Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  The topic had hung between them like an unspoken curse, and Mohr found himself looking for eavesdroppers before he replied. He’d learned that not everyone appreciated or understood his respect for the late commander of the Leyte Gulf. In fact, there’d been some ugliness over it.

  He leaned over to Evans and lowered his voice. “The way I hear it, they collected enough evidence at the scene to nail whoever done it, if they can figure out whoever done it.”

  Evans crinkled his brow with the effort of trying to understand as Mohr continued.

  “Doc Wassman, remember her? She tells me they can collect a sample of a guy’s . . . uh, stuff. His come. And they can test it to show exactly who left it behind.”

  “She was raped, then?”

  Mohr’s features contorted with distaste.

  “Oh yeah. There’s a lot of bullshit talk about this Miyazaki guy. How he might have fucked her before they got waxed. But Wassman says that’s just crap. They can tell, because of the come. It ain’t his. In fact,” he muttered, drawing even closer, “it was a coupla guys.”

  Evans nodded slowly. “But they don’t know who?”

  Mohr waited while a man who was seemingly wrapped from head to toe in white gauze bandages was wheeled past. When they were alone again he said, “They know it wasn’t one of their guys. They can tell from the DMA.”

  “DMA?”

  “It’s a like a fingerprint for the come,” whispered Mohr.

  Evans took that in without much reaction. He stared at the bright green tube around his arm for a few seconds.

  “So what happened?” he said at last.

  Mohr shrugged.

  “Dunno. Anderson and the Jap were on shore. She’d taken over his ship with a bunch of other officers from the Gulf. Americans. The Japs lost a lot of their top guys when a shell hit the bridge. Captain Anderson and this Miyazaki were probably just walking along talking things through, you know, admin stuff, when they got hit.”

  Evans sighed. He suddenly seemed very tired.

  “What a mess.”

  “Yeah, it’s a fucking pity,” said Mohr. “I thought that dame was all right, you know. A good captain.”

  He said it tentatively, as if expecting an argument. But Evans simply bobbed his head up and down.

  “Yeah. She was okay.”

  28

  BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA, 1411 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

  Commander Judge, Captain Windsor, and the Australian submariner, Captain Willet, fell into step as they left the hotel and turned down Queen Street, heading for MacArthur’s HQ. Trams that managed to look both antique and brand new rumbled past in both directions. They’d been in town for two days but it was still disorienting in the extreme. None of them had trouble recognizing their surroundings. And yet, they were so different.

  Willet shook her head. She’d grown up in Brisbane and kept turning around as if trying to catch her bearings. The absence of skyscrapers didn’t mean she was lost. The street layout was the same, and some of the buildings were even familiar. A few pubs. A couple of old commercial stores and warehouses from the nineteenth century that had been listed as national heritage items in the late twentieth. The cottages on the ridges around the small, undeveloped business district. They’d been snapped up and renovated by yuppies in her childhood and were fetching millions of dollars apiece, last she’d heard. Here they were slums. Dark, wretched, and stinking in a way she recognized from postings in Asia.

  “Bit of a head spin, isn’t it?” said Harry, who walked next to her taking it all in. The English prince knew Brisbane reasonably well. Twenty-first-century Brisbane, anyway. He’d had some mad times during the Rugby World Cup in ’03 and had been back to watch the cricket a couple of times after that.

  “It’s a hell of a thing,” said Willet. “You can see the sky all over. You couldn’t do that before . . . or . . . you know, in the future.”

  “I do know,” Harry agreed. “It’s really rather upsetting, isn’t it?”

  “Not as upsetting as it’s going to be for the locals,” said Judge. For the moment, full knowledge of their arrival was restricted to a relative few American and Australian officers on MacArthur’s staff, the British high commissioner, and Prime Minister Curtin down in the national capital Canberra. They’d flown in under the tightest security on an old Douglas C-47 Skytrain—or rather a brand-new one. The metal finish inside the plane still gleamed from the factory floor. AWACS and refueling aircraft were precious commodities now, and there was no sense in stripping the Clinton of any further capability for what was essentially a courtesy call.

