"Don't beat yourself up over it, Commander. You were an obvious candidate, and believe me, it is a goddamn tenth-order issue today. They were always going to pick you, and I think you were always going to disappoint them. But you didn't disappoint me."
Black moved around uncomfortably in his uniform. Their presence in the dining room had ceased to be a minor sensation, although a newly arrived group of four men did stop on their way through and pointedly check them out. Black didn't seem to notice them at all.
"It just leaves a sour taste in the mouth is all, Admiral."
"Get over it. They tried it on. They failed. Hoover will keep for the moment. Just be careful about talking to garrulous sheet metal salesmen in the future."
Black's face twisted as he tried to work out the reference.
"The man on your flight over here," Kolhammer said helpfully. "His name really was Dave Hurley, but he wasn't a sheet metal maker. He was FBI. He was trying to get you to compromise yourself, before he put the hook in. It wasn't the first time."
Black's jaw was knotting and clenching furiously. "Damn, Jules was right. I thought it was just her being, you know, twenty-first. All cynical and so on. But she was right about Hoover after all."
Kolhammer shrugged. "Maybe. There's a lot of unsubstantiated rumor around Hoover. And the thing about rumors, Commander-as your girlfriend the journalist could tell you if she's any good at her job-is that the rumor you most want to believe is the rumor you should be most skeptical of. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'd better go clean myself up. I feel like a bag of shit. I'll meet you in the lobby in fifteen."
As he stopped to sign his chit on the way out, Kolhammer saw the small group who'd just come in approach Black and engage him in an animated conversation. That was okay. As far as he knew, the FBI didn't have any black field agents at this point in time.
He hurried out of the dining room, with his Secret Service detail falling in behind him.
His hand kept patting the pocket where he had the data stick with the surveillance download from Chief Petty Officer Rogas. Kolhammer hadn't had time to watch the raw footage, but Rogas had cut together a five-minute briefing package that was mercifully free of too much X-rated material.
Kolhammer had no taste for gay porn.
Kolhammer was familiar with both the White House Situation Room in the basement of the West Wing, and the deeply buried tubelike Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the East Wing. In 2021, the meeting he was attending would have been held in one of those two places.
In 1942, however, neither existed. They were about to be built, because one of the more obscure factoids that came through the Transition in the lattice memory of Fleetnet was the information that the White House was structurally unsound and needed to be completely rebuilt from within. The work would have taken place during the Truman Administration, but had been brought forward in light of changed circumstances.
A single bomb could have brought the entire structure down on top of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was due to be temporarily shifted across to Blair House, but the move had been delayed by the attack in the Pacific and the bombing campaign at home. Thus Kolhammer and Black found themselves ushered into the old Oval Office by the president's secretary, Ms. Tully.
The room was instantly recognizable, but like so much of the world he moved through nowadays, noticeably different from Kolhammer's memories of the twenty-first century. He'd been in the room three times before.
Some things were reassuring constants, though: the white marble mantel from the original 1909 Oval Office, the presidential seal in the ceiling, the two flags behind the chief executive's desk, and the desk itself, carved from the timbers of the British warship Resolute. It was so familiar that he could have felt right at home, were it not for the other men in the room.
Roosevelt was in his wheelchair behind the desk, and he did not stand to greet them, although Kolhammer understood that the treatments he'd received from Task Force medical officers had greatly improved his mobility. The secretary of war, Henry Stimson, was waiting with Marshall and Eisenhower. Ike offered both of the newly arrived officers his cheeky, infectious grin.
Marshall, as ever, remained formidably reserved.
"Admiral Kolhammer," he said in his cold, clipped way. "Commander Black."
Black was mechanically formal in his reply. Kolhammer could afford to unwind a little, although he never called the chief of staff anything other than General or General Marshall. Roosevelt had told him that when he'd first met Marshall, he'd slapped the guy on the back and tried to call him George.
He quickly put me in my place, I can tell you, Roosevelt had said, not altogether fondly.
Admiral King, the navy's senior officer, stood next to one of the two dark studded leather couches, which made the room seem so much darker than Kolhammer remembered. The British ambassador, Lord Halifax, had been talking to the Army Air Force's Commanding General Hap Arnold near the windows overlooking the Rose Garden. Kolhammer could only guess at the unhappy tone of that exchange. There were already calls in Congress for the withdrawal of USAAF's strategic bombing units from the U.K., to prevent them from falling into the hands of the enemy when Britain inevitably fell.
Roosevelt cut though the formalities and asked everyone to "take a pew." He turned first to Kolhammer. "Admiral, I believe you have the most recent report from Hawaii."
Kolhammer thanked him, and inserted a data stick into the flatscreen that had been suspended on the Oval Office wall where Jann Willhelm Rohen's famous oil painting, The Death of Bin Laden, would have hung in another world.
"Gentlemen. These first images come from a Big Eye UCAD currently on station above the island of Oahu. It was launched from the Siranui last night to provide greater surveillance cover than the smaller multifunction birds we put in place to provide broadband links and basic oversight after the Clinton left for San Diego."
When the vision of Pearl Harbor and Ford Island came up, Admiral King let slip a single, sharp curse.
"As you can see," Kolhammer continued, "no significant surface units have survived the missile strike."
It was Hap Arnold's turn to react when similar images of Hickham, Wheeler, and Bellows detailed the utter devastation that had been visited upon those airfields. Kolhammer then switched to a top-down view of Honolulu, showing that approximately three quarters of the city had been razed to the ground.
"Casualties are estimated at twelve thousand dead, and about as many injured. My F-Twenty-twos are gone, save for two that were about a hundred miles south of the islands on Combat Air Patrol at the time of the attack. They had just enough fuel to make it to Midway. General MacArthur has released an in-flight tanker and a Hawkeye from the Southwest Pacific Command to join them. As you know, while in transit the AWACS plane located Yamamoto's Combined Fleet. The Japanese have already begun conventional air attacks and are expected to be in position to force a landing on Oahu in about six hours."
"How long before your jets can hit them?" asked King.
"Two and a half hours. But that strike will have a limited capacity. Each plane is carrying one heavy air-to-surface ship-killer, which, all things being equal, will take out whatever it's aimed at."
"But all things are not equal, are they, Admiral?" said King.
"No," he admitted. "The Dessaix appears to have survived and been compromised. She would be capable of negating an attack by the Raptors, and of shooting them down, too. However," he hastened to add, "I can say with certainty that the Dessaix is not being crewed by her original complement, and it's doubtful that whoever is in control will be able to use the ship to the best of her abilities."