Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  “Strobe active, targets acquired,” said St. Clair as six thin lines of invisible laser light stabbed out from a small, tripod-mounted device in repeater bursts modulated to the microsecond. The photon stream pulsed across the night before silently painting the center of four long huts in which slept hundreds of Japanese. The laser strobe looked a little like a video camera, and indeed it would record what happened in the next few minutes.

  “Teams two, three, and four report strobes active and targets acquired,” said Mitchell.

  The other SAS teams, stationed at the base points of a triangle surrounding the barracks complex, had locked strobes onto the remaining buildings and facilities, including a small guard tower, three machine-gun and mortar pits, and a line of light tanks. With fifteen seconds till showtime one man peeled away from each team, moving silently into the scrub, stalking the sentries who had last passed by.

  There was no visual warning that preceded the approach of the cruise missiles. Their turbojets burned without visible flame. Their imminent arrival registered as a time hack in the lower left corner of the goggle displays. The team leaders, had they chosen to, could have watched a missile’s progress as a receiver embedded within their goggles picked up a signal from the seeker warhead, which translated into a series of red arrowheads tracking across their heads-up displays. But being pragmatic, they all chose to plant their faces in the dirt and breathe out against the wave of overpressure that would soon hit them.

  Harry imagined that he just might have caught a rumble of distant thunder as the missile popped up and chose the closest of the targets designated by the laser strobes, all in a sliver of time too infinitesimal to be comprehended by any human mind. Flaps on its stubby wings purred into position. Gated doors swung open down the length of its belly. A very small, controlled fusion reaction cooked up deep inside the belly of the missile for just over two microseconds, enough to superheat its two hundred tungsten slugs and spit them out of their containment cells with enough kinetic energy in each to destroy a heavily armored fighting vehicle.

  The huts, first on the target list, were only constructed of plywood and corrugated iron.

  Sixty percent of the missile’s submunitions load, 120 white-hot slugs traveling at hypersonic speed, slammed into those frail structures and literally vaporized them. The expanding gas, a molecular mix of human tissue, building materials, and superheated air, manifested itself as a conventional explosion, which blew the rest of the target mass to hell and beyond.

  The Japanese crews manning the weapons pits didn’t even have time to turn around before the slugs shrieked in on top of their positions. The guard tower bought just 2 percent of the load. A toilet block got 3. And the light tanks took what was left, 30 percent of the package, or sixty slugs.

  The explosions sounded like the birth of a volcano.

  The missile then swung through 180 degrees to head north for a secondary target, which had been programmed into its seeker head; the naval base, where high-altitude drone flights confirmed a large amount of Japanese shipping was tied up.

  “Right, gentlemen,” said Captain Windsor. “Let’s have at them.”

  HMAS IPSWICH, 2359 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

  From the moment they’d helped him into this weird padded armor, Captain Tom Shapcott had done everything he could to stop worrying about the bulky feel of the “ballistic plate,” or the awkward weight of his “powered helmet,” and the confusing array of little movies, message boxes, and floating screens full of numbers and meaningless letter codes that appeared in front of his eyes when he turned on his “combat goggles.” He knew he would need to focus on the job at hand.

  He stood within the giant steel cocoon of the Australian ship’s vehicle deck, awed into silence. The four Abrams tanks waiting there were generations beyond the Shermans he knew. They were still obviously tanks, but the size of them, the brute promise of destruction that lay within their hulking mass, robbed Shapcott of words. Behind them squatted ten so-called light armored vehicles, which they called LAVs, each seeming larger and more formidable than a German tiger tank, each bristling with an individual missile suite and a twin-barreled 50mm chain gun that they’d told him could reduce a concrete bunker to dust and rubble within minutes—perhaps even seconds.

  Beyond those sat giant jeeps and other unidentifiable vehicles. The weight of violence confined within the space was overwhelming. The mass of those tanks, the raw lines of their frames, the solidity . . . he’d seen a lifetime’s worth of burning, metal wreckage and he knew that nothing was invincible. But by God, those awful things did look close to it.

