Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  Skorzeny’s bearlike voice filled the room so completely there was no escape.

  34

  ALA MOANA HOTEL, HONOLULU, 0815 HOURS, 10 JUNE 1942

  Some habits die hard. Julia’s first instinct on waking was to check her flexipad for messages. She had been mildly obsessive about staying in contact back in the twenty-first, and it would take her a while to shake off the pattern of her first few minutes each day.

  There was only one message this morning, which was one more than she’d had most mornings since the Transition. Rosanna had beamed her a quick note in the Moana Hotel’s cocktail lounge last night. Just text:

  I WANT ALL THE DETAILS, YOU SLUT.

  That cut through the Mai Tai hangover as the memories came crashing in on her. She spun around in the old feather bed and—yes—there he was. He was lying on his stomach, not snoring, God bless him. Julia’s heart gave a small lurch and she slid over to his side of the mattress, slipping one of her legs in between his as she slowly mounted him from behind and began to nip at his ears. Bristles scratched her chin as he shifted beneath her, coming awake.

  “What the hell?” he muttered into the pillow.

  “Liberated women,” she purred into his ear. “I’m afraid you’ll find us very demanding.”

  Two hours later, at a table in the Moana’s courtyard under the banyan tree, Rosanna Natoli leaned forward, her eyes twinkling like those of a squirrel with its mouth full of nuts.

  “Quickly, while he’s inside—tell me tell me tell me.”

  Julia shot a quick look at the retreating figure of Dan Black, dispatched to the dining room to fetch them some fruit salad.

  “Three little words,” she said. “Oh. My. God.”

  Rosanna simply could not contain her squeal. It pealed out over the courtyard, attracting bemused and irritated looks from the other tables.

  “I knew it!” she cried. “Didn’t I know it? I could tell from the moment that guy laid eyes on you, baby. He was gagging for it! How’d you bag him?”

  “I think it was the riot yesterday. That dude I had to fuck up. I think it kind of excited him. Or maybe he was just too scared to say no.”

  “Was he, you know, equipped for the job?”

  Julia blew out her cheeks, as though she’d been stuffed as full as a Christmas goose. Another shriek pealed off into the brilliant blue sky. Rosanna seemed to be enjoying herself almost as much as her friend had.

  An elderly couple at the adjoining table allowed their cutlery to clatter noisily to their plates, but if they thought the two women were about to pay them any heed, they were wrong.

  “Time check?” giggled Rosanna.

  Julia held up one finger, then two, then three, then four, and then all of the fingers on one hand. She paused for dramatic effect, before holding up two more.

  Natoli’s mouth dropped open as wide as it possibly could. No screams emerged, but a series of short, high-pitched squeaks, before her lips slammed shut again.

  “Seven fucking hours. Literally. I think you might be dating Superman,” she said.

  “No,” said Julia, shaking her head. “Superman’s a fag compared with this guy.”

  “Was he, like, old-fashioned.”

  “For a while.” She smirked. “He’s over that now.”

  “Bragworthy?”

  “Bragworthy.”

  “Goddamn,” said Rosanna in wonder.

  The aged tourists stood up with as much dignity as they could muster and huffily left their table. The woman, whose hair was tinted a confrontational shade of blue, hissed as she passed by the journalists. Julia simply smiled at her.

  “Exit’s that way, you old crone. And while you’re there, why don’t you get a fucking life?”

  The woman’s mouth dropped open like a ventriloquist doll. She snapped it shut before anything could fly in.

  “Well, I never!”

  “Damn,” said Natoli, “Did she just say what I thought she said?”

  “Yeah,” said Julia. “It’s like we’re living in two-D black and white.”

  The far-off drone of a hovercraft coming ashore about a kilometer up the beach drifted into the courtyard. Rosanna peered off into the bright morning light. About twenty task force personnel, mainly officers from the Leyte Gulf, had overnighted at the hotel. A few of them had partnered up with locals. Rosanna made a show of checking out a chopper pilot who’d bagged herself a rather dashing destroyer captain from Spruance’s task force.

