Final Impact (13 page)

Hidaka shook his head to clear the memory of the nightmare. He’d suffered from vivid dreams ever since the Americans had returned. Their initial assault was so powerful, so paralyzing in its violence, that he sometimes feared it had unhinged him. He was never meant to fight on land. He would surely have done better on the bridge of a cruiser or a battleship.

He swung his legs over the side of the cot and felt around with his toes for the sandals he had been wearing. It was chilly and damp in the cave and he started to cough, as he always did on waking up. He wheezed almost constantly, but for some reason it was worse when he slept on his left side. Perhaps that lung was infected.

He slipped his feet into the wooden sandals and pulled a blanket around himself as he stood up. He checked his watch: three in the morning.

The nightmares often woke him at this time. It was when the first rockets had struck, destroying the encampment at Pearl Harbor and killing thousands of his men in the opening moments of the battle. Try as he might, it was impossible to rid himself of the memories. The fire demons of his fevered sleep were incarnations of the men he’d seen burned alive by some kind of incendiary bombs. If he lived to be a hundred, which was unlikely, he would never forget the horror of seeing one man, completely wreathed in liquid flames, melting away like candle wax.

The area he’d blocked off as living quarters was quite roomy, if Spartan. He had intended to run an insurgency campaign from here, so it had been fitted out accordingly. Ten empty bunks, for other officers who never made it, lay beyond his. He had maps of the islands, radio equipment, and food and weapons stores to spare. If only a few more had reached this hidden fortress. If only his protection detail had survived. They were all good men and even with just a handful of them, he could have caused havoc for the Americans. Instead he was reduced to hiding out, waiting for the moment when he might contribute something other than infamy to the emperor’s cause.

Hidaka fired up a small gas oven and put a pot of water on to boil. He would have some green tea and noodles and ponder his dilemma some more. Perhaps he might even be able to get back to sleep before the dawn.

While the water was heating he played around with his flexipad, flipping through the radio stations in a desultory manner. Those few still on the air at this hour were mostly broadcasting slow dance tunes. At least there was no music from the future. He always found that harsh and unsettling.

He consoled himself with memories of the short time he’d been the absolute ruler of Hawaii, the way he had smashed all resistance, the luxury of playing God with vanquished foes who had thought themselves so very superior to the “little yellow men.” He stirred the water and poured off a cup to make his tea, then added a packet of dried noodles and powdered pork flavoring to the pot. He treasured the memory of Nimitz being led to his execution, and lingered over the details of the many comfort women he had taken in the officers’ facility at Diamond Head. It had been a wonderful thing, to crush the spirit of the enemy as thoroughly as that, to have his way with some
gaijin
slut while her man was forced to look on. He grew hard just remembering.

He was about to pleasure himself with the memory when he jumped at a whispered sound.

Phhhht!

Two silver prongs projected from his chest, and thin wires led from them back to…

He tried to leap to his feet, but a terrible shock surged through his body, robbing him of the ability to stand. As he fell into blackness he caught sight of his assassins, three black-clad men.

Ninjas, perhaps?

They advanced on him, weapons raised, faces obscured behind glasses that made them look like giant insects. Hidaka was vaguely aware that his penis was erect and pointing at them as he slid into darkness.

D-DAY + 23. 26 MAY 1944. 1101 HOURS.
USS
HILLARY CLINTON.

The meeting took place in the main conference room of the
Clinton.
Although it was Spruance’s briefing and should have been held on the
Enterprise,
he had agreed that it made more sense to bring everyone together on the much larger and better-equipped vessel.

Kolhammer stopped counting the number of officers sitting around the huge table after twenty-five. He hadn’t been to an O Group of a comparable size in this room since the first emergency sessions after the Transition. It was a very different crew who’d gathered today, though, to work through the Marianas campaign. Jones, now a general, was still sitting next to him, and Mike Judge was acting as chairman. But the Brits, the Aussies, the French, the Japanese, and many of the U.S. commanders of his original task force were gone. Some dead. Some captured. Most just scattered to the four corners of the globe. In a perfect world Captain Willet of the Australian submarine
Havoc
should have been here, as she would be joining the task force later, but without satellite conferencing that was impossible. HMAS
Havoc
was stalking the Japanese fleet in the western Pacific.

