Final Impact (14 page)

“Could be Black Irish…I suppose.”

Spruance frowned, not appreciating the joke, as he shuffled the photographs of Hidaka on his desk at fleet HQ in Pearl. “And these injuries?”

“He fell down,” Jones said, from the chair next to Kolhammer.

Spruance leveled a cold eye at him.

“A lot,” Jones added with a poker face.

“Has he complained of being beaten?” Kolhammer asked.

Spruance looked vaguely troubled. “No. No, he says he fell down a lot, too.”

Kolhammer dared not look at Jones. Spruance eyed them like a principal with two of his most difficult students, who also happened to be his main hope for the pennant. It was midmorning, the day after Jones’s mountain troop had stumbled across Hidaka—that much at least was true. They were meeting in a prefab hut that substituted for Spruance’s office while permanent facilities were being built—or rather, rebuilt. His office, like theirs, was a mix of old and new. A flat-panel display took up a big piece of real estate on the old wooden desk while paper maps of the Pacific theater were pinned to corkboard on all of the walls. His phone was a heavy old-fashioned lump of black Bakelite with a rotary dial, which sat next to a Siemens C65 flexipad. In the window behind him Kolhammer could see a flattop being nuzzled into its berth by a small flotilla of tugboats. It looked like the
Intrepid.

“Well, I suppose congratulations are in order, then,” Spruance said finally. “This news will be very welcome back home. Hidaka is the first high-value war criminal we’ve managed to capture alive out here.”

“They don’t give up easily,” Jones said. “Same thing where we came from. Our bad boys used to just blow themselves up.”

“Is that why you take so few prisoners?” Spruance asked coldly.

“That’s not the simple question you think it is, Admiral,” said Kolhammer, who could tell that Spruance was quite steamed about something, presumably the injuries to Hidaka. “There’s a lot of history behind our policies. I can understand that you’d find them off-putting at first, but they’ve served us well in a war that’s run much longer than yours. And of course, we’ll be reviewing them after the end of hostilities here, when our forces are folded into yours.”

“I think you’ll be doing more than reviewing them, Admiral. I think you’ll be leaving them behind for good.”

“Perhaps,” Kolhammer conceded. “They were appropriate in context.”

“And they have their uses here,” Jones added in his rumbling growl. “Otherwise I doubt Congress would have approved the extension of our rules of engagement.”

“The Australians certainly didn’t complain,” Kolhammer said, turning to Jones. “As I understand the situation, there was a lot of public pressure to turn all the Japanese captives over to you and the Second Cav for field sanction.”

Jones nodded. “There was.”

Spruance gathered up the photographs of a bruised and bleeding Hidaka. “Well, as you say, everything in context, gentlemen.” He didn’t sound as angry.

He placed the prints in a buff-colored envelope and dropped them into his top drawer. Then he turned his attention back to the two men.

“I wonder if I might prevail upon you to be a little more circumspect in the application of field punishment when we reach the Marianas, though?” He shook his head as Jones opened his mouth to speak. “I’m not asking you to alter your rules of engagement. I’m just concerned that we don’t end up indicted for the sorts of things we criticize in our opponents.”

Kolhammer saw genuine discomfort in Spruance’s eyes. He didn’t want to be a party to sanctioned field executions of any type.

Jones was not so diplomatic. “We could run any sanctions through your office, if you’d like, Admiral. Have your counsel sign off the warrants.”

Spruance paled at the suggestion. “No. No, I don’t think so, General. All I’m asking, all the
president
is asking, is that you don’t…” He groped for the words needed in such an uncomfortable moment. “…that you don’t…”

“Admiral Spruance,” Kolhammer said. “We will fight the good fight. And where justice needs to be done, it
will
be done. But we won’t embarrass the navy or the country.”

Spruance nodded, clearly relieved. “Thank you. And thank you for this,” he said, indicating the report Jones had brought on the capture of Hidaka.

Later on, out in the corridor, Jones muttered to Kolhammer, “Country would probably vote us all medals if we capped off every one of those murdering assholes.”

“No doubt,” Kolhammer agreed.

“So then, why not just tell Spruance we authorized a Sanction Three on Hidaka? It was legit.”

“It was,” Kolhammer said. “And if he asked directly, I’d tell him. But he didn’t. And now the blood’s on our hands. Not his. You and I can live with that. He shouldn’t have to.”

“We told him the little prick fell down.”

“Well, he did fall down. De Marco kept hitting him. He kept falling down.”

Jones took that in silence, grinning just a little as they walked through a secretarial pool. Tinny music followed them from an old radio. A disco tune, “Born to Be Alive,” covered by Glenn Miller and his big band.

