Designated targets

Willet caught him looking once as he wiped at the sweat from his own neck.

"The suits are thermopliable, Lieutenant. They're much more comfortable than you or I at the moment."

Ke

"This is a real-time feed from a Big Eye drone we've got shadowing this Japanese convoy," Lohrey explained. "It's sitting way above the ceiling of any air cover, but as you can see, there's none to speak of anyway."

The two torpedo boat officers had been briefed on the capabilities of the Multinational Force, and when he'd joined the ship's complement, Leading Seaman Molloy had kept everyone entranced for days with stories about the Leyte Gulf and the Astoria. But to experience the future firsthand, that was something else altogether.

The slate taking the feed from the surveillance craft-Lohrey called it a drone-was full of movies, obviously shot from somewhere above the Japs. One large frame, showing all five ships, dominated the screen. Surrounding it, five smaller "windows" carried live images of each individual ship. Lohrey played with another device, a flexipad, and the images danced around, the focus zooming in until it was like they were floating just above the deck of one of the ships. Ke

"These are good kills, gentlemen," said Willet. "But not good enough to justify burning up a couple of my combat maces. We can lead you guys right onto them, though. You can hit them tonight. There wouldn't be much moonlight anyway, but our weather radar says the cloud cover is going to be thickening up, too. You up for it?"

"Hell, yeah!" said George Ross.

Ke

"I'll be staying," said Lohrey. "And I've brought some night-vision gear in the launch. We've got holomaps of this whole coast, and we've already planted beacons to take a solid position fix, so the lack of GPS won't be an issue."

The Americans stared at her with blank incomprehension.

"Trust me," she said. "It'll be cool."

SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA COMMAND,

Hundreds of kilometers away, Lieutenant Commander Rachel Nguyen sat in a small, fourth-floor office of a colonial-era sandstone building, the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area Command. There was no air-conditioning, and her workstation pumped out enough heat to make the room extremely uncomfortable, even with the windows thrown open and a couple of old wooden fans spi

She was oblivious to it all, though, her attention focused only on the three Bang amp; Olufsen flatscreens arrayed across the huge desk at which she sat. Two officers from MacArthur's Intelligence Division sat in with her, an American major and an army captain from New Zealand. They were both 'temps, and although they outranked her, they deferred to her technical expertise, which meant that neither of them was comfortable using a wireless mouse. Or any kind of mouse, for that matter.

The screens ran video coverage and data dumps received from 21C assets positioned all over the local theater-vision recorded by a marine recon squad probing the Japanese garrison at Mackay, transcripts of signal intercepts sucked up by the AWACS birds, drone coverage of the frontline battles north of the city, even media packages from embedded journalists like Julia Duffy. Rachel hadn't spoken to the reporter since they'd briefly worked together on the Clinton after the Transition, but she followed Julia's stories whenever she could, and had privately cheered her on as she elbowed her way into the front rank of local war correspondents. She was as big a name as Ernie Pyle now. Somewhere behind the dozens of open windows, Julia's footage of the 'temp marine sergeant who'd turned the ambush earlier that day was ru

Instead, all three officers were concentrating on a data burst from the Havoc. The submarine was patrolling just south of the Whitsunday passage, blocking all attempts by the Japanese to land reinforcements closer to Homma. The small convoy of troopships and destroyers was cautiously beating south in a large window on the central flatscreen.

Rachel pulled in close on the largest of the transports, a captured tourist liner by the look of her. "It still doesn't seem right to me," she said. "There's something, I du

Major Bre

Captain Taylor, the Kiwi, leaned forward to squint at the screen. "I would have said it was a diversion. Like the Aleutians were supposed to be for Midway. But they've been here for weeks, and nothing else has happened. They're just ru

Rachel still wasn't satisfied. She pulled the keyboard over and typed quickly for a few seconds. "I'm going to ask for a tighter frame on the big troop transport," she said. Her request flickered along fiber-optic cables scavenged from her old ship, the Moreton Bay, up to a dish on the roof of the building, which pulsed the signal into the ether. It was picked up by an AWACS flight, which relayed it to a communications drone. From there it traveled to the Havoc.

A few seconds later, a new control panel opened up, and Nguyen tapped out another set of commands. A Big Eye surveillance drone, keeping station at seventy thousand feet above the Whitsunday passage, began its descent to ten thousand feet. Even at that height, it remained invisible to the ships below. Tiny motors whirred, lenses refocused, and new data streamed back via the relay links to Brisbane.

Nguyen pulled in tight on the deck of the ship, where hundreds of men performed an exercise routine. But despite the activity, they appeared listless. "Not exactly ripping it up, are they?" she said.

"It's probably hot," offered Bre

"What about these guys?" Nguyen asked, pointing at four clusters of Japanese soldiers who weren't doing anything. They just seemed to be watching over the other men.