Designated Targets

Doctor. I mean it.”

He agreed to follow her instructions, and shambled out into the dark. Francois watched him go.

The snap of gunfire was already drifting over the ruins of the town, from the main enclosure of the liberated prison camp. About two hundred survivors had gathered there to watch the rather unceremonious retribution being exacted on their behalf. She didn’t need to see it herself again. She’d briefly attended a Sanction 4 execution earlier in the day.

No drumbeat accompanied the condemned men to their final moment. No holy men of any faith administered the last rites. The prisoners’ hands were cuffed behind their backs with plastic ties. They were led or dragged over to a deep trench that had been dug in the center of the playing field by a mechanical excavator. The simple charge of “a crime against humanity” was read out to them. They were forced to kneel at the mouth of the pit, and a single bullet was fired into the back of each prisoner’s head by a man or woman, officer or enlisted, who had been rostered onto field punishment detail for that day.

Jones and Barnes divided the task equally between their commands. As a medical officer, Francois was one of the few who had the right to claim exemption from the duty, and as long as she had worthy lives to save, she generally exercised her right.

But later, standing in triage, surrounded by a pile of bloody rags that had been cut from the body of an eight- year-old boy who was now in surgery, having a gangrenous leg amputated, she felt the black heat rising inside her head again. It made her wish she’d gone with Cooper.

What the hell is wrong with people that they’d do these things—to little kids?

It was the same fury that had driven her to the edge of reason back at the prison camp in Cabanatuan, when she’d capped off five Japanese guards and their commander. She’d earned a reprimand from Jones for that—for carrying out a Sanction 4 punishment without a properly cosigned authority. But none of those women was complaining, and she wasn’t losing any sleep over it.

“Major Francois. I need your okay to release the battalion store of amoxicillin, ma’am. It’s the last we’ve got.”

She wrenched herself out of the spiral of dark thoughts that was threatening to drag her under. A corporal was holding out a flexipad and plastic pen.

“Sure,” she muttered, more to herself than to the corporal; then she signed out the last of their broad- spectrum antibiotics. They had originally been intended for the Chinese internees at the caliphate’s detention centers on Java, back in twenty-one.

“Major Francois, ma’am,” another voice called out, “we just lost those ’temp surgeons flying up out of Brisbane, ma’am. Their plane crashed on takeoff at Archerfield.”

Then another: “Major Francois, we’re going to need you in surgery, ma’am. That antitank round fucked up Bukowksi a lot worse than we thought.”

It felt like she’d stepped through a portal into purgatory: the coppery stink of blood, the stench of putrescent flesh, the stink of voided bowels, the screams, the sobbing, the madness and horror that were her natural working environment.

Her flexipad beeped and pinged with constant messages, queries, demands for action, and solutions to impossible problems.

The human part of her wanted to walk away. But Michael Cooper hadn’t given up, and he had faced a much more daunting challenge.

“Get me some more surgeons,” she told the orderly who’d delivered the bad news out of Archerfield. “We’ve been training hundreds of them down in Sydney and Melbourne. We got fuckin’ surgeons to burn.”

Then she turned to the runner who’d been sent to bring her back to the operating room.

“Tell them I’ll suit up in five,” she said.

She unclipped the flexipad from her belt and ignored the hundreds of messages stacking up in her in-tray. She fired off quick, brutal messages to half a dozen people who were dragging their feet at various points between here and Brisbane. She told them to get their thumbs out of their asses and send her the drugs, dressings, and personnel she had asked for when the battalion left the Brisbane Line. She threatened to personally shoot anyone who didn’t do exactly as she ordered.

The stories about what she’d done at Cabanatuan lent the threat some real heft.

Just before she headed back to the operating theater, she grabbed a passing corpsman and tasked him with finding Dr. Cooper in exactly one hour. “Knock him out with a taser if you have to,” she said. “That man needs to get some rest. Hell, we may need him back here before long.”

She ignored the insistent beeping of the flexipad. It had been doing that ever since she’d jumped from the rear of the LAV and run toward the first cries of “Medic!” hours earlier.

There were close to nine hundred unanswered routine vidmails and e-mails in the lattice memory of her pad. There was only one she would later regret failing to get to in time.

21

THE WOLFSCHANZE, EAST PRUSSIA

Despite the unmasking of von Stauffenberg and his murderous cabal of plotters, the fuhrer still felt safest at the Wolfschanze. In truth, this was a testament to his personal bravery, and strength of will.

Of course, Himmler mused, the assassin’s bomb that would have been planted there in July of ’44 would never materialize. He had made sure of that. Anyone even remotely connected with that act of treason had already been killed. As had their extended families, their friends, and any possible accomplices. He had even eliminated some whose names were not found in the Fleetnet files, but upon whom suspicion fell anyway.

His Mercedes hummed through the thick stands of pine and birch that made up the Goerlitz forest, where elk and wild horse still roamed free, through the steep-sided valleys and troughs carved out by massive glaciers in the distant past. As they sped along the road to the bunker complex, the SS chief felt his spirits lifting for the first time in months.

Thankfully, the worst of the traitor-hunt was now behind them. Rebellious elements of the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine had been brought to heel with exemplary severity. Some useful men had been lost, it was true. And he was the first to admit that it was more than possible that innocent blood had been spilled. But the revelations furnished by the Emergence demanded resolute action. The vengeance of the Black Angels, falling on those who would have failed the fuhrer, had been swift and terrible to behold—as history demanded that it must be.

And there was still so much to do. There was a war to be won, against much greater odds than anyone would have admitted only a year ago. But just as the Emergence had brought frightful knowledge of criminals acting in league with Jewish and Bolshevik plotters to destroy the fuhrer’s legacy, so, too, had it yielded the means of thwarting their schemes—and of defeating the corrupt democracies.

The heavy, armor-plated sedan gracefully powered out of a long, sweeping turn, allowing him to catch sight of Kaltenbrunner’s limousine, just a few hundred meters ahead. Himmler still considered his Security Service chief a very lucky man. According to the records, some doubt had hung over his actions at the end of the war in die andere Zeit, the other time. Fortunately for Kaltenbrunner, the records were inconclusive, and nobody could pin down quite what he had done. Ultimately, he was saved by his performance on the gallows.

It was an SS researcher who had discovered an electronic magazine article about famous last lines. He had come across a report of Kaltenbrunner’s execution by the Allies, in October 1946. Just before the hangman’s noose took him, Kaltenbrunner showed a distinct sense of style, saying in a low, calm voice, “Germany, good luck.”

That was the sort of Aryan contempt for death that the fuhrer found reassuring in these uncertain of days. So Kaltenbrunner lived. For now.

And his tenuous hold on life was driving him more fervently to prove his loyalty. He had accelerated the solution to the Jewish problem, despite the fact that the Allies had stepped up their efforts to bomb the rail lines that led to the camps. He had even taken over the Abwehr two years early and had placed it under the supervision of the Reich Central Security Office.