John Birmingham: Weapons of choice

He leaned forward and smacked the table with his injured hand, slowly growling out his next words.

"But even if by some chance the Sutanto fails, and this Kolhammer survives, we will still forge on with our new plan, because we have no choice. You have all read the reports I gave you. You know where fate will take us if we do not change our path. We have allowed ourselves to be blinded to the real danger. It does not lie in Russia or China. It lies across the Pacific in the United States, and south in Australia where they will first build up their forces. We must defeat them there before they are too strong. We must take their base at Hawaii from them. And on the last day of this war we must stand in the Oval Office and put their crippled president to the sword.

"Because we have no choice."

Complete silence greeted this uncompromising speech. A dozen men stared at him, some in awe, some in shock, and some without discernible emotion. The moment stretched uncomfortably until Yamamoto began to worry that one of them might actually laugh at him. Finally, a lone voice spoke up. The army officer who had questioned him before.

"But how?" he asked, genuinely perplexed.

Yamamoto smiled.

MOSCOW, 2215 HOURS, 25 JUNE 1942

He didn't think it was possible that a place even more fearful than the Gestapo headquarters at Prinz Albrechtstrasse might exist, but perhaps he had found it here in this surprisingly shabby waiting room. He knew that if the next hour didn't go well he would not live to see this room again. It was entirely possible he'd simply be shot dead behind the heavy oak doors that led into the inner sanctum of the Central Committee. Perhaps there would be a secret trapdoor through which they would spirit him away to the cells. He thought that was very much their style. There would doubtless be many cells in this building.

He did his best to appear relaxed despite the hard, uncomfortable chair on which he sat. Nobody had offered him even a simple refreshment or shaken his hand. The minor functionaries who staffed this chamber treated him with cold formality, for which he supposed he could not blame them. His country was still exterminating their people like millions of rats. Perhaps by morning that might be behind them. For the sake of the Fatherland he could only hope.

He still did not quite believe the case he would have to argue in there. If it had just been a suggestion from the Japanese alone he would have laughed it off, but the fuhrer himself was adamant that Yamamoto's plan was worth the risk. Of course it was not the fuhrer's risk to take. It was his.

It was all madness really. But the whole world was alive with talk of the insanity. The fuhrer was obsessed with reading translated stories from the Allied press about events in the Pacific. For once it had driven news of the war from the front pages around the globe. And now he was here, at the very center of the storm, on a mission that would assuredly make an irrelevance of these "time travelers." He was here and they were listening to him. That was enough to justify the risk.

German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop brushed a piece of lint from his sleeve as he waited for Joseph Stalin to admit him to the Soviet Politburo, to argue the case for a cease-fire and a new alliance with the Axis against the liberal democracies.