Designated Targets

Dan Black would normally have handled this meeting, but he was still in New York on leave with his girlfriend, the reporter.

“You’re a lucky man, Commander Black,” he muttered to himself as he reached the exit, where his PA was waiting for him. And then he grinned, because it wasn’t so long ago that the idea of spending three days in the company of Julia Duffy would have filled him with creeping horror. He supposed everything was relative.

“Turboprops. Those are really worth the effort,” someone called out across the room in a strident voice.

“God help us,” Kolhammer said to himself as Lieutenant Willy Liao fell in beside him.

Kolhammer put his head down and hurried on out of the room. The briefing notes from the meeting would be on his system by that afternoon, and some of them might even be useful, but only insofar as they supported the decisions he’d already made. It was important to give everyone a say, especially with the “old” armed forces being in a state of high anxiety about their collective futures. In the end, however, Phillip Kolhammer firmly believed in the old saying that a cow was a racehorse designed by committee. And he’d be damned if he was going to sit around waiting for this committee to decide on how best to scratch its own ass.

Liao handed him a flexipad with about a hundred documents to be signed. He scribbled out one electronic signature which the document manager then affixed to each file. The young officer was ferociously competent, and Kolhammer knew there was no point wasting his own time checking each paper individually.

“Am I still on for that meet later today?” asked the admiral.

“In one hour twenty minutes,” Liao answered. “You have a video link to General Groves booked in five minutes, sir. Then you are scheduled to inspect the new Boeing plant and progress on the new lots at Andersonville.”

“How many people are under canvas out there?” he asked as they hurried down the stairs and out into the surprisingly warm late afternoon sunshine.

“Eighteen thousand in tents. Another fifteen thousand are moving into the Quonset huts, which went up last week. And they’re just the workers. Most haven’t brought their families with them yet.”

Kolhammer sucked air in through his teeth. It was an unconscious gesture he’d picked up from his old man. Whenever Dave Kolhammer popped the lid of the family car to tinker with the recalcitrant engine, he’d suck air in through his gritted teeth just like that. “Do we have any better estimates of population growth over the next six months?” the admiral quizzed his PA again.

“Nine percent a month, at present rates. But of course, the new factories will start coming online very soon, and that will pull even more manpower in.”

Kolhammer nodded silently as they reached his Humvee.

This was not what he expected to be doing when he joined the navy.

As the heat leaked out of the day, he drove himself up to Mulholland Drive, pulling off the road and into a culvert just before the Hollywood Hills. The teleconference with Leslie Groves had gone as expected. The director of the Manhattan Project had huffed and puffed and demanded more resources and staff from Kolhammer. The admiral blocked and dodged and had given up about one tenth of what he’d been asked for. But that was it, he’d decided. The well was dry. There was nothing and nobody else he could send to Oak Ridge or Los Alamos that was going to appreciably speed up the process. Groves and Oppenheimer already had hundreds of his best officers and technical specialists. Indeed, the Clinton’s fusion reactors were being run by a skeleton staff because so many had been transferred to the A-bomb project. And Groves had grabbed up more than his fair share of the IT systems that had been salvaged and stripped from all over the Multinational Force. His work was definitely of prime importance, given the Nazi’s own accelerated nuclear programs, but it wasn’t the only game in town.

That thought led naturally to his next meeting, an altogether more informal affair. He’d driven across the San Fernando Valley, with an escort, a Navy SEAL, ghosting him in a black Packard, watching for tails. Hoover’s men were everywhere, but their field-craft hadn’t been honed in a vicious twenty-year holy war. Chief Petty Officer Vincente Rogas was more than capable of seeing them off.

It hadn’t been necessary, however. Kolhammer had driven through the flatlands north of Ventura, through remnant beet fields and walnut groves, past vast tracts of dry, coarse grassland and abandoned orchards, all staked out and fenced off for housing development in the coming months. He’d swung through the established settlements of Encino and Woodland Hills, tracked the whole time by both Rogas and a high-altitude surveillance drone that scanned for patterns in the thin traffic on the valley floor that might indicate he picked up a tail.

There was nothing.