"You'll have to excuse, Roy," said Willet. "He's an enthusiast."
Kennedy had climbed down from the flying bridge to the deck, where the last two Australian sailors had come aboard. Their coveralls were much thicker than the other three and seemed heavily padded. They wore some sort of protection at their knees and elbows, which reminded him of athletic cups, of all things. Each carried a pair of mysterious black tubes slung across his back. Their headgear resembled German helmets, and their eyes were hidden behind goggles that reflected his image like a mirror. They never stopped moving their heads, scanning the tree line and the mangroves like hunting dogs. They didn't smile much either.
Willet saw him checking them out. "Sorry, we don't mean to be rude, Lieutenant. But you're way behind enemy lines here. And good manners are always the first casualty of war."
Kennedy shrugged it off. He was acutely aware of being caught half-naked, but neither of the women seemed at all interested. Perhaps the rumors were true after all. "Well, Captain," he said, "visitors are always welcome. But I assume you're here on business."
"We are." She nodded. "How would you like to do me a big favor?"
"Anything for a lady."
Willet gave him a lopsided grin. "That's what I hear."
Kennedy wasn't sure which was louder, the laughter from his shipmates or the rush of blood in his ears as he flushed with embarrassment.
The four officers repaired to the now very cramped flying bridge, while Chief Petty Officer Flemming disappeared on a tour of the boat with Collins. Willet's security detail took up positions fore and aft and politely refused to talk to anyone. Sneaking a look at them occasionally, Kennedy wondered why they didn't faint from heat exhaustion. They were entirely cocooned within their strange battle dress.
Willet caught him looking once as he wiped at the sweat from his own neck.
"The suits are thermopliable, Lieutenant. They're much more comfortable than you or I at the moment."
Kennedy nodded absently, then turned back to the amazing devices that Lohrey had produced from a backpack. The data slates, as she called them, were about the size of a large book, and not much thicker than a packet of cigarettes. One of them displayed about a dozen graphs and readouts that made no sense at all to Kennedy and Ross. Willet explained that this was a live link back to her sub, feeding her updated intelligence. The pictures in the other data slate made a lot more sense, but were hard to believe.
"This is a real-time feed from a Big Eye drone we've got shadowing this Japanese convoy," Lohrey explained. "It's sitting way above the ceiling of any air cover, but as you can see, there's none to speak of anyway."
The two torpedo boat officers had been briefed on the capabilities of the Multinational Force, and when he'd joined the ship's complement, Leading Seaman Molloy had kept everyone entranced for days with stories about the Leyte Gulf and the Astoria. But to experience the future firsthand, that was something else altogether.
The slate taking the feed from the surveillance craft-Lohrey called it a drone-was full of movies, obviously shot from somewhere above the Japs. One large frame, showing all five ships, dominated the screen. Surrounding it, five smaller "windows" carried live images of each individual ship. Lohrey played with another device, a flexipad, and the images danced around, the focus zooming in until it was like they were floating just above the deck of one of the ships. Kennedy could see hundreds of uniformed men there. It looked to be seriously overcrowded, perhaps a sign that the Japs were having transport problems. On one of the destroyers he thought he recognized the signs of an antiair drill in progress.
"These are good kills, gentlemen," said Willet. "But not good enough to justify burning up a couple of my combat maces. We can lead you guys right onto them, though. You can hit them tonight. There wouldn't be much moonlight anyway, but our weather radar says the cloud cover is going to be thickening up, too. You up for it?"
"Hell, yeah!" said George Ross.
Kennedy was just as eager, but he didn't leap in as quickly. "Captain Willet. These, uh, slates are amazing, but we don't know how to use them. Are you planning on leaving anybody with us?"
"I'll be staying," said Lohrey. "And I've brought some night-vision gear in the launch. We've got holomaps of this whole coast, and we've already planted beacons to take a solid position fix, so the lack of GPS won't be an issue."
The Americans stared at her with blank incomprehension.
