Designated Targets

Very few civilians remained in Townsville. A massive garrison was growing quickly on the ashes of the old town, however. Acres of tents breathed slowly in the hot, humid air, which smelled of diesel, sweat, and burnt offerings. A “Negro” battalion, the Ninety-first Engineers, was busily running up more permanent structures, adding the sound of their hammers and tools to the grunt of bulldozers clearing away rubble, deuce-and-a-halves delivering men and matériel, choppers thudding back and forth to the Task Force, and men and women cursing and laughing, shouting orders, and talking shit.

Jones returned the sharp salutes of a couple of privates from the Ninety-first as they passed by. He wasn’t sure, but he suspected they’d gone out of their way to cross his path and get his attention. Behind the mirrored blades, his face was unmoved as he walked on, but he couldn’t help the stirring beneath his breastbone. Those men were proud, and not just of their uniforms. His company clerk had to field hundreds of requests every day for transfer into the Eighty-second, from men like that. He was sorry that he couldn’t take them, but they would need at least two years of retraining before they were ready to join a squad and carry a G4.

Or an AK-47.

Jones arrived at his Humvee, still shaking his head.

“Aerodrome, Colonel?” his driver asked.

“Thanks, Shauna. But we need to swing by Second Cav and pick up Colonel Toohey first. I’m giving him a lift to Brisbane.”

Jones allowed the motion of the vehicle to lull him into a drowsy state as they motored over to the Australian camp. He’d been off the stim for a couple of days, but his sleep patterns would take another week to settle down. He’d almost dozed off when his flexipad began to ping at him. He nearly missed the call, as he started to half dream about a pinball game he used to play on his old Pentium as a teenager.

“Sir. Colonel Jones, sir. You’ve got a call coming in.”

Jones was a little embarrassed to be caught out, and found himself uncharacteristically apologizing to the driver. He must have been really out of it.

He shook his head to clear the cobwebs and took the call, a live link from the Kandahar. It was Major Francois, the battalion surgeon.

“’S’up Margie?” he asked.

“We got him, Colonel. We got the fucker who killed Anderson and Miyazaki, back in Pearl.”

Suddenly Jones was wide awake.

“I can’t believe I missed this!” she said angrily. “I set this whole fucking system up just to scan for this one thing, this one fucking thing, and then when it works, I’m too fucking lazy to check back and see. Meantime this asshole’s been living high on the hog. I just can’t believe it.”

“Don’t beat yourself up, Doc,” said Jones, looking over her shoulder at the computer screen in her quarters back on the Kandahar. “It looks like you’ve got, what, four and a half thousand messages there, and eight hundred are marked priority one. You were busying saving lives. The dead can wait.”

She looked like she was about to beat on herself some more.

“I knew Anderson,” he said, cutting her off. “She’d come back from the grave and give you an ass-kickin’ if she thought you put a Band-Aid on someone with anything less than perfect care, just because of her.”

“Well, what are we going to do, then?” Francois asked, turning self-recrimination into angry indignation.

Jones looked at the name on screen, and was lost for an immediate answer. “I don’t know. At least not right now. It’s going to be sticky. We’ll need to talk to Kolhammer first.”

Francois looked as if she was going to go for his throat. Or someone else’s—

“Belay that, Major,” he warned her. “You go taking a potshot at this guy before you’ve got him dead in your sights, and he will get clean away. You’re not the person to do this, anyway. Not after Cabanatuan. You’re compromised.”

The surgeon’s face flushed bright red and then drained of all color as her anger imploded into a small, dense ball of rage. Jones knew his chief medical officer all too well.

“Listen, I know you were the ranking officer. And I know you exercised your prerogatives under Sanction Four. But then, I know what that means, and accept it as valid. Almost nobody outside the Task Force will agree, Margie.”

“That’s just fucking politics, and you know it, Lonesome.”

“That’s right, and if we’re not careful, politics are going to fuck us just as surely as bombs and bullets. We are going to deal with this, but not by charging in and capping this asshole as though we’ve got a perfect right to do so.”

“But we do!”

“Not here, we don’t. Now, sit down, chill out, and give me some time to think this through. I’m already late for a meeting with MacArthur. We’ll talk about this tomorrow. But we do not, under any circumstances, go off the reservation with this. You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” she grumbled.

It was the grumble that let him know he’d convinced her. She was always a sore loser.