Axis of Evil

Chapter Thirty-Four: A Stillness Upon the Sea

Government House

Canberra, Australia

6^th June 1941

The red blob on the computer-generated map in the conference room had started shrinking five days ago. Now, the red icons near Darwin had been removed into what Colonel Philip Hawkinson had described as the electronic equivalent of a rubbish bin. He’d spoken at great length about multiple rewritings and quantum disruptions, even something called direct hard drive virtual destruction, and attempted to explain why all the technobabble – a word that had caught on in Australia – meant that there was no way that the data could be recovered.

For Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, it meant that the largest Japanese invasion force had been removed from his continent. For the moment, everyone in Australia was grateful; they might even see their way to re-electing him in the coming election. It had been delayed for the war, but as soon as the final Japanese troops at Cape York were removed, his party would begin pressing for elections, hoping to ride the flush of victory. He’d spent a happy hour discussing the issues with Hawkinson, learning what the future held for democracy, and wondering about the republican movement that would appear in the future.

“The final count is in,” Hawkinson said, interrupting his musings. “We have destroyed nearly thirty tanks and countless lorries, at no cost to ourselves. In addition, we’ve captured nearly five thousand Japanese and shoved them in POW camps.”

“How many did they bring?” Menzies asked. “How many did we kill?”

“They brought around eighty thousand to that battle,” Hawkinson said. “The fools put them outside any possible logistic support.”

“You didn’t answer the other question,” Menzies said softly. “We killed seventy-five thousand Japanese?”

“Perhaps,” Hawkinson said. “We killed thousands of them, yes. Hundreds more died on the trek to Darwin, victims of their own criminal government. Hundreds died in the crossing; the Japanese didn’t believe in the submarines, or even sailing in convoy.”

Menzies shook his head. “We rampaged into their rear areas,” Hawkinson said. “We crushed them in their trenches, we dropped napalm and FAE bombs on them, we destroyed their supplies and trapped them far from any hope of succour.”

“They’re going to love this,” Menzies said. “You know; Parliament was thinking about passing an Act requiring all citizens of ours in the United Kingdom to return.”

“I’m not sure that the Government would go along with that,” Hawkinson said. “You do realise that many of them aren’t white?”

“It was pointed out to me,” Menzies said. “Nothing is certain anymore; what are we going to do?”

Hawkinson grinned. “Have a party,” he said. “Victory in Australia day. Free booze!”

Menzies smiled. It was a load off his mind. “All we have to do is finish off the last holdouts at Cape York, and we’re done,” he said.

“The 1^st Australian Armoured Division is moving north now,” Sir Thomas Albert Blamey said. He scowled; he hadn’t been amused by the insistence that all Commonwealth divisions carried their country’s name with them. “Once they’re ready to attack, we’ll crush the last Japanese and end the war in the outback.”

“Good,” Menzies said. “So… what next?”

Ambassador Atwell smiled. “I believe that we have obligations to assist the war still further, just to prevent the Japanese from trying again,” he said.

“That will take some time,” Hawkinson said. “I have the latest brief from PJHQ; they don’t believe that there will be any major operations until the new naval and air units are ready for deployment.”

“That would be next year at the earliest,” Blamey objected. “Can’t we move sooner?”

“Not at the moment,” Hawkinson said. “I don’t have access to all of the secured data, but I believe that units are being earmarked for Norway and something else.”

Menzies lifted an eyebrow. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Hawkinson admitted. “It must be something important, but at the same time delicate; they won’t want to give the enemy any hint as to what’s coming.”

Menzies shrugged. “It doesn’t matter in any case,” he said. “We have to rebuild ourselves, Thomas, and we have to build up the army and the navy. Quite frankly, I would prefer for us to be impregnable first, then we can worry about forcing the Japanese off the Dutch East Indies.”

Blamey winced. “You know what they’re doing there,” he said. He scowled at the discs that contained the damming evidence of Japan’s experiments with ethnic cleansing. “You know what they’re doing in China. Can we afford to wait?”

