The speakers continued to crackle with snatches of dialogue, some of it still referring to a Japanese ship. Admiral Kakuta gave him a frozen look that made clear the consequences of betrayal. Moertopo held his up hands, palms out, begging for a chance to explain.
"We had a ship with us, a Japanese stealth cruiser, the Siranui. That's what they're talking about. It probably shot down that plane."
"A Japanese ship attached to an American fleet?" scoffed Hidaka.
Moertopo shrugged. "You lost the war, Commander. I have already told you that. You were annihilated. The defeated do not get to dictate terms. In my time Japan is a baseball-playing democracy and a staunch American ally."
He was taking a risk, speaking so bluntly, with the Japanese officer already incensed. But Moertopo judged that the truth was his best defense. Kakuta murmured softly and quickly to Hidaka, the older man's hand restraining the younger one's temper. When he spoke again, it was clear that Hidaka nearly choked on the words.
"I apologize for my outburst, Lieutenant Moertopo. An understandable reaction, I'm sure you would agree."
"Yes. Of course."
"The admiral asks you to explain the nature of this ship. The Siranui, I believe you called it."
Ali Moertopo patted his systems engineer on the shoulder and motioned for him to turn down the volume of the recordings. Desperate voices still filled the CIC, but in the background now.
"We can review the intercepts later," said Moertopo. "You will need to know what sort of damage the Americans have inflicted on each other…" He carefully neglected to add that he himself would need to know exactly what had happened, as well. And whether the Nuku was down there with them.
"The Siranui," he continued, "is a Japanese adaptation of a standard U.S. Nemesis cruiser. Its arrays are perhaps even a little better than the originals, but it doesn't have as much firepower. In this context, however, it has more than enough. That one ship could sink your entire force, Admiral."
While Hidaka relayed his comments, Moertopo instructed another sysop to bring up some images and cutaways of a Nemesis cruiser on one of the center's flatscreens. Hidaka finished speaking with the admiral and turned back to Moertopo.
"The admiral wants to know about the captain of this Japanese ship. What sort of a man is he? Will he recognize his duty to the emperor?"
"Will he join you, you mean? I have no idea. I've never met him. Captain Djuanda has had occasion to deal with him, but he is still unconscious."
"What is your feeling, though, Lieutenant?" Hidaka asked, his eyes on the big screen, greedily drinking in the stored vision of the Nemesis cruiser.
"I may be wrong, but my feeling is that he would be unlikely to see the benefit of aligning himself with you."
Hidaka rolled the words around in his mouth like a handful of poison pebbles. Admiral Kakuta accepted the answer without any visible reaction. He said only one word in reply.
"Why?"
"You are asking me to explain the mind of a man I have never met," said Moertopo. "I am really just guessing, but I imagine that he-not me, but he-would hold your government responsible for taking Japan into a war it could not win. I don't know what he might do under such circumstances, but he is not of your time. His view of the world is different."
"But his duty as a warrior is eternal," Hidaka protested. "His duty is to the emperor. Not to the emperor's enemies."
"He may see his duty as belonging to Japan."
"But we are Japan!"
"Not his idea of it."
"Ideas! Damn your ideas! The emperor is descended from gods! It is our destiny to serve him."
Moertopo could feel the ground shifting dangerously. Hidaka was becoming overheated. Kakuta, who could not follow the discussion fully, was growing similarly agitated. And Moertopo was playing devil's advocate on behalf of a man he had never met, and probably never would. If he pressed this case too far, they might leap to the assumption that he agreed with the unknown captain's treasonous behavior.
Time to pour oil on troubled waters.
"Admiral Kakuta," he said as soothingly as possible, "I am not responsible for the world I came from, nor for the men who came with me. I will assist you because I understand that it will assist my own countrymen in this time and in the future. If the officers aboard the Siranui prove traitorous and unreliable, there may be other ways of dealing with them-luring them into a trap, for instance, where they might be directly confronted by their treachery. They may then see reason, and choose the correct path. Or not. But the Siranui itself, which is undeniably the property of Japan, might then be turned over to her rightful owners."
