Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  A noticeable tremor ran through Roosevelt’s upper body.

  “You authorized a hostile act, against a friendly power, which could easily have led them into declaring war on us? When we already had our backs to the wall because of your arrival?”

  “I did, sir. Although I respectfully submit that you should probably stop thinking of the Soviet Union as a friendly power, and accept that there is a war coming. Sooner, rather than later.”

  Roosevelt’s nostrils flared as he sucked in air to control the flash of anger that showed in his eyes.

  “If I wanted to bring a crazy man in here to start yet another war I’d have called up General Patton,” he barked. “I expect better of you, Admiral. And I’m not getting it. I know all about your little mission, more than you’re letting on. Because Major Ivanov wasn’t just looking for lost ships out on the tundra, was he? He was actively building a resistance network, opposed to Soviet rule.”

  “He was,” Kolhammer admitted.

  Roosevelt’s hand slammed down on the desktop with a loud crack.

  “Damn it all, Kolhammer, when where you going to tell me about that?”

  The admiral controlled his own rising temper and forced himself to concentrate on the matter at hand, rather than speculating as to where Roosevelt had picked up his information. That line of thought threatened to spiral rapidly down into panic. If he knew about Russia, then he could know about the Quiet Room. But if that was the case, Kolhammer wouldn’t be standing here; he’d be in handcuffs. Unless of course Roosevelt had decided to let the Room be, or he’d somehow found out about Ivanov but nothing else. The next few minutes would tell. Outwardly, Kolhammer forced himself to remain phlegmatic.

  “My special action team was supported for six months, Mr. President. After that, we could no longer sustain them in the field and they were withdrawn—most of them, anyway. Major Ivanov and Lieutenant Zamyatin, of the Russian Federation Defense Force, chose to stay of their own accord.”

  “You ordered them home?”

  “I recalled them. They didn’t come. They maintained, correctly, that their attachments—to the SEALs in Ivanov’s case, and the Royal Navy in Zamyatin’s—had expired. And that they were more than just free to stay in Russia, but obliged to do so.”

  “Obliged to stay?” Roosevelt said, his tone incredulous.

  Kolhammer nodded, carrying on regardless, determined not to give away any advantage. He privately wondered if Roosevelt had been briefed in on this by the Brits. They’d had an SAS guy called Hamilton in-country with Ivanov. A Russian specialist, detached by the then Major Windsor to help in the search for any Multinational Force assets that might have gone astray.

  He’d know nothing of the Quiet Room’s domestic operations in the United States.

  “Ivanov and Zamyatin regarded the Communist government as a hostile, occupying power,” he continued. “And they consider it their duty to protect the Russian people from all enemies, foreign and domestic. So they stayed.”

  “Good Lord,” Roosevelt muttered. “It never ends with you people, does it?”

  Kolhammer took that as a rhetorical question best not answered. He remained at attention while Roosevelt seemed to turn inward for a minute, examining the problem like a puzzle with a piece that just didn’t fit.

  “And your missing ship? That would be the British vessel, the Vanguard?”

  “Yes, sir, and possibly the two nuclear subs from our group. The Vanguard was our primary concern, though, since she was located within the area of the Transition’s effect back in twenty-one, as best we could tell. The nukes were a hundred miles away.”

  “And you didn’t find her? Or any trace of her?”

  Kolhammer shook his head, but all the old worries he had learned to suppress came bobbing back up to the surface. “We got nothing during the six months the team was in-country. A few wild rumors, but those are like Elvis sightings back in my day, if you’ll excuse the uptime reference, sir. People are forever reporting new ships, or planes from the future, winking through another wormhole. The Dessaix turning up like she did really bent everyone out of shape.

  “Then again, the Soviet Union is a very big country, and they have an excellent security apparatus. They could be hiding any number of secrets in there, and Beria and Stalin would think nothing of killing ten million people to protect them.