It said something about the sheer horror of the situation that such an ardent enthusiast for the ‘White Australia’ policy could take such a line. “The bastards are colonising Korea and Japan,” Blamey snapped. “We’ll have to dig them out of there, you know. How long will it be before they start using those diseases on us?”

“We have warned the Japanese that we will retaliate with nuclear weapons if they use bioweapons against you,” Hawkinson said. “The Hanover Government is not the Smith Government; they’ll back up the threat with real action.”

“Perhaps,” Blamey said. “We can’t just sit here, doing nothing for six months.”

“Yes, we can,” Menzies said. “We have to clear up the mess, General, and we have to prepare for the next offensive. The bastards might even try again.”

“Only if they can swim,” Hawkinson said. It wasn’t as funny as it seemed; thousands of Japanese soldiers had drowned because of being unable to swim. “We sunk a lot of their transports.”

“True,” Menzies said. “General, please send… ah, John Northcott a personal good luck message from me. Let me know how the offensive proceeds.”

North of Cairns

Australia

6^th June 1941

The Firefly shook violently as it hit a pothole, crossing over the ground at awesome speed, before landing hard on the ground. The driver didn’t stop for a moment, leading the swarm of tanks northwards as fast as they could move.

“Wow,” Northcott breathed, feeling his stomach settle. He’d thought for a nasty moment that the tank would overturn and crush him below its weight. “These tanks are clever.”

“You can say that again,” the driver called back. Northcott smiled; he’d seen how many British Generals commanded their battles in 2015, and he had no intention of copying them. They watched from overhead as the tanks advanced; he would lead from the front.

“General, Germans one and a half miles ahead,” the controller said. She was back in Cairns, well away from any Japanese threat. “Change course to intercept.”

“You mean Japanese, I hope,” Northcott said wryly. He glanced down once at his GPS; even without a full satellite system, the British had set up basic beacons for his forces to navigate with. “Any sign of those pesky rockets?”

There was a pause. The Japanese anti-tank rockets had come as a nasty shock, but fortunately they were unable to penetrate main battle tank armour. They could, however, damage the tank’s treads and strand it in the middle of a horde of angry Japanese.

“None detected on the satellite imagery,” the woman said finally. Northcott smiled; he had never placed much faith in the satellites. They were supposed to be able to measure the length of a Japanese unmentionable from so high above the Earth they could not be seen, but whenever he needed one, they were orbiting around the wrong part of the Earth.

“Excellent,” he said. “Forward!”

The breathtaking pace increased, and then they saw the Japanese force. It was clearly stranded as part of a fallback manoeuvre, but its lorries had run out of fuel. Instead of surrendering, they had set up a well-armed position… or at least it would have been in the First World War.

“Fire,” he snapped, and the tanks hurled a hail of shellfire into the Japanese position. Their lorries exploded at once, targeted specifically, blasting great waves of fire into the Japanese positions. They didn’t flinch; they fired back with machine guns, Northcott ducked sharply into the tank, feeling the wave of heat from the engine rising when he slammed down the hatch.

“Shit,” the driver breathed. Northcott stared; the Japanese were charging them, firing madly. “They’re insane!”

“Kill them all,” he snapped, and the tanks’ machine guns went into action, spraying bullets through the Japanese formation and slaughtering them like sheep. “Die, you bastards,” he heard someone yell, and only afterwards realised that it was his voice.

“I think we got them all,” the driver said dryly. The gunner, sickened, didn’t say anything. “Sir?”

“I’m all right,” Northcott said. He picked up the radio. “Any more of the little yellow bastards?”

There was a chorus of ‘no, sirs’ from the radio. Northcott picked up the GPS receiver, which was receiving something called a satellite download from the battalion HQ. The next Japanese location was marked in red; the other columns of the armoured units were marked in green.

