Designated targets aot-2

by John Bigmingham

  He was the first celebrity she'd ever met. The runner-up in the fourth and final Australian Idol competition didn't really count, even if a much younger Jane Willet had once upon a time waited for three hours outside the Sydney Hilton to get his autograph.

  "So, Captain, were you swept away by the famous Kennedy charm?" asked her executive officer, Commander Conrad Grey, as they waited for the attack to unfold.

  "Did I let him shag me, you mean, Mr. Grey?" she smirked.

  "Oh, Captain, please, what will the junior ranks think?"

  Willet snorted in amusement. "Well, he was a very handsome man, Commander. The image files don't do him justice. But, no. Future president or not, he didn't get a leg over. Didn't even try. He seemed-I don't know-very well mannered and quite normal."

  On the twenty-three-inch Siemens flatscreen, the two torpedo boats appeared in the opalescent green of low-light amplification, their wakes spreading and overlapping as they raced toward their prey. Part of her mind was out there with them. She recalled the faint stench of the boat's Copperoid bottom paint, the smell of atabrine tablets on the crew's breath, the abrasive feel of the saltwater soap in the officers' head, and the taste of the powdered eggs and Spam covered in chutney that they'd eaten for lunch.

  The strongest memory she took away, however, was of the crew's grim black humor. They were a ratty-looking bunch, all half-naked except for the cut-off shorts and greasy baseball caps. They were unwashed and unshaved and had the resigned look in their eyes of men who didn't really think they'd make it back home. But they adored their captain, who would obviously do anything for them. And the only nod he'd made in the direction of the bizarre fate that might await him was the hand-painted sign on the outside of the boat's flying bridge.

  It read, THE GRASSY KNOLL.

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS, BRISBANE

  The small office in which Lieutenant Commander Nguyen now worked was crowded with men, all of them 'temps. There must have been fifteen or more squeezed in there, none of them sporting as much as a drop of deodorant. She was glad for the small circle of inviolate personal space around her that was guaranteed by the presence at her elbow of General Douglas MacArthur.

  Nguyen had seen him around the building enough not to be completely freaked out. She'd even been part of a briefing team that had reported directly to him on one occasion. Nonetheless, it was quite an experience having such a legendary figure sit down next to her, so that she could talk him through the PT boat attack.

  Interest in the convoy had metastasized since the incident captured by the drone earlier that day. More surveillance time had been allotted to the troopships, and additional analysts had been drafted in.

  "It's like they want to be seen," Nguyen mused. "They have to be decoys."

  MacArthur removed the unlit pipe from his mouth-she had told him the smoke would degrade the computer's circuitry. It was simpler than explaining the dangers of secondary smoke.

  "How so, Commander?" he asked.

  "Their blackout is seriously half-arsed, if you'll excuse my French, sir. Ditto their emcon-emissions control, you know, radio silence and so on. They know from experience that if we can see them, we can kill them, but it's like they're not even trying to hide."

  "So you agree with Major Brennan that they're a lure of some sort?"

  "I think so-very much so, in fact-but I don't have enough data to say for certain, General. If I had to take a punt, I'd say they've been sent down as sacrificial goats. Not to lure the Havoc into a fight, exactly. More to soak up whatever she fires at them."

  "Let's hope we can get you some data, then," MacArthur grunted as the torpedo boats began to churn up a lot of water. It showed on the display panel as an explosion of lime-green fairy floss on a dark emerald sea surface. Everyone in the room with a view of the monitor could clearly see individual figures moving to their stations on the deck.

  "They're accelerating for the run in."

  "Which one's Kennedy?" somebody behind her asked.

  "The lead vessel," said Nguyen.

  "Ha, that figures."

  She couldn't tell whether the speaker meant well or not. She ignored him to concentrate on the feed from the drone. In contrast to the Japanese ships, the Americans weren't giving anything away. They maintained radio silence, and no telltale jewels of light sparkled from within their blacked-out cabins. They were shut up nice and tight.

