Designated targets aot-2

by John Bigmingham

  "Well, it's not usual, but I suppose, if you were with him this morning… of course, of course, just follow me."

  For just a moment, Julia allowed herself to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face, even if that face presented a savage mask to this other woman. She threw the backpack over one shoulder, her MP-5 over the other, and hung the powered-down helmet from an eyehook on her web belt. She then detached the little Sonycam, checked the battery and lattice memory, and slipped her fingers through the hand strap as she followed Nurse Halligan to one of the big preop centers. The Sonycam was little bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and sat quite comfortably in her palm. She wet a fingertip to wipe away a bloody smear that was obscuring part of the lens.

  Turned out, the 8066 was a big facility. It looked like it could handle a lot of death and trauma. Julia estimated that they could probably deal with a surge of a thousand or more cases-say, a couple of shattered battalions. She made a mental note to grab a few stats and some background on the unit before she left. There might even be a good feature in it, especially if nobody else had thought to cover the premature birth of the MASH concept.

  The censors would go for it, for sure, because they loved stories that made the folks back home think their boys were getting the best treatment in the world.

  The coppery smells of blood and horror hung over everything, blotting out the mentholated scent of the eucalyptus trees, the smoke of battle, and even the stink of so many unwashed bodies. Trucks rumbled in and out constantly, disgorging litters weighed down with unconscious men, taking away freshly patched-up marines and soldiers. American uniforms dominated, most of them 'temps, but she heard British and Australian accents. Even some French. Three soldiers walked by who could only have been from the New Zealand Maori Battalion, their faces dense maps of native tattoos.

  Just when she was beginning to sink into the period detail, a flight of Super Harriers off the Kandahar screamed overhead, thousands of pounds of locally made dumb bombs slung under their hard-points. Nobody even looked up anymore.

  Nurse Halligan threaded around a couple of stretcher-bearers who were grabbing a few z's. She threw a look back over her shoulder to make sure Julia was keeping up, and pushed through a set of swinging doors into a large building that seemed to have been stapled together out of materials scavenged from an abandoned building site.

  As she pushed through the doors behind Halligan, Julia caught the reek of disinfectant and dying flesh. It rose up to unlock memories of other casualty wards, some military, some civilian. In the end, she decided, they were all the same, just mounds of broken bodies and the glazed-over, uncomprehending eyes that all asked the same question. Why me?

  The men in here still wore the bloodied uniforms in which they'd come off the line. Nonetheless, Duffy's entrance drew a few stares. She was an alien, almost barbarous vision, even among these men who presented a facade of martial savagery. Not everyone followed her path through the gurneys and canvas cots, though. Most in fact did not, either because they were insensible with pain or medication, or because battle had numbed them to a state of existential collapse. However, enough of them struggled up, and pointed, and whispered to qualify as a minor commotion.

  Snider saw her, even before she could find him. "Hey, Miss Duffy. Over here!"

  He was propped up on a folding chair in a far corner, his injured leg resting on a wooden crate and enclosed in a bright orange inflatable tube that could only have come from a twenty-first unit. They must have fitted him on the dust-off. Five or six men were gathered around him, clearly hanging on his every word. They all turned to check her out. Some were completely taken aback at the sight of her, their eyes going wide in surprise. One whom she recognized from Hill 178 nodded and waved. Snider beckoned her over as Nurse Halligan said good-bye and wished her well.

  "This is her, boys. The reporter I told y'all about. She's from the future!" Then without warning, his excitement and gladness to see her turned to uncomfortable solemnity. "Miss Duffy, I didn't get to thank you for what you did this morning. Some of the boys told me you shot them Japs was fixing to stick me after I got hit. Said you drilled 'em like fucking paper targets on the range, if you'll pardon my language. They also said you got the Jap who killed poor Smitty."

  They all peered at her fighting knife then. Some staring openly, some just flicking a nervous glance at it.

  "And Miss Duffy, I'm sorry if I was out of line with you, you know… when things was turning to shit up there."

