Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “Service the target if it’s still viable in twenty seconds.”

  They watched and waited as their defensive screen continued to hammer away at the bogy. Fixed antiair defenses on the Isle of Wight commenced firing, as well.

  “Brave man,” McTeale said as the 262 bored in at high speed on a long, straight line of attack.

  “He’s a dead man, now,” Halabi replied. The blue-lit space momentarily shook due to the short bark of a Metal Storm pod that was unleashing a minimal burst. Forty-three rounds of hypervelocity ceramic slugs intercepted the fragile airframe at a combined speed of Mach 6, tearing it into metal confetti.

  “Stand down the Daleks.”

  “Threat boards are green.”

  “Screen deploying to original intercept path.”

  Halabi continued to stare at the flat panel, where she had just watched a man die. “Was it worth it, Mr. McTeale? Three men and their planes to make us fire off another few dozen rounds?”

  The Trident’s XO pondered the question by examining his highly polished shoes. “I suppose, ma’am, that come the day we have nothing left in the cupboard, then yes, it will have been worth it. But not today.”

  “Captain, the initial attack appears to be breaking up and returning to base. RAF is pursuing.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Burchill. Let’s keep an eye on them for now.”

  She remembered at last that her comm officer had given her a message from Downing Street. The piece of paper was crumpled in her hand. She unfurled the printout and read it while the tempo around her wound down a few notches.

  “Mr. McTeale,” she said somewhat irritably. “Have the air division warm up a chopper. Apparently I’m needed at high tea.”

  15

  IN TRANSIT, LOS ANGELES TO NEW YORK

  He hadn’t been back East since lighting out of Grantville in the worst part of the Depression. The little mining town had done it hard—harder than most—and when he’d won a union scholarship to State, his old man had virtually run him out of the house, saying he ate too much to have around anyway.

  Dan Black had never seen either of his parents again.

  His dad died in a coal gas explosion in August of ’34, and his ma had passed away a week later. Died of a broken heart, they said, although Julia insisted that it was more likely to have been a stress-related myocardial infarction. Dan preferred the romantic explanation.

  He’d been on the Roosevelt program in California by then, and hadn’t been able to get back in time for his dad’s funeral, or his mother’s broken heart. No matter how sensible and level-headed Julia was about it, he still felt that if he’d just been able to afford a train ticket, he might have saved her from dying of her grief.

  Those memories hadn’t afflicted him in two or three years, but they came rushing back as the big Lockheed Constellation banked over the San Fernando Valley and turned its nose toward home.

  Well, not home, exactly. Grantville didn’t boast an airport of any kind, and he wouldn’t be visiting his old stomping grounds. But to Commander Dan Black, heading East still meant heading home even if he’d be spending all his time in Washington and New York.

  He had two days of briefings ahead of him in the capital, and three days’ leave in the Big Apple. He’d made a play of refusing the leave when Kolhammer had first suggested it. But the admiral had been all the more insistent when he found out that Julia would be back from Down Under and working out of the Times office while Dan was there. He hadn’t kicked too hard, though. He really needed to see her.

  On his lap he had yesterday’s edition of the paper, folded over to obscure her last piece off the Brisbane Line, a pen portrait of some jarhead who was lined up for a medal after routing a Japanese ambush. He wouldn’t read it until they’d leveled off. Julia’s stories were always a waking nightmare for Dan. She wrote very differently from Ernie Pyle or any of those guys. Her pieces were like war novels. He often wondered how they got past the censors. They were always vivid and incredibly violent, and she was always right there in the middle of the action.

  Her voice was always there, too, though, and that’s why he never missed one, no matter how much they gave him the heebie-jeebies. He could always hear her speaking as he read.

