in a bright orange inflatable tube that could only have come from a twenty-first unit. They must have fitted him on the dust-off. Five or six men were gathered around him, clearly hanging on his every word. They all turned to check her out. Some were completely taken aback at the sight of her, their eyes going wide in surprise. One whom she recognized from Hill 178 nodded and waved. Snider beckoned her over as Nurse Halligan said good-bye and wished her well.
“This is her, boys. The reporter I told y’all about. She’s from the future!” Then without warning, his excitement and gladness to see her turned to uncomfortable solemnity. “Miss Duffy, I didn’t get to thank you for what you did this morning. Some of the boys told me you shot them Japs was fixing to stick me after I got hit. Said you drilled ’em like fucking paper targets on the range, if you’ll pardon my language. They also said you got the Jap who killed poor Smitty.”
They all peered at her fighting knife then. Some staring openly, some just flicking a nervous glance at it.
“And Miss Duffy, I’m sorry if I was out of line with you, you know . . . when things was turning to shit up there.”
Julia raised a bandaged hand and demurred. “It was a busy day at the office, Sarge. I’ve had worse. But how are you doing? I see they got you a gel sleeve on the chopper. That’s good. You’ll probably keep the leg.”
Snider perked up at the news. “Better than that, Miss Duffy. It’s a fuckin’ million-dollar wound. I’m going home. Won’t be dancing too many foxtrots from now on, but who really gives a fuck, eh?”
Julia pulled up an empty ammo crate and insinuated herself into the circle of wounded men. She slipped off her backpack and leaned the MP-5 up against the wall. Snider gave her a quick introduction to all of them, bar one, whose name he didn’t know. The man introduced himself as Corporal Robert Payne, a Canadian artilleryman who had been standing near a howitzer when a shell exploded in the tube.
“You know, Sergeant,” said Duffy, “You might just dance the foxtrot again after all. It’ll take a while, but knee reconstruction wasn’t a big deal up in my day. And most of the senior Task Force medical staff have been pulled off active duty and put into teaching hospitals. Of course, I gotta tell you, the fuckin’ foxtrot is never coming back.”
Duffy waited until the men’s laughter and ribbing died down before speaking again.
“Sarge, do you think you could see your way clear to an interview? There’s already a lot of talk about what you did this morning. You want my opinion, they’re going to turn you into a hero and send you out on the road back home, selling war bonds with John Wayne and Hedy Lamarr.”
Sergeant Snider was openly surprised to hear that. “Hedy Lamarr, you say. That’s a classy dame. You think she’d want to hang out with the likes of me?”
“Buddy, when I’m finished, you’ll be beating her off with a stick. Matter of fact, you’ll be able to walk into a room full of Hollywood starlets and know there won’t be a dry seat in the house.”
Snider’s friends all broke out into catcalls and cheers, and Julia made certain to grab a few lines from each of them about what they thought of his efforts on the hill.
When she was finished she checked to make sure that the lattice memory had stored the interview, and she copied it to a spare stick, just in case.
“There’s one other thing you could do for me, Sarge, which I’d really appreciate.”
Snider pulled himself a little higher in the fold-up canvas chair, wincing as he did so. “You name it, Miss Duffy. I figure there’s no way I can repay you for drilling those guys.”
“Well, in fact, there is, Sergeant. There’s some guys from Movietone who are going to be looking for you later. Could you possibly tell ’em to fuck off?”
Snider winked theatrically. “Consider them fucked, ma’am.”
The University of Queensland sat within a great bow of the Brisbane River about seven miles from the city center. There wasn’t much to it, thought Robertson, just hundreds of acres of open fields. The area had previously been given over to the cultivation of sugar, arrowroot, cotton, maize, and pineapples. Only one building had been completed before the outbreak of war, a grand colonnaded sandstone structure with two wings, divided by a massive clock tower that also housed an imposing atrium. Before any students or teachers had had the opportunity to move in, the Commonwealth Government had requisitioned it for the advanced headquarters of all Allied Land Forces in the Southwest Pacific.
In August of 1942, it had changed hands again, becoming the theater HQ of the Multinational Force ground combat elements, which was to say, the U.S. Marine Corps’ Eighty-second MEU, and the Second Cavalry Regiment of the Australian Army.
The Abrams tanks and LAVs, Bushpigs and attack helicopters assigned to those two forces did not spend much time at the HQ, having been thrown into crucial blocking positions to secure General Douglas MacArthur’s much-vaunted Brisbane Line. The line was less a natural stronghold than a strategic concession that he didn’t have the forces he needed to hold ground any farther north. It conceded about two thousand kilometers of coastline to the Japanese. To be sure, there were significant Allied forces intact and operating to the north out of Cairns and Townsville, but they were cut off from resupply and reinforcement. They were surrounded, but the Japanese in turn hadn’t managed to land enough men and materiel to snuff them out. So the forces there were effectively under siege.
The press made great play on “the new Tobruk,” and “the new Bastogne,” even though the latter hadn’t happened yet. But that was just propaganda—what Colonel Jones called “spin.” Small teams of Special Forces were operating up and down the coast, disrupting the Japanese rear areas with great effect, and the reports they sent back of atrocities against the civilian population were enough to reduce the prime minister to tears in his private moments.
The PM was staring at a map in the briefing room—a lecture theater that had yet to hold its first class. Paul Robertson, his principal private secretary, wondered what the other men and women in the room saw in that map. MacArthur seemed fixated on his great defensive line, the arc of Allied Forces blocking the Japanese drive south. Jones and the senior 2 Cav officer, Brigadier Barnes and his SAS colleague, Major Horan, undoubtedly saw hundreds of miles of exposed Japanese flank, just begging to be ripped open. He knew that General Blamey, the contemporary Australian land force commander saw twenty thousand miles of largely indefensible coastline. New Zealand’s senior representative General Freyburg probably saw the distance that remained between the leading edge of Japanese expansion and his homeland across the Tasman Sea.
As for the others, about a dozen staff officers, two of them women from the Multinational Force, the former banker had no idea.
“We are attriting the enemy into defeat,” MacArthur insisted, repeatedly flicking the screen that one of Brigadier Barnes’s young ladies had set up. Robertson wondered where he’d picked up that terrible word—
Barnes remained silent and unmoving, but Jones bowed his head and rubbed wearily at his eyes. “General,” he rumbled in a deep bass voice. “We are not going to remove all of the surveillance assets from the line, nor the Crusader guns. They will remain in place and be staffed by our specialists to make sure you retain full coverage. But we can roll up the Japanese in a
MacArthur’s thinly compressed lips warned of an explosive retort, but Prime Minister Curtin calmed him down with a gesture. “General, you’ve had my full support at every point in this campaign, but I must tell you I am not willing to allow these animals an extra day’s grace. While we sit here jawboning, they are torturing and raping and murdering with impunity, up and down the coast.”
MacArthur was becoming visibly angry, but he maintained a better working relationship with Curtin than he had with anyone in the Roosevelt administration. “Prime Minister, I can understand that,” he said in a placatory tone. “But it won’t be that much longer. We can—”
“If I might, Mr. Curtin.”
Everyone turned to face Brigadier Michael Barnes. High spots of color flared on MacArthur’s cheeks at being interrupted so abruptly, but the Australian continued in his flat nasal accent.
“This morning we received an encrypted burst from a long-range SAS patrol around Bundaberg. You need to