He knew he was talking a lot of crap, but his situation was precarious, and it was crucial to convince these two to trust him before they went off on some hysterical banzai charge of indignation, lopping off heads and arms with gay abandon to salve their wounded pride.
Kakuta, he was relieved to see, calmed visibly and nodded as Hidaka translated for him. Moertopo put the few seconds grace to good use, and asked for an update from signals engineer Damiri. In fact, there had been a development, but Moertopo was unsure how it might play with the Japanese.
They noticed the perplexed look on his face.
"You have something to tell us?" Hidaka demanded.
"Yes. Our discussion appears to have been premature. Sub-Lieutenant Damiri informs me that the Siranui has been hit. A shell strike on the bridge, which has killed the captain and a number of officers."
Hidaka informed his superior, who had by this time regained his equilibrium. He digested the information without any visible sign of distress.
"The admiral asks if the ship itself was badly damaged?"
"I don't know, but probably not," said Moertopo. "The bridge of a modern warship is more for sightseeing than for fighting. There will be peripheral damage, and we know of casualties, but her combat capability should be relatively unaffected."
Kakuta smiled when this was relayed to him. He searched for a suitable reply, and when he spoke at last, it was in English.
"Good," he said.
His contented grin didn't leave Moertopo feeling cheery at all.
13
SAR 02, 0024 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942
Flight Lieutenant Chris Harford took the Seahawk out fast and low. Conditions were midlevel challenging. Search and rescue control had vectored them onto a point some six thousand meters to the southwest of the Clinton, where drone-cams had located men in the water. The sea state remained choppy, the weather difficult. Daylight was still hours away, but their night vision systems were coping. Fourteen other SAR missions were in flight, and two choppers had taken fire from nervous AA crews on one of Spruance's surviving destroyers.
At least the Promatil dump had cleared his seasickness, or whatever the hell it was. Harford was something of a connoisseur when it came to seasickness, never having found his sea legs. It was kind of strange, considering he'd never once suffered from airsickness. But without fail he spent the first half hour of any foray beyond sheltered waters rolled into a ball of misery in his bunk, waiting for a dermal patch to kick in. It was a source of unending frustration to Harford that most people just assumed sailors and marines were immune to seasickness. His misery was, of course, a source of unending mirth to his shipmates.
There wasn't much chatter as they ate up the distance. Everybody seemed caught in a weird headspace, not so much frightened as unbalanced by the morning's events.
"Nintendo piece of shit!" cursed his SO, Flight Lieutenant Hayes, as she gave the dead GPS unit another swat. Chris sometimes suspected that, despite five years in service as a systems operator, Amanda still thought that any piece of equipment could be fixed with a solid whack upside the head, like an old TV set.
He brought the big gray helicopter to a hover above the rough center of the debris field. Amanda peered down into the flotsam that was dispersing under the fantastic downblast from the Seahawk. Scraps of cloth floated everywhere. Body parts. Broken, smashed-up
pieces of wood floating on an oil slick that was burning, here and there, degrading their infrared NVS. Amanda thumbed her ear bud to open a channel to the crewman in back of the chopper. "Tobes, you see anything worth bagging?"
Airman Toby La Salle came back at her, all growling South Bronx, but quantum smooth, as though he were right there in her ear. "Not much, Lieutenant. Burning oil's messing with my vision. Somebody knew what they doing really opened a big can of whupp-ass down there… wait, hang on, think I see a coupla dudes. Two o'clock, two hundred out. Swimming away from us, so they're in one piece… prob'ly."
Harford tilted the stick a fraction and sent them roaring toward the survivors.
"Dudes're swimming faster!" La Salle cried out. "Like they're trying to get away from us."
"Maybe they think we're gonna be mad at 'em," said Hayes. "Think we flew all the way over here to finish the job."
Harford cut in over the top of them. "Drop the line." He held the Seahawk directly over the men, who were desperately thrashing away in the rotor wash. La Salle winched down a padded rescue collar, which flapped around madly, but the men only whirled their arms faster.
