Final Impact

by John Birmingham

  Eddie Mohr, the master chief of the USS Hillary Clinton, grinned like an old fox at the henhouse door. “Will he now?”

  Halabi punched him on the arm. “And you won’t be teasing him about it either, Chief. I’ve got a good housebroken man up there on that stage, and he’s going to stay broken. Understand?”

  The beers arrived and Karen paid for them with her Combat Optics credit card. The guys at CO had insisted she take it as soon as she signed her employment contract. As senior vice president in charge of R&D she enjoyed a generous personal expense account over and above her corporate allowance. The combined sum of the two was appreciably more than her husband pulled in as a U.S. Navy captain, and the sign-on bonus had been generous enough to pay cash for their beachfront house in San Diego. It wasn’t in-Zone, but she’d found to her delight that the U.S. West Coast felt a lot more like her sort of place than she could have hoped for back in the UK. Probably something to do with being in the New World.

  The crowd roared as Mike plucked out the first notes of “Louie Louie.”

  Eddie Mohr charged his glass and shouted, “To the future.”

  Karen Halabi sloshed beer over her arm and his shirt as they clinked glasses, but she figured What the hell?

  “To the past,” she cried back.

  7 AUGUST 1944.

  SANDRINGHAM HOUSE, NORFOLK, ENGLAND.

  It had taken quite some time for Harry to get used to his being so much older than his grandmother. Princess Elizabeth had been a very young sixteen when he’d arrived, and if anything Harry had been more nervous about their first meeting than she. After all, he had loved her all his life, but he had known her as the aged monarch of another era. Here she was a smooth-faced teenager and he was the increasingly aged one. At least it felt like that some mornings. He really was getting too fucking old to be jumping out of planes and into punch-ups with the likes of Otto Skorzeny.

  He rolled the shoulder where the SS colonel had plunged in a bayonet as Harry strangled him to death in a cellar in Magdeburg. They were walking through the southern reaches of the estate, and it was unseasonably chilly.

  “It’s a lovely day, don’t you think, Harry?”

  “It is, Granny. It’s good to be alive.”

  The princess had dissolved into giggles the first time he’d called her that, and Harry had blushed beet red, but as Elizabeth had laughed and laughed, until tears began to stream from her eyes, an embarrassed chuckle had escaped her grandson. It turned into a genuine full-bellied laugh, and soon they were both rolling around on the floor of the great hall at Sandringham, under the unblinking gaze of a stuffed baboon that Harry remembered fondly from his own childhood.

  Now, strolling the grounds, Harry called her Granny without a second thought. It had become his pet name for her, and she had settled into a close, comfortable relationship with him that was more akin to that between siblings than anything else.

  They walked a little behind the rest of the shooting party of about thirty, including the king and queen mother. Elizabeth was unarmed, but Harry cradled a beautifully handcrafted shotgun. They were after a pheasant for the dinner table that evening.

  “He’s a bit scared of you, you know,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Philip, silly. My husband.”

  Harry smiled. “You haven’t married him yet, you know, Granny. You haven’t even had a real date.”

  She may have blushed then, or perhaps it was simply her skin’s response to the chill of the morning.

  “Oh you. You’re awful.”

  Harry sucked in a draft of stinging-cold air. “Am not,” he replied.

  7 AUGUST 1944.

  SAVANNAH, GEORGIA.

  “Thanks, but not for me, Vern.”

  “Your loss, Phil. From what I hear, these things are gonna be banned one day.”

  Phillip Kolhammer leaned back in the rocker on the porch of the slumping old homestead and shook his head.

  “No. I don’t think you’re going to see a revolution in Cuba now, Vern. Without Castro or Guevara to lead it, it might have happened. But all that aid money flowing in there now is tied up mighty tightly with all sorts of strings. Things are gonna be different there at least. But don’t let that stop you enjoying your stogie.”

  “It surely won’t.”

  “No. Nothing ever stops Vernon enjoying himself,” said Louisa Cuttler as she stirred a tall glass of iced tea. “I’ve been clipping him stories about how those things are going to kill him, and do you think he’ll listen? No. Not for a million dollars will he listen…”

  The lilt of her voice reminded Kolhammer of Marie so much, it hurt. But it was a sweet pain, and much softer than it had been when he’d first sought out her maternal grandparents. There was so much of Marie in Louisa’s eyes and voice that he could close his own eyes, rocking gently back and forth on the tired gray boards of the porch, and it was almost as if his wife were with him again. Like Einstein had said, she was this close.

  He’d never met Vernon and Louise Cuttler back up in his own day. They had both passed on by the time he’d met Marie. But they’d raised her after her own parents died in a car crash, and his wife had loved them with a childlike devotion, even as a grown woman.

  “That was a wonderful dinner,” said Kolhammer. “I can’t thank you folks enough for taking me into your home and…”

  “Now, Phil,” Louisa insisted. “Don’t you go getting yourself all choked up. You’re family and that’s the end of it. I know things are…well, a little strange…And our granddaughter as you knew her will never be born in this world. But the good Lord knows her soul, and I know He will send that soul to us in some form at some time of His own choosing. That may be of no ease to your suffering, but you should never doubt that you have a home here with us, and with all our family. You’ll always be welcome.”

