Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  “White and one sugar,” said Halabi as the attendant fled.

  “Black, with a squeeze of lemon,” Harry added.

  When the doors had closed and they were left alone, Churchill bade them sit in the nearest armchairs.

  He produced a cigar from his waistcoat and lit up without bothering to ask whether they would mind. Harry seemed to find it amusing, but it annoyed Halabi, though she held her tongue. Everyone in this era seemed to live in a dense cloud of carcinogenic smoke, and it was one of the things she found hardest to accept. They thought you mad if you asked them not to smoke in your presence, or even to avoid blowing their smoke in your face.

  She put her aggravation aside as best she could.

  “I have not had a chance to thank you both for the work you have put in here,” Churchill said without preamble. He held his hand up when Halabi made to protest. “No, Captain. I am the prime minister, and that means you have to sit and listen, whether you want to or not. I imagine the rules are not much different from your day.”

  The two officers admitted that they were not.

  “I know you wished very much to keep your Task Force together, and I can understand that, politically as well as militarily,” the PM continued. “This is a very hostile world you have found yourselves in. And I don’t refer only to Herr Hitler and his little friends in the East. I understand that you, in particular, Halabi, have not had the sort of welcome in Portsmouth that might be thought of as appropriate for a returning Royal Navy captain. Young Harry here has excellent family connections to smooth his way. You, on the other hand, do not.”

  “My crew are my family, Prime Minister, and we’re in this together.”

  “Stuff and nonsense,” he barked. “Sir Leslie Murray speaks very highly of your crew and the way you handle them. After being one of your fiercest critics, I might add. But you cannot spend the rest of your life on the Trident, Halabi.”

  He must have seen the panic that registered on her face.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he hurried to add. “I’m not going to attempt to hijack your ship. God knows there are more than enough rum-sodden fools at the Admiralty who are dedicated to that goal. Rest assured, as long as I am prime minister, that will not come to pass.

  “Your work with the Ministry, on the modernization programs, has been exemplary. I only hope Providence will bless us with a chance to see some of your projects come to fruition. However,” he admitted, dunking a shortbread biscuit into his tea, “you are of greatest value to the realm on the bridge of your vessel.”

  Halabi found herself unable to reply. Her throat had locked up with emotion. After leaving home, and the dark presence of her father, she had very deliberately constructed a new life and family for herself within the embrace of the senior service, consciously drawing on the heritage of her adopted clan to gather the strength and purpose she’d always felt was missing as the abused daughter of a faithless drunkard.

  Standing in front of her country’s greatest statesman, however, she felt her legs shaking with uncharacteristic gratitude for the compliment he had just paid her.

  “Why, thank you, Prime Minister,” she said when she had regained a measure of control. “That means a lot to me.”

  “I’m sure it does,” he said with surprising tenderness. “I have not been unaware of the blackguarding of your name, Captain. But I judge my captains by results. When Stalin betrayed us, I thought we’d have the barbarians at the gates of London within the week. Your fast arrival here, and your actions since that time, have given us a chance to save ourselves. I asked Major Windsor to stay, so that this conversation, while private, would not be secret.”

  Churchill turned his ample frame so he could face the prince.

  “I would appreciate it if you would apprise your family of my feelings in this matter. It will be most important, particularly if I do not survive the coming weeks.”

  Harry didn’t bother with any melodramatic objections. He simply agreed. “Of course, Prime Minister.”

  On the surface, Halabi was a picture of professional restraint, but she reeled within. Ever since she had set herself on course for a life in the Royal Navy, she’d felt the constant weight of judgment upon her, as though a long, foreboding line of ancient mariners and warriors were all watching to see if she was worthy of them. Yet here she was, almost in tears that this old man—who was the antithesis of her wretched father—had made that judgment in her favor.

