Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  The complete absence of hard edges or solid surfaces served to dampen any sound. Their voices sounded flat and alien to them, and they found that after a while they had fallen into the habit of talking only in harsh whispers. Ryan thought the silence unearthly. Their footfalls made no noise apart from a sort of muffled squelch as they withdrew their boots from the sucking green ooze. Occasionally a small rat would dart out and run off. But no skittering or rustling attended its flight.

  Eventually, the eerie forest gave way to sparse stunted upland of twisted, dead, iron-gray tree trunks. Many exhausting hours were spent threading their way through the tangle. Ryan wondered whether the carriers would have been able to come this far anyway. Rain began to fall, and Kari pulled on a curious, tentlike cowl of laced pandanus leaves, giving Ryan the impression he was walking behind a native hut on legs.

  It was one of the few light moments of the trek.

  A sharp, stabbing pain had settled into his chest, just below the heart. His nose bled and he was thirsty all the time, no matter how much he drank. When they passed out of the rain band, Kari stopped and built a small fire from a supply of kindling he had tied to his belt. They warmed themselves and heated a pot of water for tea. Ryan produced some sugar from a small cloth bag and tipped it in. They revived their spirits with the strong, black brew and a couple of Constable Dinkila’s yam pancakes, eaten cold with a smear of Vegemite.

  “Getting close now, boss,” said Kari. “You want to finish it today or tomorrow.”

  Ryan really wanted to be home in Melbourne, curled up with a good book in front of a warm fire. But he said, “Today. It’s important. The orders came directly from MacArthur’s HQ.”

  “Maybe the big fellah should be here himself,” Kari said, grinning. “If he’s so keen to know what’s up there.”

  “Maybe,” Ryan agreed. “But he’s not. And unfortunately we are. So it’s onward and upward.”

  They cleaned up the makeshift rest site, kicked out the small fire with deep regret, and set their course for the next ridge. It was early afternoon, but darkness was gathering as the daily shroud of mist appeared and the sun passed over the top of the range. Light and heat leaked out of the day. Ryan checked their map.

  “The possum hunter’s hut should be just over that saddle,” he whispered, pointing ahead about five hundred yards. “And then the crash site, another hour beyond that.”

  “If the village headman wasn’t lying,” said Kari.

  “Yes,” Ryan agreed, “there’s always that.”

  They hauled themselves through an increasingly dense field of the limestone outcrops. Sometimes the slabs were so large they presented the blank facade of a great wall. Ryan felt giddy and nauseous from the thinness of the air. He stopped at one point and made the nearly fatal error of sitting down. At once, deliciously warm waves of lassitude stole through every muscle in his body. Sinking down against the hard wet rock felt as luxurious and decadent as crawling into bed in some opulent hotel suite. He recalled, in almost Proustian detail, the soft pillows and thick blankets of his childhood bed. How nice it would be to tuck himself in under the covers for just a few . . .

  Sergeant Kari manhandled him to his feet.

  “Sorry, boss. No good to be sleeping up here. Never wake up again.”

  Ryan apologized for his weakness. They’d been on patrol for weeks when the new orders came through for them at Kirkland’s, down near the river crossing. He was really in no fit state for this Lord Jim jungle wallah nonsense.

  He put one foot in front of the other and painfully got himself moving again.

  When they crested the saddle, there was no possum hunter’s hut, and thus no shelter for the night.

  “Damn them,” cursed Ryan.

  “Listen boss. Shush now.”

  Kari cocked an ear to the higher ground.

  Ryan couldn’t hear anything at first, but after a short time he noticed a faint, metallic banging, and perhaps the sounds of human voices.

  “Japs,” said Kari.

  “Good Lord, so they are here. We’d best push on for a look-see then,” said Ryan, a small surge of adrenaline flushing the fatigue from his bones.

  From that point on, they slipped around through crevices and over nearly vertical naked rock faces like a bead of water running over a fat pandanus leaf. There were more banging noises and voices—definitely Japanese—as they neared the lip of the plateau. Ryan was quietly impressed that they had made it up here before him.

