These other guys though, Chinese and Koreans according to the lady officer, they were a mystery to everyone. They couldn't swim over to the boat fast enough, and now there was maybe a hundred or more of them jammed up against the hull, all thrashing and yelling and carrying on like Charlie Chan gone loco.
Lieutenant Kennedy said they were only supposed to get six of them, but they'd all been crying out "America number one!" and "Japan bad, USA good!" And what with them clawing at each other to get up over the sides, there had to be nearly twenty on board already, and soon there'd be almost no room to move. Moose had spent all his time on cruisers before he got moved to the little mosquito boats after Midway, and he was sort of worried they might capsize at any minute, given how much extra weight they had to be carrying.
Chief Rollins was yelling at him to get the prisoners' hands tied up. Mr. Kennedy was yelling at Miss Lohrey that this was the dumbest fucking idea anyone ever had. Some dripping-wet Chinese guy was trying to hug Moose as he tried to cuff some Japanese guy who'd had all the fight shot out of him. And then someone else was calling out that the planes would be here any minute, and then one of the ships they'd torpedoed went up in this gigantic fucking bang that lit up the whole ocean and guys were screaming and crying and the next thing he knew there was a real long burst of machine-gun fire and then a long, long second of quiet, before someone said, "Holy shit."
And Moose looked over and saw Miss Lohrey standing at the edge of the boat with one arm in a sling. In the other, she had an old tommy gun, with a drum mag just like the ones his dad said Capone's men used to have, and goddamn if she hadn't just emptied the whole fucking thing over the edge of the boat and into the guys swimming below. Well, maybe she hadn't. Maybe she'd shot it into the air or something. But then maybe not, because the Chinese were swimming away from the boat now, 'cept for a whole bunch of bodies that just bobbed up and down on the water leaking blood everywhere in the warm orange light of the oil fires.
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS
"Jesus Christ. She killed them."
Rachel Nguyen's stuffy little room had become unbearably hot and close. They'd watched the relayed vision of the pickup with mounting concern as more and more survivors crowded around the PT boat. As they formed a thick carpet of thrashing limbs and bobbing heads, the men around her murmured that it was all going wrong, that they couldn't possibly get away before the planes turned up and spotted them. MacArthur himself had just told everyone to pipe down when the female officer from Willet's submarine grabbed a gun off a sailor, walked over to the edge, and opened up on the densely packed mass of floating men.
On the screen, the 101 was now moving again, motoring slowly through the disbursed survivors, but nobody said anything until MacArthur spoke up.
"What the hell just happened, Commander?" he asked, turning away from the screen to offer Rachel his full, glowering visage.
She looked at him quizzically. "From what I could see, the mission was in danger of failing, General," she said. "Lieutenant Lohrey acted to regain the initiative."
MacArthur's face was a dead mask. He gave away nothing of what he was thinking. But the men around him weren't so well controlled. Rachel caught some of them staring at her like she had suddenly grown a second head.
"I can see," she said quietly, "that you disapprove."
10
PEARL HARBOR, HAWAII
The old girl was a ghost ship, or she felt that way to her new skipper.
Captain Mike Judge squinted against the glare of the midday sun and tried to feel the heartbeat of the USS Hillary Clinton. Dozens of screens functioned around him, constantly updating the reports on the state of the great warship. But Judge had spent nigh on six years of his life aboard this vessel, in one role or another, and he fancied that he could still feel something that the circuits and plasma screens couldn't tell him.
His darlin' was lonesome.
She'd lost a quarter of her complement to the tragedy at Midway. Another two thousand had transferred Stateside, into the research and training facilities that Kolhammer was building in the Zone and at Fleet in San Diego. Pilots without planes to fly now found that their engineering studies were a national asset of such value that they were banned from frontline combat. Systems operators and engineers, programmers and flight technicians had ceased to perform any duties at the sharp end of conflict. They, too, had been reclassified out of harm's way and into hundreds of lecture rooms and laboratories.
The Clinton echoed to their absence.