The dark ages really did get him down sometimes.

A Marine Corps full-bird colonel—a ’temp, not one of Jones’s men—was describing a Force Recon mission to plant position fixers around the Marianas, so that the fleet’s gunnery officers would have solid coordinates to lay down their computer-controlled barrages.

Kolhammer could feel the tension radiating from the man sitting beside him. Jones had his own special-ops-capable marines who were not only trained for that sort of work, but had years of experience in it to boot. But the ’temps had gone with their own people again, as they did so often when the Eighty-second was involved.

Looking around the room, he could identify two distinct groups: Spruance’s people and the AF personnel. The latter weren’t all 21C. Most of the men and women he and Jones now commanded were ’temps, but they had volunteered for service in the Auxiliary Forces, putting paid to the caricature of the ’temps being nothing more than a bunch of boneheaded rednecks.

On the other hand, there
were
a lot of boneheaded rednecks around, some of them in this very room.

Another briefing officer, an Old Navy commander by the name of Chalmers, replaced the marine colonel at the lecturn to detail the Japanese order of battle as it was currently understood. It was another frustrating experience. Kolhammer knew Stuart Chalmers quite well. He’d acted in Dan Black’s liaison role for a while, and he was a good man. But it was exasperating having to sit and listen to him guesstimate the size and strength of Yamamoto’s forces. That was the sort of information he could have dialed up on the web in a public library back home.

“We have good intelligence on enemy land forces,” Chalmers said. “Apart from some minor technological enhancements such as claymore-type mines, better radios, and an M-Seventy-nine-style grenade launcher, the Japanese army remains largely unaffected by post-Transition technical developments.”

Jones snorted quietly beside him. “Commander Chalmers never walked into a fucking claymore,” he whispered.

Chalmers carried on without seeming to notice. “However, the Japanese navy has made some significant advances in the use of radar-controlled gunnery, Close-In Weapons Systems, night-fighter operations—both submarine and antisubmarine warfare—and ship-launched missiles, probably through close cooperation with Germany, which has poured a lot of effort into rocket research.”

Kolhammer had to admire Yamamoto for the focus he’d brought to Japan’s defenses, if nothing else. The Pacific War was a naval battle. As savage as the fighting had been through the island chains, the side that controlled the seas would prevail. Japan could not hope to keep up with America’s accelerating technological superiority. It simply didn’t have the industrial or research bases to compete. But Yamamoto, for all of his talk of staging a
Kassen Kantai,
had instead fought a tremendous holding effort since the Japanese had been kicked out of Australia and Hawaii. Whatever internal battle he’d had with the Japanese army, he’d won, because hundreds of thousands of troops had been pulled out of China and redeployed into the Pacific, not to take new territory but to keep the Allies away from the Home Islands long enough for the Axis powers to develop their own atomic arsenal.

As MacArthur and Spruance fought their way toward Japan, it became obvious that most of the bounty from the Emergence, as the Japanese called the Transition, had gone to Yamamoto’s surviving fleet rather than to the army. Yamamoto knew that slowing the Allies’ inevitable advance on Japan meant slowing the U.S. Navy.

It always came back to the bomb, though, didn’t it?

Who would get there first? He didn’t believe for a minute that Germany could hope to compete with the combined industrial and scientific muscle of the English-speaking world. Not with the advantage the Allies enjoyed in raw computing power. Yet…

The admiral pushed aside these thoughts. They weren’t his immediate concern, whereas the next five minutes of this briefing were. He gave Jones a light pat on the shoulder as he stood to make his way to the lectern. Slotting home a data stick, he nodded to Spruance, his only superior in the gathering, and waited for the PowerPoint files to arrange themselves on the screen behind him.

“I’m going to quickly run you through some of the capabilities of the
Clinton
’s battle group,” he said, “and outline how these will be used in strategic support of Admiral Spruance’s plan, as well as tactical support from General Jones and the Eighty-second Expeditionary Brigade’s attack on Guam.

