Final impact aot-3

by John Birmingham

  Frankly, it was all beyond Jones-he had no idea how these guys worked out who owned what. One of his former captains, Maria O’Brien, had been a legal affairs officer attached to the War Crimes Unit on the Clinton, and she had tried to explain it to him once, without much luck. She’d been just a few weeks from finishing her hitch in the corps when the Transition had ripped her out of whatever life she’d been supposed to lead. Now she made more money than God as a civilian lawyer, smoothing out the intersection between the economy of 1940s America and twenty-first-century intellectual property law. Her personal “Death Star”-as she jokingly called it-was a weird, contorted mass of polished concrete and black glass out on the fashionable western edge of 51, amid a streetscape of expensive restaurants and lush parkland. Jones always thought her building, which had been designed by some very important architect whose name completely escaped him, resembled a bagel turned inside out, if that made any sense. It looked to be about six floors high, although he doubted it ran to anything as mundane as actual “floors” on the inside.

  As far as he was concerned, she could have it all to herself. The less Jones had to do with the ’temps, the better.

  A born conservative, even as a kid in the projects he’d never had time for politically correct bullshit. In his America men and women, black or white, got the chance to make a success out of life. And if they didn’t succeed, it was probably their own fucking fault. He’d gotten no special treatment from the corps, but he’d suffered no discrimination, either. Every decoration he had pinned to his dress uniform had been honestly earned, mostly by killing people who badly needed it. The Bible at his bedside table had lain beside his daddy’s pillow, and like his daddy he allowed himself one reading every night that it was possible, starting at Genesis and slowly working his way through to Revelation, before going back and starting all over again.

  He had supported the same baseball team-the Cubs-for thirty-five years. The same basketball team-the Bulls-for thirty-six. He loved his country, his corps, his friends, and his family, most especially his wife who was, as he never tired of telling people, as white as the Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. By way of contrast General J. Lonesome Jones disliked whining left-wingers, network news broadcasts, and steamed brussels sprouts all about equally.

  He wasn’t the sort who saw himself as the victim of anything.

  Yet nearly every time he had to deal with the ’temps, it seemed like he was instantly cast in bronze as the object of their fear and loathing. At the very best they treated him with a stiff reserve. That was the standard response whenever task force business took him down to Camp Pendleton to meet with the “old” Marine Corps brass. He was treated with courtesy, and every formality due his rank. But never once were the informalities observed. Even after Hawaii, he’d never been invited to take a drink or share a meal with anyone at Pendleton.

  Jones pressed his lips together as his boots crunched along the gravel path. The insults to his own dignity he could suffer in silence. He didn’t give a shit about the opinions of ignorant assholes. But the endless shitcanning of his marines was intolerable.

  The sun burned the back of his neck, and he could feel sweat beginning to stream between his shoulder blades, under his uniform. His eyes remained hidden behind a pair of powered-down sunglasses, but anyone who ran across his path would have had no trouble telling that he was mightily pissed about something. Around him the camp was relatively quiet, a counterpoint to the seething anger that threatened to get the better of the Eighty-second’s commander.

  A platoon jogged by, singing cadence, a tune he recognized from his earliest days in the military. The lyrics had changed, though, in this post-Transition world.

  We care a lot

  About the Nazis and the fucking Japanese.

  He really hated the fucking song, truth be known, but an old roomie had played it incessantly many years ago, and in a strange way hearing it calmed him down a little as he returned the salutes of a couple of lieutenants he passed on his way to the final staff meeting. Mary Hiers and Nikki Christa from the landing support team. Good young officers. ’Temps, but most of the brigade were, nowadays. They’d taken 20 percent casualties on Oahu. Added to the losses in Australia, it meant he’d come home with an effective fighting strength of one reinforced company.

  He was still humming the old “Faith No More” standard several minutes after the platoon had passed by.

  They’d had no choice but to rebuild from the ground up. There’d been no shortage of volunteers from among the ’temps, allowing his recruiters to skim off the cream.

