Designated Targets

His usual policy was to invest massively for the short-term gain. This war wasn’t going to be won by the side that launched the first orbital rocket. More prosaic advances like a good grenade launcher, a better tank with a more powerful gun, penicillin, and smarter human resource management were the paths to victory. Even so, 4CI—command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence—were still the key to dominating the battlespace of the future, and he was not going to let anyone get a march on the U.S. in these fields.

Kolhammer couldn’t shake his frustration at the makeshift data links that forced them to patch together relays and jerry-built networks like the one he’d just used to talk to Mike Judge. It was annoying as hell. Although he still had Fleetnet access on his desktop, it was restricted to material that had been archived in the lattice memory of the Task Force ships when they were ripped out of their own time. Not only did they have to deal with the comm-links, but they had lost access to the almost infinite resources of the Web, as well.

He supposed he shouldn’t really complain. He was old enough to remember life before quantum computing. Hell, he could even recall his old man setting up the family’s first TRS 80, with a magnificent 4K of RAM and a tape cassette for permanent file storage. But having grown used to what now felt like infinite bandwidth and processing capacity, it was maddening to have to deal with scarcity again.

As he reviewed the discussion with Judge, the admiral felt a nagging sense of having forgotten something. He flicked an eye over his handwritten notes. Nothing there.

He was about to shut down his computer for the night when it came to him. Judge had asked him about the Soviets. They were the great unknown. Would they sit out the whole war, conserving their strength? Would they attack Hitler when he was fully engaged in Western Europe? Or would they turn on their former allies, the liberal democracies, which seemed fated to consign them to the garbage dump of history? Apart from signing a separate cease-fire with Hitler, and impounding the ships of Convoy PQ 17 when they arrived in port at Murmansk, the Kremlin had given no indication of which way it might lean in the future. The intelligence services of the West were devoting enormous resources to the riddle of Soviet intentions, but so far to no avail.

Kolhammer rubbed at a headache building in his temples as he contemplated the problem. Without the satellite capabilities he’d left behind on the other side of the wormhole, there didn’t seem to be much he could contribute. He’d largely been left out of discussions on the issue in Washington.

But that didn’t mean he was content to leave the matter in the hands of the ’temps. In some ways it suited him to be out of the loop. The KGB had so many moles in the West at this time that Kolhammer was happier to work on his own. In the twenty years he’d been fighting a holy war, there’d been some staggering advances in electronic intelligence gathering. But there had also been a return to the basics. Spy cameras in low Earth orbit were great for some things. But there was nothing like having a real pair of eyes on the target.

Kolhammer leaned forward and cut the power to his computer. As secure as it was, it held no files of any relevance. The covert team he had sent into the Soviet Union were from the Quiet Room.

They didn’t exist.

YAKUTSK, SIBERIA, USSR

Without GPS, they would have been lost, were it not for the guide. Major Pavel Ivanov had seen a great deal of his homeland during the long wars of the twenty-first century. His duties as a Spetsnaz officer had taken him to a dozen different former Soviet republics, to fight enemies as diverse as death-obsessed Muslim jihadi and private mercenary forces serving the Motherland’s oligarchic supercapitalists. He had seen the slaughter at Beslan, taken part in the even bloodier siege of the Cathedral of the Resurrection in Saint Petersburg, and fought all over the Central Siberian Plateau during the Chinese incursions. He knew Chechnya and Kazakhstan and Georgia better than he knew his family home in Saratov. But he had never been to Yakutsk.

The old Korean who had agreed to lead them had spent eight years in a labor camp on the Lena River and was convinced that Ivanov and his team were White Russian grandees, or maybe Cossacks. For Mr. Kim that was enough to explain why they would be fighting the Bolsheviks. He had not heard of the Transition, and had goggled at Ivanov as though confronted by an escaped lunatic when the Special Forces officer tried to explain.

They had decided, in the end, that Mr. Kim should just think of them any way that suited him.

The guide was sleeping now in the back room of the cabin, cocooned in a thick Polarguard sleeping bag, snoring loudly, his belly full of self-heating MREs. He was in heaven. Ivanov was not.