“First, a strategic strike on enemy capital ships…”

He ended up speaking for twenty-five minutes, mostly in answer to questions from the floor. Jones seemed distracted during the presentation, even taking a couple of silent messages on his flexipad. Kolhammer would have been pissed off, except that the hulking marine flashed him a private message that immediately explained his agitation. The text came up on Kolhammer’s flexipad as it was resting in front of him.

Hidaka captured. Rogas queries Sanction 5?

Oh shit,
Kolhammer thought.

10

D-DAY + 23. 26 MAY 1944. 1554 HOURS.
WAIPAHU MEMORIAL CEMETERY, HAWAII.

Neither Chester Nimitz nor Bill Halsey was buried on Hawaii. Their remains had been found, after much distressing effort, and flown home to be interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

The short rule of the Japanese had been as horrific here as it had been in northern Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Indonesia—or the Dutch East Indies. As a matter of fact, thought Kolhammer, it had probably been worse. The civilian death rate had run to 90 percent, and almost no military personnel had survived to greet the liberators. Some of the higher-ranking officers had been transported to Japan for interrogation. With them had gone anybody from the Multinational Force, civilian or military. Almost everyone else had perished in a long orgy of abuse and mass murder to rival the Rape of Nanking.

A memorial to the dead and the missing had been erected. It stood near the ghost town of Waipahu on the site of one of the many mass graves that covered Oahu. The Japanese had used the former sugar-milling town on the north shore of Pearl Harbor’s Middle Loch as a gigantic slave camp. At least twenty-five thousand people had been interred there while they worked on clearing debris from the harbor. As they died, they’d been dumped in a series of open pits to the west of the town. Kolhammer could only imagine what a hellish sight it must have been. The death pits contained thousands of children, women, and old folks.

War crime investigators, trained by his own people from the
Clinton
’s WCI Unit, had determined that at least half of the dead from the Waipahu Site had been summarily executed in the days before the Liberation—killed simply to deny them the hope of freedom.

Kolhammer had thought himself inured to horror by thirty years of active service, most of them spent fighting medieval savages with a fetish for degrading their victims. But standing with Jones on a small rise outside Waipahu, where more than a hundred of their own people were buried, he knew that he had but a scant understanding of the evil of which humans were capable. And now he had within his power the man responsible for this atrocity.

Jisaku Hidaka.

It was a glorious day to have to contemplate such dark matters. A cool southerly breeze ruffled his shirt and dried the sweat on his exposed forearms. Thin strands of altocumulus clouds softened the hard blue sky. The mass graves, six of them combining to make one enormous burial ground between here and Pearl City, had been declared part of the national cemetery and were now tended by the Department of the Army with the same care it lavished on Arlington. Blinding white gravel paths meandered between lush green lawns, small stands of shade trees, and dozens of memorial sites devoted to honoring specific acts of sacrifice and resistance that were deemed especially notable. Other mourners moved slowly though the site, stopping here and there to pay their respects, to pray, and to grieve. Almost all of them were in uniform. Very few civilians remained on the island nowadays. A short distance from Kolhammer and Jones a contemporary marine kneeled in front of a small marble plinth commemorating five Boy Scouts who’d hidden out in the Ko‘olaus, reporting on Japanese ship and troop movements via a salvaged army radio until they were captured and beheaded. His shoulders hitched and shuddered violently as he wept. He might have been a father or uncle to one of the boys. He might have been a complete stranger. Even Jones had rubbed his eyes after reading their story on the little brass plaque at the base of the plinth. It was nearly buried in flowers and wreaths, and at some time in the past few months somebody had draped a military medal over it. A Silver Star. Hundreds more had joined it.

“So what are we gonna do about this fucker?” Jones rumbled. “I don’t think I can remember a man more in need of sanction than this evil little shit.”

Kolhammer watched the weeping man cross himself, climb to his feet, and walk away from the Boy Scout Memorial. High above them two contrails traced the flight of a couple of jet fighters. Skyhawks probably. He thought he could just make out the delta-winged silhouette.

“I don’t know, Lonesome. You’re right that hanging’s too good for this little bastard. He’s a living, breathing argument in favor of Sanction Five…”

“But?”

Kolhammer chewed his lip. “But, as much as we have a claim on him, the ’temps have a stronger one. Look at this place, would you. I don’t know that I’ve ever been anywhere sadder than this. Don’t know that I ever will. I passed sanction on Hidaka, but I’m thinking that for once, their way might be better than ours.”