She ran on a skeleton crew now. Her fuel-air explosive catapults were beyond patching up again. With no spare parts left, and no prospect of manufacturing them in the near future, she couldn't hurl her few surviving warplanes into battle. A pickup squadron of eleven SeaRaptors constituted her entire strike arm, and half of those had been rebuilt from parts scavenged off fighters wrecked beyond all hope of repair. Most of her AWACS wing had been attached to the Eighty-second MEU in the South Pacific. The rest were stationed on shore with the F-22s and a couple of in-flight refuelers. The heavy lift choppers, the search-and-rescue birds, the Seahawk troop transport, and Apache ground-attack squadrons had been split up and repositioned all across this part of the globe. Some were here in Hawaii; others were in California, being reverse-engineered as part of a hundred or more programs to accelerate contemporary weapons systems and technology. The bulk had gone to MacArthur down in Australia. It said a lot about the weakened state of the Clinton that she was effectively running away from that fight, which was the main game in the Pacific theater for the moment.
"Let's get you home, Hillary," Judge said to himself. The much-reduced bridge crew didn't hear him. Maybe a quarter of the number of men and women who normally staffed this station were posted at the remaining consoles today. So many screens and panels had been removed from the bridge that it felt like a half-completed house.
A mile away, the diminutive form of a couple of contemporary cruisers rode proudly at anchor by the Siranui, a dozen tenders fussing around them as they prepared to escort the Clinton back to the U.S. mainland.
And hadn't he taken some bullshit over that-not all of it good-natured, either. Here she was, the most powerful warship in the world, trailing along on the apron strings of a couple of old tin cans. There'd been more than one barroom brawl over it down in Honolulu, although nothing as bad as the riot that had burned down half of Hotel Street just after they'd first arrived at Pearl.
An ASW Seahawk was fueling down on the flight deck, one of the few aircraft they'd be ferrying home. Even with her teeth pulled, the Clinton remained the highest priority target for Axis forces in the Pacific theater. She still represented the single greatest collection of twenty-first-century technology, and there would inevitably be Japanese submarines willing to risk it all just for a shot at her. British Intelligence was even warning that the Germans had uncrated a prototype long-range U-boat specifically to go hunting for her. It was said to be heading their way via the south Atlantic and southern circumpolar latitudes. Not that Judge was likely to lose much sleep over it.
Now, if they'd grabbed a 21C Chinese Warbow submarine through Manning Pope's wormhole, then sure, that'd be worth staying up late for. But if the Nazis had just dusted off the old Walther blueprints, then there were going to be a bunch of German submariners dying a long way from home sometime soon.
A female lieutenant appeared on a screen to his left. "Captain Judge. We'll have the vidlink to Admiral Kolhammer established in five minutes, if you're ready, sir?"
"Thank you, Brooks. I'll take it in my ready room."
He stood up and prepared to hand the ship over to his Exec, Commander Takeshi Morgan, as a flight of Hellcats buzzed overhead. They'd be just out of the plant in L.A. As he left the bridge, he tried to imagine the Clinton with F-86 Sabres, or even a squadron of supercharged Corsairs spotted on her decks after the upcoming refit, but it was just too weird. Even four months after the Transition.
SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE
ZONE, CALIFORNIA
Kolhammer was always glad to see Mike Judge. They were able to vidlink only once every couple of weeks, when a relay became possible via a series of AWACS planes or Multinational vessels or both.
Jeez, what I wouldn't give for just one lousy fucking satellite.
Sometimes he thought it was like waiting for the stars to align, a concept that would have amused his wife, an enthusiastic consumer of astrological forecasts and a self-proclaimed skeptic. He never understood how she managed to be both. It's a chick thing, he supposed.
"Happy trails, Admiral? I don't believe I've seen you smile since we got here." The stars had, indeed, aligned, and Mike Judge was on-screen, speaking from the ready room next to the Clinton's flag bridge, where Kolhammer himself had once worked.
The admiral sent another, slightly sadder look down the encrypted link to Hawaii. More a gesture of resignation than a smile. "You caught me out, Mike. I was thinking about Marie."
"You meet her folks like you were planning to, sir?"