  Julia raised a bandaged hand and demurred. "It was a busy day at the office, Sarge. I've had worse. But how are you doing? I see they got you a gel sleeve on the chopper. That's good. You'll probably keep the leg."

  Snider perked up at the news. "Better than that, Miss Duffy. It's a fuckin' million-dollar wound. I'm going home. Won't be dancing too many foxtrots from now on, but who really gives a fuck, eh?"

  Julia pulled up an empty ammo crate and insinuated herself into the circle of wounded men. She slipped off her backpack and leaned the MP-5 up against the wall. Snider gave her a quick introduction to all of them, bar one, whose name he didn't know. The man introduced himself as Corporal Robert Payne, a Canadian artilleryman who had been standing near a howitzer when a shell exploded in the tube.

  "You know, Sergeant," said Duffy, "You might just dance the foxtrot again after all. It'll take a while, but knee reconstruction wasn't a big deal up in my day. And most of the senior Task Force medical staff have been pulled off active duty and put into teaching hospitals. Of course, I gotta tell you, the fuckin' foxtrot is never coming back."

  Duffy waited until the men's laughter and ribbing died down before speaking again.

  "Sarge, do you think you could see your way clear to an interview? There's already a lot of talk about what you did this morning. You want my opinion, they're going to turn you into a hero and send you out on the road back home, selling war bonds with John Wayne and Hedy Lamarr."

  Sergeant Snider was openly surprised to hear that. "Hedy Lamarr, you say. That's a classy dame. You think she'd want to hang out with the likes of me?"

  "Buddy, when I'm finished, you'll be beating her off with a stick. Matter of fact, you'll be able to walk into a room full of Hollywood starlets and know there won't be a dry seat in the house."

  Snider's friends all broke out into catcalls and cheers, and Julia made certain to grab a few lines from each of them about what they thought of his efforts on the hill.

  When she was finished she checked to make sure that the lattice memory had stored the interview, and she copied it to a spare stick, just in case.

  "There's one other thing you could do for me, Sarge, which I'd really appreciate."

  Snider pulled himself a little higher in the fold-up canvas chair, wincing as he did so. "You name it, Miss Duffy. I figure there's no way I can repay you for drilling those guys."

  "Well, in fact, there is, Sergeant. There's some guys from Movietone who are going to be looking for you later. Could you possibly tell 'em to fuck off?"

  Snider winked theatrically. "Consider them fucked, ma'am."

  The University of Queensland sat within a great bow of the Brisbane River about seven miles from the city center. There wasn't much to it, thought Robertson, just hundreds of acres of open fields. The area had previously been given over to the cultivation of sugar, arrowroot, cotton, maize, and pineapples. Only one building had been completed before the outbreak of war, a grand colonnaded sandstone structure with two wings, divided by a massive clock tower that also housed an imposing atrium. Before any students or teachers had had the opportunity to move in, the Commonwealth Government had requisitioned it for the advanced headquarters of all Allied Land Forces in the Southwest Pacific.

  In August of 1942, it had changed hands again, becoming the theater HQ of the Multinational Force ground combat elements, which was to say, the U.S. Marine Corps' Eighty-second MEU, and the Second Cavalry Regiment of the Australian Army.

  The Abrams tanks and LAVs, Bushpi
gs and attack helicopters assigned to those two forces did not spend much time at the HQ, having been thrown into crucial blocking positions to secure General Douglas MacArthur's much-vaunted Brisbane Line. The line was less a natural stronghold than a strategic concession that he didn't have the forces he needed to hold ground any farther north. It conceded about two thousand kilometers of coastline to the Japanese. To be sure, there were significant Allied forces intact and operating to the north out of Cairns and Townsville, but they were cut off from resupply and reinforcement. They were surrounded, but the Japanese in turn hadn't managed to land enough men and materiel to snuff them out. So the forces there were effectively under siege.