  The Connie’s four shining Wright R3350 engines strained for maximum power as they sought altitude, the brand-new computer-designed propellers biting into the hot dry air of the L.A. Basin with an extra 20 percent efficiency. He’d led a group of Army Air Force generals through the factory two days earlier, and had told them all about the redesign. Below him, in the western reaches of the San Fernando Valley, he could see the huge complex of half-finished buildings and bare excavation sites that formed Andersonville and Area 51, the dormitory and production centers for the Special Administrative Zone. He was sitting on the wrong side of the plane to catch sight of the military camps that had sprung up to house the expanding Auxiliary Forces, but he spent most of his workday shuttling among them, and knew they were almost as big.

  From this height, however, he was surprised by how much ground the new developments covered, and he wondered how long it would be before the entire valley floor was carpeted with asphalt, tract homes, and factories. About twelve months, he guessed, if they kept expanding at this rate.

  The ground glistened, as though they flew over thousands of lakes and ponds, but he knew that it was just metal and glass. You couldn’t hope to defeat—or even contain—the sort of energy that had been unleashed down there, he mused. The plane he sat in had come out of a massive new plant, right over there near the Verdugo Hills. Squinting his eyes against the glare of reflected sunlight, he thought he could pick out another three or four new aero plants, all of them working with some element of twenty-first-century technology, even if it was just a single computer.

  Of course, there had to be places like this in Japan and Germany, as well. Or Poland, if the intelligence was right. They knew the krauts and the Japs had access to some of the same gear they did, computers and such, and even if they weren’t as powerful as the stuff they’d taken off the Clinton and the Leyte Gulf, there was no denying the fact that the enemy had some great engineers working for them.

  Admiral Kolhammer said that a big chunk of America’s rocket program back in his time had been built with the help of Nazi scientists snatched right out of their laboratories at the end of the war. It didn’t bear thinking about, what those guys were doing with flexipads and computing machines. And even if the Nazis weren’t sharing with the Commies, you had to figure old Joe Stalin would do what he could to steal anything he needed to catch up.

  He had to know that if and when Hitler knocked out Great Britain, it’d be his turn again. Made you wonder—

  Dan was knocked out of his thoughts by an elbow to his ribs. “Hey, Mac, you got a light?”

  “Don’t smoke,” he said to the burly, short-haired man who sat in the seat next to him.

  “Ah, not you, too? You don’t look like one a them. What’s a matter, Mac? You ain’t buying all that hooey about a smoke being bad for a man, are you?”

  “Nope. Just don’t smoke.”

  Dan turned his shoulder away from the guy, letting him know that he didn’t really want to chat, but the big palooka wouldn’t take a hint.

  “You gonna read that paper, Mac?”

  “I am,” said Dan. “My girl works for them. She’s a reporter.”

  The man’s face lit up. “You don’t say. What’s her name? What’s she do? She work on the ladies’ page?”

  Despite himself, Dan couldn’t help it. He was proud of Julia. “No, she’s an embed. You know, a war correspondent. She’s been down in Australia with MacArthur and Jones.”

  His companion’s eyes went a little wider, as the plane leveled off and the copilot announced that they could undo their belts.

  “No kidding? So she’s from the future, eh? You lucky dog. I hear those dames, they’re insatiable. Am I right, or am I right?”

  Dan didn’t answer right a
way—he was half-embarrassed, and half-pleased. He knew Julia hated him bullshitting with other guys about this stuff, but really, he couldn’t see the harm. “Well, that’d be none of your business, buddy,” he said. “But . . . well, yeah, you ain’t a million miles from the truth.”

  The news seemed to please the guy. “Goddamn. I knew it. All those things you read, some of them had to be true. What is she—?”

  Dan held up his hand. “Sorry. I meant it. It’s really none of your beeswax.”

  Lucky for him the guy didn’t seem put out at all. “Sure, sure thing, Mac. Listen, my name’s Hurley, Dave Hurley. I’m in sheet metal. What about you?” he asked, pointing at Dan’s uniform. “Why’d you make the jump? You want to fly rocket planes? You political? Or you just wanted to make out like a bandit with those dames?”

