Final Impact (30 page)

“Well, that was Mike. Didn’t matter where we went. Who we met. He let everyone know that he was
proud
to have me on…on his arm.”

Halabi realized she was choking up. She felt Julia’s hand on her arm. The clamps and wires of the medical sensors made it feel as though a cyborg was trying to comfort her.

“And I’ll bet nobody gave him any shit about it, either,” Duffy said, her voice becoming a little muddled now.

“No.” The
Trident
’s captain shook her head and blinked away a tear. “He’s got that whole Clint Eastwood thing going for him. Not once, the whole time I was with him, did I feel like anything other than royalty. Mike has this thing, doesn’t matter how much of a butthead somebody is, they just know he’s not going to stand for any bullshit.”

The soft
peep
of the computer that controlled anesthetic drip, which had accelerated noticeably when Julia sat upright and winced in pain, dialed back a bit. Halabi composed herself and glanced over at an orderly who was checking the other patients, a couple of RAF pilots fished out of the drink with severe burns. They were deeply sedated and made no sound.

Julia seemed to be drifting off to sleep.

“Jules?”

“Still here. Just.”

“You should get some sleep.”

“Uh-huh. Could I get a drink?”

Halabi checked with the orderly, who indicated that she could have a few sips from the bottle beside her bed. Halabi lifted the tube to her mouth.

“Thanks,” Duffy said when she was finished. “And thanks for having me here. It’s…nice to…you know…somewhere modern…like…”

“Like home.”

“Yeah. Like home.”

24

D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1121 HOURS.
USS
HILLARY CLINTON,
PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“So these are from the guys off Kennedy’s ship, right?”

“Yes, Admiral. The
Armanno
inserted three teams on these islands here, here, and here.”

Kolhammer’s eyes flicked over the hologram display of the target area. It had been a long time since he’d seen a holobloc in action, and it felt a little weird. For once he could empathize with the ’temps. The small group of islands floated inside the black cube on a light blue sea. The display wasn’t to scale. The landmass had been magnified for the briefing.

Kolhammer, Judge, and the supercarrier’s ops staff clustered around the bloc in a chamber just off the
Clinton
’s CIC. The room was dark and uncomfortably chilly. A couple of ’temp liaison officers from the
Enterprise
stood in for Spruance, who was busy with the last-minute details for his own attack plans. Suspended above the ghostly 3-D display, a video cube ran fresh vision from the Force Recon patrol on the southernmost island. The four monitors flickered with images of Japanese troops tending to carefully camouflaged aircraft.

“They look like Nakajima One-One-Fives, or perhaps-Sixes,” said the briefing officer, Lieutenant Commander Brenna Montgomery, in her disconcerting
southern-belle-from-New-Jersey
inflection. Montgomery’s dad had been—and probably still was—a technical writer for IBM back up in twenty-one, and his job had taken her from central Jersey to Savannah, Georgia, when she was eleven. The move gave her tough-as-nails childhood accent a strangely soothing southern lilt that Kolhammer could happily listen to all day. It reminded him of his wife, Marie, who’d followed a similar path through life before ending up in Santa Monica, where they’d met and courted.

“Denny’s team has estimated that the Japanese had approximately a hundred and fifty of these units on this island alone,” she continued. “Klobas and Whittington report at least another hundred spread evenly across the other two islands, where there seems to have been less time to prepare facilities.”

Montgomery checked her flexipad.

“Looking at the stats from the original time line, given numbers like that you’d expect about thirty-five of the
kamikazes
to get through a contemporary air defense net. We have no way of knowing what the AT mods will do to those numbers. But we do know that eighty percent of the ships struck by aircraft of this type were sunk. They generally load out with three hundred fifty kilos of high explosive for the one-way trip, so that’s not surprising.”

Kolhammer asked a sysop to pull the view in closer on the main island. The computer-generated image swelled to fill the entire block. It was much more rudimentary than he remembered from before the Transition, but that was to be expected, given the relative lack of imaging power they now had to call upon. It was less photo-realistic, too, and something more like a cut-scene illustration from an old Xbox game. The task group commander pointed at a couple of dark circles at the base of the major feature of the island, a two-hundred-meter-tall hill at the eastern end.

“How long till Denny can give us some of idea of what they’ve got stashed in there?” he asked.

Lieutenant Commander Montgomery didn’t need to check her own briefing notes. She nodded at a flashing blue triangle halfway up the elevation. “They’ve been trying to gain access for eight hours now, Admiral. But a frontal approach is a no-go. Drone surveillance indicates there are a couple of ventilation shafts that might work out, but the island is thick with enemy troops, sir, and there’s no way we can extract our guys if the brown stuff hits the fan. The Japanese make ’em, and they’re dead meat on a stick. Sir.”

