Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  At one point he listened while the two women discussed another outrage yet to pass, some sort of germ bomb attack on LA, which he gathered they’d both covered as journalists. They seemed inured to the horrors they described, as though it was all passé.

  Spruance stirred his coffee. What sort of a world have they come from? he wondered.

  “You look pensive, Admiral.”

  It was the British officer. She’d caught him gathering wool.

  “I’m sorry, Captain. I was just wondering about your world. About how different it is from ours.”

  Halabi leaned back to give the question its due.

  “I guess you look at us,” she said, “you look at me and people like Julia and Rosanna and Colonel Jones, and you can see some hard changes coming. All I can do is remind you that change was ordained, whether we came or not.”

  Spruance and Black said nothing. The conversation at the other end of the table fell away, too, as the reporters picked up the sound of the names. Spruance was aware of how quickly the other two women shifted gear, from flighty to sober.

  “In some ways, no matter what your views, or how broad-minded you might consider yourself,” Halabi continued, directing her remarks at Black now, as well, “you would look on our world and shudder. But if the time since your day has taught us anything, it’s that you can’t pick and choose your freedoms. You take freedom’s curses along with its blessings.”

  Halabi stared into the middle distance as though examining her own world from a new vantage point. “In some ways, our world is no different from yours,” she said. “It’s violent. I’d hesitate to say it’s more violent, seeing as you’re engaged in a world war. But so are we, of a sort. And ours has gone on for years longer than yours.”

  “Why haven’t you won?” asked Curtis. “You’re so powerful.”

  “Weapons are one thing, Ensign. You can kill a man; reduce him to nothing, literally. But the ideas that made him your enemy, those survive. Ideas are much harder to kill than men. They outlive us all.”

  “Could you avoid it, your war, knowing what you do now?” asked Spruance.

  “I don’t know,” she replied honestly. “Why do you ask? It’s a way off yet. It won’t be yours to worry about.”

  “It just seems to me,” said Spruance, “that you’d want to avoid it by all means. The things I’ve heard, a whole city destroyed by a bomb in a bag, millions killed by germ war, planes flying into high-rise buildings and football stadiums. It makes me wonder what we’re doing here, if that’s the only future.”

  “It’s not the only future,” said Halabi. “Little girls still go to ballet practice. Little boys want to be firemen. Families get together at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Life goes on. Just like here. If you have children or grandkids, you’re willing to die for them. And to kill for them, too. Well, we are your children. We appreciate what you did. It’s just too bad that our turn came around, too.”

  “You agree with that?” Black asked Duffy and Natoli.

  “Pretty much so.” Duffy shrugged.

  “It’s so bleak,” said Dan Black.

  “It’s fine. We’d still all rather be there. It’s home.”

  “You’d rather live in a place where your whole city could be blown up by one madman.”

  “It’s home,” she repeated. “It’s really no worse than here.”

  “It’s better, in some ways,” said Natoli.

  Spruance looked across the table to Karen Halabi. She just held his gaze and nodded.

  35

  AMBASSADOR HOTEL, LOS ANGELES, 10 JUNE 1942

  The Ambassador Hotel was set within nearly twenty-five acres of manicured lawns. After lunch, Kolhammer and Einstein sat on a bench under a palm tree in the gardens while Agent Flint lurked nearby. Kolhammer was impressed. He’d experienced more than his fair share of close personal protection, having served once as the deputy UN military commander in Chechnya. Flint’s technique could use some updating, but he was still pretty good.

  “I suppose such things are routine in your world, Admiral,” Einstein mused.

  Kolhammer was intrigued by the insight.

  “That’s true. But why do you say so, Professor?”

  Einstein crossed his legs and leaned back to feel the sun on his face.

  “You seem to come from a militarized society, Admiral; the ease with which your men and women in uniform mix together. The way you don’t appear to heed the race or creed of your comrades. Some might see that as enlightened, and I suppose it is. But you could also see it as the defensive response of a society that has been fighting for so long it has shed itself of all trappings save those needed to wage war. You can see the same thing happening here and now, to a lesser extent.”

