Designated Targets

was beheaded on camera by Moro Front guerrillas in the Philippines, ten of her years ago. Corina had been a field- worker with the Save the Children Fund when she was kidnapped from a village she was assessing for a new water treatment program and a microcredit loan scheme. The guerrillas had murdered her and two doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres, doing so “live” on the Web.

When Filipino and U.S. Special Forces arrived at the village, they discovered another atrocity that hadn’t been broadcast. Everyone in the hamlet who’d been tended to by the “infidels” had been executed, including children who had been treated for cataracts. They’d had their eyes put out with burning sticks. It was the only time in her life that Willet regretted joining the submarine service. For weeks, she’d been tortured by a violent desire to sink her fingers into the throat of the man who’d killed her baby sister. “Captain?”

The Havoc’s commander drove away the haunted memories. It’d been a long time since she’d thought of her sister in anything but the most positive terms. Years of therapy had taught her how, but now the defenses she’d erected seemed to be creaking—and threatening to collapse.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Grey. Go on,” she said.

Her exec didn’t embarrass her by asking if she was all right. He simply relayed the update. “Lieutenant Lohrey reports that they’re picking up the prisoners now, Captain. There are two aircraft, probably Japanese flying boats, inbound for their position. ETA nineteen minutes.”

Willet nodded, an old melancholy pain settling around her heart. “Tell them to get a move on.”

It was just about the worst thing Moose had seen since that night on the Astoria, when the other ship had suddenly “appeared” right inside his own.

Lieutenant Kennedy was stomping up and down the decks, a machine gun in his hand, cursing like Moose had never known him to before. He’d had to shoot a Jap who tried to fire a flare pistol into his face when they pulled alongside him, although to Moose’s way of thinking, he should have known that was going to happen. The Japs, they’d sooner swim into the mouth of a shark than surrender. You could tell which ones they were, too. Anybody trying not to be rescued was a fair bet to be working for their ratfuck little Emperor.

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.