Kolhammer admitted that he had. "It was good, too, Mike. They were wonderful people. Marie used to speak so fondly of her grandpa and her nana, I figured it was because her own parents were away so much with work, and she spent so much more time with them. But they were good people, Mike. The best, like she always said."
He let go a long breath that he hadn't even realized he was holding in.
A dialog box opened up in the corner of the screen: LINKS VERIFIED SECURE. The sysops at each point in the communications chain had just confirmed that no Elint sensors were attempting to crack open the link between the two men.
It was time for business.
"We'll be ready to leave in four hours, Admiral," Judge reported. "I've already got antisub patrols out. All the approaches are clear. You have any word on that phantom Nazi boat?"
"Hysteria and bullshit, as best anyone can make out," Kolhammer replied. "Having said that, though, I want you to proceed on the basis of a worst-case scenario. After the Nuku and Sutanto landed in Japanese hands, we can't assume anything. We don't know for sure that the Dessaix or the Vanguard didn't make it through as well. One of them might have materialized in Hitler's bathtub, we just can't tell."
"We've been running active scans here, sir. Haven't had a ghost of a return yet."
"I know. They're probably back home right now. But they were both stealth ships. And even though I can't imagine the crews cooperating if they were captured, we have to plan for it anyway. What is it that Lonesome is always saying? Prepare for the worst, and dare the good Lord to disappoint you."
"Well the worst would be the nukes falling into the wrong hands," Judge pointed out. "We haven't heard from our subs since the Transition, either."
"Yeah, but we would have," said Kolhammer. "If Yamamoto or the Nazis had got their paws on a boomer, half the world would already be glow-in-the-dark. I'm less worried about them, Mike. But I really want you to sneak back as though you do have a rogue Nemesis cruiser on your case."
"I promise we'll sneak out of here like a preacher slipping away from a Reno whorehouse, sir."
Kolhammer allowed himself another small grin. He did miss Mike Judge's Texan charm. "Okay. Just don't fuck around with half-measures, Mike. If you get even a hint that you're being stalked, I want the Siranui to go wild. How's Colin Steele doing, by the way. He happy with the way the ship's running now?"
Kolhammer had promoted the Leyte Gulf's executive officer to command the Siranui as soon as Steele had gotten out of hospital after Midway. He'd been shot early in the brief battle belowdecks between the crews of the Gulf and the Astoria, the contemporary cruiser in which the late Captain Anderson's ship had partly materialized. The images still gave Kolhammer the creeps.
"Yeah, he's pretty much got the cobwebs shook out," said Judge. "All the software's been converted. There's a few differences between the Japanese Nemesis boats and ours, but Steele has had most of those systems taken offline, so his guys don't have to worry about them. It'll be cool. Anderson and Miyazaki did most of the hard work before, you know…" He trailed off.
Kolhammer didn't reply, beyond a brief grunt. The investigation into the killing of his two officers on Honolulu had gone exactly nowhere in the past four months. To his own shame, he'd let the matter slip off his radar, too. There was just so much to do. He made a note to e-mail Admiral Nimitz about the case in the morning. He hadn't been close to Anderson, but she'd been a fine officer, and he'd been very impressed by Miyazaki, the Siranui's surviving senior officer, in the short time he'd had to deal with him. From all reports, the two of them had worked well together, quickly getting an American crew settled onto the Japanese Self-Defense Force vessel. They deserved better.
Kolhammer returned to his discussion list. "Halabi's been bouncing her sigint take across to me every twelve hours. Things are grimmer than hell in the U.K., but she doesn't think the Kriegsmarine would try a sortie while she's still packing. She's down to six antiship missiles now, though, with four antisub, and her air defense stocks are at fifteen percent. Pretty soon she'll be like you, Mike. A floating Radio Shack. But Raeder can't be sure of that. So he's bottled up for now."
"How are the natives treating her, sir? If you don't mind me asking."
Kolhammer frowned. "That guy the Brits had as liaison in Pearl, Sir Leslie, he's been supportive. And Churchill has backed her. I think Prince Harry has been twisting arms at the Palace on her behalf as well. But I suspect she's doing it tough, Mike."