"Time for a swim, Tobes," said Hayes. She heard La Salle's "Gotcha" in her ear bud. Harford eased the chopper away from their reluctant targets while La Salle, who was wearing a thin spring wet suit, wrestled into a pair of flippers and goggles. A few seconds later, he jumped.
La Salle covered the short distance to the first sailor in less than a minute, carving through a mat of wreckage as he went. The sailor, a much smaller man and a comparatively poor swimmer, had no chance of escaping. But he tried. As La Salle pulled level with him the man turned about, hooking burned fingers into claws and swiping at the rescue jumper's face while letting go a series of terrified, guttural cries.
Both men bobbed on the chaotic swell and cross-chop, flattened some by the rotor wash, but not completely. Stinging spray lashed their faces and made it very difficult to breathe. La Salle had a little trouble keeping his head above water and the burned sailor went under a few times, vomiting as he resurfaced. La Salle finally abandoned the soft approach, wrestled him into the harness, and signaled for a winch-up. He rode with him for a moment, then dropped straight back down to search for the second survivor.
But it was too late. The sailor's companion was floating facedown, dead in the water.
USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0029 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942
The Clinton's Media Center was a mess, in a very civilian way. Jackets lay over computer screens. Food sat atop flexipads. Discarded coffee cups had multiplied like rabbits. And most days, there was more hubbub than Lieutenant Thieu could bear.
For once, however, it was quiet. As a group the reporters were older, fatter, whiter, and infinitely more prone to whining and mischief than the military personnel on whom they reported. None of them had mil-grade spinal inserts, and the illness that had come with the wormhole transition hit them hard. Most were still unconscious, laid out on canvas cots hastily set up in the corner of the center, where a single orderly watched over them. Most, but not all.
Lieutenant Edgar "The Egg" Thieu, the Clinton's media supervisor, tried putting on his best stone face for the only two journalists who remained awake. But stone faces only work on those who have something to fear from the person behind them, and neither Julia Duffy nor Rosanna Natoli had any reason to fear the worst that The Egg might dish up.
A lapsed Buddhist, he considered their furious glares and wondered what crime he had committed in a past life. This was a karmic backlash of bin Laden proportions. What a pair of fuckin' raptors, he thought. They were working him into a corner and blindsiding him, all razor teeth and slashing claws. He'd nearly wet himself watching Jurassic Park as a little kid, and he had the same feeling of free-floating horror now, eighteen years later, facing this pair of shrews.
"Ladies…," he said, offering them his open palms.
"Jesus, Nat!" cried Duffy. "Now it's not just patronizing bullshit, it's patronizing sexist bullshit!"
"Uh… I'm sorry ladi… uh…"
"Look, Edgar," said Natoli, a petite brunette with axes in her impossibly deep brown eyes. "You got caught with your pants down. You lied to us, which means you lied to the American people. But now you can make it up to them."
"Yeah, just let us out of here to do our job," Duffy finished for her.
"No," he said firmly. "Under no circumstances. It's too dangerous."
"Oh, come on, Edgar!" Natoli protested. "Why not? This is the fucking story of the century. You can't Roswell it. It's just too big. You got ten thousand witnesses, two dozen or more of them journalists. You probably got your satellite links being hacked by CNN right now."
"Excuse me, Ms. Natoli, but CNN won't be hacking any of our communications for a very long time. I can assure you of that."
Both women snorted in amusement.
"You think so?" asked Natoli, who worked for the Atlanta-based broadcaster.
The Egg smiled kindly, which put both reporters on alert. "Oh, no. Your sources seem to have misled you. You see, the Enterprise is exactly where it's supposed to be. They're not the one's who've gone missing."
He let the implications of that hang in the air.
"Holy shit," Duffy said after a brief pause.
"Yep," nodded The Egg sympathetically. "So you see. You could interview those guys we brought over; lock them down for an exclusive if you want. But who you gonna call? I don't think they've even invented the television here yet."
"Oh," said Rosanna Natoli. Then, "Oh shit."
She slumped into a chair. Her eyes seemed to lose focus.
