Designated Targets

by John Birmingham

  They did so effectively, though; that was undeniable. Their weapons were almost supernatural in their powers. But the men and even the women who used them could not claim to be the moral equal of the emperor’s troops, or even MacArthur’s. His scouts reported that they were executing their prisoners en masse.

  They didn’t have many prisoners to take, of course. No fighting man of Nippon would willingly allow himself to fall into the enemies clutches. Yet . . .

  “General?”

  “I am sorry, Lieutenant. I forget myself.”

  How long had he been standing there, daydreaming? The symphony seemed closer now. A large explosion, an aerial bombardment he guessed, rocked the ground nearby. He checked his watch. Five minutes? Yes, well, he could understand why his young aide would be keen to be off. The office seemed much emptier than it had been just a few moments ago. Fewer clerks were shuffling about. There was more paper on the ground. A chair had been turned over in the middle of the room.

  Fancy that.

  The lieutenant took his arm and gently maneuvered him out of the room, into the corridor, and down the stairs to a waiting car. A security detail of four soldiers stood by in a captured American jeep, manning a .50-caliber machine gun and watching the street as though MacArthur or Jones the giant black barbarian himself might just pop out of one of the boarded-up stores.

  Garbage lay everywhere. Strewn between abandoned cars and the burnt-out shells of commercial buildings. A black dog trotted by with a charred bone in its jaws, snarling at one of the soldiers who made a lunge for it.

  Chaos lurked on the edge of perception here. The blood-dimmed tide was close at hand. What was that English poem? The one seemingly written for these, the end of days? Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Yes, he thought. The end was nigh. The rough beast approached.

  He could see huge boiling towers of oily smoke climbing into the sky a few miles away. The leviathan murmur of the big guns was now underscored by the harsher, staccato rattle of small-arms fire. Two civilizations were grinding against each other like great mill wheels over there, and he feared that he had fed the lives of unknowable numbers of men into that demonic foundry for naught.

  To what end would they perish? To buy another six or twelve months’ respite?

  He wondered if he should just turn away from this vehicle. Trust himself to the spirits of his ancestors and his katana. Join his men at the front and disappear into history. One small noble act that might perhaps be noted with approval by a scholar in the long distant future, when the dark age had passed.

  The lieutenant must have read his mind, because Homma suddenly noticed the man’s grip, forcing him into the jeep. “We have to get to the meeting, General. The staff are waiting for instructions. The counterattack—it must begin. There is no time.”

  But the poet-general had time to pause and survey the field of his last failure. There would be no counterattack. Masaharu Homma examined his inner landscape and found it as barren and desolate as the dying city.

  Just as he cosigned the order to carry out the field punishment of the three captured Japanese officers, Jones remembered where he had seen that sergeant before. The one who’d turned back the ambush on the Brisbane Line. The memory brought forth a rich, rolling baritone laugh, which he had to clamp down on, quickly, lest somebody imagine he was enjoying himself as he signed the death warrants on the company clerk’s flexipad.

  The woman didn’t look put out. She’d seen the mass graves in every town they rolled through.

  But he explained anyway. “Something I just remembered, Corporal. Please excuse me. It was nothing to do with this,” he said, handing her the pad.

  “Thank you, Colonel. I’ll zap this over to the Aussies via laser link. Wouldn’t have bothered me none anyhow. I’d pull a cold trigger on those fuckers any day, sir.”

  Jones sent the clerk on her way and took a drink from his canteen. He parted the sunshades in the little wooden police station where he’d set up a temporary HQ as they prepared for the final assault. His Crusader guns and the Australians’ smaller battery of 155s shook the frame of the building and raised small clouds of dust as they blasted away.

  They were firing on the last Japanese strongpoint, a few thousand men dug into the city of Bundaberg. Circling drones brought the barrage down with such accuracy that individual foxholes could be targeted, if he so chose. But of course, they didn’t have the luxury of unlimited ammunition, so his gun monkeys were tasked with reducing the major enemy concentrations. The Crusaders fired twelve shots in a volley, each individual shell screaming through an arc that covered eighteen thousand meters, to slam into a target selected by a combined fire control team in a command LAV.

