Designated Targets

PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS

It was a cruel trick of the gods, allowing a magnificent warship like this to fall into the hands of a barbarian such as Le Roux.

Commander Hidaka was an educated, well-traveled man, and he knew at an intellectual level that the gaijin were not all hairy brutes, as such. Their technical accomplishments, for one thing, had to be acknowledged. But Le Roux actually did look like a barbarian. He did not shave regularly. He stank of some ditch weed called garlic. And the uniform he wore was stained!

Hidaka wondered how he retained the confidence of his men. But of course, these weren’t “his men” in any formal sense. They were mutineers, effectively. Little better than pirates. But for now, they held the key to Admiral Yamamoto’s grand design.

“I think the Clinton, she is leaving now,” said Le Roux in his heavy accented English.

“Why do you think that?” asked Hidaka, barely able to conceal his scorn.

The Frenchman tilted his head to one side and pushed out a fat lower lip as he crossed his arms over an ample belly and examined the giant screen in front of them. “Well, this is not my specialty, you understand. The men who ran this station, they would not cooperate. But the ship’s Combat Intelligence, she tells us that a great deal of radar and energy waves they are passing over us right now.”

Hidaka’s heart gave a sudden lurch. “We are being scanned!”

“Yes, well, no. She is scanning for a general threat, not to locate a specific target. So she does not know we are here. The ship you tell me they lost at Midway—the Leyte Gulf—she was their Nemesis cruiser, a protector. Her sensors were more capable, much more capable. But even so, the Dessaix, she is a stealth ship, too. The Americans do not have—how do you say?—a monopoly.

“So no, the Clinton will not see us.”

Hidaka regarded the hairy lout with an expression of open disbelief. “And the Siranui?” he asked.

“Oui. She is there, too.” He pointed at a window in which a colorful set of lines pulsed and undulated. “These are her sensors. They are not operating at full power. They have not, for as long as we have been observing them, and we must assume they were damaged at the Emergence.”

The Japanese commander considered that for a moment. His orders were specific. The Clinton was not his target. But he could not help asking. “So we could strike at her?”

Le Roux snorted in amusement, colored by a contempt that he didn’t bother to conceal. “Oh, well, yes, we could. But there would be no promise of success. The missiles would be detected, and targeted for countermeasures. The launch would be detected. We would be detected. And so on . . . you understand.”

Hidaka didn’t bother replying. He would no more disobey Yamamoto’s precise instructions than he would piss in the goldfish pond at the Imperial Palace. His warrior spirit was simply piqued by the idea that such an enemy was being allowed to slip away. That, too, however, was an integral part of the grand admiral’s plan.

Even so, he found it difficult to contain his frustration. Not with Yamamoto’s strategy, but with the unrealized potential of this ship, the Robert Dessaix. From the first moment he had seen her, deep in the wastes of the Great Southern Ocean, he recognized her as a vastly more powerful weapon than the Sutanto or the Nuku. She was larger, for a start, at least three times their size. But more important, she was obviously a generation or more advanced. He had come to understand that the most capable ships from the future did not necessarily proclaim their strength in massed tiers of gun mounts. Indeed, the sleeker the lines, the less there was for the eye to linger over, the deadlier she was likely to be.

The decks of the Robert Dessaix were almost bare. From the outside, the raked- back silhouette of her “teardrop” bridge, in which they now stood, barely rose to the height of a man. It had thrown Hidaka at first, until he realized that the floor must have been sunk below the line of the deck outside.

Everything about her suggested stealth and danger.

What a pity she hardly had a crew to sail her.

Le Roux was an enthusiastic buffoon, but it was more than apparent that he lacked the technical skills to pilot such a sophisticated vessel. It wasn’t surprising, really, since his original duties had been confined to the servicing of the ship’s two helicopters, neither of which was on board now.

The pilots, too, had “refused to cooperate.”

Commander Hidaka let his eyes drift away from the panel that was displaying the radar pulses originating aboard the American and turncoat Nipponese ships. The Pacific was calm, and quite beautiful beneath an unseasonably warm autumn sun. The boy he had once been wished for nothing more than to take this ship under his control, and to charge at the Americans under full power, with every rocket on board blasting up out of their silos and roaring away on columns of white fire.

But the adult he was today knew they’d be lucky to successfully complete their much more limited mission.

There were two other French sailors on the bridge. One of them—a junior officer, and little more than a boy himself—said something to Le Roux. Hidaka waited for the translation. The two men took their time about it, babbling on in their incomprehensible native tongue. The boy, an ensign named Danton, actually outranked Le Roux, who was merely a premier maitre, a warrant officer, but the older man enjoyed a clear advantage over his comrade. The boy seemed almost terrified of him.

They were an unconvincing pair of allies—if allies indeed they were. Hidaka had trouble understanding their motivations. To his great surprise, he found himself feeling much more at ease with the thirteen Indonesian crew members who had come aboard with him at the rendezvous. It wasn’t that he was a believer in Pan-Asian solidarity. In his opinion, the Indonesians were monkey men. But he had grown accustomed to them in the months since the Emergence, and when he wasn’t working with the handful of French or the Kriegsmarine officers who were on board, he actually preferred the company of the apes.

Le Roux finally deigned to speak to him. “Enseigne Danton believes an airborne radar plane is aloft, and probing north of the Clinton’s battle group,” the Frenchman said. “It is best that we should retire, now we have learned what we needed to.”

This time Hidaka did not question. They had achieved the first relatively simple task allotted them. So he nodded his consent.

Le Roux spoke to the third Frenchman, a leading seaman, who at least had an appearance that fit his role as helmsman. A tall, shaven-headed brute whose arms were covered in tattoos that reminded Hidaka of the markings of South Sea islanders, he responded to Le Roux’s gruff burst of instruction with a Gallic roll of the shoulders. Sitting at a “workstation” rather than standing at a wheel, the giant sailor consulted with the navigator, a German commander, and began to type out instructions with the casual air of somebody doing exactly what he’d been trained for.

It was a pleasant change.

It was the second time the Combined Fleet had set out like this, and the first time since the Emergence that he had dared concentrate his forces in this way. They were still vulnerable, but the noble sacrifices of Homma and Nagumo in the South had done much to draw the attention of their new foe.

Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto stood proud and ramrod straight on the bridge of his flagship the Yamato as it plowed into a heavy southeasterly swell. But he had lost all of the intuitive confidence that had characterized his opening moves in this game. Midway had all but destroyed his sense of certainty.

Nearly sixty ships covered the gray, wind-scored seas, stretching out to the horizon. The sight would once have filled him with pride and an unshakeable belief in destiny. Now, however, he could not help worrying that a British drone might be watching him from above. Or that damnable Willet woman from below. A flight of American rockets might be screaming toward his fleet at an inconceivable velocity.

A small grunt escaped from deep within his chest.