John Birmingham - Axis of Time 2 - Designated Targets

About the Author:

Australian authorJOHNBIRMINGHAM , whose bookLeviathan won the National Award for

Non-fiction at the Adelaide Festival of the Arts 2002, “tells stories for a living.” For doing so he has been

paid by theSydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Playboy, and numerous other

magazines. He has also been published, but not paid, by theLong Bay Prison News. Some of his stories

have won prizes, including the George Munster prize for Freelance Story of the Year and the Carlton

United Sports Writing Prize.Leviathan, John’s fifth book, was first published in Knopf (Australia)

hardback in 1999, and is the “unauthorized biography of Sydney,” Australia. His earlier works areHe

Died with a Felafel in His Hand, made into a feature film by Noah Taylor,The Tasmanian Babes

Fiasco, How to Be a Man, The Search for Savage Henry, andWeapons of Choice. He lives at the

beach with his wife, young daughter, baby son, and two cats. He is not looking for any more flatmates.

www.birmo.journalspace.com

About this book . . .

Designated Targets

Book II of the Axis of Time Trilogy

By John Birmingham

It's World War II and the A-bomb is here to stay.

The only question: Who's going to drop it first?

The Battle of Midway takes on a whole new dimension with the sudden appearance of a U.S.-led naval

task force from the twenty-first century, the result of a botched military experiment. State-of-the-art

warships are scattered across the Pacific, armed to the teeth with the latest instruments of mass

destruction.

Nuclear warheads, rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47s, computer-guided missiles—all bets are off as

the major powers of 1942 scramble to be the first to wield the weapons of tomorrow against their

enemies. The whole world now knows of the Allied victory in 1945, and the collapse of communism

decades later. But that was the first time around.

With the benefit of their newly acquired knowledge, Stalin and Hitler rapidly change strategies. A

Russian-German ceasefire leaves the Fuhrer free to bring the full weight of his vaunted Nazi war machine

down on England, while in the Pacific, Japan launches an invasion of Australia, and Admiral Yamamoto

schemes to seize an even greater prize . . . Hawaii.

Even in the United States the newcomers from the future are greeted with a combination of enthusiasm

and fear. Suspicion leads to hatred and erupts into violence.

Suddenly it's a whole new war, with high-tech, high-stakes international manipulations from Tokyo to

D.C. to the Kremlin. As the world trembles on the brink of annihilation, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt,

Hitler, and Tojo confront extreme choices and a future rife with possibilities—all of them apocalyptic.

1

TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI

Lordy,thought the boy.It’s a miracle for sure.

He was seven and a half years old—the man of the house, really, what with his daddy being away in

Como, and he had never seen anything like the fearful wonder of the newly chiseled monument.

HERE LIES JESSE GARON PRESLEY.

DEEPLY BELOVED OF HIS MOTHER GLADYS, FATHER VERNON,

AND BROTHER ELVIS.

A SOUL SO PURE, THE GOOD LORD COULD NOT BEAR

TO BE APART FROM HIM.

BORN JAN.8, 1935,

TAKEN UNTO GOD JAN.8, 1935.

Despite the unseasonable heat of the evening, gooseflesh ran up his thin arms as he read the words

again. Whippoorwills and crickets trilled their amazement in the sweet, warm air. With a pounding heart,

the boy inched forward and muttered hoarsely, “Jesse, are you here?”

The stone was cut from blindingly white marble that fairly glowed in the setting sun. The inscription had

been inlaid with real gold—he was almost certain of that. He ran his fingers over the words and the cold,

hard stone, as if afraid to discover that they weren’t real.

It must have cost a king’s ransom . . .

An enormous bunch of store-bought flowers had been placed upon a patch of freshly broken earth that

still lay at the foot of the monument. Hundreds of tiny beads of water covered the petals and caught the

last golden rays of daylight.

He dropped down on his knees as if he were in church and stared at the impossible vision for many

minutes, heedless of the dirt he was getting on his old dungarees. He remained virtually motionless until

one hand reached out and his fingers again brushed the surface of the headstone.

“Oh, my,” he whispered.

Then Elvis Aaron Presley leapt to his feet and ran so fast that he raised a trail of dust as he sprinted

down the gravel lane, away from the pauper’s section of the Priceville Cemetery, a-hollerin’ for his

mama.

“He’ll probably get his ass whupped, the poor little bastard.” Slim Jim Davidson smiled as he said it,

peering over the sunglasses he had perched on his nose.

