Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  O’Brien took a sip of her wine, a nicely chilled chardonnay, and nodded. “That’s partly what I wanted to talk to you about, Eleanor.”

  “Oh, how so, dear?”

  The old girl seemed completely ingenuous, but O’Brien could tell that her radar had just gone to full power. Almost every table in the restaurant was full. Only a couple with reservation cards perched on the starched linen tablecloths were empty. The crowd was mixed, with quite a few uptimers to break down LA’s white power homogeneity. There were more than one or two WASP holdouts on the far side of the Hollywood Hills-clubs, resorts, hotels, and restaurants that maintained a bar against “undesirable” elements, including the movie industry’s Jewish moguls. But they were dying. The Zone was the new center of the universe in California, and like Roman rule, its power was prescriptive and imperial. Twenty-first-century law stopped dead at the boundaries of the Special Administrative Zone, but twenty-first-century custom was spreading up and down the West Coast like a wildfire. It was money. It was always about money, thought O’Brien. If you wanted to tap into the insane wealth that was being generated in the Valley, then you had to play by the Valley’s rules.

  “You see a lot of things that you like out here, don’t you, Eleanor? The way that men and women of all colors and creeds are judged on the basis of their character?”

  The first lady nodded, not warily, but with just a hint of reserve. “I’ve often said to Franklin that the first principles of America have found their truest expression out here,” she said. “But why do you ask, dear?”

  O’Brien didn’t bother sugarcoating it. “Because we will need your help in preserving all this,” she said, waving a hand around the restaurant but implying much beyond its confines. “This war is going to end soon, and the sunset clause in our enabling legislation will suddenly begin to tick. A year later, everything we’ve built here, all those principles you find so appealing, will be exposed to attack by those who do not agree with them. You know what these people are like, what lengths they will go to. Hoover was one of them. He had you followed. He read your mail. He would have destroyed you, given half a chance. He did the same out here-or he tried, anyway-a thousand times over.”

  The first lady acknowledged the point with a dip of her head as a server appeared with a small square plate, in the center of which sat a tangle of roasted pepper shavings and arugula leaves, framing a small roll of daikon, celery, and carrot. O’Brien took the plate and thanked the young woman. Jazz played over the sound system, and the tables were far enough apart that they could speak in low voices without being overheard. O’Brien knew quite a few of the other diners as big-name players from the emerging aerospace and electronics industries. They were doubtlessly hatching their own plots and schemes over the fourteen-course banquet. Some may have even been discussing this very issue. The first lady was not the only person whom she had lobbied on this matter.

  “I can understand your anxiety,” said Mrs. Roosevelt. “But what can I do?”

  It was O’Brien’s turn to smile shyly, a gesture framed entirely for effect. “Come now, Eleanor. You have the president’s ear, and you speak with many people around him. Plus, you’re a significant figure in your own right. You’ve campaigned very hard to establish many of the things that already exist here in the Valley. All I am asking is that you consider helping us, where you can, when you can, back on the East Coast.”

  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wife nodded. “Of course I will, dear. I would have done so anyway. But I must say it’s a pleasure to find a young woman unafraid to put herself and her case forward in such a forthright manner. It gives me hope for the future.”

  “Thank you,” said O’Brien. “That’s very flattering.”

  She maintained eye contact with Eleanor Roosevelt while she spoke, but she noted that a waiter was showing guests to an empty table just behind the first lady. “Stiffy” McClintock, the CEO of McClintock Investments, was dining with a couple of guys from Combat Optics and IBM. She would definitely have to arrange a drink with them afterward. They were all on her list of people “to do” over the sunset clause. She topped up her glass of wine, satisfied with her efforts for the evening so far, as she mentally checked Eleanor Roosevelt off the same list.

  8

  D-DAY+ 12. 15 MAY 1944. 1410 HOURS.

  HIJMS YAMATO.