  A stiff breeze quickly strengthened into a hard, cold wind and, within a few minutes, into a howling pitiless gale. That was good. It was blowing from their direction. Down from the peaks. The Japs wouldn’t hear him approach now. They would have to take care not to run into a sentry, but he didn’t think that likely. This mountain was evil. Men huddled together on its face. None would stray too far.

  On hands and knees they slithered forward until he’d reached the lip of the little plateau. Crab-walking sideways until he made the cover of a small bush, Ryan chanced a peek over the edge.

  About three hundred yards away, clearly visible through the thickening gloom, was a ship. A giant gray warship, sinking into the mountain, her bow pointed to the heavens.

  The ship was posed as though she were about to go down, slicing through the rocky spine of the Saruwageds as she would pass through the waters of the Coral Sea on a death plunge to the ocean floor. And yet, she remained poised, knifing into the mist and the sky, as though she had always been there.

  While Ryan’s mind adjusted to the discovery, he began to take in other features of the tableau. The platform into which the ship was forever sinking was covered by a field of giant toadstools, thousands of them, with caps a foot or more across. The moss had colonized them, too, and presented the onlooker with the bizarre vision of a dense mat of knobbled green felt, high in the sky. An occasional granite spike thrust up out of the blanket of moss and fungi. And sheltering in the lee formed by the warship, a dozen tents strained at their ropes as the roaring wind tried to carry them away. He wondered idly how they’d been tied down.

  He already knew who had raised them in this strange place. Japanese soldiers had beaten them to the scene.

  19

  OAHU, 0548 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

  The bodies lay undisturbed for hours. They had been seen during that time, but were ignored. Three sailors on a small motor launch puttering through the bay noticed the forms entwined on the beach and assumed a hard-partying couple had fetched up there after a night on the booze. An hour and a half later an Army Air Force officer riding a motorcycle through the dunes briefly caught sight of them, but he actually had been drinking all night, and was far too inebriated to bother with the sight of a couple, necking down on the sand. He had to sober up get back to barracks and get rid of the stolen bike.

  Eventually a squad of marines from the Eighty-second MEU, pounding the soft sand on an early-morning run, discovered the corpses. Sergeant Clifford Hardy, jogging a few feet in front of his men, was the first to notice the dark shapes at the water’s edge a couple of hundred meters down the beach. Like the others who’d seen the bodies from a distance he immediately assumed them to be a couple flaked out after a long night. They were entwined closely enough to be lovers. Bouncing along, five kilometers into an eight-kilometer run, with sweat in his eyes, he caught just a glimpse at first, a watery blur, and was inclined to ignore the sight. If anything, he was slightly pissed at the prospect of having to detour around them, but when a stronger line of shore break closed out just a few feet from the couple and washed right over the top of them, he knew straightaway they were corpses. The bodies rolled with the white water. One of them, a much darker one, he realized then, flipped right over with the lifeless heft of the dead.

  Sergeant Hardy was a twenty-year man. He was well acquainted with the dead.

  “Yo! Hold up!” he yelled.

  The line of marines, deep in the trance of a long-distance run, stumbled over each other at the unexpecte
d halt.

  “S’up Sarge?” cried Warlow. “Your ticker giving out. You need your pills?”

  “Shut up, Warlow,” Hardy said quietly, his stillness silencing the men.

  They all switched instantly to a watchful keenness. They were dressed for PT, not combat. None carried weapons. One man rubbed the tips of his fingers together. Another cracked knuckles within a closed fist. All of them shifted on the balls of their feet, turning outward, scanning for threats.

  The morning was warm and fresh. A small, half-meter swell broke on the soft crescent of sand in regular sets of three waves at a time. A light onshore breeze ruffled the men’s hair and cooled the sweat that slicked their bodies.

  “Warlow, run up that big dune there and have a look around,” said Hardy. “See if we got any company.”