  The Aussies were all right, but he found himself more comfortable with the company of marines who’d been detached from the Eighty-second and temporarily assigned to Halabi’s task force for the raid on Singapore. They weren’t marines as he knew them. There were even a couple of women driving those tanks, but when you got over how different they looked, and you sat down and talked to them, it turned out they loved barbecues and football season, and fishing, and baseball, and beer and the Constitution of the United States of America as much as any man or woman he’d ever met.

  The giant ship was pitching slowly, making it a little difficult for him to get back to the light armored vehicle he was supposed to ride in. It was dark in the hold, but they’d showed him how to use the infrared setting on his goggles. It turned the darkest place into a world colored red and pink. It was unsettling at first, but a hell of a lot better than barking your shin.

  There were very few men—or women—moving around now. He could see some of them here and there: a head popping up out of a turret, the driver sitting in the front of a Humvee, somebody checking the missile racks on a LAV. But most of the six hundred or so who were going ashore were already buttoned up in their vehicles.

  A huge noise, like the sound of a speeding train in a tunnel, suddenly filled the hold. Shapcott jumped a little, but didn’t panic. It was the shore bombardment beginning. Rockets were screaming away to destroy the Japs’ gun batteries and command centers at the beachhead they were supposed to assault. The captain hurried a little faster—he didn’t want to get left behind. And he had the impression that once those big gated doors opened in the bow, there’d be no stopping these guys. They’d just roll right over the top of you if you got in the way.

  He reached the LAV just as another racket joined the roar of the barrage.

  “What’s that?” he asked, without raising his voice. He’d learned not to do that. A microphone in his helmet meant he didn’t have to.

  “Choppers going in,” explained Second Lieutenant Biff Hannon, as he reached a gloved hand out to Shapcott to haul him inside. The captain barely had time to strap himself in before the vehicle lurched into motion.

  Shapcott felt their departure from the assault ship as a dizzying drop down the ramp, a sickening crunch as the front tires dug into the sand of Besar Beach, and a moment of floating ambivalence while the light armored vehicle swam through the breakers and up onto the sand.

  Twelve movie screens glowed in the body of the LAV. Lieutenant Hannon seemed capable of following the action on all of them at once. To Shapcott the world outside was a confused inferno of burning vehicles, secondary explosions, mammoth, rumbling tanks firing at Christ-knew-what, and satanic-looking flying machines that pirouetted through the sky like giant mechanical dragonflies, spitting fire and thunder at distant, unseen enemies. Even inside the LAV, with his ears protected by the “smart gel” lining of his bulky helmet, he still thought the sound of battle was painfully loud.

  He was strapped into a large, admittedly very comfortable chair. But the violent stop-and-go motion of the armored vehicle still threw him around unnervingly. They seemed to speed everywhere, swerving and stopping frequently. At one point the automatic cannon on their own turret fired for a few seconds. Shapcott noticed the movie screens light up as something detonated somewhere.

  “Nice shooting, Maryanne,” said Hannon.

  But Sha
pcott never figured out what they had just shot.

  After fifteen minutes the bedlam and madness of the beachhead subsided. They bounced over one last rough section of ground and then swung onto a smooth surface.

  Hannon spoke into the tiny, wire-thin microphone that emerged from his helmet. “All units, all units, this is the Biffmeister. We’re on the road. Let’s roll, chickadees.”

  “Go go go!” Hannon yelled.

  The armored doors of the LAV sprang open and the six-man crew leapt out into the night. Captain Tom Shapcott leapt with them. Instantly, Hannon flew back into him, knocking him to his knees.

  Shapcott tried to help the fellow to his feet, but right away he recognized the feeling of dead weight. That unnerved him. He’d been assured that the body armor would protect them, and not just by Hannon. He’d spoken to sailors on the Astoria who had gone on about the virtual impossibility of killing a man who was protected by the battlesuits these people wore.

