Having been born in 1969, Admiral Phillip Kolhammer wasn't a true child of the digital age. He grew up with rotary telephones, cassette recorders, black-and-white TV, pinball machines, one type of Coke, and the unfortunate musical legacy of the 1980s. The most secure personal files on his flexipad were a collection of bootleg tracks by a long-forgotten country rock band called Lone Justice, and the first two seasons of Miami Vice.
He'd never really mastered text messaging by thumb, but like everyone who grew up after the rise of digital entertainment, he had learned to split his attention along multiple tracks. Given the immense flows of data that streamed in from a properly monitored battlespace, he was often required to concentrate on a surprising variety of information from competing sources.
Even so, chairing the R amp; D committee was a real pain in the ass.
Six full-time members came to each meeting, but anywhere up to eighteen or twenty part-timers, consultants, or guests might also attend. The sessions were held every Friday afternoon, between 1400 and 1600 hours, in the largest briefing room of the nondescript, two-story prefab offices that were the power center of the Special Administrative Zone.
The building sat in a tight cluster of similarly unimposing structures, at the western edge of the Valley, in a huge agglomeration of half-built factories, empty warehouses, and unfinished offices known collectively as Area 51.
Kolhammer couldn't recall which of his underlings had first coined the name for the facility, but it had stuck, largely because it appealed to his own quietly mordant sense of humor. Half the country seemed to imagine that dark conspiracies were carried out there as a matter of daily routine. In truth, most of his time was taken up with land development, transport, housing, and industrial project management.
He had effectively become the mayor of the greatest boomtown in U.S. history, and he spent a good deal of his down time wishing he was still a junior officer, so the Zone would have been somebody else's headache. Then he'd be free to go off and fly jets. Or even build them, which was one of the things the R amp; D group met to thrash out every Friday morning.
On this particular Friday, with the formal part of the meeting over, everyone had broken down into smaller discussion groups scattered at tables throughout the room, to knock heads over things that should have been easily resolved. The main problem, Kolhammer had found, was the seemingly infinite bounty of knowledge the Multinational Force had brought through the wormhole. This seemed to induce a state he'd once heard described as "option paralysis."
He could feel his patience running out as he moved through the briefing room, on the way back to his own office.
"We should just forget the torpedo problem," one of his officers was arguing, "and concentrate on mines instead. Those babies sank more tonnage than any other weapon, and in fact-if I recall correctly-more than all the other weapon types combined in the Pacific theater."
At the next table, a marine, one of Lonesome's people, was counting off points on his fingers as he tried to make his pitch for the projects he thought should get priority. "We need to begin immediate mass production of the Vought F-Four-U-One Corsair," he said emphatically. "It was a tough, reliable ground-attack fighter which saw constant active service through to the end of the Korean War. It'll make a huge difference in the Pacific, in places like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, when we finally get there."
A 'temp, an army captain, made another point. "I agree that we have to keep on building the Sherman, to make the best of a bad situation. But what would even the odds against the Axis tanks-and the Soviets, if that became necessary-would be upgunning it straight away to the E-Eight Super Sherman. Those were originally produced in late '44, as the result of two years' hard combat experience, and the technical data is available immediately, in the goddamn Fleetnet lattice."
Another captain put down the flexipad he'd been waving around and held up a finger. "We ought to be spending a helluva lot more time on psyops. The Sovs and the Nazis are absolutely goring themselves, because Stalin and Hitler can't trust anyone, now that they've found out what's gonna happen-"
A contemporary navy officer interrupted him. "With all due respect, that's an interesting sociological point, but it's not a technical one…"
Kolhammer heard a civilian contractor arguing that it would take too long to build a jet fighter, and that it wouldn't give the Allies much of an advantage, anyway.
"From what I've read, all the early jets were fuel hogs, with a short range. If we want to quickly build a fighter for air superiority, I'd be marrying the P-Fifty-one with the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. We had plans to do this before you guys turned up. You get a P-Fifty-one-D in squadron service by February next year, and you've got a reliable long-range fighter which can outperform anything the Luftwaffe or Japs can throw at it."
Kolhammer guessed the man was working for the division of North American Aviation, who were hoping to get the P-Fifty-one into the air before the F-86 made it redundant.
A group of army officers, all of them 'temps, were arguing energetically just a few feet away from him, about the Australian government's decision to ram through production of a variant AK-47.
A Lieutenant Hunt was in the throes of delight discussing the unrealistic prospect of building large numbers of FN Minimi squad machine guns.
A Captain Ken Young, an English Guardsman, cut across him, as if he had never spoken. "You know, if you Yanks had been serious about replacing the BAR, there were plenty of alternative designs available from the Lewis to the Bren, or even the Johnson."
"The Lewis?" spluttered an American. "You can't be serious? The BAR might be flawed, but the Lewis is a piece of crap. Haven't you read these briefing papers? There are something like fifty different types of jams just waiting to screw up that gun, and the pan magazine is an abortion."
