Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  A chime sounded in Llewelen’s ear, and her HUD lit up with targeting data. The most important was a red box hovering in virtual space a few miles in front of her. She was only vaguely aware of the world outside her cockpit. She knew that sheer mountain walls ripped by out there at twice the speed of sound, but she stayed fixated on the targeting data.

  The box suddenly inflated and filled the HUD. A loud pinging filled her head and two two-hundred-kilogram land-attack penetrators dropped away from the hard points under her wings as she peeled off. Seeker heads on the missiles strobed wildly, painting the mountain with a rudimentary form of laser radar. They recognized the terrain features that had been loaded into their chips. They roared away, up and over the edge of the plateau, before spearing directly into the Nuku. The penetrators sliced through the skin of the ship and drilled down two meters into the Saruwaged Ranges before detonating.

  A pair of titanic blast waves of rippled out from the mist-shrouded plateau, atomizing the Indonesian warship and every Japanese soldier working on her.

  “Jeez, Stiffy,” Llewelen said to her wingman, “you really don’t see that sort of thing every day.”

  They watched the recorded footage from the Raptor’s belly-cam for the third time. A Sony digital projecter threw the image up onto a screen in Roosevelt’s suite at the Ambassador Hotel. After the first run-through, Kolhammer watched the others rather than the video, which had arrived as a compressed, encrypted burst from Hawaii. Like the audience in a V3D theater, they swayed from one side to the other as the Raptor weaved through the winding valley on its way to take out the Nuku.

  He wondered if any of the Indonesians were alive when the missiles hit home. If so, it was a pity, but Halabi had made the right call. The target had to be hit.

  At least nobody in this room would disagree with that. Marshall, Eisenhower, King, and the British ambassador Lord Halifax had all joined Roosevelt for a private briefing on the raid and the implications of the ship’s discovery by Japan. Kolhammer shut off the projection as the attack ended for the third time.

  A moment’s silence descended before Lord Halifax spoke up.

  “I wish we’d had some of those Raptor thingies last year, when Hitler was bombing us silly.”

  “That was very impressive, Admiral,” said Roosevelt. “Destroying that ship in four hours.”

  “And it was a British captain who ran the show, was that right?” asked Halifax. “The PM will want to know about that.”

  Kolhammer nodded. “Captain Halabi is acting force commander in my absence. She did good. But if we’d had satellite cover we could have killed that target inside twenty minutes. And the Japanese have probably made off with a good haul, anyway. I’m sorry, Mr. President. It’s a complication for you.”

  King spoke up from the couch across the room. “And for you, Kolhammer. Even if you could get back home before, you couldn’t go now. Not with the Japs having grabbed Christ-only-knows-what sort of weapons off that ship.”

  “You don’t need to explain my responsibilities to me, Admiral King,” Kolhammer said pointedly. “I’m going back to Pearl to confer with my task force commanders on that very issue. And we know exactly what sort of weapons may have been salvaged—primitive ones, by our standards. The Indonesians weren’t running the world’s best navy.”

  Eisenhower interposed himself between the two volatile tempers. “We’re going to have a hell of a time making this work, gentlemen. I suggest we stop beating up on each other and think about how we deal with the Japs. And with the Nazis, God help us, if they can lay their hands on any of this.”

  Roosevelt gripped the wheels of his chair and spun himself around with some difficulty on the thick carpet. General Marshall helped him with the last part of the turn, until he finished up facing King and Kolhammer directly.

  “Ike’s right. It looks like you’re here for good, Admiral Kolhammer. I don’t imagine for a second that it’s going to be easy. I can already think of dozens of problems, and those are just the ones on the political side. The military implications of scattering your technology all over the globe . . . well, I don’t even want to think about that right now. But I suggest you and Admiral King quit sniping at each other and come up with some plan to smooth your transition here, and get us back on the front foot.”

  Kolhammer gave King the benefit of a very long stare before slowly turning away.