  The marine took off with a stealthy lope. All of the backchat and sass were gone from him.

  “They dead, Sarge?” asked a giant rifleman.

  “What do you think, butthead?” said Hardy, his eyes traversing like gun barrels.

  “Looks like,” said Private Bukowski.

  “They ours?” another man asked.

  Hardy turned around. It was Snellgrove.

  “What makes you think that, Smelly?”

  The marine, a raven-haired boy from Kansas, inclined his head toward the bodies. Another wave washed over them.

  “Looks like a mixed couple. And you can see their implant scars, I reckon.”

  Warlow yelled down from the heights of the dune. “All clear, Sarge!”

  Hardy took in a deep draft of clean air. It was so much cleaner here. You simply couldn’t deny it. Made a man wonder about the shit he’d been breathing all his life. He took another look at the empty beach. It was a pity to fuck up such a nice-looking place. The sea would be just about perfect for bodysurfing. The glassy green rollers crunched in with a nice hollow boom, and the sand was so white you just knew it’d blind you when the sun got higher. There wasn’t a single piece of trash to be seen anywhere. No condoms. No broken glass. No discarded syringes.

  “Okay,” he sighed. “Y’all know the drill. We’ll take it like any other atrocity site. Just pretend you’re back in Yemen or Syria. Form a box, two hundred meters out. Bukowski, you come with me. We’ll have to drag ’em up or else they’ll get washed away. We’ll walk over there through the surf. But keep your eyes peeled anyway. We might get lucky. Lazy fuckers might’ve tossed a weapon into the water.

  “Okri, you get your ass back to town. Call our guys first. When they got their shit together, let them call the local yokels.”

  Private Okri, who could run the legs off the rest of the squad, nodded and took off, being careful not to intrude into the invisible box Sergeant Hardy had drawn around the scene.

  USS KANDAHAR, PEARL HARBOR, 0612 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

  Captain Francois and Colonel Jones regarded the body with a mix of sadness and disgusted anger. Second Lieutenant Myron Byers had killed himself with a single shot through the temple. The wall behind his body was still sticky with blood and matted hair. A letter, a photograph, and a wedding ring lay together in a ziplock bag on a fold-down bedside shelf. The lieutenant and his wife of eight months smiled out of the photo. It had been taken on their honeymoon.

  The brief note apologized for the mess in the cabin and asked that his wife’s family on her maternal grandmother’s side be given the ring, the photograph, and all of his personal items. They were to keep his belongings in trust for her until her eighteenth birthday, many decades away. His savings were to be invested and held in trust for her until that time, as well.

  “Jesus, what a fucking mess,” Jones said, despondently.

  Francois knew he was talking about the request, not the cleanup job.

  “You gonna do it?” she asked.

  “It’s a man’s dying wish,” he said. He fell quiet for a few seconds. “I should have been paying more attention, seen this coming.”

  Captain Francois rubbed her burning eyes with the heel of one palm.

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Colonel,” she said. “He won’t be that last one we lose this way.”

  Jones had already accepted as much. He hadn’t had time to think much of his own wife and family. There was just so much to do, although, if truth were known, he was probably avoiding the issue. There had been one or two quiet moments since Midway, but he hadn’t sat down by himself to think through the personal implications of the Transition. If they were stuck here, he’d never see Monique or his niece again. It neatly inverted the burden of separation they always felt when he was away on active duty. Now he got to share in their sense of loss, and dread.

  “Colonel?”

  He returned from the unhappy line of thought. “I’m sorry, Captain. You were saying?”

  “I said we might want to think about screening our personnel for acute depression. People are going to respond differently, but some will want to check out, like the lieutenant here. He’s not the first, you know.”

  That surprised Jones. He leaned over, plucked the ziplock bag up between the tips of his fingers, and motioned Francois out of the cabin. She shut the door behind them.

  “You’ve had more suicides?” he asked in a low voice.

