Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “I can’t, Detective. The Japanese broke it.”

  “What . . . Oh, right. Yeah, Lieutenant Curtis down there told me about that. They had some special bomb fried the electrics. Most of ’em, anyhow. Well, not to worry. A uniformed officer will come around, and tell you when it’s safe again. For now, just do as I say. In fact, you might want to go around to the rest of the occupants and tell them the same thing. Can you do that for me, Mrs. Mackellar? Can I deputize that job to you?”

  Rosanna found herself touched, and more than a little surprised by Cherry’s ability to calm the old lady’s nerves. Mrs. Mackellar promised him she would go right away, and instruct the rest of the building to do as he said.

  “Well, get yourself a candle or a torch,” he cautioned, “and be careful on the stairs in the dark. There isn’t going to be any ambulance service for a while.”

  Cherry came back down and joined them on the lower landing.

  “What are you fucking looking at?” he growled at Rosanna.

  “You fucking asshole. You’re just a pussycat,” she said back. “Why can’t you be nice like that all the time?”

  “Because it hurts my head,” he said. “This your place, Natoli? Can we get inside and get some grub now?”

  She added the light of her flexipad to his oil lamp, to help find the keyhole.

  “Is there a layer of lead or something in there that protected it from the pulse?” asked Curtis.

  “Not lead, no,” she answered as the key turned. “But most of my stuff is hardened for battlefield use. My watch isn’t, though. Look.”

  She showed him her wristwatch. The alphanumeric display was dead.

  “It used to light up,” she said. “It had the prettiest blue face.”

  “Got any booze?” Cherry asked, pushing his way into the living room, where glass crunched underfoot.

  “There’s champagne in the icebox. That’s it, but you’re welcome to have some.”

  “Jesus Christ, lolly water,” he muttered.

  “Hey, for a guy who was spying on us until this morning, and doing a shit job of it, too, you’re a bit of a lippy fucker, aren’t you?”

  “Calm down, sister,” said Cherry. “It’s been a long day. Where d’you keep your glasses?”

  “Not under my pillow, like you. Try the cupboard over the sink.”

  Cherry crunched away.

  “I’m sorry about your place,” Curtis said. Every window seemed to be broken.

  “It was always too dark for my tastes, anyhow,” she said, shrugging. “You should see the joint I bought in New York, with Julia. Hey, speaking of which, I’d better file.”

  She set about slotting the flexipad into the drivebay of her personal server. It could run on batteries for three days, and had even better shielding against an EMP than her pad. A row of blinking lights, on a charcoal gray communications cone jacked into the rear of the box, told her that she still had a link to Fleetnet.

  “Small fucking mercies,” she said to herself.

  The screen powered up with its familiar background of family photos. The computer linked automatically to a drone circling high over the island, and a message popped up.

  “Hey, you guys had better come and see this,” she called out.

  Both of them appeared from the kitchen carrying bread and sandwich fillings.

  “What’s up?” asked Curtis.

  “Your friends on their way?” said Cherry.

  “Not really.”

  They leaned in to read the message.

  Flash traffic, Fleetnet. All units and ancillary personnel. Japanese invasion of Hawaii imminent. No equipment or data is to be captured by the Japanese. Repeat, no equipment or data is to be captured by the Japanese. Destroy all relevant material. By order of Admiral Phillip Kolhammer.

  Outside a lone air raid siren wailed in the night.

  27

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The Whitelaw Hotel on the corner of Thirteenth and T wasn’t the finest establishment in Washington, but it was special in a way that a Waldorf-Astoria could never be.

  Built in 1919 in the Italian Renaissance Revival style, the Whitelaw was the world’s most famous African-American hotel. It was a temporary home in the national capital for entertainers like Duke Ellington, or the leaders of black organizations like the NAACP, none of whom could rent rooms in the city’s segregated luxury hotels. So it was unusual—almost unprecedented—for a high-ranking white military man to stay there. Admiral Kolhammer’s PA had standing instructions to book him into the Whitelaw whenever he traveled to Washington.