  The planning room of the Yamato did not run to flat-panel plasma screens or digital projectors. In fact, it looked very much as it had in the first days of June 1942, before the Emergence.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The plotting table looked infinitely worse for Imperial Japan. Yet Grand Admiral Yamamoto betrayed none of the fears eating at his insides as he surveyed the situation. Elements of the army continued their assault against Australian forces in northwestern New Guinea, on Bougainville, and in Timor. But they had been reduced to a sideshow by MacArthur, and were operating almost as guerrilla forces-a task made all the more difficult by their complete lack of support among the native populations on those islands.

  He bit down on a disgusted grunt as he pondered the situation in the Dutch East Indies, or Indonesia as it was now calling itself, where that scabrous dog Moertopo had come back to haunt him. Yamamoto could feel his heart begin to beat faster as he contemplated the depth of Moertopo’s villainy. They should have just executed him in 1942, as Hidaka had suggested.

  Instead he’d been installed as the puppet governor of some obscure Javanese province. From there he had secretly built up his own peasant militia, which had arisen and stabbed the Imperial Japanese Army in the back when MacArthur invaded in November 1943.

  At first nobody paid them any heed. Loyalists under the local general Sukarno were dispatched to deal with them-and were slaughtered to the last man. Only then did the scope of Moertopo’s betrayal become clear. He had clandestinely hosted a large deployment of Australian SAS troops, who had been training and equipping his rebels for almost as long as the little wretch had been taking the emperor’s coin. Now he sat in Jakarta, the puppet president of the so-called Republic of Indonesia, having declared independence from Holland and Japan-with the full backing of his new protectors.

  Yamamoto’s humiliation at having been played for a fool by such a creature was compounded by his total inability to do anything about it. The emperor’s forces were in retreat on so many fronts, they didn’t have the resources to do anything about Moertopo.

  For the moment all his energies were devoted to the looming Battle of the Marianas. If and when they fell, two things would follow. The U.S. Army Air Force would begin its systematic destruction of Japan’s industrialized cities, and the Philippines would likely be taken by Allied forces, robbing Japan of her most important colonial prize and cutting off a vital source of raw materials. Staring at the diabolical state of affairs represented on the giant tabletop display, Yamamoto wanted nothing more than to collapse into a chair, let his head fall into his hands, and scream out his frustrations.

  But he stood impassively as his underlings pushed markers around this miniature world, while others argued minor points of strategy and tactics. Directly across the table from him generals Takeshima and Obata continued their never-ending feud over the relative importance of reinforcing Guam, Saipan, or the Tinian Islands. No matter how much he tried to get them to think in terms of “joint warfare,” as the Allies now called their combined arms operations, the two men were emblematic of the Japanese army’s failure to comprehend how much had changed in just two years. He regretted ever inviting them to his planning meetings.

  Soon, however, they would understand that no matter how formidable they made their defenses, they would be overcome. Only the most ignorant xenophobe still believed in the myth of the decadent democracies. They had proven themselves more than capable of inflicting and absorbing the most grievous harm. Yamamoto didn’t know whether the arrival of the Emergence barbarians-to use the popular phrase-had added anything to the hardening of the democracies’ warrior spirit, b
ut he doubted it. Everything he’d read from the documents of the future, about how this war would have gone, told him that Japan and Germany had been doomed, simply because they couldn’t beat the Allies in the atomic race.

  As the iron behemoth of the Yamato pitched gently beneath his feet on the Pacific swell, he wondered if he had done enough. Realistically, no. Despite everything that had changed, in many ways things had proceeded just as they’d been “meant” to. He was about to fight the Battle of the Marianas at roughly the same time it had been fought in Kolhammer’s world, and the Allies were actually ashore in France a month earlier than would otherwise have been the case. He, of course, had had nothing to do with the defense of the Marianas in the original time frame, having been killed in 1943. But he spent very little time worrying about his personal fate. The world was now full of those who should be dead, but weren’t, and those who were dead when they should have lived.

