Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  There was one loose end left, however. The Nagano itself. While her crew remained unaware of the guardian angel that had shepherded them north, the ship could still not be allowed to return home. After-action analysis of her mission would reveal a very large question mark over how she’d have survived the hazardous, high-speed run to deliver her suicide planes.

  “I suppose if I were Lord Nelson, I would just put a telescope to my blind eye and pretend I hadn’t seen anything,” said Willet.

  “But you’re not, are you, ma’am?” said Flemming.

  “Nope. Weapons, still got a target lock?”

  “On six tubes, ma’am. Programmed for simultaneous impact.”

  “Very good. Fire them all. Now.”

  The weapons sysop swept his fingers across a touch screen, lighting up six icons, before thumbing a final command. The sub vibrated slightly as all the warshots left their tubes at the same time.

  “Why do you think they lit Tokyo?” asked Flemming as they waited for the kill.

  She shrugged. “Temporary madness. Show of strength. Vengeance for Okhotsk. Who knows with the Sovs? They’re a bunch of fucking Klingons, those guys.”

  The ADCAP torpedoes closed the gap to their prey quickly. A drone at sixty-five hundred meters followed the Nagano in LLAMPS vision, and the ship’s Combat Intelligence provided a simulated display of the attack on another screen. Less than a minute after launch all six warheads simultaneously struck the refitted kamikaze transporter deep below the waterline, detonating with such force that the vessel completely disintegrated.

  “Good shooting, everyone,” said Willet. “Now what do we have on the threat boards?”

  “Nothing immediate,” her executive officer reported.

  Willet sighed, feeling tired and hollow.

  “Okay, that’s good. We’ll need to linger a little while and ensure there are no survivors.”

  D-DAY + 44. 16 JUNE 1944. 0633 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  The picture of his wife was real, not a quantum image on a thin-screen. Protected by a small sheet of glass, housed in a simple dark wooden frame, Marie Kolhammer smiled out at her husband from across the gulf of time. She was sitting at a garden table on the back deck of their house in Santa Monica, a light lunch of bread, cheese, and fruit laid out in front of her. A half-filled glass of white wine in her hand. He had taken the snap the last time he’d been home, just before leaving for the Timor deployment.

  Admiral Phillip Kolhammer wondered where his wife was now. The idea of another world, of his world, remained strong with him. Shortly after he’d arrived here he’d spoken with Albert Einstein, who’d assured him that in a way his wife was closer to him than the shirt on his back. The idea kept him from going mad with grief.

  Many of his colleagues had adapted to their new lives in the past. Some, like Mike Judge and Karen Halabi, had found companions from among the thousands of men and women who’d come through Manning Pope’s wormhole. Others had partnered up with locals, and as with all relationships some had worked and some hadn’t. That was just the way of things. He would be nothing like that, however. Kolhammer kissed the image of his wife before rubbing the impression of his lips off the glass with a shirt cuff and replacing the old-fashioned photograph on his desk. He and Marie had often discussed what would happen if one of them was lost to the other, and in all of their discussions it had been implicit that she would be the one left behind. They had joked about it gently. Him saying that he was too wrinkled and salty and goddamn rough-headed to attract another woman foolish enough to marry him. While Marie had always insisted there could not be a more “difficult” woman than her in any of the continental states. They had known that whatever happened, there could be no others for them.

  A deep breath, held for too long, escaped him.

  “Oh darlin’, I do miss you…,” he said softly.

  His PA, Lieutenant Liao, appeared in the doorway, coughing discreetly. “General Jones is here, Admiral.”

  “Thanks, Willy, send him through.”

  The commander of the Eighty-second stepped past the lieutenant into Kolhammer’s day cabin, saluting and standing at attention. Kolhammer waved him in and bid him to sit down on the old brown couch across from his desk.

  “Well, Lonesome, are you disappointed?”

