Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

Kolhammer shrugged. “It’s like I said. I like to drive. It helps me wind down.”

  The campus was laid out around winding roads that had once been sheep and cattle tracks, when the land was owned by a grazing company. It was one of the few areas in the whole Valley not laid out on a grid system. The complex was still small, although large areas of land had been set aside for later expansion. They drove out through the checkpoint at the front gates within two minutes of Kolhammer starting the engine.

  “I thought we’d run over to Sun Valley first,” he said. “A lot of the aerospace companies are setting up there. It’s close to Glendale airport, and there are good rail links.”

  “Fine by me,” said his passenger.

  There was almost no traffic on the way. A major change from his own time. They swung north toward the Verdugo Hills and around onto the old San Fernando Road. The temperature had dropped as the night deepened, and without the light pollution or smog of a megacity to block them out, the stars shone down hard and brilliant.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something?” Kolhammer called out over the engine noise and the roar of their passage through the clean, autumn air.

  “Not at all.”

  “Why do you care what happens out here? A lot of what you see here in the Zone must make you uncomfortable.”

  Stephenson didn’t spend long mulling over an answer. “I’m here under orders. Mr. Churchill believes it’s imperative that we speed up our research and development. The Nazis are doing so, and their engineers are very good. Better than ours in some fields. He thinks—we both think—that reinventing the wheel would be a criminal waste of time, given the circumstances. The real strength you brought with you was the knowledge and technical skills of your people. Concentrated here they form a—what do you call it?—a critical mass that the enemy can’t hope to match. It’s important that nothing interfere with what’s going on here.”

  “So you don’t care about the . . . ah . . . social . . . ramifications.”

  “Mr. Churchill feels that it’s really none of our business,” Stephenson replied.

  “No,” said Kolhammer. “But of course, Mr. Churchill doesn’t have the complication of up to ten thousand time travelers setting up shop in one of his villages, does he? He’s just got Halabi and her crew on the Trident, and maybe a hundred others scattered around—most of them the right sort of chaps who’d have no trouble at all getting membership at a good club in London.”

  “Admiral,” Stephenson said around a smirk, “you wound me with such sarcasm.”

  They turned onto Sunland Boulevard, where North American Aviation was building a massive factory to produce F-86 Saber jet fighters. Work continued around the clock, with the sounds of construction loud enough to hear over the growl of the Humvee. Giant lights illuminated the complex like a sports ground in high summer.

  “How many people do you have working there?” asked Stephenson, all business again.

  “None yet, but there’s about thirty aeronautical engineers off the Clinton attached to North American in Dallas and Kansas City. They’ll move out here in a few weeks. Mike Judge is going to run the program from our side.”

  “There you go, then,” said Stephenson. “I’ll bet it’s the same story all over the Valley. The war is going to be won here, Admiral.”

  “I thought I was the tour guide tonight.”

  “Well then, drive on, MacDuff.”

  They motored away from the island of light back into the dark bowl of the Valley, heading toward the glow of Sepulveda and Ventura. No blackout covered the L.A. Basin, which lay under the protection of an all-seeing Nemesis array. Traffic along Ventura was heavier, with a lot of cars from the city having hauled themselves over Cahuenga Pass and down into the Valley for a look-see. The neon signs of burger joints and all-night bars were strung along the side of the road like cheap Christmas lights. A dusty coupe sped past, full of teenagers who cheered and waved at the Humvee before powering into the night.

  “Probably going to park outside a strip club for a couple of hours,” said Kolhammer. “Trying to work up the courage to talk their way in.”

  “I saw my share of strippers in Paris during the Great War,” said Stephenson. “I doubt there’s much would surprise me here.”

  “Yeah?” said Kolhammer, who knew he was wrong.

  The strip fell behind as he pointed the car at the foothills below the Hollywood ridgeline. The edge of the Zone was up there, at the boundary with L.A. A few lonesome lights winked at them from behind trees hiding the mansions of movie stars and producers. More of his loyal subjects.