  But as he scrambled out from under Hannon’s inert form, he saw that the lieutenant had died from a shot to the face. His jaw and half his nose were gone, and a gluey mess of shattered bone and brain tissue was oozing out of the massive wound.

  “Up you get, Captain.”

  The voice in his ears was quiet but he heard it without any trouble, even as the battle raged around him. Hundreds of troops in black body armor ran forward toward the smoking breach in the prison wall. Choppers flew over them, rockets and machine guns pouring out a solid river of destruction. There was still some resistance—here and there a lone Japanese sentry, or a machine gun that had escaped the initial rocket swarm. But the marines charged forward as though nothing affected them, not rifle or machine-gun fire, not grenades or mortar rounds. He did see one or two go down, though. Killed or wounded by stray shrapnel or bullets that found flesh and bone instead of armor padding.

  Shapcott started forward even as the most primitive parts of his brain screamed at him to get down, to dig the deepest hole he possibly could, and stay there.

  He’d turned off the schematics in his goggles. They were just too confusing. But he left the infrared on, moving through a hellish twilight of bloody carnage. Three Japs appeared to his right, screaming incoherently.

  He fired on them and they burst into a shower of entrails and bloody fog.

  Jesus Christ.

  “Come on, come on!” a voice yelled in his ear, almost uncomfortably loud.

  Something hit him. He spun under the impact, and staggered but did not fall. It felt like he’d been punched by a prizefighter.

  Bullets snapped and cracked everywhere, their passage clear to him by the heat trails that showed vividly in the infrared. Enormous volumes of fire saturated the faintest sign of enemy resistance.

  He found himself panting at the breach in the wall. A tank had muscled through and was demolishing a stone building a hundred yards away with its main gun. Bright red streaks of light shot out of the rubble, but not many of them. The tank’s gun boomed again, twice. Shapcott felt the pressure wave in his chest and guts, and the wreckage of the blockhouse jumped under the impact of high explosives. No more shots came from there.

  Hannon’s troops moved with practiced certainty through the slaughter and turmoil. They jumped and ran and fired without seeming ever to halt. It was as though they knew the terrain better than the Japs. He had to admit, it was beyond him. He slowed the pace of his advance to a walk, giving himself time to properly examine the surroundings for the first time.

  He seemed to be in a large courtyard. The walls of the prison soared above him. Fires burned all around, and Japanese bodies lay everywhere. They were all hideously disfigured, as though they had been torn apart by wild beasts, not gunfire.

  He became conscious of his thirst. It seemed as though he’d had no water in days. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt swollen and numb. He fumbled at his unfamiliar webbing and managed to unclip a water bottle. As he tipped the sweet, cool liquid down his parched throat he saw movement, someone waving, in the corner of his eye.

  Shapcott turned and saw a woman. She was thin, and filthy, and unkempt. He suddenly realized she was also in a cage. In his tunnel vision, he hadn’t noticed it before. There were others in there with her, all of them waving him over now. He held the muzzle of his gun toward the ground as he approached, but he didn’t safe the weapon.

  “Over here!”

  “We need help.”

  “We need a doctor.”

  He stepped up the pace. The sounds of battle seemed to be falling away. He wondered whether it was over for the moment.

  “Who are you?” the woman cried. “Have you come to rescue us?”

  They shrank back as he drew close. Some of them looked quite fearful of him. When he thought about it, he realized he would look pretty intimidating in the armor, and they would have seen the others sweep though, killing everyone who resisted them. He carefully unhooked the strap that held his helmet in place and took it off. He pushed the goggles back up in his forehead and was surprised to discover he could see quite well by moonlight.

  “Captain Thomas Shapcott, ma’am,” he said. “United States Marine Corps.”

  41

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, OFF LUZON, 0013 HOURS, 21 JUNE 1942

  Dan Black couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  He was standing at the counter in the carrier’s main armory as his girlfriend—Julia let him call her that now—pulled on an outfit that made her look like some kind of character from a Johnny Weissmuller matinee.

  “Got your paperwork all filled out, Ms. Duffy?” the chief asked.

