“I guess there could have been temporal as well spatial distortions,” he conceded, without much enthusiasm. “If the Nuku ended up on top of that mountain, I guess these guys could have been thrown out of sync, you know, timewise.”
“You don’t sound confident, Commander,” said Spruance. “Can I suggest we ask them to stop before they get even farther inside our lines?”
Kolhammer checked the screen again. The Indonesian ship was much closer than he’d expected.
“Have they increased speed?” he asked.
“Goddamn,” spat Judge.
A small, perceptible jolt ran through everyone on the bridge who’d ever had to face a jihadi suicide run.
“What’s happening?” asked Spruance, who couldn’t help but notice the tension.
“Sound to general quarters,” ordered Commander Judge. “We have a possible suicide run. All hands brace for impact.”
“Comms,” shouted Kolhammer, “patch me directly into the Sutanto right now.”
Telltale static crackled over the loudspeakers as the Sutanto’s obsolete communications net linked to the Clinton.
“Damiri, this is Admiral Kolhammer. Come to a full stop right now. Are you reading me? Come to a full stop right now or we will fire on you.”
“Turn it off,” said Damiri. “All ahead full. Allahu akbar!”
As the ship leapt forward he braced himself, imagining the eruption of white water at her stern. He was surprised to find himself a little scared, but he took solace in the confusion and fear that would now be gripping the Americans.
The Clinton rushed closer with every second. He smiled, at the wallowing buckets of iron around him. They seemed to groan at the seams as they poured on steam to escape.
“Look, my sheik, look!”
A wide, beaming smile spread over Damiri’s face as he saw two ships collide about a thousand meters away. The sound of the impact reached him as a terrible grinding of steel against steel and he fancied he could even make out the screams and cries of the infidels as they reeled in fear. He smirked.
Shock and awe, indeed.
A missile roared overhead and he ducked without thinking, even though the gesture was pointless. The nearest ship, some sort of passenger liner, he thought, blew apart with a bone-shaking explosion.
“Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar!”
He heard the ghostly, whispering crack of hypervelocity caseless ammunition as it passed harmlessly through the air above the tip of the ship’s broken mast.
“They cannot depress their guns far enough, my brothers. Praise God we shall all be in Paradise soon,” cried Damiri.
Kolhammer’s mouth was a thin, white line chiseled into the granite face of a cold mountain. Alarms sounded throughout the ship and every sailor in the bridge was bracing for the detonation while trying to perform half a dozen emergency drills at the same time. He could feel the deck of the giant ship tilting as she poured on the revolutions and tried to accelerate away from the suicide boat.
He did a quick calculation on just how much explosive material you could pack into a vessel of that size, wondering whether the armor sheath could withstand the blast. Probably not, if Damiri rammed them.
The sea around him was a maelstrom with dozens of ships heading in all directions. Reports of collisions and near collisions flashed up on screens and sounded through the loudspeakers every few seconds. Judge shouted orders to the bridge crew. Spruance had quietly wandered over to the strip window with his hands clasped behind his back while the crew called out updates in the strained tones of men and women trained to die at their stations.
“Trident coming around, sir. No missile lock yet.”
“Kandahar is blocked, Admiral.”
“Kennebunkport does not have a clear field of fire.”
“CAP is sixteen kilometers out, no target lock.”
“Comanche lifting off the Kandahar.”
A dark shape flashed with a vicious buzz. Kolhammer was about to ask what the hell it was when Spruance called out over the din.
“It’s a Wildcat! Off the Enterprise.”
The antique fighter roared down the length of the Clinton’s flight deck, waggling its wings in a salute. It reached the bow and immediately opened up with all six machine guns. Kolhammer frantically flicked between a dozen battle-cam views on the nearest screen before he found a top-down view of the old F-4F boring in toward the jihadi boat. White light twinkled along the leading edge of its wings. Long, ropy strands of gun smoke trailed behind. Thousand of rounds of good old-fashioned fifty caliber whipped the midnight-blue sea around the Sutanto into a fury of white water. The first shells bit into the metal skin of the ship, and the pilot adjusted the angle of his shallow dive to keep the fire pouring into the decks. Shards of red-hot metal erupted from the small superstructure as the Sutanto shuddered under the assault.
The gap between the Wildcat and her prey closed rapidly.
Seven hundred meters.
Six hundred.
Five hundred.
Smoke and flames streamed from a dozen breaches in the ship’s plating.
Four hundred.
Three hundred.
The Wildcat’s guns ran dry and the plane peeled away.