  Great fans of seawater began to spray back from their bows as they sliced through the swell. None of the small jade figures on deck moved now. They would be coiled and waiting. Nguyen wondered how loud their engines would be, and whether any lookouts on the Japanese ships had managed to obtain night-vision equipment of their own. Some had certainly fallen into enemy hands.

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, CORAL SEA

  Ensign Shinoda, on the bridge of the Wakatake-class destroyer Asagao, did not have any night-vision goggles. Nobody on any of these ships did. In fact, the junior officers joked that the only new piece of equipment they'd taken south was a giant bull's-eye painted on the hull.

  But Shinoda, who had graduated near the bottom of his class, did not question the wisdom of their orders. He had no doubt there was some good reason why they were nursing three ships full of Chinese and Korean prisoners through some of the most dangerous waters in the world. He was equally certain the captain would have been told why this most difficult task was assigned to two of the oldest, least capable ships in His Majesty's fleet.

  So the young man pressed the Tsushima vintage binoculars to his eyes and scanned the obsidian blackness that lay beyond the windows, with the zealous devotion of a true believer. Even without the glasses that saw in the dark, or the ghost planes that floated just over the mast and took pictures that could see right through a man's uniform, even without the death beams and super-rockets of the gaijin, he still would bring honor to his ancestors. He would-

  "Shimatta!"

  The clouds parted for a second and let through a shaft of moonlight as bright and clear as a searchlight. And roaring toward him through the small oblong of illuminated ocean were two enemy vessels.

  PT boats!

  Shinoda screamed out a warning to the officer of the watch, turned his head away for just a second, and lost sight of them completely as the broken clouds knitted back together again. Chaos erupted on the bridge as Klaxons sounded to bring the crew to general quarters. Someone was yelling at him to explain, someone else was stabbing a finger at the skies, insisting that super-rockets were flying toward them. Curses and shouts reached him from the open decks, where men hurried to the ship's sad little battery of 4.7-inch guns.

  The floor began to tilt as they came around to bear down on the heading where he'd last seen the boats.

  "We've been spotted," Kennedy said with such detachment that he surprised himself.

  "Pity," Lohrey said, staring into the pearly glow of her data slate. A dense mosaic of data and images was quickly filling all the available space. "Helm, bring us around on two-two-five," she said. He heard her voice through the strange cushioned pads that covered his ears, as though she were talking on the phone.

  "We'll see if they got a lock on us, or just a sneaky peek," she added.

  Kennedy spun the wheel, and on the slate in front of him caught a glimpse of the other boat biting into the swell on a new heading, just as the rush of the first shells screamed overhead. He felt and heard them explode behind them. His men held their fire, not wanting to give away their new position.

  "He's changing course, but blind," said Lohrey. "He got lucky, that's all, and it won't last. Follow the strobe in, Skipper, and let 'em have it."

  Star shells burst in the air behind them with a muffled whump, and suddenly the sea was alight with a fierce white blaze of light. The pictures from the battle-cams disappeared momentarily, until Lohrey adjusted the filters. Kennedy bored in toward the target, heedless of the new danger. It was a straight shoot-out, and whoever got off the first good hit would win.
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  The engines howled at the outer limits of their power, driving the boat across the light choppy waves in a series of long, loping jumps from one wave crest to the next. The sound of the hull as it smacked down was massive and hollow, a series of booms that threatened to shake them apart before the Japs could land a blow.

  On screen he saw the first two fish leap from the tubes on the other boat and go racing away, just a second before the word launch flashed up in front of him.

  "Fire!" he called out, hoping that the funny little headset he wore was turned on and working.

  His own torpedoes launched. The long finger of a searchlight swept over them as all his machine guns opened up to put it out. He swung the boat around in a viciously tight arc as shells exploded in the seas around them, raising plumes of salt water that fell on his decks like heavy monsoon rain. Lohrey was braced in a corner of the wheelhouse, her head tilted at a strange angle, as though she were daydreaming. She could have been staring off into space, but with her eyes hidden behind the goggles, he couldn't tell.