  “There is one final matter I would like to discuss,” said Churchill. “There are contingency plans, outlining how to evacuate the king and his family, myself, and the War Cabinet to Canada in the event that the situation here becomes hopeless. The Trident plays an important role in those contingencies, as well. Whatever happens, she is not to fall into the hands of the enemy.”

  Halabi nodded firmly. She reviewed her own operational plans for the coming battle every day.

  “But even if those plans are activated, I will not be going with you,” said Churchill. “I cannot declare to the world that we will never surrender, then go scarpering off to leave the common people to their fate. I will be staying here in England, no matter what.”

  Captain Halabi nodded again. This time a single tear tracked down her cheek, to fall to the carpet.

  18

  NEW YORK

  The Bayswater was actually nowhere near water. It was located in a hotel on Broadway, near Washington Heights in northern Manhattan. The crowd was fantastically eclectic. Jewish refugees fleeing Germany and Austria in the late thirties and early forties had colonized the area, and quite a few of their more bohemian number were likely to be found in the Bayswater at any time of night.

  It was a determinedly open establishment. A sign on the door read, no dogs or bigots. Jazz and bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Charlie Parker were regular guests. The city’s boho art scene had adopted it as a second home. Magazine editors met with senior contributors there. Even Albert Einstein had dropped in one evening.

  “I know the guys who run this place,” Julia said as they stepped from the town car when it pulled up at the hotel portico. “They were reporters, not embeds, though. Jakey worked for PBS, and Joybelle was over at Fox. You wouldn’t have thought they’d have worked together so well.”

  A line three or four deep stretched down to the corner, hopefuls waiting to see if they could get in. Dan moved to join the end of the line, a gesture that caused Julia to roll her eyes.

  “Oh, puh-lease!”

  She took his arm and strolled on up to the velvet rope. A one-armed colossus bowed as they approached. He wore a white dinner jacket, and a lapel pin that Dan was almost certain read doorbitch.

  “Ms. Duffy,” he said, unhitching the rope and waving them through. He sounded as though he took voice coaching from grizzly bears. “That was a great piece you wrote the other day.”

  “Thanks, Max,” she said, throwing a kiss as she swept past, carrying a bemused Commander Black along in her wake. She was wearing one of her magic dresses, a little black thing that came out of a bag not much bigger than his fist, then slid over her body like oil. The hopefuls in the line were all rugged up for a cruel wait in the cold, but her only warmth came from a thin wrap of some sort of material Dan couldn’t identify.

  They moved into the Bayswater via French doors that were policed by another wounded giant, this time a man with only one eye. The short hallway opened up into a restaurant and a bar, depending on which way you stepped. The bar was roaring and packed so tightly that Dan wondered how anyone could raise a hand to actually take a drink. After the chill of the night air outside, it was almost uncomfortably heavy with the steamy heat of confined humanity.

  A band was playing back in there somewhere, a tune he didn’t recognize, but at least it was a tune, unlike so much of the music from Julia’s world.

  The place was full of her type of people, though. Twenty-first and their friends. He was getting quite good at spotting the uptimers, and he could see a few of them in the b
ar, and at the restaurant tables. Julia held his hand and cut through the crush like a salmon swimming upstream in a series of leaps. They found themselves at a lectern, where a smart young woman with her blond hair tied back in a ponytail asked them if they had a reservation. But Julia was already waving and calling out to someone. Without missing a beat, the girl smiled, produced a couple of menus, and asked them to follow her.

  Again, Dan was dumbfounded. The restaurant—Julia called it a brasserie—was obviously a high-tone affair. The wine and white linen, the cutlery, and the food all looked expensive, at least to his untrained eye. And yet the atmosphere had none of the heavy, leaden feeling he recalled from his own very limited and generally disastrous forays into the world of fine dining—all of them in pursuit of various women over the years.