Kolhammer folded his arms and let his chin sink onto his chest. He looked very unhappy.

Mike Judge spoke up from the other side of the bloc. “I’m guessing that great minds think alike, Admiral. To me, that looks like a hell of a lot of engineering work for something as lame as a Nakajima One-One-Five. Even a hundred and fifty of them. You want my five cents’ worth, Yamamoto’s got some evil jack-in-the-box just waiting to pop out of those holes and make us jump.”

“Uh-huh,” Kolhammer grunted. “Could be. Ms. Montgomery, what’s the latest vicious gossip on the Japanese, uh,
tokkotai
? Is that the right term?”

“Yes, sir. From
tokubetsu kogeki tai,
or special attack units. Captain Willet sent a burst from the
Havoc
a few hours ago, a report about a couple of midget submarines, probably
Kairyu
-class analogs, that blew themselves up under a Russian—
sorry,
a Soviet—troop carrier off Sakhalin Island. She’s also logged one large wave of Nakajima One-One-Fives, which flew up out of Hokkaido, probably from Hakodate, and threw themselves onto a couple of Soviet divisions. Caught them in a choke point. Damn near wiped them out, too. But that’s it, so far.”

“What about rocket bombs?
Ohkas,
or whatever they called them last time,” Kolhammer asked. “Any chatter about them yet?”

“No, sir,” Montgomery answered. “Quiet as a mouse. A bit like that Sherlock Holmes story. The one where the dog
didn’t
bark. Makes you wonder, if you’re so inclined.”

Captain Mike Judge leaned over the holobloc, examining the island like a three-dollar bill. “You could fit a lot more on that island than the Nakajimas Denny’s counted. And they’re all out in the open, well, sorta. They’re all under that netting in those sunken pits. Does make a man wonder, what’s the point of driving so many big goddamn holes into that mountain if you ain’t got jack worth hiding down there.”

Kolhammer nodded. “I agree. Brenna, I’d like to put a request through to Admiral Spruance to have Denny’s recon patrol penetrate the inner perimeter of that mountain facility,
whatever the cost.
”

“Sir,” she replied in a clipped voice. If so ordered, the men were almost certainly going to die.

Kolhammer looked even more unhappy than he had a few minutes earlier.

“I wish I had some of Lonesome’s guys in there,” he muttered.

D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1136 HOURS.
USS
KANDAHAR,
PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

The message—a simple e-mail—had been sent anonymously, and Jones hadn’t thought to look at it until it was too late.

Three months after the congressional hearings into the second sneak attack on Pearl Harbor had concluded that the Japanese had received
some
assistance from unknown members of the crew of the
Dessaix,
a ’bot cleaning out his message stacks found the unopened note from his brother-in-law, Sublieutenant Philippe Danton. Monique’s little brother, whom he’d met only once, at the wedding, had been named as a possible collaborator in the Japanese attack, and perhaps even a saboteur. A few fragmentary signals between the
Dessaix
and Yamamoto’s fleet, picked up before the Japanese had reestablished emission control, implied that one of the Frenchmen on board had turned on his erstwhile comrades after disrupting the missile strike, and Jones had known, down in his bones, that it had to be Philippe.

Such evidence as was available all pointed to his involvement in thwarting Hidaka’s attack. But still the committee had returned an open verdict, saying that nothing could be settled until after the war, when the enemy’s own records might be inspected. It had taken all of Jones’s moral strength not to see that as insult directed at him. God only knew there were plenty of people who were more than happy to characterize it as a strike against his own reliability.

Now, as he sat in his small cabin on the
Kandahar,
finalizing his personal affairs in preparation for what promised to be a terrible slaughter, a couple of lines of text floated on the small screen in front of him, threatening to unbalance the frail equilibrium he had sought to achieve between his personal ill feelings about the ’temps—or some of them, anyway—and his loyalty to and love of the corps and the country he had served all of his adult life.

My Dearest Brother

I hope you get this message, for I do not think we shall ever meet again. You will know by now that my ship has arrived here, but we were captured by the Germans during our incapacity after the Emergence…

Jones frowned at the word, but having materialized in the Atlantic and been taken prisoner, Philippe would have used the Axis terminology without thinking. He read on.

