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 reducing the major enemy concentrations. The Crusaders fired twelve shots in a volley, each individual shell screaming through an arc that covered eighteen thousand meters, to slam into a target selected by a combined fire control team in a command LAV.
The guns roared, and eighteen klicks away, a water tower disintegrated into fiery splinters, killing the Japanese forward observers who were sitting on top of it. A platoon dug into a deep trench was entombed; three mortar crews and their guns were atomized; a stand of eucalyptus trees, which had been hiding two light tanks, disappeared inside an explosive maelstrom. And a beautiful old white stone building in which the Japanese commanders were thought to be holed up suddenly blew apart.
But Colonel Jones's thoughts were elsewhere. Sergeant Snider, he recalled at last. That redneck asshole who'd fronted him on the Enterprise when he'd landed with Kolhammer and Halabi to meet Spruance for the first time. On top of everything else that went wrong that night, Snider simply hadn't been equipped to deal with an African-American Marine Corps colonel. Jones had bruted him into his place and pretty much forgotten about him ever since.
But that fellow who'd led the charge, and held Hill 178 back on the Brisbane Line-that had been him, for sure. He searched his memory for the name of the embed who'd filed the story.
Duffy. Julia Duffy.
She'd gone into Luzon and Cabanatuan with them shortly after the Transition. He'd heard good reports about her, too. She could handle herself in the thick of it. And she gave good copy, too.
Jones took another drink. Duffy must have gone out with the 'temps, looking for something different. And she'd turned old Snider into a hero while she was at it.
Actually, Jones mused, that was unfair of him, thinking that way. He'd seen the download of that firefight. It was pretty fucking willing. If they wanted to lay a bit of fruit salad on the sergeant's dress greens, well, fact was, he'd earned it. Jones doubted he'd ever see the prick again, but he'd make an effort to congratulate him, if he did.
The guns roared again, this time followed by the faintly ridiculous pop-pop-pop of three pistol shots.
Field punishment of the Japanese officers had been carried out.
His flexipad pinged. It was Sergeant Major Harrison. "We're getting buttoned up, Colonel. Ten minutes till the bottom of the ninth."
"Thanks, Aub. I'm coming now."
Jones strapped on his powered helmet, checked the load on his G4, and screwed the cap back onto his canteen. In his reactive matrix armor, he had to turn slightly sideways to get through the doorway and out onto the street.
His LAV sat about a hundred meters away, one of four parked on the main street. Well, the only street, really. As he adjusted his combat goggles and moved quickly to the vehicle, he tried not to think about the open pit in the town square, full of rotting bodies. Three more had been left at the edge: a Japanese captain and two lieutenants who had commanded the small garrison in this town.
Jones could see their corpses clearly in the harsh tropical light. A small group of enemy soldiers had been forced to watch the field punishment, and an Australian squad was leading them away to a truck. They would be taken to the rear and held, pending further investigation. If any were found to have been directly involved in the murder of the town's population, they would be trucked right back to the edge of the pit and shot in the head in exactly the same fashion as their superiors. Unless they were transferred into the custody of the contemporary forces, in which case, they'd probably be hanged in Brisbane in about six or seven months, after a court-martial.