Judge frowned on-screen. "We received an encrypted burst via relay yesterday. Why, has something else happened? The Soviets haven't moved, have they?"
Kolhammer shook his head. "No. Nobody's sure which way they're going to jump, or when. Only that they will, when they think they can. No. I'm just worried about the pace of the German buildup. I have our sigint and imaging people on them twenty-four-seven, and we all think it looks like the surge is coming very soon."
Judge pursed his lips. "You really think they'll try a crossing in autumn?"
"I doubt they'll wait until next year. First of all, they've killed thousands of their best officers in the purges, post-Transition. The survivors are the sort of yes-men and buttheads who'll tell Hitler what he wants to hear-that the Channel's just a glorified river crossing."
Kolhammer leaned back in his chair and ticked the next points off on his fingers.
"And of course, Hitler-fuckin' nutjob or not-doesn't think he can afford to wait. And he's right. There's already a shitload of 'temp forces training in the U.K., and more men and materiel flooding in by convoy every day. Young Harry's set up his regimental HQ in Scotland, and the Brits are working hard to leapfrog some of their key technologies. Our new weapons system will start coming online early to mid next year, and of course, Groves is going to deliver the bomb a hell of a lot quicker than he would have before we arrived. So Hitler knows he has to go now or never."
Judge nodded and shrugged fatalistically. "That's why the Luftwaffe's been hammering at the RAF and the Trident so hard."
"Yeah," said Kolhammer. "It's really costing the Germans, but the attacks are degrading the air defense net, and eating up Halabi's own antiair stocks. There's going to come a day soon when her Metal Storm pods run dry, and the only thing protecting her then will be the 'temps themselves."
Judge nodded. "You want me to fly some of our Triple-A stocks over ahead of us?" he asked. "Our laser packs are good, and Metal Storm's at forty-eight percent. We can still spare some."
Kolhammer thought it over. He didn't want the most valuable ship in the world left defenseless. Even without her catapults and squadrons, the Clinton was still a prize worth risking a whole fleet for. He'd sleep a lot easier when she was safely back in San Diego and being stripped for her retrofit.
"Hold off on that for now, Mike," he said. "But when you get closer to home and I can cover you with shore-based CAP, we might rush a few pallets of MS reloads across to Halabi. She's going to need them."
A time hack in the corner of Kolhammer's screen began a one-minute countdown, indicating the end of the comm-link. He let himself relax a little. "It'll be good to have you folks back, Captain. Even if the old tub is down at San Diego, I could use a few more friendly faces out here."
Judge took his lead from the senior officer. He dropped out of character, as well. "From what I understand, you've got too many new best friends there. Every longhair and hippie in America is making tracks for the Valley, if you believe the press."
"This is nineteen forty-two, Mike. Hippies and long hair haven't been invented yet. But you're still right, after a fashion. American population's about a hundred fifty million right now, and some days it feels as if about fifty million of them are moving here. They've all got their reasons, I guess. Some personal. Some political. But you know, we could do without it. I even had a delegation of African-American labor unions in here begging me to run for president after Roosevelt-"
Judge grunted. Knowledge of the president's impending demise had sent the country into a tailspin until Roosevelt had promised to submit to an intensive course of therapy, supervised by Kolhammer's senior medical officer, Major Margie Francois.
"I think they see me signing the new millennium into law on my first day in office," Kolhammer grumbled.
Mike Judge smiled at the admiral's obvious discomfort. "You gotta wonder how Ike and Harry S. feel about that," he said. "Or Kennedy, speaking of which, there's an intelligence package came through on the last relay from Brisbane. Young Jack features prominently. Jones wants to forward it to your intel people. I've got mine working it now. We didn't have it long enough to brief you."
"Understood. We're about to lose the link. Take care, Mike."
"Will do, sir."
The picture dropped out instantly.
Of all the artifacts they'd left behind, instant global communications, and the feelings of omnipotence they engendered were perhaps the hardest to let go. He had a lot of technical and human capital devoted to reinventing them, even though it would be many years before they showed any real results.
