Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  Another captain put down the flexipad he’d been waving around and held up a finger. “We ought to be spending a helluva lot more time on psyops. The Sovs and the Nazis are absolutely goring themselves, because Stalin and Hitler can’t trust anyone, now that they’ve found out what’s gonna happen—”

  A contemporary navy officer interrupted him. “With all due respect, that’s an interesting sociological point, but it’s not a technical one . . .”

  Kolhammer heard a civilian contractor arguing that it would take too long to build a jet fighter, and that it wouldn’t give the Allies much of an advantage, anyway.

  “From what I’ve read, all the early jets were fuel hogs, with a short range. If we want to quickly build a fighter for air superiority, I’d be marrying the P-Fifty-one with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. We had plans to do this before you guys turned up. You get a P-Fifty-one-D in squadron service by February next year, and you’ve got a reliable long-range fighter which can outperform anything the Luftwaffe or Japs can throw at it.”

  Kolhammer guessed the man was working for the division of North American Aviation, who were hoping to get the P-Fifty-one into the air before the F-86 made it redundant.

  A group of army officers, all of them ’temps, were arguing energetically just a few feet away from him, about the Australian government’s decision to ram through production of a variant AK-47.

  A Lieutenant Hunt was in the throes of delight discussing the unrealistic prospect of building large numbers of FN Minimi squad machine guns.

  A Captain Ken Young, an English Guardsman, cut across him, as if he had never spoken. “You know, if you Yanks had been serious about replacing the BAR, there were plenty of alternative designs available from the Lewis to the Bren, or even the Johnson.”

  “The Lewis?” spluttered an American. “You can’t be serious? The BAR might be flawed, but the Lewis is a piece of crap. Haven’t you read these briefing papers? There are something like fifty different types of jams just waiting to screw up that gun, and the pan magazine is an abortion.”

  Kolhammer sighed, and wondered where that turn of phrase had come from.

  Dan Black would normally have handled this meeting, but he was still in New York on leave with his girlfriend, the reporter.

  “You’re a lucky man, Commander Black,” he muttered to himself as he reached the exit, where his PA was waiting for him. And then he grinned, because it wasn’t so long ago that the idea of spending three days in the company of Julia Duffy would have filled him with creeping horror. He supposed everything was relative.

  “Turboprops. Those are really worth the effort,” someone called out across the room in a strident voice.

  “God help us,” Kolhammer said to himself as Lieutenant Willy Liao fell in beside him.

  Kolhammer put his head down and hurried on out of the room. The briefing notes from the meeting would be on his system by that afternoon, and some of them might even be useful, but only insofar as they supported the decisions he’d already made. It was important to give everyone a say, especially with the “old” armed forces being in a state of high anxiety about their collective futures. In the end, however, Phillip Kolhammer firmly believed in the old saying that a cow was a racehorse designed by committee. And he’d be damned if he was going to sit around waiting for this committee to decide on how best to scratch its own ass.

  Liao handed him a flexipad with about a hundred documents to be signed. He scribbled out one electronic signature which the document manager then affixed to each file. The young officer was ferociously competent, and Kolhammer knew there was no point wasting his own time checking each paper individually.

  “Am I still on for that meet later today?” asked the admiral.

  “In one hour twenty minutes,” Liao answered. “You have a video link to General Groves booked in five minutes, sir. Then you are scheduled to inspect the new Boeing plant and progress on the new lots at Andersonville.”

  “How many people are under canvas out there?” he asked as they hurried down the stairs and out into the surprisingly warm late afternoon sunshine.

  “Eighteen thousand in tents. Another fifteen thousand are moving into the Quonset huts, which went up last week. And they’re just the workers. Most haven’t brought their families with them yet.”

  Kolhammer sucked air in through his teeth. It was an unconscious gesture he’d picked up from his old man. Whenever Dave Kolhammer popped the lid of the family car to tinker with the recalcitrant engine, he’d suck air in through his gritted teeth just like that. “Do we have any better estimates of population growth over the next six months?” the admiral quizzed his PA again.