  “What the hell do you need that for,” Black snapped. “You don’t even have a job here.”

  He was tired and irritable. They’d already fought twice over this. Julia gave him a stare that said he was pushing his luck.

  “If I get waxed,” she said through thin, pressed lips, “I’ve signed a waiver giving them the right to harvest my organs for immediate transplant. If I get shot in the brain and go into a vegetative state, I’ve signed another waiver allowing them to take me off life support, and then to harvest my organs. If I just get stitched up and lose a kidney, or an eyeball, or a bit of my spinal cord, they need my certificates to access the stem cell deposit I made when I came on board at Darwin. They can force-breed me some new organs. So you see, Commander Black, the man needs my codes.”

  She gave CPO Toohey a small gray plastic rectangle. He waved it under a computing machine Black didn’t recognize. It must have read the information on the stick somehow, because the screen lit up.

  “Whoa! We got us a celebrity!” The chief grinned. He was a tattooed old sea dog who would have fit right in on the Enterprise. “This is a premium piece of tail you got yourself, buddy. Authorized for deployment with main force infantry units. Rated to cover close-quarter combat. And cleared for tactical briefings up to and including the Classified Level Oh Three.”

  “Thank you, Chief,” Duffy cooed, smiling broadly. “Your check’s in the mail.”

  That just irritated Black all the more. Julia had been on his back about the way he spoke to the women in the Multinational Force, even though he was a goddamn paragon compared with most of the other guys. And here was this lughead talking about her like she was some kind of bar girl, right in front of her, and she fucking joked right back at him!

  But he kept his mouth shut, because he didn’t trust his boiling temper.

  The armory was a hive of activity. He had no idea what units most of the men and women who were checking out weapons and armor belonged to. Why they even had an armory like this on a carrier was a mystery to him. But even if they had a legitimate reason to tool up, he didn’t see that a lady reporter had any call to be down here. No matter how tough she liked to think she was.

  As Black fumed, the long lines of troopers moved through. An amazing array of guns and equipment came over the counter. The chief ran his eyes down the text on the screen, nodding and grunting as if he’d found a gre
at buy on a used car.

  “Hey, you embedded with the Hundred and First for South Yemen,” he said to Julia, during a brief lull. “My brother was in that. Jeez, what a fucking circus that was.”

  “Got shot in the ass by one of the clowns,” said Duffy.

  She was doing this on purpose now. Black was certain. And Chief Toohey seemed to be playing along.

  “Okay, Ms. Duffy. You taking body armor?”

  She nodded. “Brought my own on board, back in Darwin. You should have it in there somewhere. Serial number’s on the data stick. It’s a Brooks Brothers, T-nine carbon-titanium weave, size ten.”

  “I woulda said size eight.”

  “You’re too kind, Chief.”

  Dan rolled his eyes.

  He noticed that one of Julia’s fellow reporters had fronted the counter a few spots down. He seemed to want nothing more than a flak jacket and helmet.

  “You gonna take a personal weapon, Ms. Duffy?”

  “Do bears shit in the woods?”

  “I’ve heard rumors to that effect. Okay, I can let you have a cut-down AR-15, but not the grenade launcher.”

  “How about a G-4?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. You’re not rated for that.”

  Julia chewed her lip. Dan was ready to explode. This was nuts, the whole thing, her going in with the marines, the body armor, the guns. What sort of a reporter was she?

  An unemployed one, for starters.

  “You got an MP-5 back there, Chief Toohey? They don’t get in the way when I’m working. But they do have a knack for bringing unpleasant encounters to a quick end.”

  “Indeed they do, ma’am.”

  Toohey tapped a flexipad with his pen. It beeped once.

  “How many mags you lookin’ at, Ms. Duffy?”

  “Four, thanks. Taped in pairs. If I need any more, we’re all in trouble. Dumdums would be super, if you got ’em.”

  The flexipad beeped as he tapped it again.

  “Sidearm?”

  “Mac 10.”