Designated Targets

Rosanna Natoli jumped as the shotgun went off. She hadn’t expected Cherry to actually kill the guy. She hadn’t really expected anybody to crawl out of the barge when they’d seen it wash up on the beach. It’d been shot to pieces long before they got to it.

Nobody said anything, though. A day or two back, Curtis might have protested, but they were all well past that sort of bullshit now. None of them were going to risk leaving a wounded survivor in the barge who might later bring them undone.

She filmed Cherry as he bent forward and unhitched four grenades from the dead man’s webbing. The detective passed one to Curtis, kept one in his hand, and pocketed the other two.

“On my count,” he said.

The young officer nodded.

“One . . . two . . . three . . .”

They pulled the pins—actually they looked like pieces of string to Rosanna—and lobbed the grenades, one after the other, into the barge. The muffled crump of detonation came a few seconds later, as they hurried back up the sand to the walking track that passed through the dunes. They’d given up on cars after the last one had been strafed by a Zero.

“You getting a signal?” Curtis asked as they pushed back into the thick growth from which they’d emerged to check on the barge.

“Yep,” she said. “Still there.”

They were all curiously comforted by the continued presence of the Big Eye drones that were circling over the island. They were so high up, it’d be impossible to spot them—or to shoot them down—and they weren’t armed, as far as she knew. So there was nothing the drones could do to help, really. But just the knowledge that they were there, that the Multination Force could still keep tabs on them—that was enough to make them feel as if they weren’t completely alone. And it gave them faint hope that they might be rescued.

“How’re your batteries?” asked Cherry.

“Good,” she said. “These babies were approved by the Energizer Bunny himself. They’ll be sweet for another couple of days.”

The looks on their faces told her that neither man knew what the hell she was talking about.

Another ten minutes of walking through the scrub brought them to the tree-shaded hollow where they’d made their camp. Though it was pretty generous to call it a camp. Three folding cots under a canvas tarp. A solar sheet to recharge Rosanna’s battery packs. Big cans of fresh water. Five days’ worth of canned food looted on Cherry’s say-so from an abandoned shop in town.

“There’s a lot of other barges coming ashore,” said Natoli. “You think we should get out of here?”

Cherry dropped onto a foldaway cot, grunting with exhaustion. “We’ll be all right, sister. They’re beaching around the point. The way the land lies, they’ll move inland away from us, not toward us. I say we lay up until dark, and then see if we can move back over to the Koolaus. Get you a better vantage point to film what’s happening at Pearl.”

“The Japs are going to be all over the roads by now,” said Curtis. “How do you plan on getting past them?”

Cherry rubbed at the back of his neck as he rooted through the pile of tins for something to eat. “People I used to know, Lieutenant. They did most of their business out of plain sight.”

They were all tired, so they left it at that, and sat around in silence. Cherry opened a can of baked beans and ate them cold, sitting on the edge of his cot. Curtis washed down a Hershey bar with a cup of water.

Rosanna linked the Sonycam to her slate and transferred her files for editing. She had about an hour and twenty minutes to work on, including the footage she’d taken of the barge. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to follow Kolhammer’s instructions to destroy all her twenty-first tech. Most of it, she’d hidden in a spot Cherry had shown her, a buried ammo locker just off the road in the foothills of the Koolaus. There’d been two pistols in there. “Throw downs,” he called them. And about $2,300 in cash. She didn’t ask him about the stash.

Curtis had, though.

“That’s my retirement fund and insurance policy, Lieutenant,” was all the cop would say.

Rosanna figured she’d increased the value of his glory box about a thousand times over, just by dropping her flexipad and powered sunglasses in there. She figured she could put a bullet into the slate and the Sonycam, if they came close to being captured.

For now, though, she used the touch screen to package a burst for Julia back in New York. The live link was gone. A message had come in on Fleetnet ordering all the surviving embeds and 21C personnel to switch to compressed burst, to reduce the possibility that the transmissions might be traced.

That had been a heavy blow. Julia had a lot more experience with this sort of shit, and as long as they’d been able to talk to her, she’d been a serious source of reassurance. Especially when the first Japanese ships had appeared on the horizon. Even Cherry had listened to everything she told them to do.

Now they couldn’t communicate in real time, and it felt as though darkness had drawn itself that much closer around them.