Final impact

D-DAY + 39. 11 JUNE 1944. 0402 HOURS.

“Holy shit!” Willet said.

“Yeah, there’s nothin’ like a good piece of hickory,” Master Chief Flemming muttered.

“Sorry, Chief?”

“Gratuitous classic reference, ma’am.”

Willet shook off a confused look and turned back to the main display, where the second of Yumashev’s two flattops had disappeared within a catastrophic series of blasts.

“Analysis, Amanda, as soon as poss’.”

“How about ‘better them than us,’ Captain?” Lieutenant Lohrey answered.

“You can do better,” Willet replied before addressing the crew of the sub’s Combat Center. “C’mon. Heads down and bums up, people. Every pixel, every pulse, every stray scrap of data. I want it all, and I want it yesterday. We’ve got to get this away on Fleetnet at the first opportunity.”

Normally hushed, the Havoc’s control room hummed with chatter as the first images of the titanic clash in the Sea of Okhotsk came in from the Big Eye drones lurking at twenty-five thousand meters above the Soviet host. Willet chewed a stick of peppermint gum and tried to take it all in.

The boat’s Combat Intelligence was way ahead of her, assigning individual data tags to all the Soviet combatants down to the smallest motorboat and numbering each of the Japanese attackers for after-action study. Within the quantum arrays, separate cha

More than two hundred kilometers away from the action, resting safely deep below the surface, the Havoc plugged into the battle via a thin tendril of nanonically engineered optical fiber. It trailed up and away from her co

At the moment they had nothing on the boards but one very old and noisy submarine, probably a Mitsubishi, sixty-four thousand meters to the southwest. It was completely oblivious to their presence.

Also u

Bejeweled with multiple micronic lenses, a drone was more like the segmented eye of an insect. Only 40 percent of its internal mass was given over to visual systems, however. Most of the weight-such as it was-came from the suite of arrays originally designed to vacuum up electronic intelligence from a twenty-first-century battlespace.

As panicky radio transmissions arced among Yumashev’s vessels, the combat air patrol, and the Soviet ground forces on Hokkaido, the Havoc’s Big Eye drones listened in, recording everything. When the antiaircraft cruiser Belgorod powered up fire control radar, the drone’s electromagnetic sensor suite went active, locking in on the Soviet ship’s arrays to generate a full-spectrum profile of the systems’ performance.

The column of Japanese Ohkas had completely broken down into dozens of constituent parts. As Willet and her officer looked on, the Soviet Pacific Fleet was reduced to a handful of destroyers and smaller boats. Time and again elongated white streaks punched into lumbering ironclad ships, always with devastating results. The Soviet fighters, prop-driven relics that looked like a straight clone of the old British Sea Hurricane, were left floundering.

The volume of the triple A fell away and-she glanced up to check the clock ru

“CI has the prelims, Captain,” Lieutenant Lohrey a

“They weren’t missiles, Amanda,” Willet corrected her. “They were men.”

“Sorry, Captain. Force of habit.”

Willet moved a little farther down the control room, where Yamamoto’s task force was moving toward the tip of Hokkaido. Their progress looked quite stately, even serene, but the grand admiral probably had pedal to the metal.

“What’s happening back at the Death Star, Chewie?”

A heavily bearded sysop pointed at a window displaying one of the Japanese carriers. Touching the tip of his finger to an icon, a small magnifying glass, he pulled in to a virtual height of 150 meters above her decks. “They’re prepping for a conventional attack, Captain. Zeros. Torpedo bombers. Nothing exciting.”

“Unless you’re on the receiving end,” Chief Flemming said.

“Captain Willet,” another sysop called out. “Long-range Nemesis scan has another airborne attack forming up out of Sapporo. No visuals, but the returns look like Nakajima One-One-Fives and-Sixes.”

“Probably going in to finish off the job,” Willet said. “Okay. Amanda, you’ve got some work to do. And I’ve got a call to make.”

D-DAY + 39. 12 JUNE 1944. 0522 HOURS.

Kolhammer ate his breakfast in front of the big screen in operations. At least a dozen officers crowded in around him to watch the Battle of Okhotsk. He finished his toasted muffin and coffee just as the second tokkotai wave arrived over the remains of the Soviet fleet.

The slower-moving Nakajimas were nowhere near as successful as their colleagues in the Okha attack had been. But it didn’t matter. The sea was already littered with burning debris and floating corpses. After the second wave broke over the survivors, only four destroyers remained afloat. It was a stu

“I suppose this is what they had pla

“Have pla

“Madness it may be,” Spruance said, “but it worked. The Russians don’t have any strategic depth in their Pacific assets. You’re looking at everything they had right there.”

He nodded at the screen.

Kolhammer brushed crumbs off his fingers. On screen six Nakajimas converged on one Soviet destroyer. He shrugged. “They did a hell of a job throwing that much together,” he said. “The Reds didn’t have a navy worth the name five years ago. They still don’t. Or not anymore, anyway. But think about what it must have cost them in men and materials just to put that task force together. We’ve got to get some recon birds over Vladivostok. I’m betting we’ll see some real changes there.”