  He checked in early, straight off the red-eye, before starting a long day of crisis meetings at the White House and the War Department.

  “I need to get some breakfast, have a shower, and change,” he told the front desk. “Then I’m out of here. In fact, if you could have a car waiting for me at a quarter of nine, my little part of the war effort would run a lot smoother.”

  The duty manager was only too happy to help. The Special Administrative Zone put a lot of business through the Whitelaw.

  Agents Flint and Stirling hovered nearby, like golems in off-the-rack suits.

  “Would you prefer to have breakfast in your room, sir?” the manager asked. “We have a suite ready for you.”

  “No. I’ll just go through to the dining room now. One of my staff is meeting me there. A Commander Daniel Black. Please send him on through when he arrives. He shouldn’t be too long.”

  He turned to his security detail. “We’re going to be on the move all day. You guys ought to grab some chow while you can, too.”

  The agents nodded, and Stirling moved through to check out the room.

  A bellhop was summoned to take Kolhammer’s baggage, and the kid obviously recognized him. In fact, almost everyone in the large crowded lobby seemed to know who he was, courtesy of four months of blanket coverage in the black press. As he moved through the warm but cavernous space, with strangers pointing and smiling, or just whispering and trying not to look like they were gawking at him, Kolhammer was struck by the thought that this was probably how Spruance had felt when he’d first come aboard the Clinton back at Midway.

  Well, it was his choice to stay here. In part, it was just petty politics, really. But sometimes that was important, too. He had a lot of officers serving under him who would not be welcome in any of the other, better hotels in Washington, simply because God had wrapped them up in the wrong skin color. And to Phillip Kolhammer’s way of thinking, that sucked. Back in the twenty-first, a lot of assholes would have thought of his insistence on staying here at the Whitelaw as politically correct grandstanding. But they could go fuck themselves and the horse they rode in on.

  Correctness be damned. He simply wouldn’t stand for his men and women being treated with anything but the utmost courtesy. If the fucking Ritz or the Savoy wouldn’t have, say, Colonel Jones as a customer, then they could damn well get by without Kolhammer’s money, as well. He tipped the bellhop and walked through to breakfast.

  “You eating, Agent Flint?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” said Flint. “Stirling’s always been more of a chow hound than me. I had a Twizzler on the plane.”

  A waiter met them at the entrance to the dining room, a huge sumptuous space that was about half-full. Kolhammer took a table and ordered a full hot breakfast with a pot of Jamaican coffee. Flint left him alone, taking up a station where he could see all the entrances and exits. Dan Black arrived just as Kolhammer’s first cup of coffee was poured. The man looked like he hadn’t slept in three days.

  “I haven’t, sir,” Black said, when the admiral asked him. “Julia believes sleep is for the weak. She’d make a good Nazi, in many ways.”

  Kolhammer allowed himself a chuckle at that. He had no personal relationship with Duffy, but they had locked horns professionally a couple of times back in the twenty-first. She’d proved herself more than helpful after the Transition, however, and Kolhammer had come to appreciate having
an indirect line into the national press via Duffy, through Black. It was amazing, really, the alliances he’d been forced to make.

  “Any closer to setting a date for the big day?” he asked.

  Black shook his head. “I’m beginning to think she has a—what do you guys call it?—a fear of commitment.”

  Kolhammer laughed out loud for the first time in days. “We do,” he said. “We do. But I don’t know if a lack of commitment is one of Ms. Duffy’s defining character traits, Commander. She’s just very focused. I think you’ll find that, when the time comes, she’ll throw herself into marriage with the same enthusiasm she brings to her work, you poor bastard.”

  Black looked more than a little worried at that. “You two have crossed swords before, haven’t you, Admiral?” he said. “She speaks of you a lot. Calls you the Hammer.”

  “Yes, but does she say it with respect?”

  “You can’t have everything, sir.”

  “And therein lies the sorrow of existence, Commander. At least according to the Buddhists. There’s no law says you can’t have breakfast, though.”

