"No," said Kolhammer. "It's a complication, a real one. But that ship's not going anywhere. It'll be taken care of in a few hours. They'll salvage some useful gear off her, but whether they have the capacity to exploit it quickly enough is another matter."

"Well, you better fucking hope they don't," said King.

Kolhammer ignored the challenge.

Something was puzzling him, though. He couldn't understand why it had taken so long for the news of Anderson's death to reach him. King and Eisenhower probably didn't think of a day's delay as being significant, but coming from a world of instantaneous communication, he did. He accepted the fact that without satellite cover, his own encrypted links were tenuous at best. But surely Pearl could have sent a cable?

"What's on your mind, Admiral?" asked Eisenhower.

"I just wonder, Admiral King, why I didn't get the news about the murders of my people from you?"

King seemed nonplussed by the question. "Well, I only just heard it myself."

As far as Kolhammer could tell, he didn't seem to be lying. "You heard nothing from Pearl at all, before now?"

King pressed his lips together, and his eyes crinkled slightly. "Admiral, I'd remind you that you were the one who insisted that no information be sent via radio or cable. Not when it has anything to do with you or your arrival. We've been communicating about your task force by written memo, delivered by safe hand courier. It's been a hell of an inconvenience, if you want to know. Your goddamn notification is probably making its way here the same way everything else concerning you people does. Very… fucking… slowly."

His point made, King stalked out of the room without further comment.

A long message from Nimitz, detailing the murders and the follow-up, did arrive at the hotel the next day. It had taken nearly two days to travel from Hawaii.

All things considered, Flight Lieutenant Caro Llewelen was happy to be in the cockpit of her F-22 with a full weapons load, no SAMs to speak of, and an agreeable dumbass cracker like "Stiffy" McClintock as her wingman.

The Raptors screamed along the coastline at Mach 2. For the moment their heading was slaved to an AWAC flight, but a touch of the stick would bring the craft back under pilot command. For now, both fliers were content to hitch a ride, while a navigational program downloaded from the Clinton's Combat Intelligence did the thinking for them.

A voice in Llewelen's ear, almost as though it was inside her head, said, "We have you ten minutes out. No threats. You have the stick."

"Acknowledged," she replied. "Stiffy. You're upstairs."

McClintock acknowledged her order, and his jet climbed away on a precipitous curve. He was normally a talker. A terrible bullshitter actually, in her experience. But he'd stayed well within mission parameters today. Llewelen hadn't heard a peep out of him. He took up a slot five thousand meters above her.

Her heart beat faster and her breathing deepened as she swept along the southern coast of New Guinea. No radar facilities painted the fighter. No air traffic controllers challenged her. The island rushed past her at twice the speed of sound. She switched on her belly-cams to capture the mission on video.

A ping in her ear and the sudden appearance of targeting data on the HUD confirmed the fact that her Terrain Following Radar had matched the mission-specific holomap copied from the Clinton's database to the topography of the coastal ranges beneath her. Eighty years might be a hell of a jump to make in human terms, but mountains don't change at all in that sort of time. The Raptor's navigational processors recognized the landscape and suggested a course for the pilot to follow. A series of blue circles appeared on her HUD, curving up and away over the shoreline and over toward the soaring spine of the island. Llewelen eased the joystick over until the small arrowhead icon representing her F-22 floated into the center of the nearest blue circle. She punched a series of buttons to lock in the new course.

Mangrove swamps, primordial jungle, river plains, and razor grass swept beneath her wings in a frenzied blur. Foothills approached at an insane velocity. She steered the Raptor into the vivid green slash of a long valley that snaked up into the sky. Photon streams poured down from multiple nodes along the belly of the jet fighter, feeding data about the terrain to her processors. The Raptor felt its way up the range like a blind man running his fingers over a face.

A chime sounded in Llewelen's ear, and her HUD lit up with targeting data. The most important was a red box hovering in virtual space a few miles in front of her. She was only vaguely aware of the world outside her cockpit. She knew that sheer mountain walls ripped by out there at twice the speed of sound, but she stayed fixated on the targeting data.

The box suddenly inflated and filled the HUD. A loud pinging filled her head and two two-hundred-kilogram land-attack penetrators dropped away from the hard points under her wings as she peeled off. Seeker heads on the missiles strobed wildly, painting the mountain with a rudimentary form of laser radar. They recognized the terrain features that had been loaded into their chips. They roared away, up and over the edge of the plateau, before spearing directly into the Nuku. The penetrators sliced through the skin of the ship and drilled down two meters into the Saruwaged Ranges before detonating.

A pair of titanic blast waves of rippled out from the mist-shrouded plateau, atomizing the Indonesian warship and every Japanese soldier working on her.

"Jeez, Stiffy," Llewelen said to her wingman, "you really don't see that sort of thing every day."

They watched the recorded footage from the Raptor's belly-cam for the third time. A Sony digital projecter threw the image up onto a screen in Roosevelt's suite at the Ambassador Hotel. After the first run-through, Kolhammer watched the others rather than the video, which had arrived as a compressed, encrypted burst from Hawaii. Like the audience in a V3D theater, they swayed from one side to the other as the Raptor weaved through the winding valley on its way to take out the Nuku.

He wondered if any of the Indonesians were alive when the missiles hit home. If so, it was a pity, but Halabi had made the right call. The target had to be hit.

At least nobody in this room would disagree with that. Marshall, Eisenhower, King, and the British ambassador Lord Halifax had all joined Roosevelt for a private briefing on the raid and the implications of the ship's discovery by Japan. Kolhammer shut off the projection as the attack ended for the third time.

A moment's silence descended before Lord Halifax spoke up.

"I wish we'd had some of those Raptor thingies last year, when Hitler was bombing us silly."

"That was very impressive, Admiral," said Roosevelt. "Destroying that ship in four hours."

"And it was a British captain who ran the show, was that right?" asked Halifax. "The PM will want to know about that."

Kolhammer nodded. "Captain Halabi is acting force commander in my absence. She did good. But if we'd had satellite cover we could have killed that target inside twenty minutes. And the Japanese have probably made off with a good haul, anyway. I'm sorry, Mr. President. It's a complication for you."

King spoke up from the couch across the room. "And for you, Kolhammer. Even if you could get back home before, you couldn't go now. Not with the Japs having grabbed Christ-only-knows-what sort of weapons off that ship."

"You don't need to explain my responsibilities to me, Admiral King," Kolhammer said pointedly. "I'm going back to Pearl to confer with my task force commanders on that very issue. And we know exactly what sort of weapons may have been salvaged-primitive ones, by our standards. The Indonesians weren't running the world's best navy."