Both men rolled their eyes.
"Be nice if we had some more bladders to move it around in," he continued. "And some heavy lift choppers to do the moving. Ammo is getting to be a worry. We're going to have to gear down after this op. I spoke to that Robertson bloke this morning. They've got an arms plant at Lithgow retooling to produce a simple AK-Forty-seven clone, but using thirty-aught-six cartridges. Should have a pretty good underslung launcher, too. He's promising a full production run by Christmas. The prototypes are ready now, if you'd like a look."
Jones sucked air in through his teeth. "I just wish things were that simple at home. Kolhammer's banging his head against a brick wall, trying to get an assault rifle into general production."
Horan used the toe of his combat boot to dig a well in the thick carpet of jacaranda blossoms that lay at their feet. The air was almost sickeningly sweet with the scent of their decomposition. "He's equipping the guys you've got to train with one, isn't he?"
Jones nodded. "With a Forty-seven knock-off, just like you. Weapon of choice for the third world, and that's the comparative level of industrial sophistication we're dealing with, even in the U.S. I think it's going to be a long time before we see caseless ceramic again."
"Or GPS," added Barnes.
"Or VR porn." Horan grinned.
Jones grunted. "Colonial riffraff."
The dull thud of rotor blades reached them through the warm, moist air, but the sound trailed off before they were able to spot the helicopter.
"Well, gentlemen, I suggest we get our staff together ASAP and sign off the plan for this party."
Brigadier Barnes fetched a data stick out of his shirt pocket and handed it over.
"Holomaps of the route I'd suggest we take. We've got rail transport for about a hundred and twenty klicks. Robertson has already requisitioned the rolling stock. It'll save on the fuel bill."
Jones slotted the stick into his flexipad and thanked the tank officer for the maps. "Just one thing, Mick," he said. "How in hell do they fit you into a tank, anyway?You're what, six-three?"
"Six-four." Barnes smiled. "I crouch."
12
PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS
It was a cruel trick of the gods, allowing a magnificent warship like this to fall into the hands of a barbarian such as Le Roux.
Commander Hidaka was an educated, well-traveled man, and he knew at an intellectual level that the gaijin were not all hairy brutes, as such. Their technical accomplishments, for one thing, had to be acknowledged. But Le Roux actually did look like a barbarian. He did not shave regularly. He stank of some ditch weed called garlic. And the uniform he wore was stained!
Hidaka wondered how he retained the confidence of his men. But of course, these weren't "his men" in any formal sense. They were mutineers, effectively. Little better than pirates. But for now, they held the key to Admiral Yamamoto's grand design.
"I think the Clinton, she is leaving now," said Le Roux in his heavy accented English.
"Why do you think that?" asked Hidaka, barely able to conceal his scorn.
The Frenchman tilted his head to one side and pushed out a fat lower lip as he crossed his arms over an ample belly and examined the giant screen in front of them. "Well, this is not my specialty, you understand. The men who ran this station, they would not cooperate. But the ship's Combat Intelligence, she tells us that a great deal of radar and energy waves they are passing over us right now."
Hidaka's heart gave a sudden lurch. "We are being scanned!"
"Yes, well, no. She is scanning for a general threat, not to locate a specific target. So she does not know we are here. The ship you tell me they lost at Midway-the Leyte Gulf-she was their Nemesis cruiser, a protector. Her sensors were more capable, much more capable. But even so, the Dessaix, she is a stealth ship, too. The Americans do not have-how do you say? — a monopoly.
"So no, the Clinton will not see us."
Hidaka regarded the hairy lout with an expression of open disbelief. "And the Siranui?" he asked.
"Oui. She is there, too." He pointed at a window in which a colorful set of lines pulsed and undulated. "These are her sensors. They are not operating at full power. They have not, for as long as we have been observing them, and we must assume they were damaged at the Emergence."
The Japanese commander considered that for a moment. His orders were specific. The Clinton was not his target. But he could not help asking. "So we could strike at her?"