  Black ordered bacon and eggs when Kolhammer’s order arrived.

  “So, you read the files I e-mailed you?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Black. “Read them on the train coming down. I’ve already made calls to Patton’s staff, and to Eisenhower. Ike’s on board, but I suspect that if we delay too long here in Washington, we’ll get home to find that General Patton has made off with all of our prototypes and the test crews to drive them, colored or not. I’ve gone ahead and released the new ’chutes to the Hundred-and-first, though. I didn’t think you’d have a problem with that.”

  Kolhammer chased a piece of sausage around his plate and shook his head. “That’s fine. But I’ll bet General Lee didn’t leave it at that.”

  “No, sir. He wanted the assault rifles and the grenade launchers, too. They’ve done some training with the MK-One down in Kentucky. Lee’s in town right now, trying to get Marshall to agree to reequip the whole division.”

  “Jesus Christ,” muttered Kolhammer. “They’re still months from being combat effective. Okay. Leave that one to me.”

  “What’s your reading, sir, if you don’t mind me asking. I’ve been out of touch.”

  Kolhammer blew his cheeks out in exasperation. “Well, first up, I don’t think there is any chance of an invasion here. I know that makes me a minority of one, but the Axis powers don’t have the ability to force a landing on the continental U.S. They do have a fair shot at taking Hawaii, and they will throw everything at England.”

  “Will they win?”

  Kolhammer sighed. “They could. The odds are against them. It’s the wrong time of year. They don’t have air superiority. The Royal Navy can still kick Raeder’s ass in a straight-up fight. And of course, there’s always Halabi to consider. But it’s not going to be a stand-up fight. The Luftwaffe can put two thousand aircraft over the Channel, which will severely constrain the British Home fleet, even with the RAF and the Army Air Force ripping into Göring’s men. They’ve been just as busy leapfrogging themselves as quickly as we have.”

  Black nodded. One of the files Kolhammer had sent him was Captain Halabi’s report of the jet and rocket attack on the Trident. She described the German weapons as primitive and their tactics nonexistent. But those 262s looked mighty impressive to Black, who’d learned his flying just ten years earlier in a canvas biplane.

  “And Hawaii? Australia?”

  Kolhammer looked grim as he mulled over his answer. “The signals we’re getting from MacArthur about a second assault Down Under are bullshit. The Japanese do not have the depth to pull off two strategic strikes at the same time. But they’ll benefit from any doubt they sow in our minds by making a move to surge more of their forces down from New Guinea. It complicates things enormously. The chances of Prime Minister Curtin releasing any forces to help us in retaking Hawaii are slim because of it.”

  “You think it’ll come down to having to retake the islands.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Kolhammer. “I’ve got all my intel people working the take from Hawaii, and nothing I’m seeing makes me feel good about this. The Japanese definitely have control of the Dessaix, a French ship that was part of my original force. I don’t think they have the crew helping them—or not many, anyway. The attack profile was a fucking shambles and seemed to indicate both a very low level of competence by whoever is sailing her, and possibly even active sabotage by somebody on the ship.”

  Black poked at his breakfast disconsolately. “Well it’s not all bad, then.”

  “No,” said Kolhammer. “But there’s nothing good about it, either. The enemy won’t have sent the Dessaix in harm’s way without stripping her of everything that wasn’t immediately needed for the strike. And that’s a lot of technology off a ship like that. It’s even possible they’ve removed whole weapons systems and given them to the Germans. I had to send a burst to Halabi warning her that she could face a missile strike out of France. You see the problem. It’s like a demonic butterfly effect.”

  “A what?” asked Black, looking completely dumbfounded.

  “Never mind,” said Kolhammer. “Bottom line, things are about to turn to custard everywhere all at once . . . There’s something else, too, Dan.”

  Black’s food had arrived, but he really hadn’t touched it. He looked up from the plate at the change in Kolhammer’s tone.