  So the C-47 it was. Slow, uncomfortable, and with such a limited range that they were twice forced to land to top up their tanks. At least it meant there was no need for special arrangements to deal with their arrival, and the Skytrain’s comparatively “roomy” interior allowed them to carry nearly a hundred kilograms of kit, most of which was now secured under guard at MacArthur’s HQ.

  The trio walked past an alley where half-wild dogs and giant rats picked at an enormous mound of trash. It stank to high heaven. Even in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, the subtropical city was still warm. They could smell open drains and raw sewerage nearby. The commercial heart of the town didn’t really run to more than two or three blocks on either side of the main strip down which they now walked in the warm midafternoon sun. The buildings here were generally no more than three or four stories tall. After a while the streets tended to peter out into unpaved tracks. Jungle and mangrove swamp still penetrated the inner city at points within a few minutes’ walk, and all of them had been perplexed by the sound of big cats roaring in the night.

  The concierge had explained that the zoo was nearby.

  The walk from Lennons Hotel took them along a streetscape that bore occasional reminders of their own time. A bookshop now would become a nightclub later; a teahouse here was sushi bar at home. Willet recognized the outline of a boyfriend’s apartment block in the facade of a department store.

  Crude brick pillboxes had been run up at seemingly random locations, often blocking busy footpaths and forcing shoppers to detour into the gutters. They passed a vacant lot, crisscrossed by slit trenches, some covered in thin sheets of corrugated iron, one with a single log thrown across it. And newsboys on every second corner shouted out the headline of the hour. Not news from Midway, but a scare involving tins of imported Japanese fish. It was feared they’d been laced with ground-up glass before the war.

  Many shop windows had already been boarded over, with only thin slits for potential customers to peer through. More than once, the three officers were forced to step around lines of people patiently waiting their turn to do just that. Horse-drawn carriages vied with trams, old trucks, and U.S. Army jeeps on the narrow roads. The headlights of the motor vehicles were all hooded for blackout conditions.

  Without the Manhattanized skyline that had begun to eat up the heavens in the sixties, you could still see the town hall clock from most streets. Indeed, it completely dominated the skyline. Captain Willet tried not to stare at the faces of the passersby, but she found herself unable to drag her gaze away from the children, often dressed in what looked like hand-me-downs from the Great Depression: ill-fitting sweaters, poorly cut short pants, odd socks, shapeless dresses, and cloth caps. She couldn’t help but wonder if any of them were her relatives.

  For Judge and Prince Harry, who weren’t natives of the city, fascination lay in the dowdy fashions, the grand vintage cars, and even the doughy, Old World faces, unaffected by intermarriage with generations of postwar migrants from the Mediterranean and Southeast Asia. But for Jane Willet, who’d grown up in Brisbane, it was as though . . . well . . . there was no appropriate metaphor. She simply came to a halt outside the Tattersalls Club—a VR porn club in her day—stared at her companions, and croaked, “We’re fucked.”

  A passing woman, dressed in a heavy, black fur coat that was entirely inappropriate for the increasingly hot day, almost tripped over as she threw
on the brakes.

  “No! I’ll not have it,” she protested, spinning on her heel and pointing at them with her parasol. “What bad language and poor manners! How dare you! And we’ll beat those heathen monkeys yet, I say. But not if young people like you give in to despair. You should be ashamed. My Charlie would turn in his grave!”

  And with that she spun again and waddled off up the street. They watched her go, too surprised to say anything. After a moment, Willet apologized.

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” Harry assured her. “I’m sure if it was London or—was it Dallas, did you say, Commander?—we’d be just as buggered. I could run into my grandmother for God’s sake . . . except she’d be younger than me.”