  "Hit!" she called out a split second before he felt the double crump of two torpedoes detonating about a thousand yards away. A few seconds later, the same sound, even closer, as two more struck home. The panel display split, showing two images of crippled ships. While he watched, secondary explosions tore along the aft section of one of them like a string of giant firecrackers. Then one volcanic eruption of fire and light blew the entire ship apart, whiting out one half of the split window. The supersonic blast wave reached them within a heartbeat.

  It was like hitting a wall. Everyone was thrown off their feet. The boat slewed around, uncontrolled for a moment while Kennedy wrestled with the wheel.

  "New targets, Lieutenant," Lohrey called out in a strangled voice. She was nursing an arm that dangled lifelessly.

  "Got them," he called back as the navigation screen reappeared on the panel in front of him. He spun the wheel until he'd lined up the flashing blue arrowhead, which designated the bow of the 101, with the red line, along which the battlespace arrays of the HMAS Havoc wanted him to launch his next attack. Or something like that. The details were beyond him now. All he knew was that he had to follow the red line at top speed and trust in some glorified box of nuts and bolts about two hundred nautical miles away, which apparently knew more about these things than he did.

  He desperately wanted to snatch aside the blackout curtains and have a good long look at things with his own two eyes, rather than relying on the battle-cams. As long as he didn't think about what he was doing, it was simple enough to follow the schematics on the screen, but if he gave even a moment's consideration to the situation, it all got very scary-driving a boat at top speed through a burning formation of enemy ships, with torpedoes and cannon fire filling both the air and the water.

  LAUNCH.

  The word flashed up, and he relayed the order again.

  "Fire!"

  The aft tubes spat their loads into the water, and he wrenched them around on a new heading that appeared on the panel. All his guns were firing now, the big twin 50s thrashing away like jackhammers over the ripping snarl of the 30-caliber turrets. The 37 mm antitank gun barked, and the Bofors mount thundered. The uproar was so great, he wondered how anyone heard his orders, even with the little wire microphone sitting so close to his lips.

  A distant boom, like the cracking of a mountain.

  Lohrey's voice, strained but not shouting. "We just lost a transport. It must have been carrying ammunition or something."

  ALL TARGETS SERVICED.

  Kennedy eased back on their speed and asked Lohrey if she knew where Ross's boat was. She propped herself against the bulkhead, reached across her body, and used her good hand to pull the injured arm over to where it could rest on a raised knee.

  "Broken elbow," she explained before he could ask. "I've medicated myself."

  The flexipad was sheathed in a clear plastic pouch on the bad arm. She used a pencil of some sort to input the query and nodded to his panel. Kennedy looked back and realized that now he had a top-down view of the whole area. Three ships were ablaze and going down, with hundreds of tiny figures streaming over their sides. A small box of text floated next to each of them, marking them as the two destroyers and a troopship. A couple of large floating pools of wreckage and smoke and burning oil marked the points where the other ships had been completely destroyed. They were tagged as FLOATING DATUM POINT 1 amp; 2.

  PT 59 was surrounded by a flashing blue box as it described a long elliptical course around the nearest FLOATING DATUM POINT. Kennedy reached over to tear down the blackout curtains, so he could see where he was going at last.

  "You may find it easier to leave them up," said Lohrey. "Havoc is sending a burst downline now, nav data to grab us up some prisoners."

  As the words left her mouth, the skipper's slate reformatted into another top-down perspective, with an inset window magnifying a small group of survivors swimming away from one of the sinking troopships. A red line plotted the suggested course to pick them up. It avoided the danger of sailing too close to the crippled vessels, which might yet explode, but seemed to run right through masses of struggling swimmers.

  "Can that be right?" he asked.

