Weapons of choice aot-1

by John Birmingham

"Not like this you weren't, asshole," the noncom muttered under his breath.

  When Jones stepped one pace forward and spoke, it sounded like the engine of an Abrams turning over. Slowly. "You don't know me yet, Sergeant. So I'll let your personal disrespect pass. But you know these, don't you, boy?" He fingered the silver eagles and Marine Corps insignia on his collar. "And by God, you'll respect the uniform of the United States Marine Corps, or I'll beat that respect into you, right here in front of your men."

  Jones's eyes never left the sergeant's as he spoke. They stayed locked together for two heartbeats after he had finished. The man's jawline bunched and knotted as he struggled to contain himself, while Jones just gave him the stone face. He could see the guy's entire life in that twisting mask, all of his prejudices and petty resentments, warring against the disciplines of the corps. There were no black marines in 1942, and of all the services the corps would fight hardest against integration. But Jones's warrior spirit was so powerful, his command presence so finely honed, that it could not be resisted. In the end, the Sergeant deflated, crushed by a superior will.

  "We'll see," he said, a deep flush of embarrassment discoloring his whole head. He looked as if he'd stepped in something foul.

  Kolhammer observed the interchange in silence. He knew Jones well enough, he thought. The Eighty-second had been attached to the Clinton's battle group for two years. The colonel's reputation had preceded him, but Kolhammer was experienced enough to know that the few minutes of a man's life wherein he earned a Medal of Honor didn't necessarily tell you anything about his soul. Or even his character-the everyday manifestation of that deeper, immaterial essence. Awards for uncommon valor are, by definition, won under extreme circumstances, which might call forth behavior completely out of character for the individual concerned. The exchange with the belligerent noncom, however, confirmed what Kolhammer had always suspected.

  Nobody fucks with J. Lonesome Jones.

  Standing next to him, Captain Halabi couldn't help but be affected, as well, a wave of gooseflesh running up her arms. Curiously, the magic seemed to fade with distance. Over beside the Seahawk pilot Chris Harford, Flight Lieutenant Amanda Hayes affected a faux southern accent: "Mah word, Jasper, we seem to have stumbled into a teste fest."

  Harford flashed a small but genuine smile for the first time that day. It froze on his face when he recognized the man approaching from the carrier's island structure. Admiral Raymond Ames Spruance.

  Halabi thought he looked more like a banker than an admiral, perhaps a Rothschild or Rockefeller, with short, straight hair, graying over the ears, a rather Roman nose, and deep lines at the corner of his mouth emphasizing the funereal set of his jaw. He fairly stalked over to the commander of the Multinational Force, fixing their CO with a frigid glare.

  "You Kolhammer?"

  "I am."

  That neither man had made to salute spoke eloquently of their uncertainty. Nobody was sure of what rules applied here, of whose turf they were treading on. Spruance turned to take in the stony visage of Colonel Jones and the bewildering Karen Halabi. Jones ripped out a parade-ground-perfect salute, to which Spruance merely sketched a return, somewhat grudgingly and after a noticeable pause.

  "You people have killed thousands of my men tonight," he said. "You've probably lost us this war in the space of less than an hour."

  "And you've killed plenty of mine," Kolhammer replied equably. "Tried to kill thousands more. We're both at war, Admiral. People die. Sometimes for the worst of reasons. I'm sorry for your losses and if you'll allow us, we'll do what we can for the survivors."

  "And what about the Japs?" Spruance said in a cold, level voice. "What do you intend to do for them, since I notice you seem to be running with them?"

  The Siranui. Kolhammer knew it had been spotted. It could hardly have been missed, emerging as it did so close to the Enterprise. He wondered whether Spruance had laid eyes on her himself. Probably.

  "We have a Japanese Self-Defense Force ship operating as part of our task force, that's right. But they're of no threat to you here, or to Midway, or the United States of America."

  "Tell it to the Portland," Spruance forced out through pursed lips. "I have a destroyer over where she went down and they haven't found a single survivor. Not one! And I watched that rocket fly up off the deck of your Japanese friend myself. So please, spare me. All I want to know is, what the hell is going on here. You say you're American, but you're obviously treating with our enemies."

