Designated Targets

“No kidding? So she’s from the future, eh? You lucky dog. I hear those dames, they’re insatiable. Am I right, or am I right?”

Dan didn’t answer right away—he was half-embarrassed, and half-pleased. He knew Julia hated him bullshitting with other guys about this stuff, but really, he couldn’t see the harm. “Well, that’d be none of your business, buddy,” he said. “But . . . well, yeah, you ain’t a million miles from the truth.”

The news seemed to please the guy. “Goddamn. I knew it. All those things you read, some of them had to be true. What is she—?”

Dan held up his hand. “Sorry. I meant it. It’s really none of your beeswax.”

Lucky for him the guy didn’t seem put out at all. “Sure, sure thing, Mac. Listen, my name’s Hurley, Dave Hurley. I’m in sheet metal. What about you?” he asked, pointing at Dan’s uniform. “Why’d you make the jump? You want to fly rocket planes? You political? Or you just wanted to make out like a bandit with those dames?”

Black snorted. “I was at Midway. I was one of the first guys onto their ships. Went across to the Clinton in a helicopter with a youngster by the name of Curtis. An ensign—”

“Yeah, I read about him,” Hurley said, nodding vigorously. “Ernie Pyle says he knew what the rockets and the death beams were before anyone else, didn’t he? And he was the guy told Spruance how it all worked.”

Dan nodded, recalling the night on the bridge of the Enterprise, when they’d watched helplessly while the Pacific Fleet was destroyed around them.

“Yeah, I read about that kid,” Hurley continued. “Were you there, too, with Spruance?”

“Yeah, I was a planning officer. Curtis and I volunteered to check out their story, but things moved a little quicker than we did, and we became sort of irrelevant. I was on the Clinton for a while, ended up falling into a liaison role. I’m still doing that. So no, to answer your question, I’m not officially AF. But I’m on secondment for the duration.”

Hurley took that in and readjusted his sizable frame. The seats were generous, but he was a big man. He took up all the space they had to offer, and then some.

“What about you?” asked Dan. “You look a bit like a cop, maybe even ex-navy. But you’re in metal, you say?”

“Yeah. I used to be a cop, a sheriff actually,” Hurley said. “But I was pensioned off about five years back. Crashed my patrol car during a chase. Busted my back. This flight’s gonna be hell on me before it’s done. I went into my uncle’s sheet-metal business, since he was getting ready to retire. Turns out I had a nose for a dollar. Got me a few contracts with you guys, in fact, running up warehouses out Burbank way. Hell’s bells but things are hot out there, aren’t they? I’ve got crews working around the clock. In fact,” he said, leaning over conspiratorially, “I’ve been trying to get my hands on a computer, to help run things even better. But I’m not that important.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Dan advised. “Warehouses are important. We’re growing so fast, storage and distribution is one of our real problems.”

“Yeah? You think you could get me a computer, then? It’d be worth your while, if you know what I mean.”

“Nope. Sorry.”

Hurley gave him another elbow, playfully this time. “Can’t blame a guy for trying though, can you?”

“Guess not,” said Dan.

And he wasn’t offended, really. In fact, he couldn’t help but like the guy. If he had to be trapped on a transcontinental flight, he could do worse, he supposed.

Hurley didn’t even light up a cigarette until they were about an hour into the trip. By that time they were deep into a discussion about the war, and the Zone, and the politics of both. Dave Hurley proved to be more of a broadminded character than Dan would have given him credit for. He wasn’t at all concerned about women trying to “liberate” themselves. He said that as a businessman, he’d be doing himself out of a dollar if he didn’t use all the skills his employees had to offer, whether they were women or blacks or Latinos or whatever. He didn’t even seem to mind the fact that fairies and lemons, as he called them, felt free to live openly within the boundaries of the Zone, although he did wish they’d keep it private.

“After all, it’s not like I go around groping my wife in public, is it?” he said.

No, Dan agreed. It wasn’t.

In fact, Dan Black didn’t have to share his trip with Dave Hurley all the way across America. The former sheriff left the flight in Denver, where he said he had a new branch office to visit. There was an element of truth to it, too.

Special Agent David Hurley drove to the Bureau’s field office in Denver, where he grabbed a spare secretary and a teleprinter, to immediately file a report with Washington.

He had made contact with Commander Daniel Black, he wrote, but did not think he would be willing to act as an operative, or even an informant. The commander had formed an immoral sexual relationship with a reporter from 21C, a Miss Julia Duffy (file no. 010162820). He was planning to travel across state lines with Duffy for the purposes of said immoral sexual conduct, in violation of the Mann Act, and openly admitted to having done so before.

Black seemed to share many of the subversive and Communistic leanings espoused by Duffy in particular, and the wider population of the Multinational Force in general. During their discussion, he expressed approval of many sexual perversions, including mixed race and homosexual activities. His family background may have led him to embrace socialistic tendencies, since his father had been a unionized mine worker. Black himself confessed to having been a union member, before joining the navy.

Commander Black spoke openly, without regard to security, about his duties and about developments taking place in the Special Administrative Zone, although he declined the opportunity to enter into a corrupt relationship when it was proffered.

Special Agent Hurley did not consider him to be a good American, or a friend of the Bureau. However, he did not seem to be a particularly guileful individual, and might well be cultivated as an unwitting source of information, given his lack of sophistication and his access to the highest levels of command within the Zone.

For this reason, Hurley recommended that contact be maintained.

NY MUNICIPAL AIRPORT, NEW YORK

She was never going to get used to these fucking flying coffins. It took forever to get from Brisbane to Honolulu, and then to Frisco, and New York. She traveled in a Catalina Flying Boat, and a Boeing Stratoliner, all of it supposedly first class, paid for by the Times, but Julia Duffy still got out at the other end feeling like she’d spent four days on the roof of a Pakistani goods train with about a hundred unwashed peasants and their livestock.

The period piece aesthetics of the Stratoliner had been amusing at first. The wicker chairs, the cigarette girls, the cocktails, and waiter service were all great fun if you were into historical slumming. But really, droning around the world in unpressurized tin cans that couldn’t even match the speed of a Q-class Beemer—like the one sitting back in her garage in 2021—well, that was her idea of hell.

As she waited for a porter to appear with her luggage at a very primitive LaGuardia Field, she swayed on her feet and fought to keep her eyes open. She could feel people looking at her. In her Armani jeans, Redback boots, and HotBodz thermopliable rain jacket, she was obviously Twenty-first. But then she thought, these guys are very obviously ’temp. They dressed differently, they looked different, they even moved differently. Part of it was obvious; sitting more primly, for example. Although she suspected that was partly a class thing. We must slouch around like a bunch of vulgar low-lifes by the standards of anyone with enough money to afford private air travel in 1942, she thought. But there was some subtle stuff, as well, a sort of stiffness and “blockiness,” and a way of swinging the arms and legs that was different from her time—perhaps the movement equivalent of saying cannot rather than can’t. She’d noted that even the basics set them apart, like how they got into a car. People here sat and then swung their legs in, rather than climbing in with their asses hanging out.

And of course, women moved in a more distinctly “feminine” way. They sometimes reminded her of the stylized way a drag queen of her time would move his hands and hold his head. To Julia, the handful of women disembarking from her flight or waiting for someone in the arrivals lounge all seemed artificial and blatantly coy. To them, she supposed, she must look like some sort of bull dyke from hell.

Man, she was too fucking tired. She patted the personal flexipad peeking out from under the bright yellow