  For a while he’d had to assign two lieutenants to the job of screening him from the depredations of studio executives who thought the most important thing about the Transition was the access it gave them to a vast library of their own product they hadn’t had to spend a dollar actually making. As frustrating as it was—and he’d come this close to shooting Sam Goldwyn—it had led him to make a decision that would probably alter the course of history as profoundly as the disaster at Midway had. It just wouldn’t be as obvious or spectacular.

  He agreed with everything that Stephenson had said earlier. But he’d also been speaking true when he said he was no position to get into a public brawl with Hoover, or any of the forces behind him. If his arrival here was going to mean anything beyond chaos and madness, Admiral Phillip Kolhammer would have to be willing to reach out and shape events with his own hands. But he could not be seen to be doing so.

  He’d given a lot of thought to the problem, and in the end he could see no way around it.

  He had carefully drawn up his plans, selected the right personnel, and put them to work in the Quiet Room.

  9

  PT 101, CORAL SEA, SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA

  The tropical night was inky black, but out on deck, the wraparound goggles, which seemed to mold themselves onto the face, turned everything a bright emerald green. Everybody tried them at least once, and the worst anyone could say was that you lost a little depth perception, but it was a hell of a lot better than groping around in the dark.

  “I’ll bet somebody back home is making a packet, building these things,” Chief Rollins said as they bumped over a slight swell on their way out.

  “Not these, Chief,” Lohrey replied. “That’s a sixth-generation set of Oakleys you got there. The gelform seal alone is about seven decades beyond what you could manufacture here. But you’re still right. At least two British and three U.S. companies are working on prototypes of a basic NVG. Of course, the Germans will be doing the same.”

  “What about the Japs, ma’am?” asked a young seaman.

  “Doubt it. Not if they’re smart, anyway. German optics are much more advanced. Tokyo would be better off leaving it to them, and not duplicating the effort.”

  Peering at the screen, Kennedy checked his position against Ross’s boat. They were both booming along at top speed, following directions given by Lohrey and Chief Flemming, who talked to each other as though they stood just a few feet apart, rather than riding on separate boats. The night was particularly warm, and the blast of air across the decks was refreshing after having hidden out in the stillness of the mangroves all day.

  The pilothouse was lit by Lohrey’s glowing data slates, but they had covered the boat’s windows with heavy black plastic. To steer, the helmsmen on both PTs were using the feed from a couple of dinky little “battle-cams.” Lohrey and Flemming had rigged them up that afternoon, before spending a couple of hours acquainting the crewmen with the most basic functions of the equipment they’d brought on board. “Just in case we get killed,” Lohrey had said in an offhand manner that had unsettled Kennedy.

  New orders had come through from MacArthur’s office via an encrypted data burst, requiring them to secure a number of survivors after the attack. That meant rewriting the plan, because Lohrey had originally designated the warships as secondary targets. Now they had to make certain the destroyers were sunk first. Some little Asian woma
n called Lieutenant Commander Nguyen (it sounded like Noo-win to him) had appeared in a recorded movie to brief them about it. The boats they had thought were troopships apparently looked more like prison transports now. They were still supposed to sink them, but now they had to grab a bunch of survivors for interrogation, too. That order came all the way down from MacArthur’s office, but Kennedy suspected that Captain Willet was somewhere in back of it.

  The PT boat skipper thought it very cold-blooded, and not at all the sort of thing he’d expect from a woman, although looking at Willet’s intel boss, Lieutenant Lohrey, he’d bet his bottom dollar that she’d killed many more times than he had. When the revised orders came through, she’d been largely unconcerned, quickly redesigning the attack plan to knock out the destroyers first. Then they could nail the transports and pluck a few prisoners out of the wreckage without having to worry about any interference.

  “Are they all like that, Moose?” he’d whispered to Leading Seaman Molloy at one point.

  The survivor of the Astoria, a huge slow-witted fellow, had nodded sagely. “Aye, Skipper. I wrote my old man about them—you know he’s on the Chicago PD—and he said they sounded a lot like gangsters’ molls. Just as soon cut a man’s throat as look at him.”