“Why?” asked the woman who was sitting next to him in the rear seat of the gaudy red Cadillac. You

didn’t see babies like this every day. Slim Jim had seen to the detailing himself. The paint job, the bison

leather seats, everything.

“For telling lies,” he said. “Headstones don’t just appear like that, you know. They’re gonna think he

made it up, and when he won’t take it back, there’ll be hell to pay.”

The woman seemed to give the statement more thought than it was really due. “I suppose so,” she said

after a few seconds.

Slim Jim could tell she didn’t approve. They were all the same, these people. They’d bomb an entire city

into rubble without batting an eye, but they looked at you like you were some sort of hoodlum if you even

suggested raising your hand against a snot-nosed kid. Or a smart-mouth dame, for that matter.

And this O’Brien, she was a helluva smart-mouth dame.

She’d kept her trap shut, though, while they’d been watching the Presley kid. In fact, she seemed to be

fascinated by him. They’d been waiting in the Caddy up on Old Saltillo Road for nearly an hour before

he showed. Long enough for Slim Jim to wonder if they were pissing their time up against a wall. But the

kid did show, just as his cousin said he would. And he’d heard O’Brien’s stifled gasp when the small

figure first appeared, walking out of a stand of trees about two hundred yards away.

“It’s him, all right,” she said. “Damned if it’s not.”

Slim Jim had grabbed the contract papers and made to get out of the car right then and there. He’d had

enough of sitting still. His butt had fallen asleep, and he was downright bored.

But O’Brien shook her head. “Not here.”

He’d bristled at that. His temper had frayed during the long wait. Long enough even to make him feel

some sympathy for the cops who’d had to stake him out once or twice. But he took her “advice”

because it was always worth taking.

Her advice had cost him a goddamn packet, too, over the course of their relationship. But along the

way, Slim Jim Davidson had learned that you had to spend money to make it. Problem was that up until

recently, he didn’t have no money to spend. None of his own, anyway. And spending other people’s

money had sent him to the road gangs.

Mississippi was a powerful reminder of those days. The air tasted the same as it had in Alabama, thick

and sweet and tending toward rotten. The faces they’d driven past in town had brought back some

unpleasant memories, too. Hard, lean faces with deep lines and dark pools for eyes. The sort of

uncompromising faces a man might expect to see on Judgment Day. They’d sure looked that way to Slim

Jim when they trooped in from the jury room.

Well, that felt like a thousand years ago. Now he could buy and sell that fucking jury. And the judge.

And his crooked jailers. And the whole goddamned state of Alabama, if he felt like it.

Well, maybe not the whole state. But he was getting there. This Caddy was bigger and more

comfortable than some of the flophouses he’d crashed in during the Depression. He had an apartment in

an honest-to-goddamned brownstone overlooking Central Park back in New York, and a house

designed by some faggot architect overlooking the beach at Santa Monica, out in L.A. He had stocks

and bonds and a big wad of folding money he liked to carry in his new buffalo-hide wallet—just so’s he

could pull it out and snap the crisp new bills between his fingers when he needed to remind himself that he

wasn’t dreaming.

Hell, he was so rich now that when those C-notes lost their snap, he could give them away and get some

new ones.

Not that he ever did, of course.Ms. O’Brien would kill him. And she was more than capable of it. No

doubt about that.

She’d insisted that he pick up the Santa Monica house as a long-term investment, too, even though he

thought it was kind of down-market, given his newly acquired status.

“You can stay at the Ambassador if you don’t like rubbing shoulders with your old cell mates down on

the piers,” she’d said. “Believe me, Santa Monica will come back, and you need to diversify your asset

base. Waterfront property is always a sure bet.”

Yes, indeed, and Slim Jim was fond of sure bets. After all, they’d made him richer than God. They’d

also delivered him a conga line of horny babes, a small army of his own hired muscle, and the slightly

scary Ms. O’Brien.

Thinking about the slightly scary Ms. O’Brien sitting next to him there in the Caddy, however, led

naturally to thinking about the slightly scary Ms. O’Brien sliding her body over his in a king-size hotel

bed. But that was a dangerous line of thought, he knew. Because Ms. O’Brien wasn’t inclined to get

anywhere near a bed with Slim Jim Davidson, naked or not.

He’d tried feeling her up once, and she’d nearly broken his arm for it. She’d snapped an excruciating

wristlock on him without even breaking a sweat, no doubt a party trick she’d picked up back when she

was a captain in the Eighty-second MEU. And she’d kept him locked up, gasping for breath and nearly

fainting away, while she explained to him the facts of life:

One, she was his employee, not his girlfriend.