  The reasoning was sound, even though the particulars weren’t exactly as Einstein put them. Kolhammer took a moment to study their surroundings, the affluence and luxury, the monocultural certainty of forties America. LA was starting to fill up with minorities, drawn to the war industries, but you wouldn’t know it here on the grounds of the Ambassador Hotel.

  “You’re partly right,” he told Einstein. “Things have changed a lot in the last twenty years—my last twenty years, I mean. But the things you noticed, they were well on the way before the jihad.”

  “Your holy war?”

  “I wouldn’t call it that.”

  “Do you mind?” asked Einstein as he fetched his pipe and pouch from a trouser pocket. “None of you seems to smoke much, either.”

  “Not really.” Kolhammer smiled. “But go ahead. It reminds me of my old uncle Hans.”

  “From the death camps?”

  “From the death camps,” said Kolhammer.

  They sat in silence for another minute. It wasn’t a companionable stillness. The sun beat down out of an azure sky just as before. The hint of a sea breeze ruffled Einstein’s wild hair and took the edge off the day’s heat. But a shadow that brought no comfort had fallen over them.

  “You find yourself at a loss, Admiral. Faced with evil on so vast a scale, do you think it beyond your capacity to effect change for the good?”

  Kolhammer frowned and wiped at his damp brow.

  “I made a promise once, that I would never let that sort of thing happen again if I could do anything to avoid it. I just wonder what I’m supposed to do now, what would be best.”

  Tendrils of blue smoke began to curl away from the bowl of Einstein’s pipe. The smell did remind Kolhammer of his great-uncle Hans. The old guy would be in the camp pretty soon. Although he wouldn’t be old, of course.

  “Have you spoken with Roosevelt?” asked Einstein.

  “Yes. They’re all aware of the Nazis’ programs. They were horrified at the extent of the Holocaust. But I got the impression they’d rather I hadn’t brought it up. They said the best way to help the victims was to beat the Germans.”

  Einstein took that in like a professor considering a gifted student’s thesis.

  “And you do not agree.”

  “No, I do not.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Before they could say anything more Agent Flint appeared at a run.

  “Excuse me Admiral. Professor. But you have to come right away, sir. Your people are calling from Pearl. On your communications device. They’ve been trying to get you for some time.”

  “Dead? But how?”

  The connection was flimsy. The boosted comm circuits and a large portable dish antenna, presently pointing skyward from the roof of the hotel, provided a real-time vid link, but Captain Karen Halabi appeared on the screen of Kolhammer’s flexipad through a shower of static. They’d been trying for a secure link for nearly eighteen hours. He cursed their lack of satellite cover for about the hundredth time. Admiral King and General Eisenhower, however, standing behind him the hotel room, exchanged whispers about the marvel of secure, global communications by “movie phone.”

  “We’re going to have to get on the ball with this stuff,” murmured King
.

  Kolhammer pointedly ignored the chatter behind him and concentrated on the acting Multinational Force commander.

  “It’s very obvious . . . oubl . . . urder,” said Halabi, her voice and image jumping as the signal bounced erratically off the troposphere.

  “Any suspects yet?” Kolhammer asked loudly.

  “Oh yes, thousands of them,” Halabi said.

  Great, thought Kolhammer. Halabi continued before he could reply.

  “There’s more, Admiral. The Nuku has been found. It materialized on top of a mountain in New Guinea. About half of it was fused into the rock, but the rest was sticking out, and I’m afraid the Japanese have got their hands on it.”

  King and Eisenhower suddenly appeared at Kolhammer’s shoulder.

  “What the hell is this about?” King demanded to know.

  Kolhammer held up a hand to fend him off.

  “Just a minute, Admiral. Captain Halabi, do we know status of the ship? What weapons and sensor systems were intact?”

  Halabi disappeared inside in a small blizzard of static, which lasted for a few seconds. Kolhammer asked her to repeat herself.

