Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  The last of the Koryak yelled out a few words in some impenetrable northern dialect, repeated almost immediately by other voices up and down the valley. Suddenly the slopes were alive with guerrillas, throwing themselves downward onto the remnants of the escort.

  “Prisoners. We need prisoners,” Ivanov called out before jumping up to join them.

  He and Vendulka half ran, half fell down the steep incline. The footing was treacherous, and two or three times he was forced to let himself drop onto his ass and slide part of the way. Here and there single shots, or short bursts of automatic gunfire, rang out. As he made the shoulder of the road he checked the time hack in his goggles. It was a quarter past midnight.

  “Ahmed, Sergo,” he called out. “Quickly. We need prisoners before any response force gets here. Move, before the Chukchi kill them all.”

  He and Vendulka ran for the second truck, which remained relatively unscathed. As they dashed forward, leaping the bodies of the fallen, he noted that troops wore NKVD uniforms, not Red Army. It made him feel a little better about the slaughter.

  “Ivanov, over here.”

  It was Sergo. The Cossack was pulling a man wearing civilian clothing out of the back of the truck. The prisoner howled in pain. One arm looked as though it had been struck by a bullet. He appeared to have two elbow joints, with the second one in the middle of his forearm.

  “Go,” he said to Vendulka. The medical specialist ran forward, pulling a canvas bag full of supplies off her back.

  Meanwhile Ivanov slowed down and looked to the night sky. The heavens were alive with cold, hard diamond points of light. He took off his goggles. He didn’t need them. The fires from the burning trucks and armored personnel carriers provided more than adequate light to see the Chukchi stripping the bodies and occasionally killing a surviving NKVD man.

  “Kicji,” he called out, “tell them to spare any officers they find. We need to interrogate them.”

  The old Koryak guide shrugged. “They will not like that. They came here to kill Russians.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake…then tell them to spare the officers because I want to torture them,” he said, barely containing his impatience to be away.

  “Ah, that they will like,” Kicji said.

  Ivanov inserted a fresh magazine into his weapon as Ahmed Khan dropped down from the back of one truck.

  “Five civilians,” Khan said. “Three dead. One wounded. One simply shitting himself.”

  “Gather them up and let’s get going,” Ivanov said. “We won’t have long.”

  They had chosen the ambush site because the Bolsheviks’ radios would be unlikely to work well in the folds of the mountains. Lord knew he’d had the same trouble in Afghanistan more than once.

  But you could never be certain of anything. They needed to get to the hideout and start questioning the prisoners as soon as possible.

  28

  D-DAY + 39. 12 JUNE 1944. 0354 HOURS.

  MOSKVA, SEA OF OKHOTSK.

  The fleet carrier Moskva was the pride of the Soviet navy, although Admiral Yumashev would be prouder when he commanded a ship that was truly the product of Soviet labor and ingenuity. The Moskva was merely a copy of a British carrier that had been impounded at Murmansk for two years, and a rough copy at that.

  Hastily built in the new shipyards at Vladivostok, she lacked even the rudimentary comforts of her British model, and that ship had been positively Spartan by the standards of the Vanguard. The commander of the Soviet Pacific Fleet had enjoyed a single tour of the Emergence ship, and been amazed-not just by her perverse situation, sticking out of the tundra in the Siberian wilderness, but also by the level of comfort the crew had enjoyed before the Emergence had killed most of them.

  Or that was the story anyway. Yumashev knew better than to ask questions about their fate.

  Sitting in his chair in the center of the Moskva’s bridge, surveying the fleet in the dim red glow of the surrounding volcanoes in the Kuril chain, Yumashev could only wonder what sort of power might be his to command in ten or fifteen years’ time. The Pacific Fleet had grown from next to nothing at the start of the war into a mighty force, as the Japanese had discovered to their chagrin. It was amazing what could be achieved when the virtually limitless resources of the workers’ state were applied without regard to any consideration other than success. Even so Yumashev was well aware of the fleet’s shortcomings.

