Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  Japs.

  Denny’s heart hammered at the inside of his rib cage as he slowly inched downward, with Barbaro just behind him. What the hell the Japs were doing, he had no idea, but the rails had to be significant.

  He breathed slowly and deeply, trying to calm himself as they moved closer to the enemy. The tunnel was gloomy, but he worried about being spotted anyway. Only he and Barbaro had entered; the others were waiting for them back in the jungle, beyond the large canvas sheet that obscured the mouth of the cave.

  It had been painted to match the surrounding rock face, with small plants stitched into the fabric—a cheap but effective disguise. He wondered how much work had gone into the facility. How much of the cave system was natural and how much carved out by men? Slave laborers, if he knew the Japs.

  Yukio’s boots sang on the iron rungs as he climbed. The ladder was thin, and the drop to the floor of the cave would be nasty.

  He kept his eyes focused on his hands as he climbed. It probably wasn’t necessary to inspect the launch tunnels every day, and it certainly wasn’t part of his duty, but he had made it his responsibility anyway. What if the American suddenly appeared on the horizon without warning? He’d heard sailors talk of invisible American ships, cloaked by some device from the future that had allowed them to sneak in among the Combined Fleet at Hashirajima and sink so many vessels.

  Sailors were notorious for the stories they made up, but there could be no doubt that the Allied navies enjoyed remarkable advantages in technology. It was a proven fact some of their new ships and planes baffled the radar sets that Japan had bought from the Reich, and the very act of turning on the radar seemed to act as a beacon, attracting swarms of rockets and bombs when the gaijin were about.

  Given all that, he thought as he neared the top of the ladder leading up to the launch tube, it was only prudent to make sure that they were ready to get away at a moment’s notice. Literally. And he’d meant what he said to Onada. If an Ohka struck an obstacle on the rails, it could be disastrous, perhaps even destroying the entire base in an explosion that set off a chain reaction among the dozens of Ohkas lined up for launch.

  So he would check the launch tunnels for any problems, obstructions—anything that might interfere at the last minute. And he’d do so every day, if no one else would.

  Reaching the top of the ladder, he poked his head over the rim.

  Denny and Barbaro were almost at the end of the tunnel, carefully inching forward along the floor. It was a precarious business. The slope was steep; crawling down it, Denny felt as though they might slip forward and tumble over the edge into the midst of the enemy.

  About eight feet from the opening, he could already see that they’d struck pay dirt. The huge cavern was crowded with the Japanese flying bombs he’d been tasked to locate. Ohkas, if he remembered right. These things looked just like them. The wings were a little swept back, and they looked bigger than he’d expected, but they had to be the jet-powered kamikaze planes everyone had been expecting.

  A quick radio call, and this nest of vipers would be somebody else’s problem. He was just about to turn around and start the climb back when a head popped up over the edge, and he found himself staring into the startled eyes of an enemy soldier.

  “Fuck,” Barbaro hissed.

  The Jap screamed something out in his own language. Everyone on the floor of the cavern froze and stared up in their direction.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  Americans!

  Yukio almost tumbled back off the ladder, he was so surprised.

  “Americans!” he screamed. “Americans in the launch tunnels!”

  He reached for his holster, scrambling for a gun, cursing as he remembered that he wasn’t wearing it. It was forbidden to carry sidearms in the caverns. An accidental discharge might set off a calamitous explosion.

  The faces of the enemy registered shock and fear.

  He almost slid down the ladder, but stopped himself at the last moment. A cringing, animalistic response welled up in him, urging him to flee.

  But screaming his kiai instead, he vaulted up the last couple of rungs.

  Denny shot the guy in the face. One round from his .45 took off the top of the Jap’s head and sent the corpse cartwheeling backward into space.

  The sound broke a spell that had hung over the tableau, and instantly the room below them was seething with enraged nips.

  “Get back to the others,” he shouted at Barbaro, unslinging his carbine and flipping the selector to full auto. He squeezed off a long burst that cut down a couple of the enemy running toward him. “Get word back to fleet. They gotta knock this place down. Bomb it to fucking rubble.”

