Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  Rogas waved Horton and Cockerill over to the table where he had one slate running live vision from the targets’ room.

  “What’s going on?” asked Horton.

  “Bombings or some shit,” said Klausner, who was powering up the other slate to send a query to Fleetnet.

  “Anything else?”

  “Well,” said Rogas. “Edgar and Clyde have been having a tiff, and Clyde’s been hitting the bottle a little too hard. Edgar thinks he should wear that spanky little kimono he bought for him—”

  “The blue one?” asked Horton. “I like that one. I reckon Clyde looks really edible in that.”

  “Well, he’s just sitting around in his fuckin’ crusties for now,” said Rogas. “I thought they were going to have a real catfight over it.”

  “Talk about your fuckin’ funniest home videos,” grunted Cockerill.

  The mission boss was playing with touch-screen controls while Cocky spoke, trying to isolate the audio take from the agent at the door.

  “Got it!” Klausner called out. “Early reports of half a dozen soft target bombings in New York. No details yet.”

  “Shit,” said Horton.

  They watched as the two men on screen argued with each other. They dismissed the agent who brought the bad news.

  “We have to get back there now,” said Tolson after the man had left. “We’ll get the blame for this.”

  Rogas waited for Hoover to reply, but an unusual stillness had come over the FBI director.

  “We’ll see,” he said at last.

  Rogas looked at his watch. They were due to send another data burst in ninety minutes. He took less than a heartbeat to make his decision.

  “Cocky, start compressing the last six hours’ feed for a flash traffic burst. Kolhammer needs to see this now. Shelly, let’s get this fucking pigsty policed up. I think we’re going to be on the move soon.”

  If they were going back to Washington, Rogas would need to send an alert ahead to his advance team.

  They needed to finish wiring up Hoover’s house and to try to get a surveillance roach into his office.

  Again Rogas had no idea how Kolhammer hoped to achieve that.

  “Admirals . . .” He smiled.

  NEW YORK

  Julia and Dan were in Midtown on a cold autumn evening, walking to dinner and arguing as they huddled in overcoats: his olive drab, hers black leather. The temperature had begun dropping away an hour earlier, and a gray drizzle was threatening to turn to sleet. Dan’s mood matched the weather. He wasn’t happy about her mixing with the wrong crowd, which in his opinion seemed to account for just about everyone who had ever associated with Slim Jim Davidson.

  “If those federal agents were on his case, they probably had good reason to be,” he insisted.

  “Oh, puh-leeze! Come on, Dan, the good ship Lollipop pulled away from the pier a long fucking time ago. Haven’t you been paying attention? Hoover is a fucking lunatic and a hypocrite and a screaming bender. He’s only been able to hold on to his job because half the fucking country is terrified he’s got something on them.”

  “But Davidson is a known criminal!” her fiancé protested. “He doesn’t even try to deny it.”

  “Was a criminal, Dan. But he’s super rich now—’legitimate businessman’ is now the correct phrase, I believe.”

  She could see that he was really ticked off, and she knew her gentle flirting with Davidson had probably been the cause. Dan’s frown line, which she called the Grand Canyon, was etched deeply into his forehead. It was kind of cute, really, but it would get old if he didn’t snap out of it soon. She was about to say so when her flexipad began to chime in a way that signaled a high-priority call from the office.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I have to take this.”

  The Times had secured two flexipads and one data slate, clearly at great expense. Besides giving them access to Fleetnet’s publicly available Web cache, it also meant that Julia was instantly available 24-7, as long as she was within shortcast range here in Manhattan, or jacked into Fleetnet as an embed while on tour. It was rare for them to call, however. The traffic was mostly one way, when she sent in stories after the censors had cleared them.

  A bitter wind blew grit into her eyes as she hauled the pad out of her overcoat.

  While she was answering, Dan’s pad went off, too.

  “Shit,” said Julia. “I’ll bet something’s up.”

  “What makes you—?”

  She held up a hand and waved it to indicate that he should take his call. His frown added even more depth to the canyon, but he did as she suggested, wandering into a bookshop where it was little quieter, and probably warmer.

