Designated Targets

Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto stood proud and ramrod straight on the bridge of his flagship the Yamato as it plowed into a heavy southeasterly swell. But he had lost all of the intuitive confidence that had characterized his opening moves in this game. Midway had all but destroyed his sense of certainty.

Nearly sixty ships covered the gray, wind-scored seas, stretching out to the horizon. The sight would once have filled him with pride and an unshakeable belief in destiny. Now, however, he could not help worrying that a British drone might be watching him from above. Or that damnable Willet woman from below. A flight of American rockets might be screaming toward his fleet at an inconceivable velocity.

A small grunt escaped from deep within his chest.

It was infuriating, but it was war, and he had started this war knowing that his enemies possessed much greater resources than he. Nothing had changed, in that sense.

What had changed was that he now enjoyed the advantage of surprise, and technological superiority of a sort. His heart beat rapidly, as it had in the few hours since Hidaka’s encrypted message had been received.

The Clinton had sailed with the remnants of her battle group, and a window had opened through which they might steal a victory. Or the makings of a victory.

Yamamoto’s eyes traversed the scene around his great battleship. He had two carriers with him, three other battleships, half a dozen cruisers, two-dozen destroyers, and a host of tenders, oilers, and transports. It still felt like the greatest fleet that ever put to sea, and if it weren’t for Kolhammer’s untimely arrival, that would have been true.

True, his losses had been heavy at Hashirajima, thanks to the Havoc’s missile swarm, but they were still light compared with the disaster that befell Spruance at Midway. That had given Yamamoto just enough breathing space to try a radically different line of attack.

And then the divine gift of the Dessaix had arrived.

In all the world, there were still only a handful of people who knew of its fate, and he was the only one within the Combined Fleet. The emperor and Prime Minister Tojo knew, naturally. Hitler, Himmler, and their closest surviving cohorts were aware of its existence and its mission. None of the Soviets had been informed.

There were forty-eight crewmembers of the German submarine U-96 who had learned of the Dessaix’s inexplicable arrival, weeks after the Emergence at Midway, and sixty miles south of the Spanish Canary Islands. They had acquired the information by virtue of nearly running into her, shortly after she had materialized.

Yamamoto wondered what had become of those men. The Germans had assured him that there would be no chance of the secret leaking out. Thus, he presumed they were all dead.

Both the Reich and the Soviet Union had become vast charnel houses since their rulers had gained the deadly power of foresight. It was confirmation—as if any were needed—that power was wielded by ill-bred savages, almost everywhere but on the Home Islands. And it meant that, even if he was able to avoid defeat in this particular war against the Anglophone democracies, an era of ceaseless conflict stretched away in front of them all.

It was enough to make him question the wisdom of the course on which he was now embarked.

He wondered about his enemy. The archives—the Web files—that had been retrieved from the Sutanto, and now from the Dessaix, told of a prosperous Japan, living in peace after having been conquered by MacArthur and Nimitz. Nothing he had learned about the Siranui and her curious crew gave him cause to think of them as anything other than men of giri.

The Nazis, on the other hand . . .

They gave barbarians a bad name. And the Soviets were even worse. There could be no doubt that they would turn on each other again at the first opportunity. They were both preparing for just such an eventuality, even as they pretended to fashion a new and congenial relationship. Could there be any reason to imagine that they would hesitate to wage war on the Japanese Empire, as well? He knew the Nazis regarded all Asians as barely human.

“Hmmph!”

“Admiral, is everything all right?”

Yamamoto was annoyed that a lack of control had betrayed his thoughts. “Captain,” he grunted, “what on earth could be wrong?”

The Yamato’s skipper seemed confused by the question. “Why, nothing, Admiral. We sail to victory, of course.”

“Of course,” Yamamoto echoed, nodding abruptly.

Le Roux thought himself handy in the galley, but he still missed the ship’s head chef. Petty Officer Dupleix had grown up in a family bistro outside Auxerre and was, in Le Roux’s opinion, the best pastry chef in the entire French Navy. He had begged the Germans to spare the man’s life, but to no avail, so they had been reduced to eating frozen croissants and brioche ever since.