28

True Grit was the best goddamn movie Eddie Mohr had ever seen. It was a hell of a shock, seeing John Wayne all fat and old and grizzled, but Mohr had seen enough birthdays to have no trouble imagining himself like that, so it wasn't entirely a bad thing. After all, even missing one eye and carrying a huge spare tire, Rooster Cogburn didn't give much away in the ass-kickin' stakes.

Mohr had seen the movie five times now: two times for free on the base up at San Diego, and three times on his own dollar at a theater in downtown L.A., where he was now. The youngsters, they all preferred that Star Wars shit, but it just left him cold. How you could get into something that was so far removed from reality, he just didn't know. But True Grit was as real a story as he'd ever seen, even the bit at the end with John Wayne doing his one-man cavalry charge, reins between his teeth, six-shooter in one hand and Winchester in the other. That was a great fucking ending, not like that dumbass Apocalypse Now. He'd had to see that one in the Zone, because it was banned everywhere else, and he wondered why the hell he'd bothered when that bald bastard chopped up that poor fucking cow.

Mohr shook the image from his head as Marshal Cogburn yelled at the bad guys to fill their hands. After three weeks without a break, he was gonna enjoy-

"Oh, goddamn. What now?"

The lights in the theater came up, and the management came on over the PA, telling everyone they had to get out in a fast but orderly fashion. Luckily Grauman's Egyptian Theater, a less famous cousin to Grauman's Chinese a few blocks west, was only a third full, because there was nothing orderly about the way most of the patrons suddenly flew for the exits. Some idiot even shouted that there had to be a bomb in the joint.

Mohr rolled his eyes to heaven. He dawdled at the rear of the crush, ready to start pulling people off each other if it got out of hand. But the ushers and the good sense of a couple of other customers prevented a serious bottleneck from building up. As the choke point cleared, he saw a couple of AF uniforms at the exit. A black airman and a white sailor.

"Hey, you guys know what's up?" he asked.

The black guy, a flight sergeant, inclined his head toward the manager in the lobby, who was quickly handing out refunds and trying to hurry the stragglers outside. "He said a bomb went off on a trolley car over at Van Nuys. The city is shutting down the electric railway and all sorts of stuff. Like theaters, I guess."

"Oh, for fuck's sake," said Mohr.

"Hey, chief, how we gonna get back if they shut down the rail?" asked the sailor, a young middie whose name tag read LINTHICUM.

"Initiative, Mr. Linthicum. Let's get out of here and find a bus. You coming with us, Sarge?"

Fight Sergeant Lloyd thought it best if he did.

They collected their refunds and stepped out into the bright light of a warm autumn morning. Mohr was still squinting into the sun when the tomato hit him.

"What the fuck?"

A rotting apple struck Lloyd on the head.

The fruit came from a rowdy group across the street, which he'd mistaken for disgruntled movie patrons. They were bunched up where roadworks partly blocked the footpath. Looking at them now, Mohr could tell that they were off-duty sailors and soldiers, all 'temps. There were about fifteen or twenty of them, and the way they'd gathered around in a tight group, all turned inward, he could tell somebody was about to get the shit kicked out of him.

A cruising police car slowed down as it passed by; then it sped up and disappeared around the block.

"Shit," said Mohr. "You guys gonna back me up?"

He headed across without waiting for their reply. Lloyd fell in beside him, with Linthicum bringing up the rear.

As they got closer, dodging in between the traffic, he heard somebody call out, "Hey, it's the nigger lovers and their boy."

With that, it didn't matter that they were outnumbered. Mohr was past thinking rationally. He grabbed a steel picket and wrenched it out of a pile of earth and broken asphalt.

A corporal came at him with his fists up, but Mohr just swung the heavy iron bar into his face with such casual violence that he might have been taking the top off a boiled egg. The corporal's head snapped back with a wet crack and three or four teeth flew out. As he dropped, Mohr swung an overhand blow onto his shoulder, feeling it break like a soft twig.

The dark energy holding the group together drained away instantly, allowing him to get a better look at what had been happening. A kid in a torn AF uniform was down, already unconscious and covered in blood. Half his faced had been pulped. Mohr didn't know him, but he looked like some sort of Mexican.

"He's a fucking zoot-suiter, Chief. He deserved it."

Mohr turned a pitiless eye on the man who'd spoken, a big dumb bastard in an army uniform. "You want some of this, shit head?" He held up the steel rod, which was noticeably stained with the corporal's blood.

The private backed down. "No, sir."

"Do you think you could help him up, Mr. Linthicum?" Mohr asked the midshipman he'd met inside.

The young man nodded. He and Lloyd pushed their way in through the crowd. It was then that Eddie Mohr finally realized there was something else wrong. He hadn't paid attention to the sound of sirens when they'd emerged on the street, but now that he did, they were everywhere. And at least five or six columns of smoke were visible rising over the city.

"What the fuck's been going on here?" he asked.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

"More bombs?" asked Kolhammer.

"No, sir," said Black. "Riots. Both in Chicago and L.A."

They'd moved from the White House to the War Department offices in the Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue, for a smaller meeting. Just the two of them with Eisenhower, and his secretary to take notes. Kolhammer had wondered whether they might meet Kay Summersby, but then remembered that Ike himself wouldn't meet her until he got to England. Who knew if that would ever happen now.

He'd been waiting on Eisenhower, dwelling on the ripples of blood and consequence his arrival had created, when both his and Commander Black's flexipads beeped with incoming traffic.

Black scanned the message first and told him what had happened. "It's weird, sir. It looks like your zoot suit riot in L.A., and the black riot that would have happened in Chicago in your nineteen forty-three. They're early, though. And quite a few of our people have been caught up in the violence, back in L.A."

"Have they been specifically targeted?"

Black frowned and read more of the message from the Zone. "Hard to say. There's some guy in a hospital, one of your sailors off the Leyte Gulf, says he was attacked by a mob which blamed him for Hawaii and the bombings and for the Japs invading. But the police radio is carrying lots more reports of sailors and soldiers ganging up on the local pachucos."

"And in Chicago?"

"Straight out black-and-white race riot. A big one. But nothing on why yet."

Kolhammer had his own ideas about why, but he kept them to himself for the moment.

Eisenhower turned up at that point. They'd scheduled this meeting to discuss what role Kolhammer's units out West would play in the wider global conflict.

"Let's talk worst-case scenarios first, Admiral," he said. "What can you give me right now?"

Kolhammer beamed the relevant files across to Ike's flexipad before passing across a hard copy. "There's a test squadron of Sabers out at Muroc, which I'd be happy to certify as battle ready. Two prototype midair refuelers are good to go, which means we can get those planes over Hawaii if you choose. Of course, they won't have a lot of payloads to deliver. The rockets are still in beta phase, but the cannons are fine. We've got ten thousand MK-One assault rifles, with grenade launchers, but we don't have ground forces ready to deploy with them. Colonel Jones gave up a significant number of his people to supply training cadre, but it's a slow business, and sending them now really means killing most of them, for no appreciable return."