Designated Targets

It was infuriating, but it was war, and he had started this war knowing that his enemies possessed much greater resources than he. Nothing had changed, in that sense.

What had changed was that he now enjoyed the advantage of surprise, and technological superiority of a sort. His heart beat rapidly, as it had in the few hours since Hidaka’s encrypted message had been received.

The Clinton had sailed with the remnants of her battle group, and a window had opened through which they might steal a victory. Or the makings of a victory.

Yamamoto’s eyes traversed the scene around his great battleship. He had two carriers with him, three other battleships, half a dozen cruisers, two-dozen destroyers, and a host of tenders, oilers, and transports. It still felt like the greatest fleet that ever put to sea, and if it weren’t for Kolhammer’s untimely arrival, that would have been true.

True, his losses had been heavy at Hashirajima, thanks to the Havoc’s missile swarm, but they were still light compared with the disaster that befell Spruance at Midway. That had given Yamamoto just enough breathing space to try a radically different line of attack.

And then the divine gift of the Dessaix had arrived.

In all the world, there were still only a handful of people who knew of its fate, and he was the only one within the Combined Fleet. The emperor and Prime Minister Tojo knew, naturally. Hitler, Himmler, and their closest surviving cohorts were aware of its existence and its mission. None of the Soviets had been informed.

There were forty-eight crewmembers of the German submarine U-96 who had learned of the Dessaix’s inexplicable arrival, weeks after the Emergence at Midway, and sixty miles south of the Spanish Canary Islands. They had acquired the information by virtue of nearly running into her, shortly after she had materialized.

Yamamoto wondered what had become of those men. The Germans had assured him that there would be no chance of the secret leaking out. Thus, he presumed they were all dead.

Both the Reich and the Soviet Union had become vast charnel houses since their rulers had gained the deadly power of foresight. It was confirmation—as if any were needed—that power was wielded by ill-bred savages, almost everywhere but on the Home Islands. And it meant that, even if he was able to avoid defeat in this particular war against the Anglophone democracies, an era of ceaseless conflict stretched away in front of them all.

It was enough to make him question the wisdom of the course on which he was now embarked.

He wondered about his enemy. The archives—the Web files—that had been retrieved from the Sutanto, and now from the Dessaix, told of a prosperous Japan, living in peace after having been conquered by MacArthur and Nimitz. Nothing he had learned about the Siranui and her curious crew gave him cause to think of them as anything other than men of giri.

The Nazis, on the other hand . . .

They gave barbarians a bad name. And the Soviets were even worse. There could be no doubt that they would turn on each other again at the first opportunity. They were both preparing for just such an eventuality, even as they pretended to fashion a new and congenial relationship. Could there be any reason to imagine that they would hesitate to wage war on the Japanese Empire, as well? He knew the Nazis regarded all Asians as barely human.

“Hmmph!”

“Admiral, is everything all right?”

Yamamoto was annoyed that a lack of control had betrayed his thoughts. “Captain,” he grunted, “what on earth could be wrong?”

The Yamato’s skipper seemed confused by the question. “Why, nothing, Admiral. We sail to victory, of course.”

“Of course,” Yamamoto echoed, nodding abruptly.

Le Roux thought himself handy in the galley, but he still missed the ship’s head chef. Petty Officer Dupleix had grown up in a family bistro outside Auxerre and was, in Le Roux’s opinion, the best pastry chef in the entire French Navy. He had begged the Germans to spare the man’s life, but to no avail, so they had been reduced to eating frozen croissants and brioche ever since.

Still Dupleix had been an idiot, like most of the crew. The Dessaix hadn’t been like his posting on the frigate Masson. There he’d been amongst like-minded men. The Masson’s captain had had a brother-in-law who was a deputy minister in the new government, and the captain had shared his sibling’s enthusiasm for the policies of the National Front.

That was only natural, after the Paris intifada and the atrocity of Marseilles. How anyone could think otherwise—well, it was beyond Le Roux’s understanding.

Yet he had been on board the Dessaix for only two weeks when the ship’s executive officer, Lieutenant Underzo, had frog-marched him into the capitaine’s quarters to receive a terrible dressing down. Capitaine Goscinny did not think it appropriate for a senior member of his crew to be actively politicking belowdecks, whether it was in behalf of the government or against. The old fool had insisted that Le Roux cease all political activity forthwith, or face charges when they returned from their Indonesian deployment to the Pacific Fleet base in Noumea.

It was all he could do not to laugh in the man’s face.

This was exactly the sort of thinking that had so very nearly led France into ruin under the socialists. Old farts like Goscinny had given the country over to illiterate migrants and jihadi scum, and it was only when the streets were finally running with blood that they admitted they might have been wrong.

Still, when Goscinny had upbraided him, Le Roux had bolted a mask onto his face, saluted, and barked “Yessir!” But in his mind he was already composing the letter to his old capitaine, asking him to forward a complaint to the navy’s political investigators and outlining Goscinny’s antipatriotic tendencies. Perhaps, if the capitaine could speak with his brother-in-law, the deputy minister, things might be resolved even more quickly.

The microwave pinged now, bringing him back to the present, and he removed a steaming hot Sara Lee brioche—God help him. As he carefully tore open the pastry and watched the chocolate sauce spill out, he had to smile at the memory of the last time he had seen Goscinny, naked and beaten to a purple pulp in the Gestapo cells at Lyon.

True to form, the dumb bastard had failed to see what a gift the Emergence had been. It had put them in a place where they could ensure that Frenchmen would determine the future of France, not a cabal of mad mullahs and bearded nuts. And perhaps just as important, it meant that with bold action they could also check the rise of America, the nation most to blame for the ills of the world.

After all, who had created bin Laden, the first of so many Islamist heroes? And whose appetite for oil had funded the Saudis, who in turn funded the madrassas of so many of the Wahhabi lunatics who had overrun the slums of Paris? It was the United States, Le Roux mused, who had turned the Middle East into a sinkhole of violence and Islamist revolt thanks to its support of Israel, its occupation of Iraq, its bombing of Iran, and its wars against Syria and Yemen.

Le Roux ate the brioche slowly, enjoying it in spite of himself, and enjoying also the prospect that lay before him. The prospect of rewriting history.

It mattered little that most of the men on board the Dessaix had gone into the cells at Lyon rather than serve the Republic by seizing a chance to wipe out eighty years of mistakes and perfidy. Some of them were those traitorous bastards who’d only pretended to agree with him. But they’d got theirs, in the end.

Yes, it was his ship now. The Boche needed him.

He washed down his snack with a mouthful of black coffee and stared in distaste at the two Indonesians eating some foul-smelling rice dish across the room from him. They had no language in common, but even if they did, he would not have spoken to them. He knew from the wailing that filled the ship five times a day that they were Islamists. Not jihadi, to be sure—he would never have allowed them on the ship, no matter what the Germans said.

He dreamed of a day when he could go about his business as a Frenchman and not be assailed by some