Weapons of choice aot-1

by John Birmingham

  She gestured to the technician to play it on the CIC speaker system. A hiss of static flared and dropped away as a Japanese voice said a few calm words before being cut off in midsentence.

  AIR STATION TWENTY-THREE, SUMATRA, 2155 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  The Japanese squadron had trained exclusively for night fighting since 1937. Ironically, and much to the men's disgust, their special skills had kept them out of the most important battles of the war so far. There had been no call for them because the American and British fliers couldn't take their pathetic oxcarts into the air at night, so there was no enemy to oppose. Squadron Leader Murata had insisted on training at the same fever pitch, however, even after it became obvious to them that they would most likely never fire a shot in combat.

  As he sat in the cockpit of his Zero, the engine growling, a line of firepots stretching out in front of him down the crude runway of pressed dirt, Captain Murata's heart raced. Not with fear, but with the fierce joy of a samurai who has spent his life preparing for combat. None of his men was quite sure what was steaming down the strait, and their airplanes were not, strictly speaking, designed for attacking surface ships. But he was sure they'd still give a good account of themselves with their 20mm cannon.

  He'd order the ammunition changed, to include a heavier load of incendiary tracers. If you pumped enough of them into a tanker it would go up like a giant bomb. At least so they hoped. This, too, was a theory that had never been tested.

  His ground crew chief banged on the canopy, and Murata pulled it shut over his head, only slightly muting the engine's howl. He examined his instruments with the aid of a small flashlight fitted with a red bulb that wouldn't degrade his night vision. Everything was as it should be. He pushed the throttle forward. The chocks came out from under his wheels, and he immediately began to bump up and down in the padded seat as he rolled along the slightly corrugated runway.

  He gripped the stick, increased his speed, and dropped the flaps as the firepots blurred into one long yellow streak in the darkness outside the cockpit. Acceleration pushed him back into the seat.

  He flicked a switch to turn on the blinking red lights at his wingtips. The rest of the squadron would follow these lights up into the sky. The tiny strip of light that was their airfield fell away below. The other planes strung out behind him, small snorts of blue flame coughing occasionally from the engine cowlings. Only moments after takeoff Murata spotted the three Imperial Japanese Navy destroyers, far ahead of them in the strait. If he could spot three relatively small vessels like that so quickly, there was little doubt he would find this mystery convoy before long.

  Murata hoped the air controllers had done their job. It wouldn't do to be shot down by his own navy as he flew over them. But he needn't have worried. His Majesty's Imperial Japanese Navy was the finest in the world. Murata's squadron roared over them without incident.

  He took a moment to appreciate the scenery in this, his last few minutes as an unblooded warrior. The world was a patchwork of shadows and deeper darkness. The island of Sumatra was a black void to his left, a line of mountains discernible only where the stars disappeared, cut off by the highest ridges. The waters of strait unfurled below like a great, wide ribbon of lesser blackness, shot through with diamonds as small waves threw back shards of light from the half-moon, hanging like an ancient blade in the night sky.

  It took them less than an hour to reach their objective.

  Murata waggled his wings, signaling to the other Zero pilots that they should form up on him and prepare for a strafing run. Below them, in the strait, the spreading wakes of the big, slow-moving ships taunted him. They weren't taking evasive action. They weren't firing at him. They must be asleep, he decided.

  He smiled.

  They simply could not be allowed to proceed as if they cared nothing for the might of imperial Japan. Murata took a deep breath, centering himself in his hara. The Zero became more than just a machine. It was a divine blade, an embodiment of the emperor's will. Descended from gods, destined to take dominion over the lesser peoples of the world, the spirit of the blessed Emperor Hirohito rode with him in this plane. Murata could actually feel the presence of divinity as he plunged down on the prey.

  Then an explosion rocked him.

  Ah, awake at last, white man.

  For one brief shining moment, he knew the rapture of the samurai. Nothing could deflect him, the emperor's sword, from slashing into the enemy. Not high-explosive shells, nor twisting lines of tracer. Not 20mm Oerlikon cannon, or Bofors mounts, or even the bark and cough of five-inch guns on the enemy destroyers.

