Authors: The war in 2020
"
Banzai
."
A wave of high-pitched Japanese shouts broke over the cries of the attackers. The sound of close automatic weapons increased to a blurred roar.
"
Banzai
."
In the dying firelight, Noburu saw his men charging into the oncoming mass of Azeris. The Japanese fired as they ran, and Noburu caught the glint of fixed bayonets. A miniature sun lit up in the courtyard. Noburu recognized Colonel Takahara at the forward edge of the charge, samurai sword raised overhead, its blade wielding the power of light. With his left hand, Takahara fired a sidearm.
"
Banzai.
"
The leading tentacles of the mob began to retract at the unexpected counterattack. Noburu fired beyond the ragged line of his men, helping as best he could. He knew his days of gallant charges were behind him. But he would do what remained to him.
"
Fucking Japs,
"
he heard the surviving South African NCO say. It was half a complaint, half admiration.
"
They're just as crazy as the wogs.
"
Noburu saw a fallen Azeri rise suddenly and fire point-blank into Takahara's stomach. The staff officer fell backward, staggering. It seemed to Noburu that Takahara was less concerned with staying on his feet than he was with holding the sword aloft. Its blade shone unblooded. Then another burst punched Takahara to the ground. The sword shimmered and disappeared amid the litter of corpses. Noburu held his rifle up to fire, but another Japanese beat
him to his prey, bayoneting the man who had shot Takahara. The soldier remembered his bayonet drill well enough, planting a foot on his victim’s back and twisting out his rifle.
The assault faded away, leaving two-dozen Japanese upright in the courtyard, firing across the parade ground toward the main gate and the breach in the wall. A last flare helped them, and Noburu realized that he had never seen so much death so close at hand. The broad space between the headquarters building and the main gate writhed like a snake pit with the wounded. But, when you looked closely, you saw a great ragged stillness around the hurt, waiting to accept them all. A man could have walked from the headquarters entrance to the main gate by stepping from corpse to corpse, without ever touching concrete or cobbles.
A Japanese voice commanded a return to the headquarters building defenses. On the way, the men pawed over the fallen, checking for ammunition with which to continue the fight. The smell of gunpowder burned in Noburu’s nose like dried pepper.
"
Jesus Christ,
"
a voice said. Noburu turned and saw the ammunition handler bent over the cavity of his comrade’s skull.
Kloete lit another cigarette, then offered the open pack to Noburu.
"
I don’t smoke,
"
Noburu said.
The South African nodded as though he understood perfectly.
"
Good show, that,
"
Kloete said. He spoke the anglicized phrase with his mudlike accent.
"
Your boys, I mean.
"
"
Yes.
"
"
Christ. You’re bleeding like a stuck pig.
"
Noburu did not understand.
"
The side of your head,
"
Kloete said, raising a hand partway to indicate the location of the wound. The man’s fingers stank of spent cartridges.
Noburu remembered the blow on the side of his head. And now, magically, he could feel the blood oozing warmly
from the wound, losing temperature as it wandered down his neck.
He
did not need to test the wound with his land.
"
It's of no consequence,
"
he said.
"
You'll need to have that seen to,
"
Kloete said firmly.
But Noburu no longer cared. He realized that he had been relieved, almost overjoyed by the attack. Toward the end he had not needed to think of anything else. The dream warrior was smiling.
"
It's of no consequence whatsoever,
"
Noburu said
truthfully.
Colonel Johnny Tooth, United States Air Force, was a happy man. The four big WHITE LIGHT electronic warfare birds under his immediate control were onstation and functioning perfectly, exactly twenty-four hours late.
But lateness was a relative thing. The goddamned nearsighted Army ground-pounders didn't understand that you could not risk expensive aircraft and their crews in hopelessly bad weather. Technically speaking, of course, he was a little behind schedule—but his aircraft had made it into the war after a direct supersonic flight from the States and they were performing flawlessly, jamming an enormous swathe from the Caucasus east across Soviet Central Asia and northern Iran. There wasn't going to be any chitchat down on the ground tonight.
The WHITE LIGHT aircraft had the capabilities of flying at speeds above Mach 3 or of slowing to a near hover. In either case, they were invisible to any of the air defense systems known to be deployed in-theater. A long association with the WHITE LIGHT program gave Tooth the sort of warm, safe feeling a man had when he held good investments while the economy was going to shit for everyone else. Personally, Tooth had put his money into select real estate during the plague years, and he had no retirement worries.
"
Don't you think we should try to contact the Army guys?
"
his copilot asked over the intercom.
Tooth could hardly believe his ears.
"
You nuts, Chubbs?
"
"
Well,
"
Chubbs said more carefully,
"
I just
thought
we ought to let them know we're onstation. You know?
"
Tooth sighed. So few people understood the interrelationships.
"
Maybe on the way out,
"
he said, always ready to compromise.
"
But first we're going to run a complete mission. Nobody's going to be able to say the U.S. Air Force didn't do its part.