  “I’d be a lot happier if we had some U-Two coverage over them,” he continued. “And I—”

  Roosevelt held up his hand to cut Kolhammer off. “No! I go through this every few days with the Joint Chiefs, Admiral. We have only a handful of those planes, and every last one of them is needed for hunting down the German A-bomb assets—even the two aircraft we assigned to monitoring the Nazis’ extermination camps. After your repeated demands, I might add—both here and in the press. Or have you forgotten that?”

  “No, sir,” Kolhammer said, keeping his voice neutral, though only with the greatest effort.

  The ’temps, he had found, were more than happy to play on the Holocaust for propaganda purposes, but getting them to commit assets to disrupt the program was another matter entirely. The whole thing was a waking nightmare, and his own intervention—which he considered a matter of unavoidable moral duty—had occasioned a personal tragedy.

  His uncle Hans, who would have survived this war had it not been for the Transition, had been removed from the death camp at Treblinka and publicly executed as an American spy, some six months earlier. The German propaganda minister, Josef Göbbels, had personally seen to the release of the film footage into the free world, via Spain. Even now Phillip Kolhammer could feel an ungovernable rage gathering inside him as he remembered the first time he’d heard the news. He doubted that fate would play him an even break, but if it did, and he ended up in a room with Herr Doktor Göbbels at the end of this conflict, there was a very good chance he would beat the little rodent to death with his bare hands.

  When he regained control over the poisoned wellspring of his feelings, he found that Roosevelt was looking mildly abashed.

  “I forget myself, Admiral,” the president muttered. “I apologize.”

  Not knowing what to say, Kolhammer merely nodded, but he remained stiffly at attention.

  After another few seconds of uncomfortable stillness, Roosevelt eventually broke. “Can you at least assure me that the Russians don’t have your ship?”

  “No, sir. I cannot. As you know, we’re still doing all we can to find out whether it came through and fell into the wrong hands. If it did, it might not necessarily be in the USSR, of course. It could be in Colombia, or China, or buried under a mile of ice at the South Pole. I suppose it’s possible it could turn up tomorrow or a hundred years from now, given the temporal anomalies of the Dessaix’s arrival. We just don’t know.”

  Roosevelt shook his head and held up his hand again. “Please, spare me. I just need to know that you’re not still running some undercover operation in Joe Stalin’s backyard.”

  “I am not.”

  “And what about my backyard?” the president asked, his voice suddenly cold again. “Am I going to wake up tomorrow and find that your Ms. O’Brien has done away with yet another inconvenient foe, like Mr. Hoover or Congressman Dies?”

  Kolhammer could sense a trapdoor creaking beneath his feet. He carefully avoided answering the first question by concentrating on the second.

  “Ms. O’Brien is her own woman, sir. She’s a private citizen now. Not mine to command.”

  “Really?” FDR tilted his head. A reflection of the fire burning in the Oval Office hearth filled one lens. Kolhammer resisted the urge to shrug. He knew Roosevelt was using the expanding silence as a weapon, hoping to make him blurt something out as the discomfort grew more intense. Did the old man know about the Room, or was he just fishing?

  He chose his next words carefully. “I’m sure Director Foxworth could tell you all about Ms. O’Brien,” he said in a monotone. “I understand he has a considerable number of the burea
u’s agents assigned to watching her full-time.”

  Roosevelt didn’t bite. “And how would you know that, Admiral?” he countered. “Surely Ms. O’Brien’s affairs aren’t a matter of concern to your Zone security officers.”

  “No, sir. They are not. But Ms. O’Brien is no wallflower. I doubt a week goes by that she doesn’t complain in the press—about harassment by the FBI or the IRS.”

  Roosevelt didn’t so much smile as stretch his lips back to bare his teeth. “You seem to sympathize with her, Admiral Kolhammer. You don’t think Internal Revenue should have investigated her companies.”

  Still standing rigidly, Kolhammer had little trouble avoiding that trap. In a way, being forced to remain at attention focused his mind. “I don’t see that it would be appropriate for me to comment, Mr. President, for any number of reasons.”

