Final Impact (3 page)

Apart from a gene shear contraceptive, which of course she couldn’t switch off now—and hadn’t that been a fucked-up decision—her bio-inserts were tapped out. If she took a round in the guts, there’d be no warm flush of anesthetic from her thoracic pips. She’d be screaming for a medic and a shot of morphine, just like the best of them.

“Five minutes.”

Amundson repeated the gesture he’d made before, except this time he held only one hand up. A harsh burning smell reached them, and one of the cavalry troopers, Private Steve Murphy, asked her what the hell was going on.

“Be cool,” she called back. “And learn to love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

When nobody got the reference, she rolled her eyes.

“It’s the air force. They would have come through here and bombed the shit out of the place. That’s what you smell. Toasted Nazis.
Mmmmmh. Crispy.
”

Gadsden sniggered. Murphy seemed to ponder the point before nodding his approval.

The chopper banked to the right and began to lose altitude as it put on speed.

“Just passed over the release point,” reported the copilot.

In the cabin, the pilots were now free to ditch their maps and fly by dead reckoning. They were close. The door gunner primed his .30 cal. Amundson glanced around quickly to catch a look at the whole squadron as it formed up for the assault. Like the others, Julia tugged at her chinstrap and cinched her pack just a little tighter.

Cobra gunships roared past them on both sides as she waited for the familiar snarl of miniguns and the
whoosh
of rockets leaving their pods.

“Lock and load,” Amundson cried at two minutes out as a dense black canopy of trees sped beneath the skids.

The cav troopers tapped their mags against their steel pots before slapping them into place. Julia did the same, pulling the charging handle back along with everyone else. The bolt carrier slapped the first round into place. After Hawaii she’d switched over to using the same ’temp weapons as the units she covered.

Other than a small stock of ammunition kept for research purposes, none of the original loads that had come through the Transition remained. All the marines coming out of the Zone, and a few of the ’temp forces like the cav here, now loaded out with AT gear like the M4 assault rifle, a workmanlike copy of Colt’s venerable old martyr-maker.

Indeed, fitting her goggles and sweeping her eyes over Amundson’s chalk, it was hard to separate them from some of the units she’d covered as a young pool reporter in Yemen. Swap their olive drab battle dress for Desert MARPAT, and you were almost there. The knee and elbow pads, camel backs, combat goggles, webbing, and weaponry were all uptime variants, manufactured decades ahead of their time.

The Seventh Cavalry Regiment, along with all the other regiments in the First Air Cavalry Division, were still ’temp units, however, which meant that some things were very different. There were no African American cavalry troopers riding in this or any other helicopter. And no women. Other than Julia.

“Thirty seconds!” Amundson yelled.

“Clear left,” the crew chief called.

“Clear right,” the door gunner added.

The world turned opal green inside Julia’s Oakleys when she powered up the low-light-amplification system. They were descending rapidly onto a large field, where dozens of black-and-white—or rather, dark-jade-and-lime-green—dairy cows scattered in fear. A wire-guided rocket, a stubby little SS-11, swished overhead and detonated behind a copse of oak trees. Secondary explosions followed, and the night erupted. The chopper flared over their LZ, and Julia stood up.

“Let’s go!” Amundson yelled.

2

D-DAY + 2. 5 MAY 1944.
SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE (CALIFORNIA).

It was a hell of a thing, the way the smog had come back to Los Angeles.

Well, not
back,
he supposed. Most Californians were getting to know it for the first time. When Kolhammer had arrived in mid-’42, the air over the LA basin and the San Fernando had been so painfully clear, you could hurt yourself breathing it in too quickly. That had changed.

It still wasn’t anything like the carcinogenic soup of his era, but when he flew in these days there was a definite brown haze hanging over the mountains to the east, and a blurring on the horizon out in the Pacific. Nevertheless, the admiral shrugged and took a long, deep breath, just because he still could. To his leathery old lungs the air tasted sweet.

