John Birmingham - Axis of Time 1 - Weapons of Choice

WEAPONS OF CHOICE

* * * * *

JOHN BIRMINGHAM

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Dramatis Personae

Part One

Transit

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Part Two

Détente

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part Three

Alliances

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Part Four

Impact

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Epilogue

Footnotes

Preview

Copyright

For Jane, the believer

Thanks are due to Garth Nix, who first led me down this long and winding path. To Russ Galen, who

filled my beggar’s bowl. To Steve Saffel, who suffered as no mortal editor should ever have to suffer. To

Keith Clayton, who kicked butt as Trapper John to Steve’s Hawkeye, and Crystal Velasquez, who

could easily get a job project managing a time machine. To Cate Paterson, my sword and shield. And

Brianne Tunnicliffe, for riding shotgun on this madness. The rock-steady babes at the Queensland Writers

Centre are owed my thanks and gratitude. And Pete McAllister, as always, was a dude. There is no way

I can repay the loving support of my family, Jane, Anna, and Thomas, except maybe by getting away

from the keyboard more often.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

MULTINATIONAL FORCE COMMANDERS

Anderson, Captain Daytona, USN. Commander, USS Leyte Gulf.

Francois, Captain Margie, USMC. Combat surgeon and chief medical officer, Multinational Force.

(USS Kandahar.)

Halabi, Captain Karen, RN. Commander, British contingent; deputy commander, Multinational Force;

commander, HMS Trident.

Jones, Colonel J. L., USMC. Commander, Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Unit. (USS Kandahar.

)

Judge, Commander Mike, USN. Executive officer, USS Hillary Clinton.

Kolhammer, Admiral Phillip, USN. Task force commander, USS Hillary Clinton.

Miyazaki, Sub-Lieutenant Maseo, JMSDF. Acting commander, JDS Siranui.

Moertopo, Lieutenant Ali, TNI-AL. Acting commander, KRI Sutanto.

Willet, Captain Jane, RAN. Commander, HMAS Havoc.

Windsor, His Royal Highness Captain Harry. Commander, British SAS contingent.

MULTINATIONAL FORCE PERSONNEL

Bukowski, Specialist Waylon, USMC. First Platoon, B Company. (USS Kandahar.)

Chen, Second Lieutenant Henry, USMC. Third Platoon, C Company. (USS Kandahar.)

Damiri, Sub-Lieutenant Usama, TNI-AL. Information systems officer, KRI Sutanto.

Hannon, Second Lieutenant Biff, USMC. First Platoon, B Company. (USS Kandahar.)

Harford, Flight Lieutenant Chris, USN. Helicopter pilot, USS Hillary Clinton.

Hayes, Flight Lieutenant Amanda, USN. Helicopter pilot, USS Hillary Clinton.

Ivanov, Major Pavel, Russian Federation Spetsnaz. On secondment to U.S. Navy SEALs. (USS

Kandahar.)

Nguyen, Lieutenant Rachel, RAN. Close-In Weapons System operator. (HMAS Moreton Bay.)

Seconded to History Working Group. (USS Hillary Clinton.)

Rogas, Chief Petty Officer Vincente, U.S. Navy SEALs. (USS Kandahar.)

Thieu, Lieutenant Edgar, USN. Media relations officer, USS Hillary Clinton.

MISCELLANEOUS

Duffy, Julia. New York Times feature writer. Embedded Eighty-second MEU.

Natoli, Rosanna. CNN researcher/producer. Embedded Eighty-second MEU.

Pope, Professor Manning. Project director, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

1942 ALLIED COMMANDERS

Churchill, Winston. Prime minister, Great Britain.

Curtin, John. Prime minister, Commonwealth of Australia.

Eisenhower, Brigadier General Dwight D. U.S. Army. Head of War Plans Division. Appointed

commander of U.S. forces, European theater of operations, June 1942.

King, Admiral Ernest J., USN. Commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of naval operations.

MacArthur, General Douglas, U.S. Army. Commander, Allied Forces, South West Pacific Area.

Headquartered Brisbane, Australia.

Marshall, General George C., U.S. Army. Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Nimitz, Admiral Chester, USN. Commander in chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet.

Roosevelt, President, Franklin D. Thirty-second president of the United States of America.