Two, she would be his employee only for as long as she needed to be, and she wouldnever be his

girlfriend.

Three, she could kick his scrawny ass black and blue without bothering to lace up her boots.

And four, she . . .

“Mr. Davidson?”

Slim Jim jumped, feeling guilty and worried that she might have figured out what he was thinking. But no,

luckily she was just dragging him out of his slightly bored daze.

“Elvis has left the cemetery,” she announced. She said it in a singsong way, and it seemed to amuse her

more than it should have. But Slim Jim had given up trying to figure her out.

“Let’s go over it one last time, just to be sure,” she said, pulling out a flexipad.

“Oh, please,” he begged. “Let’s not.”

O’Brien ignored him, and his shades suddenly flickered into life. Windows opened up on the lenses and

seemed to float in the air in front of him. Some carried photographs of the boy they’d just seen. Others

were full of words. Small words in large type. She’d learned not to burden him with too much text.

Bitch thinks she’s so goddamned smart . . .

Slim Jim sighed, and read through the briefing notes again. Some of his reluctance was for show, though.

He never really got tired of the amazing gadgets these guys had brought with them.

“Elvis Aaron Presley, age eight and a half. Mother’s name, Gladys. Father’s name, Vernon,” he recited.

“Dead brother, Jesse. Attends school at East Tupelo Consolidated. Father jailed for fraud. Asshole tried

to ink a four-dollar check into forty . . .”

O’Brien shot him a warning look, but he hid behind the shades, pretending he couldn’t see her.

“Daddy’s out now, away in Como, Mississippi, building a POW camp for the government. Mama takes

in sewing when she can get it. Local yokels call ’em white trash behind their backs . . .”

Slim Jim laughed out loud, glancing out across the ragged fields of corn and soybean that stretched

between the cemetery and the edge of the town. “Ha! There’s a fucking pot calling a kettle black if I

ever—”

“Thenotes, Mr. Davidson. Just review the notes,” said O’Brien.

Slim Jim returned to the readout for what felt like the hundredth time. He’d heard about some big-time

grifters who worked like this. Getting so far inside the heads of their marks that they knew what was

going on in there before the chumps realized it themselves. He could sort of see the point.

O’Brien had helped him close some amazing deals these last few months. Butdamn, it was hard work.

Nevertheless, he plowed on, reciting most of the notes from memory even though the words still hung

there in front of him.

“Gladys drinks in private. She finds her comfort in the church. Her first love was dance, her second

music. But she’s kind of a fat bitch now so . . . Sorry!Sorry . . . She gets around in bare feet and old

socks so her kid can have shoes. Elvis, he’s aware of his family’s low standing. It eats him up and he

wants to rescue them. It always tickles him when his mama says she’s proud of him.”

In spite of himself, Slim Jim couldn’t help but warm to the little prick. They’d listened to his music all the

way down here, and you had to admit, the kid had a gift.Or would have.

Then again, maybe he wouldn’t. If Slim Jim bought him a ticket out of Tupelo now, gave him enough

money for a comfortable life, maybe the kid would never sing a song worth a tinker’s crap. Not that the

thought really bothered him. Those songs were recorded by an Elvis from another time. No, this was all

about who was gonna get paid for them.

Not some asshole called Colonel Tom Parker, you could bet on that.

Nope. “Slim Jim Enterprises” would be latching itself on to this particular money tit. And if the kid never

became an actual recording star, just because he grew up rich instead of poor, well, who gave a damn?

Slim Jim had grown up in a town a lot like this, with a daddy a lot like Vernon. And if some asshole had

turned up on their doorstep, offering to buy them out of poverty, Daddy would have been trampled to

death by the entire Davidson clan rushing to sign on the dotted line. And to hell with the consequences.

Slim Jim was only vaguely aware of the deepening dusk as he sat in the Caddy, chanting his way through

O’Brien’s notes like some kind of mad priest.Yeah, Tupelo is a lot like home. Besides the two main

roads in the center of town, every street was a strip of dirt or gravel. Clouds of dust would rise from

them in summer. They’d turn into rivers of mud during the spring rains. Most folks would have worked

the Roosevelt program during the Depression, cutting brush, fixing roads. Most, like Gladys Presley,

wouldn’t ask for handouts, but would accept what was offered. The men would all be factory workers

and sharecroppers.

Now most of them would be in the army or working in the war industries. Poor but honest, they’d think

of themselves.Screwed and stupid was how Slim Jim would have put it.