Kolhammer sighed, and wondered where that turn of phrase had come from.
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.
They drove up through the foothills, weaving in and out of wild oaks and patches of sycamore and eucalyptus. He couldn't be sure, but Kolhammer felt that as they climbed the range he could taste clean air coming off the Pacific. He felt strung out and a little stale from overwork and lack of sleep. Even the hint of an ocean breeze was enough to revive him, although it fired memories of his wife and left him feeling sad and a little bewildered, an echo of the wild confusion he remembered from the first hours after the Transition.
He heard Rogas in the small earbud speaker he wore. "We weren't followed," the man reported. "But I'll keep an eye out, just in case."
"Thanks, Chief," replied Kolhammer.
They pulled off the main road into a canyon where millionaires did not yet tread. The road jinked back and forth a few times, overlooked by steep, crumbling hills that seemed to be held together with nothing but sagebrush and manzanita. The road curved left one last time and died at the base of a small, hard cliff.
His contact was waiting there. With blueprints spread out on the bonnet of his car, he looked more like an architect than a builder.
Kolhammer strode up to him. "You Donovan's man?" the admiral asked, referring to the Office of Strategic Services Chief.
"Uh-huh. Mitch Taverner's the name."
"Okay, why are we here, Mr. Taverner?"
The man picked up a roll of blueprints and waved it back up the canyon. "You guys have a lien over this land. You're going to build a signal relay station here, in time. But you've got problems with L.A. over it. Or specifically, with the local rich folks. So it gives you a reason to come up here for a meeting with your builder." He tapped himself on the chest. "And the long drive gives your man Rogas over there a lot of visible ground, to check whether or not you've been followed."
Kolhammer suppressed his irritation and forced himself to speak slowly, in a reasonable tone. "Okay, so you've proved to me that Wild Bill has almost as many feelers inside the Zone as Hoover. Is there any other reason for you to be dragging me up here?"
Taverner, a barrel-chested man with what sounded like a Texas accent, grinned broadly. "Admiral Kolhammer, Mr. Donovan is a friend. He's not like the others."
"Wonderful. Imagine my relief. But I still don't see the need for subterfuge. If you're as good as you think you are, Mr. Taverner, you'll know that I don't much care for spooks, and I definitely don't have time for this sort of bullshit. So tell me, exactly what are we doing here?"
But the Texan refused to be bullied out of his role. He reminded Kolhammer of somebody. The guy from that Walking Tall movie…
"Mr. Donovan wanted you to have this, but he had no reliable way of getting it to you. It's a list of all Hoover's agents, informants, and sources within your area, as best as we can tell."
Taverner handed over a couple sheets of paper. They seemed to be full of typing. A freshening breeze stirred the leaves of the Cyprus pine and eucalyptus that bordered the road.
Kolhammer took the list and pocketed it with barely a glance. "You tell Wild Bill I'm much obliged, but if he and Mr. Stephenson think I'm going to crank up a war against J. Edgar Hoover, then I'm afraid they should prepare themselves for disappointment. He's simply not my concern," Kolhammer said firmly.
Taverner pushed himself off the door of the Packard. Kolhammer saw Rogas start moving toward him in the reflection of the car's windscreen. He waved the SEAL back.
Taverner moved in close. The man smelled of cheap soap and breath mints. "He should be your concern," said the OSS agent. "That asshole has a lot of congressmen in his pocket. Roosevelt got the bill through, setting you up here, but he had to twist a lot of arms harder than he'd ever had to before. You know why? Because there was a little fairy flitting around, pouring poison into the ears of our honorable legislators. And he's still doing it.
"You got your Zone, Kolhammer, but the money to pay for it still comes out of Washington, and you do not have a lot of friends over there. You got enemies to spare, though. And you'll want to start paying attention to them, or else you're gonna get yourself cornholed in the town square, my friend."
Taverner didn't wait for a reply. He turned around and opened his car door, then looked back over his shoulder.
"Oh, and personally, I think the P-Fifty-one is a damn fine piece of fightin' technology." He winked, climbed in behind the wheel, and drove off, forcing the admiral to step aside.
Kolhammer watched the car disappear around the bend.
Rogas wandered over, his eyes scanning the area. "You know, boss," he said. "I've never known happy news to come out of these sorts of meetings."
Kolhammer essayed a tired grin. "Would you feel happy about a trip East, Chief?"
Rogas turned his palms out in a "whatever" gesture.
"Then pack your bags. And put together a team: two men, two women. Covert entry and prolonged surveillance. Full-spectrum coverage. Draw whatever kit you need from the Quiet Room. I'll authorize it when we get back to Fifty-one."
"Aye, aye, sir. Mission brief tonight?"
"When you've chosen your team, bring them over to my office. I'll be working late."
They both turned and walked back to the cars.
Kolhammer decided to wait until he was alone, but he was itching to open the papers Taverner had given him.
He was certain he'd spotted Dan Black's name on the first page.