Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  More to the point, he was pissed at himself for not clearly understanding his own motivations. Was he really afraid the Siranui’s crew might mutiny? That was preposterous. He had worked with that ship on a number of occasions. Okada was, if not a friend, then at least a trusted colleague. But of course, Okada was dead. And any fears he had that the surviving men might—what, steal the technology, and give it to Yamamoto? Well, it was ridiculous and insulting to the survivors. After all, he didn’t expect the Germans to run back to the führer.

  “Admiral Kolhammer? Sir?”

  Lieutenant Brooks had caught him when his mind was wandering.

  “I’m sorry Lieutenant. Fatigue. Give it to me again.”

  Kirsty Brooks gave no hint that she’d been put off by his reverie. She repeated her last statement a little louder, as though he merely hadn’t heard over the buzz in the room.

  “You can see for yourself, Admiral. Nagumo’s battle group has definitely turned tail. And although Yamamoto and the other fleet elements are at the edge of our sensor range, they all appear to have altered course, as well. They’re bugging out.”

  The Clinton’s CIC was a hive of activity, with all of the departments fully staffed and working hard to compensate for the vast inflows of national source intelligence that they had left behind in the twenty-first century. Antiair, antisubmarine, anti-surface-warfare centers all hummed ceaselessly. Only the antiorbital center seemed to be running at a moderately relaxed pace.

  “And this trace contact,” said Kolhammer. “How long ago was that?”

  “Twelve minutes ago, sir,” Brooks replied. “Could have been an echo effect, but it didn’t read that way. Little Bill picked up the silhouette. He figured an eighty-four percent probability that it was the Garrett.”

  “In the Antarctic?” Kolhammer said, doubtfully.

  “Near enough, Admiral.”

  The CIC was bitingly cold. Kolhammer shivered.

  “ETA for Spruance?” he asked.

  Brooks checked on her main screen.

  “Should be touching down now, sir.”

  USS GARRETT, SOUTHERN OCEAN, 0434 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Extreme low-pressure weather systems, whether they’re called hurricanes, or typhoons, or cyclones, are memorable events for those caught up in them; so memorable, they’re often given names whenever they cross paths with civilization. In the deep, circumpolar belt of ocean between fifty and sixty degrees south, however, dozens of giant storm cells are generated every year without being named, because there’s nobody to witness them in the vast, empty swathes of the Southern Ocean.

  Very little landmass occupies that belt of water. With almost nothing to impede them, the great storms can pile up incredible amounts of water at their leading edge. The surges gather power as they travel around the world. Sailors who have witnessed such things say that nothing bears comparison with them: fast-moving, hundred-foot-high walls of black water. Even larger rogue waves can be caused by a combination of factors—a storm surge, a pressure convergence line, a subsurface feature such as the edge of a continental shelf, or the meshing of two or three single waves into one behemoth. Such monster waves rarely survive for long, and are even more rarely reported.

  Almost nobody who encounters them lives to tell the tale.

  So it was with the air-warfare destroyer USS Garrett. Thanks to the unstable, anomalous field generated by Pope’s experiment, she emerged a great distance from the originating event.

  The crew of the Garrett was only 120 strong. None awoke immediately from the temporary coma of Transition Sickness. A small number, however, did perish quickly. Nine men and four women, who had been on deck when the wormhole inflated, were swept away by the enormous seas into which they emerged. A few more broke their necks and backs as their limp bodies were flung about belowdecks. Many suffered broken limbs and concussion.

  Eventually, after three hours, a handful of sailors did regain consciousness, but they were in no condition to control the ship. One, a petty officer, managed to crawl into the bridge, hoping to cede autonomy to the CI. But an eighteen-meter wave had smashed the blast windows and poured in, shorting out the equipment. Before she could exit the ruined post, the destroyer slipped over the ridge of a colossal wave and speared down the reverse side. The wave behind it rolled over the vessel. Thousands of liters of freezing seawater poured in and sucked the screaming woman back out again.