  “From the picture we . . . our intelligence analysts don’t . . . they could . . . retrieved the choppers or most . . . mast-mounted arrays. They were buried . . . looks like the ship’s CIC would have been cut in half by the edge of the mountain. But that . . . the forward missile mounts and a lot of incidental technology they . . . unbolted and walked off with.”

  “Suffering Christ,” spat Admiral King. “Is she saying the Japs have their own missile boats, now? I knew this would happen. I knew those little bastards would get hold of this shit.”

  “Settle down,” said Kolhammer. Turning back to the small screen, he collected his thoughts before going on.

  “All right, Captain. You’re on the spot. I’ll leave the micromanagement of the Nuku to you. But I suggest we lay a world of hurt on that mountain ASAP.”

  “Already in hand, Admiral. We’re just working our way around the lack of GPS now. We’ve got one catapult patched up, and we should have a strike inbound within four hours.”

  “Good work. What about Anderson and Miyazaki? What’s the situation there?”

  Kolhammer ignored King’s muttered resentment at the distraction.

  “We had a real pissing match with the locals at the crime scene,” said Halabi. “Nimitz intervened on our behalf. We got carriage of the forensics—Captain Francois off the Kandahar is handling that. And your Captain Lunn is working with the local DA’s office on the investigations.”

  Sitting on a footstool, hunched over the minicam sending his image back to Pearl, Kolhammer clenched and unclenched his fists.

  “Local cops doing the footwork?” he asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Halabi, unconscious of the effect her words had on Admiral King.

  “Arrogant fucking limeys,” he muttered.

  Kolhammer leaned forward and tried to focus on the stuttering video image.

  “We got any hand at all in the detective work?”

  “Nimitz is leaning on the local PD, but they’re . . . difficult in all . . . orts of ways. Also, it’s no . . . related, but we’ve had trouble on shore, a brawl in . . . tween some of our people and their . . . It’s not connec . . . to the murders as far as . . . but it’s not helping relations.”

  Kolhammer chewed his lip as he thought it over.

  “What sort of damage are looking at?”

  The link to Halabi suddenly cleared.

  “A lot of burned buildings and broken heads in town. No deaths that we know of, although one of our guys did get shot. He’ll pull through. Funny thing is, the local commanders aren’t all that worked up. I get the impression they have to put up with a lot of this stuff.”

  Kolhammer didn’t doubt it. He’d been worried that a confrontation between his sailors and the locals would only be a matter of time. But if Nimitz wasn’t raising hell about it, he’d be content to let the matter lie, for the moment. There was no ignoring the killings of two of his officers, however.

  “Okay, Captain,” he said. “Tread softly on the brawl. If it doesn’t bother them, we shouldn’t let it bother us. But I’ll want a full report for my own benefit, to see if any of our guys are at fault. As for the local cops, lean on the fuckers. If you have to, send a SEAL team through their garbage cans. Maybe they’ll dig something up we can use to heavy them. We’re not taking any shit over this. Not with two of our own in the morgue.”

  Halabi nodded once. “Got it.”

  Kolhammer was aware that the two men behind him had heard everything he’d just said, but he couldn’t have cared less what they thought of his tactics.

  “Pass on my thanks to Admiral Nimitz for his help,” he said. “And contact the other fleet commanders—ours, I mean. I want to convene an O Group tomorrow. Zero eight hundred hours your time. We’ll be back in Pearl by then. Keep me updated on the Nuku by compressed data burst in the meantime. I’ll handle the fallout at this end.”

  Halabi said she’d get on it, and they signed off. Kolhammer stood and faced the others.

  “I’m sorry about your men, Admiral,” said Eisenhower.

  “It was a man and a woman,” said Kolhammer. “Captain Anderson off the Leyte Gulf, the ship that materialized inside your cruiser. And Miyazaki, the senior Japanese officer. We’d put Anderson and some of her people onto the Siranui.”

  King took that news without visibly reacting.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Now, what about these fucking Japs in New Guinea? Are we gonna have these bastards all over us with one of those rocket swarms that wiped out Spruance?”