  “But—”

  “Just fucking go. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Barbaro took off up the steep incline, tripping once on the rail and cursing.

  Denny cringed, expecting a hail of return fire, but none came.

  He flipped his selector back to single shots and started picking off targets.

  He just had to give the others a few precious minutes to get the word back to fleet.

  30

  D-DAY + 39. 12 JUNE 1944. 1446 HOURS.

  USS HILLARY CLINTON, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

  The recording ended abruptly with a clatter of gunfire and the harsh, staccato sounds of someone shouting in Japanese. The admiral nodded at the sysop to close the file. The CIC staffer shut it down with a few key clicks and awaited further instructions.

  Kolhammer’s expression didn’t betray in any way the feelings he had about the transmission. A comm screen deployed from the ceiling of the Clinton’s Combat Information Center, dropping in front of him and revealing a somber-looking Ray Spruance.

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt that they’re gone, Admiral,” Kolhammer said. “And given the data Willet sent through from Okhotsk, we’ll be coming within range of those things very soon. I have a Skyhawk flight fitted out with bunker busters, ready to roll on your say-so.”

  If he expected a fight from Spruance, he didn’t get one. The ’temps really had hardened up in the last two years. In some ways they seemed even more inured to suffering than folks had been in his own time. Less of a victim culture, he supposed. Last he’d heard, at least eighty thousand Frenchmen and women had died in the preparatory air strike over Calais. You couldn’t pull shit like that back up in the twenty-first without most of the media and half of Congress demanding that you be indicted as a war criminal. Or a Nazi, he thought with yet another spasm of twisted irony. That was always a fave, whenever people at home were exposed to the actual brutality of warfare. Out would come the tar and the feathers and the hand-painted NAZI sign to hang around somebody’s neck.

  Somebody like him.

  But Spruance remained focused on the big picture, no matter how grim-faced he was at having to listen to the destruction of Sergeant Denny’s patrol. They had to assume that the other Force Recon units inserted on two nearby islands had been compromised, as well. Yet they couldn’t allow that to distract them.

  “I agree, Admiral Kolhammer,” Spruance said. “Launch your planes.”

  . . .

  In the short walk out to her Skyhawk, Flight Lieutenant Anna Torres began to leak sweat. The air temperature was hovering over forty degrees Celsius, but down on the Clinton’s flight deck it seemed to be about half again as much. The roar of jet engines, the heavy traffic in personnel and equipment, the reflected heat scorching off the composite decking—it all created a very uncomfortable environment. She didn’t envy her chief as he readied the stepladder just beneath the cockpit. He must have been broiling inside his coveralls and powered helmet.

  Torres gave him a thumbs-up as she strapped in and the bubble canopy slid down into place. She could have sworn there were about twice as many people watching from whatever vantage points they could grab as she ran through preflight. That was only to be expected. Although the A-4s had been flying off the Clinton for a few months now, this was
their true baptism of fire. Slung beneath her fuselage on the centerline hard point she had a laser-guided sixteen-hundred-kilo GBU-20. A bunker buster that could chew through five meters of reinforced concrete before detonating. She was also carrying a couple of thermobaric glide bombs, two under each wing, and four hundred rounds of 20mm cannon ammo.

  She was sitting at the controls of one of the most advanced operational fighter aircraft in the world. A couple of the Big Hill’s original Raptors were still functional, but they were back in California, in the Zone, and probably in about a million pieces, being studied by a team of aeronautical engineers. One of them had been hers. Nicknamed Condi, after her daughter, whom she missed every single day. The marines were still flying Super Harriers off the Kandahar, but they were being held back as a strategic shield for the task force. So she and her fliers were the spear point of the free world today.

  She checked her electronics systems: her heads-up display, the link to the AWACS bird that was already aloft, and the link to the Clinton’s Combat Intelligence, Little Bill. All good to go. Torres fed power into the turbojet, which cycled up into a screaming roar. She set herself.