  And given that so many of his newest marines were never going to be welcome in the old corps, you might have thought they’d have been left in peace. But no. He and Kolhammer had been forced to wage a series of small bureaucratic wars just to keep the Eighty-second alive. Everything was contested. For instance, there was no Fifth Marine Division when they had arrived. It would not have been established until November 1943 for the Battle of Iwo Jima, but the contemporary corps insisted on placing a caveat over the designation anyway, demanding that Jones give up the “Fifth.” Indeed, he and Kolhammer had been forced to fight battles over lineage for virtually every one of the “new” units they’d spun up. In every case they’d refused to give ground.

  The Eighty-second MEU had fought as part of the Ninth Regiment, Fifth Division of the United States Marine Corps, since it was raised for the Second Afghan War in 2012. They had earned the right to be who they were.

  He noticed that his speed had increased when he’d become angry again, stirring up a small storm of gravel as he double-timed it over to the First Battalion ops room. Jones screwed a lid on his temper. He reminded himself that for every dumbass he’d encountered, there were old-fashioned Americans like Mary Hiers and Nikki Christa, or Master Chief Eddie Mohr, or even Dan Black, God rest his soul, who were good people. As good as people ever got, really. He slowed his breathing and dropped back to a normal pace. It wouldn’t do to go charging into battalion in such a foul mood. Somebody was liable to get an ass chewed off for nothing.

  D-DAY + 2.5 MAY 1944.

  LOS ANGELES.

  The view from the top floor of the Davidson Building-which had, until recently, been the Oviatt Building-was nothing compared with his New York base. Back east the company had leased about twenty floors of the Empire State, and on a clear day Slim Jim could stand at the window of his personal office suite and almost see his own power as it pulsed outward across Manhattan, racing away toward the horizon like a blast wave. That was what real wealth and power were like. A force of fucking nature that swept everything in front of them. He’d always known that, of course. But only because for most of his life he’d been the one getting blown away. By cops. By judges. By bigger, tougher, meaner crooks. By wardens. By parole officers. By the whole fucking system.

  “Now I am the fucking system,” he said with a grin.

  “What was that, Mr. Davidson?”

  “Sorry,” he said, turning away from the window in his LA headquarters. The place was on Olive, near Sixth, and afforded him a good view of Bunker Hill, which looked like a natural rampart laid across the western edge of the old pueblo. Downtown Los Angeles lay at his feet, but it was obvious that his building was going to be dwarfed before too long by the skyscrapers rising around her. Not that he cared much. He owned a couple of construction companies now, and he loved looking out at all the cranes soaring over the city’s rooftops. It was sorta like they were there to scoop money up off the streets and dump it into his pockets.

  “Sorry,” he said again. “What were we talking about?”

  His lawyer, Ms. O’Brien, looked exasperated, as usual. He often thought that uptight was her natural state of being. Their relationship had changed some since the early days, though, when she’d acted more like his drill sergeant than his employee. O’Brien was a player in her own right now. Probably one of the richest women in America, if you didn’t count heiresses. And he didn’t. They ten
ded to be stuck-up bitches who wouldn’t give him the time of day. But as his business got bigger and he grew more and more powerful, she came to…what? Admire him, he guessed. She was only a little more deferential than she had been, but if he didn’t know any better he’d say she almost respected him for the way he’d handled the last few years.

  “We were discussing your testimony in the Rockefeller suit, Mr. Davidson,” she said. “It’s important. You can’t slide through this one on a boyish grin and southern charm. These guys are out to snap you like a twig.”

  He shrugged. “Assholes like this been beating on me since-”

  “Oh please. Let’s not do your E! channel bio today. Let’s work through the brief I zapped over. You did read it, didn’t you? They’re not going to let you wear your Oakleys in court, so I can’t send you notes up on the stand.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I read it,” he grumbled. Most of what he did nowadays seemed to be reading and signing big piles of paper. Most of it he didn’t understand. He preferred sitting down with a couple of guys over a beer and talking shit through like men. He was a good listener. You had to be when you’d made your living as a grifter.

