Weapons of choice

The video feed wasn't live, which made it infinitely worse. The signal came through on a fifteen-minute delay, and from the looks of the firestorm running through the streets of Manila, that was long enough for anything to happen. Lieutenant Commander Black wanted to turn away from the screen, to shut off the rush of chaotic savagery that swirled around his woman. He wanted to run from the Media Center and hop a chopper into the city to yank Julia right out of there.

Rosanna had him seated in front of a huge fat screen devoted exclusively to a delayed feed from Julia's squad. She furiously worked a keyboard and touch screen next to him, chopping footage, assigning it to dump bins for editing later, tagging significant sections, adding her own initial comments. Without an organization of her own to report to, she'd volunteered to stand in as Julia's producer. Black was impressed with the furious intensity she brought to the job. She was every bit as focused as one of Kolhammer's bullet-eyed warriors. But she was also every bit as emotionally removed. He'd tried to talk to her a couple of times when Julia appeared on screen, but she'd cut him off.

"Shut up for now, Dan. Talk later."

When the squad burst from the LAV and onto the boulevard Dan flinched, and his gut went tight. He clearly saw Colonel Maloney lose half his face. His heart hammered faster than it had at any time during the fight to Midway. He felt wretched, impotent, and ashamed of himself for sitting comfortably in safety on board the Clinton while Julia charged into the Japanese line of fire. When he saw her tackle and shoot the guard, he thought he might lose control of his stomach.

Natoli, excitedly cursing under her breath, hammered the keyboard until she'd isolated a video feed from Private Bukowski in a little pull-down window on the screen.

Dan Black hardly recognized the savage, gore-soaked creature he saw in there. But he knew it was Julia.

He'd been happy with the way he had adapted to the arrival of Kolhammer's ships. He prided himself on the ease with which he'd accepted the impossible, and adjusted to the demands of these strange people. But now he found himself staring, uncomprehendingly, at the snarl of rage and bloodlust that flashed across his lover's face, and at the cold self-possession he found in the eyes of her friend, sitting in the chair next to him.

Who the hell are these people?

42

CAMP 5, CABANATUAN, 0219 HOURS, 21 JUNE 1942

"How we doing, Amanda?" asked Flight Lieutenant Harford.

Hayes's voice responded inside his helmet, cutting through the dull thud of the rotors. "Three hours of fuel, ten minutes till insertion… You boys get that? Time to get funky."

The five Navy SEALs and Major Pavel Ivanov, of the Russian Spetsnaz forces, checked their harnesses and weapons loads.

The stealthed Seahawk flew low over the jungle, well below any local radar-although the chopper was sheathed in carbon-composite tiles, which would shed primitive scanning like a bride's nightgown. But Harford was a belt-and-braces guy. He already felt dangerously exposed on this mission.

"Three minutes," said Flight Lieutenant Hayes as two gunships accelerated past them. The lead Comanche banked over and began to work a dense clump of bushland with rockets and miniguns. Secondary explosions testified to the presence of some sort of Japanese camp.

"One minute," warned Hayes, who was keeping a close eye on the combined feed of the navigation radar and SINS, the chopper's self-enclosed inertial navigation system. Not a patch on the third-generation NAVSTAR GPS system, but it would have to do.

It was cold in the back of the chopper. The SEAL team donned their helmets and night vision combat goggles. Ivanov leaned forward to peer around CPO Vincente Rogas and into the darkness. He switched from the luminescent lime green of low-light amplification to infrared. Immediately the heat leaking from the chopper's engine cowling shimmered in front of him like a curtain. He adjusted the optimum range and it fell away appreciably. A cluster of buildings, blacked out, but still bleeding cherry-pink warmth into the night, appeared to the south. Flight Lieutenant Hayes's lilting voice sounded crisply inside his helmet.

"As we are preparing to land the captain asks that you return your tray tables to the upright position, unfasten your seat belts, and jump out of the helicopter. We'd like to thank you for flying with the U.S. Navy, and hope you will choose to travel with us again in the future."

"The far fucking future," added Harford.

"Amen," said Ivanov.

As the Seahawk swooped down on the compound, a platoon of the marine fire team opened up. They had been lying concealed in the elephant grass outside the barbed wire. Twelve Japanese guards perished instantly, shredded by the concentrated volley of caseless ceramic projectiles. A couple of Hellfire missiles reached through the darkness to obliterate the single guard tower.