Designated Targets

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.

SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS

General Douglas MacArthur was getting mightily pissed off at being ambushed by these characters. He stalked back and forth across his office in Brisbane. He was already late for the press conference he’d called up on the Line, where he was going to take the reporters through his victory, step by step. He had half a mind to just go anyway, to leave the prime minister hanging. But he restrained himself, mainly because he wanted to know what fresh hell Jones was about to spring on him.

It had to be something to do with Bundaberg. Some crazy scheme they were cooking up to steal his thunder while—

“General, it’s Prime Minister Curtin on the phone, sir.”