“Head for the next bunch of them,” he snapped. “We have work to do.”

In the end, the battle only lasted two days. Northcott repeated the process, wincing inside as the Japanese charged madly at tanks they couldn’t hope to damage. Three tanks were destroyed by suicide tactics; the Japanese clearly hadn’t realised that they’d lost. They tried to concentrate, without the mobility that would have made the manoeuvre a success, and they died.

A flight of Harriers roared overhead, dropping napalm and FAE on the Japanese holdouts, blazing the tanks a path through horror. Northcott looked down on the damage after a napalm attack; the Japanese had been burnt to death. He almost felt sorry for them, watching the handful of survivors trying to crawl away. Even at the end, only a handful of Japanese tried to surrender; most just fought and died. Some surrendered… and then tried to kill their captors.

“This is a filthy war,” Northcott said, over the radio to the headquarters coordinator, whose name, he had learnt, was Melanie. “Is it always like this in your time?”

“Often its worse,” Melanie said. “Trust me, John; you’re fighting a clean war.”

Northcott looked down at what he had first taken for a charred log. It had only dawned on him when he’d taken a closer look that the ‘log’ was a human being, who had curled up and died under the wave of fire. “Pah,” he said. “Any more Japanese nearby?”

“Only the final holdouts,” Melanie said. “Only five miles to the north.”

Northcott led the tanks in silence, feeling his tiredness work away on him. He swallowed one of the stimulants from the future, feeling some of his tiredness fade away. He scowled; he’d been warned against using them in combat, but there was no way he was not going to be in at the death. The GPS led them directly to a small village on the coast, almost at Cape York itself.

“Incoming,” Melanie snapped, just as the tank shuddered. “The uplink is reporting a line of Japanese guns.”

“We took a round on our frontal armour,” the driver said. “I think they’re trying to build a defensive line.”

“I never would have guessed,” Northcott said wryly. “Forward!”

The tank leapt forward, firing madly into the Japanese lines. The driver crammed on the speed, charging the Japanese directly as fast as the tank could move, firing shell after shell directly into the Japanese position. Explosions wracked the Japanese position and the tanks crashed through, crushing Japanese under their treads or blasting them down with machine guns.

“The sea, the sea,” Northcott cheered, as they looked down upon the shore. Thousands of Japanese were milling around a burnt-out freighter, trying to re-float it. Even Northcott could see that it was futile; the ship could clearly never sail again.

He clicked on the loudspeaker. “Surrender or die,” he said, though the speaker. The Japanese flinched, and then some of them reached for their weapons, firing madly at the tanks. “Return fire,” he said, and felt some of himself die in the carnage. The Japanese never stood a chance; they fought and died like men.

HIMS Musashi

Hashirajima, Japan

6^th June 1941

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was an admiral without a fleet. With the exception of Musashi, which had been unable to accompany the fleet, almost the entire Japanese battle fleet had been sunk. Gingerly, Yamamoto felt his chest; the attack that had incapacitated him for a week had spared his life… only to allow him to watch the death of the Imperial Japanese Navy. He’d served at the battle that had secured its position as one of the foremost navies – the Battle of Tsushima – and now he had missed the battle that had destroyed his navy.

He stared down at the report, the one provided for public consumption. It claimed that a great battle had been fought and won, destroying seventy enemy ships for negligible cost. Yamamoto, whose most pessimistic estimate placed fifty British ships in the Far East, knew that the battle hadn’t been anything like a victory. If a single British ship had been sunk, he would have been astonished.

After all, no Japanese ship had survived the experience.

“They’re not going to admit to it?” Yurina asked. Her dark eyes were alive with worry. “The fleet was destroyed!”

“Of course not,” Yamamoto said bitterly. He scowled; his temper was short because of the recent meeting in Tokyo, where the navy had been roundly blamed for the defeat. Then the Army had outlined their latest Victory Plan, and his heart had sunk still further…

“Thanks to the incompetence of the Navy, we now are defenceless against an invasion,” the Army Minister had said. He glared at Yamamoto, who hadn’t had the energy to fight back. He was certain that his attempted poisoning had been an army plot. “They can trap us on the islands and destroy us, one by one, but we won’t let them do that to us!”

