Designated Targets

His dad died in a coal gas explosion in August of ’34, and his ma had passed away a week later. Died of a broken heart, they said, although Julia insisted that it was more likely to have been a stress-related myocardial infarction. Dan preferred the romantic explanation.

He’d been on the Roosevelt program in California by then, and hadn’t been able to get back in time for his dad’s funeral, or his mother’s broken heart. No matter how sensible and level-headed Julia was about it, he still felt that if he’d just been able to afford a train ticket, he might have saved her from dying of her grief.

Those memories hadn’t afflicted him in two or three years, but they came rushing back as the big Lockheed Constellation banked over the San Fernando Valley and turned its nose toward home.

Well, not home, exactly. Grantville didn’t boast an airport of any kind, and he wouldn’t be visiting his old stomping grounds. But to Commander Dan Black, heading East still meant heading home even if he’d be spending all his time in Washington and New York.

He had two days of briefings ahead of him in the capital, and three days’ leave in the Big Apple. He’d made a play of refusing the leave when Kolhammer had first suggested it. But the admiral had been all the more insistent when he found out that Julia would be back from Down Under and working out of the Times office while Dan was there. He hadn’t kicked too hard, though. He really needed to see her.

On his lap he had yesterday’s edition of the paper, folded over to obscure her last piece off the Brisbane Line, a pen portrait of some jarhead who was lined up for a medal after routing a Japanese ambush. He wouldn’t read it until they’d leveled off. Julia’s stories were always a waking nightmare for Dan. She wrote very differently from Ernie Pyle or any of those guys. Her pieces were like war novels. He often wondered how they got past the censors. They were always vivid and incredibly violent, and she was always right there in the middle of the action.

Her voice was always there, too, though, and that’s why he never missed one, no matter how much they gave him the heebie-jeebies. He could always hear her speaking as he read.

The Connie’s four shining Wright R3350 engines strained for maximum power as they sought altitude, the brand-new computer-designed propellers biting into the hot dry air of the L.A. Basin with an extra 20 percent efficiency. He’d led a group of Army Air Force generals through the factory two days earlier, and had told them all about the redesign. Below him, in the western reaches of the San Fernando Valley, he could see the huge complex of half-finished buildings and bare excavation sites that formed Andersonville and Area 51, the dormitory and production centers for the Special Administrative Zone. He was sitting on the wrong side of the plane to catch sight of the military camps that had sprung up to house the expanding Auxiliary Forces, but he spent most of his workday shuttling among them, and knew they were almost as big.

From this height, however, he was surprised by how much ground the new developments covered, and he wondered how long it would be before the entire valley floor was carpeted with asphalt, tract homes, and factories. About twelve months, he guessed, if they kept expanding at this rate.

The ground glistened, as though they flew over thousands of lakes and ponds, but he knew that it was just metal and glass. You couldn’t hope to defeat—or even contain—the sort of energy that had been unleashed down there, he mused. The plane he sat in had come out of a massive new plant, right over there near the Verdugo Hills. Squinting his eyes against the glare of reflected sunlight, he thought he could pick out another three or four new aero plants, all of them working with some element of twenty-first-century technology, even if it was just a single computer.

Of course, there had to be places like this in Japan and Germany, as well. Or Poland, if the intelligence was right. They knew the krauts and the Japs had access to some of the same gear they did, computers and such, and even if they weren’t as powerful as the stuff they’d taken off the Clinton and the Leyte Gulf, there was no denying the fact that the enemy had some great engineers working for them.

Admiral Kolhammer said that a big chunk of America’s rocket program back in his time had been built with the help of Nazi scientists snatched right out of their laboratories at the end of the war. It didn’t bear thinking about, what those guys were doing with flexipads and computing machines. And even if the Nazis weren’t sharing with the Commies, you had to figure old Joe Stalin would do what he could to steal anything he needed to catch up.

He had to know that if and when Hitler knocked out Great Britain, it’d be his turn again. Made you wonder—

Dan was knocked out of his thoughts by an elbow to his ribs. “Hey, Mac, you got a light?”