  Kolhammer rocked forward and picked another beer out of the icebox lying on the floor between Vern and him. An owl hooted somewhere in the dark beyond the mosquito netting, and cicadas began to screech.

  “I really want you to know how much I appreciate it,” he said. “I cannot imagine I’ll ever get back to see Marie again, but I know she’s out there somewhere and I know she remains the only woman for me in this or any other world.”

  Vernon nodded, his lips turned down at the corners. Louisa smiled, but it was the sort of sad, encouraging smile you offered to someone trying to bear up under great pain.

  “We would understand it if you met someone else,” she said. “You’re a good man, Phillip. Any woman would be lucky to have you.”

  “Well, there won’t be any other women,” said Kolhammer. “But it’s good of you to say that. And it’s good of you to have me here. Not everyone would have been so welcoming. I’m not…uhm. Well, not everyone likes me. And that’s only going to get worse in the future.”

  “Oh, you can’t listen to them know-nothin’ peckerheads,” said Vern.

  “Vernon!” his wife scolded.

  “Well, that’s what they are,” said Vernon. He leaned forward to grab himself another drink. “Listen, Phil, you gotta do what you think is right. That’s all God ever asks of a man. Not everyone’s gonna agree with you. Hell, sometimes even I won’t agree with you.” Vern winked at him over the foaming neck of the beer bottle. “That’s when you’ll know you’re wrong, by the way.”

  Kolhammer snorted. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “Do you think you’re going to run for office soon?” asked Louisa.

  Kolhammer took a long draw on the icy-cold beer. Moths batted up against the porch netting, and a dog began to bark in the distance.

  “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “I really don’t know.”

  7 AUGUST 1944

  NEW YORK CITY.

  It took the concierge three trips to haul up all of the mail Julia had accumulated while she was away. It sat in a big pile on the massive table in the center of the kitchen in her open-plan apartment. Constructed of wooden beams sa
lvaged from a warehouse slated for demolition, it was at least ten meters long, and inset every two meters with sunken ice buckets for holding bottles of wine and champagne. Two of these had filled up with letters and parcels, and a great mound of mail lay between them. Julia simply couldn’t face the idea of sorting through it all. It was late, coming up on midnight, and she had been to a war correspondents’ dinner in the Oak Room at the Algonquin.

  She was almost fully recovered from her injuries but found herself getting tired easily. That had started when Dan had died and had been getting worse ever since. She missed him and Rosie and even geeky little Curtis more than she could have imagined. Some days the pain was like a hole where her heart should have been. She took a jug of ice water from the fridge, a new model Kelvinator that aped the looks, if not the performance, of the double-door Jenn-Air back in her apartment in 21C New York. It seemed that no matter how much money and energy she invested in trying to create a fortress of uptime solitude in here—and she had invested shitloads—the contemporary world always had some way of sneaking back in.

  She was heading for the bedroom, glass of water in hand, ready to flake out for about twenty-four hours, when her eyes fell on a package from her lawyer in California. Maria O’Brien had moved out to the Valley when her firm’s headquarters had been completed, and they talked only infrequently at the moment. Julia had given her a check-signing authority for her investment account; all she really needed to do was sit back and watch it grow exponentially. Two years ago that would have been enough to keep her entirely happy. Now, as long as the money was always there, she was largely disinterested in the actual math.

  Still, at least it wasn’t hate mail—or even worse, fan mail.

  She grabbed the parcel on her way past. It might be dull enough to lull her off to sleep.

  Julia had a long hot shower, followed by a short cold one. It’d been a stinking night outside, and she had the contemporary air-conditioning cranked up high. It was an AT Carrier model mean to chill a restaurant much bigger than her place. Domestic A/C hadn’t really taken off yet. Stepping out of the cold shower into the frigid dehumidified air felt like an insane luxury after the steam-press heat of the streets.

  Wrapping a silk kimono around herself, Julia walked to her bedroom, her legs aching in anticipation of her collapsing onto the mattress. She ripped open the parcel and tipped out another sealed package and a handwritten note. It was from Maria.

  Hey Jules,

  This was sent to you c/o the office out here. Our security guys checked it. No boom-boom. But it’s marked confidential, so that’s all I can tell you. Call me if you need a hand.

  Best,

  Maria

  The note was dated for the previous day. Frowning, she checked the outer parcel and saw that it had no postage marks. It’d been hand-delivered via the front desk while she was out at the dinner.

  Julia opened the inner parcel and spilled the contents out onto her sheets. A photograph came down next to her pillow, and she was more than a little surprised to see Artie Snider’s mug grinning up at her. She grinned back. She hadn’t seen the big palooka in ages. Not since he’d turned up at that Kennedy gig with Slim Jim Davidson. What a fucking night that’d been…

  She wondered if there was a letter from JFK somewhere in that mail mountain out in her kitchen. She hadn’t seem him in ages, either, and he’d hopefully be getting home soon. Maybe she should call him, like he’d said.