  He almost laughed with glee, and then…

  Murata gasped.

  The explosions weren't flak bursts. They were the planes of his comrades, disintegrating in dirty, orange balls of flame. Within seconds the sky was empty, save for the burning wreckage tumbling toward the sea. Murata's eyes bulged at the sight. Wings sheathed in flame fluttered downward like cherry blossoms. Strangely beautiful cascades of fire rained down as aviation gas ignited. He was certain he saw the nose of a Zero, the propeller still turning. It flew past him like a blazing comet.

  He had time to wonder why his own plane was suddenly so hot.

  And then he was consumed in a fiery maelstrom.

  The focus of activity in the Trident's CIC shifted from the antiair division to antisurface. Halabi brushed past Sir Leslie, jostling him slightly on her way over the small group of workstations. The Royal Navy's representative to Hawaii said nothing. He'd been silenced by the brutal efficiency with which Halabi and her crew had wiped out the Japanese squadron. The Zero had achieved a mythical status every bit as powerful as the RAF's own Spitfire. To see them swatted away like flies was a rather confrontational experience for the rear admiral.

  "Excuse me," Halabi said as she brushed past him again.

  "Yes, of course, Captain," he muttered in a distracted fashion. He watched, fascinated, as Halabi clasped her hands behind her back and considered the feed from the drone they had hovering above the three Japanese ships a few hundred kilometers ahead. The screen was split into two panels displaying low light and infrared. The enemy ships were steaming toward her at what must be their top speed. White water boiled at their sterns in the pale opalescent green of the low-light video, while hot smoke poured from the glowing stacks amidships of each vessel on the infrared window. Murray had trouble believing the God's-eye view of battle on the huge screen in front of him.

  The destroyers were tagged as Hostiles 01 through 03. Flashing icons marked the spot where the Zeros had died. A time hack over the island of Singapore read 2321, indicating the amount of time the SAS had been on the ground.

  Halabi could kill the destroyers now, but she said that she wanted to close with them, placing her own ships closer to their objective before alerting the Japanese to the fact that a major force had made a forced entry into their waters.

  "Designate them, Mr. McTeale, and launch on my mark."

  The Trident's commander turned briefly in Murray's direction. "You can watch the missile launch on the display, Admiral. Just there in front of you."

  Rear Admiral Murray stared at the monitor, where a movie showing the activity on the upper decks was running in black and white. It seemed rather pointless to him-the Trident was mostly featureless. As he was about to turn away, however, a hexagonal cap flipped open. An Indian-looking chap at a bank of nearby controls spoke up with a flawless Surrey accent.

  "Hard target lock confirmed. Firing in three, two, one…"

  Murray watched the screen again. White smoke and flame jetted from the silo and a dark bolt shot out with surprising speed. He heard the rocket's takeoff as dull thunder that echoed through the hull.

  The image switched instantly and he found himself viewing the Trident as if from another ship. The screen filled with a panoramic view that clearly showed a long, curving finger of smoke climbing away into the night sky.

  The image switched again to another wide-angle sho
t. Six more gray spears erupted from the deck. He felt this launch through the soles of his feet, as a small earthquake. He had no real idea what was going on, and the men and women around him gave little indication. There seemed to be a slightly increased level of activity at the dense banks of computer stations, but…

  Murray felt a tap on his arm. One of Halabi's young men, an ensign, directed his attention to the giant video wall that dominated the darkened battle room.

  "That's a full-spectrum Nemesis battlespace display, sir," the man said quietly. "You've got radar, drone coverage, and over there, in the corner, a feed from the camera in the nose of the missiles."

  To Murray, the monochrome image also seemed very unstable.

  He cast his eyes around the Combat Center.

  Every screen was attended by an operator. All of them seemed to be talking at once and somewhat to Murray's surprise, the captain stood in the center of this ferment, calmly providing instructions without a hint of panic. She seemed almost graceful.

  "Weapons bring the hammerheads around to one-oh-four."

  "One-oh-four, ma'am."

  Murray stared into a large screen carrying a black-and-white movie radioed back from the camera in the nose of the lead missile.