  “Four,” said the combat surgeon. “This is the first on the Kandahar. Oddly enough, they’ve all been male so far, even though we’ve got about five hundred mothers serving on ships throughout the task force. You’d think this would have hit them the hardest.”

  “What, you’re saying women miss their kids more? That sounds awfully old-fashioned, Doctor.”

  “Fucking A, that’s what I’m saying, Colonel. And it’s true.”

  Jones was mildly surprised by her fervor, but he chose not to argue with her, even though just that morning he’d found a young marine sobbing on the shoulder of a female petty officer. Jones learned that the man’s wife had given birth to a son just a few weeks before the ship had left for East Timor.

  On the other hand, he knew, not everybody was upset by their circumstances. He was aware of a pilot on the Clinton who’d broken out in a huge wolfish grin when he realized he’d escaped three ex-wives and one fat, famously unsympathetic Chechen bookie named Anxious Stan, to whom he owed about forty grand.

  And some lucky individuals, he guessed, were probably too stupid to comprehend the situation at all. They’d react as they did to all the important events in their lives, by continuing to find undiluted enjoyment in eating, sleeping, and evacuating their bowels whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  “So, how serious do you think it could be,” he asked. “We’re living in a heavily armed village here, Doc. Wouldn’t do to have the natives go weird on us.”

  Francois took her time with the question, and he knew why. Under normal circumstances, most of the twelve thousand men and women in the task force understood that they might be injured, disfigured, or even killed while on duty. They knew, too, that there was always a fair chance that they’d never see or hold their loved ones again. But even the combat veterans, always the most fatalistic types, knew that war spares many more than it takes. And the cherries naively thought it would all happen to somebody else.

  Jones doubted anyone really knew what the circumstances in which they now found themselves meant.

  “Depression’s not something a biochip will pick up,” she said finally. “I can’t scan for it, but we’ve got to figure it’ll be there. Everyone’s going to fit somewhere along the spectrum, from mildly ticked off to thoroughly suicidal. But how that will manifest, I can’t tell you, Colonel. I’d say there’ll be a few incidents over the next week or two, as everyone adjusts. But I’d be hopeful that most would adjust, and pretty well, too. These aren’t normal people. They accepted the prospect of their own deaths when they signed up. I guess we’ll see.”

  Jones weighed the plastic bag in his hands. It felt very light to be the sum trace of a man’s life.

  “It’s not death, though, is it?” he muttere
d. “More like exile.”

  A couple of exhausted seamen arrived from the mortuary to clean out the cabin. Francois gave them their instructions before pushing off back to the hospital. She was due to fit an artificial heart in eight hours and wanted to check on the patient’s preparation. Jones fell in beside her.

  “Here’s a question, Colonel,” she said. “How are you going to get the money to his family?”

  “Dunno, Doc. Hadn’t really thought that one through. Now you mention it, I can’t exactly authorize a Net transfer.”

  “No net.”

  “Right.”

  “Another question, seeing as how you got so much time on your hands. Even if you find a bank to deposit the money in, how much do you actually put in? One of your platoon leaders probably pulls down as much a year as President Roosevelt did in nineteen forty-two. Did you think of that?”

  Jones felt a little peeved.

  “No, Doc. But thank you so very much for pointing it out.”

  “Well, it raises more than a few questions, don’t you think? If we’re trapped here. Like, who pays our bills and wages? You’ve got marines going ashore in Honolulu for a few hours’ liberty tomorrow. How are they going to buy a beer? Amex credit stick?”

  “Damn. I’ve got no idea.”

  Before Francois could entangle him any further his flexipad began to beep. So did hers. They excused each other and took the calls.

  Both swore at exactly the same moment.

  Their eyes locked and they knew they were dealing with the same issue.

  “Secure the site,” said Jones in a flat voice. “I’ll be there ASAP.”

  Francois signed off and gave Jones a challenging look.

  “I’m going, too. I worked Srebrenica and Denpasar for the UN. I’m crime scene qualified.”

  Jones held up his open palms.

  “I’m not standing in your way, Doc.”