  Jones let the formality run out of his posture. They were old friends now. “Disappointed at what, Admiral? Not getting killed? Not getting my boys and girls killed? No. Of course not. Some of the youngsters are pissed as hell. But they’ll get over it. I’m already proud of them. And as we both know, there’ll be time and opportunity enough for getting killed in the future.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Kolhammer. “There’ll be plenty of that.”

  He stood up and made his way over to a side table. A small plate of cookies sat next to a gurgling coffeepot. A new one, just out of the States.

  “Would you like a brew, Lonesome? We’ve got ten minutes before the meeting?”

  “Sure. And one of those little choc-chip motherfuckers wouldn’t go astray, either.”

  Kolhammer smiled as he poured two mugs and handed one, with the plate, to the big marine. “You hear the Sovs have signed up to the cease-fire?”

  “Heard on the way over,” said Jones. “Guess they figure they were checked for now.”

  “They’ll be back,” said Kolhammer. “For my money, that’s why they nuked Tokyo. They’re preparing the ground. If they couldn’t have the city themselves, they figured they’d give us the ashes.”

  “They nuked Tokyo because of Kamchatka,” said Jones. “Getting even. Sending a message.”

  “That, too,” the admiral agreed. “Seems just about everyone with a nuke seems to be sending a message these days. Might be an idea if they all took a breather, don’t you think, before there’s nobody left to get the goddamn message.”

  Jones dunked a cookie and sipped from his coffee mug. “You think Roosevelt’s gonna let them have half of Japan?”

  Kolhammer shrugged.

  “He’s going to have a hell of a time telling them no, unless he plans on flash-frying a whole bunch of their cities before they have a chance to hit back.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as the type,” said Jones. “He’s no Hillary.”

  “No,” agreed Kolhammer. “He’s not.”

  They sat in a companionable silence for a few moments, each man alone with his thoughts. Kolhammer was trying to weave some sense of what might happen from everything that had gone wrong. It was not a happy prospect. You’d have thought that knowing how things would have turned out, folks might have been some way along the track to figuring out how they should have turned out. But no. People seemed to have an infinite capacity for willful ignorance. It wasn’t just the Soviets running wild over half the world, or civil wars in places like Palestine and South Africa. It was back home, too. Things would never come to a shooting war there, but you could see there were some hard days coming as the country tried to digest its future.

  “What d’you think you’ll do?”

  “Huh? Sorry.” Lonesome’s question had caught him off-guard.

  “When we get back. Will you stay in the service? Or go private.”

  Kolhammer’s answer was delayed by the muted roar of an A-4 ripping down the flight deck not far above their heads. It was a question he’d given some thought to, but without coming to any conclusions yet.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Things will change when peace breaks out. The sunset clause will start ticking, for one thing. But people will feel a lot freer to air their differences and to act on them, too. The Zone, the Valley, or whatever you want to call it, is going to be at the center of that. I feel I should be there one way or another. What about you?”

  Jones surprised him with his answer. “I’ll be staying in the corps. I think Truman will get the job come November, and he’ll desegregate the forces. Then the real work will begin.”

  “You wouldn
’t be working under our system anymore, Lonesome. You’d be in their world. They’ll take your brigade from you, for starters. You know that, don’t you?”

  The general nodded. “I do. But because it is going to happen, like you, I feel the need to be there. Besides, I don’t think we’re done fighting. Not by a long way.”

  Kolhammer nodded his agreement.

  The task force was still steaming eastward but it had turned north, away from the Marianas, after detaching a smaller force to accept the Japanese surrender there. Everything was up in the air. He assumed they’d be occupying the Japanese Home Islands, at least in the short term, but that hadn’t been confirmed yet. Nobody even knew how those islands were going to be divided among the winners. It was a fair assumption that Tokyo was going to end up in the American and Australian sector, though. On the Asian mainland China was still convulsed in war, with the Soviets and Mao’s Communists allied against the Nationalist government. Sheer mass was going to tell in that battle, he was certain. Indeed, Uncle Joe’s minions had been busy all over. They were fighting in Korea, Indochina, Afghanistan, and Persia. Not to mention the huge bites they’d taken out of Eastern and Western Europe.

