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.
As far as Jones was concerned, it made no difference, one way or the other.
He had a battle to get to.
Thankfully, thought Mitchell, none of the men in the squad had grown up in Bundaberg. It would have made navigating the town easier, of course. But that little bit of emotional distance helped when moving through the scene of a large-scale atrocity.
The SAS officer still found it maddening, having to sit still while he watched innocent civilians killed without reason. But he had a strictly covert brief for this stage of the operation. Their mission was to move around under the cover of darkness, marking targets for the big guns, plotting troop movements, and-wherever possible-identifying enemy combatants for Sanction 4 field punishment later. Unlike the first and third squads, his men had no order tasking them to directly interdict the enemy's higher command authorities.
So they retired to the layup point, a small hill with a clear view of the town, and watched as it was systematically reduced to ashes and rubble by the artillery they had called in. Most of the squad was busy adjusting fire and drone coverage, feeding new data back to the guns, and monitoring the direct approach to their small encampment. Pearce Mitchell and Sergeant Cameron McLeod, however, had dug into the hillside a short distance away, and were watching over the reverse slope, guarding against the possibility of an attack from the rear.
The only significant concentration of Japanese forces in that direction were the soldiers guarding the surviving townspeople in a rough, unsheltered barbed-wire enclosure that had been run up on a football field. The sun blazed down on the unprotected prisoners. Neither of the SAS men had seen any sign of a water supply, organized medical care, sewerage, or even a system for disposing of the increasing number of bodies.
The guards largely ignored their charges, who rarely moved. Scoping out the encampment with powered goggles, the men could see why. The prisoners were close to death. The smell of putrefaction was strong, even from this distance. Most telling, however, was their lack of reaction to the sounds of battle as it crept closer. They had no energy to react, and were simply waiting to die.
Mitchell and McLeod stayed silent. They occasionally tapped each other and pointed out some detail that had caught the eye: a pile of tiny bodies that had to be young children; a stick figure hanging from the wire; a solitary man moving about, apparently to tend to the sick and injured. A town doctor, perhaps?
The troopers had their flexipads out and were file-sharing a plan of the camp, which they added to as the time passed. Over on their hillside McLeod sketched out potential lines of approach, while Mitchell noted the position of the fixed gun emplacements, and plotted their fields of fire. They each counted the numbers of Japanese guards and checked each other's figures.
It helped not to have to think about the people who were dying down there.