Designated Targets

at the Humvee before powering into the night.

“Probably going to park outside a strip club for a couple of hours,” said Kolhammer. “Trying to work up the courage to talk their way in.”

“I saw my share of strippers in Paris during the Great War,” said Stephenson. “I doubt there’s much would surprise me here.”

“Yeah?” said Kolhammer, who knew he was wrong.

The strip fell behind as he pointed the car at the foothills below the Hollywood ridgeline. The edge of the Zone was up there, at the boundary with L.A. A few lonesome lights winked at them from behind trees hiding the mansions of movie stars and producers. More of his loyal subjects.

For a while he’d had to assign two lieutenants to the job of screening him from the depredations of studio executives who thought the most important thing about the Transition was the access it gave them to a vast library of their own product they hadn’t had to spend a dollar actually making. As frustrating as it was—and he’d come this close to shooting Sam Goldwyn—it had led him to make a decision that would probably alter the course of history as profoundly as the disaster at Midway had. It just wouldn’t be as obvious or spectacular.

He agreed with everything that Stephenson had said earlier. But he’d also been speaking true when he said he was no position to get into a public brawl with Hoover, or any of the forces behind him. If his arrival here was going to mean anything beyond chaos and madness, Admiral Phillip Kolhammer would have to be willing to reach out and shape events with his own hands. But he could not be seen to be doing so.

He’d given a lot of thought to the problem, and in the end he could see no way around it.

He had carefully drawn up his plans, selected the right personnel, and put them to work in the Quiet Room.

9

PT 101, CORAL SEA, SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA

The tropical night was inky black, but out on deck, the wraparound goggles, which seemed to mold themselves onto the face, turned everything a bright emerald green. Everybody tried them at least once, and the worst anyone could say was that you lost a little depth perception, but it was a hell of a lot better than groping around in the dark.

“I’ll bet somebody back home is making a packet, building these things,” Chief Rollins said as they bumped over a slight swell on their way out.

“Not these, Chief,” Lohrey replied. “That’s a sixth-generation set of Oakleys you got there. The gelform seal alone is about seven decades beyond what you could manufacture here. But you’re still right. At least two British and three U.S. companies are working on prototypes of a basic NVG. Of course, the Germans will be doing the same.”

“What about the Japs, ma’am?” asked a young seaman.

“Doubt it. Not if they’re smart, anyway. German optics are much more advanced. Tokyo would be better off leaving it to them, and not duplicating the effort.”

Peering at the screen, Kennedy checked his position against Ross’s boat. They were both booming along at top speed, following directions given by Lohrey and Chief Flemming, who talked to each other as though they stood just a few feet apart, rather than riding on separate boats. The night was particularly warm, and the blast of air across the decks was refreshing after having hidden out in the stillness of the mangroves all day.

The pilothouse was lit by Lohrey’s glowing data slates, but they had covered the boat’s windows with heavy black plastic. To steer, the helmsmen on both PTs were using the feed from a couple of dinky little “battle-cams.” Lohrey and Flemming had rigged them up that afternoon, before spending a couple of hours acquainting the crewmen with the most basic functions of the equipment they’d brought on board. “Just in case we get killed,” Lohrey had said in an offhand manner that had unsettled Kennedy.

New orders had come through from MacArthur’s office via an encrypted data burst, requiring them to secure a number of survivors after the attack. That meant rewriting the plan, because Lohrey had originally designated the warships as secondary targets. Now they had to make certain the destroyers were sunk first. Some little Asian woman called Lieutenant Commander Nguyen (it sounded like Noo-win to him) had appeared in a recorded movie to brief them about it. The boats they had thought were troopships apparently looked more like prison transports now. They were still supposed to sink them, but now they had to grab a bunch of survivors for interrogation, too. That order came all the way down from MacArthur’s office, but Kennedy suspected that Captain Willet was somewhere in back of it.

The PT boat skipper thought it very cold-blooded, and not at all the sort of thing he’d expect from a woman, although looking at Willet’s intel boss, Lieutenant Lohrey, he’d bet his bottom dollar that she’d killed many more times than he had. When the revised orders came through, she’d been largely unconcerned, quickly redesigning the attack plan to knock out the destroyers first. Then they could nail the transports and pluck a few prisoners out of the wreckage without having to worry about any interference.

“Are they all like that, Moose?” he’d whispered to Leading Seaman Molloy at one point.

The survivor of the Astoria, a huge slow-witted fellow, had nodded sagely. “Aye, Skipper. I wrote my old man about them—you know he’s on the Chicago PD—and he said they sounded a lot like gangsters’ molls. Just as soon cut a man’s throat as look at him.”

But the thought hadn’t put Kennedy off at all. Now, as they approached the point where they would wait for the Japanese, in the lee of a small, uninhabited island, the skipper of PT 101 found himself drawn to this female officer again. He couldn’t help but admire the hourglass curves of the visiting lieutenant as she bent over a slate, jotting notes on the much smaller flexipad that she held in one hand. There was a two-foot swell running, but she had no trouble keeping her balance, and she moved around the cramped confines of the wheelhouse as though she’d spent her life there.

He wondered if she had a boyfriend or—even more exciting—a girlfriend somewhere. Possibly away up in the twenty-first century, when—

“We have contact,” she announced. “Six thousand meters out and tracking south-southeast. Mr. Kennedy, you might want to have your men come to general quarters.”

“I might at that,” he agreed. “Chief, let’s have at them, shall we?”

Chief Petty Officer Dave Rollins nodded once. “Aye, sir.” Then he slipped through the blackout curtain, adjusting his borrowed night-vision goggles as he left.

Kennedy nudged the engines up so that the gurgle of the supercharged V-12s increased to a moderate growl. He could feel the power surge coming up through the deck as he grabbed his helmet and checked the straps of his Mae West. The Australian submariner donned her own helmet, the one that looked like SS headgear, and then fitted a pair of outsized reflective goggles over her eyes. She tugged at the straps on her body armor and fit the flexipad into a clear plastic pocket on her forearm. In doing so, it seemed to Kennedy, she transformed herself, losing even more of her individuality. Becoming less of a living, breathing thing than the creaky, roach-infested boat on which they sailed.

She looked like a killer, and nothing less.

It was an effect emphasized by the toneless voice in which she communicated with her comrade on the other PT boat. They exchanged information in a language that Kennedy recognized as English, but which was so heavy with jargon as to be impenetrable.

Lohrey turned her bug-eyed goggles on him and said, “Havoc confirms that Big Eye has designated five kills. Mr. Kennedy, on screen you’ll see five thin beams. They’re being directed onto the Japanese ships from the surveillance drone we’ve got keeping station above them. They’re invisible to the enemy. They’ll flash in sequence to mark the priority targets. So the first blinking line, there, is designating the lead destroyer. When she’s taken out, the beam marking her sister ship will begin to strobe.”

They’d been through this before, but Kennedy didn’t mind being led through the mission again. Truth was, he felt more than a little unsure of himself. They were mashing together some very different fighting techniques, but he put away his misgivings and simply concentrated on not fucking things up.

“All ahead, full,” he ordered, and the growl of the boat’s engines became a roar as they leapt toward the enemy.