The Eighty-second’s commander examined the tips of his polished shoes. An original Humvee and its driver waited for them back at the entrance to the cemetery. Jones lifted his head and stared out across manicured lawns, their gentle slopes covering a heinous crime.

“Do you even know how we would have sanctioned him?” he asked. “He’s not some raghead jihadi. If we stitched him up in a pig carcass before killing him, he’d just think we were weird.”

Kolhammer nodded. “I had some people working on it. Chances are, we’re going to be dealing with a few of Tojo’s finest at level five when we get back out there. It’s one of our little eccentricities the ’temps are happy to indulge for now. I think they believe it spreads an exemplary terror among the natives.”

“They weren’t always so happy about it,” said Jones.

“Not all of them, and not always,” Kolhammer conceded. “You’re right. I reckon they used to think we were monsters. But it’s amazing the difference a few years and a couple of standout atrocites can make, isn’t it? I don’t recall anyone bleating about Ono’s human rights when your boys put the blade on him for all this.” He swept one hand around to take in the cemetery and everything beyond it.

“But you think they’d want to deal with Hidaka themselves.”

Kolhammer didn’t answer for a while. Like Jones, he had been deeply affected by the cemetery. In a way, they were responsible for it. This had never happened in their world. From a distance, the two men probably looked like pallbearers contemplating the load they were about to lift.

“I promised Roosevelt we wouldn’t go off the reservation,” Kolhammer said.

“He knows about the Quiet Room?” The big marine’s eye’s widened in surprise.

“No. As far as I can tell, it’s never leaked. He didn’t mention it by name when we spoke about Ivanov. But there was no doubt that we were being put on some sort of notice.”

Jones folded his arms and pursed his lips as he took this in. Kolhammer recognized it as his Deep Thought routine. A couple of Jones’s best men and women had been drafted as Roomies, with his full knowledge and consent. If anything, he was more enthusiastic than Kolhammer about reshaping this world into something more amenable to their way of thinking. Given the shit he’d had to put up with, it was understandable. “Okay,” he said. “So, Hidaka? Do we take him into the Room, or not?”

Kolhammer looked past his friend’s shoulder to the mass of flowers and medals heaped up around the Boy Scout Memorial.
What would they have done?
he wondered.

“Give him to the ’temps,” he said at last. “But not straightaway. If we can’t go to Sanction Five, we can at least get a
little
medieval on his sorry ass.”

“Okay,” Jones agreed. “I’ll countersign.”

D-DAY + 23. 26 MAY 1944. 2212 HOURS.
KO‘OLAU RANGE.

Hidaka had heard all about the barbarity of these people. It made sense. Their parent society was degenerate and so, having hailed from its future, they would naturally be even more thoroughly debauched than the
gaijin
of his time.

He sat on the edge of the wooden cot, his hands cuffed with some sort of light plastic tie that dug painfully into his wrists. He tried hard not to shiver from the damp chill of the cave, lest they imagine he was shaking from fear. Two of the soldiers—he knew now they were just marines, not assassins—kept their weapons trained on him. They wore combat goggles and never moved, except to strike him once when he attempted to stand up and go to the toilet. They had made him foul himself instead of allowing him that dignity.

They were animals. Much worse than the
Sutanto
’s Indonesians or the Frenchmen on the
Dessaix.

He knew from having read the reports out of Australia what fate awaited him. These Emergence barbarians would not bother with a sham trial and formal execution. They would soon take him outside and shoot him in the back of the head. If he was lucky. Perhaps they would torture and disfigure him until he begged for mercy, as they had with Ono, forcing the man to shame himself in front of his comrades and his ancestors, indeed in front of the whole world. After all, in their eyes he was a “war criminal.” He almost laughed at the poisonous irony of it, except that would only have earned him another swipe across the face with the butt of a weapon. These animals thought nothing of burning entire cities, and yet they had the audacity to accuse him of “a crime against humanity.”

He had to wonder, though, why it was taking so long. Surely they couldn’t be planning to torture him? He had been cocooned up here in the mountains forever. What could he tell them about anything? All his plans to lead the resistance from this dank little fortress had come to nothing. He was worthless as a prisoner.