“Kinda weird, ain’t it,” Jones said.

“What?” Kolhammer asked. He sensed a change of subject.

“The way disco, of all the possible music we brought, should be the one to catch fire here. Did you notice Hidaka had a disco station playing when we walked in?”

“Well,” Kolhammer mused, “they’re all over the dial. And I suppose it sounds a bit like swing. Plus, it’s an optimistic sort of music. People want that at the moment. Who needs death metal when you’ve got the Nazis?”

They passed through the main entrance of the building and into the fierce white light of the morning. “I don’t see old Hidaka being much of a fan. Not after Gina De Marco tooled him up like that.”

Kolhammer grunted quietly at the memory. The female marine had beaten Hidaka senseless while singing along to the radio. It had been an entirely punitive retribution with the primary purpose of humiliating the man and breaking his spirit. A level three sanction. They had assumed, correctly, that he would never speak of it, shamed into silence, but even if he had, it was within their accepted rules of engagement.

“Something funny?” Jones asked.

“Not really,” Kolhammer said as he fitted his powered shades in place. “I was just thinking of serendipity. Do you remember the exact song that was playing?”

“Not really,” Jones said, looking nonplussed.

“Well, I don’t know whether you heard or not. I think you were talking to Chief Rogas at the time. But Hidaka, he was sort of whimpering after she broke his arm, begging De Marco to tell him what she was going to do.”

“And?”

“And so she leaned into him and told him they were going to boogie-oogie-oogie until they simply could not boogie no more.”

Jones’s rich baritone laughter rolled out over the naval base.

Kolhammer allowed himself a chuckle, too, now that they were out of earshot of the typing pool and any other ’temps who might be listening. They just wouldn’t understand.

11

D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 1954 HOURS.
NORTHERN FRANCE.

Julia had missed the first day of the offensive—she was stuck on the road from Dieppe to Abbeville, which, in her humble opinion, blew chunks. She didn’t like to stand still for very long these days. It gave her time to think about all the mistakes she’d made. It didn’t matter what anyone told her, she knew that she was to blame for Rosanna’s death. She could have gotten her off the island for sure if she’d really tried. God knew she’d wiggled out of tighter situations herself over the years. And as angry as she’d been with Dan over the whole pregnancy thing, in the end he’d been right. What had she married him for if not to start a family? She certainly hadn’t needed to walk down the aisle to get him into bed. And now he was dead because he’d had the shit-awful luck to fall in love with her.

She shook her head in the back of the jeep and cursed softly.

“Y’all okay there, Miss Duffy?” her driver asked. He was a pimply black kid from Detroit, name of Private Franklin, and he was still in awe of his unexpected passenger.

She smiled kindly at him. They were stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam. Thousands of vehicles stretched away in front and behind them. GIs trudged alongside the road in an unceasing line. Some of them slowed down to talk every now and then, usually until some noncom bawled at them to haul ass again. It would have been an irresistible target for the Luftwaffe…had the Luftwaffe not ceased to exist in any real sense in this part of the world. High above them countless numbers of Allied fighter aircraft described long, lazy figure eights, “guarding the parking lot,” as Julia explained to her companion.

“We’ll be out of this soon, ma’am. I’m sure of it,” Franklin promised.

“S’okay,” she said, staring across the plowed fields that surrounded them on both sides. “Gives me a chance to tally up all my regrets.”

“You, ma’am?” he gasped. “You couldn’t have any regrets! Damn, excuse me, ma’am. But damn, you’re famous and all. And rich. And pretty, too, if you don’t think me too forward for saying so, ma’am.”

Her smile touched the corners of her eyes for the first time in many days. “Thanks, Franklin. But I’m not Sinatra. I’ve had more than a few regrets.”

The jeep lunged forward a few feet as a pulse of movement crept along the jam.

“Hey, you know, that’s my favorite song, Miss Duffy. You want me to sing it for you? I can sing it real well. My mom says so, anyway.”

Before she could shrug and say
Sure
he was into the first verse, beating out a kickin’ version of the old tune, which had bounced around in the top ten for the last six months. She couldn’t help but laugh and join in the chorus. A couple of grounded paratroopers picked it up as they marched past, and within moments it had spread up and down the almost stationary line of traffic. Thousands of tired, bloodied men ripping out an a cappella power-ballad version of “My Way.”

Julia quickly unpacked her Sonycam, blocking out a precious few minutes of lattice memory to record something other than blood and horror.

There was more than enough of that waiting for her up ahead.

For six days the combined air forces of Britain, Canada, and the United States had carpet-bombed a corridor 120 kilometers long and 30 wide. Within that target box lay twelve armored and motorized divisions the Nazis had released from the “defense” of Normandy to attack the Allied Forces around Calais.

