Designated Targets

She’d originally agreed to do the gig because Ronald Reagan was supposed to be on stage, along with the monkey from Bedtime for Bonzo. Well, actually, it wasn’t the real monkey, which probably hadn’t been born yet. Bedtime was originally filmed in 1951. Instead, it had been telerecorded onto celluloid by Universal Studios, and it was one of the most popular movies of the year.

Now Reagan couldn’t get in from the West Coast, what with all the terrorist bombings, so Edward Gargan, who played Policeman Bill in Bedtime, had been sent in his place.

But there was another reason Julia had been dragooned into this animal act, and he was sitting next to her on the hard wooden bench: Sergeant Snider, of the USMC. He was in line for a Medal of Honor, or at least a Silver Star, for his bravery on the Brisbane Line.

Julia didn’t hold it against him, though. Snider was all right, and she couldn’t begrudge him living off the publicity tit. He’d done more than his fair share, and he was never going to walk freely again, thanks to his wounds. It was just that she had better things to be doing than entertaining a room full of hicks in order to get them to fork over—what, ten or twenty bucks each for the war effort?

There was no getting out of it, though. Her chief of staff, Blundell, said that if she was going to be a “celebrity reporter,” there were certain obligations that came with the job. She wasn’t sure whether he was insulting her with that “celebrity” stuff. She knew there were plenty on the paper who resented it. Harold Denny, one of the other war correspondents, had told her to her face that she was “all surface, even at the core.”

She’d punched him out.

Maybe that was why she’d been sent upstate. As punishment.

Her flexipad was set to silent mode, and it began to vibrate on her hip. She considered faking an emergency to take the call and escape, but before she could do that, Policeman Bill had finished up, and she was being called to the podium to tell her stories about how Sergeant Snider had saved the world.

Two hours later, the hall was emptying of people. She’d been signing autographs and answering questions and was actually starting to dig the whole thing. She took a particular delight in telling a couple of teenaged girls to forget about boys and to concentrate on their studies, and to see if they could get a copy of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or Greer’s The Female Eunuch from one of the mail-order companies that were springing up in the Zone.

Later on, she could remember Snider asking her if she wanted to get a cup of joe before she drove back to Manhattan, but she couldn’t recall powering up the Ericsson and finding the message from Rosanna.

Except it wasn’t from Rosanna. It was from a well-spoken Japanese Navy officer who identified himself in perfect English as Commander Jisaku Hidaka, interim military governor of Hawaii.

He was standing in a bare room.

Rosanna was seated in front of him, sobbing.

“Miss Duffy,” he said. “You will relay this message to your leaders. Hawaii is under the control of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Your countrymen are being well treated. If there is any attempt to retake the island, however, every man and woman and child will be executed. This is not an empty threat.”

And with that he drew his pistol and shot her friend in the head.

For the first time in her life, Julia Duffy fainted.

34

ALRESFORD AERODROME, HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND

They hadn’t even finished transferring their kit to the jeep when the copilot broke in over tac net.

“Excuse me, gentlemen. German air assault, gliders and Junkers, twenty-one minutes out. CI had confirmed this field as the likely DZ.”

Harry told his men to finish up as quickly as they could. He climbed up into the jeep, standing in the rear with one boot on the spare tire. This airfield wasn’t a major facility. It was a dispersal point, a place to hide precious fighters to protect them from bombing raids on the main centers like Biggin Hill. Mostly it consisted of a small control tower, a couple of Nissan huts, and a grass runway. There were no serviceable aircraft on the ground at the moment. Almost all the RAF and its Allied Air Forces were aloft.

That was probably why the Jerries were planning to use it as a landing field. Nice location, no resistance to speak of.

The aerodrome was set amongst farmland just over a hundred miles to the southwest of London. The nearest settlement was a village, which had grown up around a Norman-era church. There were no major military bases nearby. The full complement of the airfield came to 129 ground crew, air defense guards, and administrative staff. Some two dozen of them had gathered a short distance away to watch the helicopter land and disembark its passengers.

Harry called over his two demolition specialists. Bolt and Akerman.

“Andy, Piers, you’ve got fifteen minutes to turn that runway into a serious hazard to human life. Go!”