Designated Targets

Still Dupleix had been an idiot, like most of the crew. The Dessaix hadn’t been like his posting on the frigate Masson. There he’d been amongst like-minded men. The Masson’s captain had had a brother-in-law who was a deputy minister in the new government, and the captain had shared his sibling’s enthusiasm for the policies of the National Front.

That was only natural, after the Paris intifada and the atrocity of Marseilles. How anyone could think otherwise—well, it was beyond Le Roux’s understanding.

Yet he had been on board the Dessaix for only two weeks when the ship’s executive officer, Lieutenant Underzo, had frog-marched him into the capitaine’s quarters to receive a terrible dressing down. Capitaine Goscinny did not think it appropriate for a senior member of his crew to be actively politicking belowdecks, whether it was in behalf of the government or against. The old fool had insisted that Le Roux cease all political activity forthwith, or face charges when they returned from their Indonesian deployment to the Pacific Fleet base in Noumea.

It was all he could do not to laugh in the man’s face.

This was exactly the sort of thinking that had so very nearly led France into ruin under the socialists. Old farts like Goscinny had given the country over to illiterate migrants and jihadi scum, and it was only when the streets were finally running with blood that they admitted they might have been wrong.

Still, when Goscinny had upbraided him, Le Roux had bolted a mask onto his face, saluted, and barked “Yessir!” But in his mind he was already composing the letter to his old capitaine, asking him to forward a complaint to the navy’s political investigators and outlining Goscinny’s antipatriotic tendencies. Perhaps, if the capitaine could speak with his brother-in-law, the deputy minister, things might be resolved even more quickly.

The microwave pinged now, bringing him back to the present, and he removed a steaming hot Sara Lee brioche—God help him. As he carefully tore open the pastry and watched the chocolate sauce spill out, he had to smile at the memory of the last time he had seen Goscinny, naked and beaten to a purple pulp in the Gestapo cells at Lyon.

True to form, the dumb bastard had failed to see what a gift the Emergence had been. It had put them in a place where they could ensure that Frenchmen would determine the future of France, not a cabal of mad mullahs and bearded nuts. And perhaps just as important, it meant that with bold action they could also check the rise of America, the nation most to blame for the ills of the world.

After all, who had created bin Laden, the first of so many Islamist heroes? And whose appetite for oil had funded the Saudis, who in turn funded the madrassas of so many of the Wahhabi lunatics who had overrun the slums of Paris? It was the United States, Le Roux mused, who had turned the Middle East into a sinkhole of violence and Islamist revolt thanks to its support of Israel, its occupation of Iraq, its bombing of Iran, and its wars against Syria and Yemen.

Le Roux ate the brioche slowly, enjoying it in spite of himself, and enjoying also the prospect that lay before him. The prospect of rewriting history.

It mattered little that most of the men on board the Dessaix had gone into the cells at Lyon rather than serve the Republic by seizing a chance to wipe out eighty years of mistakes and perfidy. Some of them were those traitorous bastards who’d only pretended to agree with him. But they’d got theirs, in the end.

Yes, it was his ship now. The Boche needed him.

He washed down his snack with a mouthful of black coffee and stared in distaste at the two Indonesians eating some foul-smelling rice dish across the room from him. They had no language in common, but even if they did, he would not have spoken to them. He knew from the wailing that filled the ship five times a day that they were Islamists. Not jihadi, to be sure—he would never have allowed them on the ship, no matter what the Germans said.

He dreamed of a day when he could go about his business as a Frenchman and not be assailed by some illiterate ditchdigger droning on about the Koran. The sooner they trained some of his countrymen to operate this ship, the better.

“Warrant Officer, your colleague, Danton, tells us we have moved beyond the range of the enemy’s sensors, and that we may soon use our own arrays. Do you agree?”

Le Roux almost choked on the last piece of brioche. He hadn’t noticed Hidaka approaching. He nodded and hastily stood up, brushing crumbs from his shirt, smearing it with a dollop of hot chocolate sauce in the process. “Oui,” he coughed. “But let us be safe and say another hour before Danton can turn on the arrays. He can set them to look forward, so that there is less chance of their being detected. Then we make the rendezvous, non?”

The Asian shot him an irritated look, but nodded curtly.