  “I’ve been thinking about that, Mr. President,” he said. “I need to get back to Pearl right away. I have an idea I’d like to discuss with my people.”

  PART FOUR

  * * * * *

  IMPACT

  36

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0815 HOURS, 12 JUNE 1942

  Apart from the gray metal bulkheads and exposed piping overhead, the main conference room in the USS Hillary Clinton looked like the meeting space at a business convention center. A semicircle of Ikea workbenches curved around in front of a video wall. When Kolhammer walked in, all his surviving commanders were present; the captains and executive officers of the Multinational Force had gathered in person, a rare occurrence, to discuss their options and settle on a course of action.

  No ’42 personnel were present.

  Kolhammer thanked Captain Halabi for filling his seat while he’d been gone, and then launched straight into the meeting.

  “Right. You’ve all read the condensed report from the Physics Research Group. Anybody still think there’s a chance we can get home?”

  He waited for somebody to put up their hand, but this was a room full of professional realists. They’d all studied the video of the Nagoya crumpling down into a singularity. They’d read the classified material about the sort of research Manning Pope’s team was supposed to be carrying out. And they’d read the report of the Physics Group, explaining why that experiment had probably gone wrong. Having adjusted to the miracle of their arrival in 1942, nobody was holding out any hope for a second miracle to carry them home.

  Kolhammer gave it ten seconds. He could see individuals searching within themselves, counting up their personal tally of loss and pondering the consequence of their bizarre fate. But no one seemed as if they were about to jump up and demand that a new time machine be constructed.

  It just wasn’t possible, and they knew it.

  Finally Kolhammer broke the spell.

  “Okay,” he said. “Options. We fight or we don’t.”

  He waited for a return but none came. A couple of officers threw a quick glance at the Japanese representative, Lieutenant Commander Mitsuka. The young man stared fixedly back at Kolhammer. The Multinational Force commander had commissioned him “in the field”—over Mitsuka’s own objection—arguing that it simply wasn’t practical to have an ensign in charge of the Siranui. What active role the ship and her crew might play, however, was another matter.

  “Well, then, I guess that means we fight,” Kolhammer said. “I don’t see much of an alternative either, given the damage we did to the Pacific Fleet and the fact that the Japanese found the Nuku on top of that mountain. We have to assume they’ll have salvaged material and information from the ship. It won’t make an immediate difference, but if they share it with the Nazis, and we have to assume that they will, we could be looking at a greatly accelerated German rocket program, followed by a viable nuclear threat.”

  There was, at last, some reaction; an uncomfortable murmur and a noticeable number of men and women shifting about in their seats, almost as though they were trying to squirm away from the implications of such a nightmare.

  “I’m not here to impose my will on anybody today. There is an option I want to discuss. But it’s only an option. I’m going to throw the floor open to anybody who feels the need to speak first.”

  He leaned up against the edge of a desk and swept his eyes over the room. There were no assigned places, but almost everybody had grouped together by nationality. Americans, making up three-quarters of the group, all sat along one side of the room and around the curve of the desks.
Next to the last of them was Lieutenant Commander Mitsuka. On the other side of him sat the Australian commanders, Willet, Sheehan, Captain Tranter off the Ipswich and an army officer, Brigadier Barnes. Captain Halabi and her XO, Commander McTeale, were ensconced with Price Harry, the senior SAS officer.

  Halabi raised an eyebrow at Kolhammer. He nodded at her and resumed his seat next to Mike Judge.

  “Captain.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The Royal Navy officer pulled an envelope out of her jacket and dropped it onto the table.

  “I have an order from the first sea lord in London, via Rear Admiral Murray here in Hawaii, directing me to detach the Trident from this force and return with all dispatch to Portsmouth. My crew and I will be ‘evaluated’ and reassigned to training duties pending the outcome of those evaluations. Sir Leslie phoned me this morning to make sure I’d received the orders. He helpfully pointed out that disobeying them could be construed as mutiny, a capital offense.”