"
Tooth shuddered inwardly, picturing some rough-handed, semiliterate Army officer testifying before a congressional subcommittee, claiming that the weight of military operations had been borne by the Army alone. The Air Force didn't need that kind of heartache, with budgets as tight as they were. Tooth understood clearly that the primary mission of the U.S. Army was to siphon off funding from vital Air Force programs.
The Air Force had gone through a run of bad luck. It began in Zaire, where the South Africans had cheated and attacked the B-2 fleet on the ground—now that had been a royal mess, and a man could only be thankful that nobody in the press had ever been able to sort out the real unit cost of the stealth bomber. Then the Army had started grabbing all the glory, whether from their dirty little police duties during the plague or from their primitive rough-necking down in the Latin American mud. Why, you could have hired off-duty policemen to do the Army's job and you would have saved the country billions. And, all the while, it had been embarrassingly difficult to find appropriate missions for the state-of-the-art manned bombers, which Congress had finally come around to funding in the nineteen nineties—thanks to contractor programs that spread the wealth across congressional districts in practically every state in the Union. The minor action the Air Force had seen had shown, to widespread horror, that the oldest, slowest planes in the inventory were the best-suited to joint requirements. The underdeveloped countries simply refused to buy first-class air defense systems for stealth bombers to evade. Worse, they refused to provide clear-cut high-payoff targets. Then there was the humiliation with the Military Airlift Command's transport fleet. Naturally, lift capability had been put on the back burner in the quest to acquire sufficient numbers of high-tech combat aircraft to keep fighter jocks and bomber crews in uniform.
And the transport fleet had bluntly failed in its initial attempts to ferry the Army in and out of Africa and Latin America. The government had been reduced to requisitioning heavy transports and passenger aircraft from the private sector.
So the opportunity to show what the WHITE LIGHT aircraft could do was a welcome one. The birds had come in just at nine billion dollars a copy in 2015, and the program had required fall-on-your-sword efforts by congressmen whose districts included major defense contractors in order to force it through Appropriations. It would have been nice, of course, if everything could have been synchronized with the Army operation, in accordance with the original plan. But, ultimately, the thing was just to get the birds into action. His superiors had made the decision to launch the mission twenty-four hours late without consulting the other services. There was always the chance that the Army would try to block the Air Force activities with some whining to the effect that there was no further need for the jamming support, or that it would interfere with ground ops. You could never trust a grunt. They never understood the big picture, and they thought at the speed of the human foot. Absolutely no grasp of strategic imperatives. And they died broke.
"
How's everything going back there, Pete?
"
Tooth called to his weapons officer, who was currently sending streaks of man-made lightning through the heavens, destroying billions of dollars worth of enemy electronics.
"
Just fine, sir. We're putting out so much juice we'll fry pretty near every transmitter between here and the Indian Ocean. They'll be talking with tin cans and pieces of string when the sun comes up. Tokyo's going to shit.
"
"
Well, you just keep up the good work,
"
Tooth said. Then he called the navigator.
"
Jimmy-boy, you put us back in friendly airspace by dawn, understand?
"
"
Got it, sir.
"
Colonel Johnny Tooth was fully aware that stealth technology and fifth-generation electronic defenses had rendered his aircraft as invisible in the daylight hours as at night. But Tooth nonetheless preferred flying in the darkness. It might be unreasonable, but the ability to wrap himself in the ancient cloak of night just made him feel that much more secure. Besides, he wanted to be back on the ground by lunch , since he had to place a very important phone call. Supporting the Army was one thing, but a real estate transaction was serious.
23
4 November 2020
They crucified the men during the night and left
the crosses standing just outside the gate. Akiro, who had found it difficult enough to follow Noburu across the sea of bodies, began to gag. The wind flapped the blood-soaked uniforms of the Japanese officers like wet canvas.
The Azeris had not gotten it exactly right, Noburu noted. Here a spike had been driven through the hand instead of a wrist, while on another cross a leg dangled free. Noburu recognized two of the three men as officers from the airfield. Perhaps the third man was a recent arrival he did not know. Noburu looked up at the lolling faces with their expressions of torment and wonder. Behind him, Akiro finished his dry retching.
"
At least they killed them,
"
Noburu said, lowering his eyes to look down between the ranks of burned buildings, across the human flotsam the mob had left in its wake.
"
Why?
"
Akiro begged.
"
Why did they do this?
"
Noburu smiled.
"
They think we're Christians. All foreigners are Christians, you see. I'm afraid our allies are not as enlightened as Tokyo might wish.
"
Back inside the gates, the bulldozer resumed its grunting. Moving the bodies, clearing an entryway for the relief column that must eventually come. Otherwise, the city was very quiet. The morning light seemed crippled, misshapen by twisting columns of smoke and the smell of death. The bulldozer added to the stink, disturbing the settling filth
that had been a man, its blade wrenching open another corpse's bowels. Underneath the reek of mortality the familiar smell of the oil works came sharply up from the coast. A thousand years after they shut down the derricks and refineries, Baku would still stink of oil. And death.