  "Well, if we could just sit down-"

  Spruance rode in over Kolhammer. "Absolutely not. No secret parleys tonight, my friend. You were trying to kill these men a short while ago."

  He took in the hundreds of onlookers with a sweep of the hand.

  "You can make your apologies and explanations to them."

  Kolhammer's fuse was beginning a long, slow burn. He'd known this wouldn't be easy, but he had his own casualties, and he'd be damned if they'd be treated as less valuable in some wretched body count. A line of Shakespeare occurred to him. We are enough to do our country loss. If his suspicions held true, every man and woman under his command was going to be counted as lost before too long.

  The satchel of printouts and photocopied magazine articles felt heavy and useless in his hands. He could hardly lay them out on the wet flight deck and take a couple of hundred overtly hostile onlookers through a primer on quantum mechanics and Multiverse Theory, even if he knew what the hell he was talking about.

  He turned to Jones and Halabi, his eyes asking them if there was any point in sugarcoating it. Both looked back at him, clearly relieved that they weren't the ones in the rumble seat.

  "Bad medicine is best swallowed in one gulp, Admiral," said Jones.

  "It can hardly sound more ridiculous than it did to us," Halabi added.

  Spruance clearly didn't feel he had time for double talk. "Well?"

  Kolhammer drew in his breath. He took some time to look around him. Just a second or so to convince himself it was all real: the wet wooden planking beneath his feet, the cumbersome equipment for the antique gun mounts, the unchanging sea of white male faces peering out from behind the textbook image of Raymond A. Spruance. All of this under a lowering sky in the deep of night, with the chilled air tasting of brine beneath the synthetic smells of oil and steel.

  They were a long way from the tropics.

  "My name is Admiral Phillip Kolhammer," he said directly to Spruance, but loud enough to carry to the listening crowd. "I was born in the year nineteen sixty-nine. The same year, incidentally, in which you passed away, Admiral. I command a Multinational Force comprising American and Allied units, which was tasked with forcing a passage through the Indonesian Archipelago, what you would know as the Dutch East Indies, and putting an end to the mass murder of ethnic Chinese Indonesian citizens. Until an hour ago we were readying for that deployment in January twenty twenty-one. In transiting from Pearl Harbor, American elements of the Multinational Force were also providing security for a research vessel, the Nagoya, which was undertaking sea trials of a new weapons system. I can't confirm it yet, but I suspect something has gone wrong with those trials… and that we are here as the result of some malfunction of that system."

  With that, he stopped speaking. Spruance stared at him, as he had expected, blinking only once, slowly. The color had drained from his face, leaving a waxy sheen and two points of high color on his temples.

  "Do you really expect me to believe that?" he asked very quietly.

  "No sir, I do not," Kolhammer replied. "In your position, I wouldn't either. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and all I can offer you is our presence. Here we are. Myself. The colonel. Captain Halabi. Our flight crew and helicopters. You ever seen a helicopter before, Admiral? No? I didn't think so. The ships of our task force are some twelve thousand meters to the southwest-that's about six nautical miles. As alien as the helicopters might appear to you, those ships will be even stranger. You're free to inspect any of
them. To ask any questions you might care to ask. But every minute you waste doing that, more of your men die in the water. You can see with your own two eyes, right now, that we don't belong here, this is not our place-"

  "You're damn right about that," Spruance said. "Go on."

  "I'd suggest that you come back with us. The Seahawk ride, and a few minutes aboard the Clinton, and you'll…"

  Spruance actually laughed at him, a short flat bark that left no doubt what he thought of that suggestion.

  "All right," Kolhammer persisted. "You could send someone in your place. Someone you trust, but can afford to lose, to put it bluntly."

  Spruance worked his jaw, staring past the strange interlopers at the even stranger aircraft in which they had arrived. Before he could respond, a deep voice spoke up from behind him.

  "We'll go, sir," said a Lieutenant Commander Black.

