Designated Targets

The building sat in a tight cluster of similarly unimposing structures, at the western edge of the Valley, in a huge agglomeration of half-built factories, empty warehouses, and unfinished offices known collectively as Area 51.

Kolhammer couldn’t recall which of his underlings had first coined the name for the facility, but it had stuck, largely because it appealed to his own quietly mordant sense of humor. Half the country seemed to imagine that dark conspiracies were carried out there as a matter of daily routine. In truth, most of his time was taken up with land development, transport, housing, and industrial project management.

He had effectively become the mayor of the greatest boomtown in U.S. history, and he spent a good deal of his down time wishing he was still a junior officer, so the Zone would have been somebody else’s headache. Then he’d be free to go off and fly jets. Or even build them, which was one of the things the R & D group met to thrash out every Friday morning.

On this particular Friday, with the formal part of the meeting over, everyone had broken down into smaller discussion groups scattered at tables throughout the room, to knock heads over things that should have been easily resolved. The main problem, Kolhammer had found, was the seemingly infinite bounty of knowledge the Multinational Force had brought through the wormhole. This seemed to induce a state he’d once heard described as “option paralysis.”

He could feel his patience running out as he moved through the briefing room, on the way back to his own office.

“We should just forget the torpedo problem,” one of his officers was arguing, “and concentrate on mines instead. Those babies sank more tonnage than any other weapon, and in fact—if I recall correctly—more than all the other weapon types combined in the Pacific theater.”

At the next table, a marine, one of Lonesome’s people, was counting off points on his fingers as he tried to make his pitch for the projects he thought should get priority. “We need to begin immediate mass production of the Vought F-Four-U-One Corsair,” he said emphatically. “It was a tough, reliable ground-attack fighter which saw constant active service through to the end of the Korean War. It’ll make a huge difference in the Pacific, in places like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, when we finally get there.”

A ’temp, an army captain, made another point. “I agree that we have to keep on building the Sherman, to make the best of a bad situation. But what would even the odds against the Axis tanks—and the Soviets, if that became necessary—would be upgunning it straight away to the E-Eight Super Sherman. Those were originally produced in late ’44, as the result of two years’ hard combat experience, and the technical data is available immediately, in the goddamn Fleetnet lattice.”

Another captain put down the flexipad he’d been waving around and held up a finger. “We ought to be spending a helluva lot more time on psyops. The Sovs and the Nazis are absolutely goring themselves, because Stalin and Hitler can’t trust anyone, now that they’ve found out what’s gonna happen—”

A contemporary navy officer interrupted him. “With all due respect, that’s an interesting sociological point, but it’s not a technical one . . .”

Kolhammer heard a civilian contractor arguing that it would take too long to build a jet fighter, and that it wouldn’t give the Allies much of an advantage, anyway.

“From what I’ve read, all the early jets were fuel hogs, with a short range. If we want to quickly build a fighter for air superiority, I’d be marrying the P-Fifty-one with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. We had plans to do this before you guys turned up. You get a P-Fifty-one-D in squadron service by February next year, and you’ve got a reliable long-range fighter which can outperform anything the Luftwaffe or Japs can throw at it.”

Kolhammer guessed the man was working for the division of North American Aviation, who were hoping to get the P-Fifty-one into the air before the F-86 made it redundant.

A group of army officers, all of them ’temps, were arguing energetically just a few feet away from him, about the Australian government’s decision to ram through production of a variant AK-47.

A Lieutenant Hunt was in the throes of delight discussing the unrealistic prospect of building large numbers of FN Minimi squad machine guns.

A Captain Ken Young, an English Guardsman, cut across him, as if he had never spoken. “You know, if you Yanks had been serious about replacing the BAR, there were plenty of alternative designs available from the Lewis to the Bren, or even the Johnson.”

“The Lewis?” spluttered an American. “You can’t be serious? The BAR might be flawed, but the Lewis is a piece of crap. Haven’t you read these briefing papers? There are something like fifty different types of jams just waiting to screw up that gun, and the pan magazine is an abortion.”

Kolhammer sighed, and wondered where that turn of phrase had come from.