Le Roux snorted in amusement, colored by a contempt that he didn't bother to conceal. "Oh, well, yes, we could. But there would be no promise of success. The missiles would be detected, and targeted for countermeasures. The launch would be detected. We would be detected. And so on… you understand."
Hidaka didn't bother replying. He would no more disobey Yamamoto's precise instructions than he would piss in the goldfish pond at the Imperial Palace. His warrior spirit was simply piqued by the idea that such an enemy was being allowed to slip away. That, too, however, was an integral part of the grand admiral's plan.
Even so, he found it difficult to contain his frustration. Not with Yamamoto's strategy, but with the unrealized potential of this ship, the Robert Dessaix. From the first moment he had seen her, deep in the wastes of the Great Southern Ocean, he recognized her as a vastly more powerful weapon than the Sutanto or the Nuku. She was larger, for a start, at least three times their size. But more important, she was obviously a generation or more advanced. He had come to understand that the most capable ships from the future did not necessarily proclaim their strength in massed tiers of gun mounts. Indeed, the sleeker the lines, the less there was for the eye to linger over, the deadlier she was likely to be.
The decks of the Robert Dessaix were almost bare. From the outside, the raked-back silhouette of her "teardrop" bridge, in which they now stood, barely rose to the height of a man. It had thrown Hidaka at first, until he realized that the floor must have been sunk below the line of the deck outside.
Everything about her suggested stealth and danger.
What a pity she hardly had a crew to sail her.
Le Roux was an enthusiastic buffoon, but it was more than apparent that he lacked the technical skills to pilot such a sophisticated vessel. It wasn't surprising, really, since his original duties had been confined to the servicing of the ship's two helicopters, neither of which was on board now.
The pilots, too, had "refused to cooperate."
Commander Hidaka let his eyes drift away from the panel that was displaying the radar pulses originating aboard the American and turncoat Nipponese ships. The Pacific was calm, and quite beautiful beneath an unseasonably warm autumn sun. The boy he had once been wished for nothing more than to take this ship under his control, and to charge at the Americans under full power, with every rocket on board blasting up out of their silos and roaring away on columns of white fire.
But the adult he was today knew they'd be lucky to successfully complete their much more limited mission.
There were two other French sailors on the bridge. One of them-a junior officer, and little more than a boy himself-said something to Le Roux. Hidaka waited for the translation. The two men took their time about it, babbling on in their incomprehensible native tongue. The boy, an ensign named Danton, actually outranked Le Roux, who was merely a premier maitre, a warrant officer, but the older man enjoyed a clear advantage over his comrade. The boy seemed almost terrified of him.
They were an unconvincing pair of allies-if allies indeed they were. Hidaka had trouble understanding their motivations. To his great surprise, he found himself feeling much more at ease with the thirteen Indonesian crew members who had come aboard with him at the rendezvous. It wasn't that he was a believer in Pan-Asian solidarity. In his opinion, the Indonesians were monkey men. But he had grown accustomed to them in the months since the Emergence, and when he wasn't working with the handful of French or the Kriegsmarine officers who were on board, he actually preferred the company of the
apes.
Le Roux finally deigned to speak to him. "Enseigne Danton believes an airborne radar plane is aloft, and probing north of the Clinton's battle group," the Frenchman said. "It is best that we should retire, now we have learned what we needed to."
This time Hidaka did not question. They had achieved the first relatively simple task allotted them. So he nodded his consent.
Le Roux spoke to the third Frenchman, a leading seaman, who at least had an appearance that fit his role as helmsman. A tall, shaven-headed brute whose arms were covered in tattoos that reminded Hidaka of the markings of South Sea islanders, he responded to Le Roux's gruff burst of instruction with a Gallic roll of the shoulders. Sitting at a "workstation" rather than standing at a wheel, the giant sailor consulted with the navigator, a German commander, and began to type out instructions with the casual air of somebody doing exactly what he'd been trained for.
It was a pleasant change.