Spruance, Rear Admiral Raymond A., USN. Commander, Task Force Sixteen.

1942 ALLIED PERSONNEL

Black, Lieutenant Commander Daniel, USN. Assistant operations and planning chief to Admiral

Spruance. (USS Enterprise.)

Curtis, Ensign Wally, USN. Assistant payroll clerk, USS Enterprise.

Davidson, Able Seaman James “Slim Jim,” USS Astoria.

Evans, Lieutenant Commander Peter. Acting commander, USS Astoria.

Mohr, Chief Petty Officer Eddie, USS Astoria.

Molloy, Able Seaman Michael “Moose,” USS Astoria.

Ryan, Warrant Officer Peter, New Guinea Volunteer Rifles. Patrol officer.

MISCELLANEOUS

Cherry, Detective Sergeant Lou, Honolulu PD, Homicide.

Einstein, Professor Albert, Nobel laureate.

AXIS HIGH COMMAND

JAPAN

Kakuta, Rear Admiral Kakuji, IJN. Commander, Second Carrier Striking Force. (HIJMS Ryujo.)

Yamamoto, Admiral Isoroku, IJN. Commander in chief, Combined Fleet. (HIJMS Yamamoto.)

GERMANY

Göbbels, Reichsminister Josef. German propaganda minister.

Himmler, Reichsführer Heinrich. SS chief.

Hitler, Reichschancellor Adolf.

AXIS PERSONNEL

Brasch, Major Paul. Engineer.

Hidaka, Lieutenant Commander Jisaku, IJN. Chief of staff to Rear Admiral Kakuta. (HIJMS Ryujo.)

Skorzeny, Colonel Otto. Personal bodyguard to Adolf Hitler.

Steckel, Franz. SS-Obersturmführer of the SD-Ausland, a lieutenant in the Nazi Party’s foreign

intelligence service.

SHIPS OF THE MULTINATIONAL FORCE

USS Hillary Clinton. George Bush–class supercarrier.

USS Kandahar. Bagdhad-class littoral assault ship.

USS Leyte Gulf. Nemesis-class stealth cruiser. *1

USS Garret. Cobb-class air warfare destroyer. *2

USS Providence. Harper’s Ferry–class amphibious landing dockship.

USS Kennebunkport. LPD 12 landing assault ship.

HMS Trident. Trident-class stealth destroyer (trimaran).

HMS Vanguard. Trident-class stealth destroyer (trimaran). *3

HMS Fearless. Aden-class helicopter assault ship. *4

HMAS Havoc. Savage-class attack submarine (conventional).

HMAS Moreton Bay. Jervis Bay–class troop-carrying catamaran.

HMAS Ipswich. Newcastle-class light littoral assault ship.

KRI Sutanto. Reconditioned Parchim-class frigate of the Indonesian navy (TNI-AL). *5

KRI Nuku. Reconditioned Parchim-class frigate of the Indonesian navy (TNI-AL). *6

Dessaix. Sartre-class stealth destroyer of the French navy. *7

PART ONE

* * * * *

TRANSIT

1

EAST TIMOR, ZONE TIME: 0942 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

The Caliphate spy, a Javanese carpenter known simply as Adil, resettled himself against a comfortable

groove in the sandalwood tree. The small, shaded clearing in the hills overlooking Dili had been his home

for three days. He shared it with an aged feral cat, which remained hidden throughout the day, and an

irritable monkey, which occasionally tried to shit on his head. He had considered shooting the filthy

animal, but his orders were explicit. He was to remain unnoticed as long as the crusaders were anchored

off East Timor, observing their fleet and sending reports via microburst laser link, but only in the event of

a “significant development.”

He had seen nothing “significant” in seventy-two hours. The infidel ships were lying so far offshore they

were often lost in haze and distance. Only when night fell did he have any real chance of seeing them, and

even then they remained little more than a blurred constellation of twinkling, faraway lights. Such was

their arrogance they didn’t bother to cloak themselves in darkness.

Jets roared to and from the flight deck of their carrier twenty-four hours a day. In deepest night the fire of

the launches appeared to Adil as though God Himself had lit a torch on the rim of the world.