"Trust me," she said. "It'll be cool."
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA COMMAND,
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA
Hundreds of kilometers away, Lieutenant Commander Rachel Nguyen sat in a small, fourth-floor office of a colonial-era sandstone building, the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area Command. There was no air-conditioning, and her workstation pumped out enough heat to make the room extremely uncomfortable, even with the windows thrown open and a couple of old wooden fans spinning at top speed. Indeed, she suspected that their tiny motors probably dumped more heat into the room than the fans took out. Mold had discolored the walls and ceiling, and the smell of uncollected garbage drifted up from the alley below.
She was oblivious to it all, though, her attention focused only on the three Bang amp; Olufsen flatscreens arrayed across the huge desk at which she sat. Two officers from MacArthur's Intelligence Division sat in with her, an American major and an army captain from New Zealand. They were both 'temps, and although they outranked her, they deferred to her technical expertise, which meant that neither of them was comfortable using a wireless mouse. Or any kind of mouse, for that matter.
The screens ran video coverage and data dumps received from 21C assets positioned all over the local theater-vision recorded by a marine recon squad probing the Japanese garrison at Mackay, transcripts of signal intercepts sucked up by the AWACS birds, drone coverage of the frontline battles north of the city, even media packages from embedded journalists like Julia Duffy. Rachel hadn't spoken to the reporter since they'd briefly worked together on the Clinton after the Transition, but she followed Julia's stories whenever she could, and had privately cheered her on as she elbowed her way into the front rank of local war correspondents. She was as big a name as Ernie Pyle now. Somewhere behind the dozens of open windows, Julia's footage of the 'temp marine sergeant who'd turned the ambush earlier that day was running in a silent loop. Rachel had downloaded the feed from the local net as soon as a digital spyder alerted her that the reporter had filed. Nobody was watching now, however.
Instead, all three officers were concentrating on a data burst from the Havoc. The submarine was patrolling just south of the Whitsunday passage, blocking all attempts by the Japanese to land reinforcements closer to Homma. The small convoy of troopships and destroyers was cautiously beating south in a large window on the central flatscreen.
Rachel pulled in close on the largest of the transports, a captured tourist liner by the look of her. "It still doesn't seem right to me," she said. "There's something, I dunno… It just doesn't feel right. C'mon, you guys are the spooks. Do something spooky."
Major Brennan, the amiable American, just shrugged. "None of it makes much sense, Commander. The whole campaign is like the charge of the Light Brigade. They shouldn't have done it. They took New Guinea by balls, and surprise, and sheer weight of numbers. And even then, it cost them badly. They needed at least twenty divisions to take Australia, not the seven they sent. They needed air dominance, which they don't have. They needed secure supply lines, which they don't have. They can't move without you guys spotting them. They can't reinforce the forces they did get ashore. It's not rational. None of it looks right."
Captain Taylor, the Kiwi, leaned forward to squint at the screen. "I would have said it was a diversion. Like the Aleutians were supposed to be for Midway. But they've been here for weeks, and nothing else has happened. They're just running their heads into a brick wall."
Rachel still wasn't satisfied. She pulled the keyboard over and typed quickly for
a few seconds. "I'm going to ask for a tighter frame on the big troop transport," she said. Her request flickered along fiber-optic cables scavenged from her old ship, the Moreton Bay, up to a dish on the roof of the building, which pulsed the signal into the ether. It was picked up by an AWACS flight, which relayed it to a communications drone. From there it traveled to the Havoc.
A few seconds later, a new control panel opened up, and Nguyen tapped out another set of commands. A Big Eye surveillance drone, keeping station at seventy thousand feet above the Whitsunday passage, began its descent to ten thousand feet. Even at that height, it remained invisible to the ships below. Tiny motors whirred, lenses refocused, and new data streamed back via the relay links to Brisbane.
Nguyen pulled in tight on the deck of the ship, where hundreds of men performed an exercise routine. But despite the activity, they appeared listless. "Not exactly ripping it up, are they?" she said.