The first concerted air strikes had begun as the lead element of the German counterattack—the
Panzer Lehr
and the
Panzer Korps Hermann Göring—
approached the town of Abbeville. The lead three tanks, Tiger IIs, rumbled onto a ridge to the east of town, but never even made it to the downslope. High above them, fifteen Lancaster bombers, protected by a squadron of Saber jet fighters, all of them controlled by the Nemesis battlespace arrays of HMS
Trident
three hundred kilometers away, released the first of tens of thousands of dumb iron bombs that would fall on the Germans over the next week.

The Tigers, their crews, and the armored personnel carriers traveling behind them were obliterated. The quantum arrays of the
Trident
delivered the weapons package in such a focused manner that most of the initial target mass was atomized, so tightly compressed was the storm of high explosives.

The strategic bombers hammered the centerline of the advance, all 120 kilometers of it, while hundreds of Cobra gunships and ground attack aircraft buzzed viciously on the flanks, chewing over any smaller formations that escaped the crucible. Nearly twelve hundred Tiger and Leopard tanks were destroyed in the first hour. By the end of the engagement two thousand more had been reduced to scrap metal, and approximately forty thousand German soldiers were dead.

Allied losses ran to two dozen bombers and fifteen helicopter gunships. The first press reports in London actually understated the scope of the victory, because nobody could bring themselves to believe it. Once the devastated corridor was secured by a highland regiment, Julia had hopped a flight over to see for herself the realities of what the tabloids had dubbed “the Great Turkey Shoot.”

When she’d finally escaped the corps-level traffic snarl, she’d recognized the first signs of destruction from twenty klicks out—a great burned-out scar on the face of the earth.

“Holy shit,” she muttered as her chopper bled off altitude and dropped down toward the ruined countryside. “Those boys really did do it their way. Anyone know how many Frenchies bought it?” she asked in a louder voice.

The pilot’s voice came back over the intercom. “Nobody’s saying, Miss Duffy. But I don’t see how anything could have survived inside the target box. I’ve flown twenty miles in, and all the way out to the horizon on both sides that’s all you see. Scorched earth. It’s fucking amazing.”

She nodded. The highway into Damascus had looked a bit like this when the air force had trashed the Syrian First Armored Corps. But at least that wreckage had maintained a sort of integrity, like a long drawn-out junkyard. You could see, as you flew over it, each cohesive unit that had been set upon and destroyed.

The devastation stretching across northern France was something entirely different, something she was only just getting used to, along with the ’temps. They might be a little backward in many ways, but when they put their minds to it they could do violence on an apocalyptic scale. It was funny, in a really dark way, thinking back to how horrified they’d been when the uptimers came spilling out of the wormhole with their detached, postmodernist, unemotional approach to warfare. There’d been quite a run of little books and magazine articles by the sniffier sort of contemporary intellectual about the “refined barbarism” of future morality and culture. Some days reading
The New Yorker
was like being trapped in a stalled elevator with Harold Bloom—and that had happened to her once, so she would know. As a genuine uptime celebrity Julia had even been dragged into the debate, arguing on radio with some idiot professor who wanted to ban television for fifty years to allow society time to “prepare” for its arrival. For all their initial squeamishness, however, the ’temps had proven themselves fast learners in the arts of savagery.

And when all that savagery was directed—as it had been over northern France—by twenty-first-century Combat Intelligence, the effect was exactly what she’d come to observe and report on: a genuinely biblical catastrophe.

“Holy shit,” she repeated.

“Yeah,” the pilot agreed, “that’s what everyone says.”

After they landed, Julia bivouacked with a British intelligence unit tasked with picking over the scrap metal and body parts, not that there was much of either to analyze. Over the next two days she shot a few megs of imagery that was eerily reminiscent of footage she’d seen from the First World War, then tried and failed to gain access to the handful of prisoners who’d been taken. There weren’t many, and she believed the Intel Division colonel who told her they weren’t speaking to anyone yet. Most were under sedation, he told her in confidence.

She filed a thousand words for the
Times
on her impressions of the Great Turkey Shoot, which were really no different from anything anybody else had to say. No matter how she tried to spin it, it all boiled down to “holy shit.”

She did a hometown puff piece on the crew of the Huey she’d ridden in with and filed a great bit on Private Franklin’s impromptu cover of Frank Sinatra on the road to Abbeville.

Then, while waiting for a lift back to Calais, she missed the opening shots of Patton’s breakout and drive toward Belgium.

D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 0411 HOURS.
BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.

