Designated Targets

In the Combat Center of the Havoc, Captain Jane Willet watched the attack on- screen. Kennedy’s boat was the first contemporary vessel she’d set foot on, and it had left a strong impression. Standing in the slightly antiseptic chilled air of her own submarine, she couldn’t help but remember the raw sense of displacement she’d experienced as they climbed aboard the 101, to be greeted by its famous skipper.

He was the first celebrity she’d ever met. The runner-up in the fourth and final Australian Idol competition didn’t really count, even if a much younger Jane Willet had once upon a time waited for three hours outside the Sydney Hilton to get his autograph.

“So, Captain, were you swept away by the famous Kennedy charm?” asked her executive officer, Commander Conrad Grey, as they waited for the attack to unfold.

“Did I let him shag me, you mean, Mr. Grey?” she smirked.

“Oh, Captain, please, what will the junior ranks think?”

Willet snorted in amusement. “Well, he was a very handsome man, Commander. The image files don’t do him justice. But, no. Future president or not, he didn’t get a leg over. Didn’t even try. He seemed—I don’t know—very well mannered and quite normal.”

On the twenty-three-inch Siemens flatscreen, the two torpedo boats appeared in the opalescent green of low-light amplification, their wakes spreading and overlapping as they raced toward their prey. Part of her mind was out there with them. She recalled the faint stench of the boat’s Copperoid bottom paint, the smell of atabrine tablets on the crew’s breath, the abrasive feel of the saltwater soap in the officers’ head, and the taste of the powdered eggs and Spam covered in chutney that they’d eaten for lunch.

The strongest memory she took away, however, was of the crew’s grim black humor. They were a ratty- looking bunch, all half-naked except for the cut-off shorts and greasy baseball caps. They were unwashed and unshaved and had the resigned look in their eyes of men who didn’t really think they’d make it back home. But they adored their captain, who would obviously do anything for them. And the only nod he’d made in the direction of the bizarre fate that might await him was the hand-painted sign on the outside of the boat’s flying bridge.

It read, THE GRASSY KNOLL.

SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS, BRISBANE

The small office in which Lieutenant Commander Nguyen now worked was crowded with men, all of them ’temps. There must have been fifteen or more squeezed in there, none of them sporting as much as a drop of deodorant. She was glad for the small circle of inviolate personal space around her that was guaranteed by the presence at her elbow of General Douglas MacArthur.

Nguyen had seen him around the building enough not to be completely freaked out. She’d even been part of a briefing team that had reported directly to him on one occasion. Nonetheless, it was quite an experience having such a legendary figure sit down next to her, so that she could talk him through the PT boat attack.

Interest in the convoy had metastasized since the incident captured by the drone earlier that day. More surveillance time had been allotted to the troopships, and additional analysts had been drafted in.

“It’s like they want to be seen,” Nguyen mused. “They have to be decoys.”

MacArthur removed the unlit pipe from his mouth—she had told him the smoke would degrade the computer’s circuitry. It was simpler than explaining the dangers of secondary smoke.

“How so, Commander?” he asked.

“Their blackout is seriously half-arsed, if you’ll excuse my French, sir. Ditto their emcon—emissions control, you know, radio silence and so on. They know from experience that if we can see them, we can kill them, but it’s like they’re not even trying to hide.”

“So you agree with Major Brennan that they’re a lure of some sort?”

“I think so—very much so, in fact—but I don’t have enough data to say for certain, General. If I had to take a punt, I’d say they’ve been sent down as sacrificial goats. Not to lure the Havoc into a fight, exactly. More to soak up whatever she fires at them.”

“Let’s hope we can get you some data, then,” MacArthur grunted as the torpedo boats began to churn up a lot of water. It showed on the display panel as an explosion of lime-green fairy floss on a dark emerald sea surface. Everyone in the room with a view of the monitor could clearly see individual figures moving to their stations on the deck.

“They’re accelerating for the run in.”

“Which one’s Kennedy?” somebody behind her asked.

“The lead vessel,” said Nguyen.

“Ha, that figures.”

She couldn’t tell whether the speaker meant well or not. She ignored him to concentrate on the feed from the drone. In contrast to the Japanese ships, the Americans weren’t giving anything away. They maintained radio silence, and no telltale jewels of light sparkled from within their blacked-out cabins. They were shut up nice and tight.

Great fans of seawater began to spray back from their bows as they sliced through the swell. None of the small jade figures on deck moved now. They would be coiled and waiting. Nguyen wondered how loud their engines would be, and whether any lookouts on the Japanese ships had managed to obtain night-vision equipment of their own. Some had certainly fallen into enemy hands.

SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA, CORAL SEA

Ensign Shinoda, on the bridge of the Wakatake-class destroyer Asagao, did not have any night-vision goggles. Nobody on any of these ships did. In fact, the junior officers joked that the only new piece of equipment they’d taken south was a giant bull’s-eye painted on the hull.

But Shinoda, who had graduated near the bottom of his class, did not question the wisdom of their orders. He had no doubt there was some good reason why they were nursing three ships full of Chinese and Korean prisoners through some of the most dangerous waters in the world. He was equally certain the captain would have been told why this most difficult task was assigned to two of the oldest, least capable ships in His Majesty’s fleet.

So the young man pressed the Tsushima vintage binoculars to his eyes and scanned the obsidian blackness that lay beyond the windows, with the zealous devotion of a true believer. Even without the glasses that saw in the dark, or the ghost planes that floated just over the mast and took pictures that could see right through a man’s uniform, even without the death beams and super-rockets of the gaijin, he still would bring honor to his ancestors. He would—

“Shimatta!”

The clouds parted for a second and let through a shaft of moonlight as bright and clear as a searchlight. And roaring toward him through the small oblong of illuminated ocean were two enemy vessels.

PT boats!

Shinoda screamed out a warning to the officer of the watch, turned his head away for just a second, and lost sight of them completely as the broken clouds knitted back together again. Chaos erupted on the bridge as Klaxons sounded to bring the crew to general quarters. Someone was yelling at him to explain, someone else was stabbing a finger at the skies, insisting that super-rockets were flying toward them. Curses and shouts reached him from the open decks, where men hurried to the ship’s sad little battery of 4.7-inch guns.

The floor began to tilt as they came around to bear down on the heading where he’d last seen the boats.

“We’ve been spotted,” Kennedy said with such detachment that he surprised himself.

“Pity,” Lohrey said, staring into the pearly glow of her data slate. A dense mosaic of data and images was quickly filling all the available space. “Helm, bring us around on two-two-five,” she said. He heard her voice through the strange cushioned pads that covered his ears, as though she were talking on the phone.

“We’ll see if they got a lock on us, or just a sneaky peek,” she added.

Kennedy spun the wheel, and on the slate in front of him caught a glimpse of the other boat biting into the swell on a new heading, just as the rush of the first shells screamed overhead. He felt and heard them explode behind them. His men held their fire, not wanting to give away their new position.

“He’s changing course, but blind,” said Lohrey. “He got lucky, that’s all, and it won’t last. Follow the strobe in, Skipper, and let ’em have it.”