  The crowd seemed to be much younger than he would have expected, and none of them was dressed for dinner. He couldn’t see a lounge suit anywhere. Some of the men sat in rolled-up shirtsleeves, their ties undone. Others wore no ties at all! And some, who must have been artists, surely, even wore T-shirts. He felt very much out of place in his dress whites, but there were a number of other AF uniforms there, too, and even a scattering of ’temps. It was as though the whole world had come to the table just as they damn well pleased.

  “Dan. Hey, Earth to Dan! Over here, baby. It’s Maria. Come say hello.” Julia had let go of his hand and got away. Now she was shouting at him, over the din of the bar and the slightly less deafening clamor of the dining room. It was the most extraordinary thing he’d seen since Midway. Although, now that he thought about it, he might have to qualify that, having seen her apartment.

  She was already seating herself at a small round table with a woman who was very obviously twenty-first. He noticed the woman’s looks right away, but he then noticed how well conditioned she appeared: the width of her shoulders, which were bare; the strength of her arms; the crushing power of her handshake. She wasn’t long out of the service—probably the Marine Corps.

  “Hey, Dan,” she said, without any further introduction.

  “Ms. O’Brien.”

  “No, please. Call me Maria.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “Maria.”

  “Jules tells me you’ve just come out of the Zone for a couple of days.”

  “It’s my first long spell of liberty since we got back from Midway,” he said. “I thought I’d surprise her.”

  “Ah, that’s great to see.” She smiled. “She’s got you well trained already.”

  “So where’s Sinatra?” Julia asked, leaning forward and openly scoping out the other tables.

  “Oh, he’s in the back with Slim Jim and the local Mafia,” said O’Brien. “He’s going to do a few numbers later on. D’you want to come backstage later and meet them?”

  “Shit, yeah. Are the mob guys going to be there?”

  “Probably,” replied the lawyer. “But don’t worry about them. Davidson is a silent partner in the club, and he’s way too big for them now. Plus I let them know the first time they came that they were welcome to have a drink and enjoy themselves, but they definitely had no business here, if you understand what I’m saying.”

  Dan watched Julia’s eyebrows climb halfway up her forehead. He had no idea what they were talking about, but she’d obviously been taken by surprise, which he found astonishing.

  “Shit,” she said. “How’d that go down?”

  O’Brien shrugged. “I played some footage taken off a couple of microcams we planted on them. They had no idea what we’d done or how we did it. But they know we’re totally out of their league. So they won’t fuck around. They’re just here because it’s the hottest fucking joint in town. Oh, and the food, of course. They love the food.”

  “I can imagine,” said Julia. “Dan, darling, you’ve got to try everything on the menu. Joybelle used to produce Sir James Oliver’s show on Fox, before she moved over to the news.”

  Dan’s blank look was eloquent.

  “He’s a chef, sweetie. Modern Italian, by way of Cool Britannia.”

  He was still floundering.

  Julia sighed. “She had all his books and shows on stick. Not just recipes, but the actual chef demonstrating how to put them together. Then she grabbed a crew of young guys out of kitchens all over town. Of course they’re going to kill for the chance to jump their own cooking up to warp speed—you know, eighty years ahead of the game. And it’s like . . . honest to God . . . it’s like eating in New York the week we left.”

  “Well, not exactly,” O’Brien corrected her. “Try getting a decent plate of wagyu in this town.”

  The young waitress reappeared. In the rush of the arrival, he hadn’t noticed before, but she was dressed like a man. In a white shirt and a business tie. “So, have you made any decisions?”

  The two women didn’t even bother checking the menu. O’Brien ordered her usual, whatever that was.

  “I’ll have the flash-fried spanner crab omelet, to start,” said Julia, “with a glass of that thirty-eight pinot grigio, if you still have it. And a bowl of spaghetti alla vongole for main. Now, Dan, I know you’ll want to order the T-bone, but how about letting me do you a favor?”

  “Okay,” he conceded, but with no sense of confidence.

  “Good. The big guy here will have the truffled mushrooms on olive toast with Reggiano and rugetta as an appetizer, and the seared pork belly with scallops to follow. Bring him a beer to settle his nerves, and a very light, peppery red to have with the meal. The sommelier can choose.”