A guy like Vernon Presley he could understand. He knew the type. He’d have had good intentions, but

not enough character to see them through. Slim Jim wished they could deal with Vernon rather than

Gladys. It was a laydown that they could sneak a signature out of old Vern, just for a crate of beer and a

hundred bucks.

But O’Brien had been a real ballbreaker on that particular subject, even more so than usual. There’d be

no grifting the Presley family. They’d get the industry standard percentage, and Slim Jim would take the

industry standard cut. It was a shitload of money to be tossing away to a bunch of dumbass crackers, at

least to his way of thinking. But she’d given him that stone face of hers again, and he’d buckled. She was

a scary bitch—and bottom line, he was rich because of it.

“And then Vernon told Elvis he was responsible for his mama’s ill health because of the bad birth . . . ,”

he continued, only half his mind on the task.

“No,” O’Brien said. “We don’t know for sure that that’s happened yet, so it’s better not to bring it up.

But it’s supposed to happen around about now, so just keep it in mind.”

“Right.” He nodded. “So are we gonna fuck this puppy or what?”

His lawyer rolled her eyes, but she leaned forward to tap on the glass partition that separated them from

the driver.

“Okay,” she said, raising her voice. “Let’s roll.”

It was a short drive from Priceville Cemetery to East Tupelo, a pissant little rats’ nest of meandering

unpaved streets running down off the Old Saltillo Road. A couple of creeks, two sets of railroad tracks,

some open fields, and a whole world of dreams separated the hamlet’s beaten-down inhabitants from the

good people of Tupelo proper. Slim Jim wasn’t bothered none driving into such a place.

Nor, he noticed, was Ms. O’Brien. He figured it was just another one of those things about your dames

from the future. Not much seemed to rattle them, unless you tried to cop a feel without being invited.

“That’s it,” she announced.

She indicated a small wooden frame house, a “shotgun shack,” they called them. This one stood about a

hundred yards up the street they’d just entered. Dusk was full upon them now, and the car’s headlights

lanced through the gloom and the dust and pollen that always seemed to hang in the air, even at this time

of year.

“You sure you don’t want to do the talking?” he asked, suddenly nervous for no good reason. That

wasn’t like him at all.

“You’ll be fine,” O’Brien assured him. “It’s just business. Be sure and treat them with respect.”

“But . . .”

“Nobuts. You’ll nail it. I’ve never known such a rolled gold bullshit artist. If you’d been born any

luckier, you could have been a senator or a televangelist.”

Slim Jim wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but she didn’t seem to mean it as a compliment.

His driver pulled over into the gutter. As soon as he stepped out, the smell took him by the throat. Sour

sweat. Outdoor toilets. Woodsmoke. Corn bread, grits, and boiled spuds. The smell of his childhood.

He could tell, without needing to check, that dozens of pairs of eyes had settled on the back of his newly

cut, lightweight suit. Some of the bolder folks would have wandered right out onto their verandas—an

awful fancy name for a thin porch made of raw pine boards, roofed in by scraps of tin, and supported at

each corner by sawed-off bits of two-by-four. Others would be hiding in their front rooms, twitching

aside sun-faded curtains, if they had any, peering out suspiciously at the Presleys’ unexplained visitors.

And if they thoughthe was something, he wondered what sort of ripple went up and down when Ms.

O’Brien emerged from the car. East Tupelo wasn’t used to women like that, not yet. Hell, neither was

the rest of America. That skirt of hers would surely send tongues wagging, showing off so much leg

above the knee as it did.

But it was time to get into character, so he pasted a harmless, well-meaning expression on his dial. A

neutral grin that said to the world he was hoping he’d found the right address.

Slim Jim took in the details of the kid’s house in one quick glance. Again, he didn’t need to stare. It was

all old news to him. There’d be only two rooms running off one corridor. You could shoot a gun clean

through without hitting anything, hence the name. The kid would probably sleep where Slim Jim himself

had for years, on an old sofa in the front room—which did double duty as a kitchen, and a parlor when

guests came a-calling. Every stick of furniture would be someone else’s cast-offs, but it’d most likely be

clean. Gladys would make sure of that.

The water would be pumped by hand, from a well out in the backyard. There’d be bare boards on the

floor and walls. No little comforts or luxuries. Not a blade of grass grew in the brown dirt that substituted

for a front yard. Even in the gloom, he recognized the scratch marks of a homemade dogwood broom in

the hard-packed earth, and the telltale prints of chicken feet. He bit down on a sigh. It was going to be

like a goddamned oven in there.