  His old enemies Nimitz and Halsey were numbered among the latter, and he could not help but feel some residual shame about that. Unlike many others, he did not blame Hidaka for the loss of the Hawaiian Islands. The young officer had been appointed as the civil governor of the colony, not its military ruler.

  That responsibility had fallen to General Ono, and the phantom soldiers of the Negro marines’ unit, the Eighty-second, had murdered him just before the first rocket impact. A terrible thing it had been, too, the way they had ritually humiliated him in his death, and then openly proclaimed their savagery as a valid punishment for his “crimes.” Yamamoto often wondered if that was to be his fate one day. At any rate, Hidaka could not be held responsible for losing the islands. He could, however, be blamed for the abuses of the Americans held under his control, which had done so much to enrage their countrymen and allies, spurring them on to greater efforts in retaking the territory.

  Similarly, all the blood and treasure spent in the failed conquest of Australia had come to naught. His forces had been driven from that island continent, and Prime Minister Curtin had then turned around and released the Australians who came through the Emergence, allowing them to assist in the retaking of Hawaii and the hunt for the Dessaix-it was exactly what Yamamoto had hoped to avoid. All of it attributable, in his opinion, to the ham-fisted brutality of Hidaka. Yamamoto’s vision glazed over. His mind wandered away from the hot, rank planning room and back to the images of Japan’s short-lived occupation of Hawaii. He could not help feeling some approval at the form of Halsey’s death. The man had lived up to his nickname, charging like a bull at a company of Japanese marines, pistols blazing in both hands as they shot him down. Nimitz, however, had been summarily executed, as had hundreds of other high-ranking officers. It was an act of criminal stupidity, given the intelligence that might have been extracted from them, and-Yamamoto fervently believed-it was barbarous. Unworthy of a true warrior.

  Hidaka had no excuses for that. Like Yamamoto, he had been educated in America, and he understood the nature of his enemy with much greater fidelity than many of their countrymen. Perhaps, more to the point, he did not understand himself and his own culture well enough. There was nothing in the code of bushido that should lead a true samurai to commit such grotesque atrocities as Hidaka had visited upon his vanquished foes.

  A sigh at last escaped Yamamoto. A small exhalation of stale air, and a slumping of the shoulders under the weight of his own responsibility for all that had transpired. Around him, preparations continued without pause. Messengers arrived. Junior officers attended to the demands of their superiors. Staff officers worked through scenarios they had examined from every possible angle uncountable times before. Intelligence about the enemy’s movements arrived as the tiniest drops of ice water on the swollen tongue of a man dying from thirst. It wasn’t just that the Allies had access to unbreakable cryptography, thanks to Kolhammer. Not every unit in their order of battle could be so equipped. But there was also a tsunami of disinformation to be picked through, hundreds of thousands of false radio messages sent quite openly, to distract and disarm.

  And regardless of the restrained but growing excitement around him, Yamamoto was transfixed by something that frightened him more than all else, something nobody here seemed to see: the specter of the world he was working to create. A world in which men like Jisaku Hidaka and Heinrich Himmler were armed with atomic weapons.

  “A grim business, yes, Admiral, but I place my faith in the Cherry Blossoms and the spirit of Shikishima.”

  The voice of the First Air Fleet commandant, Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi, cut through Yamamoto’s maudlin self-indulgence. The grand admiral lifted his chin off his tunic, where it had been resting while darker thoughts got the better of him.

  Yamamoto had not been looking forward to this conversation. Vice Admiral Onishi was that most dangerous of creatures, a romantic. To Yamamoto’s way of thinking, he was nigh on obsessed with the martial virtue of self-sacrifice-a reasonable thing, one might have thought, except that Onishi took it to unreasonable lengths. He was known both here and in the twilight world of the Emergence barbarians as the father of the kamikaze- although nobody in the Imperial Japanese Navy used that insulting form of words. To them he was the creator of the tokkotai-the special attack units.

  Suicide bombers.