  The Garrett succumbed at 0435 hours when she ran headfirst into one of those massive, unstable, mountain ranges of water that stalk the wastes of the Southern Ocean. The warship climbed gamely up the face of the cliff, but it was simply too big to surmount. In her final moments she slewed around on the nearly vertical surface and rolled.

  The flickering echo of a distress call from her CI, which bounced off the troposphere and spattered weakly against the Nemesis arrays of the Siranui a few minutes later, was the last anyone heard of her.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0488 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Spruance couldn’t help but be impressed. The size of the Hillary Clinton was imposing to begin with. He imagined you could fit the Enterprise into her three times over, by volume.

  The flight deck was a wreck, littered with piles of scrap and ripped open like an old tin can down aft of the second finlike structure, which he assumed had to play the same role as the island on the Big E. Even wounded as badly as she was, however, the ship hummed with power. The admiral found himself deeply conflicted: proud that his men could dish out so much punishment to a vastly superior adversary; and deeply sorry that they had done so. He might have been able to win the war in a day with this floating brute.

  He’d heard his name whispered repeatedly as Commander Judge led him through the vessel. It was so very strange, these men and women, many of them looking like foreigners but speaking in accents he recognized from the corridors of his own ship; they seemed to look upon him as if he were some sort of movie star. As some pointed and others stared, he saw real awe and respect in their eyes. It wasn’t altogether pleasing. He must have returned over a hundred salutes, all of them ripped out with parade-ground perfection as he made his way through the vessel. Dan Black had rejoined him, with that young ensign trailing along in their rear beside half a dozen officers from the Enterprise.

  They turned into a room dominated by the biggest movie screen Spruance had ever seen outside a theater. Kolhammer and a number of his officers, looking like a delegation from the League of Nations, were waiting. Spruance didn’t waste any time.

  “So, the Japs are running are they? How do you know? They might be making a flanking maneuver for Pearl. They could pull it off if they wanted to.”

  Kolhammer pointed a smooth black stick at the big movie screen. It filled up with some kind of radar image. But it looked like . . . Spruance searched for a metaphor, but all that came to mind were the cartoons you sometimes saw before a Saturday matinee. The images looked drawn. They most certainly weren’t the fuzzy lights and blurred, sweeping arcs he associated with radar. He could see Nagumo’s force neatly illustrated with little boats and name tags. Dozens of vessels surrounded four carriers. Most of them were identified, too.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Spruance, unsure whether to be impressed or pissed off.

  “It’s a computerized representation of our intelligence take,” said Kolhammer. “Just think of it as an illustration of what our radars can pick up. It’s easier to show you this way.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Admiral. Just tell us what’s happening.”

  The briefing room wasn’t large for the number of men and women it contained. They had clustered around their respective leaders, and the dozen or so gathered behind Kolhammer tensed at Spruance’s outburst. In turn, the men off the Enterprise stiffened up and jutted their jaws out that little bit farther. Most of their aggression flowed toward three officers of Asian appearance who stood near Kolhammer.

  “They’re running. I can’t put it any more simply,” said the Clinton’s CO.r />
  “That’s all well and good,” said Spruance, “but do you have any idea why the Japs are running? If it’s true.”

  Kolhammer motioned to some seats. Spruance thought they looked very odd. They were misshapen and composed of some hard, unknown material. He indicated that he preferred to remain standing. Kolhammer shrugged.

  “It’s true,” he said. “But I don’t know why they’ve turned tail. They almost certainly picked up the radio broadcast I made to you last night, followed of course by the traffic between your own ships and pilots during the battle. Nagumo was, or is, incredibly conservative. The exposure of his plan and your trap may have been enough to cause him to abort the operation.”

  Neither Spruance nor his men looked at all convinced.

  “Are we supposed to just accept that?”

  “You’ll have to accept that they’re running,” said Kolhammer, indicating the image behind his back. “Our radar confirms it.”

  “With all due respect,” Spruance said, leaving no doubt he had very little respect for his new, unwanted allies, “you only know these bastards from your books. We know them firsthand. They don’t turn and run like that without a very good reason. And I don’t see one. You wouldn’t have had any other ships with you off the East Indies, would you? Something else that might have spooked Nagumo.”