  Black snorted. “I was at Midway. I was one of the first guys onto their ships. Went across to the Clinton in a helicopter with a youngster by the name of Curtis. An ensign—”

  “Yeah, I read about him,” Hurley said, nodding vigorously. “Ernie Pyle says he knew what the rockets and the death beams were before anyone else, didn’t he? And he was the guy told Spruance how it all worked.”

  Dan nodded, recalling the night on the bridge of the Enterprise, when they’d watched helplessly while the Pacific Fleet was destroyed around them.

  “Yeah, I read about that kid,” Hurley continued. “Were you there, too, with Spruance?”

  “Yeah, I was a planning officer. Curtis and I volunteered to check out their story, but things moved a little quicker than we did, and we became sort of irrelevant. I was on the Clinton for a while, ended up falling into a liaison role. I’m still doing that. So no, to answer your question, I’m not officially AF. But I’m on secondment for the duration.”

  Hurley took that in and readjusted his sizable frame. The seats were generous, but he was a big man. He took up all the space they had to offer, and then some.

  “What about you?” asked Dan. “You look a bit like a cop, maybe even ex-navy. But you’re in metal, you say?”

  “Yeah. I used to be a cop, a sheriff actually,” Hurley said. “But I was pensioned off about five years back. Crashed my patrol car during a chase. Busted my back. This flight’s gonna be hell on me before it’s done. I went into my uncle’s sheet-metal business, since he was getting ready to retire. Turns out I had a nose for a dollar. Got me a few contracts with you guys, in fact, running up warehouses out Burbank way. Hell’s bells but things are hot out there, aren’t they? I’ve got crews working around the clock. In fact,” he said, leaning over conspiratorially, “I’ve been trying to get my hands on a computer, to help run things even better. But I’m not that important.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Dan advised. “Warehouses are important. We’re growing so fast, storage and distribution is one of our real problems.”

  “Yeah? You think you could get me a computer, then? It’d be worth your while, if you know what I mean.”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  Hurley gave him another elbow, playfully this time. “Can’t blame a guy for trying though, can you?”

  “Guess not,” said Dan.

  And he wasn’t offended, really. In fact, he couldn’t help but like the guy. If he had to be trapped on a transcontinental flight, he could do worse, he supposed.

  Hurley didn’t even light up a cigarette until they were about an hour into the trip. By that time they were deep into a discussion about the war, and the Zone, and the politics of both. Dave Hurley proved to be more of a broadminded character than Dan would have given him credit for. He wasn’t at all concerned about women trying to “liberate” themselves. He said that as a businessman, he’d be doing himself out of a dollar if he didn’t use all the skills his employees had to offer, whether they were women or blacks or Latinos or whatever. He didn’t even seem to mind the fact that fairies and lemons, as he called them, felt free to live openly within the boundaries of the Zone, although he did wish they’d keep it private.

  “After all, it’s not like I go around groping my wife in public, is it?” he said.

  No, Dan agreed. It wasn’t.

  In fact, Dan Black didn’t have to share his trip with Dave Hurley all the way across America. The former sheriff left the flight in Denver, where he said he had a new branch office to visit. There was an element of truth to it, too.

  Special Agent David Hurley drove to the Bureau’s field office in Denver, where he grabbed a spare secretary and a teleprinter, to immediately file a report with Washington.

  He had made contact with Commander Daniel Black, he wrote, but did not think he would be willing to act as an operative, or even an informant. The commander had formed an immoral sexual relationship with a reporter from 21C, a Miss Julia Duffy (file no. 010162820). He was planning to travel across state lines with Duffy for the purposes of said immoral sexual conduct, in violation of the Mann Act, and openly admitted to having done so before.

  Black seemed to share many of the subversive and Communistic leanings espoused by Duffy in particular, and the wider population of the Multinational Force in general. During their discussion, he expressed approval of many sexual perversions, including mixed race and homosexual activities. His family background may have led him to embrace socialistic tendencies, since his father had been a unionized mine worker. Black himself confessed to having been a union member, before joining the navy.

