Designated Targets

It was the same fury that had driven her to the edge of reason back at the prison camp in Cabanatuan, when she’d capped off five Japanese guards and their commander. She’d earned a reprimand from Jones for that—for carrying out a Sanction 4 punishment without a properly cosigned authority. But none of those women was complaining, and she wasn’t losing any sleep over it.

“Major Francois. I need your okay to release the battalion store of amoxicillin, ma’am. It’s the last we’ve got.”

She wrenched herself out of the spiral of dark thoughts that was threatening to drag her under. A corporal was holding out a flexipad and plastic pen.

“Sure,” she muttered, more to herself than to the corporal; then she signed out the last of their broad-spectrum antibiotics. They had originally been intended for the Chinese internees at the caliphate’s detention centers on Java, back in twenty-one.

“Major Francois, ma’am,” another voice called out, “we just lost those ’temp surgeons flying up out of Brisbane, ma’am. Their plane crashed on takeoff at Archerfield.”

Then another: “Major Francois, we’re going to need you in surgery, ma’am. That antitank round fucked up Bukowksi a lot worse than we thought.”

It felt like she’d stepped through a portal into purgatory: the coppery stink of blood, the stench of putrescent flesh, the stink of voided bowels, the screams, the sobbing, the madness and horror that were her natural working environment.

Her flexipad beeped and pinged with constant messages, queries, demands for action, and solutions to impossible problems.

The human part of her wanted to walk away. But Michael Cooper hadn’t given up, and he had faced a much more daunting challenge.

“Get me some more surgeons,” she told the orderly who’d delivered the bad news out of Archerfield. “We’ve been training hundreds of them down in Sydney and Melbourne. We got fuckin’ surgeons to burn.”

Then she turned to the runner who’d been sent to bring her back to the operating room.

“Tell them I’ll suit up in five,” she said.

She unclipped the flexipad from her belt and ignored the hundreds of messages stacking up in her in-tray. She fired off quick, brutal messages to half a dozen people who were dragging their feet at various points between here and Brisbane. She told them to get their thumbs out of their asses and send her the drugs, dressings, and personnel she had asked for when the battalion left the Brisbane Line. She threatened to personally shoot anyone who didn’t do exactly as she ordered.

The stories about what she’d done at Cabanatuan lent the threat some real heft.

Just before she headed back to the operating theater, she grabbed a passing corpsman and tasked him with finding Dr. Cooper in exactly one hour. “Knock him out with a taser if you have to,” she said. “That man needs to get some rest. Hell, we may need him back here before long.”

She ignored the insistent beeping of the flexipad. It had been doing that ever since she’d jumped from the rear of the LAV and run toward the first cries of “Medic!” hours earlier.

There were close to nine hundred unanswered routine vidmails and e-mails in the lattice memory of her pad. There was only one she would later regret failing to get to in time.

21

THE WOLFSCHANZE, EAST PRUSSIA

Despite the unmasking of von Stauffenberg and his murderous cabal of plotters, the führer still felt safest at the Wolfschanze. In truth, this was a testament to his personal bravery, and strength of will.

Of course, Himmler mused, the assassin’s bomb that would have been planted there in July of ’44 would never materialize. He had made sure of that. Anyone even remotely connected with that act of treason had already been killed. As had their extended families, their friends, and any possible accomplices. He had even eliminated some whose names were not found in the Fleetnet files, but upon whom suspicion fell anyway.

His Mercedes hummed through the thick stands of pine and birch that made up the Goerlitz forest, where elk and wild horse still roamed free, through the steep-sided valleys and troughs carved out by massive glaciers in the distant past. As they sped along the road to the bunker complex, the SS chief felt his spirits lifting for the first time in months.

Thankfully, the worst of the traitor-hunt was now behind them. Rebellious elements of the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine had been brought to heel with exemplary severity. Some useful men had been lost, it was true. And he was the first to admit that it was more than possible that innocent blood had been spilled. But the revelations furnished by the Emergence demanded resolute action. The vengeance of the Black Angels, falling on those who would have failed the führer, had been swift and terrible to behold—as history demanded that it must be.