"It's probably hot," offered Brennan.
"What about these guys?" Nguyen asked, pointing at four clusters of Japanese soldiers who weren't doing anything. They just seemed to be watching over the other men.
She refocused again, bringing them to a height of fifty meters virtual above the deck of the ship. "They look like guards to me. They're carrying rifles with bayonets fixed. They never take their eyes off the men exercising on deck, so they can't be lookouts. Take a look at the prisoners, if that's what they are. They look Chinese to you?"
She didn't insult the men by making the obvious joke about them thinking all Asians looked alike. Brennan and Taylor had both spent years working in the Far East before the war, and in the time that she'd worked with them, they'd never once given her reason to think of them as anything other than the most broad-minded of souls. It made her sort of ashamed of her own assumptions. She'd wrongly figured that everyone she met here would be dumb-arse bigots. It turned out her biggest problem with Brennan was her not sharing his encyclopedic knowledge of the puppet emperors of French Indochina. It had been his specialty as a visiting fellow at Poitiers University before the war.
The two male officers leaned forward and gave the scene their undivided attention. Taylor seemed just about to speak when something strange happened. One of the men exercising on the boat broke away from the others and made a run at the gunnels. He leapt over the side and dropped out of sight. Everyone on the deck froze for a second, but then two armed soldiers suddenly ran to the same side and raised their rifles.
Nguyen quickly refocused directly on them, pulling in to twenty meters virtual. "They're shooting at him," she said. "That's it. I'd bet my much-reduced pay packet that he's Chinese, not Japanese."
There was no sound, but they could all see the puffs of smoke and the impact of recoil.
"I think so," Taylor agreed.
The American major tapped at the screen with his index finger. "You know, these things are just marvelous, but I think we're going to need to grab some of these characters for a little-what do you guys call it-face time?"
Nguyen nodded. Almost to herself. "That's a bit beyond my reach, sir. But if you're willing to take it up the line, I'll cut you together a briefing stick from the take."
Brennan agreed as they watched the shooters on the deck of the ship slap each other on the back.
"I guess that one didn't get away," said Lieutenant Commander Nguyen.
7
NEW YORK
She wasn't Rita Hayworth, and it wasn't the Ritz, but Slim Jim wasn't about to write to his congressman, either. He'd never had his dick sucked so often or so well by a movie star. In fact, he'd never had his dick sucked by a movie star. Or by anyone he hadn't paid, really.
Not that Norma was a movie star just yet, but she would be. He'd already seen most of her films, and she was gonna turn into a seriously hot piece of ass.
And if his apartment wasn't the Ritz, it was nearly as classy. So classy, in fact, that all his dough nearly hadn't been enough to get him in. Ms. O'Brien had been forced to twist a few arms before the board had consented. And old Walt Winchell had helped out some, too.
He was a good fuckin' egg, old Walt was.
In fact, lying in his big bed overlooking Central Park, recalling every detail of the previous night, Slim Jim Davidson figured himself to be just about the happiest guy in the world. He wondered whether he ought to call Norma at the little studio apartment he'd bought for her, just to get her to come over and give his pipes a really good cleaning before he got up and seized the day. After all, it never hurt to remind a girl like that who held the purse strings.
But in the end, he didn't reach for the phone. His hand was stayed by something he'd never once experienced in his short and-up until now-reasonably shitty life. He was overcome by a small, warm feeling he vaguely recognized as a sense of…
Generosity.
A smile tugged at the corner of his lips, and a great rich, rolling laugh burst forth. Yeah, that was it, all right. He felt like just about the most generous motherfucker in the whole wide world. His mother would have been shocked, even appalled, since she was one of the worst fucking grifters he'd ever met. At least she had been, until she was beaten to death by that bum she'd hooked up with down in Tallahasee way back in-what, '35 or '36? Still, she'd a been proud that at least one of her boys had amounted to something. Then she woulda cheated him of at least half of what he was worth.
And he was worth plenty.