  Curious now, she turned to the other documents, instantly recognizing a DNA graphic and wondering what the hell this was about. Less than two minutes later she knew: with her head spinning and her stomach lurching, she rushed over to the toilet bowl in her en-suite bathroom to vomit.

  Snider, the war hero she’d help create, was the killer, or at least one of the killers of Daytona Anderson and Maseo Miyazaki.

  He hadn’t been tried, of course, but the documentation was damning.

  Where the hell had it come from?

  And then, asking the question, it became clear.

  From her lawyer. Maria O’Brien. The West Coast Quiet Room controller.

  With shaking hands, sniffing to clear her blocked nose, she read the note again.

  Call me if you need a hand.

  Julia Duffy, the Quiet Room agent, opened the drawer of a bedside table and retrieved a flexipad. Rosanna’s old Samsung.

  She powered up and walked unsteadily over to the phone, removing the jack and hooking the Samsung into the phone network via a plug-in adaptor. Keying in a code on the touchpad, she waited while software agents negotiated their path through the old copper wire network to a black server somewhere in LA. As the pad logged in, security software at both ends engaged and began an elaborate verification procedure.

  After a long wait, a chime told her she had a message.

  Unable to stop herself she looked back over her shoulder. The apartment was empty, as she had known, rationally, it had to be.

  Julia opened the message. A vid-mail that would hard-delete after she had watched it. It was O’Brien.

  “Sorry, babe,” she said. “I have something for you, for a change. Snider, as you’ve gathered. He’s unfinished business. We can’t officially sanction him, of course. But you can do your thing with the data I’ve sent through. Good luck. I’ll see you for lunch next time you’re in town.”

  The screen folded in on itself and the pad beeped three times to let her know the file had been erased at a quantum level.

  All the fatigue that had threatened to drag her low vanished as she began to sort through the papers.

  She had already hardened her heart to the task ahead.

  As much as she had liked Snider, there was no chance of her turning this one down. They were in a war here. Not a shooting war, exactly. Not like the one that had just ended, or the next one that seemed to be coming on them like a fast-moving hurricane front. But a war nonetheless.

  In his own dim way Snider had probably known that. Sifting through the papers, it seemed obvious he hadn’t acted alone—that he’d probably been under orders of some sort. She began to arrange the pieces of the puzzle on her bed.

  He wasn’t an enemy combatant. He couldn’t be sanctioned.

  But he could be destroyed as a man in front of the world. Left with nothing but his shame and humiliation. An effective Sanction 5, if not an official one. And in her experience these things tended to end the same way anyhow.

  They certainly had with Hoover, her last Quiet Room target.

  Julia Duffy unplugged her flexipad and hooked up the phone again. She placed a call to the night editor. He answered on the second ring.

  “Hey, David. It’s me, Duffy,” she said.

  “Hello, Julia. I thought you were at the big dinner tonight. What’s up?”

  “Same old same old, Dave. I’ve got a story we need to run. Nobody’s going to like it, but we need to run with it anyway, okay?”

  The editor sounded unsure. “Well, it’s too late for tomorrow’s issue, Julia, we—”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t need tomorrow. I probably won’t file for about two weeks. I’m going to have a lot of research to do. I just need you to write me up as being out on a job tomorrow, okay?”

  “Okay. Where are you going?”

  “The Zone.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The usual suspects did their usual above-and-beyond routine, God bless ’em. Cate Paterson and Brianne Tunnecliffe in Sydney, with Steve Saffel and Keith Clayton in New York, all helped turn my pile of beer-stained scribbles into a real book. A couple of last-minute arrivals were Jim Minz at Del Rey and the redoubtable Steven Francis Murphy of Kansas City, who ran a soldier’s eye over the first draft and reminded me, among other things, that you can’t fire RPGs at a target only five feet away. These people make me look good, and I owe them.

  I also owe my blog homies at Cheeseburger Gothic (http://birmo.journalspace.com) for providing an excellent sounding board for crazy ideas, bitch sessions, Pepsi Challenges
, and general ranting.

  You’ll notice this book is dedicated to my old neighbors Rose and Angus, who stepped up to the line again and again when the deadline tsunami loomed, helping out with child minding and free food.

  And as always, last thanks are due to Jane, Anna, and Thomas, who put up with a lot from the crazy man in the basement.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOHN BIRMINGHAM is an award-winning journalist and author. He publishes widely on politics, defense, business, and sport. He writes novels for fun. You can talk to him and his readers at his blog, “Cheeseburger Gothic” (http://birmo.journalspace.com).

  ALSO BY JOHN BIRMINGHAM

  FICTION

  Weapons of Choice

  Designated Targets

  NONFICTION

  Leviathan

  Final Impact is a work of fiction. Though some characters, incidents, and dialogues are based on the historical record, the work as a whole is a product of the author’s imagination.

  A Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Original

  Copyright © 2007 by John Birmingham

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-50130-1

  www.delreybooks.com

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