  She remained on the sidewalk, oblivious of the passersby who were staring, some even stopping to gawk openly. The signal came through, and Graeme Blundell, the chief of staff, was frowning on Julia’s display. A lot of the ’temps did that when they were confronted with the technology.

  “What’s up, Graeme?”

  “Julia, you need to get over to Chambers Street, to the subway station. There’s been an explosion. A bomb or something has gone off over there.”

  “What sort of bomb?” she asked as all of her nerve endings lit up.

  “I don’t know,” he spluttered. “A big bomb, from the sound of it. There are a lot of people hurt. And that’s not all. The wires are saying there are another dozen or more of these things gone off around the country. And we’re getting reports from Hawaii that the Japanese have struck there again.”

  Julia shooed away a couple of teenaged boys who tried to crowd in for a closer look at the flexipad. “Piss off,” she said. “I’m working here. No, not you Graeme, go on. How’d they get near Hawaii? I thought the Clinton left the better part of a fighter wing there. Sea Raptors and Hawkeyes.”

  Blundell threw up his hands. “I don’t know, damn it! We don’t know much about Pearl yet. It’s all too early. But I can tell you, we’ve got a big story developing over at Chambers Street. And I’m afraid it’s right up your alley, Julia. It looks like the sort of thing you say used to happen all the time, back where you came from.”

  “Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that. I’ll get over there right now. And just so you know, I’ve got Dan with me. We were heading out to dinner, and he took a call same time as me. That won’t be a coincidence. There are no coincidences where I come from. If he can tell me anything about Pearl, I’ll get back to you with an update.

  “Do you think you could send me a briefing note on what you’ve got off the wires? I can’t access them.”

  She could see Blundell shooting the flexipad at the other end a nervous look. “I’ll get Miss Meade to do it. She’s much better on these things than me.”

  “It’s because she’s a chick, Graeme. We’re better at everything, y’know. See you soon.”

  She cut him off and looked around for Dan. He was still on the pad. If he was talking like that, it meant that Kolhammer had a live link running between the East and West Coasts. They didn’t do that very often, because of the amount of dicking around involved in setting up the relay.

  The shit had definitely hit the fan.

  “Miss, miss, can we have a look at your flexipad, miss?”

  It was those kids again. She recognized them as bicycle couriers, a new industry that had taken off in the city about a month ago. Now it seemed as if they were everywhere. Julia had even had a close call with a couple of female riders. At the time she hadn’t known whether to be pissed at them for nearly taking her out, or proud of them for having the cojones to do the job in the first place. In the end, she’d opted for wry amusement.

  There were no Lycra bodysuits, powered helmets, or carbon-fiber bike frames to be had in 1940s New York, but both of those girls had done their best to pull off the look. Julia was sure their raked-back riding helmets were made of papier-mâché, and the sunglasses were strictly Ray-Ban aviators from current stock. But they must have stayed up late for a whole week cutti
ng and sewing their black overalls to have them fit so tightly. And where they got the Day-Glo strips from, she had no idea.

  The two boys jumping from foot to foot in front of her hadn’t invested nearly so much effort. She looked in on Dan again. He was deep into some unpleasant conversation. Normally she’d have just tapped on the window and waved him good-bye as she rushed off to the job, but she wanted to know what his call was about.

  “Okay,” she told the kid. “But it’ll have to be quick. You wanna music vid? Sativa or J-Two? Or I’ve got some very old Britney Spears here. I’m guessing you boys would be right into Britney.”

  “Oh, wow!”

  “Awesome!”

  “Okay, check it out,” she said, bringing up a vid file and glancing at Dan again. “If you try a runner on me, though, I’ll shoot you down before you get ten feet away.” She let them catch a glimpse of the SIG Sauer in its holster under her leather coat. That seemed to excite them even more than the Ericsson.

  As she was waiting for Dan to emerge, growing impatient, she heard the unmistakable rumble of a bomb going off a few blocks away.

  SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE, CALIFORNIA

  “I need you on the next flight to Washington, Dan,” said Kolhammer. “I’ll be catching a red-eye myself, when I’ve wrapped up here. I don’t doubt this bombing campaign is related to Pearl and the U.K., but we haven’t seen anything to indicate an invasion of the U.S. mainland. Most likely, it’s a feint. At any rate, I’ve got everybody above the level of bird colonel or equivalent hammering me for ray guns and space rockets. I’m afraid you’re going to have to be my flak catcher.”

  Black seemed to be standing in some sort of library. Kolhammer could see shelves full of books behind him. The navy commander made a visible effort to pull himself together.

  “I’ll just see Jules off, Admiral. I got a feeling she’s going to be busy here, anyway. Then I’ll get straight out to Idlewild.”

  “Thanks, Dan. I’ll have Liao make sure there’s a seat for you.”

  They signed off, and Kolhammer cut the link.

  He brought up the latest flashes on his desktop display panel. Nine bombs had exploded within a twelve-minute period, in three cities. Four in New York. Three in Chicago. Two in Washington. And not one of them had taken out a hard target. Subway cars, trains, buses, and two department stores were reported as having been hit. Civilian deaths were high. Not what he thought of as mass casualties, but it was going to rock the fucking house for the locals.

  There was no vision available on Fleetnet just yet, for which he was grateful. He didn’t need to see that shit anyway. Arms and legs looked the same the world over when they were blown off with high explosives. And there’d be the usual obscenity of tiny little limbs torn from children’s bodies, given the nature of the targets.

  He shook his head and suppressed the images for the moment. As horrifying as it was, it wasn’t even the crisis of the day for him.

  That was over in Hawaii.

  He did have visuals streaming from there. Mike Judge, still en route to San Diego, was providing the link he needed to see what was happening on Oahu.

  A drone on station above Honolulu had recorded the attack, which was lucky in a cold, left-handed way, because there weren’t many Task Force assets left to file a report. Hypersonic cruise missiles had wiped out most of Hickham Field, where the F-22s and support craft he’d left in place to secure the island had been destroyed. Slagged by a sunburn missile. A Laval, by all indications.

  Other airfields had been partially, or totally, destroyed. And Pearl Harbor looked worse than it had the first time. A low-res, jumpy, live-action feed from the drone showed massive losses. The only saving grace was that it could have been so much worse, if Spruance hadn’t been safely tucked away in the southwest Pacific, supporting the Kandahar’s battle group.

  That was where the counterstrike would have to come from, if they still had the ability to launch one. A dense ball of lead was growing in Kolhammer’s stomach as he began to see the outline of Yamamoto’s design. And it wasn’t just him, of course. He was clearly coordinating his strategy much more closely with the Nazis now, trying to make up for the odds that had been stacked against them.

  His teeth ached and his jaw muscles clenched as he bit down on his fury. There was only one place such an attack, with Laval multipurpose cruise missiles, could have originated. The Dessaix. No other ship in the Multinational Force was carrying them. They all thought she’d been left behind, until now, but she’d obviously come though the Transition and fallen into the hands of the enemy. He could tell, from the substandard attack profile that the original crew wasn’t responsible—or not all of them, anyway. If the Dessaix had launched a properly coordinated attack on Hawaii, there’d be nobody left alive.

  As it was, the damage was still catastrophic. And it wasn’t over yet, either. He’d bet the farm on that.

  Admiral Phillip Kolhammer looked at the pictures coming out of Hawaii and he knew in his bones that the Japanese were on their way.

  NEW YORK

  Julia was alone again. Dan had said his good-byes and gone straight to the airport. She’d caught a cab down Broadway to Chinatown and made the rest of the journey on foot against the flood of pedestrian traffic rushing away from the bombing. Hundreds of sirens filled the air, and occasionally a city worker would stagger past, covered in soot, clothes singed, coughing and crying.