Nothing happened for two seconds, and then the Sutanto went up in a stunning eruption that Kolhammer felt in his guts as the pressure wave slammed into the Clinton. His ears popped painfully. Vision swam. Gray spots bloomed. Sailors tumbled to the floor and the great, titanic mass of the supercarrier trembled with the shock. She rose up a little as if riding over a wave, and then plunged down again, intact and safe.
The Sutanto was gone, and with her the little aluminum monoplane that had saved them all.
Well, not all, Kolhammer realized as he straightened up.
The blast wave had been strong enough to tear apart two nearby liners and a hospital ship. Another two civilian vessels had collided in their panic to get away, and one of them was going down quickly. Secondary explosions tore through the crippled liners. Oily smoke and flames poured from the foredeck of the hospital ship and the sea for miles around was in turmoil with dozens of ships, modern and contemporary, scattering to the four points.
“Damage?” cried Kolhammer.
Commander Judge scanned a nearby screen, glancing out the blast windows as though he didn’t trust the data over the evidence of his own eyes. Video coverage from drones stationed overhead and feeding from mast-mounted cams through the modern ships began to appear on screens all over the bridge.
“Jesus, it went off like a baby nuke.”
Kolhammer couldn’t tell who’d said that. One of his people, he supposed, given the reference.
“We came through without major structural damage,” Judge reported. “But we’ve lost three surface assets and another two are in danger.”
“Projected casualties?” demanded Kolhammer.
“Heavy. Five to six thousand. Search and rescue are under way. No threats on the board. We’re scanning clean to eight hundred kilometers.”
“Okay. Round ’em all up before we’re scattered to Hell and back.”
Kolhammer became aware that Spruance had made his way over from the window. He looked shaken, but not nearly so much as Kolhammer himself felt.
“What the hell was that?” asked Spruance.
Kolhammer wasn’t sure how to explain what had just happened. In the end he could only slump into his chair as the adrenaline backwash sluiced through his system, leaving him shaky and on edge. He threw his hands up, a small gesture of impotence.
“That was the future,” he said.
EPILOGUE
The meeting of the Japanese war cabinet went late into the night. It wasn’t a happy affair. Some faces were conspicuously absent. Many had perished at Hashirajima, and even though Yamamoto had repeatedly urged the imperial general headquarters to clear the anchorage, in some eyes he knew that he was somehow to blame for the disaster there. He didn’t care. Some of these fools needed shooting in
the ass before they realized what being at war really meant.
Still, even he had to admit some surprise at the raids on Luzon and Singapore. Not at the scale of destruction that had rained down on the emperor’s forces in those places, but at the strange choice that Admiral Kolhammer had made. Yamamoto had half expected him to sail right into the anchorage of the Combined Fleet and sink every single ship there. Moertopo said he was more than capable of doing just that, and Yamamoto didn’t doubt it for a moment. As an alternative he had wasted precious resources on strategically insignificant targets. It was curious, but the grand admiral didn’t make the mistake of dismissing the action as mere folly. It revealed much about the nature of his new enemy and was thus something to be very carefully thought about.
Why would they do such a thing, when they could conceivably shatter their enemies instead? Did it say more about the men they were fighting, or the world they had come from? Was it a weakness he could exploit?
Still, these were questions for another day. At that moment ministers surrounded him, demanding to know how it was possible that the Americans had simply sailed into the heart of the empire and carried away their countrymen.
“Because we could not stop them,” said Yamamoto, somewhat impishly.
The cabinet room exploded at that, but he waited them out and eventually calm returned.
“The Americans have made a terrible mistake,” he said quietly when he had everybody’s attention. “They have expended most of their precious weapons rescuing skeletons and camp whores. This tactical victory has cost them an overwhelming strategic advantage, as they shall soon see. I have fashioned a blade to drive through the heart of their fleet as it returns to Pearl Harbor.”
Prime Minister Tojo spoke into the silence that followed that revelation.
“And that is why the Sutanto left Hashirajima, Admiral?”
Yamamoto nodded, explaining himself to everyone in the room.
“It is why most of the fleet has left. They are to cover the withdrawal of our forces from China and the invasion of New Guinea and the Australian mainland. We will deny the Americans their base for a counterattack in the Pacific.”
He did not react to the sharp intake of breath around the table. To this point only he and Tojo had known of the plan.
“And what of Hawaii?” asked the prime minister.
“I have plans for them, too.”