It was the second time the Combined Fleet had set out like this, and the first time since the Emergence that he had dared concentrate his forces in this way. They were still vulnerable, but the noble sacrifices of Homma and Nagumo in the South had done much to draw the attention of their new foe.
Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto stood proud and ramrod straight on the bridge of his flagship the Yamato as it plowed into a heavy southeasterly swell. But he had lost all of the intuitive confidence that had characterized his opening moves in this game. Midway had all but destroyed his sense of certainty.
Nearly sixty ships covered the gray, wind-scored seas, stretching out to the horizon. The sight would once have filled him with pride and an unshakeable belief in destiny. Now, however, he could not help worrying that a British drone might be watching him from above. Or that damnable Willet woman from below. A flight of American rockets might be screaming toward his fleet at an inconceivable velocity.
A small grunt escaped from deep within his chest.
It was infuriating, but it was war, and he had started this war knowing that his enemies possessed much greater resources than he. Nothing had changed, in that sense.
What had changed was that he now enjoyed the advantage of surprise, and technological superiority of a sort. His heart beat rapidly, as it had in the few hours since Hidaka's encrypted message had been received.
The Clinton had sailed with the remnants of her battle group, and a window had opened through which they might steal a victory. Or the makings of a victory.
Yamamoto's eyes traversed the scene around his great battleship. He had two carriers with him, three other battleships, half a dozen cruisers, two-dozen destroyers, and a host of tenders, oilers, and transports. It still felt like the greatest fleet that ever put to sea, and if it weren't for Kolhammer's untimely arrival, that would have been true.
True, his losses had been heavy at Hashirajima, thanks to the Havoc's missile swarm, but they were still light compared with the disaster that befell Spruance at Midway. That had given Yamamoto just enough breathing space to try a radically different line of attack.
And then the divine gift of the Dessaix had arrived.
In all the world, there were still only a handful of people who knew of its fate, and he was the only one within the Combined Fleet. The emperor and Prime Minister Tojo knew, naturally. Hitler, Himmler, and their closest surviving cohorts were aware of its existence and its mission. None of the Soviets had been informed.
There were forty-eight crewmembers of the German submarine U-96 who had learned of the Dessaix's inexplicable arrival, weeks after the Emergence at Midway, and sixty miles south of the Spanish Canary Islands. They had acquired the information by virtue of nearly running into her, shortly after she had materialized.
Yamamoto wondered what had become of those men. The Germans had assured him that there would be no chance of the secret leaking out. Thus, he presumed they were all dead.
Both the Reich and the Soviet Union had become vast charnel houses since their rulers had gained the deadly power of foresight. It was confirmation-as if any were needed-that power was wielded by ill-bred savages, almost everywhere but on the Home Islands. And it meant that, even if he was able to avoid defeat in this particular war against the Anglophone democracies, an era of ceaseless conflict stretched away in front of them all.
It was enough to make him question the wisdom of the course on which he was now embarked.
He wondered about his enemy. The archives-the Web files-that had been retrieved from the Sutanto, and now from the Dessaix, told of a prosperous Japan, living in peace after having been conquered by MacArthur and Nimitz. Nothing he had learned about the Siranui and her curious crew gave him cause to think of them as anything other than men of giri.
The Nazis, on the other hand…
They gave barbarians a bad name. And the Soviets were even worse. There could be no doubt that they would turn on each other again at the first opportunity. They were both preparing for just such an eventuality, even as they pretended to fashion a new and congenial relationship. Could there be any reason to imagine that they would hesitate to wage war on the Japanese Empire, as well? He knew the Nazis regarded all Asians as barely human.
"Hmmph!"
"Admiral, is everything all right?"
Yamamoto was annoyed that a lack of control had betrayed his thoughts. "Captain," he grunted, "what on earth could be wrong?"
The Yamato's skipper seemed confused by the question. "Why, nothing, Admiral. We sail to victory, of course."
"Of course," Yamamoto echoed, nodding abruptly.