Occasionally a helicopter would appear from the direction of the flotilla, beginning as a small, indistinct

dot in the hot gray sky, taking on recognizable form only as the muffled drone of its engines clarified into

a thudding, growling roar. From his hiding spot Adil could almost make out the faces of the infidels in the

cabins of the fat metal birds. American, British, French, they all looked alike, cruel and overfed, a thought

that reminded him of his own hunger.

He unwrapped the banana leaves from around a small rice cake, thanking Allah for the generosity of his

masters. They had included a little dried fish in his rations for today, a rare treat.

Sometimes, when the sun climbed directly overhead and beat down with a slow fury, Adil’s thoughts

wandered. He cursed his weakness and begged God for the strength to carry out his duty, but it was

hard. He had fallen asleep more than once. Nothing ever seemed to happen. There was plenty of

movement down in Dili, which was infested with crusader forces from all over the Christian world, but

Dili wasn’t his concern. His sole responsibility was to watch those ships that were hiding in the

shimmering haze on the far horizon.

Still, Adil mused, it would be nice to know he had some real purpose here; that he had not been staked

out like a goat on the side of a hill. Perhaps he was to be part of some elaborate strike on the Christians

in town. Perhaps tonight the darkness would be torn asunder by holy fire as some martyr blew up one of

their filthy taverns. But then, why leave him here on the side of this stupid hill, covered in monkey shit and

tormented by ants?

This wasn’t how he had imagined jihad would be when he had graduated from the Madrasa in Bandung.

USS KANDAHAR, 1014 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

The marines wouldn’t have been surprised at all to discover that someone like Adil was watching over

them. In fact, they assumed there were more than two hundred million pairs of eyes turned their way as

they prepared to deploy into the Indonesian Archipelago.

Nobody called it the Caliphate. Officially the United States still recognized it as the sovereign territory of

Indonesia, seventeen thousand islands stretching from Banda Aceh, three hundred kilometers off the

coast of Thailand, down to Timor, just north of Australia. The sea-lanes passing through those islands

carried a third of the world’s maritime trade, and officially they remained open to all traffic. The

Indonesian government-in-exile said so—from the safety of the Grand Hyatt in Geneva where they had

fled, three weeks earlier, after losing control of Jakarta.

Unofficially though, these were the badlands, controlled—just barely—by a revolutionary Islamic

government calling itself the Caliphate and laying claim to all seventeen thousand islands, as well as the

territory of Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, and, for

good measure, northern Australia. Nonbelievers were not welcome. The spiritual leader of the Caliphate,

Mullah Ibn Abbas, had proclaimed this as the will of Allah.

The Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Unit begged to differ. And on the hangar deck of the USS

Kandahar, a Baghdad-class littoral assault ship, they were preparing a full and frank rebuttal.

The hangar was a vast, echoing space. Two full decks high and running nearly a third of the length of the

slab-sided vessel, it still seemed crowded, packed tight with most of the Eighty-second’s air wing—a

small air force in its own right consisting of a dozen Ospreys, four aging Super Stallions, two

reconditioned command Hueys, eight Sea Comanche gunships, and half a dozen Super Harriers.

The Harriers and Super Stallions had been moved onto the “roof”—the flight deck, thus allowing the

ground combat element of the Eighty-second MEU to colonize the space that had been opened up. The

GCE was formally known as the Third Battalion of the Ninth Regiment, Fifth Marine Division. It was also

known as the Lonesome Dead, after their passably famous CO, Colonel J. Lonesome Jones.

Not all of 3 Batt were embarked upon the Kandahar. The battalion topped out at more than twelve

hundred men and women, and some of their number had to be berthed elsewhere in the three ships that

were carrying the Eighty-second into harm’s way. The USS Providence, a Harper’s Ferry–class

amphibious landing dockship (LSD), took the battalion’s four Abrams tanks, a rifle company, and the

amphibious assault vehicle platoon. The Kennebunkport, a venerable LPD 12, carried the recon

platoon, the regiment’s Humvees, two more Hueys, the drone platoon, and the Navy SEAL team that

would be providing security to the Eighty-second during their cruise through the archipelago.

Even as Adil unwrapped his rice cake and squinted into the blue expanse of the Wetar Strait a six-man

detachment from the SEAL team was unpacking their gear on the hangar deck of the Kandahar, where

they were getting set to train the men of C Company, 3 Batt.

