Winds of Wrath Read online

  THE DESTROYERMEN SERIES

  Into the Storm

  Crusade

  Maelstrom

  Distant Thunders

  Rising Tides

  Firestorm

  Iron Gray Sea

  Storm Surge

  Deadly Shores

  Straits of Hell

  Blood in the Water

  Devil’s Due

  River of Bones

  Pass of Fire

  Winds of Wrath

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Taylor Anderson

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE is a registered trademark and the A colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Anderson, Taylor, 1963– author.

  Title: Winds of wrath / Taylor Anderson.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Ace, 2020. | Series: Destroyermen

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019051132 (print) | LCCN 2019051133 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399587566 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399587573 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3601.N5475 W55 2020 (print) | LCC PS3601.N5475 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051132

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051133

  Cover art by Liddell Jones

  Cover design by Adam Auerbach

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  The Destroyermen Series

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Maps and Illustrations

  Our History Here

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks again to my agent, Russell Galen, who was sure from the start that the Destroyermen series had long legs. Without him it might still be just rattling around in my head. I’ve always thanked my editor, Anne Sowards, but she deserves much more than the usual short sentiment. Her assistance, supportive suggestions, and calm, steadying influence can’t be overstated. She’s firmly and insightfully corrective when I goof, but defends my “vision” of things, including the somewhat unconventional style in which I chose to write the tale. I fear I may occasionally frustrate various copy editors with antiquated nautical/military/technical terms and old-fashioned turns of phrase and colloquialisms (or stuff I just make up), little of which is supported by current dictionaries. Don’t get me wrong—all the copy editors at Ace are great, and I hope they’ll accept my apologies and admiration, but I can’t measure my appreciation for Anne. She always has my back, but also has this graceful . . . way about her that helps me keep things in perspective and makes me ask myself if the fate of the cosmos truly depends on me defending whatever artistic or hard-history hill I’ve planted a flag on. Thanks, Anne. You really are the best. Period.

  On a sad note, I must acknowledge the passing of a fine fellow named Charles Simpson. Many longtime readers of the series knew him as a tireless, cheerful, and dedicated supporter of the D-Men, who started the “Destroyermen Fan Association” page and was an early, driving force in expanding the informative wiki. I talked to him fairly often in recent years and was privileged to get to know him as an excellent historian and an enjoyable conversationalist as well. Even though I never met him in person, I considered him a friend. Fair winds, Charles.

  OUR HISTORY HERE

  By March 1, 1942, the war “back home” was a nightmare. Hitler was strangling Europe and the Japanese were rampant in the Pacific. Most immediate, from my perspective as a . . . mature Australian engineer stranded in Surabaya Java, the Japanese had seized Singapore and Malaysia, destroyed the American Pacific Fleet and neutralized their forces in the Philippines, conquered most of the Dutch East Indies, and were landing on Java. The one-sided Battle of the Java Sea had shredded ABDAFLOAT: a jumble of antiquated American, British, Dutch, and Australian warships united by the vicissitudes of war. Its destruction left the few surviving ships scrambling to slip past the tightening Japanese gauntlet. For most, it was too late.

  With several other refugees, I managed to board an old American destroyer, USS Walker, commanded by Lieutenant Commander Matthew Reddy. Whether fate, providence, or mere luck intervened, Walker and her sister Mahan, their gallant destroyermen cruelly depleted by combat, were not fated for the same destruction which claimed their consorts in escape. Instead, at the height of a desperate action against the mighty Japanese battlecruiser Amagi, commanded by the relentless Hisashi Kurokawa, they were . . . engulfed by an anomalous force, manifested as a bizarre, greenish squall—and their battered, leaking, war-torn hulks were somehow swept to another world entirely.

  I say “another world” because, though geographically similar, there are few additio
nal resemblances. It’s as if whatever cataclysmic event doomed the prehistoric life on “our” earth many millions of years ago never occurred, and those terrifying—fascinating—creatures endured, sometimes evolving down wildly different paths. We quickly discovered “people,” however, calling themselves “Mi-Anakka,” who are highly intelligent, social folk, with large eyes, fur, and expressive tails. In my ignorance and excitement, I promptly dubbed them “Lemurians” based on their strong (if more feline), resemblance to the giant lemurs of Madagascar. (Growing evidence may confirm they sprang from a parallel line, with only the most distant ancestor connecting them to lemurs, but “Lemurians” has stuck). We just as swiftly learned they were engaged in an existential struggle with a somewhat reptilian species commonly called “Grik.” Also bipedal, Grik display bristly crests and tail plumage, dreadful teeth and claws, and are clearly descended from the dromaeosaurids in our fossil record.

