Weapons of choice

At least the Promatil dump had cleared his seasickness, or whatever the hell it was. Harford was something of a connoisseur when it came to seasickness, never having found his sea legs. It was kind of strange, considering he'd never once suffered from airsickness. But without fail he spent the first half hour of any foray beyond sheltered waters rolled into a ball of misery in his bunk, waiting for a dermal patch to kick in. It was a source of unending frustration to Harford that most people just assumed sailors and marines were immune to seasickness. His misery was, of course, a source of unending mirth to his shipmates.

There wasn't much chatter as they ate up the distance. Everybody seemed caught in a weird headspace, not so much frightened as unbalanced by the morning's events.

"Nintendo piece of shit!" cursed his SO, Flight Lieutenant Hayes, as she gave the dead GPS unit another swat. Chris sometimes suspected that, despite five years in service as a systems operator, Amanda still thought that any piece of equipment could be fixed with a solid whack upside the head, like an old TV set.

He brought the big gray helicopter to a hover above the rough center of the debris field. Amanda peered down into the flotsam that was dispersing under the fantastic downblast from the Seahawk. Scraps of cloth floated everywhere. Body parts. Broken, smashed-up pieces of wood floating on an oil slick that was burning, here and there, degrading their infrared NVS. Amanda thumbed her ear bud to open a channel to the crewman in back of the chopper. "Tobes, you see anything worth bagging?"

Airman Toby La Salle came back at her, all growling South Bronx, but quantum smooth, as though he were right there in her ear. "Not much, Lieutenant. Burning oil's messing with my vision. Somebody knew what they doing really opened a big can of whupp-ass down there… wait, hang on, think I see a coupla dudes. Two o'clock, two hundred out. Swimming away from us, so they're in one piece… prob'ly."

Harford tilted the stick a fraction and sent them roaring toward the survivors.

"Dudes're swimming faster!" La Salle cried out. "Like they're trying to get away from us."

"Maybe they think we're gonna be mad at 'em," said Hayes. "Think we flew all the way over here to finish the job."

Harford cut in over the top of them. "Drop the line." He held the Seahawk directly over the men, who were desperately thrashing away in the rotor wash. La Salle winched down a padded rescue collar, which flapped around madly, but the men only whirled their arms faster.

"Time for a swim, Tobes," said Hayes. She heard La Salle's "Gotcha" in her ear bud. Harford eased the chopper away from their reluctant targets while La Salle, who was wearing a thin spring wet suit, wrestled into a pair of flippers and goggles. A few seconds later, he jumped.

La Salle covered the short distance to the first sailor in less than a minute, carving through a mat of wreckage as he went. The sailor, a much smaller man and a comparatively poor swimmer, had no chance of escaping. But he tried. As La Salle pulled level with him the man turned about, hooking burned fingers into claws and swiping at the rescue jumper's face while letting go a series of terrified, guttural cries.

Both men bobbed on the chaotic swell and cross-chop, flattened some by the rotor wash, but not completely. Stinging spray lashed their faces and made it very difficult to breathe. La Salle had a little trouble keeping his head above water and the burned sailor went under a few times, vomiting as he resurfaced. La Salle finally abandoned the soft approach, wrestled him into the harness, and signaled for a winch-up. He rode with him for a moment, then dropped straight back down to search for the second survivor.

But it was too late. The sailor's companion was floating facedown, dead in the water.

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 0029 HOURS, 3 JUNE 1942

The Clinton's Media Center was a mess, in a very civilian way. Jackets lay over computer screens. Food sat atop flexipads. Discarded coffee cups had multiplied like rabbits. And most days, there was more hubbub than Lieutenant Thieu could bear.

For once, however, it was quiet. As a group the reporters were older, fatter, whiter, and infinitely more prone to whining and mischief than the military personnel on whom they reported. None of them had mil-grade spinal inserts, and the illness that had come with the wormhole transition hit them hard. Most were still unconscious, laid out on canvas cots hastily set up in the corner of the center, where a single orderly watched over them. Most, but not all.

Lieutenant Edgar "The Egg" Thieu, the Clinton's media supervisor, tried putting on his best stone face for the only two journalists who remained awake. But stone faces only work on those who have something to fear from the person behind them, and neither Julia Duffy nor Rosanna Natoli had any reason to fear the worst that The Egg might dish up.