Designated targets aot-2

by John Bigmingham

  She fired at the swarm of their attackers again, her arms aching from the tension in her rigid muscles. The attack faltered and broke, and then dozens of marines slammed into the survivors. Their full-throated roars mingled with her own snarls and the kiai of the enemy. She distinctly heard the wet, ripping thud of a long knife spearing into human flesh, but could not place it anywhere in the mandala of blood and savagery that swirled all around her.

  A cry, a scream with a familiar tone. A Jap was in the hole with them, scrambling on top of one of the marines. They wrestled like large, awkward children in the dirt. Raking and biting. The other American thrashed beside them, trying to reattach his mangled jaw. Julia was on top of the intruder without knowing how she'd crossed the distance, the knife already in her hand, her thick gloves gouging at the eyes of their would-be killer. Wrenching back his head to expose the throat. She stabbed the blade in to the hilt, and her world disappeared in a red wave as hot blood jetted out onto the goggles, leaving her just one small window in the upper right-hand quadrant of her visual field-the feed from the Sonycam, on which she watched herself slaughter the man who struggled in her hands like a wild animal.

  Two thousand meters away, Colonel J. Lonesome Jones was crouched over in his command bunker, a cramped dugout with a roof of logs and rammed earth, the interior lit by glo-tubes and two dozen computer screens feeding tac data from the drones circling high above.

  The battalion was stretched thin, covering an area of low hills and light scrub at the western base of a soaring tabletop plateau with sheer granite sides. Forward observers for the Crusader guns had been choppered up there along with a small security detail. Between the 'temp forces, the Eighty-second's ground combat element, and the Australian Second Cavalry Regiment to the northwest, Jones had bottled up the advance of three Japanese divisions on MacArthur's headquarters in Brisbane.

  It had been a turkey shoot at first. Thousands of enemy soldiers had ridden down the thin two-lane "highway" on bicycles. They'd done something similar in Malaysia, if he recalled his history correctly. But in Malaysia they hadn't had to contend with a battery of computer-controlled howitzers firing time-on-target along their precise line of advance. After losing the better part of two regiments to the Crusaders, the Japanese had got off their bikes and begun to press forward on foot through the bush.

  They had died in there, too. Surveillance drones picked them out of the background clutter, and a fearsome nighttime barrage by three hundred antique howitzers-American, New Zealand, and Australian guns under MacArthur's command-chewed them over. It was a vindication, said MacArthur, of his Brisbane Line strategy.

  Jones's men and women were paying for it now, though. Thirty-seven KIA so far, some from hand-to-hand, but mostly through the inevitable fuckups. Two days ago, a squadron of Liberators had bombed them by mistake, wiping out the better part of a platoon at the edge of his base area. That had finally and irrevocably poisoned an already strained relationship with MacArthur's command. In response, Jones could only say his prayers to thank the good Lord that the 'temps-as they called the contemporary forces-missed most of what they aimed for, although he did tell MacArthur, off the record, that in future any contemporary air assets that came within five thousand meters of the Eighty-second without clearance would be target-locked by his air defenses as a precautionary measure.

  It hadn't been a pleasant conversation.

  His intelligence chief, Major Annie Coulthard, broke into the memory. "Colonel, we have movement in the scrub to the northwest, eight and a half thousand meters out, across a one-thousand-meter front. I make it a regimental force, advancing on a direct line toward the New Zealanders on Hill One-forty-nine."

  Jones could see the advance on a bank of flatscreens, some carrying real-time drone footage, others displaying schematic CGI with tags identifying the disposition of friendly and enemy forces.

  "We got an envelopment under way?" asked Jones.

  The S2 worked her touch screen, zooming out, dragging the focus box to either side of the red column that was advancing on the small hill held by the depleted Kiwi battalion. Jones could see the place in his mind, a shattered landscape of gray ash and blackened tree stumps where everybody was coated in a layer of dark charcoal that gave both the Maori and white pakeha soldiers the appearance of black ghosts crouching in their gun pits. They were going to have a hell of a time holding off a frontal assault by a Japanese regiment.

