Designated Targets

His fear began to shift, and his stomach knotted with fury. They had told him there were no American aircraft left. No rocket planes, or even any of the older types. He tried to wipe more blood from his eyes, but it only made things worse. His face was sticky with the remains of his friends.

Nanten craned his head skyward and slitted his eyes against the sun’s glare. It was a hot, gray day, and it felt like he was sitting in an oven. Ammunition popped and burned around him. The moaning stopped, and he knew he was finally alone.

It seemed perversely safe inside this little ghost ship now. The war was a distant murmur. Surely nobody would fire upon a vessel full of dead bodies. Even the gaijin were not that uncivilized. Although, given the rumors he’d heard of their atrocities in Australia, perhaps they were.

Seagulls began to gather now, and they shrieked and swooped down to feed on the rich pickings. Yutaka Nanten felt outrage boil up inside him. He was preparing to shoot at the nearest bird, which was attempting to tear a strip of meat away from the charred rump of a comrade, when the barge hit something with a grinding clang and a great lurch sideways.

The boat tipped over about twenty degrees, as the keel scraped across sand, and possibly a coral bottom. He had been so conditioned to leap forward when he heard those sounds that the failure of the bow doors to drop actually surprised him. But then he remembered that there was no one to operate the lever.

The boat slewed around, beginning to rock along its axis, as it turned side-on to the surf.

Nanten’s eyes opened wide, cracking the thin crust of dried blood that had formed in the folds of his skin. Big waves bore down on him. Big enough to see over the side of the boat. For some reason that terrified him even more than the strafing of the fighter plane. The barge rolled to and fro, tipping itself toward the swell like an open bowl. A breaker slammed into the seaward side with a sound as loud as a small shell going off. At least two feet of water poured in on top of the corpses.

It was too much to bear.

Without thinking he scrambled to his feet and over the side that seemed closest to shore. Another wave struck as he attempted to get free, threatening to tip everything over on top of him. A pitiable sound crawled up out of Nanten, a mewling animalistic protest against the fates. And then he was thrown free. He sailed through the air, hit the water, and tumbled over and over without a hint of control. Salt water rushed in through his nose and down his throat, and he began to cough and choke, which caused him to suck in even more water. His arms and legs, no longer shaking, scrambled for purchase, but he could not touch bottom. In the swirling chaos, he wasn’t even sure which way was up and which was down.

His feet struck out on their own accord, desperate to find something solid from which they might propel him to safety. He was vaguely aware that the water was turning pink, and then red. His head broke surface just long enough for him to grab one precious mouthful of air, and then he was under again, tossed about like flotsam.

His left toe touched something.

And then he felt sand underfoot. He pushed off and broke free of the surf again. Sucked in clean air. Once . . . twice. A wave slammed him, but this time when he went under, gritty sand scraped at his face. His hands and knees touched bottom.

He beetled forward, riding in on a small pink wave of mutilation and blood froth.

But he was safe. He had made land.

Nanten crawled up from the water’s edge. The sea rushed up the incline of the beach, and flowed back again, sucking the sand out from beneath his hands. Despite the contamination of the water, from the contents of the barge, he’d never felt cleaner. The awful gummy sensation of being bathed in human blood was gone. The sun was warm on his neck. The sand hot beneath his hands.

“Going somewhere, Tojo?”

But Corporal Yutaka Nanten was beyond the point where his heart could possibly leap in fright. It had been racing so fast, for so long, that the meaningless words actually seemed to slow his pulse.

Then he looked up.

Three gaijin stood in front of him. Two men and one woman. The woman was pointing something at him that could only be a gun from the future. She was going to disintegrate him, turn him into dust that would blow away on the breeze.

“I said, going somewhere?”

Nanten turned his head slightly toward the larger of the men, the one who had spoken. He looked like a civilian, dressed in a business suit, which struck the corporal as funny, down here on the sand, with the remains of his platoon bobbing around him on the tide.

The businessman was also carrying a gun, but it was a standard contemporary weapon. A shotgun of some sort. The muzzle stared back at him, a circle of darkness. Eternity.

Suddenly it flashed white . . .