Designated Targets

“The Honolulu harbor, she does not move around, no? The airfields of my day, they exist in yours, yes?” Le Roux explained. “So we program the missiles to strike at them as Melanie knows them. It’s not perfect, but it does not matter. The targets will be destroyed.”

Hidaka and a few of the Kriegsmarine officers had watched as Sub-Lieutenant Danton brought up amazing, almost three-dimensional images of a Pearl Harbor and Honolulu that would never exist, the island as it would have been.

The young man’s fingers danced across a keyboard. He used a light pen to move strange icons and data tags around the massive panel display. After twenty minutes, it was done. He spoke to Le Roux, who translated for Hidaka. The Germans all spoke French.

“We have designated the Fleet Base at Pearl as a wide-area target box,” said Le Roux. “The missiles will travel there, then seek out targets using their own sensors. They will be drawn to dense concentrations of metal. Others will home in on the signature of the Americans’ radar installations. Still others will deliver area-denial munitions to the airfields. It will be very messy, I’m afraid. If we had the satellite cover and a few nukes, it would be much easier.”

“How will they know where to go?” asked Hidaka. “The Allies always position their spy drones above their targets.”

Le Roux rolled his eyes. “Over there, Commander, look. That Boche officer is working at the navigation console. We have no GPS fix, but we still know where we are, partly because he is a trained navigator and can tell us, but also because the Americans have placed locator beacons at fixed positions such as Midway, to help them navigate. Those beacons emit their signal, so we can receive them without using an active array to seek the position fix. You understand? Melanie knows where she is in relation to the targets, so she can give them directions? Yes?”

Hidaka was glad that most of the men in the center didn’t speak English. He had never been treated in such a dismissive fashion. Le Roux spoke to him as if he were a slow child, and took a cruel and obvious pleasure in doing so.

A slow, dull, throbbing pain built up behind Hidaka’s eyeballs, as he resisted the urge to cut this brute down. Even so, it was a lucky thing his sword was not close at hand. “Chief Petty Officer Le Roux,” he said, slowly and quietly, “you forget yourself. You can no more captain this ship than I. You are a simple mechanic.”

Hidaka loaded the word with as much contempt as he could muster, and he leaned forward.

“I hope your confidence in your own abilities does not prove to be misplaced. You would not want to disappoint your new masters, I think. They are no more forgiving of failure than I.”

Le Roux couldn’t help flicking a quick glance at the Germans. The tip of his tongue darted out to lick at dry, cracked lips. A nervous laugh slipped the leash, and escaped from within him. “We won’t fuck it up,” he promised. But all of a sudden, he didn’t sound so sure.

Sub-Lieutenant Philippe Danton hoped that nobody would see how much his hands were shaking. But then, even if they did, they would presume that it was because he was a coward. Half a man.

While that pig Le Roux argued with Hidaka, Danton found himself praying that they would come to blows and kill each other. A serious confrontation had been brewing between them from the moment the Japanese had come aboard, in the Southern Ocean.

As they snapped at each other, he told Kruger, one of the Germans, that the CI was asking him to recheck and reenter some of the data.

“Why?”

“She has checked her holomaps and thinks the coordinates should be refined,” he said. “See, the airfields at Hickham and Wheeler are much smaller in nineteen forty-two than they will be in twenty twenty-one. Melanie thinks the missiles are likely to land outside of the new target box.”

Kruger watched a computer illustration that showed six Laval missiles slamming into empty cane fields. “Ah, I see, yes. Best we correct then. Good work, Lieutenant. I shall tell Le Roux.”

Danton snorted in amusement. “Good luck. He doesn’t like to be told he is wrong.”

Kruger took in the scene of the Japanese commander and the French premier maitre, arguing over by the weather station.

“No, he doesn’t,” Kruger agreed. “You had best see to it, then.”

“Yes, sir,” Danton replied, calling up a window he’d opened earlier, and immediately shuffled to the back of the desktop.

He typed quickly now, trying to appear calm and relaxed, even though he felt like passing out from terror. He shot a quick glance in Le Roux’s direction. Hidaka had leaned in close and appeared to be threatening him.

Please, let them keep fighting.

He reprogrammed the weapons in the forward bays. Another window opened up. He reprogrammed the bays amidships.

Hidaka and Le Roux became ominously silent. He tried to catch sight of them in the reflection on his monitor, but the CIC was too dark for that. He forced himself to look bored, like a process worker on the production line at the end of the day. He made a show of stretching his neck to work out a cramp.

Hidaka was stalking away, and Le Roux was about to return.

Damn.

He was out of time. Two key clicks shut down the targeting windows. He’d reset half the missile bays, but the rest were still programmed as Le Roux had wanted them. Except for the last two bays. Those missiles had already been taken off the ship. That still left plenty of punch, though. Twelve subfusion plasma-yield Laval cruise missiles.

He had failed.

He took out the photograph of his sister that he kept in a breast pocket. “I’m sorry, Monique,” he whispered.

Le Roux’s coarse bark sounded right behind him, making him jump. “Don’t cry for her now, boy. She’ll have her revenge soon enough, eh?”

“I hope so,” said Philippe Danton. He wanted more than anything to kill Le Roux at that moment.

A marine had not raped his sister. In fact, she had married a marine she met in Lebanon, when she had been working there for Medecins Sans Frontieres. She had loved him, but she had lost him forever.

His name was J. “Lonesome” Jones.

It would be good to get home. They were running low on frozen brioche.

Still, he wouldn’t want to miss this for the world. Le Roux wished they had satellite cover, or even a drone. The vision they took from the small cams in the nose of the Lavals was nowhere near adequate. Even with the CI cleaning up the image, it still shook so much that watching for too long was liable to make you feel ill.

He occupied Capitaine Goscinny’s old chair, and from there he could survey the entire Combat Information Center. The trained apes Hidaka had brought along were proving themselves fast learners. They couldn’t match the original crew, of course, but they could be trusted to keep the ship running at a basic level. And the Germans were quite impressive. He couldn’t rely on them in combat, but the navigator was good, and the others had adapted to their various roles with great enthusiasm. Within a year, they might just make decent replacements for those idiots rotting in the cells back in Lyon.

Melanie began the ten-second countdown. Even Hidaka, who spoke no French, could tell immediately what was going on. He stood as still as the pitch and yaw of the vessel allowed, and watched the main panel display, which carried vision of the silos on the forward decks.

“Quatre, trois, deux, un . . .”

Le Roux’s balls climbed up inside his body as the first salvos soared free. The whole vessel shuddered as the brand-new, French-designed multipurpose missiles scorched away, their scram jets engaging after a less than a minute. Sonic booms reached them through the hull as the atmosphere was ruptured by the passage of the Lavals.

“Sacre merde.”

It was done. There was no calling them back now. He wasn’t even sure Danton could destroy them in flight, if he had to. Suddenly a flash of blind panic seized him, before subsiding just as quickly. “These will destroy the