  But the thought hadn’t put Kennedy off at all. Now, as they approached the point where they would wait for the Japanese, in the lee of a small, uninhabited island, the skipper of PT 101 found himself drawn to this female officer again. He couldn’t help but admire the hourglass curves of the visiting lieutenant as she bent over a slate, jotting notes on the much smaller flexipad that she held in one hand. There was a two-foot swell running, but she had no trouble keeping her balance, and she moved around the cramped confines of the wheelhouse as though she’d spent her life there.

  He wondered if she had a boyfriend or—even more exciting—a girlfriend somewhere. Possibly away up in the twenty-first century, when—

  “We have contact,” she announced. “Six thousand meters out and tracking south-southeast. Mr. Kennedy, you might want to have your men come to general quarters.”

  “I might at that,” he agreed. “Chief, let’s have at them, shall we?”

  Chief Petty Officer Dave Rollins nodded once. “Aye, sir.” Then he slipped through the blackout curtain, adjusting his borrowed night-vision goggles as he left.

  Kennedy nudged the engines up so that the gurgle of the supercharged V-12s increased to a moderate growl. He could feel the power surge coming up through the deck as he grabbed his helmet and checked the straps of his Mae West. The Australian submariner donned her own helmet, the one that looked like SS headgear, and then fitted a pair of outsized reflective goggles over her eyes. She tugged at the straps on her body armor and fit the flexipad into a clear plastic pocket on her forearm. In doing so, it seemed to Kennedy, she transformed herself, losing even more of her individuality. Becoming less of a living, breathing thing than the creaky, roach-infested boat on which they sailed.

  She looked like a killer, and nothing less.

  It was an effect emphasized by the toneless voice in which she communicated with her comrade on the other PT boat. They exchanged information in a language that Kennedy recognized as English, but which was so heavy with jargon as to be impenetrable.

  Lohrey turned her bug-eyed goggles on him and said, “Havoc confirms that Big Eye has designated five kills. Mr. Kennedy, on screen you’ll see five thin beams. They’re being directed onto the Japanese ships from the surveillance drone we’ve got keeping station above them. They’re invisible to the enemy. They’ll flash in sequence to mark the priority targets. So the first blinking line, there, is designating the lead destroyer. When she’s taken out, the beam marking her sister ship will begin to strobe.”

  They’d been through this before, but Kennedy didn’t mind being led through the mission again. Truth was, he felt more than a little unsure of himself. They were mashing together some very different fighting techniques, but he put away his misgivings and simply concentrated on not fucking things up.

  “All ahead, full,” he ordered, and the growl of the boat’s engines became a roar as they leapt toward the enemy.

  In the Combat Center of the Havoc, Captain Jane Willet watched the attack on-screen. Kennedy’s boat was the first contemporary vessel she’d set foot on, and it had left a strong impression. Standing in the slightly antiseptic chilled air of her own submarine, she couldn’t help but remember the raw sense of displacement she’d experienced as they climbed aboard the 101, to be greeted by its famous skipper.

  He was the first celebrity she’d ever met. The runner-up in the fourth and final Australian Idol competition didn’t really count, even if a much younger Jane Willet had once upon a time waited for three hours outside the Sydney Hilton to get his autograph.

  “So, Captain, were you swept away by the famous Kennedy charm?” asked her executive officer, Commander Conrad Grey, as they waited for the attack to unfold.

  “Did I let him shag me, you mean, Mr. Grey?” she smirked.

  “Oh, Captain, please, what will the junior ranks think?”

  Willet snorted in amusement. “Well, he was a very handsome man, Commander. The image files don’t do him justice. But, no. Future president or not, he didn’t get a leg over. Didn’t even try. He seemed—I don’t know—very well mannered and quite normal.”