  They walked on the few hundred yards to the sand-stone chambers that housed the headquarters of all Allied forces in the South West Pacific Area. Judge was actually familiar with the building. In his time it had been converted into luxury apartments and an entertainment center with one of the best sports bars on the Pacific Rim. He’d visited it more than once while on shore leave. In comparison, it seemed somewhat crude here in its original form.

  They’d seen increasing numbers of military personnel as they approached. The town’s civilian population tended not to notice them in the throng of uniforms, but they’d drawn some stares from the contemporary soldiers. The cut and style of their uniforms set them apart.

  A surprising number of African American soldiers were on the streets. An engineering battalion, they’d learned. Judge found them to be deferential to a fault. He didn’t dwell on it. There were some older branches of his family tree that had laid claim to the sort of good old boys who’d thought regular lynchings and cross burnings were a pretty good idea. He wasn’t proud of it.

  A double beep on the flexipad in his briefcase warned of an incoming transmission. Normally, live video from the far side of the world could have been instantly relayed via satellite, but of course the sky was empty, so he had to wait a few minutes while the single, highly compressed data burst bounced off the troposphere and down onto a “footprint” that covered more than a hundred square kilometers. His pad was currently located in the center of that area. It was considerably bulkier than a standard flexipad, packed tight with boosted comm circuitry and quantum processors, developed when military planners correctly surmised that their satellites might be among the first targets in any high-level military conflict. Even so, it was grossly inadequate and seemed to be nonfunctional most of the time. Judge really missed instant and reliable comms.

  “News from fleet,” he told the others.

  They hurried up the stairs of the headquarters building, flashing newly printed passes at the guards. Once off the street Judge hauled the pad out of the old leather bag.

  He brought up the short, encrypted message. The pad decoded the burst and displayed the text.

  “It’s from Flag Ops,” he told the others. “Operational concepts for the Pacific theater.”

  “That should please MacArthur,” said Willet.

  “Am I to be usurped?” roared General Douglas MacArthur.

  Commander Judge had racked up a lot of practice being roared at by the late captain of the USS Hilary Clinton. Guy Chandler had spoken in a dull roar even during normal conversations. When something really ticked him off, you could hear him over the din of an F-22 spooling up on the flight deck. Still, being roared at by Douglas MacArthur was a unique and even a worthwhile experience—if you could stand back and appreciate the historical incongruity of getting hammered down by the volcanic temper of the supreme commander of the South West Pacific Area.

  “I already have an operation planned to hit back at the Japanese,” MacArthur thundered. He stalked over to the large paper map hanging on the wall of his office in Brisbane.

  “I’ve studied the electrical files and information you brought with you, Commander Judge. And even with your forces degraded by the incident at Midway, I still believe you have the power to smash the Japanese advance and drive them from their base at Rabaul. And your very own history books bear me out. We can dig those little yellow fiends out of there now, or kill thousands of marines getting them out of Guadalcanal in August.”

  Prince Harry opened his mouth to speak, but MacArthur ignored him and plowed on.

  “The Japs are stretched thin throughout the southwest theater,” he said, tapping the map with a wooden pointer. “If only I’d had the resources, I would have defeated Homma back in Bataan. However, I place my trust in God, who has by some miracle placed you here at my convenience and given me the power to drive these devils all the way back to the Home Islands.”

  Judge winced imperceptibly at the attempted hijacking of the Multinational Force. But he spoke as soothingly as he could.

  “General, as I said, we are more than willing to commit to any future operations. But you must understand that our forces are not—” He paused for just a heartbeat, wondering how to handle this massive but fragile ego. “—well, they’re not conventional forces as you would construe the term. They’re not equipped or trained to fight in the same way as the forces you command.”

  “And just what do you mean by that?” demanded MacArthur, an explosive discharge that made them all flinch. “Am I to be undermined? Am I not the supreme commander in this theater? I would have thought that operational judgments were my prerogative. But it sounds like that prerogative is to be usurped. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you are sitting there telling me I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “No, General,” said Judge soothingly. “Please. Just hear me out. As you well know, military doctrine advanced a great deal between the end of the Great War and the start of this one. You yourself were instrumental in recognizing the importance of armored mobile warfare, long before many in the German high command.”