  For Julia it was something akin to déjà vu. She supposed if she’d been a bit older, she might have instinctively looked for the old Twin Towers. But the New York she remembered hadn’t included them, so the antiquated low-rise buildings—such as City Hall, just ahead of her—didn’t seem so out of place. No, the streetscape didn’t much affect her, but the victims did. It was their faces.

  She’d grown used to thinking of the ’temps as different. Their faces were much more racially homogenous, their bodies oddly shaped. They were neither grotesquely obese nor inhumanly hard—sculpted by drugs and extreme exercise, like something out of one of Spielberg’s Draka movies. But running from danger, eyes bulging in terror, they were all of a sudden too painfully familiar to her.

  She stopped at the corner of Canal and Broadway, ostensibly to rig her flexipad for the job and to dig out her cardboard press pass, but also to regain her balance. Disorientation threatened to sweep her legs out from under her before she got anywhere near Chambers Street. She took in several long, slow breaths, letting the chill of the early dusk clear her head. Her breath came out in small, quick clouds of steam.

  Regaining her center, she pushed on.

  Fire trucks and ambulances were gridlocked for a block around the subway station. The approaching night pulsed a deep red from their spinning lights, as though a wound had laid open the city’s heart, and the blood was everywhere. Without access to her Sonycam, she had to use the flexipad in its camera mode, taking full-motion video of the scene as she approached.

  A block away from the Chambers Street station, hundreds of stretchers covered the grounds of City Hall Park, reminding Julia of the MASH unit she’d visited back on the Brisbane Line. That had been a hell of a lot more organized than this. She couldn’t see any sort of system here. There seemed to be four or five competing triage centers. Police, firefighters, and civilian medical teams swarmed everywhere, sometimes rubbing up hard against each other, leading to arguments and even a couple of fights, which she caught on video.

  A soldier wandered through, an army lieutenant, a ’temp. His uniform was blackened, and a big, egg-shaped bump had come up on his forehead. But otherwise he seemed fine. Julia grabbed him, identified herself, and got down to work.

  “I was going to meet my brother,” he said. “He was going to be on the subway—the A train. I was waiting over by the newsstand. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened. A bomb. I guess. They must have dropped a bomb. I gotta find my brother—”

  He wandered off before she could get his name.

  She had to get close
r to the station, to find somebody who had at least half a clue. So she began to jog over to Chambers Street, stopping to grab a clip of a mother and young daughter—she supposed—dressed for the opera, sitting and hugging each other, shaking violently and not speaking at all. The daughter was moaning.

  The pad chimed, and she broke off filming to read an updater from the Times. There were three other bomb sites in Manhattan: at Penn Station, Grand Central, and in Macy’s. There were fewer casualties at Macy’s, which had been closed when the explosion went off. The bombs at the railway stations had seemingly been designed to hit civilians, rather than to damage infrastructure. They’d gone off in the restaurants.

  She heard the musical theme from The Simpsons and experienced a definite shunt in her mind, as it tried to get traction on a very slippery slope. Then she remembered that was Rosanna’s call ID tag.

  “Hey, babe. God, am I glad to see you,” Julia said with enormous relief. “Dan said you guys were toast.”

  Rosanna looked fine, if a little shaken. It was still daylight in Hawaii, and she seemed to be outside, with a huge fire burning in the background. “We got hammered,” said Rosanna. “It had to be a missile strike, Jules. Nothing else looks like this. There was even an EMP. It fried all my stuff that wasn’t hardened to mil-grade. Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m home,” said Julia. “Well, not at home. The city got parcel-bombed. I’m on it right now. Looks like someone’s been doing their homework. They’ve gone for soft targets, high body counts. Easier than hitting guarded facilities. How long has the laser link been up?”

  Rosanna shook her head. “Just a few minutes. I figured they’d use the Clinton as a relay soon as I saw how bad it was. I can’t say how long it’ll stay in place, or how long they’ll let us have access. Bandwidth is pretty limited, but I guess they want to know what happened. I’ve got a highlights package for you. I’m sending it now, compressed in the signal. I’ve got vision of Pearl, what used to be Hickham, and what’s left of Honolulu.”