Weapons of choice

"I don't know why Kolhammer even agreed to let you go," Black countered angrily as his exasperation finally got the better of him.

Duffy snorted.

"Because he knows he's going to need a positive spin on this whole fucking disaster."

Kolhammer, like Halabi, had corralled his guests into the now obsolete satellite warfare section of his CIC. Spruance, Halsey, and a couple of other 'temps he didn't recognize had sat themselves down and were taking in the feverish pace of the center while Lieutenant Thieu tried to explain how it all fit together.

They didn't care that the Clinton didn't have live satellite links to the Singapore task force or the submarine standing off Hashirajima. To them, coordinated strategic strikes hitting three locations at once, and feeding back battlefield images within an hour or two, was the stuff of magic. Every movie screen in the huge, chilly cavern of the Combat Information Center held something of interest, so that they didn't know where to focus. Tanks plowing through lines of Japanese field guns on Singapore. Storm troopers in bulky "armor" dropping out of helicopters. Jet planes roaring off the one working catapult on the Clinton. Armored hovercraft on fat-bellied rubber skirts pounding through the waves toward Luzon. Marine Corps "jump jets" settling down vertically on the deck of the Kandahar. Missiles diving into Yamamoto's anchorage at Hashirajima.

Even the fact that most of the Combined Fleet had disappeared didn't seem to bother them.

As impressive as it all was, Kolhammer knew this was lulling them into a false sense of security. It was awesome, true, but it had its limits. He was running through land-attack missiles at a ruinous rate as they degraded the Japs' ability to resist on Luzon. He envied Halabi her mission to Singapore. Sure, it was a tight trip through some very sharky waters, but she had all of her targets grouped. He had to fire on half a dozen sites over five hundred square kilometers, and even then, without good intel, he could never be sure he'd covered all the bases.

He approached his guests. Spruance saw him coming and nodded.

"It seems to be going well, Admiral, except for Hashirajima, and even then, I'm not going to quibble, with two carriers sunk."

"Thank you, Admiral," said Kolhammer. "I'll be a lot happier when this next phase is done. Jones is going to have his hands full securing Manila and Cabanatuan."

"Two minutes, sir," a weapons sysop called out. "Feeding drone coverage to the main screen."

The three giant panels that formed the main display had been running recorded footage sent by compressed burst from Halabi and Willet. They winked out to a featureless blue for a fraction of a second before coming back online with three live images transmitted from drones high over Luzon.

The smallest of the three showed a city block in Cabanatuan. Thanks to the late hour, the town was asleep. No traffic moved on its streets. It could have been a still photo, except that trees were swaying in a breeze. A complex tapestry of targeting data suddenly appeared over a large white building, as a time hack counted down.

"What is that place?" asked Spruance.

"Regional subcommand center for two Japanese divisions," said Kolhammer. "It's a residential as well as an administrative compound, so the higher command elements should all be there. We've had Marine Recon in-country for a week, scoping it out for us."

"What about the others?"

"Main garrison. It used to be a Philippine army barracks. Now the Japs are in there."

The time hack reached zero.

Something flashed across the screen of the smaller window and the whole city block on which the targeted building had stood erupted in a volcanic blast. Even the drone's sophisticated cameras were unable to cope, and the screen blanked out to white for a few seconds.

Two heavy missiles were assigned to the main Japanese camp, which lay sixteen kilometers from the POW camp. They bore in at the relatively low speed of three hundred knots, just above the tree line.

As Kolhammer and Spruance watched silently, a small pop-up window showed a couple of sentries squeezing off a few random shots into the dark. Alerted by the gunfire, hundreds of figures spilled out of tents and barracks buildings.

The missiles detonated and the army camp, in which fifteen thousand men lay abed, vanished inside a colossal explosion.

"Sweet Jesus," breathed Admiral Halsey. He had been briefed on the effects of the Wide Area Impact Munitions, but Kolhammer knew that to actually watch such power unleashed-especially for the first time-was a humbling, even a frightening experience. The surveillance drone refocused for a wide-angle shot just before detonation, allowing the audience in the CIC to view the blast from a virtual height of six thousand meters. It was obvious to all that nobody could have survived. Supersonic pressure waves blew out across the landscape from the blast centers, flattening trees and demolishing any structures they met for eight kilometers.