  “Oh, come now, Admiral. You must have an opinion. I know you think very highly of Ms. O’Brien. You were quoted at length in that New Yorker profile of her, as I recall. You can’t be happy to see her name dragged through the mud.”

  “If I had a personal opinion, it would be just that, sir. Personal…and private.”

  “I see,” Roosevelt said, fitting a new cigarette into his holder. “That’s odd, because you were quite free with your opinions when Director Hoover resigned.”

  Kolhammer ground out his reply like an ogre chewing rocks. “Director Hoover misapplied public resources in the surveillance and harassment of Zone personnel. He compromised the security of a significant number of research programs. And he did untold damage to the operations of other intelligence agencies through his incompetence, malfeasance, and utterly inappropriate use of bureau resources. You are correct, Mr. President. I expressed these opinions publicly, under oath, during hearings in both the Senate and the House. It was my duty to do so.”

  “Was it your duty to repeat them and expand on them for Miss Duffy in The New York Times?” Roosevelt demanded.

  “I believe so, sir. Where I came from, considerable harm was done by military officials who did not speak their minds when they should have.”

  “Well, you’re not there anymore, admiral!” the president barked. “You are here, and we do things differently, as you are forever reminding me. You may not have liked Hoover, but he was a patriot, and he didn’t deserve what your people did to him. Julia Duffy drove that man to his grave. In the end, I believe she as good as put that gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  A single twitch at the corner of one eye was all that gave away the roiling surge of anger behind Kolhammer’s mask, but he held his tongue.

  Roosevelt was breathing hard, one fist clenched on his desk blotter. What Kolhammer wanted to do was pound the president’s desk so hard it cracked in two. He wanted to demand that Roosevelt sign an order directing as many resources as it took to dismantle the transport system that fed the Nazi death camps in Poland. He wanted to tell the president to stop fucking around, to face the inevitable and sign Truman’s Executive Order 9981. He wanted to do about a thousand things that he knew were vitally important, but that nobody born here seemed to care two figs about.

  Most of all, Kolhammer wanted to know why Roosevelt was allowing the killer of Daytona Anderson and Maseo Miyazaki to continue walking around as free as a fucking bird, fêted as a hero while he did so.

  Roosevelt had known the murderer’s identity for well over a year, and Kolhammer had suppressed it for the entire time, much to the disgust of the only other two uptimers who also knew: Doc Francois and Lonesome Jones. The commandant of the Special Administrative Zone felt sick whenever he thought about it. He had given his word that he wouldn’t go public with the information, and he had extracted the same promise from both Francois and Jones, on the understanding that justice would be done.

  But it hadn’t been, and now he had to stand here being dressed down about Hoover when the vicious old fag had brought ruin on himself. It was enough to make him throw up his hands and walk away.

  And he might have, too, if not for Roosevelt’s next move.

  “I want you to sign this, Admiral.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  Kolhammer came back to earth with a thud. The president had taken a piece of paper out of a desk drawer, and he was holding it out for the admiral.

  “It is an undated letter of resignation,” Roosevelt explained without preamble. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to shorten your leash, at least until I feel I can trust you to—”

  “No, sir,” Kolhammer interrupted.

  The president looked genuinely stunned. “What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, no, sir. I will not sign this letter. If you wish to dismiss me, I would ask you to do so now. Terminate my commission as of this minute. But I will not be a party to this.” He dropped the paper back onto the desktop.

  “Well, I…I…”

  Clearly Roosevelt was at a complete loss.

  Kolhammer expected to be dismissed, cashiered on the spot, but the president simply gawked at him.

  The two of them faced off over the letter for what seemed like an awfully long time. Kolhammer knew he was supposed to pick it back up. You don’t just throw documents back in the face of the president of the United States.

  Finally a long sigh leaked out of Roosevelt. He leaned back in his chair, nodding slowly.

  “All right then.”

  He took up the letter and tore it in little pieces, dropping them into a wastebasket by his side.