"She is tough, Admiral."
Kolhammer thought he detected something more than professional respect in Judge's voice, but he let it pass. The new captain of the USS Hillary Clinton wasn't married. He hadn't even been seriously hooked up before they arrived here.
"She is, indeed, Commander. Now, see that you get yourself back in one piece," he continued, changing tack. "I know it's breaking your heart, but we need to clean out the Big Hill. She's a lot more valuable to us stripped down to bare bones. The retrofit's going to take a good eight or nine months, and even then she's not going to need more than a fraction of the systems she's still carrying. Meantime, I got Leslie fucking Groves turning up here every second day with empty deuce-and-a-halves, telling me to fill 'em up with everything from Nemesis processors to espresso machines."
"Well, he is building a better A-bomb, sir," Judge teased.
"Yeah, I know," said Kolhammer, rolling his eyes. "And he gets only about a tenth of what he wants, but it plays hell with the project management for everyone else. Even with all our processing muscle, and some of our people holding his hand, that bomb isn't going to be ready until late '43, early '44 at best. It's not like we brought any centrifuges or fast breeders through with us. Meantime, I've got immediate need for processing time on about a hundred and forty different design and production lines, damn few of which I would have chosen as priorities, but what are you gonna do?
"We're trapped by the politics, Mike. Roosevelt got the Zone bill through Congress by the skin of his teeth and the grace of that goddamn sunset clause. You've never seen anything like it, the scaremongering and bullshitting that went down. You'd think we were setting up the fucking Fourth Reich here in the Valley."
"Or the USSA, if you listen to Hoover," Judge added, causing Kolhammer to throw up his hands.
"Oh, jeez, let's not get into that. We just don't have time. Listen, Mike, I'm sending data in this transmission. It's the specs for the project I want you to take over when you get here. I want to ramp up production of the F-86 by the end of winter, but I also want to be ready to jump through another generation, up to a prototype F-5 by the end of next year. You're going to get that ready for me. Study up on the package while you're en route, and choose your division heads from the guys you've got with you. You can prep them along the way. I want you to tie up and come running down that gangway, raring to go."
Kolhammer wasn't really expecting Judge to object, even though he was effectively taking the Clinton away from him. He'd been
out to Hawaii a month earlier, and the ship had a lost feeling about her, like an unfinished story that would now never be written. Everyone he spoke to wanted to move on to their next assignment. It was a sorry way for the old girl to end up, but he told himself-they all told themselves-that she'd be back one day, kicking butt and taking names, just like her namesake.
The two men had a few more minutes before they lost the link.
"What's the latest with Jones?" asked Kolhammer. "I haven't had an update today."
"I've sent along his last four data bursts, Admiral. The latest came an hour ago. They pretty much blocked Homma's advance before it really got going. Lonesome wants to pull his armor and close air support out of the line, link up with 2 Cav, and hit the Japanese flanks. They can't get reinforcements past Willet and Spruance. They've tried air supply out of Moresby, but it's just not their gig. They're well and truly fucked.
"Jones should have it wrapped up pretty soon, which'll be a boost for the Aussies. Truth is, they were shitting themselves."
Kolhammer shrugged. "Fair enough. They had good reason, too, after New Guinea. The whole thing was developing a very unpleasant momentum. So you think we can get the Eighty-second back here soon?"
A lopsided grin spread over Captain Judge's tanned face. "I don't believe General MacArthur will let Colonel Jones or a single one of his marines out of sight before VJ Day. He knows possession is nine tenths of the law."
"Tough shit," said Kolhammer. "I need him here to work up the land warfare programs. The training cadre we put together is good, but it doesn't have the critical mass I need. MacArthur can make do. You'll see-I've also included a package for Jones in the transmission. Make sure it gets out to him before you leave."
"Will do, Admiral."
Kolhammer looked at the handwritten list on his desk. There was one last item he need to discuss. "I really don't like the look of the reports coming out of Europe, Mike," he began. "When did you get your last update from Halabi?"
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