  The guns roared, and eighteen klicks away, a water tower disintegrated into fiery splinters, killing the Japanese forward observers who were sitting on top of it. A platoon dug into a deep trench was entombed; three mortar crews and their guns were atomized; a stand of eucalyptus trees, which had been hiding two light tanks, disappeared inside an explosive maelstrom. And a beautiful old white stone building in which the Japanese commanders were thought to be holed up suddenly blew apart.

  But Colonel Jones’s thoughts were elsewhere. Sergeant Snider, he recalled at last. That redneck asshole who’d fronted him on the Enterprise when he’d landed with Kolhammer and Halabi to meet Spruance for the first time. On top of everything else that went wrong that night, Snider simply hadn’t been equipped to deal with an African-American Marine Corps colonel. Jones had bruted him into his place and pretty much forgotten about him ever since.

  But that fellow who’d led the charge, and held Hill 178 back on the Brisbane Line—that had been him, for sure. He searched his memory for the name of the embed who’d filed the story.

  Duffy. Julia Duffy.

  She’d gone into Luzon and Cabanatuan with them shortly after the Transition. He’d heard good reports about her, too. She could handle herself in the thick of it. And she gave good copy, too.

  Jones took another drink. Duffy must have gone out with the ’temps, looking for something different. And she’d turned old Snider into a hero while she was at it.

  Actually, Jones mused, that was unfair of him, thinking that way. He’d seen the download of that firefight. It was pretty fucking willing. If they wanted to lay a bit of fruit salad on the sergeant’s dress greens, well, fact was, he’d earned it. Jones doubted he’d ever see the prick again, but he’d make an effort to congratulate him, if he did.

  The guns roared again, this time followed by the faintly ridiculous pop-pop-pop of three pistol shots.

  Field punishment of the Japanese officers had been carried out.

  His flexipad pinged. It was Sergeant Major Harrison. “We’re getting buttoned up, Colonel. Ten minutes till the bottom of the ninth.”

  “Thanks, Aub. I’m coming now.”

  Jones strapped on his powered helmet, checked the load on his G4, and screwed the cap back onto his canteen. In his reactive matrix armor, he had to turn slightly sideways to get through the doorway and out onto the street.

  His LAV sat about a hundred meters away, one of four parked on the main street. Well, the only street, really. As he adjusted his combat goggles and moved quickly to the vehicle, he tried not to think about the open pit in the town square, full of rotting bodies. Three more had been left at the edge: a Japanese captain and two lieutenants who had commanded the small garrison in this town.

  Jones could see their corpses clearly in the harsh tropical light. A small group of enemy soldiers had been forced to watch the field punishment, and an Australian squad was leading them away to a truck. They would be taken to the rear and held, pending further investigation. If any were found to have been directly involved in the murder of the town’s population, they would be trucked right back to the edge of the pit and shot in the head in exactly the same fashion as their superiors. Unless they were transferred into the custody of the contemporary forces
, in which case, they’d probably be hanged in Brisbane in about six or seven months, after a court-martial.

  As far as Jones was concerned, it made no difference, one way or the other.

  He had a battle to get to.

  Thankfully, thought Mitchell, none of the men in the squad had grown up in Bundaberg. It would have made navigating the town easier, of course. But that little bit of emotional distance helped when moving through the scene of a large-scale atrocity.

  The SAS officer still found it maddening, having to sit still while he watched innocent civilians killed without reason. But he had a strictly covert brief for this stage of the operation. Their mission was to move around under the cover of darkness, marking targets for the big guns, plotting troop movements, and—wherever possible—identifying enemy combatants for Sanction 4 field punishment later. Unlike the first and third squads, his men had no order tasking them to directly interdict the enemy’s higher command authorities.