  Dan Black returned and laid down a tray of fruit salad, which was very heavy on pineapples, and a plate of bacon and eggs.

  “Sorry, ladies,” said Black, “But I haven’t seen real cackleberries for a while.”

  “Don’t sweat it, sweetie,” said Julia. “You need to keep up your strength—”

  The comment dropped into one of those unfortunate, unforeseen holes that sometimes develop in conversations and background noise.

  Duffy, completely unfazed, simply deadpanned, “—for the war effort.”

  Blushing lightly, Dan settled himself as the background buzz cycled up to a normal level again.

  Music started up from somewhere behind them. The Stones. “Sympathy for the Devil.” The bongos that opened the track were a perfect fit with the tropical setting. Julia and Rosanna hardly noticed. They lived in a world where no item of pop culture was allowed to die. Every song, every movie, every cartoon or TV show ever made was important to somebody, which meant that it had to be instantly available, 24/7, virtually anywhere in the world.

  Dan Black had not.

  Both women noticed the perplexed expression across the table before they noticed the music.

  “Is he really singing about the Devil?” asked Dan. “I think he just sung something about the Devil being a German tank driver. Did you hear that? Where’s it coming from?”

  “A ghetto blaster,” said Julia. “Why? You don’t like it? That’s very disappointing, Dan. You’re aren’t supposed to come over all Archie Bunker for another twenty years yet.”

  “It just sounds strange, is all.”

  “It’s the Stones, baby,” said Julia. “It’s great to fuck to.”

  Dan nearly choked on a mouthful of egg.

  Julia was about to tease him some more when she felt a tap on her shoulder. A long, thin streak of misery in the form of the hotel’s assistant manager, Mr. Windshuttle, loomed ever her. He wore a tired expression, which perfectly matched the wilted flower in his jacket lapel. Ignoring the two women, he spoke directly to Black.

  “I’m afraid we’ve had complaints, sir. About the ladies’ language and deportment.”

  Before Black could speak, Julia opened fire.

  “Hey, cabana boy, if those old fossils who just shuffled out of here on their way to extinction have a problem, you can send them back in to talk to us.”

  “I do not imagine that will be happening, Miss Duffy. They are valued guests of the hotel.”

  Somebody turned up the volume on the Stones. It was like they’d pushed a hot wire up Windshuttle’s butt. He winced noticeably.

  Black took a swig from his coffee, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and addressed the manager over the music. “I don’t think we want another riot, do we, Mr. Windshuttle? And believe me, sir, these ladies are more than capable of it. They’re quite mad. I believe Ms. Duffy here is probably packing heat. You can tell by just looking at her that she’d be the sort. Now, if you just back off a little bit, I’ll see what I can do about bringing her down from the fine head of psychotic rage I can see building behind her eyes.”

  Mr. Windshuttle’s mouth pursed to form a reasonable facsimile of a cat’s anus, and he spun away, storming off in high dudgeon.

  The three of them burst out laughing before he was out of earshot.

  Dan returned to the Clinton for the rest of day, leaving the women to lounge around the hotel. He thought it would put Julia in a relaxed frame of mind for the dinner with Spruance, but he was wrong. When he returned to the hotel he found her pacing
their room like a caged wolf. She was beginning to chafe at the restrictions on her movements.

  “This story is going to break, Dan,” she said, “and if I want to have any chance at getting my job on the Times, I need to be there on day one.”

  Dan slipped an arm into the jacket of his dress whites.

  “I think you’re getting all worked up over nothing, baby. You’re the man on the spot, so to speak. They’re going to want as much as you can write for them.”

  “They’re going to want to know why I didn’t get on the blower to call them right away. That’s what they do here. They get on the blower. Right away.”

  Dan finished buttoning his jacket and leaned over to kiss her on the forehead.

  “Nobody is getting on the blower at the moment, baby. So what is it you say? ‘Chill out’? You’re going to dinner with Admiral Spruance, and there’s a story for you right there.”