  Spruance could tell he’d hit a raw nerve with that question. Kolhammer seemed to be chewing over a very tough piece of gristle as he pondered his answer.

  “Well, there has been another development,” he conceded. “We may have located a missing ship from our task force. A destroyer, the Garrett. She appears to have emerged in the Southern Ocean. We had a very faint distress signal from her. We’ve heard nothing since. Weather down there is pretty wretched at this time of year. If the crew were unconscious she may have foundered.”

  Spruance felt a tingle run up his spine. It wasn’t at all pleasant.

  “And how many other ships have you misplaced, Admiral?” he muttered, barely able to contain his growing rage.

  “First,” said Kolhammer in a clipped tone indicating that he did not appreciate Spruance’s insinuation, “we didn’t misplace them. We’re as much a victim of the accident that brought us here as you are. Second, I can’t tell you with any certainty which ships are missing because I don’t know which came through. But it’s possible that others may have arrived. We’re following up a ghost return from the southwest that might be a British destroyer, the Vanguard.”

  “And you’ve sat on this for how long?” asked Spruance, incredulity struggling with fury in his voice.

  “We haven’t suppressed it at all. These signal traces are less than fifteen minutes old. I was informed on my way here to meet you. We’re still analyzing them.”

  Spruance exploded.

  “Goddamn it! Have you got any of your precious analysts evaluating what sort of a mess we’ll b

  17

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0612 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

  Later, as the survivors of the combined task forces steamed back toward Hawaii, Kolhammer sat alone, in silence, staring at the flatscreen on his stateroom wall. It displayed an image of his home in Santa Monica, with his wife, Marie, in gardening gloves, attacking a dense wall of agapanthus. Lucy, their black Labrador, lay under a eucalyptus, sheltering from the sun.

  As Kolhammer gazed at the scene his throat grew tight and two tears squeezed out like hard little bullets of grief, tracked down his freckled face.

  “I’m sorry Marie,” he whispered to her. “I promised to come home and now . . . I just don’t know.”

  He stared a while longer, then reached for the control stick and thumbed through a series of flawlessly reproduced images. More garden shots. A picture of Marie and Lucy on the old couch in the sunroom. A few pictures of their son, Jed, killed off Taiwan. No grandchildren, sadly. But a few much-loved great-nephews and -nieces. And other family portraits, becoming stiffer and more formal as they moved back through the years, tracing the Kolhammer family journey from the German city of Magdeburg in 1934 to the New World, and then west across the continent. Following a trail laid down by generations of the damned.

  Kolhammer froze the slide show on a sepia-toned studio image of his great-uncle Hans and great-aunt Hilda. The photograph had been torn before being digitized long ago, and Kolhammer had asked the image bureau to leave the imperfection as it was. He liked it that way. Family photographs, he firmly believed, should be weathered and a little damaged by age and handling. It was proof of one generation handing on history to the next.

  He stared at the portrait of Hans and Hilda, peering into the hollow space around their eyes. Knowing and yet not really understanding what misery and horror danced slowly in there. The photo had been taken in New York in 1952, but both were still draped in heavy European clothes. Kolhammer accepted that the long sleeves weren’t simply an expression of émigré formality. He remembered spending many hours with his great-uncle as a boy. And he knew that under the heavy serge suit was a tattoo of which Hans was unspeakably ashamed. It had been burned there by a minor functionary of Heinrich Himmler’s SS and it marked him as a survivor of the Final Solution.

  Hans had kept it hidden for many years, but late in his life—just after a young Phillip Kolhammer had taken his commission in the U.S. Navy—a trembling, wasted Uncle Hans had left his nursing home and traveled across the continent to visit his nephew. The trip was unannounced. Hans simply up and left one day and there was hell and high interest to pay when he got back. He was struggling with the latter stages of Parkinson’s by then, a foe that would claim him where the führer’s minions had failed.

