advice, my friend—do not let him hear you say that. His concept of honor is even more outlandish than yours. He’ll kill you where you stand, and damn the consequences.”

  “Really?” said Hidaka, intrigued. “Where do you know him from?”

  Brasch laughed. “Everyone knows him. In America they have Superman comics. In Germany we just have Superman. And there he is, stomping all over your precious ship. He’ll probably dent it.”

  They left the walkway, entering the bridge and making their way down to where the two guests waited. Hoth’s greeting was perfunctory. He was distracted by the surroundings. Skorzeny by way of contrast roared a welcome to Brasch as though they were the oldest of chums.

  “I have wanted to meet you since I heard about your fucking madness at Belgorod. To pile up their dead and rain fire down on them like a Viking god. Take my hand, Brasch, but do not crush it, you are obviously not a mortal man.”

  Unable to match Skorzeny’s ferocious hail-fellow-well-met routine, Brasch didn’t even try. He sketched a smile that was half grimace. “I was merely taking a piss when the Soviets interrupted with their damn charge. How could I sit down again? I had not finished shaking off.”

  Skorzeny’s laughter roared out so loud that Brasch thought he must surely damage a lung. “That’s the spirit that wins the Iron Cross. Shoot them or piss on them—it doesn’t matter as long you kill them. Come along, Herr Major, introduce us to your comrades and show us around your magic boat.”

  Brasch did as he was asked. Hidaka was so taken aback by the giant Nazi’s theatrical presence that he restricted himself to the briefest formalities. For that alone, Brasch was happy to have the Standartenführer on board. Moertopo looked like he would give his right arm to be anywhere in the world but there.