  Aiding the first group against the second—Captain Reddy had no choice—we made fast, true friends who needed our technical expertise as badly as we needed their support. Conversely, we now also had an implacable enemy bent on devouring all competing life. Many bloody battles ensued while we struggled to help our friends against their far more numerous foes, and it was for this reason I sometimes think—when disposed to contemplate “destiny”—that we survived all our previous ordeals and somehow came to this place. I don’t know everything about anything, but I do know a little about a lot. The same was true of Captain Reddy and his US Asiatic Fleet sailors. We immediately commenced trying to even the odds, but militarizing the generally peaceful Lemurians was no simple task. Still, to paraphrase, the prospect of being eaten does focus one’s efforts amazingly, and dire necessity is the mother of industrialization. To this day, I remain amazed by what we accomplished so quickly with so little, especially considering how rapidly and tragically our “brain trust” was consumed by battle.

  In the meantime, we discovered other humans—friends and enemies—who joined our cause, required our aid, or posed new threats. Even worse than the Grik (from a moral perspective, in my opinion) was the vile “Dominion” in South and Central America. A perverse mix of Incan/Aztecan blood-ritual tyranny with a dash of seventeenth-century Catholicism flavoring technology brought by earlier travelers, the Dominion’s aims were similar to those of the Grik: conquest, of course, but founded on the principle of “convert or die.”

  I now believe that, faced with only one of these enemies, we could’ve prevailed rather quickly, despite the odds. Burdened by both, we could never concentrate our forces and the war lingered on. To make matters worse, the Grik were aided by the madman Kurokawa, who, after losing his Amagi at the Battle of Baalkpan, pursued a warped agenda all his own. And just as we came to the monumental conclusion that not all historical human time lines we encountered exactly mirrored ours, we began to feel the malevolent presence of yet another power centered in the Mediterranean. This “League of Tripoli” was composed of fascist French, Italian, Spanish, and German factions from a “different” 1939 than we remembered, and hadn’t merely “crossed over” with a pair of battle-damaged destroyers, but possessed a powerful task force originally intended to wrest Egypt—and the Suez Canal—from Great Britain.

  We had few open conflicts with the League at first, though they seemed inexplicably intent on subversion. Eventually we discovered their ultimate aim was to aid Kurokawa, the Grik, even the Dominion, just enough to ensure our mutual annihilation—removing multiple future threats to the hegemony they craved at once. But their schemes never reckoned on the valor of our allies or the resolve of Captain Matthew Reddy. Therefore, when the League Contre-Amiral Laborde, humiliated by a confrontation, not only sank what was, essentially, a hospital ship with his monstrous dreadnaught Savoie, but took some of our people hostage—including Captain Reddy’s pregnant wife—and turned them AND Savoie over to Kurokawa, we were caught horribly off guard. Tensions with the League escalated dramatically, though not enough to risk open hostilities that neither we—nor they—were ready for. (We later learned such had already occurred in the Caribbean, between USS Donaghey and a League DD, and that Second Fleet and General Shinya’s force had suffered a setback in the Americas at the hands of the Dominion.) But we had to deal definitively with Kurokawa at last, and at once. As powerful as he’d become, and with a battleship added to his fleet, we simply couldn’t risk our invasion of Grik Africa with him at our backs.

  Captain Reddy conceived a brilliant plan to rescue our friends and destroy Kurokawa once and for all, and in a rare fit of cosmic justice, the operation actually proceeded better than planned, resulting in the removal of one long-standing threat, and the capture of Savoie herself. The battle was painfully costly, however, and the forces involved were too exhausted and ill-placed to respond when the Grik went on the move. Our hopes now depended on the insanely, suicidally daring defiance of some very dear friends aboard the old Santa Catalina. Captain Russ Chappelle steamed the ancient armed merchantman up the Zambezi and fought the Grik Swarm to a standstill, ultimately blocking the river with her own half-sunken hulk. Even then her fight wasn’t finished, and as reinforcements trickled in, the battle raged on. Finally blasted to utter ruin and with the Grik surging aboard, Commodore Tassanna brought her massive carrier Arracca to evacuate survivors, but Arracca was fatally wounded and forced to beach herself.