  The press made great play on "the new Tobruk," and "the new Bastogne," even though the latter hadn't happened yet. But that was just propaganda-what Colonel Jones called "spin." Small teams of Special Forces were operating up and down the coast, disrupting the Japanese rear areas with great effect, and the reports they sent back of atrocities against the civilian population were enough to reduce the prime minister to tears in his private moments.

  The PM was staring at a map in the briefing room-a lecture theater that had yet to hold its first class. Paul Robertson, his principal private secretary, wondered what the other men and women in the room saw in that map. MacArthur seemed fixated on his great defensive line, the arc of Allied Forces blocking the Japanese drive south. Jones and the senior 2 Cav officer, Brigadier Barnes and his SAS colleague, Major Horan, undoubtedly saw hundreds of miles of exposed Japanese flank, just begging to be ripped open. He knew that General Blamey, the contemporary Australian land force commander saw twenty thousand miles of largely indefensible coastline. New Zealand's senior representative General Freyburg probably saw the distance that remained between the leading edge of Japanese expansion and his homeland across the Tasman Sea.

  As for the others, about a dozen staff officers, two of them women from the Multinational Force, the former banker had no idea.

  "We are attriting the enemy into defeat," MacArthur insisted, repeatedly flicking the screen that one of Brigadier Barnes's young ladies had set up. Robertson wondered where he'd picked up that terrible word-attriting. "He's bleeding out, I tell you, gentlemen. He cannot sustain these losses and he cannot be reinforced. We don't want to risk upsetting this excellent arrangement by letting Colonel Jones and Brigadier Barnes go gallivanting across the countryside. Their remote-sensor coverage and fire support are in large part responsible for denying Homma the city. Every time he moves, we hit him. Soon there will be nothing left to hit."

  Barnes remained silent and unmoving, but Jones bowed his head and rubbed wearily at his eyes. "General," he rumbled in a deep bass voice. "We are not going to remove all of the surveillance assets from the line, nor the Crusader guns. They will remain in place and be staffed by our specialists to make sure you retain full coverage. But we can roll up the Japanese in a fraction of the time if we get our armor on the move, and around into their rear."

  MacArthur's thinly compressed lips warned of an explosive retort, but Prime Minister Curtin calmed him down with a gesture. "General, you've had my full support at every point in this campaign, but I must tell you I am not willing to allow these animals an extra day's grace. While we sit here jawboning, they are torturing and raping and murdering with impunity, up and down the coast."

  MacArthur was becoming visibly angry, but he maintained a better working relationship with Curtin than he had with anyone in the Roosevelt administration. "Prime Minister, I can understand that," he said in a placatory tone. "But it won't be that much longer. We can-"

  "If I might, Mr. Curtin."

  Everyone turned to face Brigadier Michael Barnes. High spots of color flared on MacArthur's cheeks at being interrupted so abruptly, but the Australian continued in his flat nasal accent.

  "This morning we received an encrypted burst from a long-range SAS patrol around Bundaberg. You need to see this."

  Barnes thumbed a control wand, and the theater map disappeared, replaced by a movie, quite obviously shot in stealth. The cameraman-or woman, Robertson supposed-was lying in scrub, on a raised position overlooking what appeared to be a schoolyard. A number of civilians, maybe three dozen of them, were being bruted into a rough circle by a platoon of Japanese soldiers.

  Major Horan provided a commentary. "This vision was taken by a four-man patrol. The Japanese have established a major garrison and staging post at Bundaberg, which had a prewar population of approximately thirteen thousand people."

  As the officer spoke, seemingly without emotion, two soldiers in the movie clubbed an old man to death in front of the other prisoners. Robertson felt ill just watching it. The PM's face twisted with revulsion. Most of the time travelers, he noted, did not react with anything like the same intensity, although Brigadier Barnes's jaw muscles were moving slowly, as though he was grinding his teeth.

  "The civilian population have been separated from the small contingent of Allied personnel who were based in the town, all of whom, as best we can tell, have been executed. The civilians are being held in a large open area on the banks of the Burnett River. During the day they are employed building earthwork defenses. There is very little food or water, and casualties are estimated at thirty percent to date."