  “Nine percent a month, at present rates. But of course, the new factories will start coming online very soon, and that will pull even more manpower in.”

  Kolhammer nodded silently as they reached his Humvee.

  This was not what he expected to be doing when he joined the navy.

  As the heat leaked out of the day, he drove himself up to Mulholland Drive, pulling off the road and into a culvert just before the Hollywood Hills. The teleconference with Leslie Groves had gone as expected. The director of the Manhattan Project had huffed and puffed and demanded more resources and staff from Kolhammer. The admiral blocked and dodged and had given up about one tenth of what he’d been asked for. But that was it, he’d decided. The well was dry. There was nothing and nobody else he could send to Oak Ridge or Los Alamos that was going to appreciably speed up the process. Groves and Oppenheimer already had hundreds of his best officers and technical specialists. Indeed, the Clinton’s fusion reactors were being run by a skeleton staff because so many had been transferred to the A-bomb project. And Groves had grabbed up more than his fair share of the IT systems that had been salvaged and stripped from all over the Multinational Force. His work was definitely of prime importance, given the Nazi’s own accelerated nuclear programs, but it wasn’t the only game in town.

  That thought led naturally to his next meeting, an altogether more informal affair. He’d driven across the San Fernando Valley, with an escort, a Navy SEAL, ghosting him in a black Packard, watching for tails. Hoover’s men were everywhere, but their field-craft hadn’t been honed in a vicious twenty-year holy war. Chief Petty Officer Vincente Rogas was more than capable of seeing them off.

  It hadn’t been necessary, however. Kolhammer had driven through the flatlands north of Ventura, through remnant beet fields and walnut groves, past vast tracts of dry, coarse grassland and abandoned orchards, all staked out and fenced off for housing development in the coming months. He’d swung through the established settlements of Encino and Woodland Hills, tracked the whole time by both Rogas and a high-altitude surveillance drone that scanned for patterns in the thin traffic on the valley floor that might indicate he picked up a tail.

  There was nothing.

  They drove up through the foothills, weaving in and out of wild oaks and patches of sycamore and eucalyptus. He couldn’t be sure, but Kolhammer felt that as they climbed the range he could taste clean air coming off the Pacific. He felt strung out and a little stale from overwork and lack of sleep. Even the hint of an ocean breeze was enough to revive him, although it fired memories of his wife and left him feeling sad and a little bewildered, an echo of the wild confusion he remembered from the first hours after the Transition.

  He heard Rogas in the small earbud speaker he wore. “We weren’t followed,” the man reported. “But I’ll keep an eye out, just in case.”

  “Thanks, Chief,” replied Kolhammer.

  They pulled off the main road into a canyon where millionaires did not yet tread. The road jinked back and forth a few times, overlooked by steep, crumbling hills that seemed to be held together with nothing but sagebrush and manzanita. The road curved left one last time and died at the base of a small, hard cliff.

  His contact was waiting there. With blueprints spread out on the bonnet of his car, he looked more like an architect than a builder.
>
  Kolhammer strode up to him. “You Donovan’s man?” the admiral asked, referring to the Office of Strategic Services Chief.

  “Uh-huh. Mitch Taverner’s the name.”

  “Okay, why are we here, Mr. Taverner?”

  The man picked up a roll of blueprints and waved it back up the canyon. “You guys have a lien over this land. You’re going to build a signal relay station here, in time. But you’ve got problems with L.A. over it. Or specifically, with the local rich folks. So it gives you a reason to come up here for a meeting with your builder.” He tapped himself on the chest. “And the long drive gives your man Rogas over there a lot of visible ground, to check whether or not you’ve been followed.”

  Kolhammer suppressed his irritation and forced himself to speak slowly, in a reasonable tone. “Okay, so you’ve proved to me that Wild Bill has almost as many feelers inside the Zone as Hoover. Is there any other reason for you to be dragging me up here?”