  Lohrey considered the image for a second, before nodding. "You'll think me unladylike, Lieutenant, but you should just get on with it. We want to clear this area as quickly as possible. Havoc says there are hostile aircraft within the threat bubble. They'll see the fires."

  Jack Kennedy struggled to keep the distaste off his face. She was suggesting he open the throttles and ride over the top of dozens, if not hundreds, of survivors. Most of whom might not even be Japs, if that Nguyen lady was right.

  "Can you patch me through to Barney Ross on this thing? It's secure, right?" he asked, tapping the headset.

  She played with the flexipad and nodded.

  "Barney, you there? It's Jack."

  "I can hear you, buddy. That was great driving before. And good shooting, too."

  His friend's voice was so clear, he might as well have been standing right next to him in a quiet bar.

  "Barney, I've got to pick up the prisoners now. You want to get going, and we'll catch up. There's bogeys about."

  A short, hard laugh told him that PT 59 wouldn't be going anywhere until her sister ship was ready to cut out, as well.

  Kennedy signed off. This time he did pull down the blackout curtains, and he looked out onto the burning oil slicks with abhorrence distorting his features. The screams of dying and injured men reached him faintly over the industrial noise of buckling metal and exploding munitions. He could see the flashing navigation schematics at the lower periphery of his vision, but he kept his eyes fixed on the waters in front of his boat.

  "What the hell's he doing?"

  "He's threading his way through the survivors," said Willet, watching the minor drama on the Intelligence Division's monitor. "Mr. Grey, bring all of the Nemesis arrays online, and keep Lieutenant Lohrey updated on the threat boards via the live link."

  "Aye, ma'am," replied her exec.

  Willet had been crouching over the display for the last twenty minutes, and now she stood up. She stretched her back muscles but never once took her eyes off the feed from the Big Eye drone.

  She'd wondered whether Kennedy might do this, endanger himself and his crew rather than run down a few men he'd been trying to kill just minutes earlier. It said something about the 'temps, or maybe just about him, that the war hadn't yet coarsened their spirits completely.

  She envied him, in a way. She'd lost almost any feeling she might have had for her enemies when her sister was beheaded on camera by Moro Front guerrillas in the Philippines, ten of her years ago. Corina had been a field-worker with the Save the Children Fund when she was kidnapped from a village she was assessing for a new water treatment program and a microcredit loan scheme. The guerrillas had murdered her and two doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres, doing so "live" on the Web.


  When Filipino and U.S. Special Forces arrived at the village, they discovered another atrocity that hadn't been broadcast. Everyone in the hamlet who'd been tended to by the "infidels" had been executed, including children who had been treated for cataracts. They'd had their eyes put out with burning sticks. It was the only time in her life that Willet regretted joining the submarine service. For weeks, she'd been tortured by a violent desire to sink her fingers into the throat of the man who'd killed her baby sister. "Captain?"

  The Havoc's commander drove away the haunted memories. It'd been a long time since she'd thought of her sister in anything but the most positive terms. Years of therapy had taught her how, but now the defenses she'd erected seemed to be creaking-and threatening to collapse.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Grey. Go on," she said.

  Her exec didn't embarrass her by asking if she was all right. He simply relayed the update. "Lieutenant Lohrey reports that they're picking up the prisoners now, Captain. There are two aircraft, probably Japanese flying boats, inbound for their position. ETA nineteen minutes."

  Willet nodded, an old melancholy pain settling around her heart. "Tell them to get a move on."

  It was just about the worst thing Moose had seen since that night on the Astoria, when the other ship had suddenly "appeared" right inside his own.

  Lieutenant Kennedy was stomping up and down the decks, a machine gun in his hand, cursing like Moose had never known him to before. He'd had to shoot a Jap who tried to fire a flare pistol into his face when they pulled alongside him, although to Moose's way of thinking, he should have known that was going to happen. The Japs, they'd sooner swim into the mouth of a shark than surrender. You could tell which ones they were, too. Anybody trying not to be rescued was a fair bet to be working for their ratfuck little Emperor.