Final Impact Read online

  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.”

  “You know, it’s been noted—rather uncharitably, I might add—that the three of us are all going back into combat,” Judge observed.

  Kolhammer shrugged it off. “We’ve been through it a hundred times. Somebody has to command this battle group, and it’s a very different gig from running Spruance’s task force, even with the AT stuff they’ve been bringing online. The whole world is watching Calais right now, but soon enough they’ll be watching us, too. Tojo isn’t the only one who wants to see us fall on our asses.

  “So if there’s nothing else I can do for you gentlemen, I suggest we all get back to work. And I’ll see you in San Diego.”

  Both men nodded in agreement, then signed off. Kolhammer returned to the business of handing over the Special Administrative Zone to his deputy, Colonel Viviani. She would be empowered to act in his stead for the duration of the deployment. That meant he was almost free. There were about two hundred documents requiring hard-copy signatures, a final sit-down with the colonel, a quick tour of the campus to say good-bye to his department heads, and then he was outta there.

  The only way he could be more excited was if they’d let him fly one of the new Skyhawks out onto the Big Hill. But that was an indulgence reserved for younger men. No, he’d be catching a C-130 down to the base.

  Kolhammer pulled the stack of documents toward him and reached for his fountain pen. He brought the D-Day coverage back up and noticed that the byline on the air assault video was Julia Duffy’s.

  Dan’s ex.

  That had been a hell of a piss-poor show, their breakup. It had gutted Dan, killed him if truth be known. The big doofus had insisted on going back into combat afterward, whether to prove himself or to escape, Kolhammer wasn’t sure. Didn’t matter, though. Poor bastard never even made it to Pearl. His transport had crashed on takeoff from Muroc. Still, it wasn’t his place to judge. What chance had they really had, coming from such different worlds? It had been noted, more than once, that almost all relationships between uptime women and contemporary men failed in the end—although, intriguingly, the reverse was not true. Perhaps the angrier feminists of his time had been right and all twenty-first man had really wanted was an old-fashioned wife. God knew there were any number of movies being made about it now. They screened as straight romances throughout the rest of the country, but were marketed as comedies inside the Zone. In the same way that Reefer Madness had once played so well with stoned college students.

  Kolhammer watched the feed as he methodically worked his way through the stack of paper, signing wherever Liao had indicated. It wasn’t something that took much of his attention, so he could follow Duffy’s raw vision quite closely. The ’temps had adopted the embed system pretty much intact, so she got total access to the Seventh Cav. But all her unedited data became government property.

  The fight outside Calais looked intense. There was no way most of this footage would be released outside the Zone, to the general public. It was way too graphic for the ’temps, who still hadn’t seen a picture of a dead GI. While he scratched away with his Mont Blanc, a savage hand-to-hand battle played itself out on the screen in front of him. He couldn’t tell which village she was reporting from, or even whether the cav and the 101st had made it into the port itself at this point. He kept the sound turned down while he worked. A part of him, detached from the repetitive task of signing off documents, wondered whether Julia Duffy was working through the same sort of impacted emotional damage that had driven her husband back to combat, and on to his death. She would doubtless carry a heavy load of guilt for the breakup. Dan had told him that she was already messed up over her friend Rosanna getting waxed on Hawaii. Blamed herself and couldn’t get over the fact that she was still alive when Natoli was gone.

  That was only normal. But did she blame herself for Dan getting killed, too? There was not a shred of doubt he’d demanded a combat assignment because of the breakup. And they had broken up mostly because of her refusal to accept that with marriage came family commitments. At least according to Dan. Kolhammer had never discussed it with Duffy. He had always found her to be a really tough bitch when they dealt professionally, and they’d had occasion to do so a lot when she was on Hoover’s case last year. But he had to admit she was always a pro. The grunts loved her. And a lot of readers did, too, because of that. He shrugged the thought off. It wasn’t relevant.

  Having grown up with global media coverage, Kolhammer was more than capable of sitting in his comfortable office, watching men die thousands of miles away while he calmly attended to paperwork and personal thoughts. Some called it callous, and even the contemporary military personnel thought of it as a defining characteristic of the people who had come through the Transition. For him, however, it was just the way the world turned. The way it always had.

  Other than Halabi and the Trident, none of “his” units were involved in the invasion. The only personal connection he had with the D-Day landings was there on his flat-panel display. The ex-wife of his late chief liaison officer.

  Julia Duffy.

  She was firing a weapon, silently. A helmet-mounted camera rendered the scene into something reminiscent of the video games he’d played as a teenager. The barrel in the center of the screen spat long tongues of fire, tracers leaping away, the impacts clearly visible around the window of a stone cottage a hundred meters in the distance.

  He wondered when Dan had last spoken to her, and what they had said to each other.

  All the heavy equipment had already been loaded onto the Eighty-second’s newly commissioned heavy littoral assault ships down at San Diego. The Falluja and the Damascus were based on a l
ong-hulled Essex-class keel, with substantial modifications to fit them out for the requirements of Jones’s marine expeditionary brigade. The president had approved the change from unit to brigade when the First and Second battalions came online. And Jones’s promotion had gone through in the same sheaf of orders.

  There had been times, plenty of them, when Jones had wondered if they’d ever be allowed to leave. Or whether, when they did, they’d be pushed off into some sideshow like Persia or Burma. He’d have to apologize to Kolhammer for snapping at him like that before, but even his considerable reserves of Zen calm were being drained dry.

  Still, at long last, they looked good to go. The Super Shermans and AT-LAVs were all stowed away and chained down on the Kandahar. The last supplies were being loaded. Only a few heavy-lift choppers and Jones’s own command Huey remained to be flown out from Muroc Field, along with the twelve Skyhawks that would join with his remaining Super Harriers to provide organic air support. Another thirty-six of the “modern” Skyhawk fighter-bombers were embarking with Kolhammer on the Big Hill, making them the first carrier-borne jets in the Pacific. They were also the most powerful military planes in the world, a generation more advanced than the Sabers that were increasingly coming to dominate the skies over Europe.

  Regardless of the matériel they had amassed, Jones was most concerned with the beating heart of his command—the three battalions of the Ninth Regiment, Fifth Division, United States Marine Corps.

  He pulled the brim of his cap down lower as he stepped out of the Quonset hut onto the gravel path, turning away from the regiment’s administrative buildings toward Camp Hannon’s parade ground. Conditions at Hannon were primitive, especially when compared with the increasingly settled and luxurious campus informally known as “Area 51” or just “51,” the control center of the Special Administrative Zone, which had attracted dozens of aeronautical and “high-technology” firms—a term he found more than a little ironic.