  Commander Black spoke openly, without regard to security, about his duties and about developments taking place in the Special Administrative Zone, although he declined the opportunity to enter into a corrupt relationship when it was proffered.

  Special Agent Hurley did not consider him to be a good American, or a friend of the Bureau. However, he did not seem to be a particularly guileful individual, and might well be cultivated as an unwitting source of information, given his lack of sophistication and his access to the highest levels of command within the Zone.

  For this reason, Hurley recommended that contact be maintained.

  NY MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, NEW YORK

  She was never going to get used to these fucking flying coffins. It took forever to get from Brisbane to Honolulu, and then to Frisco, and New York. She traveled in a Catalina Flying Boat, and a Boeing Stratoliner, all of it supposedly first class, paid for by the Times, but Julia Duffy still got out at the other end feeling like she’d spent four days on the roof of a Pakistani goods train with about a hundred unwashed peasants and their livestock.

  The period piece aesthetics of the Stratoliner had been amusing at first. The wicker chairs, the cigarette girls, the cocktails, and waiter service were all great fun if you were into historical slumming. But really, droning around the world in unpressurized tin cans that couldn’t even match the speed of a Q-class Beemer—like the one sitting back in her garage in 2021—well, that was her idea of hell.

  As she waited for a porter to appear with her luggage at a very primitive LaGuardia Field, she swayed on her feet and fought to keep her eyes open. She could feel people looking at her. In her Armani jeans, Redback boots, and HotBodz thermopliable rain jacket, she was obviously Twenty-first. But then she thought, these guys are very obviously ’temp. They dressed differently, they looked different, they even moved differently. Part of it was obvious; sitting more primly, for example. Although she suspected that was partly a class thing. We must slouch around like a bunch of vulgar low-lifes by the standards of anyone with enough money to afford private air travel in 1942, she thought. But there was some subtle stuff, as well, a sort of stiffness and “blockiness,” and a way of swinging the arms and legs that was different from her time—perhaps the movement equivalent of saying cannot rather than can’t. She’d noted that even the basics set them apart, like how they got into a car. People here sat and then swung their legs in, rather than climbing in with their asses hanging out.

  And of course, women moved in a more distinctly “feminine” way. They sometimes reminded her of the styli
zed way a drag queen of her time would move his hands and hold his head. To Julia, the handful of women disembarking from her flight or waiting for someone in the arrivals lounge all seemed artificial and blatantly coy. To them, she supposed, she must look like some sort of bull dyke from hell.

  Man, she was too fucking tired. She patted the personal flexipad peeking out from under the bright yellow slicker. There was no local net for it to link to in New York, but Julia had been working on story files during the flight, so she hadn’t wanted to pack it away.

  Plus, she thought, it was a lot safer on her hip than in her luggage. The black-market price of an Ericsson T4245 Flexipad was probably upward of two or three million bucks.

  That’s why the first piece of hand luggage she’d unpacked was her trusty SIG Sauer, which she’d made a great play of openly fitting into her shoulder holster. That was at least one good thing about the 1940s. No airport security, or none that she recognized as such, anyway.

  The terminal at LaGuardia—still known as New York Municipal Airport—was relatively quiet for an early evening. Her flight had disembarked, and its passengers were awaiting their baggage. A flight to the Bahamas was due out in forty minutes and one from Toronto was due in. But the place felt like a ghost town.

  She was contemplating a limo run to her apartment, which was a little exciting because the interior designers should have finished the renovations by now, when her arms were pinned to her side from behind, and a sandpaper rough face pressed up against her cheek.

  “Guess who!” Dan Black whispered into her ear. “Don’t hit me!” he added quickly, hopping away, just in case her reflexes got the better of her.

  She jumped when he grabbed her. Her heart skipped forward a few beats, but she didn’t grab his nuts and try to rip them off, as she had last time. They were both learning. Dan, she noticed, had turned his body a little to the side, in order to avoid just such an attack.