His usual policy was to invest massively for the short-term gain. This war wasn't going to be won by the side that launched the first orbital rocket. More prosaic advances like a good grenade launcher, a better tank with a more powerful gun, penicillin, and smarter human resource management were the paths to victory. Even so, 4CI-command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence-were still the key to dominating the battlespace of the future, and he was not going to let anyone get a march on the U.S. in these fields.
Kolhammer couldn't shake his frustration at the makeshift data links that forced them to patch together relays and jerry-built networks like the one he'd just used to talk to Mike Judge. It was annoying as hell. Although he still had Fleetnet access on his desktop, it was restricted to material that had been archived in the lattice memory of the Task Force ships when they were ripped out of their own time. Not only did they have to deal with the comm-links, but they had lost access to the almost infinite resources of the Web, as well.
He supposed he shouldn't really complain. He was old enough to remember life before quantum computing. Hell, he could even recall his old man setting up the family's first TRS 80, with a magnificent 4K of RAM and a tape cassette for permanent file storage. But having grown used to what now felt like infinite bandwidth and processing capacity, it was maddening to have to deal with scarcity again.
As he reviewed the discussion with Judge, the admiral felt a nagging sense of having forgotten something. He flicked an eye over his handwritten notes. Nothing there.
He was about to shut down his computer for the night when it came to him. Judge had asked him about the Soviets. They were the great unknown. Would they sit out the whole war, conserving their strength? Would they attack Hitler when he was fully engaged in Western Europe? Or would they turn on their former allies, the liberal democracies, which seemed fated to consign them to the garbage dump of history? Apart from signing a separate cease-fire with Hitler, and impounding the ships of Convoy PQ 17 when they arrived in port at Murmansk, the Kremlin had given no indication of which way it might lean in the future. The intelligence services of the West were devoting enormous resources to the riddle of Soviet intentions, but so far to no avail.
Kolhammer rubbed at a headache building in his temples as he contemplated the problem. Without the satellite capabilities he'd left behind on the other side of the wormhole, there didn't seem to be much he could contribute. He'd largely been left out of discussions on the issue in Washington.
But that didn't mean he was content to leave the matter in the hands of the 'temps. In some ways it suited him to be out of the loop. The KGB had so many moles in the West at this time that Kolhammer was happier to work on his own. In the twenty years he'd been fighting a holy war, there'd been some staggering advances in electronic intelligence gathering. But there had also been a return to the basics. Spy cameras in low Earth orbit were great for some things. But there was nothing like having a real pair of eyes on the target.
Kolhammer leaned forward and cut the power to his computer. As secure as it was, it held no files of any relevance. The covert team he had sent into the Soviet Union were from the Quiet Room.
They didn't exist.
YAKUTSK, SIBERIA, USSR
Without GPS, they would have been lost, were it not for the guide. Major Pavel Ivanov had seen a great deal of his homeland during the long wars of the twenty-first century. Hi
s duties as a Spetsnaz officer had taken him to a dozen different former Soviet republics, to fight enemies as diverse as death-obsessed Muslim jihadi and private mercenary forces serving the Motherland's oligarchic supercapitalists. He had seen the slaughter at Beslan, taken part in the even bloodier siege of the Cathedral of the Resurrection in Saint Petersburg, and fought all over the Central Siberian Plateau during the Chinese incursions. He knew Chechnya and Kazakhstan and Georgia better than he knew his family home in Saratov. But he had never been to Yakutsk.
The old Korean who had agreed to lead them had spent eight years in a labor camp on the Lena River and was convinced that Ivanov and his team were White Russian grandees, or maybe Cossacks. For Mr. Kim that was enough to explain why they would be fighting the Bolsheviks. He had not heard of the Transition, and had goggled at Ivanov as though confronted by an escaped lunatic when the Special Forces officer tried to explain.
They had decided, in the end, that Mr. Kim should just think of them any way that suited him.
The guide was sleeping now in the back room of the cabin, cocooned in a thick Polarguard sleeping bag, snoring loudly, his belly full of self-heating MREs. He was in heaven. Ivanov was not.
The woodcutter's lodge had been abandoned many years ago, when this tract of forest was logged out. It offered the benefit of isolation, but had needed three days of repairs to make it vaguely habitable. The six-man team had replaced half the roof and most of the floorboards, rebuilt the fireplace, braced a partly collapsed rear wall and shovelled about half a ton of bear shit out of the front door. There was no furniture. It had probably been looted, according to Kim, so they had fashioned their own tables and benches from the almost petrified limbs of cedar and birch lying on the floor of the denuded forest. Solar sheeting covered the roof, recharging the batteries of the slates and flexipads that added their glow to the smoky, pungent oil lamps. Five slates cycled through the feed from their Sentinel Systems, watching for any human incursion into the area around their camp. There had been none, but two of the team were out checking on the defenses anyway.
They took turns to work the perimeter every four hours. The only vehicular approach to the little valley was along an overgrown logging road, two klicks to the south. Surveillance cams covered the track, beaming images back to the lodge via laser-link relay. Command-detonated mines could turn long stretches of the approach into killing boxes.
The Sentinel Position Denial Systems, or PODS, which had been the very first item of kit unpacked when they arrived, were now buried on five surrounding hilltops, ready to deploy against any serious ground or air attacks.
The team was good to go. They were taut and straining, like a bow drawn for too long. But Ivanov was waiting. He would not move against the targets until the first snow flurry touched his nose. Then he could be reasonably certain of their isolation and relative safety from reprisals.
For the moment he checked his watch. Two hours until nightfall.
"Mikhail," he called out to the stocky, brown-haired man who was watching the Sentinel feeds like a hungry cat watching a mouse. "It's time to swap with Vendulka. You need to rest before we head out."
"Okay, boss."
Mikhail spoke with a guttural New York accent, but could drop into good Russian, the language of his migrant parents. Sergeant Michael Fedin, from the Eighty-second, was one of two marines who had been assigned to Ivanov, both of them first-generation Americans from Russian emigre families.
The other, Corporal Joe Pilnyak was out in the woods with a British SAS Lieutenant, Pete Hamilton. The Englishman had picked up his workmanlike grasp of Russian at Eton, where he'd played rugby with Prince Harry. He later polished it at the Foreign Office language school and on a posting to Moscow as a junior military attache.
Fedin called out to Lieutenant Zamyatin that it was time to get up. Vendulka, or Vennie, Zamyatin was a Russian Navy medical officer who'd been on secondment aboard HMS Fearless, the British helicopter carrier, when it was destroyed by the Transition. Now she was one of only eighteen survivors. She emerged from the small room where they'd built three sets of primitive bunk beds, rubbing her eyes and yawning.
The last member of Ivanov's squad, a Turkic-speaking Russian Navy diver, came off the Australian Light Littoral Assault Ship Ipswich. Petty Officer Victor Abizad was still sleeping in the bunkroom, adding his snores to those of Mr. Kim.
As Fedin disappeared into the bunkroom for a quick nap, Zamyatin poured a coffee from the pot atop the camp stove and took his place in front of the displays.
"Josep and Peter are just passing the fourth POD," she announced.
Ivanov grunted in acknowledgement. He busied himself with packing the supplies he and Fedin would need for the thirty-mile hike to the nearest camp just outside Ust Maisk, on the river Aldan. They would lie up and observe the camp for three days before returning. Mr. Kim said that at least a thousand prisoners were being held there under the control of the Ministries of Coal Production and Forests. Many were lowly draftees, caught up in the purge of their units by the NKVD. At least eighty to a hundred, however, were officers. They were being held in a separate compound just outside the main camp. Signal intercepts indicated that they came from a division that had openly rebelled when the NKVD had arrived with orders to detain three quarters of the staff officers on the charge of crimes against the state.
The men were doing punishing physical work in the coal mines of the Lena Basin, living in the most primitive accommodation, on starvation rations, with no medical care. They would not survive the winter. Ivanov's team had traveled to the ends of the earth to find these men, and to liberate them. He and Admiral Kolhammer hoped they would form the nucleus of a Russian resistance.
11
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, THE BRISBANE LINE
While Julia Duffy was growing up, having received a good deal of her education from popular media, she assumed that the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH, was born in the Korean War.
In fact, the idea of a self-contained medical unit, performing surgery and providing postoperative care immediately behind the front line, was a child of the Second World War. The first MASH units were established in August 1945. Or they would have been.
Duffy drove into the 8066th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in early October 1942, not in Korea, but about a hundred kilometers north of Brisbane, Australia. It looked just as she expected from all those years of watching syndicated reruns on TV: the khaki tents and ramshackle huts made of corrugated iron and ply board, the odd assortment of harried-looking medicos, the sense of barely controlled chaos as waves of casualties arrived on litters. It even boasted a helipad, on a hill cleared of vegetation, just up from a big open area that served as a triage point. The seasons were turning to summer in the southern hemisphere, drying everything out, so that some days she felt as if the air itself might just catch alight. The MASH unit was caked in a fine red dust, stirred up by passing choppers.
There were only nine dedicated medevac choppers in this theater, however, so they tended to fly in only the most critical cases. Marine Sergeant Arthur Snider definitely wasn't critical. He might yet lose his leg, but his life wasn't in grave danger.
His company CO had shoved him onto a Blackhawk that was dusting off five of his comrades who did need to get onto an operating table, and inside of fifteen minutes if they were going to pull through. Those who did survive would do so thanks to Snider, who was the toast of his unit for rallying the counterambush back on Hill 178.
Julia Duffy arrived about an hour and half after Snider, determined to get an interview. She had a shit-hot story to relay back to New York, via Rosanna in Hawaii, if she could just find this guy for an interview.
Her jeep slewed to a halt in a cloud of red dust in front of the hospital's postop ward. She thanked the driver and hopped down, heaving her backpack, Sonycam rig, and machine pistol. She waved away an Australian nurse who came running at her with a horrified look on her lumpy 1940s face. Julia was still matted with go
re and filth from the fight back on the line. Her reactive-matrix armor was so heavily caked with blood and mud that she could feel it stiffening up in the warm spring sunlight.
The nurse kept coming. "Are you okay, young man?" she cried out.
Julia eased off her helmet, shaking her hair free.
"Oh!" said the nurse. "I see. You're one of them."
The reporter couldn't help but smile. It was a thin, wan shadow of a smile that peeked out from under the adrenaline backwash and deep body revulsion with which she was so familiar-but a smile nonetheless.
"That's right," she said. "My name's Duffy. I'm looking for a marine corps sergeant, a 'temp, would have come in about ninety minutes ago. Leg wound. Got clipped up on One-seventy-eight in that big ambush this morning."
The woman brightened up considerably. "Oh, you mean Sergeant Snider!" She beamed. "He's still waiting to go into surgery. They say he saved his whole company. There's a Movietone cameraman coming to film him tonight."
"Is there?" Julia said. "Well, I was up on One-seventy-eight myself, this morning, Nurse… Halligan," she continued, reading the woman's name tag. "Do you think I could talk to him?"
Nurse Halligan seemed to consider Julia in a new light now. She took in the befouled armor and the futuristic machine gun; the fighting knife that was still covered in dried, blackened blood; the bandaged hand and the field sutures that had reattached a flap of bruised skin on her left cheek. "Are you one of those special soldiers, Miss Duffy?"
"Actually, I'm a reporter, ma'am. For the New York Times. Normally embedded with the Eighty-second MEU." She hoisted the Sonycam. "But I was on assignment filming the sergeant's platoon this morning. I'd very much like to talk to him now, if I could."
Not for the first time was Julia interested to see the wonder, and even a touch of dread, that so often came over contemporary women when they met their counterparts from the next century. More important, this one displayed no hint of the guarded response that might have characterized a more media-aware individual from her own time.
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