  Young Phillip was surprised, enchanted, and little concerned when the old guy turned up without warning. He hadn’t taken his medication with any sort of regularity, and the cross-country road trip in a Greyhound bus had been awfully tough on his old bones. But Hans had waved that aside, seized his favorite nephew in a weak, shaky bear hug, and told him how proud he was to see a Kolhammer in the uniform of his liberators. After a few hours of drinking and bullshitting and of Marie fretting endlessly, Uncle Hans took Phillip aside. They had men’s business to discuss, he told Marie, as he led her husband into a bedroom.

  They stood in there, alone, and a terrible stillness came over his twitching face as he stripped his sleeves and bared his arm, pointing at the tattoo.

  “You promise me now, nephew,” he said. “Promise me that for as long as there is breath in your body and you wear the uniform of a free country, you promise me that you will never allow this evil a place in the world again.”

  Phillip Kolhammer had promised.

  PART THREE

  * * * * *

  ALLIANCES

  18

  THE SARUWAGED RANGES, NEW GUINEA, 0445 HOURS, JUNE 1942

  The last village lay a thousand feet below them. Amyen, a small, tight cluster of bark huts, was set among limestone lakes and gardens of sweet potato, which gradually gave onto forest at the foot of the ranges. It was unmarked on any maps, unknown to the colonial authorities in Port Moresby.

  Warrant Officer Peter Ryan huddled in the mouth of the cave and peered out into the freezing mists. He knew that seven thousand feet below them lay the Wain and Naba country, and the flatlands of the Markham River. Were it not for the accursed mountain weather he’d probably be able to see Lae and Salamaua, where the Japs were already busy digging in.

  It was another world down there, oppressively hot and humid, with thick, primordial jungle clinging to the edge of fast-flowing rivers. For Ryan, the dense, superheated air of the lowlands was reminiscent of a big Chinese laundry, or some other confined place where you’d find large quantities of boiling water. Up here, though, the conditions were practically arctic as they clumped together in the cramped limestone cave.

  A thick, foul-smelling fug of body odors, and smoke, and human grease reached out for him from the dark recesses of the cave. The last of his native carriers were huddled together in there on
sheets of beaten bark. He’d set out from Amyen with fifteen stout boys. The last four had gone down with a fever in the cave the previous night. Ryan knew he’d get no more work from them. His native sergeant, Kari, had offered to try and get the bearers to their feet, but Ryan told him not to bother. They were best left there, under the watch of Constable Dinkila, while the two of them made the last push up to the ridge.

  “We’ll move faster without them or the baggage,” said Ryan.

  “They won’t be here when we get back, boss,” Kari argued. “Then we won’t need baggage. Just coffins.”

  Ryan essayed a weak smile at his friend.

  “Needs must when the Devil drives, Sergeant. There’s something quite odd going on up this mountain. And I’m Johnny-on-the-spot.”

  Just before dawn a freezing gale howled down from between the jagged, broken teeth of the Saruwageds, blowing away the mist and their last excuse for staying tucked up in the relative warmth and comfort of the cave. Ryan and Kari ate three tins of bully beef and a packet of biscuits, washed down with a canteen of water collected from the many trickles of condensation running down the smooth black rock face outside their shelter. They put on their last dry socks and best boots, gave Constable Dinkila strict instructions about caring for and guarding the carriers, and then they set off, carrying their Owen guns and long lengths of vine rope.

  They traversed a sickeningly steep, razor-thin ridgeline on their hands and knees before plunging back into the forest. Ryan thought it akin to stepping into a darkened basement from a bright-lit garden. A soft dark green, evil-looking moss covered everything, sometimes to a thickness of a foot. Trees took on the appearance of fleshy, bloated green monsters from one of Grimm’s fairy tales. Walking was a matter of sinking their feet into a spongy, moss-covered sludge of rotting vegetable matter. Sometimes they sank in up to their thighs. At one point, curious about the true depth of the strange, clotted mulch, Ryan pushed in sharpened stick. It was eight feet long and met no resistance. They trod more carefully after that.