And,
he thought,
as a man.

The blanket he’d hung as a blackout curtain twitched aside, and three figures entered. He couldn’t help himself. Before he could control his reaction his eyes widened in shock. It was the giant black barbarian—the marine called Jones. And the famous Kolhammer right behind him! What could this mean? Did they intend to carry out the—what did they call it?—the “sanction” themselves? He’d heard that about those, too. Their death squads in Australia had been made up of all ranks, even the highest. He assumed the same had been the case in Hawaii, but he’d had no way of confirming it, isolated from events as he was up here.

“Get up,” Kolhammer said.

The man’s voice was harsh and deep, reminding him of Grand Admiral Yamamoto. Hidaka climbed to his feet with difficulty, ashamed of his nakedness, his poor physical condition, and the running sores on his legs and feet. They would not allow him any clothes to cover himself.

“You are Jisaku Hidaka?”

He nodded, flinching from a cracking blow that never came. More shame heaped upon unutterable shame.

“You know who we are?”

He stood as straight as he could. “Admiral Kolhammer and Colonel Jones,” he said.

“General,” the black man corrected him.

“Congratulations,” he said with as much scorn as he could muster. “But I shall wager that you promoted yourself,
Colonel.
I doubt that your countrymen would be so generous to a
nigger.
”

He grinned, pleased with himself for the first time in many long months. They knew he spoke English, but they couldn’t have been prepared for his mastery of their colloquialism, or the unpleasant realities of their adopted society. His satisfaction lasted all of half a second, until Kolhammer stepped forward and drove a fist into his face. The blow was powerful, knocking him off his feet and through the air. He flew over the wooden cot and fell in a tangle among the beds lying next to it. White, scalding-hot pain filled his head, and he could no longer breathe through his nose.

“You will keep a civil tongue in your head, or I will have it cut out. Do you understand?”

One of his guards was already holding a dagger. Hidaka nodded, sending spikes of pain through his head and neck again. He crawled back to his feet. The knife disappeared back into its scabbard like a marvelous conjuring trick. He waited for them to do whatever it was they did before murdering their prisoners. But nothing happened.

“You can consider yourself a lucky motherfucker,” Jones said. “We caught you, but you’re going back to Pearl and we’re turning you over to Admiral Spruance’s folks. They’ll deal with you their own way.”

Hidaka’s head wobbled, and he thought he might lose consciousness. “Why?” he asked. “You do not take prisoners. Not prisoners like me, anyway. You just kill them.”

“Oh, don’t tempt me,” Kolhammer said. “You’re right, we would normally sanction you under protocol five of the standing rules of engagement. And believe me, by the time that was done with, you’d wish we had just put a gun to your head. But other people have a claim on your sorry carcass. And we’re giving you to them.”

“No,” he said, his voice breaking. “This is not
fair.
I cannot become a prisoner. Not after the shame I have already brought upon myself.”

Hot tears welled up in his eyes. He blinked them away impatiently. Kolhammer and Jones seemed surprised. But what would they know of
bushido
? After all the dishonor he had brought upon his name, to be cheated now of death’s release—it was unbearable.

Even with his hands cuffed he launched himself at Kolhammer, but he had covered only half the distance across the cave to him when a freight train slammed into him and drove him backward. He struck the wall painfully and looked up, expecting to see the admiral advancing on him like a common brawler. Instead, to his horror, a woman stood in front of him, the third American who had come through the blackout curtain. He had ignored her, thinking her some minor functionary. She bent down over him and released the uncomfortable plastic restraints.

He moved to push her aside and she broke his arm, snapping it at the elbow.

Then she went to work on him.

D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 0902 HOURS.
CINCPAC, PEARL HARBOR.

“What do you mean you’ve got him? How?”

Admiral Ray Spruance stared at Kolhammer as though he’d grown an extra head.

“Lonesome’s mountain troop was on a training run through the Ko‘olaus. Just stretching their legs after the voyage. They picked up his trail. Figured they’d stumbled across another holdout. Tracked him. Bagged him.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” said Kolhammer. “Luck of the Irish.”

“Master Chief Vincente Rogas is Irish?”