  “I received some information the other day. Through back channels. It’s about Hoover.”

  Black’s face was blank.

  “We’ve had a lot of trouble with the Bureau in the Zone, as you know.”

  The commander nodded. He seemed genuinely in the dark about whatever Kolhammer needed to discuss.

  “I was given a list of names, of people the Bureau had recruited or attempted to recruit as informants, provocateurs, and so on. Your name was on the list.”

  Black’s eyes went wide, and he swore. The blood drained from his cheeks and then rushed back in as his whole body seemed to stiffen with an electric shock. “Me? Why me?”

  Kolhammer’s smile was tired, but real. He had no intention of hooking Black up to a polygraph or asking him to take a shot of T5. His security section had already determined the circumstances of the approach to Black.

  “Don’t beat yourself up over it, Commander. You were an obvious candidate, and believe me, it is a goddamn tenth-order issue today. They were always going to pick you, and I think you were always going to disappoint them. But you didn’t disappoint me.”

  Black moved around uncomfortably in his uniform. Their presence in the dining room had ceased to be a minor sensation, although a newly arrived group of four men did stop on their way through and pointedly check them out. Black didn’t seem to notice them at all.

  “It just leaves a sour taste in the mouth is all, Admiral.”

  “Get over it. They tried it on. They failed. Hoover will keep for the moment. Just be careful about talking to garrulous sheet metal salesmen in the future.”

  Black’s face twisted as he tried to work out the reference.

  “The man on your flight over here,” Kolhammer said helpfully. “His name really was Dave Hurley, but he wasn’t a sheet metal maker. He was FBI. He was trying to get you to compromise yourself, before he put the hook in. It wasn’t the first time.”

  Black’s jaw was knotting and clenching furiously. “Damn, Jules was right. I thought it was just her being, you know, twenty-first. All cynical and so on. But she was right about Hoover after all.”

  Kolhammer shrugged. “Maybe. There’s a lot of unsubstantiated rumor around Hoover. And the thing about rumors, Commander—as your girlfriend the journalist could tell you if she’s any good at her job—is that the rumor you most want to believe is the rumor you should be most skeptical of. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better go clean myself up. I feel like a bag of shit. I’ll meet you in the lobby in fifteen.”

  As he stopped to sign h
is chit on the way out, Kolhammer saw the small group who’d just come in approach Black and engage him in an animated conversation. That was okay. As far as he knew, the FBI didn’t have any black field agents at this point in time.

  He hurried out of the dining room, with his Secret Service detail falling in behind him.

  His hand kept patting the pocket where he had the data stick with the surveillance download from Chief Petty Officer Rogas. Kolhammer hadn’t had time to watch the raw footage, but Rogas had cut together a five-minute briefing package that was mercifully free of too much X-rated material.

  Kolhammer had no taste for gay porn.

  Kolhammer was familiar with both the White House Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing, and the deeply buried tubelike Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the East Wing. In 2021, the meeting he was attending would have been held in one of those two places.

  In 1942, however, neither existed. They were about to be built, because one of the more obscure factoids that came through the Transition in the lattice memory of Fleetnet was the information that the White House was structurally unsound and needed to be completely rebuilt from within. The work would have taken place during the Truman Administration, but had been brought forward in light of changed circumstances.

  A single bomb could have brought the entire structure down on top of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was due to be temporarily shifted across to Blair House, but the move had been delayed by the attack in the Pacific and the bombing campaign at home. Thus Kolhammer and Black found themselves ushered into the old Oval Office by the president’s secretary, Ms. Tully.

  The room was instantly recognizable, but like so much of the world he moved through nowadays, noticeably different from Kolhammer’s memories of the twenty-first century. He’d been in the room three times before.

  Some things were reassuring constants, though: the white marble mantel from the original 1909 Oval Office, the presidential seal in the ceiling, the two flags behind the chief executive’s desk, and the desk itself, carved from the timbers of the British warship Resolute. It was so familiar that he could have felt right at home, were it not for the other men in the room.