Weapons of choice

Commander Judge, Captain Windsor, and the Australian submariner, Captain Willet, fell into step as they left the hotel and turned down Queen Street, heading for MacArthur's HQ. Trams that managed to look both antique and brand new rumbled past in both directions. They'd been in town for two days but it was still disorienting in the extreme. None of them had trouble recognizing their surroundings. And yet, they were so different.

Willet shook her head. She'd grown up in Brisbane and kept turning around as if trying to catch her bearings. The absence of skyscrapers didn't mean she was lost. The street layout was the same, and some of the buildings were even familiar. A few pubs. A couple of old commercial stores and warehouses from the nineteenth century that had been listed as national heritage items in the late twentieth. The cottages on the ridges around the small, undeveloped business district. They'd been snapped up and renovated by yuppies in her childhood and were fetching millions of dollars apiece, last she'd heard. Here they were slums. Dark, wretched, and stinking in a way she recognized from postings in Asia.

"Bit of a head spin, isn't it?" said Harry, who walked next to her taking it all in. The English prince knew Brisbane reasonably well. Twenty-first-century Brisbane, anyway. He'd had some mad times during the Rugby World Cup in '03 and had been back to watch the cricket a couple of times after that.

"It's a hell of a thing," said Willet. "You can see the sky all over. You couldn't do that before… or… you know, in the future."

"I do know," Harry agreed. "It's really rather upsetting, isn't it?"

"Not as upsetting as it's going to be for the locals," said Judge. For the moment, full knowledge of their arrival was restricted to a relative few American and Australian officers on MacArthur's staff, the British high commissioner, and Prime Minister Curtin down in the national capital Canberra. They'd flown in under the tightest security on an old Douglas C-47 Skytrain-or rather a brand-new one. The metal finish inside the plane still gleamed from the factory floor. AWACS and refueling aircraft were precious commodities now, and there was no sense in stripping the Clinton of any further capability for what was essentially a courtesy call.

So the C-47 it was. Slow, uncomfortable, and with such a limited range that they were twice forced to land to top up their tanks. At least it meant there was no need for special arrangements to deal with their arrival, and the Skytrain's comparatively "roomy" interior allowed them to carry nearly a hundred kilograms of kit, most of which was now secured under guard at MacArthur's HQ.

The trio walked past an alley where half-wild dogs and giant rats picked at an enormous mound of trash. It stank to high heaven. Even in the Southern Hemisphere's winter, the subtropical city was still warm. They could smell open drains and raw sewerage nearby. The commercial heart of the town didn't really run to more than two or three blocks on either side of the main strip down which they now walked in the warm midafternoon sun. The buildings here were generally no more than three or four stories tall. After a while the streets tended to peter out into unpaved tracks. Jungle and mangrove swamp still penetrated the inner city at points within a few minutes' walk, and all of them had been perplexed by the sound of big cats roaring in the night.

The concierge had explained that the zoo was nearby.

The walk from Lennons Hotel took them along a streetscape that bore occasional reminders of their own time. A bookshop now would become a nightclub later; a teahouse here was sushi bar at home. Willet recognized the outline of a boyfriend's apartment block in the facade of a department store.

Crude brick pillboxes had been run up at seemingly random locations, often blocking busy footpaths and forcing shoppers to detour into the gutters. They passed a vacant lot, crisscrossed by slit trenches, some covered in thin sheets of corrugated iron, one with a single log thrown across it. And newsboys on every second corner shouted out the headline of the hour. Not news from Midway, but a scare involving tins of imported Japanese fish. It was feared they'd been laced with ground-up glass before the war.

Many shop windows had already been boarded over, with only thin slits for potential customers to peer through. More than once, the three officers were forced to step around lines of people patiently waiting their turn to do just that. Horse-drawn carriages vied with trams, old trucks, and U.S. Army jeeps on the narrow roads. The headlights of the motor vehicles were all hooded for blackout conditions.