  "Weapons, I want simultaneous hits on those destroyers. Quickly now. We don't want any intel leakage, if possible."

  A young black woman near Murray click-clacked at the plastic keys of her computing machine with a speed and confidence that astonished the admiral. Surely one false keystroke would doom the mission.

  Halabi appeared in front of him.

  "All done."

  "But they're-"

  "Watch the screen, Admiral."

  Murray saw then that the center's main screen had split into a confusing grid of tiled windows. Some carried jumpy, black-and-white footage of the Japanese ships. In the space of a few seconds the outline of each target swelled to fill the screen. Then all the displays turned black.

  "What's wrong?" asked Murray. "Where did the pictures go? Were all the rockets shot down?"

  "No, Sir Leslie. Think, what would happen to the camera when the missile struck armor plating."

  "Oh," he said. "I see."

  HIJMS AKATSUKI, 2348 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  Commander Osamu Takasuka surveyed the heaving ocean from his eyrie's nest. It was only mildly turbulent tonight, with the bows knifing through meter-and-a-half waves. Still, each plunge of the ship threw plumes of water high into the air.

  Takasuka wondered what awaited them ahead. The fleet had been alive with rumor ever since the canceled mission to Midway. Some said the Russians had declared war. Others claimed with righteous certainty that the Americans were about to capitulate. One wild tale originating with an old salt on their sister ship, the destroyer Hokaze, spoke of a gigantic whirlpool that had sucked two American carriers down to the very bottom of the Coral Sea. By the time that rumor had reached Takasuka's ears, it had twisted itself into a perverse story that as you dropped down the funnel you could see old Viking raiders and the bones of Roman galleys on the gray floor of the seabed.

  He never failed to be amazed at the bullshit sailors were able to dream up.

  As he stood into the freshening breeze, waiting for a radio message relating what the Zeros had discovered up the strait, he thought perhaps a falling star had dropped from the heavens in front of them. He gazed at the sight, captivated by its simple beauty, until it became apparent that the bright comet trail wasn't moving from the heavens toward the waves, but across them, toward him.

  More lights appeared, and he tried to get a fix on them through his binoculars, but the heaving motion of the ship and the shaking of his hands made it impossible. The fantastic speed of the lights struck him next, and the sense of intent that seemed to lurk behind their progress. At that point he raised the alarm.

  Bells rang and Klaxons blared but it was too late.

  Lieutenant Commander Takasuka's existence came to an end inside an expanding globe of hellfire.

  Another four missiles shrieked over the scene on their way to Singapore.

  40

  SINGAPORE, 2351 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  The heel of a Japanese sentry's boot pressed into the earth fifteen centimeters from the tip of Captain Harry Windsor's royal nose. The prince's night vision goggles were switched to low-light amplification and small-unit narrowcasting. The other members of his section, including Sergeant St. Clair and two Australian SAS troops, captured the video feed in lime green on the small pop-up window in the corner of their own goggles.

  Harry lay as still and quiet as the warm soil beneath him. He breathed as little as possible. Even so, the smell of Singapore was overpowering, a heady brew of open drains and dried fish, of swamp gas and Chinese spices.

  In his own pop-up he could see that both St. Clair and Captain Pearce Mitchell, the ranking Aussie, had drawn a bead on the Japanese soldier. A microlight targeting dot, invisible to the sentry, had settled on the side of his head just above the ear, while another dot, emanating from Mitchell's silenced HK 9mm submachine gun, had glued itself to the center of his body mass.

  Harry was trying to center himself in a mental exercise, releasing his ego and allowing the world to flood in through all his senses without interruption. Unfortunately the steady stream of piss gushing from the Jap into the bushes beside his head was proving to be a hellish distraction. His heart refused to stop hammering, and a smirk was threatening to break out all over his face. This would, no doubt give rise to a fit of fear-inspired, hysterical laughter if he should let it.

