My Dearest Brother

I hope you get this message, for I do not think we shall ever meet again. You will know by now that my ship has arrived here, but we were captured by the Germans during our incapacity after the Emergence…

Jones frowned at the word, but having materialized in the Atlantic and been taken prisoner, Philippe would have used the Axis terminology without thinking. He read on.

I have little time. I am watched so closely by the Nazis I could not send this message before now, and even now I cannot send it directly. I have encrypted a pulse to go out with the launch of the missiles on Hawaii. I can only pray it finds a Fleetnet node somewhere and eventually finds you. I have done what I can to impair the fascists’ plans but I fear it is not enough. There is no more time. When they discover what I have done my life will be forfeit, but I shall do what I can before the end. I do not know if you will ever see Monique again but if you do, please make her understand that I did not dishonor my family or the Republic. Vive la France. And good-bye, brother.

Philippe

Stony-faced, keeping the tightest rein on his emotions, the commander of the Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Brigade opened two encrypted files that were attached to the mail. In the first he found a list of names: the crew of the Dessaix and brief notes explaining the fate of each man after their capture. At a glance it looked like most had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo for refusing to cooperate. A few, like Philippe-with the consent of their CO, Captain Goscinny-had pretended to work with the Germans in order to have a chance at sabotaging the vessel. Only his brother-in-law had survived long enough to sail into the Pacific.

In a separate section, Philippe named a handful of crewmembers who had genuinely gone over to the enemy.

The second file was a technical log of all the actions carried out by Philippe and the other saboteurs. It was mostly beyond Jones’s understanding, but it seemed impressively long. It made him wonder what might have happened without their interference.

Poor kid, he thought. It must have turned pretty fucking ugly on that boat when Hidaka realized what had gone down. He sent a quiet prayer to his brother-in-law before closing the e-mail and its attachments.

He hadn’t even realized Philippe was on the Dessaix until a couple of boxheads from ’temp Naval Intelligence turned up in the Zone to ask him about it. There was nothing to be done now but send a copy of the message to Kolhammer and Spruance, with a letter asking that they make sure it got back to the relevant authorities in Washington and London, where the French government-in-exile still had its headquarters.

But then, after a moment’s consideration, he opened his address file and pulled up an address for Julia Duffy. She’d written some good stuff about that business with Margie Francois sanctioning those camp guards in the Philippines. And she’d gone into Hawaii with the battalion when they took it back from the Japanese. She was a good embed. She could be trusted, and she wasn’t beholden to the chain of command. Not like the admirals.

General J. Lonesome Jones knew he could trust Kolhammer and Spruance. But the guys above them?

As if.

After all, look what had happened when Francois came to him with that DNA match on Anderson and Miyazaki’s killer. They’d taken it to Kolhammer, who’d taken it right up the chain, and he’d been assured at every step that it’d be dealt with.

The bottom line? Two years on and the murdering prick was not only walking free but living off the fat of the land.

Jones grunted in disgust.

He knew that Kolhammer had made the case his personal jihad, but he also knew that in the end it hadn’t counted for anything. The ’temps weren’t about to have one of their heroes perp-walked, not on this one.

There’s no way the thing would have been so completely smothered if the victims hadn’t been a nigger and a Jap. Well, there might be nothing he could to do for them, but at least he could prevent Monique’s little brother from swinging in the breeze.

And with that thought, he hit the SEND button.

“Holy shit,” Kolhammer said.

He’d just sat down in his stateroom to a late lunch of stale ham sandwiches and a cup of coffee when he read the e-mail from Jones.

“What’s up?” asked Mike Judge, who was also taking a ten-minute break, the only downtime they’d get for the rest of the day.

Kolhammer shook his head and sniffed.

“Lonesome was cleaning out his accounts and he found an old note he’d missed. Here. Have a look.”

The touch screen was too big to swivel, forcing Judge to walk around the desk in the admiral’s office.

“Yeah. Okay. Holy shit is about right,” he said after scanning the message.

“He copied it to Julia Duffy at the Times, as well,” Kolhammer noted with more than a little chagrin.

“I saw. Do you blame him, though? It’s a personal letter. Sort of. And he took a lot of shit over Danton. Probably figures there’d be someone somewhere wanted to hush this up, for whatever reason. Politics, you know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Kolhammer chewed joylessly on the sandwich. Unlike Mike Judge, he knew that Jones was probably thinking of something more than his brother-in-law’s reputation, and by extension his own. Besides Jones, of all the uptimers, only he and Margie Francois knew about the DNA match that related back to the murders on Oahu, just after they’d arrived. Of the ’temps, Nimitz knew, because Kolhammer had taken it to him, demanding justice.

But Nimitz was dead. Before he’d died, though, he’d extracted from Kolhammer a promise that the admiral would deal with this through channels. Kolhammer had no idea how far Nimitz had taken it, but right now the case was still sitting, undisturbed, in Washington. In his darkest moments he had considered opening a file in the Quiet Room back in the Zone, but signing off a sanction on an American citizen without the benefit of a trial was a step too far.

“I think I’d better call him,” Kolhammer said, shaking himself out of his reverie.

“It’s got nothing to do with that rapist motherfucker,” Jones said.

“I wouldn’t hold it against you if it did,” Kolhammer replied.

Mike Judge had left him to it, carrying away the remains of their so-called lunch. Kolhammer hadn’t dicked around when he’d called the marine officer, asking him why he’d thought it necessary to cut the press in on the Danton e-mail.

“She’s not just press, she’s one of my original embeds. I trust her.”

“And not me?”

“That’s unfair, Admiral. You’re tied down by politics. Marge Francois got a clean match on his blood and semen. As good as a needle in the arm, where we came from. And you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. That file is sitting in somebody’s bottom drawer back in Washington, stamped TOO FUCKING HARD, and meanwhile he’s rolling around the country copping blow jobs from movie stars.”

Kolhammer kept himself still, stifling the urge to drum his fingers on the desktop where Jones could see and hear his frustration via the video link.

“You might want to recall, Lonesome, that Ms. Duffy was a big part of creating the guy.”

Jones nodded on screen. “And she’d send him to Hell in a goddamn New York minute if she knew about that match.”

Kolhammer couldn’t argue with that. He knew Duffy well enough after two years to be able to understand her on a professional, if not personal, level. He doubted that even Dan Black had really known what went on deep inside her heart. He leaned back and showed Jones his open palms, conceding the other man’s point.