They were waiting, Noburu realized. Down in the labyrinth of the old city. On the waterfront. Or, farther out, in the apartment blocks built to give the workers a foretaste of paradise, and in the disease-culled slums, where families lived under worse conditions than had their most distant ancestors. The streets were empty now. The population had been driven indoors by the light of day, by defeat, plague, and exhaustion. But they were still there. Waiting.
Until the darkness returned. They would come again in the night. Noburu could feel it.
The communications center was a ruin. The intelligence officer speculated that the Americans had employed aircraft from their WHITE LIGHT program. But it was impossible to know with any certainty. The world was so full of surprises. The only thing that was definite was the burned-out stasis of the magical talking machines that directed warfare in the twenty-first century. When the interference finally stopped, only two systems remained functional: an ancient vacuum tube radio set inherited from the Soviets—with which the staff had been able to contact a loyal garrison to the north—and the main computer system. The computer was Japan's pride. It had been built to withstand any imaginable interference. The computer was the castle of the new age, wherein the modern warrior sought his last refuge. Certainly, it was more important than any number of brave Takaharas or subordinates nailed up on crosses.
A black bird flittered down onto one of the foreign dead in the street. Noburu feared some further atrocity. But the bird merely twitched its head back and forth a few times, judging the world, then settled down into the pile of rags as if nesting.
A low humming arose in the distance. The two living, standing men looked at each other.
"
The relief column?
"
Akiro asked.
"
Too soon.
"
The younger man looked back down at the street with its frozen traffic of papers, glass, and death.
The humming stopped. Another detail of events that would never be explained.
It would be hours before any relief column could arrive. Perhaps even a day or more. Everything was so unsettled. Rough, relayed messages indicated that fundamentalist elements in Iran had called for a holy war against the Japanese in the liberated territories as well as against the Russians. The Azeris were fellow Shi'as, and they had obeyed the call. Perhaps the Sunni populations of central Asia would make common cause in this, as they had in the war against the Soviets. Noburu did not know. Without communications, the world was simply a question mark. But even if they made common cause now, it would not be too long before the Shi'as and Sunnis began killing one another. It was the natural way of this world, as inevitable as the seasons.
Of course, it made no logical sense. But these people lived on a spiritual frontier where the logic of other races or religions had little value. Faith was all.
The masses had responded to the green call of their god, as had some of the rebel units and formations. But others had kept faith with Japan and her military technology. Now there was a civil war within a civil war, and a fractured world was fracturing again into ever smaller, ever more uncontrollable parts. He had known it all in advance. The dream warrior had whispered to him, smiling at Noburu's folly as he attempted to reason with Iranian generals, Arab generals, central Asian generals, each of whom was only waiting for the day when he would fight the other once again, waiting for the day when the Slavs and Japanese would be gone so that the children of God could return their attention to more exclusive massacres.
A relief column had been organized to fight its way into the city from the nearest loyal garrison, according to a message received over the old HF radio. But no one knew what obstacles and ambushes were out there waiting. Ideally, the helicopters and tilt-rotor aircraft would have provided reconnaissance as well as quicker relief, ferrying in troops and ammunition and lifting out the wounded.
But the jamming attack during the night had destroyed the electronics on virtually all of the tactical aircraft in the vicinity. The only option remaining was the dispatch of an armored relief convoy—which would have to drive blindly over mountain roads. There would be plenty of time to wait and worry.
Ammunition. Above all, they needed ammunition. If the mob returned now, they could virtually stroll into the compound.
Noburu had been forced to allow the rear command post to continue to control combat operations. His shrunken staff labored to repair at least a few of the communications systems by cannibalizing others. He could have run the war through the master computer, but he recognized that such an action would be sheer vanity. He needed a functioning headquarters around him. For the moment, the rear had a broader capacity to sort out the damage and revitalize allied efforts. Given the present state of his headquarters, Noburu would have been shooting into the darkness. As it was, he could not even communicate with the rear command post by voice. So he elected to wait. To try to think clearly. He had transmitted only one firm order through the master computer: the Scramblers were not to be employed again without his personal authorization. Beyond that, there was only an emptiness, inability.
Behind him, he heard the indestructible computer singing. A quiet song of electricity and perfection. The computer was ready to do his will. The brilliant machine
wanted
to do his bidding. It was only the man, feeble and unsure, who could not respond.
The black bird rose abruptly from its human nest and sailed up to the head of one of the crucified officers. Again, the bird made no attempt to disturb the flesh. It simply perched, fluffing its black feathers over the dead man's hair.
Akiro drew his pistol.
"
No,
"
Noburu said.
But the younger man fired. He missed the bird, which rose skyward with a baffled cry. Under the black wings the dead officer's skull exploded, coming back to life for
an instant before its wreckage lolled back down on the officer's chest.
Akiro was shaking. He looked as though he had been abandoned on an ice floe. He held the pistol in his hand, struggling with its purpose.
"
Organize a detail,
"
Noburu said calmly.
"
It's time to cut them down.
"