  He stood in front of Yamamoto, seemingly entranced with the evolving cataclysm on the map table. His eyes positively sparkled as he contemplated the presumed westward passage of Spruance’s main strike force, the Clinton battle group. It was thought to be somewhere between San Diego and Hawaii by now, as the Allies gathered their might for a sledgehammer blow on the empire. A long time ago Yamamoto might have shared Onishi’s enthusiasm for the coming fight. It was shaping up as the Kassen Kantai, the decisive battle, which he had advocated in the first days of the war. But unlike Onishi, who had yet to taste the ashes of defeat, Yamamoto was sanguine about their chances for success.

  “You have heard from Manila, then, Admiral?” he said, tipping his head in reply to Onishi’s bow. “How go your plans?”

  “Very well, Admiral. They go very well. The last of the Ohkas are ready. We have nearly a hundred of the Type Twenty-twos and forty of the turbojet Forty-threes. I have seen a test flight myself, and they are magnificent. Fearsome. The Americans will not be able to withstand them.”

  Yamamoto’s eyebrows crawled toward the ceiling. “So you have only a hundred and forty all together. Admiral Onishi, almost none of them will survive the air screen. Kolhammer’s people have been dealing with rocket swarms of much greater sophistication than anything we can invent.”

  Onishi looked insulted. “That is not all I have been doing,” he protested. “There are two and a half thousand tokkotai ready to fall on the enemy in the conventional way. And many of them will get through. But their role is really to overwhelm the Allied defenses and create a gap for the Ohkas to exploit. That they will do-I assure you. I have studied the archival material and concluded that it would not be sensible to send our men in piecemeal. They must come upon the American fleet as a typhoon comes upon a fishing boat, with overwhelming power.”

  His eyes glistened as he spoke, and Yamamoto feared that he was about to cry again. He had famously soaked the ground with his tears when told of his own act of seppuku in the alternate world at the end of the war. Something had fused in the vice admiral’s mind since then, and he had become unbalanced on the subject of “his” tokkotai.

  “And where have you disposed your forces, Onishi?” he asked, hoping to forestall any possible blubbering.

  His subordinate rapped out instructions, and three junior officers began to place unit markers on the map table throughout the islands of the Marianas.

  “The Germans,” he said as they worked at their task, “were most helpful in speeding up the development of the Type Forty-three, as you would expect given their expertise in the field. However, they were also of great assistance in helping us disguise the airfields from which the tokkotai will embark. I suppose they have learned something
from the Soviets in that regard. At any rate, if you examine the map, you will see that the approach to the islands will naturally funnel the Allied ships to this point”-he tapped at the map table with a long wooden pointer-“where we shall suddenly appear as a great swarm of hornets buzzing about their heads.”

  Yamamoto examined the display, and was not entirely unhappy with what he saw. Onishi had dispersed his forces well, so that they could not be destroyed at a stroke with some Emergence superweapon. They would have a reasonably short flight to intersect the American advance, and although the pilots were not the best in the empire-far from it, in fact-they could probably be trusted to follow their pathfinders. Since the full weight of Spruance’s airpower would most likely be given over to demolishing the bunkers and sandbagged gun pits that generals Takeshima and Obata were so lovingly building, there might even be a chance that some real damage could be done.

  “Have you assigned your men to their targets yet, Admiral Onishi?” he asked.

  “Not only have they been assigned, but they have also been training to press home their attacks as best they can, given our resources. My study of the archives led me to understand that I had previously underestimated the importance of piloting skills, to ensure that a higher percentage of them penetrate the air defense screen. I imagine that Spruance will use his jet fighters for long-range strike missions, and his lesser aircraft to fly combat air patrol around the fleet.”

  Yamamoto could not stifle a snort at that.

  Lesser aircraft! Onishi was talking about F-4 Corsairs and Skyraider fighter-bombers, both of which were vastly superior to the Zero that was still the mainstay of the Japanese fleet. He was glad that Onishi had planned on having so many tokkotai in the attack wave, because most of them were never going to make it through the American defenders.