Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “What the hell is that shit, anyway?” asked Bad Cop.

  Slim Jim smiled. O’Brien had made him memorize the schtick for when that Hersey guy came around to write about him for the New Yorker.

  “Those ones over there are by a guy called Pollock. He went nuts in ’38, and he started painting like that. It’s like he was cribbing from that Picasso guy over there, don’t you reckon? The three by the piano are called Bird, Male and Female, and Guardians of the Secret. My lawyer tells me they’re full of seething imagery.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” muttered Good Cop, falling out of character for a second. “My little girl draws better than that.”

  “Yeah, looks like something a fruit would hang on his wall.”

  Slim Jim just deadpanned them. “Well, at least I’m banging the welder’s wife, and not Assistant Director Tolson.”

  Both men colored visibly, and Slim Jim actually wished he could take it back. What the hell was up with him, making fun of Hoover and his boyfriend in front of a couple of hired gorillas like this? He had to stop watching those wise-guy movies.

  The roughneck leaned forward again, his face bright red and shoulders like bowling balls moving around under his suit. “Listen, you little pissant. You might think you’re a big man now. But you’re a fucking bug, and you’re gonna get squashed if you don’t cooperate. You’ll do as we say, or it’s gonna go hard on you. That fucking lawyers of yours, we’ve got her number. You’re going to start recording every conversation you have with her, every crooked fucking deal you put together. She’s about this close to being disbarred, anyway. Her papers mean nothing here. All those bullshit laws she goes on about that nobody here even heard of. If you’re smart, you’ll dump her and give this guy a call.”

  A small slip of paper appeared in his hand.

  “He’s Bureau approved. He’ll set you straight, and when you’ve done that, you’re going back to California, and you’re taking this with you.” He held out a small black disk, about half the size of a garden pea. Slim Jim recognized it instantly. A microcam. Commercial, not mil-grade. The sort of thing that’d be picked up by an elint sweep in less than half a second.

  What a pair of fucking bozos, he thought. Probably don’t know what an elint sweep is. His expression, however, gave nothing away. “Okay, fellas,” he said, showing them his open, honest palms. “You got yourself a narc.”

  “That’s great, Mr. Davidson.” Good Cop beamed at him. “You won’t regret it, and your country will be grateful.”

  Slim Jim nodded and smiled nervously, as he figured he was expected to.

  He never once looked at any of the eight microcams that had recorded everything in the apartment from the moment he’d opened the door. And those microcams were mil-grade.

  HONOLULU, HAWAII

  Detective Sergeant Lou “Buster” Cherry didn’t so much wake up as find himself more conscious than unconscious, a state in which he slowly became aware of how much he felt like a bag of shit. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. There were the usual sorrows of an elephant-sized hangover, the headache like a meat ax to the brain, the nausea, the burning throat, the taste of bile, and the sour stench of his own sweat and unwashed bedclothes.

  Then there was a growing list of unrelated woes. The chronic pain of a bullet wound he’d received on the job what seemed like a hundred years ago. The hateful longing for his first shot of the day. A dreadful suspicion that there was no booze left in the apartment anyway. A fading twitch of resentment at the bitch he’d once called his wife—a woman he hadn’t heard from in well over a year.

  There was something else this morning, too, as he lay on the fold-up cot in his studio apartment, under a pile of dirty laundry. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it but . . .

  “You’re a disgrace, Detective.”

  He would have sat bolt upright, but that would’ve hurt too much. So he groped about for his revolver, knowing in the back of his mind that it was futile.

  “Don’t bother. We moved it out of reach, just to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself.”

  “Who the fuck—?” The raspy voice was almost unrecognizable as his. He suddenly realized how long it had been since he’d spoken to another person.

  He rubbed his eyes and lifted his head, taking in the two figures who stood in the center of his room. They looked as if they didn’t want to move, for fear of stepping in something nasty.

  “We’re from the Bureau, Detective.”

  At first he had no idea what they were talking about, but then some very rusty memories of his former life began to creak back into place. “Hoover men?”

  “Yeah. Special agents.”

  As they spoke, he became increasingly aware of just how much worse this headache was than normal.

  “You got names?”

  “Not today, Detective.”

  Cherry could feel a small storm building inside his head, but he tried to ignore it. “I’m not a detective anymore,” he said. “They suspended me. Six years in uniform. Nine in plainclothes, and they fucking shit-canned me because that asshole Jewish kraut pulls some strings.” He pushed himself up in his cot and saw a half-empty fifth of Old Granddad lying on the floor. Hell, what’s half-empty is half-full, too. He was about to reach for it—thinking it’d make a fine breakfast, right about now—when one of them spoke again, and he froze in place.

  “You think Admiral Kolhammer caused you to be suspended?”

  “I don’t think. I know. I got my owns strings I can pull.”

  The feeb grunted. “Maybe so. Because you’re back on the job.”

  Then something—two things, in fact—landed in his lap: his badge and his gun.

  A squall of confusion blew through his head, and there was no way to ignore it now. He’d been drinking something like a bottle of bourbon every day since they’d ass-fucked him.

