Designated targets aot-2

by John Bigmingham

  It was too much to bear.

  Without thinking he scrambled to his feet and over the side that seemed closest to shore. Another wave struck as he attempted to get free, threatening to tip everything over on top of him. A pitiable sound crawled up out of Nanten, a mewling animalistic protest against the fates. And then he was thrown free. He sailed through the air, hit the water, and tumbled over and over without a hint of control. Salt water rushed in through his nose and down his throat, and he began to cough and choke, which caused him to suck in even more water. His arms and legs, no longer shaking, scrambled for purchase, but he could not touch bottom. In the swirling chaos, he wasn't even sure which way was up and which was down.

  His feet struck out on their own accord, desperate to find something solid from which they might propel him to safety. He was vaguely aware that the water was turning pink, and then red. His head broke surface just long enough for him to grab one precious mouthful of air, and then he was under again, tossed about like flotsam.

  His left toe touched something.

  And then he felt sand underfoot. He pushed off and broke free of the surf again. Sucked in clean air. Once… twice. A wave slammed him, but this time when he went under, gritty sand scraped at his face. His hands and knees touched bottom.

  He beetled forward, riding in on a small pink wave of mutilation and blood froth.

  But he was safe. He had made land.

  Nanten crawled up from the water's edge. The sea rushed up the incline of the beach, and flowed back again, sucking the sand out from beneath his hands. Despite the contamination of the water, from the contents of the barge, he'd never felt cleaner. The awful gummy sensation of being bathed in human blood was gone. The sun was warm on his neck. The sand hot beneath his hands.

  "Going somewhere, Tojo?"

  But Corporal Yutaka Nanten was beyond the point where his heart could possibly leap in fright. It had been racing so fast, for so long, that the meaningless words actually seemed to slow his pulse.

  Then he looked up.

  Three gaijin stood in front of him. Two men and one woman. The woman was pointing something at him that could only be a gun from the future. She was going to disintegrate him, turn him into dust that would blow away on the breeze.

  "I said, going somewhere?"

  Nanten turned his head slightly toward the larger of the men, the one who had spoken. He looked like a civilian, dressed in a business suit, which struck the corporal as funny, down here on the sand, with the remains of his platoon bobbing around him on the tide.

  The businessman was also carrying a gun, but it was a standard contemporary weapon. A shotgun of some sort. The muzzle stared back at him, a circle of darkness. Eternity.

  Suddenly it flashed white…

  Rosanna Natoli jumped as the shotgun went off. She hadn't expected Cherry to actually kill the guy. She hadn't really expected anybody to crawl out of the barge when they'd seen it wash up on the beach. It'd been shot to pieces long before they got to it.

  Nobody said anything, though. A day or two back, Curtis might have protested, but they were all well past that sort of bullshit now. None of them were going to risk leaving a wounded survivor in the barge who might later bring them undone.

  She filmed Cherry as he bent forward and unhitched four grenades from the dead man's webbing. The detective passed one to Curtis, kept one in his hand, and pocketed the other two.

  "On my count," he said.

  The young officer nodded.

  "One… two… three…"

  They pulled the pins-actually they looked like pieces of string to Rosanna-and lobbed the grenades, one after the other, into the barge. The muffled crump of detonation came a few seconds later, as they hurried back up the sand to the walking track that passed through the dunes. They'd given up on cars after the last one had been strafed by a Zero.

  "You getting a signal?" Curtis asked as they pushed back into the thick growth from which they'd emerged to check on the barge.

  "Yep," she said. "Still there."

  They were all curiously comforted by the continued presence of the Big Eye drones that were circling over the island. They were so high up, it'd be impossible to spot them-or to shoot them down-and they weren't armed, as far as she knew. So there was nothing the drones could do to help, really. But just the knowledge that they were there, that the Multination Force could still keep tabs on them-that was enough to make them feel as if they weren't completely alone. And it gave them faint hope that they might be rescued.

  "How're your batteries?" asked Cherry.

