Final impact

Willet watched dispassionately as the section quickly knifed down into the depths. The greater bulk of the dying vessel was still afloat, but surely not for much longer. Hundreds of men swarmed over the upper decks and threw themselves into the churning waters.

Similar scenes repeated themselves throughout the Japanese fleet, which was now in complete disarray. Both of the conventional carriers had already gone down. The Musashi, like her sister ship, had been cleaved in two. Six heavy cruisers were in their final throes.

“Captain, that converted carrier, the Ohka ferry, is boogying to the south. I can get a target lock in just a few minutes.”

“Thank you, weapons. Just hold on a second. Mr. Knox. What do you have on your threat boards?”

“The destroyers still haven’t found us, ma’am. But there are about a dozen of them, throwing depth charges everywhere. It’s a bit like flying over Baghdad or Damascus, with everyone shooting into the air. Somebody might get lucky.”

Willet made a show of weighing her options. “All right, then. I think we’ve earned our pay for today. Helm, let’s blow this Popsicle stand. Wouldn’t do to get nailed by a random shot.”

“Aye, ma’am,” the helmsman replied.

But Willet wasn’t really paying attention. She was watching the Nagano slip away.

34

D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 0710 HOURS (LOCAL TIME).

ALAMOGORDO AIR FIELD, NEW MEXICO.

The last B-52 ever built rolled off the Boeing assembly line in 1962, thirty years before Caro Llewellyn was born. They were still kicking ass sixty years later, when she was flying Raptors off the Big Hill for a living. The air force had been intending to keep them in service until 2050, at which point the youngest of the airframes would be coming up on ninety years old. Of course, being a navy flier, that meant shit to her.

Or it had until Manning Pope had opened a can of wormholes and dragged Caro’s sorry carcass all the way back to 1942. Now, sitting in the pilot’s seat of a brand-new B-52 Stratofortress waiting for clearance to open the throttles and get the hell out of Dodge, or out of Alamogordo Air Field at any rate, she shifted uncomfortably in her new Army Air Force flight suit and tried not think about the Escher-print metaphysical detour her life had taken that day off East Timor. A year ago she’d been transferred without consultation into the newly formed Strategic Air Command, given the temporary rank of colonel in the Army Air Force, and dropped into the middle of the New Mexico desert. And these undeniably weird contortions in her personal fate were all of infinitely less consequence than the mission she was about to lead: the dropping of three atomic bombs on Nazi Germany.

New Mexico had been a real head spin. There were a lot of uptimers stationed out there. Nearly a thousand at her reckoning, which gave them some say in determining the culture of the place, but only some. There were thousands more ’temps, and nearly as many of them were civilians as military. It felt very different from the Zone, where she’d been working on the A-4 program, but it was also a world away from the rest of the country.

“You’re clear to roll, Colonel. Good luck.”

The voice in her earphones was female, an air traffic controller at the main tower. From the clipped, correct tones Llewellyn took her to be a ’temp, but you could never tell. Some said they could. The uptime vocabulary was generally given to more interesting profanity and was littered with the detritus of a great deal of as-yet-unrealized mass culture. But even if you took those surface elements away, there was something deeper still that separated them, an innate slackness or mental drawl of some sort that some linguists insisted on identifying in the speech patterns of everyone who’d arrived from the next century.

Colonel Llewellyn shrugged inwardly as she pushed the throttles forward to feed more power into the eight massive underwing engines. It beggared belief, the money and manpower Uncle Sam must have poured into the task of just building those behemoths. And if you let your mind expand from there, thinking about the effort involved in retroactively constructing the giant bombers, or a rough facsimile of them, and beyond that again to the Herculean labor of the Manhattan Project itself…well, it was enough to make your head spin.