  Ms. O’Brien started in on him like a prosecutor going after an ax murderer. It’d been a little scary the first time she’d done it, but she explained it was just like in the navy when he’d trained for war. The courtroom was no different. He had an enemy that was coming after him, trying to destroy him. He had to be ready. She kept firing questions at him. Real curly ones, too, and he practiced saying as little as possible that’d get him in trouble. The only real joy of it was contemplating what a bloody pulp Ms. O’Brien was going to reduce those Rockefeller assholes to when they got onto the stand. She had a well-earned reputation for brutality in the courtroom. It was partly why he expected this bullshit case to settle, and why only part of his mind was really on it. Another part, the old Slim Jim, was thinking about the party he was gonna throw in his penthouse over the weekend. He had half of Hollywood coming over to rip it up in his rooftop pool and artificial beach. They were the only original features he’d kept when he bought the Oviatt Building. Everything else-the Lalique chandeliers, the art deco bar, the exotic woods in the floors and walls-he’d had torn out and replaced with the closest facsimiles of twenty-first materials his personal designers could find. Ms. O’Brien had been aghast and argued vehemently against the “vandalism,” as she called it, but Slim Jim wasn’t having a bar of it. The next century had been very kind to him, whereas this one had done nothin’ but kick his ass from the moment he’d crawled out of the cradle.

  And anyway, 21C was the hottest style in modern architecture. Nobody built old anymore.

  “Are you concentrating, Mr. Davidson?”

  “Nope,” he admitted.

  “Are you thinking about your party this weekend?” she asked, putting down the flexipad she’d been holding.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You thinking about copping a blow job from Hedy Lamarr again?”

  He grinned. “No, but now that you mention it-”

  “Well, knock it off!” she barked. “Because if you can’t, the only blow jobs you’re gonna be getting will be from the jailhouse cat in a federal pen.”

  Chastened, he apologized and tried to focus on the questions. But before long he was daydreaming about Hedy Lamarr again. And splitting beers with Ernest Hemingway. And sailing with Errol Flynn. And playing poker with Artie Snider, the war hero he’d met at a Kennedy fund-raiser. They were all great fucking guys. And unlike those society snobs, they didn’t look down on him for what he’d once been.

  3

  D-DAY + 4. 7 MAY 1944. 2045 HOURS.

  BUNKER COMPLEX, BERLIN.

  It was no longer safe at the Wolfschanze.

  Indeed, there was no Wolfschanze to speak of-not now. Allied bombers had struck there in a massive raid just three months ago. Had the fuhrer not been delayed in Berlin, he might even have been killed. More than a thousand men of the SS had died on that day.

  Himmler rubbed the hot, grainy feeling from his eyes. This bunker offered none of the comforts of Rastenburg, but it had one major advantage. The British and Americans did not know of its existence. Or at least he thought they didn’t. One could never be sure these days…

  The Reichsfuhrer-SS grunted. It was pointless trying to second-guess one’s opponent, especially in wartime. The enemy rarely did what you wanted. You could study them, and plan for contingencies based on their capabilities, but once you began fantasizing that you actually knew their intentions…well, that was a folly for decadent novelists, not for statesmen.

  The rough concrete walls of the underground bunker oozed with condensation. Here in the map room, it wasn’t so bad. Fans turned constantly to suck the stale atmosphere away and drag fresh air down from the surface. But there were places in this complex-as in all the subterranean hideouts in which they had been forced to take sanctuary-where he found himself close to passing out, so vile were the stench and the heat. Every breath tasted as though it had already been inhaled a hundred times over. Fastidious in his personal habits, Heinrich Himmler found the press of unwashed humanity one of the hardest burdens he had been forced to bear in this conflict.