Duffy rummaged around in a pocket and came up with a small bottle of pills. She dry swallowed one and handed the rest to her friend. Thieu wondered what the medication was. It might explain why they were still conscious.
Whatever. At least I shut 'em up, he thought.
And for a few seconds at least, Lieutenant Edgar Thieu got to enjoy the feeling of being in control.
Dan Black was out of his depth. A few seconds after they had jumped out of the Seahawk, he'd received word that his mission was redundant. Spruance had authorized the Multinational Force to carry out search and rescue. The helicopter had lifted off almost immediately, taking Colonel Jones and leaving the two Enterprise men stranded on the Clinton. Kolhammer apologized to the pair, shouting over the sound of the rotor blades. He said it was critical they get SAR away as fast as possible.
A Negro woman appeared, wearing camouflaged pants, a heavy blue, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a bulky yellow crash helmet. She hustled them all off the flight deck, which was swarming with emergency and damage control teams. Fires burned everywhere amid the wreckage of smashed aircraft and equipment.
Black noticed that there seemed to be two island structures on the deck, separated by hundreds of yards. They hurried into the first one, and the change of atmosphere struck him immediately. The smell of burning chemicals was completely masked.
"Overpressure," said Curtis. "Wow."
The corridors, which were much wider, well lit, and better ventilated than the narrow passages of their own ship, were nonetheless crowded with personnel charging from one crisis to another. Corpsmen carrying stretchers busted past every few minutes. Firefighters in silver space suits straight out of Flash Gordon came and went. Sirens sounded, the PA blared. Ensign Curtis snapped his head left and right, trying to take it all in at once. Black was more controlled, but the mayhem conspired to knock his feet out from under him, nonetheless.
Kolhammer put a hand on his arm and tugged gently.
"You might as well come with me, Commander. I'm heading back to the bridge."
Black shrugged, and fell into step with the admiral. They passed rooms that seemed to be full of nothing but movie screens, and a mess hall that looked more like a swish restaurant and smelled of things he vaguely recalled from port visits in the Far East and the Mediterranean. It was impossible to ignore the cosmopolitan nature of the carrier's crew. M
en and women of all races seemed to work in close proximity without any apparent difficulty. He saw white men take orders from what looked to be a Mexican woman, and watched as the men obeyed without question.
The same Tower of Babel effect was repeated on the flag bridge when they arrived. Black was as bemused by the way different sexes and races were all mixed in among the bridge crew, as he was by the staggering display of technology. The cockpit of the helicopter had looked like something on a space rocket. This room, with its banks of glowing movie screens and flashing lights, was even more bewildering. How on earth did anyone know how to operate this stuff? And what sort of a world was it where women barked orders at men and colored folk were placed in charge of whites? Dan Black preferred not to think of himself as a prejudiced man, but his mind locked up. This was simply beyond his comprehension.
He missed Kolhammer's introduction of some officer named Judge.
"Got the butcher's bill sir," the man said. "Damage and casualties across both forces."
He's from Texas, thought Black.
"Thanks, Mike," said Kolhammer.
A Seahawk flew past the blast window. They shuttled constantly between those ships with working flight decks and an ever-widening search and rescue zone. Kolhammer waited as Judge consulted his flexipad, unvarnished distaste creasing the exec's features in the light of the screen. He noted that while Curtis had his face glued to the armor glass, watching the flight operations, Lieutenant Commander Black had settled into a quiet corner to watch the Clinton's executive officer.
"Every one of our ships has taken significant damage," said Judge. "The Close-In Systems harvested a shitload of incoming, but another two shitloads arrived right behind the first. So far we have six hundred and thirty-seven confirmed dead on the Clinton. One thousand and fifty-three KIA on the Fearless. Another eight hundred and ninety-two throughout the task force. We have more than fifteen hundred injured. Half of them from the Clinton again. We've definitely lost contact with our two boomers, and with the Vanguard, the Dessaix, the Garrett, and the Indonesians. We're not leaping to conclusions, but it could be they just didn't come through."
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