  He’d never been much for your actual detecting, in the past. Mostly he just knew whom to shake down. But the mystery of this resurrection, of the badge and gun that were lying between his legs . . . well, it was beyond him.

  So he stared at the two men who called themselves special agents. They were dressed identically. Dark suits, white shirts, red ties.

  The taller one shrugged. “Everyone knows you shot that guy during the riot in Honolulu. But not everyone cares. Get up, Detective, and pull yourself together. You’ve got work to do.”

  A tangle of emotions—relief, dread, indignation, and self-loathing—all boiled toward the surface. “I’m back on the same case? That dyke from the future got whacked with the Jap?”

  “No. That won’t be possible. You’re going back to your old office, but you’re going to be working for us—on the side.”

  “The Bureau?” he asked.

  The tall agent just smiled.

  8

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  He still used the wheelchair, although the treatment had restored his mobility to an amazing degree. Eleanor said he looked twenty years younger, but Franklin Roosevelt still felt uncomfortable.

  He knew he wasn’t long for the world, even with the treatments devised by Kolhammer’s doctors. He might have given himself an additional three or four years at best, but you could never tell. There was so much to do, and he wasn’t sure he could see it through to the end. The Transition had proved to be as hideously complicated as he’d expected. Creating the Special Administrative Zone where companies like Douglas and Boeing and Ford could fully exploit the patents they already had on future technologies meant that the market drove the pace of innovation as fast as it possibly could, without sending a shockwave through the “old” economy. But of course, it had also meant establishing an enclave within the body politic of the Republic, which many saw as being a protected reserve for the worst sort of subversive elements. It had cost him enormous amounts of political capital to ram the thing through Congress, even with a sunset clause, and he just knew that his enemies would play merry hell with it at every opportunity. Indeed, they were already do
ing so. The damnable House Un-American Activities Committee of Congressman Dies had suddenly stopped investigating the Ku Klux Klan and the German American Bund and announced hearings into the Zone that very morning.

  Roosevelt had to wonder whether it was significant that Dies had met with Hoover and Tolson for dinner last night.

  He really needed a smoke.

  Giving up had been remarkably easy after receiving the implant, and it was a wonder how clear-headed he’d become. His mind ran at twice the speed, and he seemed to retain much more of what he read and heard. The physical craving for a cigarette was only a fleeting twinge nowadays, and even that bothered him less and less frequently. But at times like this, he still suffered a powerful need for the soothing familiarity of the habit.

  It made him ponder what to do about the cigarette companies when the war was over.

  For the moment, however, the war was a long way from being over. In fact, from many angles, the situation looked significantly worse. From the point of view of Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, who sat in the armchair directly across from him in the Oval Office, the course of events must have looked very grim, indeed. A long Roman nose and a high domed forehead conspired to give the ambassador a mournful countenance at the best of times. These last few months, his naturally forlorn expression had grown longer and more strained.

  Admiral King wasn’t helping.

  “Ambassador,” King rumbled, “you’ve got the Trident blocking the Channel. And you still have one of the most powerful fleets in the world anyway. If and when Hitler is fool enough to send his pissant little navy against you, it will be destroyed.”

  Halifax, who had been born without a hand at the end of his withered left arm, managed to balance a bone china cup of tea on his knee, and take a sip without any apparent effort. “Admiral King,” he replied calmly, “the Trident is indeed a powerful deterrent. But she cannot be rearmed. She wasted a good many of her rockets on the Singapore raid.”

  King raised an eyebrow. “Wasted, you say?”

  “You know what I mean, Admiral. It was a marvelous achievement, rescuing so many of our POWs—and yours, I suppose. It played very well with the press, and the Parliament. A second Dunkirk, and all that. But in so many ways, it was irresponsible.”

  Roosevelt felt the need to break in before this old argument flared up again. There were no representatives of the Multinational Force present, just the president, his three joint chiefs, and the British ambassador. But he’d found, time and again, that whenever two or more people gathered together, they could quickly and easily find themselves coming to blows on this particular topic. Indeed, it had joined religion and politics as a third great social taboo, never to be discussed in bars or at dinner. He knew, as well, that King privately agreed with Halifax, but he could see the navy chief squaring off for an argument.

  “Gentlemen,” he interjected, “there’s no point raking over these coals again. The choice was not ours. It belonged to Kolhammer and his people, and they knew exactly what they were doing. Let’s just move on, and deal with the present, shall we?”

  It was midmorning in Washington, with an autumn chill lying hard against the windows of his office. Gusting, uncertain winds blew drifts of fallen leaves across the manicured lawns of the White House. The newly formed joint chiefs had gathered to give Halifax some unwelcome news. The U.S. Army simply did not have enough combat-ready divisions to bolster Great Britain’s defenses against a renewed threat of invasion. The navy, heavily engaged in the South Pacific and still reeling from Midway and the seizure of convoy PQ 17 by the Soviet Union, could not secure the Atlantic or offer much more than token assistance in the event of a lunge across the channel by the Third Reich. And the army air force was still training pilots and building up its squadrons.

