Designated Targets

His eyes crinkled and a wide grin split his face. “Something like that,” he said. “When would you like to do your interview, Ms. Duffy?”

19

BUNDABERG, 350 KM NORTH OF THE BRISBANE LINE, SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA

It wouldn’t be long now. No supplies or reinforcements had made it through to them, although the navy hadn’t really pressed the issue. The enemy’s “special soldiers” moved at will behind the lines, destroying precious stockpiles and even murdering his officers in their bedrolls at night. His men died bravely, but for no good reason.

The ridiculously outmoded Brisbane Line still held, protected by the superweapons of the Emergence barbarians. And now, with his guns almost empty and his men unable even to forage enough food from the scorched earth, those barbarians had emerged once again, this time from their dugouts and revetments. His forward scouts, reporting by radio now that it no longer mattered, told of monstrous tanks and armored vehicles, cutting through any resistance like a katana through a single reed.

Masaharu Homma, the poet-general, adjusted his sword and cap and centered his hara with a deep breath as he prepared to address the divisional staff.

He stood in the office of the former mayor of this town, Bundaberg. It was a rather fine whitewashed edifice for such a small settlement, typical of British colonial architecture. He doubted it would survive another day. The dull, distant thunder was drawing close, becoming louder, sharper, and more significant. Barbarian artillery was no longer nibbling at the edge of the town. It chewed whole streets to pieces, smashing houses, shops, and schools, setting fire to the large swaths of bushland. His own artillery sounded in reply, once a monstrous rumble but now growing perceptibly weaker with each passing minute.

The barbarian guns were hellishly accurate. It seemed as if everything they hit was important to him in some way. A house where some of his officers were bivouacked. A parking lot full of trucks. This town hall must surely be marked, as well.

How many hours left? wondered Homma. Would this room still exist, the building still stand? He looked about dolefully. His staff hurried about, packing some files, destroying others. Hopefully there was some systemic method at work there. His adjutant waited by the door.

“I imagine it was all worth it, Admiral,” he muttered to himself bitterly and to an absent Yamamoto. More bitterly than he would have thought possible even a year ago. A corrosive decay of the soul had settled upon him, and refused to lift.

“Excuse me, sir?”

Had he spoken aloud? He’d been prone to that recently, and the lieutenant was looking at him most strangely.

When he didn’t respond, the young officer continued. “I have your papers, General. And we don’t have much time. Enemy soldiers have secured the aerodrome. They came in helicopters after the garrison was overcome by a strange gas. Special soldiers, we think. They are animals, sir. They fight without honor.”

Homma was both amused and a little touched by the young man’s furious sincerity. Surely the empire would prosper with men like him to defend it, even if this particular one was fated to die in a benighted wasteland of red dust and savages.

He hoped the enemy would pay due respect to the spirits of his men, but he doubted it. These new barbarians were supposed to be even more advanced than the white men he had fought in the Philippines and New Guinea. But he couldn’t see it. Why, many of them weren’t even white men at all. They were not a race as he understood it—just a cabal of mercenaries, from what he could tell. For whom did they fight?

They did so effectively, though; that was undeniable. Their weapons were almost supernatural in their powers. But the men and even the women who used them could not claim to be the moral equal of the emperor’s troops, or even MacArthur’s. His scouts reported that they were executing their prisoners en masse.

They didn’t have many prisoners to take, of course. No fighting man of Nippon would willingly allow himself to fall into the enemies clutches. Yet . . .

“General?”

“I am sorry, Lieutenant. I forget myself.”

How long had he been standing there, daydreaming? The symphony seemed closer now. A large explosion, an aerial bombardment he guessed, rocked the ground nearby. He checked his watch. Five minutes? Yes, well, he could understand why his young aide would be keen to be off. The office seemed much emptier than it had been just a few moments ago. Fewer clerks were shuffling about. There was more paper on the ground. A chair had been turned over in the middle of the room.

Fancy that.

The lieutenant took his arm and gently maneuvered him out of the room, into the corridor, and down the stairs to a waiting car. A security detail of four soldiers stood by in a captured American jeep, manning a .50-caliber machine gun and watching the street as though MacArthur or Jones the giant black barbarian himself might just pop out of one of the boarded-up stores.

Garbage lay everywhere. Strewn between abandoned cars and the burnt-out shells of commercial buildings. A black dog trotted by with a charred bone in its jaws, snarling at one of the soldiers who made a lunge for it.

Chaos lurked on the edge of perception here. The blood-dimmed tide was close at hand. What was that English poem? The one seemingly written for these, the end of days? Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Yes, he thought. The end was nigh. The rough beast approached.

He could see huge boiling towers of oily smoke climbing into the sky a few miles away. The leviathan murmur of the big guns was now underscored by the harsher, staccato rattle of small-arms fire. Two civilizations were grinding against each other like great mill wheels over there, and he feared that he had fed the lives of unknowable numbers of men into that demonic foundry for naught.

To what end would they perish? To buy another six or twelve months’ respite?

He wondered if he should just turn away from this vehicle. Trust himself to the spirits of his ancestors and his katana. Join his men at the front and disappear into history. One small noble act that might perhaps be noted with approval by a scholar in the long distant future, when the dark age had passed.

The lieutenant must have read his mind, because Homma suddenly noticed the man’s grip, forcing him into the jeep. “We have to get to the meeting, General. The staff are waiting for instructions. The counterattack—it must begin. There is no time.”

But the poet-general had time to pause and survey the field of his last failure. There would be no counterattack. Masaharu Homma examined his inner landscape and found it as barren and desolate as the dying city.

Just as he cosigned the order to carry out the field punishment of the three captured Japanese officers, Jones remembered where he had seen that sergeant before. The one who’d turned back the ambush on the Brisbane Line. The memory brought forth a rich, rolling baritone laugh, which he had to clamp down on, quickly, lest somebody imagine he was enjoying himself as he signed the death warrants on the company clerk’s flexipad.

The woman didn’t look put out. She’d seen the mass graves in every town they rolled through.

But he explained anyway. “Something I just remembered, Corporal. Please excuse me. It was nothing to do with this,” he said, handing her the pad.

“Thank you, Colonel. I’ll zap this over to the Aussies via laser link. Wouldn’t have bothered me none anyhow. I’d pull a cold trigger on those fuckers any day, sir.”

Jones sent the clerk on her way and took a drink from his canteen. He parted the sunshades in the little wooden police station where he’d set up a temporary HQ as they prepared for the final assault. His Crusader guns and the Australians’ smaller battery of 155s shook the frame of the building and raised small clouds of dust as they blasted away.

They were firing on the last Japanese strongpoint, a few thousand men dug into the city of Bundaberg. Circling drones brought the barrage down with such accuracy that individual foxholes could be targeted, if he so chose. But of course, they didn’t have the luxury of unlimited ammunition, so his gun monkeys were tasked with