Charlie Company doubled as Colonel Jones’s cliff assault and small boat raiding squadron, and the

SEALs had come to acquaint them with a new toy: the G4, a lightweight assault rifle that fired strips of

caseless ceramic ammunition and programmable 30mm grenades. It was to become standard equipment

throughout the U.S. armed forces within twelve months. The marines, however, were always at the

bottom of the food chain, and would probably have waited two years before they laid hands on these

toys. But the battalion logistics officer, Lieutenant Colonel Nancy Viviani, was an inventive and talented

S4. As always, Viviani was determined that the battalion should have the very best equipment other

people’s money could buy.

Not that long ago she would have been known as a scavenger, a scrounger, and would have done her

job under the cover of darkness with a pair of wire cutters and a fast getaway jeep. She would have

been a man, too, of course. But Lieutenant Colonel Viviani carried two master’s degrees into combat,

one of them an MBA from the London School of Economics, and the graduates of that august institution

didn’t stoop to anything so crude as petty theft. Not when they could play the Pentagon’s fantastically

complex supply programs like an antique violin.

Six and a half hours of extracurricular keyboard time had been enough to release a shipment of G4s from

pre-positioned supply vessels in Darwin. Viviani’s genius was in making the process appear entirely

legitimate. Had the Senate Armed Forces Committee itself spent a year inspecting her electronic audit

trail, it would have found everything in order with absolutely nothing linking the G4 shipment to the loss of

a similar supply package scheduled for delivery to an army public relations unit.

“This is the Remington G-four,” CPO Vincente Rogas barked at the members of C Company. “By the

end of today’s lecture you will be familiar with the procedure for maintaining this weapon in the field.” It

sounded more like a threat than a promise.

“The G-four is the first solid-state infantry weapon,” he bellowed. “It has very few moving parts.”

A slight murmur passed through the tight knot of marines. They were familiar with the weapons specs,

having intensively trained with them back in the United States. But still, it was a hell of a thing to wrap

your head around.

“And this is the standard battle load.” His audience stared at the long thin strip of ceramic munitions like

children at their first magic show. “The ammo strip is placed in the barrel like this. An electrical charge

ignites the propellant casing, driving the slug out with such velocity that, even with a three-round burst,

you will feel no kickback—at least not before the volley leaves the muzzle.

“Tomorrow, when we move ashore to the range, each of you will be allotted three hundred rounds. I

suggest very strongly that before then you take advantage of the full VR tutorial we’ve loaded into your

training sets. The base software package is a standard Asian urban conflict scenario, but we’ve added

modules specifically tailored for operations in Jakarta and Surabaya.”

With deployment less than a fortnight away, similar scenes were being replayed throughout the U.S.-led

Multinational Force accompanying the Kandahar. Twelve thousand very serious men and women drilled

to the point of exhaustion. They were authorized by the UN Security Council to use whatever force was

necessary to reestablish control of the capital, Jakarta, and to put an end to the mass murder of

Indonesia’s Chinese and Christian minorities. Everybody was preparing for a slaughter.

In the hundred-bed hospital of the Kandahar the Eighty-second’s chief combat surgeon, Captain Margie

Francois, supervised her team’s reaction to a simulated missile strike on an armored hovercraft carrying a

marine rifle company into a contested estuary.

Two thousand meters away, the French missile frigate Dessaix dueled with a pair of Raptors off the

supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton.

In the other direction, three thousand meters to the west, two British trimaran stealth destroyers practiced

their response to a successful strike by suicide bombers whose weapon of choice had been a high-speed

rubber boat. Indeed, Captain Karen Halabi, who had been on the receiving end of just such an attack as

a young ensign, drilled the crew of the HMS Trident so fiercely that in those few hours they were

allowed to sleep, most dreamed of crazy men in speedboats laden with TNT.

JRV NAGOYA, 1046 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

As diverse as these ships were, one still stood out. The Joint Research Vessel Nagoya was a

purpose-built leviathan, constructed around the frame of an eighty-thousand-tonne liquid natural gas

carrier. Her keel had been laid down in Korea, with the fit-out split between San Francisco and Tokyo,

reflecting the multinational nature of her funding. She fit in with the sleek warships of the Multinational

Force the way a hippo would with a school of swordfish.