  Of all the joints chiefs, Admiral King was the most dedicated to the idea of defeating Japan first. He was a constant critic of the accepted Europe First strategy, and the recent events had only hardened his resolve. “We are already heavily engaged in repelling an invasion, Mr. Ambassador,” he said with customary bluntness. “Unless you had forgotten about abandoning your former colony. Remember? Australia? We have nearly a quarter million men down there right now because your Royal Navy built its guns facing the wrong way in Singapore, letting the Japs run wild.”

  Roosevelt closed his eyes and counted to five, but Halifax was a practiced diplomat and refused to rise to the bait. As brilliant an officer as King was, Roosevelt wished he could curb his tongue sometimes. He was without a doubt the most deeply loathed admiral in the U.S. Navy.

  “Do I need to remind you, Mr. Ambassador, that if we lose Australia, we will find it virtually impossible to fight our way back into Asia? Tojo will control the East. He’ll also have seized a significant manufacturing base and all the continent’s natural resources, including massive uranium deposits.”

  When King sat down, the other joint chiefs started up, and Halifax listened to all the arguments, sipping from his precariously placed cup of tea, waiting until the last man, General Henry H. Arnold, finished explaining why precious resources were being diverted from building B-17s to B-29s, and even a prototype test squadron of B-52s.

  Then the ambassador placed his teacup on the table in front of him and spoke quietly, but with great force. “Do you not see, gentleman, that this is exactly what Hitler is gambling on? That he can strike, and make up for his blunders, while we are still reeling from the aftermath of the Transition. It is exactly what the Japanese have done in the Pacific, withdrawing from China and moving their forces south to block any advance on the Home Islands. You may think yourself safe, protected by two oceans as you are, but we all know they are rushing to develop their own atomic weapons, and the means of delivering them onto your cities. If we give them time—even a little time—they will succeed.”

  Admiral King had developed the habit of playing devil’s advocate in any discussion with the British, and much to Roosevelt’s chagrin, he did so again now. “Mr. Ambassador, it’s inevitable that Hitler will attempt a Channel crossing. We all agree with that. He shut down the Eastern Front when he had Stalin on the executioner’s block. He would only have done that because he discovered what was about to happen out there. And no doubt, Stalin agreed to cease hostilities when records from the future confirmed us as his ultimate foe.

  “But Hitler doesn’t have it all his own way. I don’t believe he can cross the Channel in the face of your air and naval forces. And from what we can gather, he and Stalin have agreed to a cease-fire, not an alliance. We’re not facing two enemies. In fact, it’s most likely that Stalin is using the breather to build his forces up for an assault into Western Europe.”

  Halifax pursed his lips, showing his annoyance. “And how, exactly, is that reassuring? Do you imagine that exchanging one tyranny for another is any sort of comfort?” He turned to face Roosevelt. “The British Isles remains the keystone, Mr. President. For the foreseeable future, American security is ultimately to be found in Europe, and you cannot secure Europe without first securing Great Britain.

  “I understand the temptation to avoid every crisis and entanglement that might just befall you over the next hundred years. Nobody wants to see their mistakes repeated before they even happen. But the next six months might render all of that null and void. If Hitler controls Britain, you will be trapped inside your continental fortress, forever . . . or at least until he develops a missile capable of reaching you. You know he’s mad enough to start an atomic war. He’s most likely planning one against Russia, before he even completes his first bomb.”

  Roosevelt regarded the ambassador, then considered the faces of his joint chiefs, King, Arnold, and General George C. Marshall. Each man wore the same gloomy expression. It had been an increasingly common sight in Washington, ever since Stalin had pulled out of the war and the Japanese had turned away from China to launch what looked increasingly like a strategic kamikaze raid into the South Pacific.

  The president rea
lized he was playing with an imaginary cigarette, and he was irritated with himself for showing the weakness. The subdermal patches had ended his addiction to nicotine, but they could not eradicate the habits of a lifetime.

  “General Marshall,” he said to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “The ambassador is essentially correct. Hitler is going to invade, or try to anyway, and he’s going to do it very soon. He’s building up forces just like he did after Dunkirk. He’s moved two entire army groups from Russia into France. He’s stopped bombing the cities and returned to attacking airfields. We have to assume, given his rapprochement with Moscow, that he is going to receive some sort of help from them, although God only knows what. And if he takes the British Isles, we may find it impossible to take them back.

  “I need to know what we can do about it. We are looking at a new Dark Age, General. If these maniacs do develop atomic bombs, we may even be looking at the end of the world.”

  Marshall shifted uncomfortably in his chair, then spoke. “We’ve just sent the First Marine and the Americal Division down to MacArthur in Australia, Mr. President. They should have been on Guadalcanal by now, but after Midway we didn’t have the Fleet assets to contest the island, and the Japs took it when they swarmed south out of China. It will be months before any more of our divisions come online. Even with the revised training techniques coming out of California—”

  Roosevelt noticed that all three of his military advisers glanced awkwardly at the floor at mention of California.

  “—we just can’t push them any further.”

  “Can we move some of the trainees to the British Isles, to continue their training there, just as the Canadians have done?”