Weapons of choice aot-1

by John Birmingham

  "That's not the case with the Nagoya, though," said Kolhammer.

  "No, sir, it's not. We're pretty sure now the Nagoya was the source of the event and was destroyed by it. Makes sense, given what they were messing with. We've got some video on screen three."

  The flatscreen came to life, quartering into four windows displaying mast-mounted cam coverage of the Nagoya. The video ran at normal speed for a few seconds then seemed to stop. Both Black and Curtis moved around to watch the video. The ensign whistled softly, but the older man scowled at the screen as if he didn't trust it.

  "We had to dial back the replay speed," said Judge. "Even then it's hard to say what happened, it was so quick."

  Kolhammer watched as the giant research vessel suddenly seemed to contract to a single point before a lens of swirling light bloomed out from the same spot. "What the hell was that?" he asked. "It looked like they got sucked down a drain or something."

  "Yeah, it did, didn't it? Lieutenant Dietz from the working group trying to nut this out called it spaghettification. He says it's what happens when matter is drawn down into a singularity. Like a black hole. He doesn't rate it as an enjoyable trip."

  "Fatal?"

  "And then some."

  Curtis leaned over to his superior officer and whispered, "What's a black hole, sir?"

  "Dunno," said Black.

  "We'll explain later," said Kolhammer, as an idea struck him.

  "Excuse me, Commander Black. Mike, that reporter we have on board from the Times, Duffy, she wrote a piece about this stuff a few years back. It was in the briefing pack I took across to the Enterprise. We should get her to write us up a briefing note. Something clear and concise we can use for our own people and for the locals. Lord knows, we're going to need something. She still with us?"

  "I believe Lieutenant Thieu is rattling her cage even as we speak, sir."

  "Make a note, I'll want to speak to her later. She can start earning her room and board. Okay." He nodded, drawing a mental line under the topic. "Our missing ships, we sure they didn't come through and get turned into noodles?"

  "No, we're not sure," said Judge as a Seahawk lifted off from the heavily damaged deck of the carrier. "But it's unlikely. The event had an edge. We know that because Captain Halabi saw it cut the Fearless in two. That took place eight thousand meters from the Nagoya. The subs were a long way beyond that, assuming there was a uniform shape to the phenomenon."

  "Do we have any reason to assume that?" asked Kolhammer, a note of incredulity creeping into his voice. "This thing did throw everyone out of position, after all. It moved the Havoc about seven thousand meters closer to us."

  Judge looked worried, but he could only shrug in agreement. "Admiral, we can't assume anything about a process we don't understand. The phenomenon seems to have been… anomalous. Our relative positions got mixed up. For instance, the Havoc was closer, but the Siranui was ten thousand meters farther from us than she should have been when we emerged. It's possible the missing ships got scattered all over the globe. Or out into space. Or a hundred kilometers beneath the earth's crust. We simply don't know."

  "Okay, then, we don't assume anything. What about Spruance's group? How badly are they hurting?"

  Mike Judge flicked a glance at Dan Black and sucked in through his teeth with a hiss. "We fucked them three ways from Sunday, Admiral, if you'll pardon my French. Three cruisers are gone, the Yorktown, and the Hornet. That's more than seven, eight thousand dead, right there. They got maybe another thousand dead on the destroyers, five sunk, two going down right now. We can't rightly say anything about final casualty figures yet. They don't have any implants here."

  Judge sounded morose. There was nothing Kolhammer could say in mitigation. He felt as awful as the executive officer looked and sounded. Curtis and Black were even more subdued. Although they stood near the center of the room, nobody looked directly at them.

  "Okay, Mike," said Kolhammer. "For now we can only take the first steps. Search and rescue. Care for the wounded. How's that going?"

  Judge stared out the blast windows as he answered. "Doc Francois over on the Kandahar is in charge of that, Admiral. We lost Preston when the liquid oxygen went up. She's the senior surgeon now. She's organized triage for both forces. We're taking the worst on our ships because we have the best facilities. The locals are doing what they can. They've got some of our medics on their ships now."

  "And how's that working out?"

  "No problems yet, but it's early. There is one other issue, of course."

  Kolhammer rubbed his neck. "Midway," he sighed.

  Black and Curtis stiffened.

  "You told us you'd stand down any threat," Black reminded him.

  "Admiral Spruance does want to know what we're going to do about it," said Judge, "since we pretty much crippled his ability to act."

  "Do we know where the Japs should be at this point?" asked Kolhammer.

  Judge leaned over a touch screen and danced his fingers across the surface. The lines and creases in his weathered face seemed unnaturally deep in dim red light of the flag bridge. Ensign Curtis shook his head in wonder as dozens of icons moved around the screen under the officer's fingers, sometimes opening out into windows full of scrolling text and numbers, sometimes expanding into pictures of men and women in various uniforms.

  "I scanned the crew records," said Judge, as he pulled the files. "I took a couple of history majors off other duties, set them to work on the archives tracking the progress of the Japanese according to the books."

  A screen next to Judge filled up with a map of the Pacific. The relative positions of the Japanese and American fleets were recorded from June 1 through June 7, 1942.

  "The Nemesis arrays already have a good lock on a large body closing from the west, exactly where Admiral Nagumo should be at this time."

  "When's the first strike due?"

  Judge checked the flexipad. "At zero eight hundred hours on June third-that's today-the Second Carrier Striking Group under Admiral Kakuta will launch a diversionary attack on Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians. At zero five fifty-three on June fourth, the radar station at Midway will pick up the first wave of attacking planes, which will be over the island from zero six thirty to zero six forty-three."

  Kolhammer nodded, satisfied with small mercies. "Okay then. We have a day and a half until the main attack. Let's work up a plan for a strike on the carriers heading for Midway. If we can't get any planes off, we'll take them out with missiles.

  "We'll need to discuss all this at fleet command level first. Schedule a conference for the soonest possible time, invite Spruance and whoever he needs to bring along. We can chopper them over here. But let's get the search and rescue finished first. And I'd best have a talk with the acting CO of the Siranui well before the general conference."

  "That'd be Sub-Lieutenant Miyazaki. You want to laser-link to him or talk face-to-face?"

  "I think we'd best meet in my quarters, man-to-man. Show some respect."

  "I think he'd appreciate that, Admiral," said Mike Judge. "He's likely to find it scarce around these parts for a long time."

  Lieutenant Commander Black said nothing.

  USS KANDAHAR, 0029 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Captain Margie Francois paused for the first time in two and a half hours. It was just a moment's break.

  As chief combat surgeon of the Eighty-second MEU, her first priority had been to get her own medical staff back online, then the Kandahar's defensive sysops, then the ship's most critical naval personnel and the 3 Batt staff officers.

  Then the casualties began to arrive, some caused by the Transition, like the kitchen hand suffering third-degree burns from collapsing onto a gas oven, and a marine who'd gone headfirst down a hatch between decks, breaking his spine. Shortly after that, the first shells had hit the ship, and her real work had begun, patching up torn and broken bodies.

  There was no real lull between that and the arrival of the first survivors from Spruance's task
force. The newcomers had filled all one hundred beds in the Kandahar's hospital, and still they came; burns, amputations, compound fractures, split skulls, crushed limbs, ripped torsos. Hundreds of men had swallowed oil, some had lungs half full of contaminated seawater. Many screamed, some moaned quietly. The hospital smelled of charred flesh, blood, shit, and fear. When an orderly handed her a tube of chilled fruit pulp the contrast between the sweet, fresh taste and the charnel house atmosphere of the ward came as a smack in the face.

  A brief sense of dislocation took hold, and she stopped for a few seconds to observe the scene.

  So, she thought without allowing herself any real feeling, this is what it looks like for the other guy.

  "Captain? Captain Francois, ma'am?"

  The voice dragged her back into the world.