He really missed his brownstone.

2

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

He’d expected some changes. Even so, after an hour or more in Los Angeles, Chief Petty Officer Eddie

Mohr felt like his head had been turned inside out. Sort of like an old sock.

He felt awkward as hell in his new “twenty-first” uniform. Figured people woulda been staring and

pointing at him like he was some sort of carnival freak as he walked through the train station. But it was

Mohr himself who had to resist the urge to stop and gawk, while nobody else gave him as much as a

second glance. Most didn’t even notice him the first time around.

He’d stood on the concourse at Union Station for a long time, ever since he’d painfully uncurled himself

from one of the hard, cheap seats on theSuper Chief. The station was roaring with foot traffic. Sailors

from what they were calling the Old Navy lounged around in their best whites, clearly in no rush to get

away to the South Pacific. Hundreds of civilians swarmed over the bright mosaic floor, too, their shoes

clicking and scuffing on the tiles. Many of them were of fighting age, but none seemed to be bothered that

somebody might front them about why they hadn’t signed up yet. Or been drafted.

Mohr wandered through, hauling the dead weight of his duffel bag as if it were a side of beef.

Occasionally he’d spot a uniform like his own, the coloring slightly different from the local rig, the cut a

little more stylish. At least that’s how some fairy from New York called it.

His old man had read that article from thePost out loud, howling with laughter, tears streaming down his

face.“Lookit this, Ethel,” he’d yelled out to the kitchen. “Lughead here’s standin’ atd’ cuttin’ edge a

fashion. ”

Maybe that’s why Mohr was rolling and twitching his shoulders so much inside the new uniform. To

steady his balance. Meanwhile, he did his best to avoid catching the eye of anybody else who looked to

be headed out to the Zone, to the raw, sprawling settlements and industrial “parks,” as they called them.

Not a one of them looked much like a fucking park to Eddie Mohr, though. Just a bunch of big sheds

and warehouses with a few scraggly fucking eucalyptus trees for shade. Some of them, they didn’t even

seem to have workers inside. It was like the machines ran themselves.

He scowled then, and remembered Midway. Machines running themselves—that’s what had caused the

whole class-A fuckup to begin with. That’s why he never went out near the factories if he could avoid it.

He’d seen that movie, the one with the muscle man in it. A kraut, and he’d been the goddamned

governor of California, if you could believe it! In the movie, the machines had tried to take over the

world. He felt like it was about two minutes from happening whenever he set foot in some of them

factories out in the Valley.

Somebody bumped into him then, knocking the duffel bag off his shoulders. “Sorry, mac,” the guy called

out as he hurried away, not even bothering to turn around.

Some long-haired gimp. Mohr snorted in disgust. Probably wearing an earring, too.

He found himself standing in front of the station’s Harvey House restaurant. It was full of officers and

their dates. Freshly minted war brides some of them, to judge by the painfully happy smiles and that

just-been-fucked glow about the cheeks. And a fair swag of gold diggers, too, if his suspicions played

true. They were probably dizzy with the prospect of the ten-grand GI’s insurance they’d pocket if their

“dearly beloved” got himself shot to pieces along with old Dugout Doug.

Mohr’s whole body ached with fatigue, and his fractured skull—or at least the cracks they’d fixed up

with some sort of plastic cement—throbbed in a dull, far-off kind of way.

His train had left Chicago early, and he’d rested only fitfully on the long haul across the continent. He

thought about grabbing a sit-down sandwich or a burger at Harvey’s. He could see they ran a

desegregated joint—a lot of places in California seemed to these days. There were a couple of uniformed

Negroes and some Chinese-looking fellas eating in there. Even had some white folk with them. But he

thought he could still detect a sort of no-go area around them. The place was packed, but a few empty

chairs seemed to be scattered around their table. Still, they were being served, and left in peace.

That wouldn’t have happened six months ago.

He propped himself on the arm of a big leather chair for a moment. If he weren’t so tired, he would have

marveled at the thing. It was a much flashier piece of furniture than had ever graced the Mohr family

home, and here it was stuck in a goddamn train station. Somebody had left behind a crumpled copy of

theL.A. Times, and he flicked through it idly while he waited for the bus out to Fifty-one.

Bad move.

Right there on the second fucking page was a picture of that fucking idiot Slim Jim Davidson, grinning up

a storm!