Perhaps after the war there’d be a chance to slow down and do things differently. Some people were already headed in that direction. He’d met some of the pointy-heads up in Berkeley who were looking at fusion, and he knew there was a small but well-connected group in the National Security Office studying options that would help the United States avoid ever falling hostage to the whims of the Saudi royal family “again.”

On his infrequent trips to downtown LA, he never failed to notice some manifestation of the future folding back in on itself. Last time it had been a billboard advertising the arrival of disposable diapers. Before that it was a restaurant that proclaimed its “all-microwaved” menu to the world—very unwisely, in Kolhammer’s opinion. Some days it seemed as if the postwar economy was already with them. Despite the demands of war production, some resources were now being allocated to manufacturing consumer goods like automatic washing machines and pop-up toasters. They weren’t available in great numbers, but that scarcity only added to the hysteria of desire for each new arrival. He’d read somewhere that each of five hundred “experimental” color television sets made by General Electric had been bought before they rolled off a special assembly line last month. Even though there were no network broadcasts for them to tune in to yet.

Everyone of the top five hundred companies in the United States now had a wholly owned subsidiary resident in the Zone. Some, like GE or Boeing, were there to exploit their own future intellectual property. Others were simply hydra-headed monsters like Slim Jim Enterprises or McClintock Investments, which had moved quickly and aggressively to cash in during the confusion of the months following the Transition. They had accumulated enough wealth, and with it power, to protect their often dubious claims to ownership over myriad products and patents.

So much money had been pouring into the Zone via its own stock exchange—an offshoot of New York’s—that regulators in Washington had been forced to step in and stem the capital tide, lest it unbalance the outside economy.

It was amazing what happened when hindsight became foresight.

“Refill, Admiral?”

It was all he could do not to jump. The female seaman had appeared at his elbow without making a sound.

Kolhammer swirled the dregs of his cold coffee around in the bottom of a mug he’d taken off the
Clinton
nearly two years ago. The gold-plated motto
IT TAKES A CARRIER
was patchy in places, and there was a chip right where he put his mouth, but he couldn’t bring himself to part with it. It was a rare link to the “old” world.

“No thank you, Paterson. I’d best be getting back inside, anyhow.”

It was really too hot to be standing around in the midday sun, sipping coffee, but Phillip Kolhammer was a creature of habit. When he was buried in work, he tended to eschew a sit-down lunch in favor of a ham sandwich and a quick cup of joe, taken out on the balcony of his office. It was a fine view from up here on the eighth floor, all the way back to the Santa Monicas. In between there lay a patchwork of undeveloped farmland, industrial estates, and miles of cheap tract housing for the hundreds of thousands of workers who’d migrated here.

Kolhammer poured the last of his drink into a much-abused potted plant, then turned to go back inside, momentarily closing his eyes to help them adjust to the darker interior.

He stepped through into his air-conditioned office, pulling the glass door closed behind him. Paterson took his mug and disappeared through the main office door, telling his personal assistant, Lieutenant Liao, that the boss was back on deck. Kolhammer strode over to his desk and dropped into the gelform swivel chair—another piece of
Clinton
salvage, as was the enormous touch screen that dominated his work space.

On that screen, multiple windows ran the first images from D-Day, mostly in color and V3D. That meant the source had to be twenty-first-century equipment, since it still took them a few days to convert contemporary black-and-white film coverage. So for now he was restricted to whatever came down the wire from Washington—and even that had to be encoded on a data stick, then physically flown across the Atlantic before it was sent via cable to San Diego.

There, at last, it could be laser-linked to the Zone.

Any assets that might have been used to grab the take from Halabi’s Nemesis arrays were fully engaged in-theater, meaning that even the
Trident
’s data bursts had to travel by stick. Coaxial cable just wasn’t up to carrying encrypted quantum signals, not without significant degradation. Still, despite the time delays, he had an excellent overview of the titanic struggle Eisenhower insisted on calling the “Great Crusade.”

That phrase brought a quirk to his lips whenever he heard it. Back in 2021, after twenty years of the jihad, you still weren’t allowed to use the C-word.