  "Good," she said. "These babies were approved by the Energizer Bunny himself. They'll be sweet for another couple of days."

  The looks on their faces told her that neither man knew what the hell she was talking about.

  Another ten minutes of walking through the scrub brought them to the tree-shaded hollow where they'd made their camp. Though it was pretty generous to call it a camp. Three folding cots under a canvas tarp. A solar sheet to recharge Rosanna's battery packs. Big cans of fresh water. Five days' worth of canned food looted on Cherry's say-so from an abandoned shop in town.

  "There's a lot of other barges coming ashore," said Natoli. "You think we should get out of here?"

  Cherry dropped onto a foldaway cot, grunting with exhaustion. "We'll be all right, sister. They're beaching around the point. The way the land lies, they'll move inland away from us, not toward us. I say we lay up until dark, and then see if we can move back over to the Koolaus. Get you a better vantage point to film what's happening at Pearl."

  "The Japs are going to be all over the roads by now," said Curtis. "How do you plan on getting past them?"

  Cherry rubbed at the back of his neck as he rooted through the pile of tins for something to eat. "People I used to know, Lieutenant. They did most of their business out of plain sight."

  They were all tired, so they left it at that, and sat around in silence. Cherry opened a can of baked beans and ate them cold, sitting on the edge of his cot. Curtis washed down a Hershey bar with a cup of water.

  Rosanna linked the Sonycam to her slate and transferred her files for editing. She had about an hour and twenty minutes to work on, including the footage she'd taken of the barge. She hadn't been able to bring herself to follow Kolhammer's instructions to destroy all her twenty-first tech. Most of it, she'd hidden in a spot Cherry had shown her, a buried ammo locker just off the road in the foothills of the Koolaus. There'd been two pistols in there. "Throw downs," he called them. And about $2,300 in cash. She didn't ask him about the stash.

  Curtis had, though.

  "That's my retirement fund and insurance policy, Lieutenant," was all the cop would say.

  Rosanna figured she'd increased the value of his glory box about a thousand times over, just by dropping her flexipad and powered sunglasses in there. She figured she could put a bullet into the slate and the Sonycam, if they came close to being captured.

  For now, though, she used the touch screen to package a burst for Julia back in New York. The live link was gone. A message had come in on Fleetnet ordering all the surviving embeds and 21C personnel to switch to compressed burst, to reduce the possibility that the transmissions might be traced.

  That had been a heavy blow. Julia had a lot more experience with this sort of shit, and as long as they'd been able to talk to her, she'd been a serious source of reassurance. Especially when the first Japanese ships had appeared on the horizon. Even Cherry had listened to everything she told them to do.

  Now they couldn't communicate in real time, and it felt as though darkness had drawn itself that much closer around them.

  Cherry was sleeping quietly. Rosanna had insisted he spray himself with Snore-eze.

  Curtis came over and sat next to her on the cot. "Do you mind?" he asked.

  "Nah. It's cool."

  Rosanna was only half listening to him, though. She might have been clueless in a firefight, but she could use an editing program in her sleep
. With the slate balanced on her lap, she sent her fingers dancing over the screen, cutting, splicing, and juxtaposing images while she and Curtis talked.

  "Do you think we're going to get out of this?" he asked.

  Rosanna chopped twelve seconds from a long shot of Japanese dive-bombers working over the wreckage of Ford Island. Even pulled in as tight as she could, they weren't individually identifiable. Damn.

  "I doubt it," she said.

  "You don't think we can hide out up here, until help arrives?"

  She tidied up a jumpy bit of footage of half a dozen landing barges beaching themselves on the island's eastern shore. They were the main body of the force from which the wrecked barge had been detached.

  "Wally, maybe we could, you know, in the movies. But this is real life, buddy. Nothing good happens in real life. Not in wartime, anyway. Like this," she said, bringing up a vid of Cherry killing the Japanese soldier on the beach.

  Then Curtis watched as he and the detective used the grenades to make sure nobody else crawled out of the barge.