  Thus, most awkwardly, began the Allied invasion of Grik Africa. Captain Reddy and our Republic allies to the south (to whom, incidentally, I was attached) brought everything at their disposal to support our people marooned behind Grik lines. Through daring, terrible suffering, and sheer force of will, “Tassanna’s Toehold” held, and a bloody beachhead was finally secured in Grik Africa, from which we could strike deep against the ancient foe.

  On the other side of the world, the vile Don Hernan and the equally unpleasant Victor Gravois finalized a treaty of alliance between the cruel Dominion and the fascist League, and General Shinya pushed north in a race with Don Hernan’s General Mayta to secure the city of El Corazon and the fabled El Paso del Fuego. Mayta got there first and fortified El Corazon against Shinya’s and High Admiral Jenks’s inevitable assault.

  And so the war began to build to an ever bloodier, more heartrending crescendo. Bekiaa-Sab-At and I, still with General Kim’s Army of the Republic, battled northward to join Captain Reddy and General Alden, smashing their way up the bloody Zambezi to the very heart of Grik Africa. The decisive engagement was fought in the ancient city of Sofesshk, in the shadow of the Palace of Vanished Gods itself. The balance (against the Grik, at least) had tipped in our favor.

  Or so we thought.

  I was not at the Battle for El Corazon and El Paso del Fuego, of course, but the fighting in the city has been described in the most horrific terms. Ultimately, only valor and good fortune allowed General Shinya to evict General Mayta. But no Allied fleet remained to exploit this natural passage between the seas, or support the NUS invasion of the Dominion from the Caribbean. Worse, the fascist League understood the strategic threat posed by Allied control of the Pass, and in concert with the evil Don Hernan, Victor Gravois finally began to gather the powerful League fleet he’d always craved for his own murky purposes.

  And then there was General Esshk, of course, who’d escaped defeat in Grik Africa to build a new army and new weapons—and prepare a final, obscene plot to ruin the world if he couldn’t rule it. . . .

  Excerpt from the foreword to Courtney Bradford’s

  The Worlds I’ve Wondered

  University of New Glasgow Press, 1956

  PROLOGUE

  ////// Old Sofesshk

  Grik Africa

  May 1, 1945

  General of the Army and Marines Pete Alden hopped up on the freshly repaired dock on the Old Sofesshk waterfront and got his first good look at the ancient Grik capital. He was surprised. Every other Grik city he’d seen had been little more
than a mazelike warren of jumbled adobe dwellings, reinforced with long grass and a few sticks here and there. They reminded him more of termite tunnels than anything a thinking being would build. But Old Sofesshk was different. For one thing, however long ago, it had clearly been planned and built with one eye for practicality and another to a recognizable—even to Pete—ascetic standard. Still more unusual, it was largely constructed of carefully shaped stones. Adobe had only been used to add or make repairs to far older structures. Much lay in rubbled ruin after the fighting, but a lot remained intact. And the predominating architecture reminded him vaguely of ruins they’d found in India, or even pictures he’d seen of ancient Greek cities—without all the columns and stuff, of course. He didn’t know what to think of that.

  He’d jumped from the bobbing foredeck of a battered MTB (motor torpedo boat) that had carried him east down the Zambezi River from Lake Nalak. His butt hurt after so long in the saddle of a me-naak, and it showed in his walk. Me-naaks were large, scary carnivores shaped a little like long-legged crocodiles. Mi-Anakka (Lemurians) from the Filpin Lands employed them very effectively as cavalry mounts, but not only were their saddles profoundly uncomfortable for large humans—such as Pete—the damn things gave him the willies. Particularly when the one he rode was hungry, and kept glancing back at him . . .

  Several people were waiting on the dock in a light drizzle under an overcast sky, but before Pete acknowledged their salutes he turned to catch a couple of duffel bags and a pair of rifles tossed up by his new orderly, Kaik-Sar, a big, muscular Lemurian sergeant from the 1st Marines. He also threw a quick salute to the skipper of the MTB as it backed into the rain-swollen river and turned to pound back upstream. The old “Seven Boat,” Pete reflected. I bet Nat Hardee misses her, but there was no sense sending her with him. He’ll have a whole new squadron of better boats to pick from where he’s going. Shouldering his duffel and precious 1903 Springfield, Pete finally returned the waiting salutes of the three Lemurians—and two Grik—standing on the bright new timbers.