Designated Targets

shown her, a buried ammo locker just off the road in the foothills of the Koolaus. There’d been two pistols in there. “Throw downs,” he called them. And about $2,300 in cash. She didn’t ask him about the stash.

Curtis had, though.

“That’s my retirement fund and insurance policy, Lieutenant,” was all the cop would say.

Rosanna figured she’d increased the value of his glory box about a thousand times over, just by dropping her flexipad and powered sunglasses in there. She figured she could put a bullet into the slate and the Sonycam, if they came close to being captured.

For now, though, she used the touch screen to package a burst for Julia back in New York. The live link was gone. A message had come in on Fleetnet ordering all the surviving embeds and 21C personnel to switch to compressed burst, to reduce the possibility that the transmissions might be traced.

That had been a heavy blow. Julia had a lot more experience with this sort of shit, and as long as they’d been able to talk to her, she’d been a serious source of reassurance. Especially when the first Japanese ships had appeared on the horizon. Even Cherry had listened to everything she told them to do.

Now they couldn’t communicate in real time, and it felt as though darkness had drawn itself that much closer around them.

Cherry was sleeping quietly. Rosanna had insisted he spray himself with Snore-eze.

Curtis came over and sat next to her on the cot. “Do you mind?” he asked.

“Nah. It’s cool.”

Rosanna was only half listening to him, though. She might have been clueless in a firefight, but she could use an editing program in her sleep. With the slate balanced on her lap, she sent her fingers dancing over the screen, cutting, splicing, and juxtaposing images while she and Curtis talked.

“Do you think we’re going to get out of this?” he asked.

Rosanna chopped twelve seconds from a long shot of Japanese dive-bombers working over the wreckage of Ford Island. Even pulled in as tight as she could, they weren’t individually identifiable. Damn.

“I doubt it,” she said.

“You don’t think we can hide out up here, until help arrives?”

She tidied up a jumpy bit of footage of half a dozen landing barges beaching themselves on the island’s eastern shore. They were the main body of the force from which the wrecked barge had been detached.

“Wally, maybe we could, you know, in the movies. But this is real life, buddy. Nothing good happens in real life. Not in wartime, anyway. Like this,” she said, bringing up a vid of Cherry killing the Japanese soldier on the beach.

Then Curtis watched as he and the detective used the grenades to make sure nobody else crawled out of the barge.

“There’s nothing good here, Wally. We’re killing them. They’re killing us. It’s old news.”

“You can’t really believe that,” he said, sounding almost offended. “You know what these guys are like. The Japs and the Nazis, they’re in your history books. Beating them is the most important thing in world.”

A smile softened her face. “I’m sorry. You’re right. It is, but—”

Rosanna was never able to figure out whether she heard the shot or saw the impact of the bullet first.

Curtis was already flying backwards, tumbling over, blood spraying back in her face, when she became aware that she couldn’t hear herself screaming for the sound of rifles discharging all around them.

Julia had often said that time became elastic under fire. A few seconds might stretch themselves out over what felt like half a day, or whole hours might disappear in a glimmer of compressed, accelerated activity. For Rosanna, it happened both ways.

Curtis airborne, slowly turning and twisting like an Olympic diver, his body jolting as more bullets struck home, bright red pearls of blood sailing away. And then Cherry, twice as big as she remembered him, suddenly on top of her, knocking her down, filling the whole world, a riot gun in his hands, the muzzle barking and shooting flames and sparks and smoke.

Japanese soldiers everywhere, some leaping from the brush in a twinkling, others charging at her in such drawn out, slow-mo that if they kept running and running for a thousand years, she doubted they would cross the little clearing to reach her.

A bloodied steel spike—a bayonet—emerged through Cherry’s shoulder. He roared and spun, and a Japanese soldier with a comically surprised expression was taken off balance by the momentum. She saw a huge pistol in Cherry’s hand. It fired twice, and Rosanna was somehow aware of a man behind her being killed, his head taken off by the twin blasts. A sickening wet, crunching sound. Three more bayonets driven into Cherry’s body. Fists and boots hammering at him as he went down. A single pistol shot. A soldier falling away, clutching at his shattered jaw as it hung from his face by tendrils and skin.

Something slammed into her head, and she fell into darkness.

OSWEGO, NEW YORK

Julia couldn’t believe she’d been suckered into this. It wasn’t like she had nothing else to do.

Car bombs and parcel bombs were still going off all over the country. The Japanese were on Oahu. She was overdue to download Rosanna’s latest package. And the Times had finally agreed to give her a team to run a three-part investigation of Hoover’s FBI.

But here she was, stuck on a platform in a town hall that had rats in the rafters, in some pissant burg in upstate New York, selling fucking war bonds. At least the turnout was healthy. The hall probably held about 150 people, but at least three times that had spilled out into the night, wrapped up in mufflers and heavy coats, listening to this circus over an antique PA system that lost about half of everything that was said. The whine of the feedback was giving her a headache.

She felt like gagging on the cigarette smoke, and couldn’t believe that people would allow their children to breathe in the stuff. But dozens of kids were dotted throughout the audience, many of them dressed for bed in slippers, winter pajamas, and long woolen robes.

She’d originally agreed to do the gig because Ronald Reagan was supposed to be on stage, along with the monkey from Bedtime for Bonzo. Well, actually, it wasn’t the real monkey, which probably hadn’t been born yet. Bedtime was originally filmed in 1951. Instead, it had been telerecorded onto celluloid by Universal Studios, and it was one of the most popular movies of the year.

Now Reagan couldn’t get in from the West Coast, what with all the terrorist bombings, so Edward Gargan, who played Policeman Bill in Bedtime, had been sent in his place.

But there was another reason Julia had been dragooned into this animal act, and he was sitting next to her on the hard wooden bench: Sergeant Snider, of the USMC. He was in line for a Medal of Honor, or at least a Silver Star, for his bravery on the Brisbane Line.

Julia didn’t hold it against him, though. Snider was all right, and she couldn’t begrudge him living off the publicity tit. He’d done more than his fair share, and he was never going to walk freely again, thanks to his wounds. It was just that she had better things to be doing than entertaining a room full of hicks in order to get them to fork over—what, ten or twenty bucks each for the war effort?

There was no getting out of it, though. Her chief of staff, Blundell, said that if she was going to be a “celebrity reporter,” there were certain obligations that came with the job. She wasn’t sure whether he was insulting her with that “celebrity” stuff. She knew there were plenty on the paper who resented it. Harold Denny, one of the other war correspondents, had told her to her face that she was “all surface, even at the core.”

She’d punched him out.

Maybe that was why she’d been sent upstate. As punishment.

Her flexipad was set to silent mode, and it began to vibrate on her hip. She considered faking an emergency to take the call and escape, but before she could do that, Policeman Bill had finished up, and she was being called to the podium to tell her stories about how Sergeant Snider had saved the world.

Two hours later, the hall was emptying of people. She’d been signing autographs and answering questions and was actually starting to dig the whole thing. She took a particular delight in telling a couple of teenaged girls to forget about boys and to concentrate on their studies, and to see if they could get a copy of de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex or Greer’s The Female Eunuch from one of the mail-order companies that were springing up in the Zone.