John Birmingham: Final impact

“Not much of a welcome home, is it?” mused Lieutenant Lohrey, her intelligence boss.

“Not much,” Willet agreed.

There were only a few sailboats out on the deep, and no RAN vessels or officials to greet them.

“We are having a reception at town hall tomorrow, remember,” the captain offered a little weakly.

“Whacko,” said Flemming.

“Spiffing,” Lohrey agreed in the same monotone.

Willet smiled thinly and muttered, “Wankers.”

They passed the cliffs at Vaucluse in companionable silence, watching as the lighthouse drew up, then slipped behind them. Soon enough they were turning to port for the run in to Sydney Harbor, and as Willet was afforded a better look inside the vast anchorage, her heart began to beat harder. A real smile broke out, lighting up her face.

The entire harbor was choked with flotillas of sailcraft and warships. A dozen ferries, all of them crowded with cheering and waving spectators, were drawn up in the waters off Manly Pier. Tugboats pumped huge white geysers from their fire hoses, high into the sky, forming rainbows as the winter sunlight refracted through the falling spray. Horns began to blare. Whistles shrieked and tooted. And Willet could feel in her chest the roar of what had to be a million voices raised in acclamation of their return. She wanted to speak but a lump in her throat prevented any words from coming. She swallowed and tried again, beaming as she turned to Lohrey. “Amanda, you’d better make sure the crew can see this on shipnet. They’re gonna be pissed if they miss it.”

The Havoc’s intelligence chief sported a rather sheepish grin. “Already taken care of, skipper.”

Willet narrowed her eyes in suspicion. “You knew? You knew this was waiting for us and you didn’t say anything?”

Lohrey showed her a pair of open, honest palms. “Orders from the PM, ma’am. Mr. Curtin was adamant that this was to be a surprise party. He’s waiting for us at Woolloomooloo along with an honor guard, our families, such as they are, and a couple of hundred freeloading dignitaries.”

Willet’s curse was lost in the roar of six RAAF jet fighters sweeping overhead, waggling their wings and trailing green and gold smoke, a nice uptime touch. A battery at the North Head artillery school commenced a twenty-one-gun salute.

The captain of His Majesty’s Australian Ship Havoc saw almost none of it as tears dissolved the scene into a swirling miasma of color. She felt Roy Flemming’s hard, leathery hand slap her once on the back.

“Good job, skipper. Good fucking job.”

7 AUGUST, 1944.

CANADA.

Paul Brasch stepped lightly out of the jeep and thanked the driver before collecting his duffel bag. Night was falling on the small lakeside village; one bright star had already appeared in the east, a single point of light in a burned orange sky. Without the wind of the jeep’s passage, he became aware of a rich stew of unfamiliar scents and the chaotic overture of birdsong and insect calls.

The village, a tiny hamlet that serviced the local salmon-fishing industry, was a good mile around the curve of the lake. He caught the briefest hint of singing and a piano playing as the breeze changed direction for a moment. And then it was gone again, and he was left alone at the end of the long gravel roadway down to the waterfront cabin.

The sound of the jeep’s engine faded away, and he began to walk. With each step he found his throat growing tighter, and his eyes bleary with the first tears he had shed in an age. He walked slowly, taking in the magnificent view and the quiet peace that surrounded him, hoping to compose himself before meeting his wife and son. He had no idea whether they would stay here in this obscure part of Canada, no idea what the rest of their lives would bring. He had money enough to give them a new life anywhere in the free world, but perhaps, for the next little while, they might just sit quietly here by the edge of this lake and wonder at the miracle that had delivered them from evil.

Brasch was imagining long fishing trips with little Manny, and the first night he would spend in bed with his wife, when a small, piping voice brought his head up with a start.

“Papa! Papa!”

It was Manfred and Willie, both of them running up the path toward him, arms out, their cheeks red and wet with tears of joy. But there was something wrong with the boy’s face and his voice. Brasch experienced a second of free-floating panic and then realized what was so different. Manny’s voice was clear and his mouth a perfect O as he ran toward his long-lost daddy. The cleft palate with which he’d been born-the small deformity that would inevitably have seen him fed into the ovens of the Reich at some point-was gone. Fixed by surgery, he supposed.

But gone. Gone forever.

“Papa! Papa!”

Paul Brasch, the good German, dropped his duffel bag and ran toward them.

7 AUGUST 1944.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.

“So when are you starting work, ma’am.”

Mohr’s voice was a raspy bellow in her ear. It had to be, or she would never have heard him over the roar of the nightclub.

“Please, Eddie!” she yelled back. “Would you knock it off with the ma’am-and-skipper routine. We’re not on the quarterdeck and I’m not even a captain anymore. Karen will be fine.”

The big chief petty officer smiled and winked. “Right you are, ma’am. Karen it is, then, skipper.”

His face glistened with sweat, and stage lighting glinted off his scalp beneath the short back and sides. Karen Halabi rolled her eyes, but she, too, was smiling. She was free. She was alive. She was a little bit drunk. And she was married to the greatest guy in the world who was, at that very moment, up on stage, playing his beloved electric guitar in public for the first time in three years. Mike was a little rusty, but like everyone in the Palomino Club he was also drunk and happy and well beyond caring whether his version of “Smoke on the Water” paid sufficient homage to the original. The guys in his garage band were all uptimers and they were just loving the chance to play some old-school rock and roll for the heaving crowd of Zoners and Angelinos who gathered at the Palomino four nights a week to dance along to some kickin’ tunes.

“So, you didn’t answer my question…Karen. When d’you start?”

Halabi finished her beer and signaled an overworked bartender for two more as Mike and the boys started in on their version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

“Next Monday morning,” she shouted back at Mohr. “So Mike and I have a few days left yet. He has an extra week’s leave, so he’s going to be getting the house set up, making my dinner, ironing my shirts. All the old-fashioned corporate-wife stuff.”

Eddie Mohr, the master chief of the USS Hillary Clinton, grinned like an old fox at the henhouse door. “Will he now?”

Halabi punched him on the arm. “And you won’t be teasing him about it either, Chief. I’ve got a good housebroken man up there on that stage, and he’s going to stay broken. Understand?”

The beers arrived and Karen paid for them with her Combat Optics credit card. The guys at CO had insisted she take it as soon as she signed her employment contract. As senior vice president in charge of R D she enjoyed a generous personal expense account over and above her corporate allowance. The combined sum of the two was appreciably more than her husband pulled in as a U.S. Navy captain, and the sign-on bonus had been generous enough to pay cash for their beachfront house in San Diego. It wasn’t in-Zone, but she’d found to her delight that the U.S. West Coast felt a lot more like her sort of place than she could have hoped for back in the UK. Probably something to do with being in the New World.