  A few people snorted and laughed. Some swore. Prince Harry rolled his eyes.

  “I see,” said Kolhammer. “What about you, Captain Willet? Have you had anything similar?”

  The Australian submariner shook her head.

  “No, but Commander Judge tells me that Canberra is very keen to see us back in home waters. They’re not putting pressure on yet, but you can bet they will if there’s any concerted Japanese push south. At this time, mid-nineteen-forty-two, they very likely think of themselves as facing a full-scale invasion.”

  Commander Judge spoke up from beside Kolhammer.

  “That’s about right, Admiral. They’ll take their lead from Washington for now. But MacArthur is down there banging the drums, desperately trying to get his hands on the whole force. If he thinks he can get in Prime Minister Curtin’s ear to recall the Australian national contingent, I’m certain that’s exactly what he’ll do. He wants Brigadier Barnes’s battalion and the SAS under his wing as soon as possible. If he can get the Eighty-second as well, he’ll be in seventh heaven.”

  “He only thinks so,” said Colonel Jones.

  Kolhammer nodded as he digested the information.

  “This isn’t an immediate issue—at least not yet,” he said. “For now, unless anyone has any drastic objection, I don’t intend to split our forces. Captain Halabi, you leave London to me.”

  He looked at the foreign commanders. None of them said a word. So Kolhammer stood up again and walked around in front of the wallscreen.

  “We agree we’re stuck here, for the moment,” he said. “Effectively forever. Even winning this war and accelerating the rate of technological development in this time line, the best guess says we won’t be able to build anything like the Nagoya for thirty or forty years. I’m not just quoting from our own amateurs in the Physics Group we put together. I spoke to Professor Einstein and a whole bunch of other eggheads back in LA, and they agree. They’re champing at the bit to pore over the information we brought with us. But even leapfrogging their theoretical understanding forward by three or four generations, we have to wait for the industrial base to catch up.”

  He began to pace back and forward as he built his argument.

  “Bottom line, we’ve got to make this work, and we’ve already got problems. Some people will never forgive us for Midway. Then there’s Anderson and Miyazaki, that’s a bad business. Maybe it was an opportunistic homicide, maybe it wasn’t. The riot in Honolulu, that chief petty officer getting shot, none of it bodes well. We don’t fit in here. I don’t know that we ever will with any great ease. But I think we have to try. We’ve got to bring something more than disruption and chaos with us. That’s why I’m thinking of hitting those Japanese prison camps. We can save more lives than we took when we came here. I think we need to do it. Not just politically, but morally. We owe them.”

  Silence and a sense of expectancy greeted his statement. Nobody rushed to contradict him, but neither did they rush to endorse the idea. Halabi chewed her pencil, obviously deep in thought. Willet seemed to nod once. Colonel Jones leaned forward and clasped his hands together.

  “It’s a hell of a task, Admiral. Even for us.”

  Kolhammer smiled. “I believe you were the first to raise the idea, Colonel.”

  “I was, but my people will be the ones getting shot at, too. Are you talking about hitting both Singapore and Luzon? Because you have to split your forces to do that. And what about the Japanese carriers that survived Midway? They don’t impress us much, but they scare the shit out of the locals.”

  “They do,” Kolhammer agreed. “And I think we do need to deal with them. We know they’ve hightailed it back to the Home Islands. Captain Willet, you can get the Havoc to Japan in, what, three and a half days?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well then, in four days, those ships are scrap metal.”

  “If they’re still there,” said Jones.

  “That’s right,” Kolhammer nodded. “If they’re still there. And if they’re not we will have to find them and destroy them, but nobody here doubts our ability to do that. And yes, Luzon and Singapore are a hell of a way from each other. But if we do this we have to get them all out.”

  Captain Halabi stopped chewing her pencil.

  “While you were away, I had a chat with one of the young officers in the working party we put together to do some historical research. We talked about this. She thinks the locals will be grateful to get their men back. But she doesn’t think it’ll make all that much difference to their attitude in the long run. She said we’re just too alien.”