The führer was screaming. The object of his rage, a poor Luftwaffe colonel with more bad news from the Western Front, looked gray, perhaps even feverish. Certainly he didn’t look healthy.

Rather than creating a pall over the crowded underground room, however, Hitler’s outburst actually lifted a few spirits, because it meant that the focus of his rage had shifted safely away from everyone else, at least for a brief moment. It had no effect whatsoever on Himmler, though, since he had long since stopped paying any attention to the führer’s rants. They were like a constant background refrain, similar to the rumble of the British bombs during the night.

Still, the SS leader felt nearly as sick as the Luftwaffe officer looked. It was he who’d convinced Hitler to release the forces from Normandy for a strike against the Allied foothold. He had even committed his own prized Waffen-SS divisions to act as the vanguard for the assault:
Das Reich, Totenkopf,
and the
Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.
The finest units in the whole world.

And now they no longer existed. It wasn’t that they had been broken or suffered crippling damage. They had simply ceased to exist. Men and machines, they were all gone. Erased by a rain of bombs that fell with inhuman accuracy.

Ah, but that was the point, wasn’t it.

Inhuman
accuracy.

The British press had gone on at great lengths concerning the role played in the wreck of his elite forces by that half-caste mud creature, Halabi. Their arrogance was unbelievable, the way they openly boasted that the so-called Combat Intelligence on board the
Trident
had controlled every air strike.

He scowled over at Göring, drunk and probably insensible with morphine again. He was slumped in the corner of the map room. If that fat fool had only done his job and sunk the damn ship two years ago, this disaster would not have come to pass.

His attention returned to the map table that stretched out in front of him. It was a sorry sight. They were still pushing around little wooden blocks denoting tens of thousands of men who were already dead. Whole armies of ghosts haunted central and northern France. The display was so disconnected from reality as to be worse than useless.

Now the führer was blaming him—
him!
—for the failure to contain Patton and Montgomery in Calais. It was intolerable. He couldn’t exactly wave a magic wand and conjure up the Reich’s equivalent to the Allied surveillance drones and computer technology. There simply wasn’t time to develop such things. And hadn’t he delivered a treasure trove of other advances to the German war industries anyway? Didn’t that count for anything?

Apparently it did not.

He came out of his self-pitying fugue with a shock when he realized that everyone was staring at him now. The führer was still screeching, but the tone had changed somehow. It was more threatening, more…

Direct.

With some alarm, he understood. Hitler was yelling at him again.

“I am sorry,
Mein Führer,
” he mumbled. “I was distracted by the map.”

A terrible stillness came over the supreme leader of Nazi Germany. “Distracted, you say?” he sneered.

“Yes,” Himmler answered uncertainly. “I, ah—”

“Perhaps if you had been paying attention, we would not be losing this fucking war!”
Hitler smashed his fist down on the table, upsetting a handful of unit markers. Then he gathered himself and resumed in a quiet, cracked voice. “I asked you what happened to my missiles. I ordered the strike on London two hours ago. Everyone in that city should be dead by now. But they are not. I…want…to…know…
why.
”

“Yes,
Mein Führer,
of course. But I…but I did tell you that the Donzenac facility was destroyed by British commandos. Do you not remember?”

The führer’s already strained eyes seemed to bulge inhumanly, as if they might pop out of their sockets and roll across the map table.

A shudder passed over him.

“Of course,” he said in a small, cracked voice. “I lost my train of thought. The air in here, it is…”

The release of tension in the room was palpable. Himmler could feel others’ muscles loosening just like his own.

“Just go,
Herr Reichsführer,
” said Hitler. “Find out what is happening to my atom bombs. I need them. German civilization needs them.”

Himmler used the opportunity to meekly bow and back out of the room, his ears and face burning with embarrassment. He had exposed the führer to potential ridicule, correcting him like that. But what was he to do? He had stood at the exact same spot one day ago and explained why there would be no V3 strike on London. He remembered the ashen faces of the assembled staff as he explained how Prince Harry had escaped with so many of the Reich’s top scientists after the RAF had destroyed the missile silos. How could the führer have forgotten that?

He scurried out of the bunker, with its foul air of stale sweat and rising fear, glad to get away from it all. If only for a little while.

D-DAY + 25. 28 MAY 1944. 0205 HOURS.
CALAIS.

Julia made it back to Calais at two in the morning. Dismounting from the jeep, she thanked the driver, a garrulous Pole, and looked around for her next ride toward the front. Her status as an official embed of the Seventh Cav wasn’t of much use. They’d been pulled from the line and were already headed back to England to take on replacements. The regiment had suffered close to 40 percent casualties and wouldn’t be rated to fight again for months.