  Taverner, a barrel-chested man with what sounded like a Texas accent, grinned broadly. “Admiral Kolhammer, Mr. Donovan is a friend. He’s not like the others.”

  “Wonderful. Imagine my relief. But I still don’t see the need for subterfuge. If you’re as good as you think you are, Mr. Taverner, you’ll know that I don’t much care for spooks, and I definitely don’t have time for this sort of bullshit. So tell me, exactly what are we doing here?”

  But the Texan refused to be bullied out of his role. He reminded Kolhammer of somebody. The guy from that Walking Tall movie . . .

  “Mr. Donovan wanted you to have this, but he had no reliable way of getting it to you. It’s a list of all Hoover’s agents, informants, and sources within your area, as best as we can tell.”

  Taverner handed over a couple sheets of paper. They seemed to be full of typing. A freshening breeze stirred the leaves of the Cyprus pine and eucalyptus that bordered the road.

  Kolhammer took the list and pocketed it with barely a glance. “You tell Wild Bill I’m much obliged, but if he and Mr. Stephenson think I’m going to crank up a war against J. Edgar Hoover, then I’m afraid they should prepare themselves for disappointment. He’s simply not my concern,” Kolhammer said firmly.

  Taverner pushed himself off the door of the Packard. Kolhammer saw Rogas start moving toward him in the reflection of the car’s windscreen. He waved the SEAL back.

  Taverner moved in close. The man smelled of cheap soap and breath mints. “He should be your concern,” said the OSS agent. “That asshole has a lot of congressmen in his pocket. Roosevelt got the bill through, setting you up here, but he had to twist a lot of arms harder than he’d ever had to before. You know why? Because there was a little fairy flitting around, pouring poison into the ears of our honorable legislators. And he’s still doing it.

  “You got your Zone, Kolhammer, but the money to pay for it still comes out of Washington, and you do not have a lot of friends over there. You got enemies to spare, though. And you’ll want to start paying attention to them, or else you’re gonna get yourself cornholed in the town square, my friend.”

  Taverner didn’t wait for a reply. He turned around and opened his car door, then looked back over his shoulder.

  “Oh, and personally, I think the P-Fifty-one is a damn fine piece of fightin’ technology.” He winked, climbed in behind the wheel, and drove off, forcing the admiral to step aside.

  Kolhammer watched the car disappear around the bend.

  Rogas wandered over, his eyes scanning the area. “You know, boss,” he said. “I’ve never known happy news to come out of these sorts of meetings.”

  Kolhammer essayed a tired grin. “Would you feel happy about a trip East, Chief?”

  Rogas turned his palms out in a “whatever” gesture.

  “Then pack your bags. And put together a team: two men, two women. Covert entry and prolonged surveillance. Full-spectrum coverage. Draw whatever kit you need from the Quiet Room. I’ll authorize it when we get back to Fifty-one.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. Mission brief tonight?”

  “When you’ve chosen your team, bring them over to my office. I’ll be working late.”

  They both turned and walked back to the cars.

  Kolhammer decided to wait until he was alone, but he was itching to open the papers Taverner had given him.

  He was certain he’d spotted Dan Black’s name on the first page.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Five nights a week, without fail, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson dined at Harvey’s Restaurant on the 1100 block of Connecticut Avenue. A little dais, which raised them slightly above the other patrons, was blocked off for their private use. Hoover always sat with his back to the wall, while Tolson always faced the door.

  They paid two bucks fifty for all they could eat. They were supposed to cover their own tab at the bar, but a local businessman took care of that unpleasantness in their behalf. It was a healthy tab, too. Pooch Miller, the maître d’, poured six shot glasses of Old Granddad and club soda every night as soon as the director arrived.

  Hoover nearly always had a medium rare steak, but would occasionally go wild and order green turtle soup. He was a demon in the restaurant’s oyster-eating competitions, too, rarely failing to win. Every night when they left, the manager would provide him with a bag of ham and turkey for his pet dogs.

  J. Edgar Hoover was a creature of habit.

  On this night, however, things were different. They had two guests joining them for dinner. Two somewhat reluctant guests: Congressmen Gentry and Summers.