“And how do you plan to stop them?” Yamamoto asked coldly. He drew on the last of his energy. “Do you plan to produce ships from nowhere?”

“We will hold them up in the islands for the time it will take to produce new ships,” the Army Minister proclaimed. “We may have lost some of our forces in Australia” – deliberately understating the losses, which Yamamoto knew were total – “but we still have thousands of men available.”

His tone became sticky-sweet. “You will have time to build your ships, admiral,” he said.

“There is a stillness on the sea,” an older civil servant said. Yamamoto glared at him; his mind was going. His presence was only tolerated for the support of the civil service, which ran the Empire. “All the ducks are dying.”

“Very interesting, I’m sure,” the Army Minister said. “However, can we keep this a little more focused?”

Yamamoto sighed, gathering his resources. Agreeing with the Army Minister was not something that happened everyday. “General,” he said, “we don’t have the resources to produce the ships that you think are needed.” He sighed again. “Even if some kindly deity from outer space gave us the resources, we could not hope to have them built before the British fleet arrives.

“And even if we did build them, what would be the point?” He demanded. “They have massive superiority; the best we could hope for would be the use of suicide speedboats to attack their troopships! They can see everything we do on the ground! We have to end this war, now!”

“I assume that you are distressed by your recent illness,” the Army Minister said. “We have moved thousands of troops to Korea and we are moving new manufacturing complexes there, now that the Chinese are in disarray. Even if we lose the Home Islands, the fight goes on and on…”

“They honestly don’t see that it’s over,” Yamamoto said grimly. He waved a hand across the map. “They think that they can dig into Korea and China, move over enough factories before the British get their submarines into position, and stand off the British. They were going on and on about new tanks and new weapons; all the British have to do is arm the Chinese and let them wear us away to death.”

He scowled down at her. She had been very loving, the night he’d been released from hospital, but no one could be loving enough to make him forget about the fleet. The last moments of the fleet must have been nightmarish, with missiles blasting entire ships out of the water. If the Musashi hadn’t been completing its refit, the battleship would have gone down with the rest of the fleet.

She looked up at him. “We could leave,” she said. “There must be places here in Japan where we could hide out, get married…”

Yamamoto smiled. It was a pleasant thought. “No,” he said finally. He studied some of the reports; two British ships had launched cruise missiles against the air bases in the Dutch East Indies, softening them up for a later invasion. Another report, classified MOST SECRET, detailed the use of the improved viruses in China, viruses that might spread onwards to India… and provoke British retaliation. Yet another discussed the effects of the future medical knowledge from Germany. A final report, in cold clinical terms, discussed the shortages and the impact that they would have on the new building program.

He shook his head. The author didn’t quite say it, but Yamamoto was skilled at reading between the lines. The resource curve would not allow them to complete more than one of the planned building program ships, which called for ten aircraft carriers and several more battleships.

“And even if we did build them, they would be sunk easily,” he said, passing the report over to Yurina. She was naked, her nipples hard in the cold air, but he ignored it. He was too tired for sex. “On the other hand, I have a cunning plan.”

He chuckled as she giggled, although he wasn’t sure what she was giggling at. For a long moment, he felt like a young irresponsible man again, one who had nothing and no one tying him down. He no longer had a navy to devote himself to, he no longer had a family thanks to the Army, but he still had his duty to Japan. The plan spun in his mind, cunning, clever… and it might just work.

He reached for her and was surprised to feel a rush of arousal. The plan would take time to put in place, and time to activate, maybe even months, but he felt a rush of pure hope. He kissed her, hard, and pulled her over to the bed. Her body responded willingly and he lost himself in her. It was just like being a young man again.