Le Roux thought himself handy in the galley, but he still missed the ship's head chef. Petty Officer Dupleix had grown up in a family bistro outside Auxerre and was, in Le Roux's opinion, the best pastry chef in the entire French Navy. He had begged the Germans to spare the man's life, but to no avail, so they had been reduced to eating frozen croissants and brioche ever since.
Still Dupleix had been an idiot, like most of the crew. The Dessaix hadn't been like his posting on the frigate Masson. There he'd been amongst like-minded men. The Masson's captain had had a brother-in-law who was a deputy minister in the new government, and the captain had shared his sibling's enthusiasm for the policies of the National Front.
That was only natural, after the Paris intifada and the atrocity of Marseilles. How anyone could think otherwise-well, it was beyond Le Roux's understanding.
Yet he had been on board the Dessaix for only two weeks when the ship's executive officer, Lieutenant Underzo, had frog-marched him into the capitaine's quarters to receive a terrible dressing down. Capitaine Goscinny did not think it appropriate for a senior member of his crew to be actively politicking belowdecks, whether it was in behalf of the government or against. The old fool had insisted that Le Roux cease all political activity forthwith, or face charges when they returned from their Indonesian deployment to the Pacific Fleet base in Noumea.
It was all he could do not to laugh in the man's face.
This was exactly the sort of thinking that had so very nearly led France into ruin under the socialists. Old farts like Goscinny had given the country over to illiterate migrants and jihadi scum, and it was only when the streets were finally running with blood that they admitted they might have been wrong.
Still, when Goscinny had upbraided him, Le Roux had bolted a mask onto his face, saluted, and barked "Yessir!" But in his mind he was already composing the letter to his old capitaine, asking him to forward a complaint to the navy's political investigators and outlining Goscinny's antipatriotic tendencies. Perhaps, if the capitaine could speak with his brother-in-law, the deputy minister, things might be resolved even more quickly.
The microwave pinged now, bringing him back to the present, and he removed a steaming hot Sara Lee brioche-God help him. As he carefully tore open the pastry and watched the chocolate sauce spill out, he had to smile at the memory of the last time he had seen Goscinny, naked and beaten to a purple pulp in the Gestapo cells at Lyon.
True t
o form, the dumb bastard had failed to see what a gift the Emergence had been. It had put them in a place where they could ensure that Frenchmen would determine the future of France, not a cabal of mad mullahs and bearded nuts. And perhaps just as important, it meant that with bold action they could also check the rise of America, the nation most to blame for the ills of the world.
After all, who had created bin Laden, the first of so many Islamist heroes? And whose appetite for oil had funded the Saudis, who in turn funded the madrassas of so many of the Wahhabi lunatics who had overrun the slums of Paris? It was the United States, Le Roux mused, who had turned the Middle East into a sinkhole of violence and Islamist revolt thanks to its support of Israel, its occupation of Iraq, its bombing of Iran, and its wars against Syria and Yemen.
Le Roux ate the brioche slowly, enjoying it in spite of himself, and enjoying also the prospect that lay before him. The prospect of rewriting history.
It mattered little that most of the men on board the Dessaix had gone into the cells at Lyon rather than serve the Republic by seizing a chance to wipe out eighty years of mistakes and perfidy. Some of them were those traitorous bastards who'd only pretended to agree with him. But they'd got theirs, in the end.
Yes, it was his ship now. The Boche needed him.
He washed down his snack with a mouthful of black coffee and stared in distaste at the two Indonesians eating some foul-smelling rice dish across the room from him. They had no language in common, but even if they did, he would not have spoken to them. He knew from the wailing that filled the ship five times a day that they were Islamists. Not jihadi, to be sure-he would never have allowed them on the ship, no matter what the Germans said.
He dreamed of a day when he could go about his business as a Frenchman and not be assailed by some illiterate ditchdigger droning on about the Koran. The sooner they trained some of his countrymen to operate this ship, the better.
"Warrant Officer, your colleague, Danton, tells us we have moved beyond the range of the enemy's sensors, and that we may soon use our own arrays. Do you agree?"
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