  So they retired to the layup point, a small hill with a clear view of the town, and watched as it was systematically reduced to ashes and rubble by the artillery they had called in. Most of the squad was busy adjusting fire and drone coverage, feeding new data back to the guns, and monitoring the direct approach to their small encampment. Pearce Mitchell and Sergeant Cameron McLeod, however, had dug into the hillside a short distance away, and were watching over the reverse slope, guarding against the possibility of an attack from the rear.

  The only significant concentration of Japanese forces in that direction were the soldiers guarding the surviving townspeople in a rough, unsheltered barbed-wire enclosure that had been run up on a football field. The sun blazed down on the unprotected prisoners. Neither of the SAS men had seen any sign of a water supply, organized medical care, sewerage, or even a system for disposing of the increasing number of bodies.

  The guards largely ignored their charges, who rarely moved. Scoping out the encampment with powered goggles, the men could see why. The prisoners were close to death. The smell of putrefaction was strong, even from this distance. Most telling, however, was their lack of reaction to the sounds of battle as it crept closer. They had no energy to react, and were simply waiting to die.

  Mitchell and McLeod stayed silent. They occasionally tapped each other and pointed out some detail that had caught the eye: a pile of tiny bodies that had to be young children; a stick figure hanging from the wire; a solitary man moving about, apparently to tend to the sick and injured. A town doctor, perhaps?

  The troopers had their flexipads out and were file-sharing a plan of the camp, which they added to as the time passed. Over on their hillside McLeod sketched out potential lines of approach, while Mitchell noted the position of the fixed gun emplacements, and plotted their fields of fire. They each counted the numbers of Japanese guards and checked each other’s figures.

  It helped not to have to think about the people who were dying down there.

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS

  General Douglas MacArthur was getting mightily pissed off at being ambushed by these characters. He stalked back and forth across his office in Brisbane. He was already late for the press conference he’d called up on the Line, where he was going to take the reporters through his victory, step by step. He had half a mind to just go anyway, to leave the prime minister hanging. But he restrained himself, mainly because he wanted to know what fresh hell Jones was about to spring on him.

  It had to be something to do with Bundaberg. Some crazy scheme they were cooking up to steal his thunder while—

  “General, it’s Prime Minister Curtin on the phone, sir.”

  “About time,” he grumbled, before switching to a more appropriate tone as he picked up the heavy, old-fashioned handset. It was funny how quickly he’d become accustomed to the lightweight materials the twenty-first people used.

  “Yes, Prime Minister.”

  The harsh, flat accent of the Australian PM crackled out of the earpiece. “General, I’d like you to hold off on that press conference you’re planning.”

  MacArthur barely contained the outburst that instantly threatened to erupt past his lips. He drew in a quick breath and waited out the political leader.

  “Jones is still some time away from taking Bundaberg, and we’ve had a request from Colonel Toohey, the Australian field commander, to alter the operational plan. They want to try to rescue the surviving townspeople. They’re being held in an open field some distance from the town center, and Jones agrees that it’s worth trying.

  “In that light, I’d rather we didn’t go trumpeting our success on the Line just yet. It should be only a few more hours.”

  MacArthur had to squeeze his eyes shut and fight the urge to bellow down the phone. “Prime Minister, with all due respect, I have to disagree. The Japanese have spent themselves in front of the Line. They’ve collapsed, and that part of our operation is effectively complete. I don’t see how it can have any effect on what Jones or Toohey are planning. However, I am your servant, as always, in these matters. And if that is your wish, then so be it.”

  His rage was so great that he had passed beyond the point of mere anger and into a strange calm place, where everything was devoid of color and utterly flat. His voice didn’t shake at all as he spoke.

  Curtin probably understood him better than did his own commander in chief. At least the prime minister hadn’t handed him a fait accompli. He was shrewd enough—or considerate enough—to present the matter as a choice, not an order.

