information from competing sources.
Even so, chairing the R & 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 & 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
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
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
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