  He sipped at a glass of hot sweet black tea, and worried about the things that could go wrong. He wasn’t so much concerned about the Japanese as he was with the potential for an unwanted contact with the Allied forces. The intelligence reports he’d seen, of the force Spruance had assembled to take the Marianas, was the stuff of nightmares. Multiple carrier battle groups, swarms of guided missile frigates and destroyers, staggering tonnages of capital ships-all of them equipped with what the Americans quite rightly called Advanced Technology.

  And of course, at the heart of it, Kolhammer’s rebuilt task force. The Clinton. The Kandahar. The Siranui. And the dozen or more vessels specially constructed for their so-called Auxiliary Forces in Los Angeles and San Diego. Yumashev had read the reports. The firepower contained within that one group-just a subset of Raymond Spruance’s armada-would be enough to shatter Yumashev’s entire fleet within a matter of minutes.

  Even putting aside the magical powers of the “Nemesis” radars, the quantum processors, and the inhuman Combat Intelligence that could control every aspect of a battle, Yumashev had no doubt that the comparatively primitive electronics systems that had become standard equipment on the U.S. Navy’s contemporary vessels would be years beyond the systems on his own ships. He wasn’t complaining, mind you. His ships had proved more than adequate against the Japanese. Without the new radar sets he would have taken much worse damage at the hands of the kamikaze maniacs. And he had taken a terrific pounding in the first few assaults.

  They were winning, though, and-

  “Admiral. An alert, sir. Fast-moving planes approaching from the south.”

  “The south?” he replied. “But there is…never mind. Bring the fleet to general quarters and prepare to receive the enemy.”

  Horns and Klaxons blared. Bells rang and men shouted orders as Yumashev searched the southern skies for the danger. He saw them almost right away, and his heart began hammering painfully.

  Coming over the jagged ranges of the southernmost Kuril Islands he could see dense clumps of bright white stars. They grew in size and number as he watched.

  A single line of tracer fire reached up from a ship on picket duty. Then another and another. As he watched, fascinated and horrified, one of the shining comets fell away from the cluster and dived into the little destroyer. A massive fireball consumed the source of the tracer fire, which ended instantly.

  All around him, voluble but tightly controlled chaos ruled as his men reacted to the attack. Without needing to say a word himself, he heard orders shouted to vector the combat air patrol onto the incoming raiders. Another voice issued commands that brought the full weight of the fleet’s antiaircraft artillery to bear. Technical officers relayed information from the ship’s electronic sensors as it became available.

  “A hundred-plus hostiles…”

  “No surface combatants…”

  “No subsurface threats…”

  “Incoming airspeed estimated at one thousand kilometers per hour…”

  Yumashev’s brows climbed skyward at that.

  One thousand kilometers an hour!

  This was no ordinary kamikaze attack out of Sapporo. These were jet-powered planes. Perhaps even rockets.

  For a terrible second he wondered if the Allies had decided to strike directly at him. They couldn’t be happy at the prospect of Japan falling under Soviet control, and in the last twelve months the Pacific Fleet had prepared any number of scenarios involving combat with the Americans. The results always went badly.

  But as soon as the thought occurred to him, he dismissed it. From his ow
n studies he knew that when Kolhammer struck, the target rarely had a chance to respond, or even to take evasive action. For all of the surprise of this attack, he still had a chance to fight back. Yamamoto had not enjoyed the same luxury when the missiles from the Havoc caught elements of his fleet in Hashirajima, just two years ago. By all accounts the Japanese had had no idea what was happening as they died.

  For that reason alone he suspected he wasn’t fighting Spruance, or Kolhammer. No, he was certain this was the Japanese grand admiral.

  Yamamoto.

  “So, my friend,” he said quietly to himself. “You did not go south after all.”

  It was, all things considered, a beautiful sight.

  As the lower Kurils fell away behind the Ohka, Lieutenant Masahisa Uemura took the briefest of moments to appreciate the vista that stretched out before him. One enemy ship was already ablaze, struck amidships shortly after it opened fire on them. Engulfed from stem to stern in flames, it slipped beneath his wings.

