John Birmingham - Final impact

That wouldn’t stop the Nazis, though, he supposed. Axis Sally had been taunting the Allies for weeks now, claiming that the Reich was just waiting for them to set foot on the Continent, giving them an excuse to use the first of their many, many A-bombs. Amundson glanced down, then back at the lead elements of the great fleet headed for the beaches of Calais. At least his squadron was probably too small a target to justify the use of such a weapon.

No, they were probably just gonna get chewed to bits by German jet fighters.

Ah, screw it.

He figured the same doubts were gnawing through every man in the operation. Eisenhower himself was probably being tortured by the same sort of fears. Ever since the Transition, so much was known, but so much more was unknowable.

There was one person who didn’t seem to give a shit, though, and she was sitting directly across from him. She was a civilian, but she’d seen more combat than any of them. Maybe even anyone in the whole squadron. Amundson knew a few guys who’d fought in the Pacific, but almost everyone else in the Seventh had never fired a shot-not in combat. Nor had they come under fire themselves.

But they’d trained as hard as any outfit in the world. And in one of those weird, head-spinning paradoxes, they’d learned the lessons of another D-Day, one that had taken place on another world. Amundson knew, for instance, that a field full of French cows most likely wasn’t mined, but if those cows kept staring at a bush or a hedgerow, there was probably a German hiding there. Their equipment was without a doubt the best. The poor old infantry, down in those Higgins boats, they didn’t get any Starlite goggles, or even body armor. And they were still armed with the M1 Garand, not the brand-new assault rifles with integrated grenade launchers.

But even though he’d been honed to a razor’s edge and was riding at the head of the most powerful cavalry unit ever assembled, Gil Amundson couldn’t help but wonder. Would he crumble when the first bullet zipped past? Would he freeze up over the Landing Zone? Would he fail his men? And would he look like a coward in front of this woman who seemed not to give a damn that they were less than an hour away from certain death?

The chopper banked sharply as the dark sky to the north suddenly filled with dozens of beautiful, sinuous lines of light. Tracer fire. Where the hell had that come from? They’d been told that the air force was going to bomb the coast back to the Stone Age.

He struggled to get a view back to the rest of the squadron, which followed the lead chopper. He heard the copilot calling in a position estimate for the antiaircraft batteries and half expected to see a couple of gunships peeling away to deal with them. But everyone stayed in formation, pressing on toward the objective.

They left the lead elements of the fleet behind them. The only movement on the sea was a rippling crescent of reflected moonlight as they sped on. The pilot’s voice crackled out of a speaker above Amundson’s head. “We’ll be over the coastline in five minutes.”

Amundson looked south as four gunships pulled ahead, their job to rake the ground clear of defenders. When he looked back at the woman, she was talking to Gadsden. Or rather he was yelling something in her ear. She smiled and nodded.

Amundson felt a brief, irrational surge of jealousy. He slowly and deliberately stamped it down. She wasn’t his girl, after all. They’d shared a bed in London for a couple of nights, made love in ways he hadn’t thought possible-and which wouldn’t have been, if he wasn’t in such amazing physical shape. But she’d made it clear that she wanted nothing more than sex. She didn’t even like to cuddle. The couple of times he’d tried, she had rolled on top of him, fucked him insensible, then rolled off and gone back to sleep.

When he’d told his best buddies, lieutenants Savo and Lobes, they’d stared at him like he’d just won the Kentucky Derby. And actually, it kinda bugged him, them just looking at him like he was out of his mind.

Julia Duffy was famous. And beautiful. And rumor had it that she was as rich as a Rockefeller. So if he didn’t feel like sharing her bed, then Savo and Lobes reckoned they’d be more than happy to volunteer. After all, if she was good enough for the president of the United States of America-well, he’d be president someday, at least, if he survived the war-then who were they to turn her away?

Amundson caught himself staring at her just before she locked eyes with him. He glanced away guiltily.

Julia kicked him. It would have hurt if he hadn’t been wearing a thick rubber knee pad.

“You and your boys, you’ll be fine, Lieutenant,” she called out over the noise. “Don’t sweat it. You’re gonna eat those fuckers alive. Garry-fuckin’-owen.”

The men in his chalk roared back.

“Garryowen!”

Amundson smiled. But he felt sick in the pit of his stomach.

About three months after the Allies had retaken Hawaii, a package had arrived for Julia at The New York Times. She’d been back home for a month by then. After the slaughter on Oahu, the paper had insisted that she take a proper vacation, and to everyone’s surprise she had agreed.

She’d still been with Dan at that point, but she hadn’t gone out to the Zone. Hadn’t even bothered to phone and tell him she was back. Mostly, she just stayed drunk.

She did manage to visit Rosanna’s family, and for about three hours in their company she felt half human. But she fell apart when Poppi Ugo brought out the family album and insisted on taking her through every shot they had of Rosanna. She’d guzzled down nearly three-quarters of a bottle of grappa, crying hysterically all the time, and had passed out on the couch. She woke up at three in the morning, shivering under the Natoli family quilt, then vomited and snuck out the front door, leaving twenty dollars to cover the dry-cleaning bill. Hours later she remembered that dry cleaning as she knew it didn’t exist yet.

She’d gone back to apologize, but the Natoli clan refused to hear it. They tried to talk her into staying for another 188-course dinner, but-fearing a meltdown-she had begged off and fled back to the city. The next she heard from them was when this package turned up at the Times.

The mailroom cleared about a thousand items a week for Julia. Letters from servicemen she’d written about. Cookies baked by their moms. Crayola drawings by little girls who said they wanted to grow up and be just like her. And at the other extreme, hate mail and death threats from fans of the former FBI director who blamed her for his ruin, or from nutjobs who just didn’t like her. There were plenty of those. Many of them working for the same paper as her.

The package from Rosanna’s family lay on her desk for about two weeks before she could bring herself to do anything about it. Worried that she might fall apart in front of her colleagues, Julia had carried the parcel back to her apartment and left it in a closet for nearly a month.

It took a fifteen-hour liquid lunch at the Bayswater before she could get it back out of the closet, and two pots of black coffee before she could take a knife to the packing tape without cutting a finger off.

She had no idea what was waiting in there. Part of her thought the Natolis might have sent the quilt over for her to clean up. But the package wasn’t big enough, and when she spilled the contents of the thick, padded envelope onto her Castiglioni coffee table, a small “Oh!” escaped her, and she had to run to the bathroom to be sick again.

The snoring man in her bed stirred but didn’t wake as she lost a whole day’s worth of Manhattans and finger food in the bathroom. She sucked a few mouthfuls of cold water straight from the faucet, thought about taking a shower, and decided to go without, lest she wake up the asshole in her bedroom.