Designated Targets

traveled to the ends of the earth to find these men, and to liberate them. He and Admiral Kolhammer hoped they would form the nucleus of a Russian resistance.

11

SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, THE BRISBANE LINE

While Julia Duffy was growing up, having received a good deal of her education from popular media, she assumed that the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, or MASH, was born in the Korean War.

In fact, the idea of a self-contained medical unit, performing surgery and providing postoperative care immediately behind the front line, was a child of the Second World War. The first MASH units were established in August 1945. Or they would have been.

Duffy drove into the 8066th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in early October 1942, not in Korea, but about a hundred kilometers north of Brisbane, Australia. It looked just as she expected from all those years of watching syndicated reruns on TV: the khaki tents and ramshackle huts made of corrugated iron and ply board, the odd assortment of harried-looking medicos, the sense of barely controlled chaos as waves of casualties arrived on litters. It even boasted a helipad, on a hill cleared of vegetation, just up from a big open area that served as a triage point. The seasons were turning to summer in the southern hemisphere, drying everything out, so that some days she felt as if the air itself might just catch alight. The MASH unit was caked in a fine red dust, stirred up by passing choppers.

There were only nine dedicated medevac choppers in this theater, however, so they tended to fly in only the most critical cases. Marine Sergeant Arthur Snider definitely wasn’t critical. He might yet lose his leg, but his life wasn’t in grave danger.

His company CO had shoved him onto a Blackhawk that was dusting off five of his comrades who did need to get onto an operating table, and inside of fifteen minutes if they were going to pull through. Those who did survive would do so thanks to Snider, who was the toast of his unit for rallying the counterambush back on Hill 178.

Julia Duffy arrived about an hour and half after Snider, determined to get an interview. She had a shit-hot story to relay back to New York, via Rosanna in Hawaii, if she could just find this guy for an interview.

Her jeep slewed to a halt in a cloud of red dust in front of the hospital’s postop ward. She thanked the driver and hopped down, heaving her backpack, Sonycam rig, and machine pistol. She waved away an Australian nurse who came running at her with a horrified look on her lumpy 1940s face. Julia was still matted with gore and filth from the fight back on the line. Her reactive-matrix armor was so heavily caked with blood and mud that she could feel it stiffening up in the warm spring sunlight.

The nurse kept coming. “Are you okay, young man?” she cried out.

Julia eased off her helmet, shaking her hair free.

“Oh!” said the nurse. “I see. You’re one of them.”

The reporter couldn’t help but smile. It was a thin, wan shadow of a smile that peeked out from under the adrenaline backwash and deep body revulsion with which she was so familiar—but a smile nonetheless.

“That’s right,” she said. “My name’s Duffy. I’m looking for a marine corps sergeant, a ’temp, would have come in about ninety minutes ago. Leg wound. Got clipped up on One-seventy-eight in that big ambush this morning.”

The woman brightened up considerably. “Oh, you mean Sergeant Snider!” She beamed. “He’s still waiting to go into surgery. They say he saved his whole company. There’s a Movietone cameraman coming to film him tonight.”

“Is there?” Julia said. “Well, I was up on One-seventy-eight myself, this morning, Nurse . . . Halligan,” she continued, reading the woman’s name tag. “Do you think I could talk to him?”

Nurse Halligan seemed to consider Julia in a new light now. She took in the befouled armor and the futuristic machine gun; the fighting knife that was still covered in dried, blackened blood; the bandaged hand and the field sutures that had reattached a flap of bruised skin on her left cheek. “Are you one of those special soldiers, Miss Duffy?”

“Actually, I’m a reporter, ma’am. For the New York Times. Normally embedded with the Eighty-second MEU.” She hoisted the Sonycam. “But I was on assignment filming the sergeant’s platoon this morning. I’d very much like to talk to him now, if I could.”

Not for the first time was Julia interested to see the wonder, and even a touch of dread, that so often came over contemporary women when they met their counterparts from the next century. More important, this one displayed no hint of the guarded response that might have characterized a more media-aware individual from her own time.

“Well, it’s not usual, but I suppose, if you were with him this morning . . . of course, of course, just follow me.”

For just a moment, Julia allowed herself to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face, even if that face presented a savage mask to this other woman. She threw the backpack over one shoulder, her MP-5 over the other, and hung the powered-down helmet from an eyehook on her web belt. She then detached the little Sonycam, checked the battery and lattice memory, and slipped her fingers through the hand strap as she followed Nurse Halligan to one of the big preop centers. The Sonycam was little bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and sat quite comfortably in her palm. She wet a fingertip to wipe away a bloody smear that was obscuring part of the lens.

Turned out, the 8066 was a big facility. It looked like it could handle a lot of death and trauma. Julia estimated that they could probably deal with a surge of a thousand or more cases—say, a couple of shattered battalions. She made a mental note to grab a few stats and some background on the unit before she left. There might even be a good feature in it, especially if nobody else had thought to cover the premature birth of the MASH concept.

The censors would go for it, for sure, because they loved stories that made the folks back home think their boys were getting the best treatment in the world.

The coppery smells of blood and horror hung over everything, blotting out the mentholated scent of the eucalyptus trees, the smoke of battle, and even the stink of so many unwashed bodies. Trucks rumbled in and out constantly, disgorging litters weighed down with unconscious men, taking away freshly patched-up marines and soldiers. American uniforms dominated, most of them ’temps, but she heard British and Australian accents. Even some French. Three soldiers walked by who could only have been from the New Zealand Maori Battalion, their faces dense maps of native tattoos.

Just when she was beginning to sink into the period detail, a flight of Super Harriers off the Kandahar screamed overhead, thousands of pounds of locally made dumb bombs slung under their hard-points. Nobody even looked up anymore.

Nurse Halligan threaded around a couple of stretcher-bearers who were grabbing a few z’s. She threw a look back over her shoulder to make sure Julia was keeping up, and pushed through a set of swinging doors into a large building that seemed to have been stapled together out of materials scavenged from an abandoned building site.

As she pushed through the doors behind Halligan, Julia caught the reek of disinfectant and dying flesh. It rose up to unlock memories of other casualty wards, some military, some civilian. In the end, she decided, they were all the same, just mounds of broken bodies and the glazed-over, uncomprehending eyes that all asked the same question. Why me?

The men in here still wore the bloodied uniforms in which they’d come off the line. Nonetheless, Duffy’s entrance drew a few stares. She was an alien, almost barbarous vision, even among these men who presented a facade of martial savagery. Not everyone followed her path through the gurneys and canvas cots, though. Most in fact did not, either because they were insensible with pain or medication, or because battle had numbed them to a state of existential collapse. However, enough of them struggled up, and pointed, and whispered to qualify as a minor commotion.

Snider saw her, even before she could find him. “Hey, Miss Duffy. Over here!”

He was propped up on a folding chair in a far corner, his injured leg resting on a wooden crate and enclosed