  "Here we go, sir," said Coulthard. "Two clicks farther west, sir. Another column. Five-hundred-and-fifty-meter frontage, give or take. Battalion-sized force, moving on the double. Probably hoping to infiltrate through that blind valley along the creek bed."

  "No prep fire?" asked Jones.

  "None yet, sir. I think we took them all out. But it's a laydown that they'll set up those dinky little mortars as they get closer. Maybe even one of their mountain guns."

  "Okay. Give 'em a heads-up over on One-forty-nine. The bush has already been burned out over there, so we can hit 'em about… here," he said, tapping the screen at a couple of natural choke points. "Set up some close air support just in case. And stay sharp, Major. These fuckers just will not stay ass-whupped. Could be they're shooting for a divisional envelopment. If they knew the limits of our coverage, they'd go for it."

  "Yes, sir."

  The tempo in the dugout picked up, background chatter rising, the snap of fingers on keyboards quickening as the effects of Jones's orders spread out through the command post. On a screen to Coulthard's left, he could watch a video feed of ground crew around his own attack helicopters as they suddenly picked up their pace. A virtually identical scene repeated itself over at 2 Cav, except that the gunships were Arruntas, not Comanches. There was no cam coverage of the aerodrome at Brisbane, but he knew that as soon as word passed down the landline, the same burst of frenetic activity would take place there, except this time the aircraft would be old Kittyhawks and sad little Wirraways, refitted for ground attack using napalm; just one more ghastly development that had arrived before its time.

  Jones turned away from the small drama that was about to play itself around Hill 149 and took in the theater-wide view. It was nothing like he'd been used to back in 2021. Drone coverage was minimal, and there was no satellite feed, of course. No satellites. He had access to two AWACS birds, safely lurking a hundred miles or so in the rear. A couple of long-range SAS patrols and Marine Recon were buried deep behind the Japanese front line and reporting by microburst. But that was about it.

  He felt naked, even though he knew, or at least he hoped, that his own view of the battle was godlike compared with that of his opponent, General Homma. He could never really be certain what technology had leaked across to the enemy, but they were running a full ECM suite, and Homma didn't seem to be packing much beyond a few flexipads used for communications. The encryption software seemed to be commercial and dated, at least by his standards; some Microsoft piece of crap that had been hacked to death about ten years beforehand, subjectively speaking. The pads had probably been used for games or VR porn on the Sutanto.

  Still, even without the war-fighting technology that Jones had at his disposal, the Japanese were still here, weren't they? As Lenin once said, quantity has a quality all of its own, and three months ago they'd poured enormous quantities of men and material first into New Guinea and then into northern Australia, using MacArthur's island-hopping tactic before he had a chance to use it himself. Jones doubted that they could have been stopped were it not the rapid deployment of the Multinational Force's ground combat element to bolster MacArthur's defenses. As soon as the first reports sorted themselves out, it was obvious the enemy had finally decided on how to respond to the strategic shock of the Transition. They were going to try to swarm the Allies with sheer weight of numbers. The Germans looked to be preparing for something similar in Europe, having shifted the bulk of their forces west after agreeing to terms with Stalin.

  Jones had more immediate problems to deal with, however. Hig
h strategy could wait. Six large flatscreens had been linked to provide a workable video wall that displayed theater-wide data, and it wasn't family-friendly viewing. There were seven divisions of Imperial Japanese troops infesting the eastern coast of the Australian continent, four of them pressing down on MacArthur's much-vaunted Brisbane Line. Jones didn't think they'd break through, and the Havoc had cut off any chance they had of reinforcement, but when the killing was done with, he didn't imagine he'd have much of a force left, either. Both his guys and 2 Cav were starting to run uncomfortably low on war stocks, and although they brought other strengths to the field, when you ran out of bullets, you weren't much of a soldier anymore.