  "There's nothing good here, Wally. We're killing them. They're killing us. It's old news."

  "You can't really believe that," he said, sounding almost offended. "You know what these guys are like. The Japs and the Nazis, they're in your history books. Beating them is the most important thing in world."

  A smile softened her face. "I'm sorry. You're right. It is, but-"

  Rosanna was never able to figure out whether she heard the shot or saw the impact of the bullet first.

  Curtis was already flying backwards, tumbling over, blood spraying back in her face, when she became aware that she couldn't hear herself screaming for the sound of rifles discharging all around them.

  Julia had often said that time became elastic under fire. A few seconds might stretch themselves out over what felt like half a day, or whole hours might disappear in a glimmer of compressed, accelerated activity. For Rosanna, it happened both ways.

  Curtis airborne, slowly turning and twisting like an Olympic diver, his body jolting as more bullets struck home, bright red pearls of blood sailing away. And then Cherry, twice as big as she remembered him, suddenly on top of her, knocking her down, filling the whole world, a riot gun in his hands, the muzzle barking and shooting flames and sparks and smoke.

  Japanese soldiers everywhere, some leaping from the brush in a twinkling, others charging at her in such drawn out, slow-mo that if they kept running and running for a thousand years, she doubted they would cross the little clearing to reach her.

  A bloodied steel spike-a bayonet-emerged through Cherry's shoulder. He roared and spun, and a Japanese soldier with a comically surprised expression was taken off balance by the momentum. She saw a huge pistol in Cherry's hand. It fired twice, and Rosanna was somehow aware of a man behind her being killed, his head taken off by the twin blasts. A sickening wet, crunching sound. Three more bayonets driven into Cherry's body. Fists and boots hammering at him as he went down. A single pistol shot. A soldier falling away, clutching at his shattered jaw as it hung from his face by tendrils and skin.

  Something slammed into her head, and she fell into darkness.

  OSWEGO, NEW YORK

  Julia couldn't believe she'd been suckered into this. It wasn't like she had nothing else to do.

  Car bombs and parcel bombs were still going off all over the country. The Japanese were on Oahu. She was overdue to download Rosanna's latest package. And the Times had finally agreed to give her a team to run a three-part investigation of Hoover's FBI.

  But here she was, stuck on a platform in a town hall that had rats in the rafters, in some pissant burg in upstate New York, selling fucking war bonds. At least the turnout was healthy. The hall probably held about 150 people, but at least three times that had spilled out into the night, wrapped up in mufflers and heavy coats, listening to this circus over an antique PA system that lost about half of everything that was said. The whine of the feedback was giving her a headache.

  She felt like gagging on the cigarette smoke, and couldn't believe that people would allow their children to breathe in the stuff. But dozens of kids were dotted throughout the audience, many of them dressed for bed in slippers, winter pajamas, and long woolen robes.

  She'd originally agreed to do the gig because Ronald Reagan was supposed to be on stage, along with the monkey from Bedtime for Bonzo. Well, actually, it wasn't the real monkey, which probably hadn't been born yet. Bedtime was originally filmed in 1951. Instead, it had been telerecorded onto celluloid by Universal Studios, and it was one of the most popular movies of the year.

  Now Reagan couldn't get in from the West Coast, what with all the terrorist bombings, so Edward Gargan, who played Policeman Bill in Bedtime, had been sent in his place.

  But there was another reason Julia had been dragooned into this animal act, and he was sitting next to her on the hard wooden bench: Sergeant Snider, of the USMC. He was in line for a Medal of Honor, or at least a Silver Star, for his bravery on the Brisbane Line.

  Julia didn't hold it against him, though. Snider was all right, and she couldn't begrudge him living off the publicity tit. He'd done more than his fair share, and he was never going to walk freely again, thanks to his wounds. It was just that she had better things to be doing than entertaining a room full of hicks in order to get them to fork over-what, ten or twenty bucks each for the war effort?