  “As I said, it’s only a couple of hours, General. It simply means there’ll be more for you to talk about with the press. And you’ll want to familiarize yourself with the details of Bundaberg, so you can handle any questions arising from that, too.”

  “Yes, I suppose I will,” MacArthur agreed.

  “One other thing, General. We’re keeping this business of the dummy convoys under our hat for the moment. Young Kennedy seems to have stumbled onto something that may be of much wider significance, and we’d like to question Homma about it, if at all possible.”

  MacArthur glowered just at the mention of the Kennedy clan. They were no allies of his. “As you wish, Prime Minister. Although I doubt General Homma will allow himself to be taken alive.”

  “Perhaps not, but let’s wait and see. Colonel Jones says that if they can lay their hands on him, he will talk.”

  At this MacArthur turned to his office window, squinting into the late afternoon glare. The city of Brisbane seemed to doze in the heat of an early summer. It had been spared, for now, but he still wondered what plans Tojo might have for all the other divisions he’d withdrawn from China.

  And MacArthur was irritated at all the attention that had been focused on Jones and Toohey’s sideshow, rather than on the magnificent defensive effort he had organized to the north of the city. He couldn’t help but indulge himself in a moment of spite. “I suppose you read Kennedy’s entire report, Prime Minister. And Captain Willet’s also?”

  “Of course,” the PM replied warily.

  “Were you not disturbed by the actions of that young female officer? The Australian? It seemed to me that she lost her head completely when she opened fire on those men in the water.”

  MacArthur could tell he’d scored a small victory when Curtin didn’t reply immediately.

  “Prime Minster?”

  “I had an opportunity to speak to Captain Willet about that matter, General. She assured me that Lieutenant Lohrey’s actions were in no way out of the ordinary. Not as far as their rule book is written, anyway.”

  The PM’s voice carried a suggestion of sadness.

  “It was an ugly business, General. Very ugly. But you’re a soldier, and I don’t doubt that you’ve seen just as bad, if not worse. I’m afraid that, given the emergency we face, I cannot find it in my heart to condemn either Lohrey or Willet. And of course, they still operate under their own rules of engagement, so no legal question will arise from the incident. But you are correct if y
ou think me troubled by it. I’ve been kept up-to-date on the progress of the counteroffensive, and while I shed no tears for the Japanese, I wonder what became of our two countries that they evolved into such pitiless societies.”

  MacArthur hadn’t been expecting that at all. He found himself caught flat-footed for a moment, unable to reply.

  He had followed the debate at home, the pros and cons of allowing Kolhammer to run his little fiefdom as a separate country, if only for a limited time, but the hysteria surrounding that decision was largely a matter of Sunday school morals—an argument about the bedroom, not the battlefield. Still, Curtin must have taken his silence as an invitation to continue.

  “The press is already running stories from those reporters who are embedded with Jones about the summary executions they’re carrying out. It plays very well with the public, of course. They’ve got the blood up. But that’s what worries me, General. We’re supposedly fighting this war to secure ourselves against barbarism, not to embrace it. I accept the fact that those enemy officers who were responsible for the crimes against my people must die for what they have done. But this business of simply dragging them out into the street and shooting them in the head smacks of gangsterism, don’t you think? It’s a long way removed from what Lieutenant Lohrey did in the rush of battle, when she thought her mission and her comrades were imperiled.”

  MacArthur shooed away an aide who appeared at the door. Curtin had tapped into some of his own, very strong misgivings. Whilst he had welcomed the incredible power of Jones’s MEU and Colonel Toohey’s Armored Cavalry units, he had to admit that he found some of their procedures to be deeply disturbing.

  “I don’t know that we’re in a position to judge them, Prime Minister. It’s not simply a matter of supporting your allies. They’ve been at war for twenty years. Can you imagine what your people, what mine would be like, after fighting with the likes of Tojo and Hitler for that length of time? Not much different, I would assume.”