Her presence was a function of the speed with which the crisis in Jakarta had developed. The USS Leyte

Gulf, a stealth cruiser from the Clinton’s battle group, had been riding shotgun over the Nagoya’s sea

trials in the benign waters off Western Australia. When the orders came down that the carrier and her

battle group were to move immediately into the Wetar Strait the Nagoya had been left with no choice but

to tag along until an escort could be assigned to shepherd her safely back to Hawaii. It was a situation

nobody liked, least of all Professor Manning Pope, the leader of the Nagoya team.

Crouched over a console in his private quarters, Pope muttered under his breath as he hammered out yet

another enraged e-mail directly to Admiral Tony Kevin, commander in chief, U.S. Pacific Command. It

was the ninth such e-mail he had sent in forty-eight hours. Each had elicited a standardized reply, not

from the admiral himself mind you, but from some trained monkey on his personal staff.

Pope typed, stabbing at the keys:

Need I remind you of the support this Project elicits at THE VERY HIGHEST LEVELS OF

GOVERNMENT. I would not wish to be in your shoes, Admiral Kevin, when I explain to your

superiors that we have gone over budget while being dragged into this pointless fiasco. The NAGOYA is

a research vessel, not a warship, and we should have been allowed to continue our trials unmolested in

the perfectly safe testing range off Perth. As small as they are, the Australian navy are more than capable

of fending off any drunken fishermen who might have strayed too close.

Therefore I DEMAND that we be freed from this two-penny opera and allowed to return to our test

schedule as originally planned. I await your earliest reply. And that means YOURS, Admiral Kevin. Not

some junior baboon!

That’ll put a rocket under his fat ass, thought Pope. Bureaucrats hate it when you threaten to go

over their heads. It means they might actually have to stagger to their feet and do something for a

change.

Spleen vented for the moment, he keyed into the vidlink that connected him with the Project control

room. A Japanese man with a shock of unruly, thick black hair answered the hail.

“How do we look for a power-up this morning, Yoshi?” Pope asked. “I’m anxious to get back on

schedule.”

Standing at a long, curving bank of flatscreens Professor Yoshi Murayama, an unusually tall cosmic string

theorist from Honshu, blew out his cheeks and shrugged. “I can’t see why not from this end. We’re just

about finished entering the new data sets. We’re good to go, except you know that Kolhammer won’t

like it.”

“Kolhammer’s a chickenshit,” Pope said somewhat mournfully. “I really don’t care what he thinks. He’s

not qualified to tell us what we can and cannot do. You are.”

“Like I said,” the Japanese Nobel winner responded. “I don’t see a problem. Just a beautiful set of

numbers.”

“Of course.” Pope nodded. “Everyone else feel the same?” he asked, raising his voice so that it

projected into the room beyond Murayama. The space was surprisingly small for such a momentous

undertaking, no bigger than a suburban living room really. Large glowing monitors shared the area with

half a dozen senior Project researchers, each staffing a workstation.

His question caught them off-guard. Their boss enjoyed a hard-won reputation as a thoroughly

unpleasant little prick with an amazingly rigid pole up his ass. A couple of them exchanged quick glances,

but nobody said anything for a few moments until Barnes, their magnetic ram technician, ventured a reply.

“Well, it’s not our fault we fell behind. But you can bet we’ll get blamed if we don’t hustle to catch up.”

“Exactly!” Pope replied. “Let’s prepare for a test run at point-zero-one efficiency. That should be enough

to confirm a stabilized effect with the new figures. Are we all agreed?”

They were.

HMAS MORETON BAY, 1049 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

Lieutenant Rachel Nguyen had slept six hours out of the last forty-eight. As the defensive systems

operator of the troop cat Moreton Bay, she felt herself directly responsible for the lives of four hundred

soldiers and thirty-two crewmembers. The Moreton Bay was a fat, soft, high-value target; so much more

tempting for would-be martyrs or renegade Indonesian forces than the Clinton, or the Kandahar, or any

of the escort vessels. The software for the catamaran’s Metal Storm CIWS—Close-In Weapons

System—had been twitching and freezing up ever since they’d loaded the update patches during the last

refit in Sydney. Nguyen, at the tail end of a marathon hacking session, had just come to the conclusion

she’d be better off trashing the updates and reverting to the old program.

John Birmingham - Axis of Time 1 - Weapons of Choice

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: