Eisenhower didn't seem put out by that. Instead he threw Kolhammer off balance with a pause and a change of tack. "I thought you handled that scene in the Oval Office very well, Admiral. Hoover was really gunning for you."
"He's been gunning for all of us, from day one," said Kolhammer. "Well, maybe day two, when he figured out that he had no secrets from us."
"Rumors have been swirling around him for years," said Eisenhower. "But he's wounded, not crippled, Admiral. You'll want to watch yourself."
"I have bigger problems than that fruit and nut bar," said Kolhammer.
"For now you do. That won't always be the case." Eisenhower waved a hand toward the map on the wall. "This isn't the only war you're fighting, Admiral. Don't make the mistake of assuming you have to fight every battle on your own. Not everybody in this country is as frightened of the future as Mr. Hoover."
"They should be," replied Kolhammer. But he regretted doing so.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
The guy in the back of the car was beginning to spasm and vomit up bile. Mohr thought they might lose him before they made it to the hospital. The driver, some Good Samaritan who'd surprised the hell out of Eddie by pulling over and offering to help, kept veering into the oncoming traffic as he craned around to ask if the kid was going to make it.
"I don't know," said Eddie. "They fucked him up pretty good."
Flight Sergeant Lloyd was in the front passenger seat, while in the back Mohr and Linthicum nursed the unconscious victim of the mob attack. The chief had been forced to crack another one of those losers across the head with his makeshift club to get them to break it up. He'd belted a sailor with blood on his bell-bottoms, figuring that was as good as a guilty verdict in a proper court.
"And the rest of you can fuck off right now, unless you're hungry for some of this, too," he'd growled, waving the steel picket around.
They hadn't argued.
Mohr and Lloyd had been trying to rig up a litter to transport their patient when a black Packard Clipper, driven by a silver-haired gent called Max, pulled over and offered them a lift. Frankly, Max looked like he had the sort of old money that'd make Scrooge McDuck seem hard up for a buck, but he didn't even take off his expensive suit jacket when he helped pick up the kid. He just mucked right in and got blood all over it.
"I know a private clinic we can take him to," Max said, almost swerving into the path of a fire engine as it shot past in a red blur. "The big emergency wards are all going to be stretched past what they can handle, anyway. This madness is all over the city. And you can take it from me, the police aren't making it any better."
"You a doctor, Max?" Mohr called out over the muted roar of the Packard's 356-cubic-inch straight-eight.
"Hell, no. My family's in oil. You boys are with the Zone, right? Your friend there, too."
"We are," Mohr confirmed, "but we don't know this guy. We just found him."
Max took them out of the city, driving hard past mobs of drunken servicemen and small groups of angry-looking Mexican kids in ridiculously oversized suits. Half of Bunker Hill looked like it had been set ablaze, and they saw a huge mob at war with itself a few blocks down Third Street, near the tunnel entrance.
At times, Mohr was sure they reached a hundred miles per hour, an insane speed, but Max stayed hunched over the wheel, all the way up into the hills. A motorcycle cop seemed to think about giving chase at one point, but the dispatchers must have had something better for him to do, because he peeled away almost immediately.
"Those assholes are just letting this happen," said Max. "And you can bet there's a reason behind it. Did you hear? The same thing's happening in Chicago, with the blacks over there, of course. Mark my words, gentlemen, some baby-fascist like Anslinger or Hoover will get their grubby little mitts all over this."
"Jeez, Max, you sound more like a Wobbly than an oil man," Mohr said, smiling for the first time since they'd left the theater.
"Like I said, my family's in oil, Chief. But I'm not. I had enough of that in the Great War. Drove a St. Chamond tank with the French at Laffaux Mill. Damn thing turned over in a ditch and caught fire. I swear, I could still smell burning Frenchmen a year later. Never again, Chief. This car is my one indulgence. The rest of my life I try to live according to the teachings of Henry Thoreau. You know him?'
"Another French tanker?"
Max burst out laughing, and nearly put himself into a ditch again. "Not likely. Okay, we're here. Let's get your friend seen to."
Max took them off the street and through a grand, gated entrance into what looked like a mansion.
"It's a private facility," he said as they slid to a halt on the gravel driveway. "Half of Hollywood comes here to dry out, but they have a fully equipped emergency ward, too. You never know when Veronica Lake is going to turn up."
"Uhm, do you think they'll let us in?" Flight Sergeant Lloyd asked doubtfully.
"Don't worry, son. The only color that counts here is money. My family's probably built a whole wing onto this place over the years. They'll let us in, all right. Let's go."
Two white-suited orderlies carrying a stretcher were hurrying toward them, down a sweeping staircase that led up into a blindingly white building. They didn't even break stride when Mohr and his motley band emerged from the car covered in blood.
"Hello, Mr. Ambrose," they called out simultaneously.
"Hello, Louis. Mandy," Max answered. "I wonder if you could see to my young friend here. He's in some distress."
They relieved Mohr and Linthicum of their burden, placed the kid on the stretcher, and disappeared back up the stairs without another word. The chief didn't know what to say. He had never, in his whole life, been witness to such a thing. He'd always thought it was compulsory to be a complete asshole once you got to be rich enough to get away with it.
But Max was already climbing back into the car, saying there'd be other people downtown who needed his help. "Are you coming?" he asked.
"I guess so," said Eddie Mohr. His companions just nodded.
29
In many ways, Sea Dragon was a blessing in disguise for Captain Muller.
The titanic effort required of the Nazi superstate to rise up and throw itself across the English Channel inevitably focused the energies of the Reich in northern France. The Gestapo and the SS were both kept busy trying to suppress the French resistance, which was sacrificing itself in a desperate assault on German preparations for the invasion of Great Britain.
Thousands of Frenchmen and -women would die in the next few days to give their traditional enemies, the English, a fighting chance against Jurgen Muller's countrymen. He pondered the ironies as he polished his great-grandfather's war watch and wondered what role his forebear would play in the crusade of the coming days. In Muller's universe, he'd been a company commander in the Gross Deutschland Division. His ancestor had been executed for holding a river crossing against the Red Army during the retreat from Moscow. Saving the lives of hundreds of his men was considered defeatist, and had cost Heinrich Muller his own life.
His family had gone into the camps shortly after.
This same watch still sat in his great-grandfather's breast pocket somewhere. Probably in a forward depot near the French coastline, where the Gross Deutschland would await transport to Britain, should the airborne assault gain a foothold. Holding the watch gingerly in his "injured" hand-the one encased in a fake plaster cast-Muller rubbed at the glass face with a handkerchief. Apart from that glass face, which had been replaced sometime in the 1960s, this timepiece was the same one his ancestor carried, right down to the subatomic level.