He had some poor kid tucked under one arm and some flint-eyed dame who just had to be twenty-first

lurking at his shoulder. In his other hand, he was waving around a giant cardboard check written out for

twenty thousand dollars.

Mohr felt a wave of acid rise in his gut, and he hadn’t even gone for the burger yet. He tried not to read

the story, but he couldn’t help himself. Davidson had bought himself another singer, name a’ Presley, and

a whole bunch of this kid’s tunes were gonna be released over the next six months. Mohr snorted when

he read that a “significant” percentage of the profits was being channeled straight into a war-bond drive.

It’d be one tenth of 1 percent of fuck all compared with the bribes that little weasel had paid out to get

himself taken off active duty and assigned to “special services” with the USO. Mohr bitterly regretted not

hammering Davidson flat when he’d had the chance back on their ship.

On theAstoria, he’d had the little crook under his thumb; now he was just like everyone else—reduced

to following the adventures of Slim Jim in the papers and the newsreels. Mostly that involved watching

him getting richer and richer. But Davidson was a sneaky little shit, and it seemed every time he fell

ass-backwards into a pile of someone else’s money, he made sure to donate a big whack of it to some

war widow or an orphaned kid, or some dogface with his dick shot off. So now everybodyloved Slim

Jim Davidson. Walter fucking Winchell wouldn’t shut up about the jerk.

Mohr felt a twinge of sympathy for the Presley kid, though. He looked like some poor dumb rube who’d

gone to bed on a dirt floor and woken up in the Ritz. He wanted to warn the boy not to hold on to that

check too tightly, or one day he’d find Davidson had chewed his arm down to a bloody stump trying to

get the thing back.

He angrily reefed the page over and tried to lose himself in some other, less aggravating news. He half

read some piece about a delegation from the NAACP and the Congress of Industrial Organizations

visiting Kolhammer. His old man would have been interested in that. He still kept up with the union news.

Next, Mohr skimmed a report out of London about all the invasion fears, and he was actually getting

interested in a bit on some guy called McCarthy who would’ve been some kind of heavy-hitting senator

one day, ’cept that he got himself killed by the Japs down in Australia.

Then he heard the police whistle.

The roar of the crowd died away to a buzz, and he could suddenly hear music coming from somewhere

nearby. A twenty-first number, for sure—a duet about this dame called Candy. It sounded like it was

being sung by some drunk on laudanum and a Texas bar whore.

Then everyone turned, the way a crowd will. Mohr turned with them and heard the whistle again. He got

a quick flash of a dark-skinned figure in a uniform like his—

Ah, shit.

—being tackled by two guys who looked like LAPD, until he moved a little closer to discover they

worked for the Union Pacific line. They were older than your average beat cop. And fatter. But by God,

they could swing a nightstick just as quickly.

Mohr cursed under his breath at the sound of polished hickory smacking into flesh. He’d once stood on

a picket line with his old man when it had been broken up by private muscle using ax handles and brass

knucks. The sound of the nightsticks took him back there, and he started to trot. Nobody else within

thirty yards of the assault was moving. A few women gasped and turned their faces away—they wouldn’t

have been from the Task Force, then. A few of the men looked on meekly. Some green kids in army

uniforms, who’d been so full of themselves just a minute earlier, looked queasy now. A couple of sailors

snickered and pointed.

Mohr glared at them as he picked up speed.

“What the fuck is going on here?”he roared in his fiercest gun-deck voice.

The guy they were hitting, a young kid, a greaser of some sort by the look of him, actually flinched as

much under the lash of the chief’s voice as he had under the rain of blows. He was a Mexican, in what

had been a new Auxilliary Forces uniform, until it got all torn up and bloodied.

“None ofyour business, salty,” snarled one of the railroad cops. He had his billy club raised for another

blow, and he suddenly seemed to become aware of it hanging up there. Mohr could tell that for a split

second he thought about whipping it down one last time, but a cold, fixed stare stayed his hand. The man

lowered the weapon uncertainly.

A spell was broken. The tableau on the station concourse began to move again as a furious buzz of

conversation started up and spiraled out and away from the confrontation. The kid, a newly minted

private, still lay where he’d been taken down. Violent shudders ran through his body as he struggled to

choke off sobs and whimpers that wanted to turn into full-blown howling. Mohr willed the kid to keep it

together as he bent down under the hostile eyes of the UP cops and gripped him by the arm.

“Suck it up, kid,” he whispered fiercely. “Get on your feet, and cut out the sniveling.”

John Birmingham - Axis of Time 2 - Designated Targets

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