  “Yeah, there’ll be some fighting yet,” said Kolhammer.

  Lieutenant Liao appeared at the door again. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “But we’ve just received a priority encrypted data burst from Captain Willet on the Havoc. Your eyes only. It’s on your desktop now.”

  He thanked his assistant and clicked on the flashing icon.

  Jones took another cookie while he waited.

  “Hmm,” said Kolhammer. “That’s a shame.”

  “Can you say what?”

  “Captain Willet caught up with the Nagano, that kamikaze transport, and sank her. But she regrets to inform us that it was after the cessation of hostilities. The cease-fire orders didn’t get through in time.”

  “She pick up any survivors?” asked Jones.

  “There were none,” said Kolhammer, pointedly.

  The marine shrugged.

  “Fortunes of war, Admiral.”

  “I suppose so,” said Kolhammer.

  EPILOGUE

  7 AUGUST 1944.

  SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.

  If she squinted into the bright morning light and concentrated on the northern headland, where developers hadn’t gained the upper hand back in twenty-one, it was almost possible for Jane Willet to imagine she was home again. Bondi Beach remained the same deep, south-facing bay. That would never change. The biscuit-colored cliffs looked just as they had when she’d last left her Sydney, the beautiful, conflicted, and utterly self-obsessed meta-city of 2021. Standing in the fresh air on the flying bridge of the Havoc’s conning tower, she could see the old art deco apartment she’d rented for a year when studying for her postgrad degree at Sydney Uni, except that here it was a “new” building, standing out rather starkly on the raw, scraped-looking heights of Ben Buckler. The third story had not yet been added and two modern houses that had stood beside it in her memory were gone, replaced by fibro cottages. Goats roamed freely over what would one day be the links of the North Bondi golf course.

  “Fancy a drink at the RSL, Chief?” she asked.

  Roy Flemming didn’t take the binoculars from his eyes. “They haven’t built it yet, skipper. Just a big sand dune there at the moment.”

  The great, black cigar-shaped hull of the most powerful submarine in the world passed smoothly through the cold blue waters of the Pacific as they drew nearer to the end of their long voyage. There was almost no swell to speak of today, no lines of whitecapped breakers rolling in toward the golden crescent of the beach. Her beach. That was fine by Willet. It’d make for a much smoother passage through the Heads.

  “Not much of a welcome home, is it?” mused Lieutenant Lohrey, her intelligence boss.

  “Not much,” Willet agreed.

  There were only a few sailboats out on the deep, and no RAN vessels or officials to greet them.

  “We are having a reception at town hall tomorrow, remember,” the captain offered a little weakly.

  “Whacko,” said Flemming.

  “Spiffing,” Lohrey agreed in the same monotone.

  Willet smiled thinly and muttered, “Wankers.”

  They passed the cliffs at Vaucluse in companionable silence, watching as the lighthouse drew up, then slipped behind them. Soon enough they were turning to port for the run in to Sydney Harbor, and as Willet was afforded a better look inside the vast anchorage, her heart began to beat harder. A real smile broke out, lighting up her face.

  The entire harbor was choked with flotillas of sailcraft and warships. A dozen ferries, all of them crowded with cheering and waving spectators, were drawn up in the waters off Manly Pier. Tugboats pumped huge white geysers from their fire hoses, high into the sky, forming rainbows as the winter sunlight refracted through the falling spray. Horns began to blare. Whistles shrieked and tooted. And Willet could feel in her chest the roar of what had to be a million voices raised in acclamation of their return. She wanted to speak but a lump in her throat prevented any words from coming. She swallowed and tried again, beaming as she turned to Lohrey. “Amanda, you’d better make sure the crew can see this on shipnet. They’re gonna be pissed if they miss it.”

  The Havoc’s intelligence chief sported a rather sheepish grin. “Already taken care of, skipper.”

  Willet narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “You knew? You knew this was waiting for us and you didn’t say anything?”

