Weapons of choice

More lights appeared, and he tried to get a fix on them through his binoculars, but the heaving motion of the ship and the shaking of his hands made it impossible. The fantastic speed of the lights struck him next, and the sense of intent that seemed to lurk behind their progress. At that point he raised the alarm.

Bells rang and Klaxons blared but it was too late.

Lieutenant Commander Takasuka's existence came to an end inside an expanding globe of hellfire.

Another four missiles shrieked over the scene on their way to Singapore.

40

SINGAPORE, 2351 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

The heel of a Japanese sentry's boot pressed into the earth fifteen centimeters from the tip of Captain Harry Windsor's royal nose. The prince's night vision goggles were switched to low-light amplification and small-unit narrowcasting. The other members of his section, including Sergeant St. Clair and two Australian SAS troops, captured the video feed in lime green on the small pop-up window in the corner of their own goggles.

Harry lay as still and quiet as the warm soil beneath him. He breathed as little as possible. Even so, the smell of Singapore was overpowering, a heady brew of open drains and dried fish, of swamp gas and Chinese spices.

In his own pop-up he could see that both St. Clair and Captain Pearce Mitchell, the ranking Aussie, had drawn a bead on the Japanese soldier. A microlight targeting dot, invisible to the sentry, had settled on the side of his head just above the ear, while another dot, emanating from Mitchell's silenced HK 9mm submachine gun, had glued itself to the center of his body mass.

Harry was trying to center himself in a mental exercise, releasing his ego and allowing the world to flood in through all his senses without interruption. Unfortunately the steady stream of piss gushing from the Jap into the bushes beside his head was proving to be a hellish distraction. His heart refused to stop hammering, and a smirk was threatening to break out all over his face. This would, no doubt give rise to a fit of fear-inspired, hysterical laughter if he should let it.

The fellow must have been bursting with tea, judging from the time it took him to empty his bladder. At last, however, the stream began to gutter and die and then, with a few shakes, which splashed a drop or two on Harry's goggles, he was done. The special ops teams listened to the rustle of his fly being fastened and the crunch of his boots through the undergrowth as he continued his patrol. They waited five minutes before moving or even resuming normal breathing patterns. When Harry judged it safe he subvocalized, "Fuck me, that was unpleasant."

A small biochip implanted at the base of his neck, and powered by the electrical charge of his body's cells, picked up the bone vibrations caused by the comment, transforming them into a quantum signal that was captured by the processors in his ear bud and narrowcast to the rest of the soldiers. They heard his voice in their helmets as clearly as if he had pressed his lips there and whispered to them.

"And I thought those pricks were supposed to revere royalty," whispered Mitchell.

They lay on a small ridge that rose twenty meters above a Japanese barracks complex at the edge of the town. Familiar with Singapore in his own time, Harry found himself amazed at every turn by the primitive, colonial outpost through which they'd crept. There were no high-rise buildings, no architecture he thought of as modern in any way. You could see the water from almost every vantage point. Shrieks and chirps and a thousand other noises of the jungle never ceased. Monkeys still roamed everywhere.

A strict curfew kept the captive population of Malays and Indians inside after dark, and most of the Europeans were locked up in the Changi prison camp. Even so, he could tell when they passed near one ethnic neighborhood or another. The Indian quarter smelled of peppers, curry powder, and exotic fruits, the Chinese of fried meat and jasmine rice. The odors must have settled into the skin of the place, he thought. There was very little food in Singapore at the moment.

Since this was far from the war front, security had been allowed to slack off. Singapore was a garrison town. Only three men made a regular desultory sweep of the subtropical jungle around the barracks, sticking strictly to schedule and a well-beaten walking track. Harry's squad members were lurking just off this path, waiting for a signal from three other SAS units that were moving into position closer to the buildings. They'd traversed the city via dense tunnels of verdant growth that ran all over her. Only the very center had been too built up to provide safe passage. A grid of wide avenues ran there, fringed with flame trees and frangipani. The grass verges, untrimmed in the wet heat, were already overgrown, but the white government buildings were all occupied by Japanese troops and administrators now.