  “No,” said Kolhammer. “It’s a complication, a real one. But that ship’s not going anywhere. It’ll be taken care of in a few hours. They’ll salvage some useful gear off her, but whether they have the capacity to exploit it quickly enough is another matter.”

  “Well, you better fucking hope they don’t,” said King.

  Kolhammer ignored the challenge.

  Something was puzzling him, though. He couldn’t understand why it had taken so long for the news of Anderson’s death to reach him. King and Eisenhower probably didn’t think of a day’s delay as being significant, but coming from a world of instantaneous communication, he did. He accepted the fact that without satellite cover, his own encrypted links were tenuous at best. But surely Pearl could have sent a cable?

  “What’s on your mind, Admiral?” asked Eisenhower.

  “I just wonder, Admiral King, why I didn’t get the news about the murders of my people from you?”

  King seemed nonplussed by the question. “Well, I only just heard it myself.”

  As far as Kolhammer could tell, he didn’t seem to be lying. “You heard nothing from Pearl at all, before now?”

  King pressed his lips together, and his eyes crinkled slightly. “Admiral, I’d remind you that you were the one who insisted that no information be sent via radio or cable. Not when it has anything to do with you or your arrival. We’ve been communicating about your task force by written memo, delivered by safe hand courier. It’s been a hell of an inconvenience, if you want to know. Your goddamn notification is probably making its way here the same way everything else concerning you people does. Very . . . fucking . . . slowly.”

  His point made, King stalked out of the room without further comment.

  A long message from Nimitz, detailing the murders and the follow-up, did arrive at the hotel the next day. It had taken nearly two days to travel from Hawaii.

  All things considered, Flight Lieutenant Caro Llewelen was happy to be in the cockpit of her F-22 with a full weapons load, no SAMs to speak of, and an agreeable dumbass cracker like “Stiffy” McClintock as her wingman.

  The Raptors screamed along the coastline at Mach 2. For the moment their heading was slaved to an AWAC flight, but a touch of the stick would bring the craft back under pilot command. For now, both fliers were content to hitch a ride, while a
navigational program downloaded from the Clinton’s Combat Intelligence did the thinking for them.

  A voice in Llewelen’s ear, almost as though it was inside her head, said, “We have you ten minutes out. No threats. You have the stick.”

  “Acknowledged,” she replied. “Stiffy. You’re upstairs.”

  McClintock acknowledged her order, and his jet climbed away on a precipitous curve. He was normally a talker. A terrible bullshitter actually, in her experience. But he’d stayed well within mission parameters today. Llewelen hadn’t heard a peep out of him. He took up a slot five thousand meters above her.

  Her heart beat faster and her breathing deepened as she swept along the southern coast of New Guinea. No radar facilities painted the fighter. No air traffic controllers challenged her. The island rushed past her at twice the speed of sound. She switched on her belly-cams to capture the mission on video.

  A ping in her ear and the sudden appearance of targeting data on the HUD confirmed the fact that her Terrain Following Radar had matched the mission-specific holomap copied from the Clinton’s database to the topography of the coastal ranges beneath her. Eighty years might be a hell of a jump to make in human terms, but mountains don’t change at all in that sort of time. The Raptor’s navigational processors recognized the landscape and suggested a course for the pilot to follow. A series of blue circles appeared on her HUD, curving up and away over the shoreline and over toward the soaring spine of the island. Llewelen eased the joystick over until the small arrowhead icon representing her F-22 floated into the center of the nearest blue circle. She punched a series of buttons to lock in the new course.

  Mangrove swamps, primordial jungle, river plains, and razor grass swept beneath her wings in a frenzied blur. Foothills approached at an insane velocity. She steered the Raptor into the vivid green slash of a long valley that snaked up into the sky. Photon streams poured down from multiple nodes along the belly of the jet fighter, feeding data about the terrain to her processors. The Raptor felt its way up the range like a blind man running his fingers over a face.