  Before him the Sea of Okhotsk was congested with ships large and small, none of them moving at any great speed. A few gun flashes lit the surface of the waters, giving him a chance to get a fix on his prey, a large flattop vessel in the center of the flotilla. Then the twinkling of small-caliber gunfire and the flare of the big-bore guns spread across the Russian fleet, lighting up the world in front of him.

  As scared as the pilot was-and he was very scared-a part of him felt strangely detached. It was the part that caused him to smile sadly and to stroke his daughter’s doll with one gloved, trembling finger-but only ever so briefly. He had to keep both hands on the stick to avoid a catastrophic loss of control, so close to the end.

  The roar of the engine seemed much louder, and every vibration of the airframe shook him to his core. His mouth was dry and he wished that he could have just one last sip of water.

  Antiaircraft shells began to burst around him, buffeting his plane with great violence. Two close explosions shook his daughter’s doll loose from where he had fixed it on the console.

  “No!” he cried.

  It seemed a much worse thing than his approaching death. Uemura did a quick calculation. The target vessel was now lit up by dozens of guns throwing a storm of metal into the air in front of him. He was about thirty seconds from impact.

  He cursed, gripped the control stick with all the strength in his right hand, and leaned forward to grope around as best he could for Motoko’s doll. He felt the plane veer down and gave a tug on the stick.

  A quick glance over the dashboard.

  The Russian ship was getting much closer, and growing ever larger.

  He grunted in frustration, almost crying.

  Then he had it in his hand, and a beatific smile spilled across his face as he raised the doll to his cheek. It was like being kissed good-bye by his daughter.

  Lieutenant Uemura gripped the controls in both hands again. He pushed the nose down toward his objective. Motoko’s little doll crushed up against the stick.

  The carrier was rushing at him.

  An insane velocity.

  No time for-

  The voices of his officers bellowing orders down the chain of command betrayed an edge of real panic as the kamikaze swarm raced toward them. The enemy was coming in at much greater speeds than in the previous attacks. Almost three times as quickly.

  The Stormoviks of the combat air patrol had closed quickly with them, only to find themselves firing at empty space as the rocket planes swept past. Admiral Yumashev cursed his lack of jet fighters, but there simply hadn’t been time to develop a carrier version of the MiG-15. It hadn’t been done in the world on the other side of the Emergence, either, forcing the Soviet navy to crib from the British carrier planes they had impounded as part of convoy PQ 17. Hence the striking similarities between his Stormoviks and the British Sea Hurricane.

  The predawn gloom was banished entirely as every gun in his fleet opened up. The head of the flying column had already begun to spread out, however, with dozens of rocket-propelled bombs peeling away to throw themselves onto their victims. The noise was head splitting, with hundreds of cannons and machine guns pounding away, all of it laid over the scream of the Japanese engines.

  One, two, three of the attackers detonated in midair. But dozens more speared through the burning debris.

  “Steam, I need steam,” someone called out.

  Yumashev’s eyes bulged as four of the flying demons drove themselves down into the body of the Moskva’s sister ship, Kiev. His heart sank into his boots as the carrier died within a cyclone of high explosives. Any hope that her great mass might absorb the damage was forlorn. The first three blooms of fire swallowed her up just before the fourth and last attacker dived in and blew the entire ship to pieces with a roar that he felt inside his chest from over a kilometer and a half away.

  Yumashev opened his mouth to tell the fire control officer to coordinate a fleetwide defense of the capital ships, but it was too late. The words died at the back of his throat as he saw five of the Japanese rocket bombs heading directly for him.

  He had time enough to register that the planes appeared to be painted white before the first one-now just a streak, a blur across his visual field-stabbed down into the flight deck directly in front of the carrier’s island.

  D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0402 HOURS.

  HMAS HAVOC, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  “Holy shit!” Willet said.

  “Yeah, there’s nothin’ like a good piece of hickory,” Master Chief Flemming muttered.

  “Sorry, Chief?”

  “Gratuitous classic reference, ma’am.”