I have little time. I am watched so closely by the Nazis I could not send this message before now, and even now I cannot send it directly. I have encrypted a pulse to go out with the launch of the missiles on Hawaii. I can only pray it finds a Fleetnet node somewhere and eventually finds you. I have done what I can to impair the fascists’ plans but I fear it is not enough. There is no more time. When they discover what I have done my life will be forfeit, but I shall do what I can before the end. I do not know if you will ever see Monique again but if you do, please make her understand that I did not dishonor my family or the Republic. Vive la France. And good-bye, brother.

Philippe

Stony-faced, keeping the tightest rein on his emotions, the commander of the Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Brigade opened two encrypted files that were attached to the mail. In the first he found a list of names: the crew of the
Dessaix
and brief notes explaining the fate of each man after their capture. At a glance it looked like most had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo for refusing to cooperate. A few, like Philippe—with the consent of their CO, Captain Goscinny—had pretended to work with the Germans in order to have a chance at sabotaging the vessel. Only his brother-in-law had survived long enough to sail into the Pacific.

In a separate section, Philippe named a handful of crewmembers who had genuinely gone over to the enemy.

The second file was a technical log of all the actions carried out by Philippe and the other saboteurs. It was mostly beyond Jones’s understanding, but it seemed impressively long. It made him wonder what might have happened
without
their interference.

Poor kid,
he thought. It must have turned pretty fucking ugly on that boat when Hidaka realized what had gone down. He sent a quiet prayer to his brother-in-law before closing the e-mail and its attachments.

He hadn’t even realized Philippe was on the
Dessaix
until a couple of boxheads from ’temp Naval Intelligence turned up in the Zone to ask him about it. There was nothing to be done now but send a copy of the message to Kolhammer and Spruance, with a letter asking that they make sure it got back to the relevant authorities in Washington and London, where the French government-in-exile still had its headquarters.

But then, after a moment’s consideration, he opened his address file and pulled up an address for Julia Duffy. She’d written some good stuff about that business with Margie Francois sanctioning those camp guards in the Philippines. And she’d gone into Hawaii with the battalion when they took it back from the Japanese. She was a good embed. She could be trusted, and she wasn’t beholden to the chain of command. Not like the admirals.

General J. Lonesome Jones knew he could trust Kolhammer and Spruance. But the guys above them?

As if.

After all, look what had happened when Francois came to him with that DNA match on Anderson and Miyazaki’s killer. They’d taken it to Kolhammer, who’d taken it right up the chain, and he’d been assured at every step that it’d be dealt with.

The bottom line? Two years on and the murdering prick was not only walking free but living off the fat of the land.

Jones grunted in disgust.

He knew that Kolhammer had made the case his personal jihad, but he also knew that in the end it hadn’t counted for anything. The ’temps weren’t about to have one of their heroes perp-walked, not on this one.

There’s no way the thing would have been so completely smothered if the victims hadn’t been a
nigger
and a
Jap.
Well, there might be nothing he could to do for them, but at least he could prevent Monique’s little brother from swinging in the breeze.

And with that thought, he hit the
SEND
button.

D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1422 HOURS.
USS
HILLARY CLINTON,
PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“Holy shit,” Kolhammer said.

He’d just sat down in his stateroom to a late lunch of stale ham sandwiches and a cup of coffee when he read the e-mail from Jones.

“What’s up?” asked Mike Judge, who was also taking a ten-minute break, the only downtime they’d get for the rest of the day.

Kolhammer shook his head and sniffed.

“Lonesome was cleaning out his accounts and he found an old note he’d missed. Here. Have a look.”

The touch screen was too big to swivel, forcing Judge to walk around the desk in the admiral’s office.

“Yeah. Okay. Holy shit is about right,” he said after scanning the message.

“He copied it to Julia Duffy at the
Times,
as well,” Kolhammer noted with more than a little chagrin.

“I saw. Do you blame him, though? It’s a personal letter. Sort of. And he took a lot of shit over Danton. Probably figures there’d be someone somewhere wanted to hush this up, for whatever reason. Politics, you know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Kolhammer chewed joylessly on the sandwich. Unlike Mike Judge, he knew that Jones was probably thinking of something more than his brother-in-law’s reputation, and by extension his own. Besides Jones, of all the uptimers, only he and Margie Francois knew about the DNA match that related back to the murders on Oahu, just after they’d arrived. Of the ’temps, Nimitz knew, because Kolhammer had taken it to him, demanding justice.

But Nimitz was dead. Before he’d died, though, he’d extracted from Kolhammer a promise that the admiral would deal with this through channels. Kolhammer had no idea how far Nimitz had taken it, but right now the case was still sitting, undisturbed, in Washington. In his darkest moments he had considered opening a file in the Quiet Room back in the Zone, but signing off a sanction on an American citizen without the benefit of a trial was a step too far.