Designated Targets

Hidaka didn’t bother replying. He would no more disobey Yamamoto’s precise instructions than he would piss in the goldfish pond at the Imperial Palace. His warrior spirit was simply piqued by the idea that such an enemy was being allowed to slip away. That, too, however, was an integral part of the grand admiral’s plan.

Even so, he found it difficult to contain his frustration. Not with Yamamoto’s strategy, but with the unrealized potential of this ship, the Robert Dessaix. From the first moment he had seen her, deep in the wastes of the Great Southern Ocean, he recognized her as a vastly more powerful weapon than the Sutanto or the Nuku. She was larger, for a start, at least three times their size. But more important, she was obviously a generation or more advanced. He had come to understand that the most capable ships from the future did not necessarily proclaim their strength in massed tiers of gun mounts. Indeed, the sleeker the lines, the less there was for the eye to linger over, the deadlier she was likely to be.

The decks of the Robert Dessaix were almost bare. From the outside, the raked-back silhouette of her “teardrop” bridge, in which they now stood, barely rose to the height of a man. It had thrown Hidaka at first, until he realized that the floor must have been sunk below the line of the deck outside.

Everything about her suggested stealth and danger.

What a pity she hardly had a crew to sail her.

Le Roux was an enthusiastic buffoon, but it was more than apparent that he lacked the technical skills to pilot such a sophisticated vessel. It wasn’t surprising, really, since his original duties had been confined to the servicing of the ship’s two helicopters, neither of which was on board now.

The pilots, too, had “refused to cooperate.”

Commander Hidaka let his eyes drift away from the panel that was displaying the radar pulses originating aboard the American and turncoat Nipponese ships. The Pacific was calm, and quite beautiful beneath an unseasonably warm autumn sun. The boy he had once been wished for nothing more than to take this ship under his control, and to charge at the Americans under full power, with every rocket on board blasting up out of their silos and roaring away on columns of white fire.

But the adult he was today knew they’d be lucky to successfully complete their much more limited mission.

There were two other French sailors on the bridge. One of them—a junior officer, and little more than a boy himself—said something to Le Roux. Hidaka waited for the translation. The two men took their time about it, babbling on in their incomprehensible native tongue. The boy, an ensign named Danton, actually outranked Le Roux, who was merely a premier maître, a warrant officer, but the older man enjoyed a clear advantage over his comrade. The boy seemed almost terrified of him.

They were an unconvincing pair of allies—if allies indeed they were. Hidaka had trouble understanding their motivations. To his great surprise, he found himself feeling much more at ease with the thirteen Indonesian crew members who had come aboard with him at the rendezvous. It wasn’t that he was a believer in Pan-Asian solidarity. In his opinion, the Indonesians were monkey men. But he had grown accustomed to them in the months since the Emergence, and when he wasn’t working with the handful of French or the Kriegsmarine officers who were on board, he actually preferred the company of the apes.

Le Roux finally deigned to speak to him. “Enseigne Danton believes an airborne radar plane is aloft, and probing north of the Clinton’s battle group,” the Frenchman said. “It is best that we should retire, now we have learned what we needed to.”

This time Hidaka did not question. They had achieved the first relatively simple task allotted them. So he nodded his consent.

Le Roux spoke to the third Frenchman, a leading seaman, who at least had an appearance that fit his role as helmsman. A tall, shaven-headed brute whose arms were covered in tattoos that reminded Hidaka of the markings of South Sea islanders, he responded to Le Roux’s gruff burst of instruction with a Gallic roll of the shoulders. Sitting at a “workstation” rather than standing at a wheel, the giant sailor consulted with the navigator, a German commander, and began to type out instructions with the casual air of somebody doing exactly what he’d been trained for.

It was a pleasant change.

It was the second time the Combined Fleet had set out like this, and the first time since the Emergence that he had dared concentrate his forces in this way. They were still vulnerable, but the noble sacrifices of Homma and Nagumo in the South had done much to draw the attention of their new foe.