Death Cab for Cutie’s “Crooked Teeth” poured from the speakers in Kolhammer’s cabin. The admiral swirled the ice-filled glass of Coke, sipped, and stared at the flexipad on his desk as the Cuties sang about making a horrible call.

There was nothing he could do. Willet had her orders and she would obey them without question, regardless of her own personal misgivings. He looked at his watch. She was probably launching her first salvo right now.

He leaned over and picked up the flexipad. A small icon, an open envelope, marked the e-mail message from Yamamoto.

Another icon designated Ivanov’s file. His eyes flicked over at the door to his room like the tip of a rawhide whip. There was one chance that he might yet influence events. He and Willet had talked their way around it after the audio hookup with Washington, convincing Spruance that the Havoc should only take down those ships that provided a clear and immediate threat to Allied vessels.

It left one possibility open.

He didn’t stop to consider the consequences.

Opening Ivanov’s message, he quickly excised the location of the Siberian Sharashka and copied in a few details about the facility’s purpose.

He checked the SEND and HARD-DELETE boxes at the top of the message. The pad linked to the Clinton’s Nemesis arrays and pulsed outward. Microseconds later a software agent cannibalized that portion of the pad’s lattice memory that held any trace of the e-mail. Then it ate itself as the music played on, assuring him that there had been nothing there all along.

Kolhammer turned off the pad, finished the Coke, and stood up. It was time to get back to the bridge.

The Woomera-class submarine slipped through the warm bath of the Pacific like an assassin’s blade. It never came closer than sixty meters to the surface, but a thin cable trailed from a recessed slot at the rear of its conning tower and ran all the way up to the surface, where it maintained a constant link to a Big Eye drone that was maintaining its position above the center of the Japanese fleet.

“Target lock verified, Captain.”

“Thank you, weapons,” Willet said, never taking her eyes off the screen in which the Japanese ships steamed south. “You may fire.”

The sub’s offensive sysop ran her fingers down a line of icons. A hundred and twenty meters forward of the Combat Center, eight torpedo tube doors slid open and an impossibly complicated waltz began, with the Havoc’s Combat Intelligence tracking its prey via the link to the drone, then passing the position fix data down to the seeker heads in the retrofitted torpedoes.

One after another they launched, leaping from the tubes and accelerating away. They were driven by hydrazine monopropellent rocket engines, and trailed guidance wires back to their mother ship.

Standing behind her chief weapons officer, Willet watched with unspoken misgivings as the flashing blue triangles crawled across the flatscreen toward software-generated representations of their intended victims.

The sysop and the Combat Intelligence controlled the Mark 48s until they reached three thousand meters-the limit of their guidance wires. Well before then, however, passive/active seeker heads had acquired the acoustic profiles of four ships. Yamato, Musashi, and the fleet carriers Shinano and Hiyo. Since it had no offensive capability left, she had decided to ignore for now the converted kamikaze carrier, the Nagano. Willet had a limited number of torpedoes and agreed with Admiral Kolhammer that they should be reserved for the functioning carriers and gun platforms.

Her boat chief Roy Flemming appeared at her side. “I hope this turns out to be for the best, Chief,” she said.

Flemming gently clamped one of his meaty paws on her shoulder-he was the only person on the boat she would allow to take such a liberty. They had served together for a long time, and he was as much a favorite uncle as anything else.

“Don’t worry yourself overly, skipper. Remember what these bastards did at home, and in Hawaii. Some people are just in desperate need of being killed.”

The blue triangles separated from the thin black lines representing their guidance wires.

“Seekers active. Targets still locked, Captain.”

“Thank you, weapons…” She caught Flemming glancing at her apprehensively. “I know Chief, I know. I’ve got no sympathy for them. Kill ’em all, I say. Still, I just wonder if we’re gonna be back up here in a few years’ time, facing off with the People’s Democratic Republic of Nippon because of this.”

“If that’s the case, we’ll just have to kick their arse, won’t we.”

“CI indicates one minute till impact.”

He hadn’t really thought much would come of it. It had been a moment’s foolishness. Madness really. He couldn’t expect the enemy to treat with him after the savageries of the last four years. Even Admiral Kolhammer, an outsider, and a man he had studied-as far as it was possible-in the finest detail. Even he could not be expected to step outside of the rigid demands of military command, to act independently. Not for something as fundamental as this.

Yet Grand Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto kept dipping his good hand into the pocket where he kept his personal flexipad, furtively checking to see if he had received a reply. He hadn’t cleared the contact with the general staff. Had not mentioned it to anyone beyond the Emperor, in fact. He had reached out to Kolhammer, unofficially, man-to-man, in the desperate hope that he might be able to avert the cataclysm he was certain was now inevitable.

He had no way of knowing whether or not the message had even gone through.

He leaned forward now and placed both hands on the edge of the map table in the Yamato’s operations room, surveying the abysmal situation. The Americans were estimated to be close to launching their strike on the Marianas. He had no idea what the Soviets were going to do about Hokkaido. He didn’t even know if they had committed all their naval forces to the failed mission. The army was in general retreat throughout the Dutch East Indies, or had been bypassed completely by MacArthur’s land forces.

The operations staff moved quietly around him, nobody daring to speak. Would they now head south to the Marianas, to face certain defeat against Spruance and Kolhammer? Or did they need to remain here, ghosting about the Home Islands, as insurance against another Soviet thrust? And what possible help would they be when Stalin sent planes with nuclear bombs, to avenge his humiliation in Okhotsk?

His mind was a blur as he tried to keep all of these questions suspended in his imagination, hoping that some brilliant stratagem, some unforeseen correlation of events and actions might suggest itself to him.

His flexipad buzzed and he almost dropped it as he tried to haul the device out of his pocket with his crippled, shaking hand.

It was Kolhammer.

It had to be.

Yamamoto stared at the screen where a message was indeed waiting for him. But it made no sense. The message title read: SOVIET A-BOMB FACILITY.

Before he could open the file two gigantic explosions rang throughout the body of the Japanese flagship. Yamamoto was flung into the low metal ceiling, breaking his shoulder and cracking a cheekbone, and he slammed back down and smashed his face on the edge of the map table.