Kolhammer traced his fingertips across the screen, bringing three windows to the fore, filling most of the display. One carried raw vision from the air assault over the villages of Coquelles, Peuplingues, and Frethun, towns that sat astride the main road leading into and out of the port of Calais.

The window next to it ran footage of the mass parachute drop by 101st into the same area, just two hours later. And in the third and smallest window, a continual loop showed the first wave of Higgins boats coming ashore on the wide sandy beaches of the Pas de Calais, where a half-built section of the Atlantic Wall had been reduced to smoking rubble by a six-hour-long storm of precision-guided five-hundred-kilo bunker busters and fuel-air explosives, the “poor man’s nukes.”

A chime sounded, and Lieutenant Liao appeared in a pop-up.

“I have your conference call, Admiral. General Jones and Captain Judge on screen. Links verified secure.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Kolhammer collapsed the D-Day coverage into thumbnails as his two closest friends and colleagues took over 90 percent of the screen in two separate windows. Judge was down in San Diego on board the
Clinton,
while Jones was in his office at Camp Hannon, the Eighty-second’s induction and training facility just a few klicks over in Andersonville.

“Morning, Lonesome. Mike. You’ve been following the progress in Calais, I suppose.”

“As best I can, Admiral,” Jones replied. “Things are a little hectic over here, but I’ve been getting the highlights from your guys. It looks like it’s gonna work. I can’t believe Hitler bought the Normandy fake-out, but then you never could tell what that fuckin’ loon would do, could you?”

Mike Judge, sitting in Kolhammer’s old cabin on the supercarrier, shook his head. “Nope, it’s true. Bookies are still six-to-five that he’ll go nuclear, though.”

“You taking those odds?” Kolhammer asked.

“Nah. My bet’s that if he had ’em, he’d a used ’em already,” Judge said. “I doubt he’d even wait for the invasion. That guy’s got poor impulse control. He woulda lit up London as soon as he got the wrapping off his first bomb.”

Kolhammer had to agree. Herculean efforts had gone into determining the status of the Axis powers’ atomic weapons program. Nearly as much energy had gone into disrupting that program as had been devoted to the invasion, and to the search for any more “missing” task force ships like the
Dessaix.

Of course, the great unknown was still the Soviets. Stalin undoubtedly had his own atomic plans, and while it was extremely unlikely that he’d really cooperate with the Nazis beyond the elaborate charade of the Demidenko facility, just about
everything
they’d been dealing with had been unlikely, ever since the moment Manning Pope’s wormhole had dropped them eight decades into the past.

“I think you’re right, Mike,” Kolhammer said. “But I still get that sick feeling in my gut every morning when I get out of the rack. You have to figure Groves is going to deliver any day now, and then what? When we first got here, I used to dream about Marie every night. Now all I see in my dreams are mushroom clouds springing up over Europe.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Jones agreed, with a somber cast to his features.

None of the three was privy to the progress of the Manhattan Project, the Allies’ own race for the bomb. Despite the resources Kolhammer had transferred over to General Leslie Groves, the man in charge of the project, a wall of impenetrable secrecy still surrounded it. Nobody outside the inner circle had any idea when the first bomb would be dropped, or where.

But thanks to the records they had brought with them, the whole world knew it was coming. This had induced a state of generalized panic that reminded Kolhammer of the days following the destruction of Marseilles, back in his own universe. The genie was out of the bottle, and everybody was well aware that he wasn’t a friendly spirit.

“Okay, gentlemen,” he said, putting an end to the maudlin exchange, “we deal with what we must, and what we can. Mike, I’ll be handing things over to Nancy Viviani tomorrow and heading down your way, so you’ll need to get out of my room and change the sheets. I know you Texans love sleeping rough, but we admirals, we prefer our little comforts.”

Judge grinned. “It’ll be good to have you back, sir.”

“Lonesome,” Kolhammer continued. “You got everything squared away there? I’ve been talking to Spruance, and he’s looking forward to seeing your people at work. But some days it feels like he’s a minority of one.”

