{"product_id":"designated-targets-isbn-9780345457158","title":"Designated Targets","description":"\u003cb\u003eIt’s World War II and the A-bomb is here to stay. The only question: Who’s going  to drop it first?\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Battle of Midway was forever transformed by the devastating appearance of a U.S.-led naval task force from the twenty-first century. Since that day, state-of-the-art warships have prowled the Pacific, armed with the latest instruments of mass destruction, as the warring powers of 1942 scramble to be first to wield the weapons of tomorrow against their enemies. Russia and Germany form a deadly alliance, while Admiral Yamamoto moves to seize Hawaii and invade Australia. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSuddenly it’s a whole new war with unimaginable high-tech tools, and high-stakes inter-national betrayals from Tokyo to Washington to the Kremlin. As the world trembles on the brink of anni-hilation, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, and Tojo confront extreme choices and a future rife with possi-bilities—all of them apocalyptic.\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eWeapons of Choice\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eFirst book in the Axis of Time\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[A] weapons-grade military  techno-thriller . . . It’s like a Clive Cussler novel fell into a transporter beam  with a Stephen Ambrose history, and they came out all fused together.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eTime\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “High-tech  intrigue and suspense similar to the works of Tom Clancy.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eJohn Birmingham\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eEmergence, Resistance, Ascendance, After America, Without Warning, Final Impact, Designated Targets, Weapons of Choice, \u003c\/i\u003eand other novels, as well as \u003ci\u003eLeviathan, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich won the National Award for Nonfiction at Australia’s Adelaide Festival of the Arts, and the novella \u003ci\u003eStalin’s Hammer: Rome\u003c\/i\u003e. He has written for \u003ci\u003eThe Sydney Morning Herald, Rolling Stone, Penthouse, Playboy, \u003c\/i\u003eand numerous other magazines. He lives at the beach with his wife, daughter, son, and two cats.TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Lordy, thought the boy. It’s a miracle for sure.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    here lies jesse garon presley.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    deeply beloved of his mother gladys, father vernon, \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    and brother elvis.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    a soul so pure, the good lord could not bear \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    to be apart from him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    born jan. 8, 1935,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    taken unto god jan. 8, 1935.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It must have cost a king’s ransom . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oh, my,” he whispered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The woman seemed to give the statement more thought than it was   really due. “I suppose so,” she said after a few seconds.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And this O’Brien, she was a helluva smart-mouth dame.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It’s him, all right,” she said. “Damned if it’s not.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But O’Brien shook her head. “Not here.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Hell, he was so rich now that when those C-notes lost their snap, he could  give them away and get some new ones.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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-sized 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    One, she was his employee, not his girlfriend.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Two, she would be his employee only for as long as she needed to be, and  she would never be his girlfriend.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Three, she could kick his scrawny ass black and blue without bothering to  lace up her boots.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And four, she . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Mr. Davidson?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Let’s go over it one last time, just to be sure,” she said, pulling out a  flexipad.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Oh, please,” he begged. “Let’s not.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Bitch thinks she’s so goddamned smart . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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 . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    O’Brien shot him a warning look, but he hid behind the shades, pretending  he couldn’t see her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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 . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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—”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “The notes, Mr. Davidson. Just review the notes,” said O’Brien.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    O’Brien had helped him close some amazing deals these last few months. But  damn, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Not some asshole called Colonel Tom Parker, you could bet on that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Right.” He nodded. “So are we gonna fuck this puppy or what?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    His lawyer rolled her eyes, but she leaned forward to tap on the glass  partition that separated them from the driver.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Okay,” she said, raising her voice. “Let’s roll.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “That’s it,” she announced.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You’ll be fine,” O’Brien assured him. “It’s just business. Be sure and  treat them with respect.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “But . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “No buts. 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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Slim Jim wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but she didn’t seem to mean  it as a compliment.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And if they thought he 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He really missed his brownstone.Author of Weapons of Choice A novel of alternate history","brand":"Del Rey","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301130981605,"sku":"NP9780345457158","price":8.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345457158.jpg?v=1767725019","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/designated-targets-isbn-9780345457158","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}