Weapons of choice

"As for this rescue mission, I admit, it looks shaky on paper. But having seen what happened to those men, the pictures of them in those prison camps, I couldn't live with myself if I turned down a chance to save them. And I'd have their families coming over the fence to get me."

"That's why Kolhammer sent you those pictures, sir," King said, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. "To force your hand."

Roosevelt smiled like an old wolf.

"I know. He'd make a good politician."

The admiral tried another tack.

"They're asking us to divert a hell of a lot of shipping capacity to their little adventure," he pointed out. "MacArthur, for one, is going to have to wait for reinforcements in Australia. He'll howl like a stuck pig."

"He always does," Roosevelt countered, waving away the point. MacArthur's good opinion counted for little with him. "And anyway, he's already assented. Not that he had any real say in the matter."

King was unable to contain his surprise, and in turn his annoyance.

"I hadn't been told that MacArthur knew anything of this," he said.

"I only found out myself two hours ago, when he cabled me his approval of the operation." Roosevelt shook his head in wonder at the man's gall, dealing himself into the hand when he wasn't even at the table.

King looked like he'd stepped in something nasty whenever the subject of MacArthur came up. "I suppose he got one look at those marines and their equipment and decided to put them in his back pocket," he said.

"Possession is nine-tenths of the law, Admiral. They're in his theater. And I'm surprised at you. You're always trumpeting the case of Japan over Germany. If they can catch the Japs at Hashirajima they'll cripple Tojo. After that, well, I thought you'd want to get your own hands on Kolhammer's ships for the Pacific, too."

King tried to look insulted, but failed. Roosevelt smiled again.

"I'm approving the operation, Admiral. Let Kolhammer run it his way. We'll worry about the niceties afterward. This business in Honolulu with the murders and the riot, I fear it's a taste of more to come. If these characters can pull this off, it will create a reservoir of goodwill, and I suspect we're going to need every drop of it."

37

USS KANDAHAR, 1238 HOURS, 13 JUNE 1942

The planning room of the USS Kandahar was only a third the size of the Clinton's main conference center, but marines are a hardy bunch, quite capable of working up a major op without the benefit of buffet service or an espresso machine. For many of the 1942 personnel, a mix of Marine Corps and navy officers, this briefing was their first real exposure to a twenty-first-century environment. A few of them struggled to maintain their focus in the face of numerous distractions, both technological and human. Lieutenant Commander Black felt fortunate to be one of the few who'd already begun to adapt to the situation.

The officer who delivered a short history lesson on the original liberation of the POW camp at Cabanatuan on Luzon was Lieutenant Gina De Marco, a strikingly pretty blond woman who already had a reputation among Black's contemporaries as a ball breaker.

Sure enough, a wolf whistle greeted her when she took the podium. If she was supposed to giggle and blush at that provocation, somebody was in for a shock. Lieutenant De Marco fixed the offender with a frigid stare.

"Do you have a particularly small penis, sir? Is that why you feel the need to compensate for your inadequacies with this behavior? If so, let me assure you, it didn't work. You still have a very small penis, and now you look like an idiot, too."

De Marco's shipmates exploded into hoots of laughter. The whistler and his buddies didn't really know where to look, and settled on a range of more or less shit-eating grins as their response. The lieutenant's microcelebrity grew just that little bit more potent.

She continued without further interruption, silencing the room with her grave delivery.

"The death toll for American personnel at Cabanatuan in June of this year will be five hundred. In July it will reach eight hundred. There are also civilian prisoners being held, many of them women who have been or will be forced into sex slavery by the Japanese."

The uniformly white male audience of '42 personnel squirmed quietly as the flatscreen behind the Lieutenant segued through dozens of archival images of the death camp, including some of white "comfort women." Sitting in the second row, Lieutenant Commander Black found the images disturbing, as he was meant to, but he was also unsettled by the methodical, dispassionate way in which the beautiful young woman went about her briefing. He didn't need to ask whether all the young women of the future were so confounding. He already knew from personal experience.

Black shook his head at the memory of Julia crippling that guy in Honolulu.