  In fact the man seemed less than happy about the idea, but beside him, a much smaller and greener-looking ensign was doing a fair impersonation of a young man who might just shatter into a thousand pieces if denied a chance to fly one of those "Hiller-Copters."

  "You sure about that, Dan?" asked Spruance.

  "Hell, the only thing I'm sure of is that we haven't seen a copper mine worth a damn anywhere around here. So I guess you can do without me, if you have to. And Ensign Curtis here, well, I don't think I'd care to leave him behind, sir. The crying would keep us up nights until the end of the war. Besides, he's the only man on this ship seems to know what those things are."

  Black indicated the two choppers with a tilt of his head.

  While Spruance was weighing their offer, Karen Halabi stepped forward.

  "If I may, Admiral?"

  Both Kolhammer and Spruance answered. "Yes?"

  Halabi smiled, trying to arrange her handsome Eurasian features as innocently as possible. "My exec has things well in hand back on the Trident. I am more than happy to remain here while these two officers cross deck to the Clinton. And I've brought some materials that might help us sort all this out."

  She offered Spruance the two books she had carried over. As he examined them like unexploded bombs, she fished a flexipad out of her jacket.

  "I also downloaded some files from Fleetnet that the admiral might care to examine. Some history vids. Victory at Sea and The World at War. And a V-three-D colorized rendering of Casablanca."

  "Excellent," said Kolhammer. He'd heard that this young woman had advanced quickly through the ranks of her service, and he was beginning to understand why. She was proving herself more adaptable than many other officers he had met over the years. That was the left-handed gift of ceaseless war, he supposed. It was a savagely effective form of natural selection.

  "What do you say, Admiral?" asked Kolhammer, turning back to Spruance. "Time is short."

  "You don't need to remind me!" his opposite number snapped. "We'll have the Japanese navy knocking on the door at Midway any minute now. And when they find out what's happened tonight, I imagine it'll be the Devil's own job keeping them from Pearl, too."

  "As I said before," Kolhammer assured him, "we understand our responsibilities, and will do whatever is necessary. But right now, we have a hell of a mess to clean up right here. Men are still dying."

  "And will your friends on the Siranui do whatever is necessary to defend American soil from their ancestors?" Spruance asked frostily.

  Well, that was progress of a sort, thought Kolhammer, who chose to ignore the bitterly sarcastic tone. He knew now that Spruance must have caught a close-up view of the Japanese stealth cruiser to know her name.

  "The Siranui," he replied in as level a fashion as he could, "suffered a direct hit on her bridge. The captain and many of his senior officers were killed there, while they lay unconscious, suffering from the effects of the trip here. The cruiser is now under the command of Sub-Lieutenant Maseo Miyazaki, and he has slaved her combat functions to the… computing machine that helps run the Clinton. That is to say, the Siranui is under American control. They can't warm up a coffeepot without my say-so. I didn't ask them to do that. Lieutenant Miyazaki suggested it, and I agreed, in the interests of reducing tensions between our two forces."

  Spruance's thin, haunted face grew even darker while Kolhammer delivered his speech. When he had finished, the hero of Midway stared at him intently. Indeed, Kolhammer had the distinctly unpleasant feeling that Spruance was staring into him, decoding him, reading his deepest, pass-protected files and weighing up whether to hold or fold. His jawline flexed as he glowered fixedly and angrily at the invaders who freely admitted to having brought so much ruin with them.

  And then, as if a switch had been thrown, much of the tension ran out of his posture. His whole frame, which had been so taut the whole time, sagged fractionally.

  "Right," he grunted. "Commander Black, you and the ensign will return to the… uh, Hillary Clinton. Report back with all dispatch if you think we can gain anything from the assistance offered by these people. But before you go, Commander, a word in private if you please?"

  Black and Spruance walked away from Kolhammer's group until they were far enough removed that they could no longer be heard. Spruance turned his back on the two men and their odd female companion. He and Black were both facing out over the bow of the Enterprise, which methodically rose and sank on the long ocean swell. It was cold, and they were dressed lightly. They shivered as hundreds of pairs of eyes bored into their backs.