  “He’s not going to tell me squat about what you guys are cooking up. First thing I’ll know, there’ll be newsreel footage of a mushroom cloud over Tokyo and some asshole sounds like he’s got a pole up his butt doing a voice-over like, That’ll put the nips in the stir-fry.”

  Dan sat at the end of the bed to enjoy the sight while she pulled on her stockings. Julia rarely wore dresses, and he wondered why, given how good she looked in this one.

  “You brought that frock with you, I’ll bet,” he said.

  “Nice shuffle, Dan. I did. I got it in Milan a couple of years ago. It’s great for travel because it crumples to nothing in your bag, but never creases. See?”

  She held the dress against herself, not a crinkle or fold to be seen, even though she’d just pulled it out of her suitcase in a tightly rolled ball.

  “How do they do that?” asked Dan, who was almost as interested in the answer as he was in copping another look at Julia in her stockings and underwear.

  “Nanonic manipulation of the silk fibers,” she said. “It’s the same sort of process they use to make body armor, except with a few twists you get a cocktail dress that feels like air on your skin.”

  “Well, you look a hell of a lot better than some jarhead.”

  “Better than Lieutenant De Marco?” she asked with an arch of one eyebrow.

  “Hey, I wasn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

  Julia burst out laughing.

  “Chill out yourself, Daniel. Word gets around. I hear all of you primitives get one look at Gina De Marco and the blood rushes right to your pants.”

  Julia drew the dress over her head and let it slide down into place. It seemed to flow down her like black oil. Dan thought that was almost as good as watching it come off.

  “Don’t panic, Lieutenant,” she said. “That Marine Corps chicky-babe is a hottie. I’d probably fuck her myself after a couple of drinks.”

  Dan didn’t know whether to be excited or horrified by that revelation. In his embarrassment, he opted to change the subject again.

  “Julia, why is it okay for you to call her a chicky-babe, but it’s akin to a federal crime for someone like me?”

  “Well, for one thing, I am a chicky-babe, so it’s cool.” She smiled. “And also, I say it with a sense of irony. Work on your irony, Dan. If you want to hang around with my gang, you’re going to need it. You want to know a secret about us modern chicky-babes?”

  Dan handed her a clutch purse as they headed for the door.

  “Sure,” he said.

  She stopped by the door, leaned over, and kissed his ear while whispering, “A boyish grin and a sense of irony will carry you through almost anything.”

  With that, she bit him, ducking quickly out of the door as he yelped in surprise.

  Captain Karen Halabi had nobody to joke with as she buttoned up her dress whites. She was in no mood to dine with Admiral Spruance. Acting in Kolhammer’s position had drained her of any desire to do anything other than drive a missile boat. The politics of their situation were starting to get to her. She’d spent the entire day hosing down brush fires, dealing with the aftermath of the riot, sorting through the double homicide, and juggling what felt like a thousand other competing problems.

  But Spruance had insisted that she join him and his party for a late supper. So she padded quietly into the cocktail lounge of the Moana, her temper improving when she discovered that the two female reporters were to be part of the evening.

  “I’m glad to have your company,” she said quietly as they all shook hands. “At least that’s one flank secure tonight. Where’s your date, Julia? All I hear about from my spies is this Cro-Magnon character you snagged for yourself.”

  Julia smiled. “He’s patching himself up in the bathroom, Captain. A bit of roughhouse in the boudoir, I’m afraid.”

  Ensign Curtis arrived, tricked out in his whites and looking incredibly nervous. He saluted, then shook Captain Halabi’s hand and stammered a greeting.

  “Wally, just calm down,” said Rosanna, his date for the evening. “What’s up, you never been surrounded by so many beautiful women before?”

  “Uh, no,” Curtis confessed sincerely. “Never. Oh, sorry, Captain, I didn’t mean that you were beautiful, I just, oh darn . . .”

  Against her better judgment, Halabi found him endearing. He was a geek, just like she’d been, a long time ago.

  “Be cool Ensign,” she said, patting him on the arm. “Take a few slow deep breaths, and don’t worry about what you’re going to say to Admiral Spruance. Trust me, you’ll hardly get a word in edgeways with these two at the table.”

