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. His 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 émigré 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 attaché.
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 gore 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.
“Well, it’s not usual, but I suppose, if you were with him this morning . . . of course, of course, just follow me.”
For just a moment, Julia allowed herself to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face, even if that face presented a savage mask to this other woman. She threw the backpack over one shoulder, her MP-5 over the other, and hung the powered-down helmet from an eyehook on her web belt. She then detached the little Sonycam, checked the battery and lattice memory, and slipped her fingers through the hand strap as she followed Nurse Halligan to one of the big preop centers. The Sonycam was little bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and sat quite comfortably in her palm. She wet a fingertip to wipe away a bloody smear that was obscuring part of the lens.
Turned out, the 8066 was a big facility. It looked like it could handle a lot of death and trauma. Julia estimated that they could probably deal with a surge of a thousand or more cases—say, a couple of shattered battalions. She made a mental note to grab a few stats and some background on the unit before she left. There might even be a good feature in it, especially if nobody else had thought to cover the premature birth of the MASH concept.
The censors would go for it, for sure, because they loved stories that made the folks back home think their boys were getting the best treatment in the world.
The coppery smells of blood and horror hung over everything, blotting out the mentholated scent of the eucalyptus trees, the smoke of battle, and even the stink of so many unwashed bodies. Trucks rumbled in and out constantly, disgorging litters weighed down with unconscious men, taking away freshly patched-up marines and soldiers. American uniforms dominated, most of them ’temps, but she heard British and Australian accents. Even some French. Three soldiers walked by who could only have been from the New Zealand Maori Battalion, their faces dense maps of native tattoos.
Just when she was beginning to sink into the period detail, a flight of Super Harriers off the Kandahar screamed overhead, thousands of pounds of locally made dumb bombs slung under their hard-points. Nobody even looked up anymore.
Nurse Halligan threaded around a couple of stretcher-bearers who were grabbing a few z’s. She threw a look back over her shoulder to make sure Julia was keeping up, and pushed through a set of swinging doors into a large building that seemed to have been stapled together out of materials scavenged from an abandoned building site.
As she pushed through the doors behind Halligan, Julia caught the reek of disinfectant and dying flesh. It rose up to unlock memories of other casualty wards, some military, some civilian. In the end, she decided, they were all the same, just mounds of broken bodies and the glazed-over, uncomprehending eyes that all asked the same question. Why me?
The men in here still wore the bloodied uniforms in which they’d come off the line. Nonetheless, Duffy’s entrance drew a few stares. She was an alien, almost barbarous vision, even among these men who presented a facade of martial savagery. Not everyone followed her path through the gurneys and canvas cots, though. Most in fact did not, either because they were insensible with pain or medication, or because battle had numbed them to a state of existential collapse. However, enough of them struggled up, and pointed, and whispered to qualify as a minor commotion.
Snider saw her, even before she could find him. “Hey, Miss Duffy. Over here!”
He was propped up on a folding chair in a far corner, his injured leg resting on a wooden crate and enclosed in a bright orange inflatable tube that could only have come from a twenty-first unit. They must have fitted him on the dust-off. Five or six men were gathered around him, clearly hanging on his every word. They all turned to check her out. Some were completely taken aback at the sight of her, their eyes going wide in surprise. One whom she recognized from Hill 178 nodded and waved. Snider beckoned her over as Nurse Halligan said good-bye and wished her well.
“This is her, boys. The reporter I told y’all about. She’s from the future!” Then without warning, his excitement and gladness to see her turned to uncomfortable solemnity. “Miss Duffy, I didn’t get to thank you for what you did this morning. Some of the boys told me you shot them Japs was fixing to stick me after I got hit. Said you drilled ’em like fucking paper targets on the range, if you’ll pardon my language. They also said you got the Jap who killed poor Smitty.”
They all peered at her fighting knife then. Some staring openly, some just flicking a nervous glance at it.
“And Miss Duffy, I’m sorry if I was out of line with you, you know . . . when things was turning to shit up there.”
Julia raised a bandaged hand and demurred. “It was a busy day at the office, Sarge. I’ve had worse. But how are you doing? I see they got you a gel sleeve on the chopper. That’s good. You’ll probably keep the leg.”
Snider perked up at the news. “Better than that, Miss Duffy. It’s a fuckin’ million-dollar wound. I’m going home. Won’t be dancing too many foxtrots from now on, but who really gives a fuck, eh?”
Julia pulled up an empty ammo crate and insinuated herself into the circle of wounded men. She slipped off her backpack and leaned the MP-5 up against the wall. Snider gave her a quick introduction to all of them, bar one, whose name he didn’t know. The man introduced himself as Corporal Robert Payne, a Canadian artilleryman who had been standing near a howitzer when a shell exploded in the tube.
“You know, Sergeant,” said Duffy, “You might just dance the foxtrot again after all. It’ll take a while, but knee reconstruction wasn’t a big deal up in my day. And most of the senior Task Force medical staff have been pulled off active duty and put into teaching hospitals. Of course,
I gotta tell you, the fuckin’ foxtrot is never coming back.”
Duffy waited until the men’s laughter and ribbing died down before speaking again.
“Sarge, do you think you could see your way clear to an interview? There’s already a lot of talk about what you did this morning. You want my opinion, they’re going to turn you into a hero and send you out on the road back home, selling war bonds with John Wayne and Hedy Lamarr.”
Sergeant Snider was openly surprised to hear that. “Hedy Lamarr, you say. That’s a classy dame. You think she’d want to hang out with the likes of me?”
“Buddy, when I’m finished, you’ll be beating her off with a stick. Matter of fact, you’ll be able to walk into a room full of Hollywood starlets and know there won’t be a dry seat in the house.”
Snider’s friends all broke out into catcalls and cheers, and Julia made certain to grab a few lines from each of them about what they thought of his efforts on the hill.
When she was finished she checked to make sure that the lattice memory had stored the interview, and she copied it to a spare stick, just in case.
“There’s one other thing you could do for me, Sarge, which I’d really appreciate.”
Snider pulled himself a little higher in the fold-up canvas chair, wincing as he did so. “You name it, Miss Duffy. I figure there’s no way I can repay you for drilling those guys.”
“Well, in fact, there is, Sergeant. There’s some guys from Movietone who are going to be looking for you later. Could you possibly tell ’em to fuck off?”
Snider winked theatrically. “Consider them fucked, ma’am.”
The University of Queensland sat within a great bow of the Brisbane River about seven miles from the city center. There wasn’t much to it, thought Robertson, just hundreds of acres of open fields. The area had previously been given over to the cultivation of sugar, arrowroot, cotton, maize, and pineapples. Only one building had been completed before the outbreak of war, a grand colonnaded sandstone structure with two wings, divided by a massive clock tower that also housed an imposing atrium. Before any students or teachers had had the opportunity to move in, the Commonwealth Government had requisitioned it for the advanced headquarters of all Allied Land Forces in the Southwest Pacific.
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