  Jones had been hoarding materiel for weeks now, farming out tactical and even strategic strikes to the 'temps, who'd been strengthened by a long list of quick fixes and catch-ups, such as those napalm tanks now slung beneath the local ground-attack aircraft. It was a two-way street, though. He'd just read a report of a marine company cut to ribbons by a string of claymores a few hours earlier. They'd have been completely wiped out if one of their sergeants hadn't rallied the survivors and charged right into the enemy force, which was racing downhill to finish them off.

  The command bunker had gone very quiet for a minute when the microburst packet from that reporter's Sonycam had filled one of the screens on the video wall. Every marine in his Battalion HQ had at least four years' combat experience. Most of them had a lot more. There'd been some unkind talk about what a bunch of pussies and amateurs the 'temps had turned out to be, and Jones was certain he could feel some embarrassment in the room as the footage of that unholy, disorganized blood swarm filled the screen.

  It was every bit as bad as anything he'd known in Damascus or Yemen. And these guys, with the exception of the embed from the Times, were fighting old school. No body armor, medevac, spinal inserts, or tacnet. It was like something out of the Dark Ages.

  As he watched now, the thunder of massed artillery rolled over them; that was the barrage he had initiated just a minute earlier. Hundreds of old-fashioned high-explosive shells screamed through the air, their firing sequence controlled by an old laptop computer and designed to drop the entire load simultaneously. Hearing that rumble, he nodded in satisfaction. Air control had three dozen planes stacked up, ready to drop on the Japanese like hawks as soon as the artillery was done fucking with them. Hopefully, the New Zealanders wouldn't have much to do beyond picking off the survivors.

  They'd given up investing much energy in trying to grab live prisoners. These guys had turned out to be worse than Hamas jihadi. It was like every one of them kept a grenade in his loincloth, just to avoid capture and to take a few gaijin with him.

  The ground shuddered as hundreds of shells struck home.

  Jones stifled a sigh as a bone-deep lassitude swept over him. It had nothing to do with sleeplessness and fatigue. Not a fatigue of the body, at any rate. He was tired in his soul. As the first flight of Kittyhawks dived away to unload their shiny new tanks of napalm on the unseen, screaming survivors of General Homma's shattered envelopment, Jones fought an urge to just walk away. For the briefest moment, the only thing keeping him at his post was a replay of Julia Duffy's video package on a small screen at an untended station.

  Jones couldn't help but stare at the sergeant who had saved his entire company from annihilation. The commander of the Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Unit was certain the man would earn a high honor for his actions. Perhaps the highest. The evidence of the video was irrefutable. He had turned that small battle from a disaster into a most unlikely victory. But that wasn't what caught Colonel Jones's attention. He knew that man from somewhere. He just couldn't place it.

  A quick scan of the theater-wide threat boards informed him that nothing was about to go pear-shaped in the next few minutes. He pulled out his flexipad and called up the brief report from the action on that hill about two clicks away.

  Nothing.

  Oh, well. Time's a-wasting. He grabbed his G4 and helmet and called over Sergeant Major Harrison, his senior enlisted man. They were due to tour the perimeter, but the image of that 'temp sergeant, swinging his old Thompson machine gun like a baseball bat, just would not leave him alone. He'd lay money on the barrelhead that they'd met before. Christ knew where, though.

  "Sir!" barked Harrison, who had been chewing the ass off a corporal from B company, no doubt for some minor sin. Aub Harrison was nearly as enthusiastic about ass-chewing as his battalion commander, which made the Eighty-second a very dangerous place to walk around with your ass hanging out for no good reason.

  "Grab your shootin' irons, Aub," said Jones. "It's time for us to take a stroll."

  He threw a glance back at the screen as they left. The sequence was replaying, and the marine was heaving a couple of grenades up the hill again, firing his machine gun from the hip with his other hand.

  He looked angry, and Jones had that infuriating feeling that he was this close to remembering where they'd met. But then he was out the door and into the light of the day.

  CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA

  There would be a terrible drought in the 1980s. And another at the turn of the century. El Nino they called it, although why you'd name a drought was beyond understanding for the Australian prime minister.

  "It's not the drought, sir," his adviser offered helpfully. "El Nino refers to the weather pattern which apparently causes our droughts."