  That point was arguable at best, but Lieutenant Nguyen had advised him before he left Pearl that he should take every possible opportunity to stroke MacArthur’s ego. True to form, the general nodded at the compliment as if it were his due. It seemed to calm him down a little.

  Judge continued. “Doctrine and war have likewise advanced in the decades between the end of this war and our time.”

  Jones then made a fist, unfurling his fingers as he ticked off each of his next points. “Stealth platforms, directed energy weapons, quantum processors, comm nets and bio implants, intelligent munitions, hypersonic flight, high-earth-orbit kinetic-impact devices, remote sensing, night vision. You may well be the finest general on the face of the planet at this time—”

  MacArthur grunted and nodded his agreement again.

  “—but the greenest marine in our task force has an innate understanding of our war-making capacity, which it will take you some time to fully comprehend. And, as I have explained, we do not have much time.”

  Judge paused and waited on MacArthur’s response. He was surprised by the man’s gaunt appearance, but reminded himself that MacArthur had only recently escaped Corregidor, where he’d shared the same privations as his men during the siege. Deep fissures raked his hollow face, and the skin hung slack beneath his chin. He was thinking openly, the play of his thoughts so apparent on his face that no one spoke. He looked up at the three visitors and sighed. “You know, millions died pointlessly in the last war because those charged with its prosecution hadn’t learned the lessons of our own Civil War,” he said.

  “We don’t have many lessons to teach you, General,” Judge offered to smooth over the difficult moment.

  “No, but I hope you have a few for those bastards in Tokyo.”

  The flexipad emitted another double beep and a long chirrup. Flash traffic.

  “Excuse me, General. Do you mind?” asked Judge. “This will be urgent.”

  MacArthur nodded his assent. A knock sounded at the door as Judge consulted the pad. An adjutant handed MacArthur a slip of paper and a black-and-white photograph. The general’s eyebrows shot up when he read the note.

  He handed it to Prince Harry, who was
sitting closest to him. The prince mouthed an obscenity when he read the document.

  Mike Judge didn’t mouth or whisper anything.

  He said quite clearly, “Motherfucker!”

  His colleagues turned sharply toward him, and MacArthur was jolted out of his own reverie by the outburst.

  Judge shut down the pad with a sour look creasing his tanned features.

  “Anderson and Miyazaki, two of our commanders back in Hawaii, General, they’re both dead,” he announced. “Murdered.”

  Jane Willet was obviously shocked by the news, but Judge noticed that neither MacArthur nor Prince Harry reacted as sharply as he might have expected. Then he noticed the look on MacArthur’s face. His heart, already thudding from the news out of Pearl, lurched again. Something else must have happened.

  “It’s the Nuku,” said Harry. “She’s turned up, and the Japs have got her.”

  29

  PARLIAMENT HOUSE, CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA, 2032 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

  There were few wartime friendships more unusual than that between General Douglas MacArthur and the Australian prime minister, John Curtin. Watching the two men together, Paul Robertson could never quite shake himself of the feeling that theirs was a partnership doomed to succeed.

  MacArthur was an imperial figure, an overweening egotist, a favorite of the far right in America and a demonic character in the imagination of the left for his role in using troops to smash a demonstration by unemployed veterans and their families in Washington during the Great Depression.

  Curtin was a labor organizer and left-wing politician who’d been jailed for opposing conscription during the Great War. Much less a firebrand than a man of unassuming stillness and modesty, he provided MacArthur with the one thing the general could never hope for at home, unconditional support and dependence.

  Robertson, a well-traveled banker who’d given up a lucrative career to serve as Curtin’s principal private adviser, shook hands with MacArthur in the PM’s cramped parliamentary office before taking one of the two seats in front of Curtin’s desk. MacArthur, carrying one of those fantastic machines they called a “slate,” dropped into the other.