  "You'll need a signal. In case you're coerced," Spruance said. "Something simple that they won't notice."

  "Well, my sainted mother raised me never to cuss at an admiral, sir. Not even a lousy rear admiral from the Cruiser Division. I could slip in a fucking profanity, begging your pardon, sir. That's not like me at all. Then you'd know we were in trouble."

  "Fine," Spruance said, smiling weakly despite himself. "That youngster you're taking with you. Keep a close eye on him. His mother would probably like to see him again, too."

  "I'll do my best, sir. It was his idea by the way. It's more like Ensign Curtis is taking me. If this comes off, that should be acknowledged. Otherwise, well, I'll take responsibility."

  "Duly noted."

  "Sir?"

  "Yes, Commander?"

  "Do you believe any of this malarkey?"

  Stillness came over Ray Spruance. But this time his pause was short.

  "I don't know. I really don't. It's just so crazy. But I'll tell you this. I hope they're not lying. Because otherwise the Japs are going to roll right over us, maybe even win this war. They'll certainly take Hawaii, and probably Australia and New Zealand if they really feel like stretching themselves. They could even drive through Burma and into India. The Germans could push through Persia to link up with them. That'd be an ungodly mess. But maybe with some of the rockets these bastards turned on us tonight, we might stand a chance."

  "What about the Negro and the half-breed dame? You think they're for real?"

  Spruance turned back.

  "The wonders never cease," he said.

  10

  IN FLIGHT, 0005 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Despite his appearance, it didn't pay to underestimate Ensign Wally Curtis. He was no rube. He had grown up in Chicago. Since enlisting he'd met sailors from pissant little backwoods burgs in places like Kentucky and Georgia who could count on one hand the number of times they'd seen a motor vehicle. Assuming they could count, of course. And assuming they had the regulation five fingers per hand. There were times he had his doubts.

  Right now, however, Curtis felt like just about the dumbest, most unsophisticated backwoods cracker on God's green earth. Not that he cared. A bright ribbon of joy blew through him. The older men had often teased him about the promise he'd made to his strict Presbyterian parents, that he wouldn't lie with a woman until she wore his wedding ring. But he knew as a moral certainty that the thrill of riding in this helicopter surpassed anything any of them had ever known while riding some low-rent floozie.

&nbs
p; It was all beyond him, gloriously, unreachably beyond his experience and understanding. He'd been right when he told Lieutenant Commander Black that the truth of the night would prove to be something they couldn't even imagine. He was young and unscarred, and the raw shock of the future folding back in on itself was enough to set his spirits soaring.

  Braced across the cabin from him, Colonel Jones smiled at Curtis's obvious delight. Beside him, Lieutenant Commander Black was doing a fair job of concealing his discomfort, but his white-knuckle grip on the grab bars gave him away. By way of contrast, Jones had to keep pushing the ensign back in his seat as he leaned forward, craning this way and that to take in as much detail as possible.

  The lights and displays of the flight controls kept drawing his attention. He seemed even more fascinated by them than he had been by shaking hands with his first black man-and a full-bird colonel of the marines at that-and only his second lady pilot. His daddy had taken him to see Amelia Earhart once. If it was possible, Flight Lieutenant Hayes seemed even more exotic and beautiful.

  "What part of Chicago did you say you were from, Ensign?" asked Jones.

  Both Curtis and Black wore astonishingly small headsets, allowing them to communicate over the noise of the Seahawk. But no one else seemed to need them. Jones had tried to explain the devices-he'd called them "chips"-that enabled each of the other passengers to communicate without the help of an external rig, but he'd been reduced to saying it was like having a radio inside your head. It sounded like something a drunk or a madman might say, and Lieutenant Commander Black regarded him in just such a fashion. Curtis, on other hand, simply marveled at the crystal-clear sound of Jones's soft conversational tones purring in his ear. The man wasn't speaking any louder than you might in your maiden aunt's drawing room, yet they heard every word he said, even over the thundering rotors.

  "I'm from Oak Brooke, sir," said Curtis. "My father has a hardware store over in North Lake."

  "I know that part of town well," said Jones.