  Paul Robertson, the former banker who'd been recruited to the PM's staff, thought the old man looked very ill, as bad as he'd been when he'd recalled the Sixth and Seventh Divisions from the Middle East back in March. They knew now that he would die in July of 1945-or at least he would have in the normal run of events. A doctor from the Australian component of the Multinational Force had run all sorts of gizmos over the PM, and had even inserted some kind of pellet under the skin of his right elbow that was supposed to help him cope with the stress of his office. But to Robertson, John Curtin looked like he might not make it through the night. No matter what wonder drugs they gave him, he was being eaten alive by the war.

  "I suppose the Japs will find this information useful when they take over the place," he muttered bleakly, dropping the briefing memo back onto his desk. "Although I'll be buggered how they expect to grow rice here."

  "They won't be growing any rice here, Prime Minister. You know that," said Robertson. "They'll be beaten here. Driven back through the islands. And burned alive in their own cities. Probably a lot quicker than would have happened originally. We had that uranium dug up and shipped off to the Yanks double-quick. They're working twenty-five hours a day on this A-bomb of theirs. And they're not going to waste time running up blind alleys like they did-or would have-the first time. They have a room full of computers now. It could be less than a year before they test the first warhead."

  The prime minister, a former journalist, sketched a thin, humorless smile. "Everybody is working overtime to build their own bombs, Paul. I don't imagine for a second that Hitler and Tojo haven't stripped all the computers off the ships they found. And I think the Japs are here partly because they covet our uranium-"

  Robertson made to object, but the PM waved him away.

  "Oh, I know, I know. They're going hell-for-leather to deny the Americans a launchpad for their counterattack in the Pacific. They can get uranium from the Russians now, anyway. Neither they nor the Germans can hope to compete with the Yanks in the end. They just don't have the industrial base needed to win a race to the bomb-" Curtin rubbed at his red eyes with a shaky hand. "-but they are here, on our soil, killing our people."

  "We're beating them."

  "No. We're killing them. But we're not beating them yet. They're not in retreat from MacArthur's bloody Brisbane Line. They're dying on it. But there's a hell of a lot of people trapped behind that line, and I'll wager pennies to pounds that they're dying a lot harder than Homma's men. It's not even propaganda that the Japs treat their captives worse than animals. It's history now." />
  Robertson couldn't argue with him on that. It had proved impossible to suppress the knowledge that had come through the Transition, and after a couple of futile attempts by the Commonwealth censors, they hadn't bothered trying any longer. For once they hadn't had to invent stories of the bestial nature of their enemies. The Nazis and Imperial Japan already stood condemned by history, and even by the testimony of their own descendants.

  He had seen newsreels of some of the English-speaking German and Japanese personnel who'd arrived with Kolhammer. They were touring the U.S. on a war-bond drive, and had proved themselves to be more than effective campaigners against their own countrymen. The Germans in particular, as he recalled, attacked the Third Reich with almost messianic zeal. The two Japanese sailors were a little more restrained, but no less emphatic that the militarist government of their homeland had to be defeated and replaced with a modern democracy.

  It made Robertson's head spin every time he thought about it, and he was grateful to be so busy. He wasn't responsible for giving Curtin military advice. Originally he'd been assigned to the PM's office to help smooth the transition from a state-based to a federal taxation system. But that had been temporary, and now he'd agreed to a permanent appointment, helping the government deal with the economic implications of the Transition. His brief covered everything from planning for future droughts, through to simple trademark issues. Before joining the PM in his surprisingly small, dark office, he'd been on the phone to the American ambassador, trying to convince their cousins across the Pacific to prosecute some five-star grifter by the name of Davidson who'd lodged patents for more than half a dozen inventions that would have been developed by local businesses.

  It was a hell of a job, dealing with the monetary implications of an invasion one moment, and with a crook who was trying to steal the plans for a self-chilling can of beer the next. But when nobody was watching, Robertson had to admit to himself that he was, just occasionally-well, not having fun exactly, but he'd never been as excited by the challenge of his old job in the bank. There he'd made money. Here he made history.