John Birmingham: Final impact

The only way he could be more excited was if they’d let him fly one of the new Skyhawks out onto the Big Hill. But that was an indulgence reserved for younger men. No, he’d be catching a C-130 down to the base.

Kolhammer pulled the stack of documents toward him and reached for his fountain pen. He brought the D-Day coverage back up and noticed that the byline on the air assault video was Julia Duffy’s.

Dan’s ex.

That had been a hell of a piss-poor show, their breakup. It had gutted Dan, killed him if truth be known. The big doofus had insisted on going back into combat afterward, whether to prove himself or to escape, Kolhammer wasn’t sure. Didn’t matter, though. Poor bastard never even made it to Pearl. His transport had crashed on takeoff from Muroc. Still, it wasn’t his place to judge. What chance had they really had, coming from such different worlds? It had been noted, more than once, that almost all relationships between uptime women and contemporary men failed in the end-although, intriguingly, the reverse was not true. Perhaps the angrier feminists of his time had been right and all twenty-first man had really wanted was an old-fashioned wife. God knew there were any number of movies being made about it now. They screened as straight romances throughout the rest of the country, but were marketed as comedies inside the Zone. In the same way that Reefer Madness had once played so well with stoned college students.

Kolhammer watched the feed as he methodically worked his way through the stack of paper, signing wherever Liao had indicated. It wasn’t something that took much of his attention, so he could follow Duffy’s raw vision quite closely. The ’temps had adopted the embed system pretty much intact, so she got total access to the Seventh Cav. But all her unedited data became government property.

The fight outside Calais looked intense. There was no way most of this footage would be released outside the Zone, to the general public. It was way too graphic for the ’temps, who still hadn’t seen a picture of a dead GI. While he scratched away with his Mont Blanc, a savage hand-to-hand battle played itself out on the screen in front of him. He couldn’t tell which village she was reporting from, or even whether the cav and the 101st had made it into the port itself at this point. He kept the sound turned down while he worked. A part of him, detached from the repetitive task of signing off documents, wondered whether Julia Duffy was working through the same sort of impacted emotional damage that had driven her husband back to combat, and on to his death. She would doubtless carry a heavy load of guilt for the breakup. Dan had told him that she was already messed up over her friend Rosanna getting waxed on Hawaii. Blamed herself and couldn’t get over the fact that she was still alive when Natoli was gone.

That was only normal. But did she blame herself for Dan getting killed, too? There was not a shred of doubt he’d demanded a combat assignment because of the breakup. And they had broken up mostly because of her refusal to accept that with marriage came family commitments. At least according to Dan. Kolhammer had never discussed it with Duffy. He had always found her to be a really tough bitch when they dealt professionally, and they’d had occasion to do so a lot when she was on Hoover’s case last year. But he had to admit she was always a pro. The grunts loved her. And a lot of readers did, too, because of that. He shrugged the thought off. It wasn’t relevant.

Having grown up with global media coverage, Kolhammer was more than capable of sitting in his comfortable office, watching men die thousands of miles away while he calmly attended to paperwork and personal thoughts. Some called it callous, and even the contemporary military personnel thought of it as a defining characteristic of the people who had come through the Transition. For him, however, it was just the way the world turned. The way it always had.

Other than Halabi and the Trident, none of “his” units were involved in the invasion. The only personal connection he had with the D-Day landings was there on his flat-panel display. The ex-wife of his late chief liaison officer.

Julia Duffy.

She was firing a weapon, silently. A helmet-mounted camera rendered the scene into something reminiscent of the video games he’d played as a teenager. The barrel in the center of the screen spat long tongues of fire, tracers leaping away, the impacts clearly visible around the window of a stone cottage a hundred meters in the distance.

He wondered when Dan had last spoken to her, and what they had said to each other.

All the heavy equipment had already been loaded onto the Eighty-second’s newly commissioned heavy littoral assault ships down at San Diego. The Falluja and the Damascus were based on a long-hulled Essex-class keel, with substantial modifications to fit them out for the requirements of Jones’s marine expeditionary brigade. The president had approved the change from unit to brigade when the First and Second battalions came online. And Jones’s promotion had gone through in the same sheaf of orders.

There had been times, plenty of them, when Jones had wondered if they’d ever be allowed to leave. Or whether, when they did, they’d be pushed off into some sideshow like Persia or Burma. He’d have to apologize to Kolhammer for snapping at him like that before, but even his considerable reserves of Zen calm were being drained dry.

Still, at long last, they looked good to go. The Super Shermans and AT-LAVs were all stowed away and chained down on the Kandahar. The last supplies were being loaded. Only a few heavy-lift choppers and Jones’s own command Huey remained to be flown out from Muroc Field, along with the twelve Skyhawks that would join with his remaining Super Harriers to provide organic air support. Another thirty-six of the “modern” Skyhawk fighter-bombers were embarking with Kolhammer on the Big Hill, making them the first carrier-borne jets in the Pacific. They were also the most powerful military planes in the world, a generation more advanced than the Sabers that were increasingly coming to dominate the skies over Europe.

Regardless of the matйriel they had amassed, Jones was most concerned with the beating heart of his command-the three battalions of the Ninth Regiment, Fifth Division, United States Marine Corps.

He pulled the brim of his cap down lower as he stepped out of the Quonset hut onto the gravel path, turning away from the regiment’s administrative buildings toward Camp Hannon’s parade ground. Conditions at Hannon were primitive, especially when compared with the increasingly settled and luxurious campus informally known as “Area 51” or just “51,” the control center of the Special Administrative Zone, which had attracted dozens of aeronautical and “high-technology” firms-a term he found more than a little ironic.

More often than not these companies had established West Coast offices in downtown LA or elsewhere in the Valley. However, with the Zone operating as an autonomous region where twenty-first-century U.S. law and custom prevailed, a lot of outfits like Douglas, IBM, Boeing, and McDonnell had spun off stand-alone companies with their offices here.

Despite wartime restrictions on building materials, they had still managed to run up some very impressive-looking buildings dotting the grounds of 51. Even so, they were dwarfed-both physically and conceptually-by a publicly owned entity, the Intellectual Property Trust, or IPT. By an act of Congress, IPT now held “deemed” patents over all those remaining processes and creations where ownership was contested or even nonexistent. Prime examples were Microsoft’s operating systems and applications, which had yet to be invented, yet had come with them through the Transition. From what he had heard, the plan was for the trust to be broken up and floated on the open market sometime after the war.