Final impact

The admiral pushed aside these thoughts. They weren’t his immediate concern, whereas the next five minutes of this briefing were. He gave Jones a light pat on the shoulder as he stood to make his way to the lectern. Slotting home a data stick, he nodded to Spruance, his only superior in the gathering, and waited for the PowerPoint files to arrange themselves on the screen behind him.

“I’m going to quickly run you through some of the capabilities of the Clinton’s battle group,” he said, “and outline how these will be used in strategic support of Admiral Spruance’s plan, as well as tactical support from General Jones and the Eighty-second Expeditionary Brigade’s attack on Guam.

“First, a strategic strike on enemy capital ships…”

He ended up speaking for twenty-five minutes, mostly in answer to questions from the floor. Jones seemed distracted during the presentation, even taking a couple of silent messages on his flexipad. Kolhammer would have been pissed off, except that the hulking marine flashed him a private message that immediately explained his agitation. The text came up on Kolhammer’s flexipad as it was resting in front of him.

Hidaka captured. Rogas queries Sanction 5?

Oh shit, Kolhammer thought.

10

D-DAY + 23. 26 MAY 1944. 1554 HOURS.

WAIPAHU MEMORIAL CEMETERY, HAWAII.

Neither Chester Nimitz nor Bill Halsey was buried on Hawaii. Their remains had been found, after much distressing effort, and flown home to be interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

The short rule of the Japanese had been as horrific here as it had been in northern Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Indonesia-or the Dutch East Indies. As a matter of fact, thought Kolhammer, it had probably been worse. The civilian death rate had run to 90 percent, and almost no military personnel had survived to greet the liberators. Some of the higher-ranking officers had been transported to Japan for interrogation. With them had gone anybody from the Multinational Force, civilian or military. Almost everyone else had perished in a long orgy of abuse and mass murder to rival the Rape of Nanking.

A memorial to the dead and the missing had been erected. It stood near the ghost town of Waipahu on the site of one of the many mass graves that covered Oahu. The Japanese had used the former sugar-milling town on the north shore of Pearl Harbor’s Middle Loch as a gigantic slave camp. At least twenty-five thousand people had been interred there while they worked on clearing debris from the harbor. As they died, they’d been dumped in a series of open pits to the west of the town. Kolhammer could only imagine what a hellish sight it must have been. The death pits contained thousands of children, women, and old folks.

War crime investigators, trained by his own people from the Clinton’s WCI Unit, had determined that at least half of the dead from the Waipahu Site had been summarily executed in the days before the Liberation-killed simply to deny them the hope of freedom.

Kolhammer had thought himself inured to horror by thirty years of active service, most of them spent fighting medieval savages with a fetish for degrading their victims. But standing with Jones on a small rise outside Waipahu, where more than a hundred of their own people were buried, he knew that he had but a scant understanding of the evil of which humans were capable. And now he had within his power the man responsible for this atrocity.

Jisaku Hidaka.