  Thirty or more people were crammed into the map room, an area not much bigger than a sizable parlor. The overcrowding was made worse by the huge map table, which dominated at least half the floor. A large, flat televiewing screen hung from the wall, displaying much the same information as the little wooden blocks that were being pushed around the table, but it wasn’t updated nearly as frequently. Even with the bounty they had taken off the Dessaix and the “Indonesian” ships, the Reich simply did not have the Allies’ ability to monitor the “battlespace,” as they called it.

  Goebbels had come up with a suitably Teutonic alternative to the Anglo-Saxon phrase-Kriegsgebiet, the realm of battle. And standing by Hitler’s side as the fuhrer marshaled his response to this violation of the Reich, Himmler could appreciate the correctness of the phrase. Battle was not joined across a simple field, as it had been in the days of Bismarck. No, it was being fought on land, in the air, on and under the sea, where millions contested the future of the world, in blood and iron.

  The mood in the room was tense. They had known this was coming, since their own lunge across the channel was foiled. The memory still gave him shudders. The fuhrer’s screaming. Gцring getting drunk and becoming more dangerous as his vaunted jet fighters were scythed out of the sky. Goebbels saying nothing, his eyes sinking back into those darkened pools. The military high command making one excuse after another. One fool of an admiral had even dared to question the wisdom of launching the operation in the first place. He, of course, was no longer numbered among the living. Indeed, a great many of the men who had been in the war room at Rastenburg had received their final rewards: a firing squad and an unmarked grave.

  This would be different, however. He breathed slowly through his mouth, lest a sudden gulp give away how nervous he was. The fuhrer ordered the Second SS Panzer Corps moved up out of Le Mans. A moment later he countermanded the order. No one said anything.

  Himmler let his eyes traverse the room, settling on anybody who seemed even half inclined to question their leader’s judgment. One Wehrmacht colonel blanched under his gaze.

  “It is a ruse,” Hitler muttered, biting his lower lip. “I am sure of it.” He was staring at the table with such febrile intensity that it was a wonder the surface did not begin to smolder.

  General Zeitzler, the army chief of staff-who looked about two decades older than his forty-nine years-seemed about to say something, jumping into the space left clear by the fuhrer’s uncertainty. But then Hitler folded his arms and jutted his chin.

  “Yes. A ruse. This business in Calais is a feint, don’t you agree, Herr General? Just as it was with their Operation Fortitude in the Other Time. I saw through that one, too, you know. The historical documents make it quite clear. I knew they would come ashore at Normandy, a
nd tried to get that traitor Rommel to reorder the defenses. But no! He would not listen. So it is here, at Normandy, that the real blow will fall.”

  The fuhrer brought his pointer down with a sharp crack.

  Himmler, along with everyone else in earshot, jumped slightly.

  The tip of the pointer was resting on the stretch of shoreline the Allies referred to as Omaha Beach. It was the logical point of access, and much work had gone into luring them there. The defenses in the dune system had been allowed to degrade, to make Eisenhower think that the Wehrmacht’s center of gravity had shifted north of the Seine, just as it had in the Other Time, die Andere Zeit. Close study of the archives captured from the French ship and corroborated by the Japanese had taught them that fixed defenses were a death trap. No matter how much concrete was poured, no matter how many thousands of miles of razor wire were laid, in the end such defenses could be negated by high explosives.

  No, it was mobility that had won the Reich all the prizes in the opening phase of this war, and it was mobility-the doctrine of blitzkrieg-that would win this next battle.

  Himmler mopped at his greasy brow with a gray handkerchief. It had once been white. The accursed “drones” sent out by the mud woman Halabi made everything much more difficult, but the Soviets had been unusually helpful in providing creative camouflage, what they called maskirovka. They were acknowledged masters of the field. Himmler shook his head. He was tired, suffering from nervous exhaustion, and his mind had a tendency to wander. He forced his attention back onto the map table.