  “All right,” he repeated. “But understand this, Admiral, your days of running off like Lord Jim are well and truly over. You have no idea of the political capital I have spent protecting you and your little kingdom out there on the West Coast.”

  Kolhammer opened his mouth to speak, but this time Roosevelt wouldn’t allow him to get a word in.

  “No. Just be quiet and listen for once. This war is drawing to a close, if the whole planet doesn’t burn inside a nuclear fireball. I won’t be here much longer—”

  He held up his hand to forestall any objections.

  “—another year or two, most likely. Maybe three depending on the treatments your physicians have been supervising. But I can feel myself winding down like an old clock. My time is passing.”

  Roosevelt paused, and seemed to notice for the first time that Kolhammer was still standing at attention.

  “Please relax a little, would you, Admiral. You’re giving me a stiff neck just watching you stand like that.”

  Kolhammer allowed some of the tension to run out of his body, but he still didn’t look around for a chair.

  “The sunset clause on your enabling legislation for the Zone will come into effect one year after the unconditional surrender of whichever of the Axis powers lasts the longest—probably Japan, as in your time,” the president said. “So on the stroke of midnight of that day, a little more than one year hence, the Special Administrative Zone will cease to exist.”

  He seemed to be waiting for something from Kolhammer, watching him like an old dog eyeing a fox at the henhouse door. When he didn’t get it, he continued.

  “You’re not going to be able to trick the American people into doing what you want. You certainly won’t be able to force them, no matter how hard Ms. O’Brien and her friends may try.”

  For the first time in the evening, he smiled. A dry, desiccated wasteland of a smile.

  “You’re going to have to do things the old way, Admiral Kolhammer. When you disagree, you are going to have to convince them that you are right, and they are wrong. And while setting out to destroy men like J. Edgar Hoover might seem to clear a path to that goal, I can assure you that it is a road to perdition. I would caution you against walking any farther down it.”

  Kolhammer’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly. Roosevelt had not come out and accused him of running the Quiet Room. He had certainly danced around the issue, but he’d done nothing directly. He wondered where this was heading. Was Roosevelt trying to sound him out about some sort of p
olitical future? Or was he simply warning him against misadventure?

  The president produced another letter, this one sealed in an envelope.

  “Since you’ll be staying on, you have new orders, Admiral. You’ll be going back to sea when the Clinton is ready. If that’s all right with you, of course,” he added, loading the phrase with a heavy dose of patrician sarcasm.

  “Thank you, Mr. President,” Kolhammer said, not entirely sure whether he’d just been tested, disciplined, or comprehensively outmaneuvered.

  D-DAY + 9. 12 MAY 1944. 1915 HOURS.

  SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE.

  The food in Wakuda’s was some of the best in the Zone, which meant it was some of the best in the country, and certainly on the West Coast. Maria O’Brien had tried out the new restaurant at the Ambassador with Slim Jim and Ronald Reagan, and it was probably as good as Pacific cuisine got outside the Zone, but it still wasn’t a patch on Mr. Wakuda’s place, an eighty-seater run by a former petty officer from the Siranui and a couple of local partners, some gay guys who’d been among the first wave of ’temp refugees beating down Kolhammer’s doors when he set up shop out here. Styled after an Asian longhouse, Wakuda’s was open on three sides, with covered decks spilling down into a manicured garden through which a lily pond wound a sinuous course. She could spy the blue glass atrium of the newly opened Burroughs Corporation building through the foliage, just around the corner from her own firm’s landmark site.

  O’Brien popped a small piece of freshly baked bread liberally slathered with truffle butter into her mouth. The truffle shavings and a dusting of Parmigiano-Reggiano gave the butter a thick, obscenely rich dark taste, vaguely reminding her of an old mustard without the heat.

  “You’re not having the beef, dear?” her companion asked. “It’s quite wonderful, you know. And you need your strength. You can’t possibly get by on green beans and radishes, with all the work you do.”

  O’Brien smiled and shook her head, reaching for a small white disk of rice topped with a confit of wild mushroom, resting over grated apple and olive.