Final impact

The main battlespace display was almost entirely devoted to the A-4 raid on the island where Denny’s patrol had discovered Yamamoto’s nasty little secret. The fighter-bombers were beginning their payload run and would deliver in less than two minutes. So far no radar had painted them, and the Hawkeye was picking up nothing in the way of signals traffic. Kolhammer’s only real concern was how the new snap-on laser guidance kits would perform. They weren’t anywhere near as accurate as the precision-guided munitions he was used to, but then they were a quantum leap ahead of anything that had been deployed by the ’temps so far. As Mike Judge said, they were “probably good enough for government work.”

In the short time he had until the strike went in, Kolhammer had been watching a data package from Jane Willet’s sub, the Havoc. She was still lurking off the southern Kurils, with three drones at high altitude above the engagement between Yamamoto and their putative allies, the Soviets. And they were feeding her some scarifying footage.

In all his years in the service, Kolhammer had never fought a naval battle at close quarters. Even Taiwan had been contested from well over the horizon. The only experience he had of closing directly with an enemy was in warding off suicide attackers using speedboats.

On one of the panels of the main display, however, he could see Soviet and Japanese ships pounding at each other from just a few miles away. And the Sovs were having a very tough time of it. All their major combatants had been sunk or heavily damaged in the surprise attack by the jet-powered tokkotai.

By the time Yamamoto’s Combined Fleet came pouring through the channels of the lower Kuril Islands, they were opposed by a handful of crippled destroyers, or maybe even corvettes. The Japanese probably could have finished them off with conventional air strikes, but for some reason Yamamoto wanted to get in close with his guns. Perhaps he knew it was the last chance he’d ever have to fight like that.

“Ten seconds from release, Admiral.”

“Thank you,” Kolhammer replied, switching his attention back to his own onscreen battle.

There was no drone coverage of the target. Torres and her guys were doing this the old-fashioned way. Consequently he had to be content with watching a CGI projection of the unfolding attack. It was all very primitive, but he knew that over on the Enterprise, Spruance and his staff were taking the same images in their refitted CIC and probably feeling like they were there in the cockpit. Everything was relative.

Lieutenant Torres’s voice, clipped and slightly distorted, came over the speaker system. “I have the target. No triple A. No radar locks. Releasing payload.”

…

The GBU-20 detached and fell away, beginning a long glide toward the side of the small mountain. The Skyhawk seemed to bounce upward after it let go of the sixteen-hundred-kilo weight.

Torres heard both of her wingmen release as she brought the A-4 around and powered up the laser designator. The pod was new, the product of a collaboration between a San Fernando-based start-up company called Combat Optics and a Bell Telephone subsidiary set up within the Zone to exploit the parent company’s future intellectual properties. The two directors of Combat Optics were 21C senior chief petty officers whose enlistments had expired about two months after the Transition. With a total of fifty years’ experience between them in the care and feeding of precision-guided munitions, they returned to civilian life and went straight to the downtown offices of O’Brien and Associates with a proposal to set up Combat Optics and go hunting for federal government contracts. The company was now publicly listed, employing two thousand people, and was worth well over half a billion dollars. Its main line of business was producing strap-on laser guidance kits for dumb iron bombs, designator pods, and night vision equipment.

The system Combat Optics had settled on was a variant on the early Paveway bomb series-for which a relatively new contemporary company known as Texas Instruments was being paid a 5 percent royalty in a deal hammered out by Maria O’Brien. The early Paveways had the benefit of being simple, rugged, and well within the capability of local industry to manufacture, given engineering guidance by the principles of Combat Optics.

So as Lieutenant Anna Torres hauled her Skyhawk jet fighter around, the designator pod lit up and threw a beam of coherent light down onto the cliff face where the Force Recon team had discovered the launch tubes. Torres laid her “sparkle” on a point chosen by the Clinton’s Combat Intelligence as the most likely location for the opening of the shaft, given the data provided by Denny’s patrol before they were wiped out.