  "We're starting to run low on burn gel, ma'am. It's not critical yet. But it will be soon enough, if we keep running through it at this rate."

  Francois looked at the intern. "Thanks for the snack. It helped."

  "Ma'am?"

  "Yeah, I know, the goddamn burn gel. Can't be helped, Ensign. It's there to be used. You know the principles of triage. That's all you need to worry about for now."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  The young man saluted and hurried away.

  "Captain?"

  Francois turned toward the deep bass of Colonel Jones's voice, acknowledging him with a tired salute.

  "You need anything down here, Doc?" he asked.

  "Some answers would be good," she said a touch bitterly. "Failing that, more burn gel and vat tissue. We're going to need plenty of both."

  Jones rubbed his shaved head in frustration. "How many of our people are down?" he asked, meaning the battalion.

  "Sixty-two dead," she replied without hesitating. "Another fifty-three wounded. Mostly from blast effects, but a few were just unlucky. Happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  "At the Transition point?"

  "If that's what we're calling it, yeah."

  A man lying in a bed nearby suddenly howled like a wounded animal. Francois hurried over, reaching him before anyone else. His uniform had been stripped so there was no way of telling to whom he belonged by just looking at him. A quick scan with a sensor wand told her he had no inserts, which meant he almost certainly came off an old ship. A transmitter node on the bed beamed his data to her flexipad: Leading Seaman Murray Belknap, one broken hip, seven broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and second-degree burns to 15 percent of his body. A trauma team arrived as she finished reading his slate.

  "We got him, Captain," one of them shouted.

  Jones took Francois by the arm and steered her away.

  "Let them work, Margie. You've trained them well. Give them some room. You can't lay hands on everybody who comes in. You got the bigger picture to keep you up nights."

  "I know," she admitted. "You just get into the groove, that's all."

  "I understand. How many of the locals do you have with you here?"

  "Nearly three hundred here, just a shade under two thousand spread out through the rest of the fleet. We're at capacity now. We've starting taking over the sleeping quarters."

  Jones nodded. "And how many are we going to lose? For certain?"

  Francois took a few seconds to think it over. She consulted her flexipad for a minute after that before answering. "My best guess at this stage, we'll lose about eight percent."

  "Okay, better than I'd expected."

  Jones didn't insult her with any platitudes about trying harder. He knew her well. She'd give it everything she had.

  Francois just hoped it would be enough.

  14

  HIJMS YAMATO, 0146 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was incandescent with rage. A lesser man might have howled like a dog and hammered at the bare bulkhead until his fists were mashed into a bloody pulp. He had not wanted this war! He had not wanted the glorious baubles and empty honors that had poured on his head after the victory at Pearl Harbor. He had not wanted them, because he suspected they would lead to utter ruin.

  The United States of America was a colossus that he had little chance of besting in a fair fight. He knew in his heart that the only hope was one decisive engagement, the Kessen Kantai, which would leave the Americans so stunned, naked, and bleeding that they would have to sue for peace.

  But it was a tremendous gamble. The life of a nation bet on the turn of a card. And now this oaf, this fool, this butcher's bastard son Kakuta had lost his mind and upturned the entire card table.

  He examined the lengthy radio transcript. The radio! He cursed volubly and at great length. Eavesdroppers be damned! How many times had he stressed the importance of maintaining absolute radio silence, lest the Americans unravel his plot before it ensnared them. His thick, calloused hands, the left one missing two fingers, were shaking with fury as he reread the message.

  Kakuta had turned the entire Second Carrier Striking Force around and was heading back toward the Home Islands. Admiral Hosogaya's Northern Force was following, in great confusion. Kakuta was demanding-demanding! — that Yamamoto order his own Main Force and Nagumo's First Carrier Striking Force to turn tail and make for Hashirajima with all dispatch. And he was flying-flying! — back to the battleship Yamato to personally brief the commander of the Combined Fleet on some supposedly momentous development that had necessitated all of this.