  The catapult fired and slammed her back into the padded ejector seat. The outside world blurred past as she shot down the runway and lifted off into clear space. For just a few seconds everything was clean and uncomplicated. She had a canopy of blue sky, dusted with fairy floss, the sort of day when once upon a time she would have taken her daughter down to the park, to just lie on the grass looking for shapes in the clouds. For that brief moment there was no war, no Transition, no madness and dislocation and the aching fucking loneliness of knowing that she was never going to see her child again.

  And then she banked around to the northwest and the world rolled back into view. The Combined Task Force filled up the wide bowl of the sea beneath her wings, a vast armada carving white arrowheads across the Pacific. Her own ship, the Clinton, stood out because of her size. Fully twice as large as the next biggest flattop, she launched one plane after another into the sky. All of them A-4 Skyhawks like hers, the distinctive delta wings standing out as iron-gray triangles against the deep blue.

  She formed up with her squadron, and in turn they fell in behind the E-2D Hawkeye that would control their mission.

  After settling in for the flight, Torres called up the V3D map on her HUD, showing the target. The quality was abysmal compared with what she’d been accustomed to back in the twenty-first, but that was to be expected without satellites or full-spectrum drone coverage. Most of the image was computer-generated and didn’t come anywhere near photo-realistic, but it’d just have to do.

  The principal terrain features should all be easily recognizable—she hoped—and her primary target was easy enough to spot, some sort of launch silo drilled into the side of a six-hundred-meter-tall hill that dominated the southern end of the island.

  For eight months now she’d been training on the Skyhawk, getting ready for just this kind of mission. The novelty of flying a genuine museum piece had long since worn off, and she very much missed her old F-22. It was a hell of a lot more comfy, for one thing. The climate control in this plane sucked. If they’d just let her have her old baby, she could have nailed the job herself and been back in time for an afternoon nap. But it was going to be a long time before a working squadron got its hands on a Raptor again.

  A text message from the Hawkeye came up on her HUD via laser link. The AWACS plane was about to roll into a holding pattern, allowing it to stay a safe distance from the objective. Six A-4s configured for air superiority broke off to take up watch over that rare and precious bird.

  Torres checked the mission data in the bottom left-hand corner and saw that an in-flight refueler had just lifted off from the Clinton—it would be there to meet them on the way home. She keyed in a query and found that a mixed crew was driving the tanker. Originals and AF ’temps.

  Not so long ago she’d have had uneasy feelings about that, but the ’temps were learning, and those who put their hands up to join the Auxiliary Forces tended to be especially motivated. It was as if they had something to prove—both to the uptimers and to their former colleagues. Besides, who the hell wanted to fly old Corsairs or Mustangs or even an F-86 when they could be driving something like this baby? Primitive as it was.

  At least three-quarters of the pilots in her squadron were ’temps now, what with so many of the original Clinton air group being sent back stateside into the labs and lecture halls. Torres had been spared by the luck of the draw—somebody had to stay behind and teach these clueless newbies how to handle the fast movers.

  It’d been a tentative business at first. The looks on some of her pilots’ faces the first time she’d stepped into the briefing room on the Clinton— Jesus, what a fucking nightmare. Nobody had been fool enough to diss her, or even look sideways at her. They’d had that particular brand of piss and vinegar whupped out of them back in the Zone, at Andersonville.

  That’s where it became obvious pretty quickly who wasn’t going to be able to make the adjustment, answering to women or people of color. A surprising number of those assholes had turned up, thinking they still had the run of the joint, but none lasted very long.

  So Torres only had to deal with the ’temps who made it through that winnowing-out process, for which she was endlessly grateful. Even then, there was a cultural brick wall that separated ’temp from uptimer, and she probably butted up against it at least a dozen times a day.

  Sometimes it was meaningless things, like a joke they didn’t get, or some cultural reference she slipped into conversation without thought. Like referring to the squadron as the Scooby Gang, or responding to the news that the Clinton’s battle group would be fighting under ’temp control with the timeless Kent Brockman quote, “And I for one welcome our new overlords.”

  Torres sighed. She really missed home.

  The mood in the CIC was hushed, and even a little tense.