  There was no getting out of it, though. Her chief of staff, Blundell, said that if she was going to be a "celebrity reporter," there were certain obligations that came with the job. She wasn't sure whether he was insulting her with that "celebrity" stuff. She knew there were plenty on the paper who resented it. Harold Denny, one of the other war correspondents, had told her to her face that she was "all surface, even at the core."

  She'd punched him out.

  Maybe that was why she'd been sent upstate. As punishment.

  Her flexipad was set to silent mode, and it began to vibrate on her hip. She considered faking an emergency to take the call and escape, but before she could do that, Policeman Bill had finished up, and she was being called to the podium to tell her stories about how Sergeant Snider had saved the world.

  Two hours later, the hall was emptying of people. She'd been signing autographs and answering questions and was actually starting to dig the whole thing. She took a particular delight in telling a couple of teenaged girls to forget about boys and to concentrate on their studies, and to see if they could get a copy of de Beauvoir's The Second Sex or Greer's The Female Eunuch from one of the mail-order companies that were springing up in the Zone.

  Later on, she could remember Snider asking her if she wanted to get a cup of joe before she drove back to Manhattan, but she couldn't recall powering up the Ericsson and finding the message from Rosanna.

  Except it wasn't from Rosanna. It was from a well-spoken Japanese Navy officer who identified himself in perfect English as Commander Jisaku Hidaka, interim military governor of Hawaii.

  He was standing in a bare room.

  Rosanna was seated in front of him, sobbing.

  "Miss Duffy," he said. "You will relay this message to your leaders. Hawaii is under the control of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Your countrymen are being well treated. If there is any attempt to retake the island, however, every man and woman and child will be executed. This is not an empty threat."

  And with that he drew his pistol and shot her friend in the head.

  For the first time in her life, Julia Duffy fainted.

  34

  ALRESFORD AERODROME, HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND

  They hadn't even finished transferring their kit to the jeep when the copilot broke in over tac net.

  "Excuse me, gentlemen. German air assault, gliders and Junkers, twenty-one minutes out. CI had confirmed this field as the likely DZ."

  Harry told his men to finish up as quickly as they could. He climbed up into the jeep, standing in the rear with one boot on the spare tire. This airfield wasn't a major
facility. It was a dispersal point, a place to hide precious fighters to protect them from bombing raids on the main centers like Biggin Hill. Mostly it consisted of a small control tower, a couple of Nissan huts, and a grass runway. There were no serviceable aircraft on the ground at the moment. Almost all the RAF and its Allied Air Forces were aloft.

  That was probably why the Jerries were planning to use it as a landing field. Nice location, no resistance to speak of.

  The aerodrome was set amongst farmland just over a hundred miles to the southwest of London. The nearest settlement was a village, which had grown up around a Norman-era church. There were no major military bases nearby. The full complement of the airfield came to 129 ground crew, air defense guards, and administrative staff. Some two dozen of them had gathered a short distance away to watch the helicopter land and disembark its passengers.

  Harry called over his two demolition specialists. Bolt and Akerman.

  "Andy, Piers, you've got fifteen minutes to turn that runway into a serious hazard to human life. Go!"

  The troopers snatched up a couple of backpacks and dashed away enthusiastically.

  The base commander was a one-legged Australian named Fitzsimons. He'd played test rugby in the 1930s before volunteering for the Empire Air Training Scheme. He'd taken a desk job after losing his leg, and that had turned a lot of his muscle to fat. But he still looked like a powerful man.

  "Anything I should know, Major Windsor?" Fitzsimons asked as Bolt and Akerman moved ominously toward his runway.

  "Yes," said Harry. "I'm afraid you're about to have some unwanted visitors. Jerry has decided he wants your lovely little airfield for his own. I'd put away the good silver, if I were you, Mr. Fitzsimons. German gliders and Junkers-probably with paratroops are on their way. Enough of them so that it looks like a battalion to me. They will probably have some fighters escorting them, too."