Weapons of choice

"It's quite amazing," the president said. "Do you know they've sent nearly a hundred motion pictures, and thousands of books, all inside this box?"

Marshall, who'd just arrived from Washington, shook his head a fraction. He was still spinning from the cables he'd read on the flight over. He wasn't sure what had most upset him, the loss of the fleet or the arrival of the time travelers.

Goddamn!

Time travelers. Every time he used that cockamamie phrase he wanted to slap some sense into himself. But Roosevelt, King, and Eisenhower had all been out at the airfield when the rocket planes had come in. Eisenhower was still out at Muroc with Kolhammer's people and a dozen staff officers who'd flown across the continent overnight. King and the president, alone in the luxury suite except for the ubiquitous Secret Service detail, were still talking excitedly about the planes when Marshall arrived. And they weren't the only ones.

Down in Australia, MacArthur was already on the warpath, beating the drum so loudly you could hear him across the Pacific. He wanted Kolhammer's marines, the tanks, the planes. Everything. He wanted to take them to Tokyo next week. Marshall felt like he was a long way behind in the game of catch-up.

He snuck a glance at Admiral King. The navy chief and MacArthur openly despised each other, but there was an issue on which they were of one mind. Japan first. Marshall, who knew the real threat lay in Nazi Germany, was expecting to get caught in a pincer movement between them.

Despite the terrible losses at Midway, King seemed to have reconciled himself to the changed circumstances. He'd already presented the Joint Chiefs with his broad recommendations for deployment of the new assets. Unsurprisingly, under King's proposal none of them, not even the British forces that arrived with Kolhammer, would find their way back to the Atlantic. The old dog had even suggested allowing Kolhammer to retain control of his task force as an integrated unit, just to keep the ships together and concentrated in King's personal fiefdom, the Pacific.

If Marshall weren't careful and quick, Roosevelt would probably back the shift in strategy, just to regain some control over the runaway course of events.

The president certainly was taken with that electrical book, or whatever in hell it was.

"Will you look at this, General Marshall?" Roosevelt said with real wonder. "A space rocket to Mars."

24

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 1055 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

For just a second or two after that first moment of clarity, Lieutenant Rachel Nguyen had actually been relieved that, for the time being at least, she wouldn't have to write a doctoral thesis. Moment of clarity-also known as the "Oh, no" moment-was the term Margie Francois had coined for those few seconds of dizzying intellectual free fall that came on when you realized deep down in your bones that you had fallen through a hole in the universe. If you were going to check out for good, they said, you were mostly likely to do so within thirty minutes of your own moment of clarity.

After her momentary spurt of guilty glee, Rachel's reaction had shifted back toward the average, a mix of bewilderment and grief. Her first rational thought had been for her mother and father, who'd alternated between pride and alarm when confronted by their daughter's choice of a career in the navy. She was the only Nguyen daughter, and they'd been aghast at the possibility of losing her. Well, she thought ruefully, they've lost me now. She wasn't dead, but she felt so utterly lost it seemed as if she might as well be.

Such was her mood when the two reporters knocked on the door of her temporary office aboard the Clinton where she'd been transferred to work with a small group of history graduates. There was no escaping her damn degree.

"Hey, are you Rachel?" asked one of them. "I'm Julia Duffy, and this is Rosanna Natoli. The Hammer said we should come down and help you out."

"Cool," Nguyen said, though without much enthusiasm.

"Hey," Natoli said, "you an Aussie?"

Rachel glanced down at the shoulder patch displaying her national flag.

"Apparently."

"My cousin Stella married an Aussie. They moved to Melbourne. You from there? You might know them."

"Yeah, Stella from Melbourne. Everyone knows her."

"Jeez," said Duffy, "you're a bright beam of sunshine aren't you, Lieutenant."

"I'm sorry," said Rachel. "I was just thinking about my oldies. You know, my parents."

Natoli pulled a chair out, patted Rachel on the arm, and launched into a therapeutic routine that consisted of endless, labyrinthine tales of her five sisters' weddings and her own plans to get to New York as soon as possible to find her grandparents and tell them to invest in IBM. Julia Duffy drifted about the small office, which was fitted out with half a dozen workstations and a large whiteboard Nguyen had been filling up with a local time line of the last month and the next two.