hwrnmnbsol

This started out as a single-parter but I decided it should be broken in the middle.

My Repellex was supposed to keep all biting insects away, but apparently the Solomon Island mosquitos hadn't gotten the memo. I swatted at them idly while crouching in my concealed nest atop a dormant volcano. It was a low-action assignment I had been given, and the heat and humidity and biting insects were a much worse threat than the Japanese.

From time to time I checked the scope. Twenty-second century imaging technology allowed me to view Naru Island thirty miles away. I could see the Navy men lying in the shade, some of them wounded, all of them low on morale, waiting for something to happen. And there was Kennedy, too, lean and shirtless, pacing around the island and rationing out coconuts to his men. I admired his leadership. It wasn't hard to see that he was future president material.

I wasn't expecting anything to happen. After all, everybody knows that Kennedy eventually did become the thirty-fifth President of the United States of America. It's not like hostile time travelers could do anything to change that; you can't alter recorded history. But there are other ways to damage the Presidency. Gathering information that might show the future President in a bad light; planting documents or blackmailable situations that could be used to tarnish Kennedy's legacy; gaining access to the future presidency that might come back to haunt America two centuries in the future – these were things that the Secret Service, Forewatch Division, had a mission to prevent. It had happened to President Obama, with twenty-first century private interest groups going back to muddle his citizenship records; it couldn't be allowed to happen again.
( Read more... )