A Captain of the Gate Read online

  The men of Second Platoon, still daubed in the remains of Private Forster, shouldered their packs and weapons without complaint, but with a grim and somber frame of mind as they prepared to push deeper into their own small corner of the earth, their hell.

  AFTERWORD

  This is an idea I had a few years ago, that I’m still working on, for an alternate history of the Cold War. There were a couple of what-ifs in the back of it. What if the A-Bomb didn’t work, at first? What if the slaughter of invading Japan pushed America back into isolationism? What if, and this my favorite, the Domino Theory then came true? ASEAN becomes the Association of Socialist East Asian Nations, a third communist bloc. The fag end of the British Empire is wheezing along as the world’s policeman. And then Ronald Reagan gets elected and everything changes. The idea was to write the history of the period via a biography of one of its players, an adventurer by the name of Branch McKinnon. If I ever go ahead and do it, a big if, it would look exactly like a work of non-fiction, with footnotes, appendices etc, but of course, it’d all be total bullshit.

  — John Birmingham

  ENDNOTES

  1 The policy was credited with saving thousands of American lives but it remains a sticking point in relations between the two countries, with some ultranationalist Japanese politicians still demanding fifty years later that the US apologize for its ‘war crimes’. Throughout the 1970s some American diplomats maintained that they could tell how difficult any given set of trade negotiations were likely to be by the fervor with which, in the weeks beforehand, the Japanese Foreign Ministry pressed the issue of ‘reparations’ to make good civilian losses during Operation Downfall.

  2 McKinnon had ample chance to find out whether he could forgive himself over the next two weeks, as three of the four new recruits were killed. Pvt. Andrew Forster, from Delaware, stepped on a mine less than a mile from the beach where the platoon disembarked from their landing craft. Pvt. Michael Hall, Sioux Falls, was cut down while approaching a Japanese pillbox on the outskirts of Tokyo. And Pvt. Greg Beck, Kansas City, was cut down by a pitchfork-wielding gardener in the grounds of the Imperial Palace.

  3 The Fall of Giants, unpublished manuscript, McKinnon, B. 1953. Original copy held by The McKinnon Foundation, Washington DC.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Books like this bear the name of only one author, which is a grave disservice to the many people who bring them into being. My US editor, Betsy Mitchell, and my Australian boss lady, Cate Paterson, are both owed a debt I can never hope to repay. So too my agent Russ Galen who first proposed this idea while I was in the US on a Fulbright scholarship in 1998. To them, and to all of the production staff at Random House and Pan MacMillan, I offer thanks.

  A number of people from various libraries, universities, research foundations and public and private archives were also embarrassingly generous with their time on this project. I am grateful beyond words to the trustees of the McKinnon Foundation for the unfettered access and unstinting support they provided throughout the research and writing process. The US Library of Congress, the Department of Defense in Washington, the Office of Strategic Services (Archives and Records), the Imperial War Museum in London, the Australian Colonial Office and the Southeast Asian section of the International Criminal Court (War Crimes and Human Rights Division) were all enormously important and supportive of this project.

  Finally I must acknowledge the love and counsel of my wife and children, who put up with six years of obsessive, irascible, distant and downright unacceptable behavior from me while I brought this book to print.

  About the Author

  John Birmingham’s proudest achievement as a writer was being published in the Long Bay Prison News. After that it was all downhill. Contributing editor for a bunch of porn mags like Playboy and Penthouse, sleeping on the couch at Rolling Stone while he waited for his dole cheques to clear. Raiding the beer at the cricket and footy while writing for Wisden and Inside Sport. No wonder he shifted to indie comedy in He Died With a Felafel in His Hand and genre writing with the Axis of Time series and his current trilogy, which kicked off in Without Warning and After America, and will continue with Angels of Vengeance.

  For news and author contact, visit

  www.cheeseburgergothic.com

  www.twitter.com/johnbirmingham

  Find all the latest news, events and competitions for Voyager authors and books at www.voyagerblog.com.au

  Copyright

  First published in 2010 in the compilation Legends of Australian Fantasy (ed. Jack Dann and Jonathan Strahan).

  This edition published in 2011

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © John Birmingham 2010

  The right of John Birmingham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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