Designated Targets

Trident through the labyrinth of hazards that lay ahead of her in the Channel. They were now in the hands of the Combat Intelligence they called Posh.

32

TOWNSVILLE, SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA

It didn’t look like a weapon of mass destruction, but that’s how Colonel J. “Lonesome” Jones thought of it. He hefted the gun, which was still slightly oily from the packing grease. It looked and felt pretty much as he remembered.

The AK-47, he thought. Killed more people than the atom bomb and the automobile put together.

They weren’t calling it a Kalashnikov or an AK down here, though. In Australia it was known as a Lysaght submachine gun, after the firm that had the contract to turn them out. He knew that in the U.S. it had been designated the MK-1. And in Canada and the UK, the prototypes were called, rather unimaginatively, AW/GLs, for Automatic Weapon and Grenade Launching system.

Jones thought he’d stick with AK. It was like Coke or Pepsi. Why fuck around with the original?

“Thank you, soldier,” he said, handing the weapon back to the quartermaster with very mixed feelings. He’d only been issued with his G4 on the eve of deployment to Timor, but he was getting ready to miss it like hell. It was a magnificent killing piece, but there was no point in even thinking about trying to build one here. They were going to be years just getting the electronics up to speed. Not to mention the ceramics, the alloys, all the materials science that was thus far beyond the abilities of a very primitive industrial base.

Hence the AK-47, preferred weapon of rag-headed punks from southern Thailand to Addis Abbaba.

It was a depressing thought.

The supply sergeant just saluted and disappeared out of the tent, into the harsh light and subtropical humidity of Townsville. This was another place Jones had thought himself familiar with. Up in the twenty-first, he’d transited the joint a couple of times a year on his way to and from Southeast Asia. The Marine Corps had leased a massive training range nearby, and from 2010 onward, an MEU had been rotated through the Townsville barracks every two years.

This Townsville had been a sleepy backwater, a cattle town and a minor port before the Japanese had taken it. Now it was just another burnt-out ruin. The airstrip and the docks had been repaired, though, and the Kandahar’s battle group lay just a few miles offshore—although battle group was probably too dignified a phrase for the sorry collection of odds and ends gathered around the slab-sided assault ship and her tenders.

The Enterprise was out there, still sailing under Spruance, along with the old cruisers Pensacola and Salt Lake City, the Littoral Assault Ship Ipswich and a destroyer screen stitched together from surviving U.S., Free French, and British Commonwealth forces. Jones had known shower curtains that’d offer more protection. But if Hawaii was going to be retaken, those ships would have to be the ones to do it.

Their chances would be greatly improved when the Siranui arrived in twelve days.

He pulled his cap down over his eyes, wrapped a pair of sunglasses around his face, and tried not to think of what might happen on the islands over the course of twelve days. He also tried not to think about the news that his brother-in-law might have come through the Transition on the Dessaix. He’d only met Philippe Danton once, at the wedding, but he’d seemed a nice enough lad. He couldn’t bear thinking about him getting caught up in this unholy mess. Was he still on the ship? Jones hadn’t even known he’d been part of the Task Force until this morning. Was he helping the Japs? Or did he have a hand in the obvious sabotage of the Lavals? This bullshit was now a personal fucking nightmare as well as a professional one. The colonel pushed his doubts down to where they couldn’t bother him anymore. It wouldn’t do to waste time worrying about shit he couldn’t change. If Danton had come through alive, chances were he was part of the reason the Dessaix’s missile strike had aborted, at least in part. The Eighty-second’s commander had more pressing issues to deal with. As he emerged from the supply tent, the two guards—both ’temps—snapped to attention.

Very few civilians remained in Townsville. A massive garrison was growing quickly on the ashes of the old town, however. Acres of tents breathed slowly in the hot, humid air, which smelled of diesel, sweat, and burnt offerings. A “Negro” battalion, the Ninety-first Engineers, was busily running up more permanent structures, adding the sound of their hammers and tools to the grunt of bulldozers clearing away rubble, deuce-and-a-halves delivering men and materiel, choppers thudding back and forth to the Task Force, and men and women cursing and laughing, shouting orders, and talking shit.

Jones returned the sharp salutes of a couple of privates from the Ninety-first as they passed by. He wasn’t sure, but he suspected they’d gone out of their way to cross his path and get his attention. Behind the mirrored blades, his face was unmoved as he walked on, but he couldn’t help the stirring beneath his breastbone. Those men were proud, and not just of their uniforms. His company clerk had to field hundreds of requests every day for transfer into the Eighty-second, from men like that. He was sorry that he couldn’t take them, but they would need at least two years of retraining before they were ready to join a squad and carry a G4.

Or an AK-47.

Jones arrived at his Humvee, still shaking his head.

“Aerodrome, Colonel?” his driver asked.

“Thanks, Shauna. But we need to swing by Second Cav and pick up Colonel Toohey first. I’m giving him a lift to Brisbane.”

Jones allowed the motion of the vehicle to lull him into a drowsy state as they motored over to the Australian camp. He’d been off the stim for a couple of days, but his sleep patterns would take another week to settle down. He’d almost dozed off when his flexipad began to ping at him. He nearly missed the call, as he started to half dream about a pinball game he used to play on his old Pentium as a teenager.

“Sir. Colonel Jones, sir. You’ve got a call coming in.”

Jones was a little embarrassed to be caught out, and found himself uncharacteristically apologizing to the driver. He must have been really out of it.

He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and took the call, a live link from the Kandahar. It was Major Francois, the battalion surgeon.

“’S’up Margie?” he asked.

“We got him, Colonel. We got the fucker who killed Anderson and Miyazaki, back in Pearl.”

Suddenly Jones was wide awake.

“I can’t believe I missed this!” she said angrily. “I set this whole fucking system up just to scan for this one thing, this one fucking thing, and then when it works, I’m too fucking lazy to check back and see. Meantime this asshole’s been living high on the hog. I just can’t believe it.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Doc,” said Jones, looking over her shoulder at the computer screen in her quarters back on the Kandahar. “It looks like you’ve got, what, four and a half thousand messages there, and eight hundred are marked priority one. You were busying saving lives. The dead can wait.”

She looked like she was about to beat on herself some more.

“I knew Anderson,” he said, cutting her off. “She’d come back from the grave and give you an ass-kickin’ if she thought you put a Band-Aid on someone with anything less than perfect care, just because of her.”

“Well, what are we going to do, then?” Francois asked, turning self-recrimination into angry indignation.

Jones looked at the name on screen, and was lost for an immediate answer. “I don’t know. At least not right now. It’s going to be sticky. We’ll need to talk to Kolhammer first.”

Francois looked as if she was going to go for his throat. Or someone else’s—

“Belay that, Major,” he warned her. “You go taking a potshot at this guy before you’ve got him dead in your sights, and he will get clean away. You’re not the person to do this, anyway. Not after Cabanatuan. You’re compromised.”