Final impact

“Thank you, Mr. Hubbard. XO, give our guests a five-minute warning.”

“Aye, Captain.”

His executive officer passed on the command via the ship’s intercom. Kennedy continued to sweep the sea with his Starlite goggles. He was past marveling at the opalescent view. He knew that down in the ship’s CIC, two dozen systems operators were scanning the threat bubble with infinitely more powerful sensors, but his days flitting around behind Japanese lines died hard, and he had lookouts posted all over the ship, just in case some gremlin decided to chew through a golden wire holding all his magical AT gear together. Sonar, radar, active, passive, phased array. It was all good, and he’d never be dumb enough to argue that a Mark 1 Eyeball was better. But as his father used to say, an extra set of peepers on a problem never hurt, did it?

A small meteor shower to the northwest caught his attention, the falling stars appearing as streaks of emerald brilliance in his Starlites. The last time he’d seen anything so beautiful had been up at the family place in Hyannisport back at the end of fall. A cool, crisp night, with the northern stars out in abundance. His father had thrown a party on the last night of his leave, a little going-away soirtie. Or that was how they’d sold it to him anyway. When he’d arrived with his date Natalia from upstate New York, the dozens of cars parked along Marchant Avenue spoke of an entirely different purpose. The summer house was full of political types and businessmen. His heart sank as soon as the whole circus caravan swung into view.

He’d tried to convince Ali, as she liked to be called, that they should split before anyone saw them. Head back to the cabin and spend the rest of his leave together there. But she was a sweet girl, and coming from LA she loved a party. They could hear the music drifting down across the lawns as soon as he cut the car engine.

“That sounds like Frank Sinatra,” she squealed. “Oh, come on, Jack. We simply must!”

Against his better judgment he gave in to her, and spent the next six hours regretting it as his dad forced him to glad-hand every sweating, drunken idiot in a suit on the East Coast. He died inside every time someone insisted on calling him Mr. President, which was more or less every time anyone spoke to him. He caught sight of Ali’s honey-blond hair just once, on the other side of a crowded room, where she was deep in conversation with Sinatra and a rough-headed character who had to be the famous Slim Jim Davidson. He hardly got to speak to his brothers, which in hindsight wasn’t such a bad thing, as his dad seemed intent on playing each off against the other. He’d have thought reading the future histories might have dampened the old man’s enthusiasm for pushing his sons into public life, but no. Far from it.

Foresight seemed to have fueled a deep, almost unnatural desire in Joe Kennedy to take a stranglehold on fate and choke the living shit out of it. He hadn’t been able to rest till he got that Oswald kid away from his mother and into that boarding school in Canada. And poor Joe Jr. still blamed him for getting yanked off the flight line over in England. Man, he’d heard the yelling and the hollering over that one all the way out in Hawaii.

“Hell of thing, ain’t it, buddy, having your past come back and bite you on the ass before you even have a chance to fuck it up the first time around?”

“Huh?”

He’d been woolgathering out on the patio, and the man had snuck up on him. The man and the woman, now that he looked.

“Don’t worry, Mack, I’m not gonna Mr. President you, you poor bastard.”

Kennedy found himself feeling genuine relief. He couldn’t help being amused by the cheeky, knowing grin on this guy’s face, either.

“Well, if you promise you won’t whistle ‘Hail to the Chief ’ while you’re blowing smoke up my ass,” he said, “I won’t call for the cops after I check to see if my wallet’s still here, Mr. Davidson.”

Slim Jim Davidson grinned broadly. “I ain’t like that no more, Captain Kennedy. These days I got me a whole bunch of minions to do my pickpocketing for me, and on a much grander scale.”

“And is this one of them?” Jack asked, nodding to the woman who stood, smiling enigmatically, just behind the famous businessman.

“No,” she answered for herself, “Slim Jim and I have had professional dealings in the past, but not like that. I’m a reporter. Julia-”

“Ms. Julia Duffy,” he finished for her. “And you’re hardly just a reporter, ma’am. You’d probably be as famous as Mr. Davidson here, at a guess. Almost as rich, too.”

“Hardly,” she snorted.

“Yeah. I’m pretty fucking wealthy,” Davidson said with a twinkle in his eye. Kennedy couldn’t miss the fact that he was joking and being very, very serious at the same time.

“Well, you wouldn’t be here if my dad didn’t think much of your money,” Kennedy smiled.

“But your father couldn’t care less about my breeding, right?”