  Very few newspapers or magazines had published a word of the rumors that were flying around Washington about the director. Certainly none dared do so openly, preferring instead to play up Hoover’s love of delicate china, the expensive cologne, and his fastidious dressing. No tittle-tattle had ever been aired on the wireless by the likes of Walter Winchell and his peers. But that didn’t mean the city wasn’t alive with venemous gossip.

  Congressman Summers had been to three dinners and two cocktail parties over the last week, and in each case the hors d’oeuvre had barely arrived before somebody was making merry with the latest breathless revelation from the future—courtesy of a friend of a friend of an acquaintance in California. They concerned the president, some future president, the president’s wife, a movie star, an entertainer, or—increasingly—director Hoover and his longtime companion.

  That was what they were calling Clyde Tolson nowadays, “The director’s longtime companion.” Tolson, who was sitting opposite, was nursing a grudge against his fourth martini. A senator’s intern had told Summers that Tolson had exploded in the foyer of the Bureau earlier that afternoon, when he’d arrived downstairs from a meeting with Hoover and found a delivery had just arrived for him.

  A bunch of pansies.

  Oh, Hoover still had his allies. Some who refused to believe or even listen to the whispers. Others, like Gentry and Summers, who couldn’t afford to cross him. Tame reporters still turned out anodyne puff pieces and glowing testimonials concerning “the man who stood on America’s front line against subversion.”

  But Washington was a town acutely attuned to the merest hint of a shift in the wind, and there was a silent gale howling around J. Edgar Hoover. He still held power, but the perception that it might ebb away was enough to start the collapse, and he was the sort of man who would take half the city down with him when he went. As a rule, it was always best to distance oneself from such spitefulness. Unfortunately, it wasn’t always possible.

  Congressman Summers, like every politician who arrived in Washington, had an FBI file with his name on it. He assumed that Gentry did, too. Otherwise why would he be here? The existence of these files was an open secret. They were probably illegal. They were certainly dynamite. A complete file would allegedly document entire family backgrounds. Education and employment history, whether or not they’d played sports, whom they had socialized with, slept with, feuded with, cheated, betrayed, and so on. Of most interest to the director,
however, was whom they had slept with.

  That’s why Summers was at dinner with Hoover, despite his best efforts to be somewhere else. He had made a few mistakes, and they had been discovered. He’d taken the call at home, lying in bed beside his wife for a change. Just two months after he’d been elected Hoover had called him personally—at one in the morning to say that one of his agents had come across the most awful photographs of the congressman. It was clearly the congressman: he was easily identifiable. But he didn’t need to worry, because the director understood that he was a friend of the Bureau, and the Bureau looked after its friends. There would be no chance of this scandal ever seeing the light of day.

  And then he had hung up, without waiting for a reply.

  Summers could only wonder what awful indiscretion Gentry had committed.

  “Would you like some butter with that bread roll, Congressman?” Hoover asked in his squeaky voice. “You haven’t touched your plate or had a sip of wine all night.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Hoover,” Summers replied. “I’m simply very tired. The war, you know.”

  “I know, I know,” said Hoover. “We all work like Trojans, don’t we? Not like some of those union sluggards in California, I’ll bet, what with their mandated hours and legislated undutifulness. I swear, Congressmen, that if this tergiversating Herr Kolhammer had his way, the national defense would be subject to veto by the Wobblies and the Comintern.”

  For one horrid moment, Summers wasn’t sure if Hoover was making a joke, and he remained suspended in an agony of indecision. Should he laugh, and risk enraging the vindictive faggot? Or should he nod vigorously and pound the table with an open palm and exclaim something like “Exactly!” thereby looking like a fool who couldn’t appreciate Hoover’s mordant wit? He could feel his fellow congressman stiffen with tension beside him.

  Tolson saved them by snickering cruelly, providing him with a cue to chuckle. Hoover joined in the happy moment, his braying laugh sailing over the heads of the other diners.