He wondered what he was going to find when Ivanov sent his scheduled data burst from Siberia tomorrow. Assuming he sent anything at all. He wondered if Wild Bill Donovan had made contact with Ho Chi Minh yet, with a promise to supply all the arms the Viet Minh would need to make the Japanese occupation of Indochina a grinding nightmare. He wondered if Roosevelt would accept his argument that rather than fighting the Communist north after the war, they should bury them in aid and consumer goods. As he climbed the steps of the building that housed his office, he thought about the latest reports of out of the Middle East, about the Baath Party uprising in Syria and the Wahabi Intifada in Egypt.
He wondered if his uncle has been sent to the death camps yet and whether another round of horror stories in the broadsheet press might shame Churchill and Roosevelt into assigning more assets to bombing the rail links into Poland. He made a note to ask Dan Black to speak to Julia Duffy about that. She’d been more than helpful that way in the past.
As he saluted the guards at the entry foyer and marched down the corridor to his office, thoughts of Duffy led naturally to the horrible footage of that Natoli girl being murdered. A slow burn began in his gut, and he felt his gorge rising with his anger. He returned the salutes of the three men waiting for him.
Hidaka, the Japanese “governor” of Hawaii, had lied. He’d said that the Allied prisoners, both military and civilian, were being well treated. But the evidence on the flatscreen in Kolhammer’s office said differently.
Nobody spoke as they watched the video of the executions. Kolhammer had seen it five times now, and counted 123 victims, all of them beheaded. Even though he’d lost count of the number of times he’d seen people die like this, there was still something about it that froze the soul.
He thumbed the remote to freeze the footage before they had to watch the gruesome scene of Bill Halsey’s death again.
“So who is this asshole?” he rumbled.
“Commander Jisaku Hidaka, Admiral. Interim military governor—”
“I know that, Chief. He told me that himself, on the vid, just before he capped that poor girl. I want to know more. You open a file, in the Room. And we’ll close it when the protocols are carried out.”
“Sanction Four, sir?”
“No,” said Kolhammer. “I don’t think so. Do you?”
Chief Petty Officer Vincente Rogas shook his head. “I guess not.”
Kolhammer regarded the image on the screen with a cold, flat lack of feeling. “Sanction Five,” he said.
Praise for
WEAPONS OF CHOICE
Book One of The Axis of Time
by John Birmingham
“Birmingham hits the ground running and accelerates through the first half of the novel, before slowing down enough to let the reader and characters consider the implications of what’s going on. Quick-paced and very clever alternate history.”
—DAVID DRAKE, acclaimed author of The Far Side of the Stars and Redliners
“An excellent combination of near future military SF and alternate history, and a riveting story to boot.”
—ERIC FLINT, author of 1632 and 1634: The Galileo Affair
“This book has everything: time travel, the British royalty, things that go boom, and unrelenting action. Read the opening at your own risk: you won’t be doing anything else until you finish it.”
—SEAN WILLIAMS, coauthor of Heirs of Earth and Star Wars: Force Heretic: Reunion
“Smart munitions meet smart writing in a military-grade action-adventure that’s impossible to stop reading.”
—GARTH NIX, author of Sabriel and The Ragwitch
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Australian author JOHN BIRMINGHAM, whose book Leviathan won the National Award for Non-fiction at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts 2002, “tells stories for a living.” For doing so he has been paid by the Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Playboy, and numerous other magazines. He has also been published, but not paid, by the Long Bay Prison News. Some of his stories have won prizes, including the George Munster prize for Freelance Story of the Year and the Carlton United Sports Writing Prize. Leviathan, John’s fifth book, was first published in Knopf (Australia) hardback in 1999, and is the “unauthorized biography of Sydney,” Australia. His earlier works are He Died with a Felafel in His Hand, made into a feature film by Noah Taylor, The Tasmanian Babes Fiasco, How to Be a Man, The Search for Savage Henry, and Weapons of Choice. He lives at the beach with his wife, young daughter, baby son, and two cats. He is not looking for any more flatmates.
www.birmo.journalspace.com
ALSO BY JOHN BIRMINGHAM
THE AXIS OF TIME
Weapons of Choice
Designated Targets
Designated Targets is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey® Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2005 by John Birmingham
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Birmingham, John
Designated targets / John Birmingham.
p. cm.—(The axis of time ; bk. 2)
1. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9619.3.B5136D47 2005
813&8242;.6—dc22 2005049371
www.delreybooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-48606-6
v3.0r1
Designated Targets Page 51