“Even with these supercarriers and warships there?” barked an army general. The army had never been supporters of the thrust to expand the empire southward. To Yamamoto’s way of thinking they were fixated on Manchuria and the Communists. He had to suppress a mischievous smirk at the prospect of dragging them out of China, kicking and screaming.
“The Sutanto will destroy the Kolhammer force,” Yamamoto promised, raising his hand against the inevitable objections. “Yes, she is one small ship, but she will sweep them away like a Divine Wind, a kamikaze.”
“And when will we know?” asked Tojo.
“We still have sources in Hawaii,” Yamamoto explained. “They will send word.”
He leaned forward and smacked the table with his injured hand, slowly growling out his next words.
“But even if by some chance the Sutanto fails, and this Kolhammer survives, we will still forge on with our new plan, because we have no choice. You have all read the reports I gave you. You know where fate will take us if we do not change our path. We have allowed ourselves to be blinded to the real danger. It does not lie in Russia or China. It lies across the Pacific in the United States, and south in Australia where they will first build up their forces. We must defeat them there before they are too strong. We must take their base at Hawaii from them. And on the last day of this war we must stand in the Oval Office and put their crippled president to the sword.
“Because we have no choice.”
Complete silence greeted this uncompromising speech. A dozen men stared at him, some in awe, some in shock, and some without discernible emotion. The moment stretched uncomfortably until Yamamoto began to worry that one of them might actually laugh at him. Finally, a lone voice spoke up. The army officer who had questioned him before.
“But how?” he asked, genuinely perplexed.
Yamamoto smiled.
MOSCOW, 2215 HOURS, 25 JUNE 1942
He didn’t think it was possible that a place even more fearful than the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz Albrechtstrasse might exist, but perhaps he had found it here in this surprisingly shabby waiting room. He knew that if the next hour didn’t go well he would not live to see this room again. It was entirely possible he’d simply be shot dead behind the heavy oak doors that led into the inner sanctum of the Central Committee. Perhaps there would be a secret trapdoor through which they would spirit him away to the cells. He thought that was very much their style. There would doubtless be many cells in this building.
He did his best to appear relaxed despite the hard, uncomfortable chair on which he sat. Nobody had offered him even a simple refreshment or shaken his hand. The minor functionaries who staffed this chamber treated him with cold formality, for which he supposed he could not blame them. His country was still exterminating their people like millions of rats. Perhaps by morning that might be behind them. For the sake of the Fatherland he could only hope.
He still did not quite believe the case he would have to argue in there. If it had just been a suggestion from the Japanese alone he would have laughed it off, but the führer himself was adamant that Yamamoto’s plan was worth the risk. Of course it was not the führer’s risk to take. It was his.
It was all madness really. But the whole world was alive with talk of the insanity. The führer was obsessed with reading translated stories from the Allied press about events in the Pacific. For once it had driven news of the war from the front pages around the globe. And now he was here, at the very center of the storm, on a mission that would assuredly make an irrelevance of these “time travelers.” He was here and they were listening to him. That was enough to justify the risk.
German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop brushed a piece of lint from his sleeve as he waited for Joseph Stalin to admit him to the Soviet Politburo, to argue the case for a cease-fire and a new alliance with the Axis against the liberal democracies.
*1Destroyed or lost.
*2Destroyed or lost.
*3Destroyed or lost.
*4Destroyed or lost.
*5Destroyed or lost.
*6Destroyed or lost.
*7Destroyed or lost.
Advance praise for
WEAPONS OF CHOICE
Book One of The Axis of Time
by John Birmingham
“Birmingham hits the ground running and accelerates through the first half of the novel, before slowing down enough to let the reader and characters consider the implications of what’s going on. Quick-paced and very clever alternate history.”
—DAVID DRAKE, acclaimed author of
The Far side of the Stars and Redliners
“An excellent combination of near future military SF and alternate history, and a riveting story to boot.”
—ERIC FLINT, author of
1632 and 1634: The Galileo Affair
“This book has everything: time travel, the British royalty, things that go boom, and unrelenting action. Read the opening at your own risk: you won’t be doing anything else until you finish it.”
—SEAN WILLIAMS, co-author of Heirs of Earth and
Star Wars: Force Heretic: Reunion
“Smart munitions meet smart writing in a military-grade action-adventure that’s impossible to stop reading. Send me some more!”
—GARTH NIX, author of Sabriel and The Ragwitch
Weapons of Choice is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2004 by John Birmin
gham
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Random House website address:
www.delreydigital.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request from the publisher.
eISBN 0-345-47838-X
v1.0
Weapons of Choice Page 56