  “Excellent.” The girl’s head bobbed once as she finished the order.

  Dan shifted on his chair. “Don’t you feel a little, uh, odd eating you know—”

  “Enemy food?” said O’Brien.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “No,” they both answered at once.

  Without missing a beat, O’Brien plowed on. “Now, Dan, Jules tells me you need to look at an investment portfolio. Because of your position in the Zone, we’d have to establish it as a blind trust so there could be no question of your having profited from inside knowledge.”

  The former Marine Corps captain reminded Black of a hundred other women he’d met in the Multinational Force. As soon as they switched to work, they became almost robotic. Even though she was no longer dealing in war Maria O’Brien gave him the impression she would have briefed a team of fighter pilots or navy divers in the same tone of voice she was using now to review his investment options.

  Truth be told, he had no real interest in his investment options. He’d only agreed to come because of Julia.

  “. . . are no-brainers,” she was saying. “Burroughs. And IBM, unless the Holocaust connection bothers you. Aerospace. GM. Ford. All of them easy picks for both wartime and postwar expansion. Then there are the less obvious, longer-term options, like pharmaceuticals, especially corporations that will be registering patents in drugs for heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and so on.

  “No matter what happens with the baby Bells, you’ll want a lot of exposure to telecoms. That area is going to go ballistic. I wouldn’t advise putting anything into the content providers for now, though. The copyright issue is going to be twenty years getting itself sorted out, especially with so many German, Japanese, and Chinese firms holding the rights to stuff like Disney and Warners. A better bet would be intellectual properties developed by firms with no parentage in this era, especially if the IP was generated in jurisdictions which don’t exist yet, and may never exist, for all we know.”

  Julia, he noticed, was nodding as the lawyer delivered her pitch, dropping in the occasional comment of her own. He was really surprised—by both of them, actually. They spoke like Wall Street veterans, but neither of them were what he thought of as capitalists. A reporter and a marine. You didn’t think of those sort of people as having these sort of concerns. It opened another window onto the world they had come from, but even so, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Grantville hadn’t prepared him at all for this. They were
talking like the mine bosses his daddy hated so much.

  “Here you go.” The waitress was back, delivering their first course.

  Dan’s plate held one large, flat black mushroom, drizzled with some kind of oil and sprinkled with spiky green leaves and shavings of a dry, pungent cheese. Julia’s omelet looked just like an omelet, for which he was unexpectedly glad.

  “What are you having, Maria?” he asked, glad of an opportunity to change topics. He just didn’t feel comfortable talking about money. It wasn’t a proper topic for the dinner table. He figured he’d agree to some sort of investment, just to keep Jules happy, and also, he thought, because they’d need a little nest egg to start a life together after the war.

  “I always go for the vegetarian option,” she said, clicking out of her professional personality. “It’s nothing philosophical, really. I don’t mind meat stocks or sauces. But when you’ve exhumed as many mass graves as I have, you lose your taste for T-bones.”

  He was sorry he asked, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “And they do the most exquisite minty peas here,” she added.

  So that’s what she was having. A big bowl of minted peas.

  “Wow,” said Dan. “My ma would have died a happy woman if she thought I was eating a whole bowl of peas for my dinner. She used to have to stand over me with a wooden spoon to make sure I didn’t flick mine out the window.”

  “Try your own dish, Dan,” said Julia. “It’s not meat, but you’ll love it. Trust me.”

  In fact, he didn’t mind it. It was warm, and felt a bit like steak in his mouth, which, O’Brien explained, was why she didn’t order it. If he thought there would be a respite from the financial conversation, though, he was wrong.

  Julia had no sooner swallowed a mouthful of omelet before she started up again. “Maria, you were warning us off content providers, but I know you’ve got Davidson and some of your other clients hooked into that market.”