  Curtis looked only vaguely relieved.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s just that nobody back in Oak Brooke would ever believe that Wally Curtis would find himself having dinner with a real admiral. And I can’t write my mom and dad about it, the censors would just cut it out and anyway they’d never believe me, and—”

  “Ensign, calm down,” said Halabi. “You’re babbling. I imagine there’s plenty that folks won’t believe about what’s happened to you the last few weeks. But it has, and you’ll always have that. Admiral Spruance told me you were the first man on the Enterprise to have any idea of what was happening. That makes you just about one of the most interesting people in the world right now. Imagine that.”

  “I can’t,” he confessed.

  “It’s pre-Warhol syndrome,” said Natoli. “Nobody here realizes they have a constitutional right to fifteen minutes of fame and their own cable talk show.”

  “It’s kind of sweet, don’t you think?” said Julia.

  “Heads up, the boys are here.”

  Dan Black and Ray Spruance appeared at the same time. “Ms. Duffy,” said the admiral, “Commander Black here has been telling me all about your adventures after the riot. I’m glad you’re giving him back to me in one piece.”

  “I’m not quite finished with him, Admiral,” she teased. “I might just break him yet.”

  “Well, please don’t kick him around like you did that fellow in town. I need him to run a few errands for me. And you, Curtis, how are you finding the Clinton?”

  “It’s amazing, sir! They let me sit in a Raptor today. And Ms. Natoli has been teaching me to use the computer net. It’s got everything on it.”

  “Would you like to know who played you in the movie of Midway, Admiral?” asked Rosanna. “I bet we could get that off the net.”

  “I’d hope it was Errol Flynn,” quipped Spruance.

  “Sorry,” said Rosanna. “But it could have been Clint Eastwood.”

  “No way,” said Julia. “Harrison Ford.”

  “That’s the remake of Tora Tora Tora,” Halabi said, correcting them both.

  “I thought Pearl Harbor was the remake of that,” said Rosanna.

  “Pearl Harbor was full of Ben Affleck making kissy face,” said Julia. “There’s no kissy face in Tora Tora Tora, just lots of ass-whupping.”

  “Pearl Harbor was a cautionary tale about the impossibility of making a chick flick that guys would go see,” said Rosanna.


  “But Pearl Harbor Two was all right,” said Julia. “It had that great butt shot of Dylan McDermott.”

  “Highlight of the sorriest damn movie ever made,” said Rosanna.

  As they reached their table, Spruance made to pull out a chair for Rosanna but found his arm stayed by a light touch from Dan Black. The junior officer shook his head sadly as if to say don’t bother, and sure enough, the young woman simply plucked the seat out by herself and plopped down on it without any ceremony, never once interrupting a lively monologue on the best comparative butt shot from her favorite Oscar nominees.

  “I’m beginning to regret broaching this topic,” Ray Spruance confessed to Black.

  “Don’t worry, sir, the night’s still young. There’ll be plenty of other things to regret.”

  After that, the table quickly divided in two. Spruance talked business with Halabi and Black for the first hour, while the reporters engaged in a champagne-fueled quest to tease out of Ensign Curtis the meager and possibly nonexistent details of his dating history.

  Spruance was struck by the contrast between the two civilian women, who were obviously intelligent but seemed wantonly dizzy, and Captain Halabi, who was unnaturally grave. She wouldn’t allow herself to be drawn into polite chitchat until she had worked through the riot, the ongoing murder investigation, and arrangements for moving more casualties off the Clinton and Kandahar and into shore-based facilities.

  The reporters, who promised not to divulge anything they heard at the table, hung on Halabi’s every word while she hammered him about applying more pressure to the local police, but otherwise they seemed content to tease poor Ensign Curtis.

  Spruance wasn’t so naive as to think them rude. He assumed they weren’t behaving out of the ordinary at all, and he was fascinated by their lack of . . . what? Refinement? They both seemed well traveled and sophisticated. Manners? Both obviously knew how to deal with a silver service place setting and had a relaxed way of relating to the dining room staff that he associated with the idle rich. Was it their lack of gravity, perhaps?