  On the twenty-three-inch Siemens flatscreen, the two torpedo boats appeared in the opalescent green of low-light amplification, their wakes spreading and overlapping as they raced toward their prey. Part of her mind was out there with them. She recalled the faint stench of the boat’s Copperoid bottom paint, the smell of atabrine tablets on the crew’s breath, the abrasive feel of the saltwater soap in the officers’ head, and the taste of the powdered eggs and Spam covered in chutney that they’d eaten for lunch.

  The strongest memory she took away, however, was of the crew’s grim black humor. They were a ratty-looking bunch, all half-naked except for the cut-off shorts and greasy baseball caps. They were unwashed and unshaved and had the resigned look in their eyes of men who didn’t really think they’d make it back home. But they adored their captain, who would obviously do anything for them. And the only nod he’d made in the direction of the bizarre fate that might await him was the hand-painted sign on the outside of the boat’s flying bridge.

  It read, THE GRASSY KNOLL.

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS, BRISBANE

  The small office in which Lieutenant Commander Nguyen now worked was crowded with men, all of them ’temps. There must have been fifteen or more squeezed in there, none of them sporting as much as a drop of deodorant. She was glad for the small circle of inviolate personal space around her that was guaranteed by the presence at her elbow of General Douglas MacArthur.

  Nguyen had seen him around the building enough not to be completely freaked out. She’d even been part of a briefing team that had reported directly to him on one occasion. Nonetheless, it was quite an experience having such a legendary figure sit down next to her, so that she could talk him through the PT boat attack.

  Interest in the convoy had metastasized since the incident captured by the drone earlier that day. More surveillance time had been allotted to the troopships, and additional analysts had been drafted in.

  “It’s like they want to be seen,” Nguyen mused. “They have to be decoys.”

  MacArthur removed the unlit pipe from his mouth—she had told him the smoke would degrade the computer’s circuitry. It was simpler than explaining the dangers of secondary smoke.

  “How so, Commander?” he asked.

  “Their blackout is seriously half-arsed, if you’ll excuse my French, sir. Ditto their emcon—emissions control, you know, radio silence and so on. They know from experience that if we can see them, we can kill them, but it’s like they’re not even trying to hide.”

  “So you agree with Major Brennan that they’re a lure of some sort?”

  “I think so—very much
so, in fact—but I don’t have enough data to say for certain, General. If I had to take a punt, I’d say they’ve been sent down as sacrificial goats. Not to lure the Havoc into a fight, exactly. More to soak up whatever she fires at them.”

  “Let’s hope we can get you some data, then,” MacArthur grunted as the torpedo boats began to churn up a lot of water. It showed on the display panel as an explosion of lime-green fairy floss on a dark emerald sea surface. Everyone in the room with a view of the monitor could clearly see individual figures moving to their stations on the deck.

  “They’re accelerating for the run in.”

  “Which one’s Kennedy?” somebody behind her asked.

  “The lead vessel,” said Nguyen.

  “Ha, that figures.”

  She couldn’t tell whether the speaker meant well or not. She ignored him to concentrate on the feed from the drone. In contrast to the Japanese ships, the Americans weren’t giving anything away. They maintained radio silence, and no telltale jewels of light sparkled from within their blacked-out cabins. They were shut up nice and tight.

  Great fans of seawater began to spray back from their bows as they sliced through the swell. None of the small jade figures on deck moved now. They would be coiled and waiting. Nguyen wondered how loud their engines would be, and whether any lookouts on the Japanese ships had managed to obtain night-vision equipment of their own. Some had certainly fallen into enemy hands.

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, CORAL SEA

  Ensign Shinoda, on the bridge of the Wakatake-class destroyer Asagao, did not have any night-vision goggles. Nobody on any of these ships did. In fact, the junior officers joked that the only new piece of equipment they’d taken south was a giant bull’s-eye painted on the hull.

  But Shinoda, who had graduated near the bottom of his class, did not question the wisdom of their orders. He had no doubt there was some good reason why they were nursing three ships full of Chinese and Korean prisoners through some of the most dangerous waters in the world. He was equally certain the captain would have been told why this most difficult task was assigned to two of the oldest, least capable ships in His Majesty’s fleet.