The room seemed to become hotter, and closer. Brasch tried not to let his hopes get the better of him. "I'm afraid I don't understand. Am I to be transferred? My work here-"

Himmler held up one, thin, pallid hand to cut him off. "Your work here is done. Stalin is convinced that our cooperation is sincere, at least in the short term. And your efforts here have played a large part in that. He knows there must come a final settlement between us, and we know he is frantically building his forces in the Far East, where he thinks himself beyond our gaze. It doesn't matter. When we have dealt with the immediate threat of the Allies, we shall turn on him with weapons he has never dreamed of. The trinkets we let him play with here will not save him, nor will those fleets of antique tanks he is building."

"I understand that, Herr Reichsfuhrer. My mission briefing was quite specific. But what now?"

"Now," said Himmler, leaning forward. "You are going home. These idiots will think you have been transferred in disgrace, after today's failure. But you have proved yourself adept at working under extreme pressure, and there are projects that require your attention back in the civilized world.

"We are going to take the British Isles, Colonel Brasch. And you are going to help us."

It was as if they were counting her shots. Captain Jane Willet knew Yamamoto was lurking off to the north of New Guinea, well beyond the range of her Nemesis arrays. The Havoc had been out on point duty, hundreds of miles ahead of Admiral Spruance's diminished Task Force for nearly six weeks now. No Japanese ships had made it past them. Spruance may have had just the Enterprise and USS Wasp to call on for carrier-borne strike missions, but with the submarine's advanced sensor suites and battle management systems to act as a force multiplier, he could deploy his precious aircraft to devastating effect. Yamamoto, meanwhile, could not move directly against him, for fear of losing his capital ships to the Havoc.

The Japanese grand admiral seemed to be waiting her out. Sending a long line of tempting targets her way, hoping she would run down her stocks of torpedoes and cruise missiles. Willet assumed he knew what she was packing. Some of the basic specs for the Havoc were available online, and the Indonesian tubs had been linked into Fleetnet. God only knew how many pages they had cached before the Transition, but it would be prudent to assume that the Japanese were somewhere with an abacus, or a flexipad, ticking off every kill she made.

"Five contacts, Captain," reported her intel chief, Lieutenant Lohrey. "Good returns from the drone. We can have visual in ten if you want me to reposition."

The commander of HMAS Havoc leaned over her shipmate's shoulder to check out the data for herself. "You make them out to be transports, Amanda?"

"At least three, with a couple of destroyers for escort. No air screen, again."

Willet chewed her lower lip, but in the end the decision was easy. "Well, I'm not wasting any taxpayers' money on this. Especially as the taxpayers haven't even been born yet. Squirt a position fix to Spruance, see if they can vector a couple of those American subs on them."

Lohrey turned in her chair. "Begging your pardon, Captain, but the 'temps still haven't completed the changeover of their torpedoes. If they're packing Type Fourteens, they might as well shoot spitballs at 'em."

Willet nodded ruefully. The sub-launched torpedoes carried by American boats from this time had major problems with their running depth and warheads. Depression-era budgets hadn't allowed for proper testing, and the training shots ran with significantly lighter dummy warheads. This meant that in a real shoot-out, the torpedoes tended to "sink" a little, and could actually run right under the keel of their targets. The magnetic exploders that might have compensated for this didn't work properly, because they were designed to function in far northern latitudes, and they went a little haywire south of the equator.

Even if, by some chance, the captain got lucky and actually hit his target, the contact detonator often failed because they'd been designed for an earlier, slower type of fish. The 'temps' Mark 14 hit with enough speed that the firing pin often missed the exploder cap altogether. It was logical to assume that once this had been pointed out, it would have been attended to with all dispatch. But no, she'd just read an e-mail that morning from Kolhammer complaining that the civilian manufacturer, NTS Newport and the responsible navy office, ComSubSWPac, were still resisting a total refit.

"You're right," sighed Willet. "They could shoot their whole wad and still not hit anything."

"What about these guys here?" She tapped the screen with a light pen, instantly drawing a box around two blue contacts floating within a sheltered cove on the mainland, less than a hundred klicks to her east and 250 south of the advancing Japanese reinforcements. Lieutenant Lohrey worked her station quickly; a window opened and began scrolling text.

"That's a couple of PT boats, ma'am. Fifty-nine and One-oh-one. They're tasked for harassment and interdiction of Japanese supply barges coming down through the Whitsundays. If they're carrying the old Mark Thirteen's, they'd have a better chance than the subs."

Willet stood back from the screen and thought it over. She couldn't risk a radio transmission, and the PT boats didn't have the equipment to receive a compressed data burst. But she didn't want to use up any more of her precious store of weapons taking out a troop ship. She had worthier targets.

"Okay," she concluded. "Let's make some new friends. Helm, I want a fast run across to those torpedo boats. I'll talk to the skippers myself. Leave the drones up; we'll grab the take from them on the way."

She ordered the comms boss to send a compressed encrypted burst back to Spruance, explaining why they were moving off station.

Turning back to the flatscreen, she tapped her pursed lips with the light pen.

"The One-oh-one?" she said softly. "Do you think he's still driving it, Amanda?"

The intel boss shrugged. "Could be, Skipper. Who can tell, nowadays?"

Riding at anchor, the pair of contemporary American torpedo boats were invisible from the main shipping channels, and nestled in under a thick, tropical mangrove canopy, they had reasonably good topside cover as well. His men thought it would have been nice if they'd had a beach to relax on, and maybe some sweet-lookin' dolls to while away the long, hot afternoons, but you couldn't have everything.

Unless you were on one of those superships, of course. They came with their own dolls, and chilled air, and movies like you wouldn't believe. Word was they had comfier bunks than the swishiest hotels.

Lieutenant John F. Kennedy had stayed in a few swish joints before he'd signed up for the navy, but he hadn't had the pleasure of a visit to the Clinton or the Kandahar, or even the British or Aussie ships, which were rumored to have heads where the toilet water swirled down the opposite way. At least that's what Leading Seaman Molloy said, and he'd been on the Astoria at Midway, so he was the closest they had to an expert on all things related to the time travelers.

Kennedy mopped the sweat from his forehead and neck with an old gray cloth and tried to tune out the drone of the crew's voices. It was only late spring in this part of the world, but the days were already oppressively hot under the canvas shade they'd rigged up. He was working through an attack plan with Lieutenant George "Barney" Ross, and although he could appreciate the crew's endless conversation about the sexual practices of women in the twenty-first century U.S. Navy, it was becoming distracting.