  Kolhammer thought about it for a moment.

  “She might be right, Captain. But we’re here and have to make these choices. I guess the consequences will take care of themselves.”

  THE OVAL OFFICE, WASHINGTON, 2210 HOURS, 12 JUNE 1942

  Admiral King preferred good old-fashioned paper to those infernal data slates and flexi-whats-its. You could roll a bunch of papers up and bang them like a gavel. You could fold, spindle, and mutilate them. You could tear them, and crumple them, and throw them into the wastebasket.

  And that’s what he felt like doing with the papers he was holding in his hands, a summary of Kolhammer’s plan to intervene in the Pacific. King had no trouble with the idea of turning those rocket ships and planes on the Japs, but this maniac was talking about wasting precious resources on some ridiculous prison breakout in Luzon and Singapore.

  Granted, he was also proposing to attack Hashirajima and give the Japs a taste of their own Pearl Harbor. But to King’s studied eye, the whole thing looked like fantasy. They were sending one lousy Australian submarine to hit the Combined Fleet in the Home Islands, while the rest of their force would be split up between an attack on a couple of POW camps. It made no sense at all.

  Singapore was deep in the heart of the empire now. You didn’t just sail in and tie up at the yacht club before popping into Raffles for drinks. And this POW camp at Cabanatuan on Luzon—it was miles inland. They were talking about evacuating thousands of prisoners. King would dearly love to get those boys back, but this wasn’t the way. This was fucking madness.

  He could barely control his urge to slap the data slate from Roosevelt’s hands. The president was engrossed in one of their goddamn movie presentations. A neat little cartoon pitch about how they planned to win the war. It was enough to make you wretch, after what they’d done at Midway.

  “Are you going to let them go ahead with their plan, Mr. President?” asked King. The tone of his voice told Roosevelt that his navy chief didn’t think that was even remotely a good idea.

  Roosevelt fell back in the chair and struggled to find a comfortable position.

  “I take it, Admiral, that you would not.”

  “No, sir. If I had my way, I wouldn’t be letting them out of my sight.”

  Roosevelt peered out into the darkness of the White House lawn. Even with the lights down it was difficult to see past his reflection in the windowpanes.

&n
bsp; “They’re talking about destroying Yamamoto’s fleet before it puts to sea again. Do you think they can do it?” he asked. “Your honest appraisal.”

  “I have no idea, sir. We couldn’t, and I don’t know that I’d be happy letting these bastards off the leash to try. You know about the sort of personnel they’re carrying. That’s a hideous can of worms, right there.”

  Roosevelt levered himself around to face King more directly, pushing his elbows into the armrest and lifting his crippled body a few inches. He grunted as he settled again.

  “Admiral, that’s an argument for another day. My good lady wife is already in my ear, carrying on about integration, and I fear she won’t rest until I sign an executive order turning half of your navy over to her suffragette friends.”

  Seeing the expression that contorted the admiral’s face, Roosevelt had his first good laugh in weeks.

  “Relax, Admiral. I’m joking. Eleanor doesn’t get everything her way.”

  Though the tension ran out of King’s shoulders, as he slumped back into his own chair, he still looked worried. “So this plan,” he said, “I have a feeling you’re going to approve it.”

  “Your intuition is correct. If we can destroy the Combined Fleet, we go a long way toward winning this war. And they say they can do it without losing a single man. I’d deserve to be impeached if I said no to that.

  “As for this rescue mission, I admit, it looks shaky on paper. But having seen what happened to those men, the pictures of them in those prison camps, I couldn’t live with myself if I turned down a chance to save them. And I’d have their families coming over the fence to get me.”

  “That’s why Kolhammer sent you those pictures, sir,” King said, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. “To force your hand.”

  Roosevelt smiled like an old wolf.

  “I know. He’d make a good politician.”

  The admiral tried another tack.