  Lohrey showed her a pair of open, honest palms. “Orders from the PM, ma’am. Mr. Curtin was adamant that this was to be a surprise party. He’s waiting for us at Woolloomooloo along with an honor guard, our families, such as they are, and a couple of hundred freeloading dignitaries.”

  Willet’s curse was lost in the roar of six RAAF jet fighters sweeping overhead, waggling their wings and trailing green and gold smoke, a nice uptime touch. A battery at the North Head artillery school commenced a twenty-one-gun salute.

  The captain of His Majesty’s Australian Ship Havoc saw almost none of it as tears dissolved the scene into a swirling miasma of color. She felt Roy Flemming’s hard, leathery hand slap her once on the back.

  “Good job, skipper. Good fucking job.”

  7 AUGUST, 1944.

  CANADA.

  Paul Brasch stepped lightly out of the jeep and thanked the driver before collecting his duffel bag. Night was falling on the small lakeside village; one bright star had already appeared in the east, a single point of light in a burned orange sky. Without the wind of the jeep’s passage, he became aware of a rich stew of unfamiliar scents and the chaotic overture of birdsong and insect calls.

  The village, a tiny hamlet that serviced the local salmon-fishing industry, was a good mile around the curve of the lake. He caught the briefest hint of singing and a piano playing as the breeze changed direction for a moment. And then it was gone again, and he was left alone at the end of the long gravel roadway down to the waterfront cabin.

  The sound of the jeep’s engine faded away, and he began to walk. With each step he found his throat growing tighter, and his eyes bleary with the first tears he had shed in an age. He walked slowly, taking in the magnificent view and the quiet peace that surrounded him, hoping to compose himself before meeting his wife and son. He had no idea whether they would stay here in this obscure part of Canada, no idea what the rest of their lives would bring. He had money enough to give them a new life anywhere in the free world, but perhaps, for the next little while, they might just sit quietly here by the edge of this lake and wonder at the miracle that had delivered them from evil.

  Brasch was imagining long fishing trips with little Manny, and the first night he would spend in bed with his wife, when a small, piping voice brought his head up with a start.

  “Papa! Papa!”

  It was Manfred and Willie, both of them running up the path toward him, arms out, their cheeks red and wet with tears of joy. But there
was something wrong with the boy’s face and his voice. Brasch experienced a second of free-floating panic and then realized what was so different. Manny’s voice was clear and his mouth a perfect O as he ran toward his long-lost daddy. The cleft palate with which he’d been born-the small deformity that would inevitably have seen him fed into the ovens of the Reich at some point-was gone. Fixed by surgery, he supposed.

  But gone. Gone forever.

  “Papa! Papa!”

  Paul Brasch, the good German, dropped his duffel bag and ran toward them.

  7 AUGUST 1944.

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.

  “So when are you starting work, ma’am.”

  Mohr’s voice was a raspy bellow in her ear. It had to be, or she would never have heard him over the roar of the nightclub.

  “Please, Eddie!” she yelled back. “Would you knock it off with the ma’am-and-skipper routine. We’re not on the quarterdeck and I’m not even a captain anymore. Karen will be fine.”

  The big chief petty officer smiled and winked. “Right you are, ma’am. Karen it is, then, skipper.”

  His face glistened with sweat, and stage lighting glinted off his scalp beneath the short back and sides. Karen Halabi rolled her eyes, but she, too, was smiling. She was free. She was alive. She was a little bit drunk. And she was married to the greatest guy in the world who was, at that very moment, up on stage, playing his beloved electric guitar in public for the first time in three years. Mike was a little rusty, but like everyone in the Palomino Club he was also drunk and happy and well beyond caring whether his version of “Smoke on the Water” paid sufficient homage to the original. The guys in his garage band were all uptimers and they were just loving the chance to play some old-school rock and roll for the heaving crowd of Zoners and Angelinos who gathered at the Palomino four nights a week to dance along to some kickin’ tunes.