Designated Targets

The surgeon’s face flushed bright red and then drained of all color as her anger imploded into a small, dense ball of rage. Jones knew his chief medical officer all too well.

“Listen, I know you were the ranking officer. And I know you exercised your prerogatives under Sanction Four. But then, I know what that means, and accept it as valid. Almost nobody outside the Task Force will agree, Margie.”

“That’s just fucking politics, and you know it, Lonesome.”

“That’s right, and if we’re not careful, politics are going to fuck us just as surely as bombs and bullets. We are going to deal with this, but not by charging in and capping this asshole as though we’ve got a perfect right to do so.”

“But we do!”

“Not here, we don’t. Now, sit down, chill out, and give me some time to think this through. I’m already late for a meeting with MacArthur. We’ll talk about this tomorrow. But we do not, under any circumstances, go off the reservation with this. You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” she grumbled.

It was the grumble that let him know he’d convinced her. She was always a sore loser.

SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA HEADQUARTERS

His old man always said, never do someone a really big favor—they’ll never forgive you for it. Jones had reason to recall that pearl of wisdom as he listened to MacArthur in the old sandstone bank building that housed the HQ of the Southwest Pacific Area Command.

The Uber-temp looked like he was going to bite right through the stem of his corncob pipe when he greeted the Multinational Force leaders who’d flown in for the crisis talks. Thirty or more officers squeezed into the bank’s former boardroom. They represented all the services of all the different Allied Forces in the Pacific theater. And they mixed more readily with the men and women of Kolhammer’s Task Force than would have been the case a few months earlier. There was nothing like spilling a little blood to bring people together.

But MacArthur didn’t share the mood of reconciliation. Jones suspected he was pissed that the coup de grace had been delivered to Homma by Kolhammer’s forces, even if they were nominally under Mac’s command now. And Jones knew for a righteous certainty that the general was seriously pissed at the deployment order withdrawing the Kandahar and her group from the Australian theater, for a counterstrike against the Japanese in Hawaii. MacArthur probably thought he’d never get them back again.

Jones had already noticed one glaring absence. Captain Willet of the Havoc was nowhere to be seen. He hoped that meant the submarine had gone hunting for the Dessaix. Even if the stealth destroyer was crewed by a scratch team of half-assed try-hards, he didn’t fancy trying to force a landing on Oahu with that ship hanging around.

The colonel felt a hand on his upper arm and was surprised to find Prime Minister Curtin standing beside him wearing a dark, slightly crumpled suit. Jones hadn’t known he was going to be there, and hadn’t seen him enter the room.

“Mr. Prime Minister, you should try out for the SAS, sir, the way you spook about.”

Curtin, who looked about five years younger than he had the last time they’d met, took Jones’s hand and pumped it a few times. “Labor Party conferences are blood sport enough for me, Colonel. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you.”

“You should be thanking your men, Barnes and Toohey, sir. They made the case for the counteroffensive.”

Curtin nodded. His eyes were watery, but that could have been from all the cigarette smoke. These people lived in a permanent fog of nicotine and free-floating carcinogens. “I’ve already spoken to Mick Barnes,” the prime minister said. “But I wanted to be sure of catching you, too. I’m not staying for your meeting. It’s all operational stuff. I have to get back to Canberra, and I wanted to visit some of your wounded before I flew out. I understand they’re at the Royal Brisbane.”

“They are, sir,” said Jones. “Major Francois is setting up shop there.”

“So I hear. My scientific adviser tells me she’s rewritten the texts for our medical schools.”

“I think she probably just copied some new ones out, sir.” Jones smiled.

“Well, we’re very grateful for everything you’ve done, Colonel. If there’s anything we can do for you . . .”

Jones didn’t openly point out MacArthur, but he did let his eyes rest on the fuming supremo for a second. “Well, not everyone is happy about our redeployment, Prime Minister. I imagine you’ve had some experience at smoothing ruffled feathers.”

Curtin sighed, “I’m the veteran of ten thousand conferences, Colonel Jones, but this may be beyond my limits. Nevertheless, I’ll see what I can do.”

“There is one other thing, Prime Minister.”

“Yes?”

“I can understand,” said Jones, “that you’d want to keep Second Cav here, but it would make my job a lot easier if they were with me in Hawaii.”

Curtin held the big marine’s level stare for a long time. Jones realized then and there that he wouldn’t want to play poker against the man.

Eventually though, his head bobbed up and down, just fractionally. “There’s no point in being a ninety percent ally, is there, Colonel?”

“No, sir, there’s not. And neither Admiral Kolhammer nor I, nor Brigadier Barnes, for that matter, think there is a realistic chance that the Japanese can make another landing in force here in Australia. We’ve got long-range aerial surveillance covering your northern approaches, and nothing is lighting up the threat boards.”

Curtin took that in and gave Jones a flat, calculating look. “But your own signals-interception people tell us there is a lot of talk on the Japanese radio channels about a second invasion.”

“Talk is cheap, Prime Minster. Men and ships and planes are not. You need a lot of them to pull off an invasion, and best we can tell, Yamamoto has all his eggs in one basket. Hawaii.”

“Do you really think you’d be able to take the islands back from the Japs? They’ll have had at least three weeks to dig in, by the time you get there.”

“That’ll just mean there’s a nicer gravesite ready for them,” promised Jones.

HIJMS YAMATO, THE PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS

He could not see the prize he had come to take. It was obscured by the smoke of his own giant guns, and by the burning of so many buildings and fields. But Oahu was definitely there, just ten miles off starboard, the whole island shaking under the thunder of bombardment.

The commander of the Combined Fleet did not let his feelings escape. He maintained a stern countenance and refused to join in the celebrations. But he did let his men applaud as reports came back of a sea of fire, engulfing the remains of Nimitz’s fleet at Pearl Harbor, and of airfields reduced to smoking rubble and twisted, red hot metal. Indeed, they had earned the right.

The great iron behemoth of the battleship Yamato shuddered again as her eighteen-inch batteries fired a broadside into the gray shroud that hung over the Americans’ Pacific bastion. Using the newly installed German range-finding equipment, the ship’s gunnery officers could be certain of landing their shots with remarkable accuracy. Only the Yamato had been fitted out so far, but with every volley, she sent tons of high explosives screaming through the air, to land on the heads of the defenders.

Above him, lost in the glare of the equatorial sun, hundreds of bombers and fighters pressed their attacks, sweeping in toward their prey and then returning home to the decks of his carriers by an elliptical route that kept them from being destroyed by the cannon fire of their own ships.

If Yamamoto had one regret, it was that the Dessaix’s attack had been so successful, despite the attempted sabotage. As a result, he would never engage in a decisive match with the American fleet. The U.S. would survive this defeat, and would rebuild their navy. Indeed, it would probably be infinitely more powerful than the force he had set out to destroy in December 1941. But it would do them no good.