Designated Targets

The PM was staring at a map in the briefing room—a lecture theater that had yet to hold its first class. Paul Robertson, his principal private secretary, wondered what the other men and women in the room saw in that map. MacArthur seemed fixated on his great defensive line, the arc of Allied Forces blocking the Japanese drive south. Jones and the senior 2 Cav officer, Brigadier Barnes and his SAS colleague, Major Horan, undoubtedly saw hundreds of miles of exposed Japanese flank, just begging to be ripped open. He knew that General Blamey, the contemporary Australian land force commander saw twenty thousand miles of largely indefensible coastline. New Zealand’s senior representative General Freyburg probably saw the distance that remained between the leading edge of Japanese expansion and his homeland across the Tasman Sea.

As for the others, about a dozen staff officers, two of them women from the Multinational Force, the former banker had no idea.

“We are attriting the enemy into defeat,” MacArthur insisted, repeatedly flicking the screen that one of Brigadier Barnes’s young ladies had set up. Robertson wondered where he’d picked up that terrible word—attriting. “He’s bleeding out, I tell you, gentlemen. He cannot sustain these losses and he cannot be reinforced. We don’t want to risk upsetting this excellent arrangement by letting Colonel Jones and Brigadier Barnes go gallivanting across the countryside. Their remote-sensor coverage and fire support are in large part responsible for denying Homma the city. Every time he moves, we hit him. Soon there will be nothing left to hit.”

Barnes remained silent and unmoving, but Jones bowed his head and rubbed wearily at his eyes. “General,” he rumbled in a deep bass voice. “We are not going to remove all of the surveillance assets from the line, nor the Crusader guns. They will remain in place and be staffed by our specialists to make sure you retain full coverage. But we can roll up the Japanese in a fraction of the time if we get our armor on the move, and around into their rear.”

MacArthur’s thinly compressed lips warned of an explosive retort, but Prime Minister Curtin calmed him down with a gesture. “General, you’ve had my full support at every point in this campaign, but I must tell you I am not willing to allow these animals an extra day’s grace. While we sit here jawboning, they are torturing and raping and murdering with impunity, up and down the coast.”

MacArthur was becoming visibly angry, but he maintained a better working relationship with Curtin than he had with anyone in the Roosevelt administration. “Prime Minister, I can understand that,” he said in a placatory tone. “But it won’t be that much longer. We can—”

“If I might, Mr. Curtin.”

Everyone turned to face Brigadier Michael Barnes. High spots of color flared on MacArthur’s cheeks at being interrupted so abruptly, but the Australian continued in his flat nasal accent.

“This morning we received an encrypted burst from a long-range SAS patrol around Bundaberg. You need to see this.”

Barnes thumbed a control wand, and the theater map disappeared, replaced by a movie, quite obviously shot in stealth. The cameraman—or woman, Robertson supposed—was lying in scrub, on a raised position overlooking what appeared to be a schoolyard. A number of civilians, maybe three dozen of them, were being bruted into a rough circle by a platoon of Japanese soldiers.

Major Horan provided a commentary. “This vision was taken by a four-man patrol. The Japanese have established a major garrison and staging post at Bundaberg, which had a prewar population of approximately thirteen thousand people.”

As the officer spoke, seemingly without emotion, two soldiers in the movie clubbed an old man to death in front of the other prisoners. Robertson felt ill just watching it. The PM’s face twisted with revulsion. Most of the time travelers, he noted, did not react with anything like the same intensity, although Brigadier Barnes’s jaw muscles were moving slowly, as though he was grinding his teeth.

“The civilian population have been separated from the small contingent of Allied personnel who were based in the town, all of whom, as best we can tell, have been executed. The civilians are being held in a large open area on the banks of the Burnett River. During the day they are employed building earthwork defenses. There is very little food or water, and casualties are estimated at thirty percent to date.”

“Good God,” breathed the prime minister. “Are they giving any succor to the women and children, Major?”