Designated Targets

When he was a little kid on the mainland, his old man had taken him up in a clock tower to hear the bell toll twelve. He’d started screaming at the first gong, at the size of it, and the feeling of his insides being shook to jelly. He was back there for a few seconds, until the monstrous rolling thunder trailed off and the sound of a screaming woman cut through the high-pitched whine he just knew he was gonna be hearing all day.

He felt tender inside. Not just his head, which always felt that way, but everywhere, like he was some sort of human fucking cocktail shaker and he’d just made up a couple of hundred daiquiris.

The bar wasn’t nearly as badly fucked up as he expected. He’d thought a bomb might have gone off, but apart from a lot of broken glass and some upturned furniture that’d been knocked over by the patrons, there was remarkably little damage. A lot of people were wailing in pain, though, holding their hands over their ears. But there was none of the grotesque carnage he’d witnessed after the Jap attack last December. No severed limbs or chunks of meat hanging from the trees.

He caught sight of Natoli and Curtis busting out of the front door, and he chased after them without thinking about it.

For such a dive, Irish Mike’s poorly named bar was superbly located. As soon as he stepped outside and his eyes adjusted to the fierce sunlight, he had a panoramic view back along Waikiki toward the harbor. An enormous cloud, looking just like a big mushroom, had swallowed up half of Honolulu. His balls contracted, and ice water filled his gut. He’d heard about those fucking things. They were bad fucking news. Even the cloud could kill you if you breathed it in or let it touch you.

Nevertheless, he was nailed to the spot, completely unable to move. The whole island seemed to be covered in twisting clouds of smoke. Pearl, Hickham, Schofield Barracks—they were all lost inside the firestorms.

But strangely enough, so were the mountains in the center of the island. And something had obviously exploded with great force a mile or so off Waikiki, where there was nothing but empty water.

“Hey, are you a police officer?”

At first he didn’t realize they were talking to him.

“Hey, you there, are you a cop?”

Cherry looked up stupidly. His targets were walking toward him. He followed their eyes, looking down and seeing his .38 growing out of his hand like a blue metal tumor. It was so much a part of him that he’d forgotten about pulling it.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, knowing that his surveillance was over, if not exactly blown.

“You got a radio? In your car?” Natoli asked. “You still got your car, right? You’ve been following us in that piece of shit for three days now?”

Blown, all right.

“What? Huh? Oh, yeah. Over there.” He waved his gun in the general direction of the car.

“The black Dodge, I know. Do you have a radio?”

“Why?” He couldn’t get his brain out of first gear.

“Just come on,” said the broad. She raised a dust trail, she moved so quickly. When she reached the Dodge, she wrenched open the door with a yank.

“Hey, you can’t do that!” he protested, starting to get his senses back at last. The sound of three gigantic eruptions reached them from the burning maelstrom of Pearl Harbor. He looked away from Natoli and Curtis, but he couldn’t see a thing through the smoke.

“Secondary blasts,” he said to himself, musing that only a cruiser or a battleship going up would sound like that. He saw the gimp playing with his police radio, and then with the car’s own set.

“Get the hell outta there,” he called out.

They emerged from the front of the Dodge, but not because of him.

“It’s fried,” said Curtis. “EMP.”

“What?”

“Electromagnetic pulse. Every piece of wiring on the island is probably fused.”

“Oh,” said Cherry. “That’s bad, right?”

PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS

It wasn’t nearly as disastrous as he had feared. Hidaka had watched the footage over and over again. It seemed that Danton had got to the entire opening salvo. One missile had fallen into the ocean and two more had speared uselessly into a mountain range. But one that had been meant to land on Ford Island had instead devastated Honolulu. Half of the city was probably gone, according to the helmsman.

Of the second launch series, only one had been wasted, flying right over the Fleet anchorage and continuing on for another two hundred miles before dropping into the water. The other Lavals had all found their intended marks, or hit near enough as made no difference.

He turned away from the display to take in the slaughterhouse that was the Dessaix’s Combat Information Center. There had been no time to clean up yet. The dead lay where they had fallen. This was a disaster, but his attack was not, and the next phase of Operation H.I. could proceed.