Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

Yamamoto did not react. This was not his battleship to command. So he very deliberately raised his cup and slowly drank the rest of the tea, without even looking out the window, like so many others who were searching for the telltale streak just beneath the ocean’s surface. Captain Takayanagi would see them through this, or not. Yamamoto concentrated on drawing a slow, deep breath and focusing on the center of his being, his hara.

  In spite of his outwardly unmoved appearance, however, the cry of torpedo had been a nasty jolt. Until he realized that it could not be the Havoc. Her torpedoes ran deep, and so swiftly that the first you knew of them was when your ship was disintegrating around you like an exploding star.

  No, this would be an American submarine, firing torpedoes that hardly ever worked, assuming the U.S. Navy had not yet to come to its senses. Yamamoto didn’t know why it was taking the Americans so long to fix their torpedoes, now that they must surely know of their defects. Perhaps they weren’t listening quite so closely to Kolhammer as he would have, in their position.

  The grand admiral tilted his head in a figurative gesture of peering into the sky, where he knew that robot planes were watching everything. He finished the tea, while around him sailors and their superiors shouted orders and acknowledgment back and forth as Takayanagi attempted to move the Yamato’s seventy-thousand-ton bulk out of harm’s way.

  “Look!” someone shouted, and a strangled cheer arose, then quickly died as a little destroyer raced across the torpedoes’ track. There were two explosions, and twin geysers of white water bracketed her, at stem and stern. The Yamato continued to pour on steam, leaning over at a noticeable angle, fighting to drag herself out of the path of any more enemy attacks.

  Four other destroyers raced toward their crippled sister ship, popping depth charges as they sliced through the waves and sea spray.

  Yamamoto sent a silent prayer of thanks to the ancestors of the men who had just perished on the little ship that had sacrificed herself in his behalf.

  No, he thought, nothing was certain but death.

  33

  OAHU, HAWAII

  A lone Wildcat had appeared out of nowhere and strafed Corporal Yutaka Nanten’s landing barge, turning it into a slaughtering pen. Cannon and machine-gun fire killed three quarters of his platoon, the first pass by the fighter scything them down, another pass pulverizing their remains into a scarlet gravy while Nanten screamed and screamed.

  Three Zeros came and drove the demon away, but by then it was too late. Even the helmsman was dead; all that was left was one disembodied hand, still clutching at the steering wheel. Nanten himself was unharmed, except for a small sliver of bone that had pierced his left cheek. With tremors shaking his entire body, he pulled it out like a splinter, expecting half his face to come away. But the bone fragment wasn’t even his.

  As reason began to reassert itself, he realized he was not completely alone. Not everyone had been killed. He could hear three other men moaning or screaming over the sounds of the engine and the thump of the hull on the waves, as the helmsman’s hand steered them ever farther from the other boats.

  Nanten’s limbs shook so much that he couldn’t manage to drag himself up out of the bloody gruel that was sloshing up and down the length of the barge as they plunged through the swell.

  The night before, as they had waited to transfer from the troopship, there had been a great deal of nervous talk concerning the time travelers they might encounter, and what weapons they might wield. Many of their greatest fears seemed to be centered on the lost souls of the ronin, those Japanese warriors who had come back with the magician Kolhammer. They were thought to be the most fearsome of all the time travelers, armed with “chaos blades” that could slice through the barrel of a tank. Since they had turned their backs on the emperor, the ronin had clearly gone mad.

  Nanten himself felt madness gnawing at the edge of his mind.

  Who needed chaos blades and lost souls, when a simple aeroplane could do this?

  He wiped the blood from his eyes with one shaking hand and took in the ruin of his platoon. What he saw caused him to retch uncontrollably. He had no way of reaching the rail, so his vomit became a part of the foul mixture that filled the bottom of the barge.

  The platoon had been together since the Nanking campaign, and now in a sense they would be together forevermore. One of the other survivors stopped screaming, but Nanten did not know why, and did not go to investigate. He did not wish to raise himself, lest another plane dive in to finish the job.

  His fear began to shift, and his stomach knotted with fury. They had told him there were no American aircraft left. No rocket planes, or even any of the older types. He tried to wipe more blood from his eyes, but it only made things worse. His face was sticky with the remains of his friends.

  Nanten craned his head skyward and slitted his eyes against the sun’s glare. It was a hot, gray day, and it felt like he was sitting in an oven. Ammunition popped and burned around him. The moaning stopped, and he knew he was finally alone.

  It seemed perversely safe inside this little ghost ship now. The war was a distant murmur. Surely nobody would fire upon a vessel full of dead bodies. Even the gaijin were not that uncivilized. Although, given the rumors he’d heard of their atrocities in Australia, perhaps they were.

  Seagulls began to gather now, and they shrieked and swooped down to feed on the rich pickings. Yutaka Nanten felt outrage boil up inside him. He was preparing to shoot at the nearest bird, which was attempting to tear a strip of meat away from the charred rump of a comrade, when the barge hit something with a grinding clang and a great lurch sideways.

  The boat tipped over about twenty degrees, as the keel scraped across sand, and possibly a coral bottom. He had been so conditioned to leap forward when he heard those sounds that the failure of the bow doors to drop actually surprised him. But then he remembered that there was no one to operate the lever.

  The boat slewed around, beginning to rock along its axis, as it turned side-on to the surf.

  Nanten’s eyes opened wide, cracking the thin crust of dried blood that had formed in the folds of his skin. Big waves bore down on him. Big enough to see over the side of the boat. For some reason that terrified him even more than the strafing of the fighter plane. The barge rolled to and fro, tipping itself toward the swell like an open bowl. A breaker slammed into the seaward side with a sound as loud as a small shell going off. At least two feet of water poured in on top of the corpses.

  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, suckin
g 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 i
n 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.