Weapons of choice

Three windows opened up on screen. Each carried low-light-amplified footage from various angles showing an old propeller-driven monoplane nosing down a few thousand feet over the Clinton's flight deck. The acid level in Kolhammer's stomach rose painfully, leaving a sour taste at the back of his throat. He understood Brooks's reluctance to make a call on the attacker's ID. But he recognized it immediately.

As a twelve-year-old boy he'd built a plastic model of a Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber. It had taken young Phillip Kolhammer three months to save the money needed to buy that kit. It took him weeks of work, getting every detail right, the flush-riveted stretched-skin wing covering; the Wright R-1820-52 nine-cylinder radial air-cooled engine; the painting inside the cutaway aluminum alloy fuel tanks. Two center-section seventy-five-gallon tanks, as he recalled, and another two fifty-five-gallon outer wing tanks. He'd done such a good job on it, taken such serious, professional care, that his father, a career coastguardsman, bought him another model kit as a reward.

He sat, staring at the screen as the vision looped back on itself. A Douglas Dauntless SBD dive-bomber.

"Admiral?" Commander Judge laid a hand on his shoulder, just lightly. "Admiral. Captain Halabi's on laser link. I think you'd better take the call. They've been running analysis a few minutes longer than us."

"Thanks, Mike," he croaked, dragging his eyes away from the replay. Outside, the battle continued. As he turned to Karen Halabi's attractive face, which occupied almost all of a single monitor on his left, three violent blooms of light and fire marked the destruction of a volley of incoming shells just a few hundred meters from the carrier's bow. A shower of hot shrapnel pattered onto the flight deck, but it didn't matter. All human life had ended out there a few minutes earlier.

"Captain. Please report."

"Thank you, Admiral." The British officer looked unhappy. "They're Americans, Admiral. We've been killing American sailors. And they've been trying to kill us."

"How?" he asked, finding himself increasingly exasperated, but not disbelieving her. The plane in the looped video. He couldn't shake the image.

"I don't know how. I really have no idea. But we've had six minutes more than you to get over the neural effect-" Kolhammer noted that she didn't call it an attack. "-We shared data with the Havoc, and we can't get past the fact. They're American. Old Americans."

"What do you mean, Captain?"

Captain Halabi wasn't known for her delicacy. She didn't soften the blow now.

"We've positively identified eight major combatants, cross-matched drone footage with archival data, and cataloged enough signals intelligence to confirm the theory. We're firing on Task Forces Sixteen and Seventeen, out of Pearl Harbor, bound for Midway Atoll, originally under the command of Admiral Frank Fletcher, now led by Admiral Ray Spruance. Fletcher was on the USS Yorktown. It's been destroyed."

Halabi was neither belligerent nor challenging. She could have been war-gaming at Staff College for all the emotion she invested in her delivery. Kolhammer couldn't help but sneak a quick peek at the cam coverage of the dive-bomber again.

"Any proof?" he said.

It was as if she had been waiting for the question. The screen carrying her face split into four windows. She occupied the top right corner. The other three cycled through a selection of images, real-time video of World War II-vintage cruisers, destroyers, and aircraft carriers, churning up a maelstrom of foam at their sterns as they maneuvered frantically-and all too frequently in vain-while attempting to outrun a supercavitating torpedo or combat mace. Kolhammer's nausea returned as he watched a destroyer die inside a small cyclone of ballistic munitions. The image rewound and the ship reintegrated itself as torrents of white fire were sucked back into the decks and superstructure. The vision froze, and the other two windows cycled through a series of still photographs of the same vessel.

The pictures, culled from files across Fleetnet, had been taken on a number of different occasions, more than eighty years earlier.

As Kolhammer sat quietly, Halabi repeated the performance with four other ships. Three destroyers and one cruiser. There was no doubt. They were sinking these very ships. But how? No, that question would have to wait.

"We have extensive intercepts," said Halabi. "Ship-to-ship. Aircraft in-flight. Internal communications."

"Okay," said Kolhammer. "Make it quick."