  "Good God," breathed the prime minister. "Are they giving any succor to the women and children, Major?"

  "None whatsoever," replied Horan. Brigadier Barnes handed him the video control, and the officer brought up a new window within the main display. Hundreds of children, some of them little more than toddlers, were shown working in a large excavation. The focus zoomed in on two small boys scraping away at the dirt with toy shovels. Their arms were engulfed in spasms. When one stopped digging, the other appeared to encourage him, but to no avail. The picture began to shake a little, but steadied itself again. The lower half of a Japanese soldier appeared and kicked the child who had stopped working in the head. Audible gasps filled the briefing room, followed by several groans and protests when the other boy attacked the soldier, only to be run through with a bayonet.

  Robertson heard a strangled sob somewhere nearby, but he couldn't identify the source. It may well have been Curtin. The fight seemed to have gone out of MacArthur. He was standing, his shoulders slumped, his face a picture of pure horror. Robertson recalled that the general had a son of about the same age as the boys in the video.

  Horan closed the pop-up window, returning them to the scene at the schoolyard, where Robertson was mortified to see that many of the prisoners had been killed. An untidy scattering of headless bodies lay in front of the survivors, mostly women, who were silently screaming as a boy-who couldn't have been more than ten years old-was forced to his knees in front of a Japanese officer wielding a long sword.

  Curtin's voice boomed out. "I think we've seen enough, Major Horan."

  The screen went blank, for which Robertson would be forever grateful.

  "Was there nothing your men could do, Major?"

  The PM's adviser was surprised to find that he himself had asked the question.

  "It's a four-man patrol, sir, under orders to remain undetected. They have endeavoured to collect enough identifying material so that the responsible enemy combatants may be sanctioned when the opportunity arises."

  "We're still a long way from war-crimes tribunals," said Freyburg, the New Zealander.

  Brigadier Barnes replied before Horan could speak. "Actually, sir, under ADF Standing Rules of Engagement, enemy combatants apprehended in the course of, or after the commission of, crimes against humanity are to be summarily executed without recourse to appeal."

  The statement fell into empty space, the implications tumbling over and over in everyone's minds.

  Nobody spoke for what felt a long time, until MacArthur broke the spell. "Colonel Jones, do American forces operate under the same rules?"

  The giant marine nodded his shaven head. "Something like them, General. The effect is the same. President Clinton
signed an executive order in two thousand nine. Congress passed its own legislation a year later."

  Robertson could see from the faces that the contemporary personnel and their civilian counterparts, many of whom had thought themselves well adapted to the disturbingly predatory culture of their grandchildren, were given pause to think again.

  Major Horan interrupted their thoughts. "Prime Minister, as you know, all Multinational Force elements still operate under their original rules of engagement. The guilty parties in this instance have been identified. They could be sanctioned immediately, if you wish. But it would inevitably lead to reprisals against the surviving population."

  "Inevitably," breathed Curtin in a very soft voice. He sighed heavily, coming to a decision. "I'm sorry, Mac, but I can't have this. We need to act now. Colonel Jones, Brigadier Barnes, pull whatever forces you need out of the line and shut these bastards down."

  "We're on our way," said Barnes.

  The glory of a subtropical spring day was a jarring contrast with the darkness of the footage they had witnessed in the briefing room. Jones and his Australian colleagues lingered under a stand of jacaranda trees, their foliage a riot of bright pink blossoms. Jones stood with his foot propped up in the doorway of his Humvee while the Australians leaned against their smaller Land Rover.

  "That was quite an ambush, Major Horan," the big marine growled, but not disapprovingly.

  Horan shrugged. "Strategy, policy, it's all a fucking wank. Bottom line, it's always some poor prick trying to outrun a bullet."

  "Uh-huh. Speaking of which, how're your war stocks?"

  Barnes waggled his hands in a so-so gesture. "Fuel's not a problem. We've got enough JP-Eight off the Clinton to last another two months, by which time the locals will have the blend right. At least that's what they assure me."