  The fellow must have been bursting with tea, judging from the time it took him to empty his bladder. At last, however, the stream began to gutter and die and then, with a few shakes, which splashed a drop or two on Harry's goggles, he was done. The special ops teams listened to the rustle of his fly being fastened and the crunch of his boots through the undergrowth as he continued his patrol. They waited five minutes before moving or even resuming normal breathing patterns. When Harry judged it safe he subvocalized, "Fuck me, that was unpleasant."

  A small biochip implanted at the base of his neck, and powered by the electrical charge of his body's cells, picked up the bone vibrations caused by the comment, transforming them into a quantum signal that was captured by the processors in his ear bud and narrowcast to the rest of the soldiers. They heard his voice in their helmets as clearly as if he had pressed his lips there and whispered to them.

  "And I thought those pricks were supposed to revere royalty," whispered Mitchell.

  They lay on a small ridge that rose twenty meters above a Japanese barracks complex at the edge of the town. Familiar with Singapore in his own time, Harry found himself amazed at every turn by the primitive, colonial outpost through which they'd crept. There were no high-rise buildings, no architecture he thought of as modern in any way. You could see the water from almost every vantage point. Shrieks and chirps and a thousand other noises of the jungle never ceased. Monkeys still roamed everywhere.

  A strict curfew kept the captive population of Malays and Indians inside after dark, and most of the Europeans were locked up in the Changi prison camp. Even so, he could tell when they passed near one ethnic neighborhood or another. The Indian quarter smelled of peppers, curry powder, and exotic fruits, the Chinese of fried meat and jasmine rice. The odors must have settled into the skin of the place, he thought. There was very little food in Singapore at the moment.

  Since this was far from the war front, security had been allowed to slack off. Singapore was a garrison town. Only three men made a regular desultory sweep of the subtropical jungle around the barracks, sticking strictly to schedule and a well-beaten walking track. Harry's squad members were lurking just off this path, waiting for a signal from three other SAS units that were moving into position closer to the buildings. They'd traversed the city via dense tunnels of verdant growth that ran all over her. Only the very center had been too built up to provide safe passage. A grid of wide
avenues ran there, fringed with flame trees and frangipani. The grass verges, untrimmed in the wet heat, were already overgrown, but the white government buildings were all occupied by Japanese troops and administrators now.

  They were somebody else's problem. Harry's team was assigned to take out the main barracks on the road to Changi, temporary home to more than two thousand Japanese soldiers.

  His tac display went active.

  "Payload inbound," he said. "Thirty seconds. Sergeant, fire up the laser strobe."

  "Strobe active, targets acquired," said St. Clair as six thin lines of invisible laser light stabbed out from a small, tripod-mounted device in repeater bursts modulated to the microsecond. The photon stream pulsed across the night before silently painting the center of four long huts in which slept hundreds of Japanese. The laser strobe looked a little like a video camera, and indeed it would record what happened in the next few minutes.

  "Teams two, three, and four report strobes active and targets acquired," said Mitchell.

  The other SAS teams, stationed at the base points of a triangle surrounding the barracks complex, had locked strobes onto the remaining buildings and facilities, including a small guard tower, three machine-gun and mortar pits, and a line of light tanks. With fifteen seconds till showtime one man peeled away from each team, moving silently into the scrub, stalking the sentries who had last passed by.

  There was no visual warning that preceded the approach of the cruise missiles. Their turbojets burned without visible flame. Their imminent arrival registered as a time hack in the lower left corner of the goggle displays. The team leaders, had they chosen to, could have watched a missile's progress as a receiver embedded within their goggles picked up a signal from the seeker warhead, which translated into a series of red arrowheads tracking across their heads-up displays. But being pragmatic, they all chose to plant their faces in the dirt and breathe out against the wave of overpressure that would soon hit them.

  Harry imagined that he just might have caught a rumble of distant thunder as the missile popped up and chose the closest of the targets designated by the laser strobes, all in a sliver of time too infinitesimal to be comprehended by any human mind. Flaps on its stubby wings purred into position. Gated doors swung open down the length of its belly. A very small, controlled fusion reaction cooked up deep inside the belly of the missile for just over two microseconds, enough to superheat its two hundred tungsten slugs and spit them out of their containment cells with enough kinetic energy in each to destroy a heavily armored fighting vehicle.