"Top o' the mornin', Ma!" he crowed to his empty bedroom. "Top o' the fuckin' morning!"
He reached around under the covers, enjoying the slippery feel of the silk sheets, taking his time to find what he wanted. His remote for the sound system had got itself kicked down near the foot of the bed. He snagged it up with his foot and thumbed the button to fill the apartment with music. The neighbors had complained about him playing AC/DC before breakfast, and he didn't want to get kicked out. So he'd dialed it back a little, programmed some Elvis, some Benny Goodman, a little Herb Alpert and Garth Brooks, to mix in with his favorite bits of Metallica, Sacre Coeur, and the Beach Boys. He had what Ms. O'Brien called "eclectic" tastes, but then, he had eighty years to catch up on, so she could just go fuck herself-a thought that brought on a slow smile.
So he was about to reach for the phone to call Norma after all, when his good humor was ruined by a hammering at the door.
Shit.
Only cops banged away like that, like they had a perfect right to go hassling guys in their jammies with half a woody on. He spat out a few curses, wrapped himself in a thick white robe-which he had actually bought from the Ritz, just for the effect-and stalked out of his bedroom, snatching up his flexipad from a low marble coffee table that was littered with cold food. He powered up, dropped the volume, and triggered the apartment's security system without even having to watch what he was doing. Slim Jim spent hours practicing with his flexipad. He loved it more than he loved any human being he'd ever known.
The hammering sounded again, and he yelled that he was coming.
His head had cleared remarkably quickly, considering all the champagne he and Norma had enjoyed last night. He swung open the door and barked at the two cops who stood there to get the hell inside, and stop disturbing his neighbors. He needn't have bothered, though, since they were inside before he even finished. A cursory glance told him right away they were feds.
Bureau men.
Ah shit.
He didn't piss his pants the way he might have ten years earlier. He had too many miles on the clock for that, but he could feel a shit-eating grin freezing in place on his dial. He turned away a touch too quickly, hoping they didn't catch it, and praying that his voice didn't waver too much.
"Sorry, boys," he called out as he headed into the kitchen to make himself a coffee. "My girlfriend don't sleep over, and she keeps all her best frocks at her place. I'm afraid Mr. Hoover will just have to call her himself if he wants to borrow a little something for the-"
Without warning, a blinding pain exploded inside his head. He was di
stantly, stupidly aware of it being on the left side as he toppled to the hardwood floor and down into darkness. Somehow it seemed important, that he'd been whacked from the left.
…
…
…
Garth Brooks was singing a cover.
When a man loves a woman.
Slim Jim was still in darkness. Then he was in… a sort of red fog. Like he was looking at the world from the inside of a bottle of wine. Then a jagged spike of fire shot through his head-the left side-and he needed to vomit.
He was lying facedown in a broken plate of cold linguine, and his beautiful bathrobe from the Ritz Hotel was all gathered up in the small of his back, leaving his butt exposed to the breeze. He thought about rolling over, but gagged on a mouthful of bile, then groaned as somebody grabbed his robe, yanked him up, and threw him into a lounge chair. The robe came open. His nuts were slapping around. It was all very undignified, and a million miles removed from his new life as a respected businessman and registered Democrat.
"Jesus Christ," he coughed. "I was only joking, fellas. He can have the dresses. She left 'em in the other room."
"Shut up, you cocksucker."
"Ha! That's good, coming from one of J. Edgar's boys," he said, even though he knew he was risking another whack upside the head. When none came, he blinked away some of the blurred vision that turned his attackers into dark blobs of attitude and body odor. They came into focus. Two feds, just as he recalled. Dark suits, white shirts, red ties. Everything buttoned down to within an inch of its life. Just as Mr. Hoover liked it.
"Okay, so I'll be shutting up now. But you are gonna want me to talk, aren't you? Ain't that the way it works? You beat the crap outta me, so I'll tell you what you want to hear?"
"Not really."
That surprised him, so he decided to shut up for real.
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