  Willet shook off a confused look and turned back to the main display, where the second of Yumashev’s two flattops had disappeared within a catastrophic series of blasts.

  “Analysis, Amanda, as soon as poss’.”

  “How about ‘better them than us,’ Captain?” Lieutenant Lohrey answered.

  “You can do better,” Willet replied before addressing the crew of the sub’s Combat Center. “C’mon. Heads down and bums up, people. Every pixel, every pulse, every stray scrap of data. I want it all, and I want it yesterday. We’ve got to get this away on Fleetnet at the first opportunity.”

  Normally hushed, the Havoc’s control room hummed with chatter as the first images of the titanic clash in the Sea of Okhotsk came in from the Big Eye drones lurking at twenty-five thousand meters above the Soviet host. Willet chewed a stick of peppermint gum and tried to take it all in.

  The boat’s Combat Intelligence was way ahead of her, assigning individual data tags to all the Soviet combatants down to the smallest motorboat and numbering each of the Japanese attackers for after-action study. Within the quantum arrays, separate channels were established to track the history of each combatant; autonomous software agents had already begun to crawl over the data like programmed spiders, spinning intricate webs of potential meaning around the rapidly accumulating information load.

  More than two hundred kilometers away from the action, resting safely deep below the surface, the Havoc plugged into the battle via a thin tendril of nanonically engineered optical fiber. It trailed up and away from her conning tower to a small receiver pod bobbing on the wavelets 180 meters above. Skin sensors probed the threat bubble directly around the submarine out to a distance of ninety klicks. Willet’s defensive sysops maintained an obsessive-compulsive watch for any potential foes.

  At the moment they had nothing on the boards but one very old and noisy submarine, probably a Mitsubishi, sixty-four thousand meters to the southwest. It was completely oblivious to their presence.

  Also unnoticed were the Havoc’s drones, two of them over the Soviets and one keeping station above the remnants of Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet. The lightweight plasteel disks, seventy-five centimeters in diameter, were powered by phosphoric acid fuel cells and packed with hundreds of different sensors in the outer ring, which surrounded the power plant and a monobonded carbon fan. Anyone standing
just beneath one of those disks would see what looked exactly like a big eye-hence the name.

  Bejeweled with multiple micronic lenses, a drone was more like the segmented eye of an insect. Only 40 percent of its internal mass was given over to visual systems, however. Most of the weight-such as it was-came from the suite of arrays originally designed to vacuum up electronic intelligence from a twenty-first-century battlespace.

  As panicky radio transmissions arced among Yumashev’s vessels, the combat air patrol, and the Soviet ground forces on Hokkaido, the Havoc’s Big Eye drones listened in, recording everything. When the antiaircraft cruiser Belgorod powered up fire control radar, the drone’s electromagnetic sensor suite went active, locking in on the Soviet ship’s arrays to generate a full-spectrum profile of the systems’ performance.

  The column of Japanese Ohkas had completely broken down into dozens of constituent parts. As Willet and her officer looked on, the Soviet Pacific Fleet was reduced to a handful of destroyers and smaller boats. Time and again elongated white streaks punched into lumbering ironclad ships, always with devastating results. The Soviet fighters, prop-driven relics that looked like a straight clone of the old British Sea Hurricane, were left floundering.

  The volume of the triple A fell away and-she glanced up to check the clock running in the top right-hand corner of the main screen-after three minutes it was done. No Japanese planes survived.

  “CI has the prelims, Captain,” Lieutenant Lohrey announced. “Seventy-three percent of the attackers got through. Eighty-nine percent of those targets that were struck were destroyed, although they seem to have allotted at least four missiles to each of the larger vessels. Five, in the case of the flattops.”

  “They weren’t missiles, Amanda,” Willet corrected her. “They were men.”

  “Sorry, Captain. Force of habit.”

  Willet moved a little farther down the control room, where Yamamoto’s task force was moving toward the tip of Hokkaido. Their progress looked quite stately, even serene, but the grand admiral probably had pedal to the metal.