Final impact

And with that thought, he hit the SEND button.

D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1422 HOURS.

USS HILLARY CLINTON, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“Holy shit,” Kolhammer said.

He’d just sat down in his stateroom to a late lunch of stale ham sandwiches and a cup of coffee when he read the e-mail from Jones.

“What’s up?” asked Mike Judge, who was also taking a ten-minute break, the only downtime they’d get for the rest of the day.

Kolhammer shook his head and sniffed.

“Lonesome was cleaning out his accounts and he found an old note he’d missed. Here. Have a look.”

The touch screen was too big to swivel, forcing Judge to walk around the desk in the admiral’s office.

“Yeah. Okay. Holy shit is about right,” he said after scanning the message.

“He copied it to Julia Duffy at the Times, as well,” Kolhammer noted with more than a little chagrin.

“I saw. Do you blame him, though? It’s a personal letter. Sort of. And he took a lot of shit over Danton. Probably figures there’d be someone somewhere wanted to hush this up, for whatever reason. Politics, you know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Kolhammer chewed joylessly on the sandwich. Unlike Mike Judge, he knew that Jones was probably thinking of something more than his brother-in-law’s reputation, and by extension his own. Besides Jones, of all the uptimers, only he and Margie Francois knew about the DNA match that related back to the murders on Oahu, just after they’d arrived. Of the ’temps, Nimitz knew, because Kolhammer had taken it to him, demanding justice.

But Nimitz was dead. Before he’d died, though, he’d extracted from Kolhammer a promise that the admiral would deal with this through channels. Kolhammer had no idea how far Nimitz had taken it, but right now the case was still sitting, undisturbed, in Washington. In his darkest moments he had considered opening a file in the Quiet Room back in the Zone, but signing off a sanction on an American citizen without the benefit of a trial was a step too far.

“I think I’d better call him,” Kolhammer said, shaking himself out of his reverie.

D-DAY + 38. 10 JUNE 1944. 1429 HOURS.

USS KANDAHAR, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

“It’s got nothing to do with that rapist motherfucker,” Jones said.

“I wouldn’t hold it against you if it did,” Kolhammer replied.

Mike Judge had left him to it, carrying away the remains of their so-called lunch. Kolhammer hadn’t dicked around when he’d called the marine officer, asking him why he’d thought it necessary to cut the press in on the Danton e-mail.

“She’s not just press, she’s one of my original embeds. I trust her.”

“And not me?”

“That’s unfair, Admiral. You’re tied down by politics. Marge Francois got a clean match on his blood and semen. As good as a needle in the arm, where we came from. And you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. That file is sitting in somebody’s bottom drawer back in Washington, stamped TOO FUCKING HARD, and meanwhile he’s rolling around the country copping blow jobs from movie stars.”

Kolhammer kept himself still, stifling the urge to drum his fingers on the desktop where Jones could see and hear his frustration via the video link.

“You might want to recall, Lonesome, that Ms. Duffy was a big part of creating the guy.”

Jones nodded on screen. “And she’d send him to Hell in a goddamn New York minute if she knew about that match.”

Kolhammer couldn’t argue with that. He knew Duffy well enough after two years to be able to understand her on a professional, if not personal, level. He doubted that even Dan Black had really known what went on deep inside her heart. He leaned back and showed Jones his open palms, conceding the other man’s point.

“Lonesome, it was a personal communication. Granted, it was about military concerns-but I’ll stand behind your decision to release it. It’s not like you sent her the attachments, after all.”

“No, it’s not. And thank you.”

Kolhammer shook his head.

“You don’t have to thank me. You have a right to expect my support, and you haven’t always had it when you needed it, the last few years.”

It was Jones’s turn to shake his head. “You’ve had your own battles to fight, Admiral. That shitty business with Hoover and his pet congressmen. The Zone. The Old Navy. I haven’t been looking for you to get my back because I knew you had a full-time job watching your own.”

Jones’s image loomed in the monitor as he leaned toward the camera.

“Just so as we’re clear. I don’t blame you for the Anderson-Miyazaki thing, either. I know you went to the mat. It was almost like they were using it as a lesson.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Do you really want to go there?”

“Probably not, but go on.”