Final impact

“I married an American, remember? A very political American, too, in his off-duty hours. Mike had no time at all for Hoover. Said he was a menace to society. He read every piece you and just about anybody else ever wrote about him. Used to scan them and e-mail them to me. Instead of love letters I’d get these enormous bloody text files with Mike’s annotations on the life and crimes of J.-bloody-Edgar.”

“Let me guess. He was a blogger, back up in twenty-one?”

Willet smiled. “I think it’s what he misses most about the future. Handing around mimeographs just doesn’t do it for him.”

Duffy chuckled. It was a low, warm sound. “So why’d you two get together. It doesn’t sound like he knows how to treat a gal?”

Halabi smiled again. “Mike looks like a hanging judge, if you’ll excuse the awful pun, but he’s a sweetie at heart. And he came after me. Looked me up when he was in London for some conference. Took me out to dinner. Showed me off. You know how with some guys, when you’re out with them, you can just tell they’re walking ten feet tall because they think they’ve grabbed the prettiest girl in the room all for themselves.”

The corner of Duffy’s mouth quirked up in a fair imitation of a grin. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, that was Mike. Didn’t matter where we went. Who we met. He let everyone know that he was proud to have me on…on his arm.”

Halabi realized she was choking up. She felt Julia’s hand on her arm. The clamps and wires of the medical sensors made it feel as though a cyborg was trying to comfort her.

“And I’ll bet nobody gave him any shit about it, either,” Duffy said, her voice becoming a little muddled now.

“No.” The Trident’s captain shook her head and blinked away a tear. “He’s got that whole Clint Eastwood thing going for him. Not once, the whole time I was with him, did I feel like anything other than royalty. Mike has this thing, doesn’t matter how much of a butthead somebody is, they just know he’s not going to stand for any bullshit.”

The soft peep of the computer that controlled anesthetic drip, which had accelerated noticeably when Julia sat upright and winced in pain, dialed back a bit. Halabi composed herself and glanced over at an orderly who was checking the other patients, a couple of RAF pilots fished out of the drink with severe burns. They were deeply sedated and made no sound.

Julia seemed to be drifting off to sleep.

“Jules?”

“Still here. Just.”

“You should get some sleep.”

“Uh-huh. Could I get a drink?”

Halabi checked with the orderly, who indicated that she could have a few sips from the bottle beside her bed. Halabi lifted the tube to her mouth.

“Thanks,” Duffy said when she was finished. “And thanks for having me here. It’s…nice to…you know…somewhere modern…like…”

“Like home.”

“Yeah. Like home.”

24

D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1121 HOURS.

USS HILLARY CLINTON, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“So these are from the guys off Kennedy’s ship, right?”

“Yes, Admiral. The Armanno inserted three teams on these islands here, here, and here.”

Kolhammer’s eyes flicked over the hologram display of the target area. It had been a long time since he’d seen a holobloc in action, and it felt a little weird. For once he could empathize with the ’temps. The small group of islands floated inside the black cube on a light blue sea. The display wasn’t to scale. The landmass had been magnified for the briefing.

Kolhammer, Judge, and the supercarrier’s ops staff clustered around the bloc in a chamber just off the Clinton’s CIC. The room was dark and uncomfortably chilly. A couple of ’temp liaison officers from the Enterprise stood in for Spruance, who was busy with the last-minute details for his own attack plans. Suspended above the ghostly 3-D display, a video cube ran fresh vision from the Force Recon patrol on the southernmost island. The four monitors flickered with images of Japanese troops tending to carefully camouflaged aircraft.

“They look like Nakajima One-One-Fives, or perhaps-Sixes,” said the briefing officer, Lieutenant Commander Brenna Montgomery, in her disconcerting southern-belle-from-New-Jersey inflection. Montgomery’s dad had been-and probably still was-a technical writer for IBM back up in twenty-one, and his job had taken her from central Jersey to Savannah, Georgia, when she was eleven. The move gave her tough-as-nails childhood accent a strangely soothing southern lilt that Kolhammer could happily listen to all day. It reminded him of his wife, Marie, who’d followed a similar path through life before ending up in Santa Monica, where they’d met and courted.

“Denny’s team has estimated that the Japanese had approximately a hundred and fifty of these units on this island alone,” she continued. “Klobas and Whittington report at least another hundred spread evenly across the other two islands, where there seems to have been less time to prepare facilities.”

Montgomery checked her flexipad.