  The only momentous development Yamamoto could see in Admiral Kakuta's future was his inescapable beheading when they fished him from the sea beside the Yamato. Or had he forgotten, in his derangement, that the Yamato was a battleship, not an aircraft carrier.

  Yamamoto crushed the paper in his good right hand. He had read it so many times now that he could probably recite its litany of delirium from memory. Kakuta said the Americans had broken the JN25 code and were waiting in ambush for Nagumo's flattops. An unsettling development, if true, but then the whole reason for their being out here in this hellish weather was to engage the Americans in decisive battle and sweep away the last remnants of their fleet. So what did it matter if they were waiting? He had assembled the greatest naval force since Jutland. Its sheer mass would crush them, even without the benefit of surprise.

  Perhaps the answer lay there. The U.S. Navy would surely know they were coming, now that Kakuta had blurted his plans to the heavens. But he had gained the Ryujo and the Junyo to augment Nagumo's force. How could they hope to resist six fleet carriers and dozens of heavy battleships and cruisers with the few tin toys they had left? Perhaps another gamble might bring even greater rewards, against greater odds.

  He drew a deep, cleansing breath, focused on finding his center, his hara. He would need to move quickly. Plans would have to be remade on the run. There was so little time that he might not even be able to spare a minute to watch Kakuta's execution.

  IN FLIGHT, 0212 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  The Eurocopter Panther 2E hammered through the fog about two hundred meters off the surface of the ocean. Kakuta and Hidaka were strapped into seats in the bay, where they could look forward to the cockpit. The old admiral found himself continually craning around to gawk at the multiplicity of illuminated displays, wondering how the pilots managed to keep on top of them all. The Indonesian, Moertopo, who seemed more and more subdued as the distance from his own ship grew, repeatedly assured him that they would not lose themselves in the vastness of the northern Pacific. He conceded that the "GPS" was gone, whatever that meant, but said that he had faith in something called "SINS" to bring them within a short distance of Yamamoto's Main Force.

  Moertopo also assured them that the helicopter's "radar" would have no trouble finding a body of iron as substantial as that, even though it lay many miles away. Furthermore, he said, they were far enough from their erstwhile colleagues at Midway that any "radar leakage" would not be detected.

  Kakuta's heart lurched every time he imagined having to explain all this to Admiral Yamamoto. He felt like a bug that had ni
pped the toe of a giant. There was a chance that the admiral would be so incensed by his actions that he would shoot them out of the sky. For his part, he had assured the Indonesians that he could forestall such precipitate action, but privately he had his doubts.

  Hidaka seemed more sanguine. He had the heart of a true samurai, and Kakuta hoped that whatever came of this, no dishonor would attach itself to his favored protege.

  Lieutenant Moertopo pressed a hand to one ear.

  "The pilot reports that we are one hundred and sixty kilometers out, Admiral. We should be able to establish a secure tightbeam contact at this distance."

  The sound of Hidaka's translation came through beautifully clear on the lightweight headset they had provided him. Another small piece of evidence in favor of this whole crazed scenario.

  "And so I am to just speak into this little twig?" he asked, tapping the slim metal rod that reached around to the corner of his mouth.

  Moertopo held up his hand until the copilot gave him the sign that they had broken into the Yamato's frequency. He pointed a finger at Kakuta and nodded.

  "Yamato. Yamato. This is Admiral Kakuta. Commander of the Second Carrier Striking Fleet. This is Admiral Kakuta of the Second Carrier Striking Fleet. We are flying inbound on a heading of two-four-three relative to your position. Please acknowledge this transmission."

  "This is Chief Signals Officer Wada," came the startlingly clear reply. "Stand by."

  The men in the helicopter waited as a full minute dragged by. They were all tense, even though they still sat well outside the range of the fleet's antiair defenses. Moertopo had explained that they might not have sufficient fuel for a round trip to the Yamato and back. The Panther bucked violently on turbulence, adding to the stress. Admiral Kakuta was about to repeat his message when a cold, angry voice filled his headset. It was like having the commander in chief growl into his face from just a few inches away.