  Or maybe that was putting it too strongly. Most of the men and women in here were Big Hill originals. Some had even fought with Kolhammer off Taiwan and North Korea. So they probably weren’t particularly anxious. More likely they were just stretched taut by returning to major combat for the first time in the retrofitted supercarrier.

  In all of the sea trials and war games off San Diego they’d adjusted with alacrity to the new mix of technology and personnel on board. The old girl wasn’t half the ship she’d once been, but she was still the biggest, meanest piece of floating iron on the face of this particular world. And while a good deal of her electronic architecture had been stripped out and left back in the States, very little had changed in the CIC. Between her organic intelligence assets like the Advanced Hawkeyes and the Nemesis arrays of the Siranui, Kolhammer knew he was riding with the king.

  Or maybe the queen, in this case.

  The main battlespace display was almost entirely devoted to the A-4 raid on the island where Denny’s patrol had discovered Yamamoto’s nasty little secret. The fighter-bombers were beginning their payload run and would deliver in less than two minutes. So far no radar had painted them, and the Hawkeye was picking up nothing in the way of signals traffic. Kolhammer’s only real concern was how the new snap-on laser guidance kits would perform. They weren’t anywhere near as accurate as the precision-guided munitions he was used to, but then they were a quantum leap ahead of anything that had been deployed by the ’temps so far. As Mike Judge said, they were “probably good enough for government work.”

  In the short time he had until the strike went in, Kolhammer had been watching a data package from Jane Willet’s sub, the Havoc. She was still lurking off the southern Kurils, with three drones at high altitude above the engagement between Yamamoto and their putative allies, the Soviets. And they were feeding her some scarifying footage.

  In all his years in the service, Kolhammer had never fought a naval battle at close quarters. Even Taiwan had been contested from well over the horizon. The only experi
ence he had of closing directly with an enemy was in warding off suicide attackers using speedboats.

  On one of the panels of the main display, however, he could see Soviet and Japanese ships pounding at each other from just a few miles away. And the Sovs were having a very tough time of it. All their major combatants had been sunk or heavily damaged in the surprise attack by the jet-powered tokkotai.

  By the time Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet came pouring through the channels of the lower Kuril Islands, they were opposed by a handful of crippled destroyers, or maybe even corvettes. The Japanese probably could have finished them off with conventional air strikes, but for some reason Yamamoto wanted to get in close with his guns. Perhaps he knew it was the last chance he’d ever have to fight like that.

  “Ten seconds from release, Admiral.”

  “Thank you,” Kolhammer replied, switching his attention back to his own onscreen battle.

  There was no drone coverage of the target. Torres and her guys were doing this the old-fashioned way. Consequently he had to be content with watching a CGI projection of the unfolding attack. It was all very primitive, but he knew that over on the Enterprise, Spruance and his staff were taking the same images in their refitted CIC and probably feeling like they were there in the cockpit. Everything was relative.

  Lieutenant Torres’s voice, clipped and slightly distorted, came over the speaker system. “I have the target. No triple A. No radar locks. Releasing payload.”

  . . .

  The GBU-20 detached and fell away, beginning a long glide toward the side of the small mountain. The Skyhawk seemed to bounce upward after it let go of the sixteen-hundred-kilo weight.

  Torres heard both of her wingmen release as she brought the A-4 around and powered up the laser designator. The pod was new, the product of a collaboration between a San Fernando–based start-up company called Combat Optics and a Bell Telephone subsidiary set up within the Zone to exploit the parent company’s future intellectual properties. The two directors of Combat Optics were 21C senior chief petty officers whose enlistments had expired about two months after the Transition. With a total of fifty years’ experience between them in the care and feeding of precision-guided munitions, they returned to civilian life and went straight to the downtown offices of O’Brien and Associates with a proposal to set up Combat Optics and go hunting for federal government contracts. The company was now publicly listed, employing two thousand people, and was worth well over half a billion dollars. Its main line of business was producing strap-on laser guidance kits for dumb iron bombs, designator pods, and night vision equipment.