“Admiral, I’ve had the First and Second battalions locked down for three days now. Everyone is back from R and R, and we didn’t have a single straggler. I think that’s a record. My boys and girls, they’ve got some shit to prove. Not to me. But like you say, there’s a lot of folks don’t think they’re up for it. We’ll prove ’em wrong,
if
we get the chance.” The marine growled out the last line with real anger.

“You’ll get the chance,” Kolhammer promised.

“That’s not what I hear. What I hear is that you’ve been taking heat to send us to fucking Persia. For garrison duty with the Brits.”

Kolhammer shook his head emphatically. “Look, you’ve heard right. There’s been some pressure, but it doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. You’ve got to stop chasing your tail, Lonesome. It’s been two years, and it never stops.”

Frustration flashed in the marine’s eyes. “That’s
why
I can’t stop chasing my goddamn tail, Admiral. Every time I look back, there’s someone trying to fuck me in the ass!”

“Nobody here is going to allow that to happen. True, I got leaned on. And when it happened, I did what I always do. I told ’em to take a leap. You’re coming to the Marianas with the rest of us, so get used to it.

“Now, Mike,” he continued, shutting down the subject, “how’s my old girl? She ready to rumble?”

Judge nodded. He looked uncomfortable, though, at having been caught up in the crossfire. “Even my wife was impressed when she stopped by, sir. And those Royal Navy types, they don’t impress easy.”

Jones’s deep bass rumbled out. “So what, you gonna have to keep your pants on forever now?”

Judge’s expression didn’t change a bit. “I think the phrase
yo mama
covers it, jarhead,” he replied calmly.

It was a rare day when Kolhammer could think of anything positive that had come of the Transition, but Mike Judge’s wooing and winning of Captain Karen Halabi qualified as A Good Thing. Their giddy, teenlike infatuation reminded him of his own marriage, back in its first hot flush, and he felt sure that, like his, theirs would endure. He had kept to his vows, forsaking all others even though he was lost to Marie, and for all she knew he had died off East Timor.

Though Judge had already been married for six months, Kolhammer still saw the intensity there, despite the fact that they’d been able to spend very little time together. Halabi’s last two weeks of leave had been spent on board the
Clinton
while her husband bedded down the last of the retrofit and prepped the great warship to go back out to sea. She’d worked just as hard as he had, lending her invaluable experience in re-equipping the
Trident
with what the locals called “Advanced Technology” but the uptimers all thought of as museum pieces. Like the six-barreled 20mm Vulcan cannon that replaced the
Clinton
’s laser packs and Metal Storm mounts.

It hadn’t been much of a honeymoon, as Judge admitted, but at least they had managed to get one day and one night to themselves, staying at the log cabin Kolhammer had bought for himself up at Clear Lake.

Jones broke in on Kolhammer’s train of thought. “I saw the new fighter squadrons out at Muroc the other day, Admiral. It was a beautiful thing, watching those Skyhawks get busy. Of course, my guys were all over yours, Mike.”

Before Judge could respond, Kolhammer cut him off. “You can lay your bets later, gentlemen. I just wanted to make sure nothing’s getting jammed up here at the last moment. So, Mike, you happy with your aircrew? They’re about ninety percent ’temp, aren’t they?”

“Yes, sir. And I’ve got hundreds of requests from the ship’s original complement, asking to return to combat duty, but we still can’t justify putting our own people in harm’s way. Not when they’re of more use in research and development. It
does
make for some sore feelings, though, Admiral.”

“Bruised egos,” Kolhammer grunted.

“Nothing to be done about it,” Jones said. “It’s been the case since we got here that anyone with an engineering degree—or
any
technical qualifications, for that matter—is going to be of more use in the lab than out on the battlefield. I’ve lost some of my best combat engineers to Caltech because of it. And one of my best company commanders, too, who just
happened
to major in fucking fluid mechanics, all because he was hot for some bimbo surfboard designer back in college.”