Weapons of choice

They were somebody else's problem. Harry's team was assigned to take out the main barracks on the road to Changi, temporary home to more than two thousand Japanese soldiers.

His tac display went active.

"Payload inbound," he said. "Thirty seconds. Sergeant, fire up the laser strobe."

"Strobe active, targets acquired," said St. Clair as six thin lines of invisible laser light stabbed out from a small, tripod-mounted device in repeater bursts modulated to the microsecond. The photon stream pulsed across the night before silently painting the center of four long huts in which slept hundreds of Japanese. The laser strobe looked a little like a video camera, and indeed it would record what happened in the next few minutes.

"Teams two, three, and four report strobes active and targets acquired," said Mitchell.

The other SAS teams, stationed at the base points of a triangle surrounding the barracks complex, had locked strobes onto the remaining buildings and facilities, including a small guard tower, three machine-gun and mortar pits, and a line of light tanks. With fifteen seconds till showtime one man peeled away from each team, moving silently into the scrub, stalking the sentries who had last passed by.

There was no visual warning that preceded the approach of the cruise missiles. Their turbojets burned without visible flame. Their imminent arrival registered as a time hack in the lower left corner of the goggle displays. The team leaders, had they chosen to, could have watched a missile's progress as a receiver embedded within their goggles picked up a signal from the seeker warhead, which translated into a series of red arrowheads tracking across their heads-up displays. But being pragmatic, they all chose to plant their faces in the dirt and breathe out against the wave of overpressure that would soon hit them.

Harry imagined that he just might have caught a rumble of distant thunder as the missile popped up and chose the closest of the targets designated by the laser strobes, all in a sliver of time too infinitesimal to be comprehended by any human mind. Flaps on its stubby wings purred into position. Gated doors swung open down the length of its belly. A very small, controlled fusion reaction cooked up deep inside the belly of the missile for just over two microseconds, enough to superheat its two hundred tungsten slugs and spit them out of their containment cells with enough kinetic energy in each to destroy a heavily armored fighting vehicle.

The huts, first on the target list, were only constructed of plywood and corrugated iron.

Sixty percent of the missile's submunitions load, 120 white-hot slugs traveling at hypersonic speed, slammed into those frail structures and literally vaporized them. The expanding gas, a molecular mix of human tissue, building materials, and superheated air, manifested itself as a conventional explosion, which blew the rest of the target mass to hell and beyond.

The Japanese crews manning the weapons pits didn't even have time to turn around before the slugs shrieked in on top of their positions. The guard tower bought just 2 percent of the load. A toilet block got 3. And the light tanks took what was left, 30 percent of the package, or sixty slugs.

The explosions sounded like the birth of a volcano.

The missile then swung through 180 degrees to head north for a secondary target, which had been programmed into its seeker head; the naval base, where high-altitude drone flights confirmed a large amount of Japanese shipping was tied up.

"Right, gentlemen," said Captain Windsor. "Let's have at them."

HMAS IPSWICH, 2359 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

From the moment they'd helped him into this weird padded armor, Captain Tom Shapcott had done everything he could to stop worrying about the bulky feel of the "ballistic plate," or the awkward weight of his "powered helmet," and the confusing array of little movies, message boxes, and floating screens full of numbers and meaningless letter codes that appeared in front of his eyes when he turned on his "combat goggles." He knew he would need to focus on the job at hand.

He stood within the giant steel cocoon of the Australian ship's vehicle deck, awed into silence. The four Abrams tanks waiting there were generations beyond the Shermans he knew. They were still obviously tanks, but the size of them, the brute promise of destruction that lay within their hulking mass, robbed Shapcott of words. Behind them squatted ten so-called light armored vehicles, which they called LAVs, each seeming larger and more formidable than a German tiger tank, each bristling with an individual missile suite and a twin-barreled 50mm chain gun that they'd told him could reduce a concrete bunker to dust and rubble within minutes-perhaps even seconds.