Captain Francois mashed the palms of her hands into the balls of her eyes, trying to rub out the feeling of hot sand. She hadn't slept in twenty-six hours, and it was beginning to affect her judgment. She would need to get some time in the rack very soon. But first she had one more cut to make.

She leaned forward, her lower back aching, and scanned the list again. The screen showed a register of every patient she might-just might, mind you-be able to transfer from the fleet's shipborne hospitals to Pearl's more primitive shore-based facilities. She needed to free up another 150 beds to accommodate the critical cases they would likely pick up in Singapore and Luzon.

She just didn't see how she could do it without killing at least seventy or eighty patients.

"What a fucked-up way to earn a dollar," she grumbled.

Perhaps the burn case off the Astoria? They're used to dealing with burns here. Perhaps he could go ashore.

She reached out to click the mouse and consign the man to dark ages medicine.

"No," she sighed, stopping herself. "He'd die for sure."

She spat a quiet curse at the ceiling of her office and went back to the start of the list.

At her elbow lay another file, one she pored over compulsively when she wasn't working on the patient lists. It was the results of her postmortem examination of Anderson and Miyazaki. It included the DNA profiles of the men who'd raped the Leyte Gulf's captain. She felt sick every time she read it. But she was convinced that if Anderson and Miyazaki were to have justice, it would come from their own people. Not from someone like "Buster" Cherry.

There was something else about the case that she hadn't discussed with anyone. It brought back memories. Not just of the war crimes she'd worked for the UN in Srebrenica and Denpasar, but also of her own rape, at the age of seventeen.

Margie Francois had been a premed college freshman when a bunch of drunken jocks had jumped her as she walked back to her dorm from the library, late at night. She'd never told anyone about it. There were times when she still felt ashamed.

Kolhammer stood in the bridge of the Clinton, watching the activity down on her flight deck. Hundreds of men and women toiled around the clock to prepare her for war. The feeling recalled the days before the Transition, when they were still preparing to deploy into the Indonesian Archipelago.

He was still getting by on only four or five hours' sleep. There was so much to do. The Multinational Force was battered and much reduced, but it was still the most powerful fleet of ships on the face of the earth at this time. He had the Kandahar and the two ships of her MEU intact. The torpedo strike on the marine flattop had been patched up well enough to put her back to sea. The Kennebunkport and the Providence had come through relatively unscathed. HMS Trident lay at anchor just abaft of them, and the Siranui beyond her. She was now crewed by Japanese and American sailors, the latter mostly coming from the Leyte Gulf. Those Japanese who did not feel they could fight against their forebears, about 80 percent of the crew, would await her return on shore.

He couldn't see the submarine Havoc. She was prowling the approaches to Midway.

The Australian troop carrier Moreton Bay had been patched up and quickly fitted out as a hospital ship. The four hundred members of the Second Cavalry Regiment who had been on their way to Timor in her were now squeezed into the monohulled assault ship HMAS Ipswich with their armour.

And of course, there was the Clinton.

Only one of her catapults had been repaired. She had but four jet fighters in one piece. Nearly three-quarters of her combat power was gone, wiped out at Midway, and her corridors were much less crowded. They'd buried so many of her complement at sea.

But like her murdered namesake, the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States, she was a hard-charging, life-taking bitch who'd crush anyone or anything that got in her way.

He trained his binoculars on the old Enterprise. She was as much a scene of activity as the Clinton. He wasn't sure that he agreed with Nimitz's decision that she accompany them, but he didn't feel he could argue against it. If nothing else it gave them more carrying capacity, and they'd need it. They were looking to bring home nearly twenty thousand prisoners.

"Penny for your thoughts, sir?" asked Commander Judge.

Kolhammer lowered the glasses.

"I just hope we can pull it off, Mike," he said. "We're doing the right thing. I'm sure of that. But there's any number of things that can go wrong."

"That's right," said Judge. "Can and probably will, when the shooting starts. But it's like you said, Admiral. It's the right thing."

Dan Black came awake to the smell of freshly brewed coffee. For one terrible instant he thought Ray Spruance was about to subject him to another mug of his terrible java. Then his head cleared and he remembered he was in bed at the Moana, not in his bunk on the Enterprise. The room was still, but a figure was coming toward him.

"Here, get this into you, Daniel. We've got to get back to Pearl in an hour."

Julia pushed the coffee toward him before opening the curtains. The reporter was already dressed in the jeans and hiking boots she seemed to prefer. He had been hoping for a little roll before heading off, but she was all business.

"I don't understand," he said. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, Dan, but we're both shipping out today, and my call is a little earlier than yours. I figured you'd want a brew to wake up."

"There are better ways to wake up, darling."

She ruffled his hair affectionately, but without a hint of sexual playfulness.

"There are," she agreed, "but we've got to get to work."

His heart tripped over in his chest.

"You're going to work? You got your job back in New York? I was hoping we'd be able to see more of each other."

Julia was halfway through a big mouthful of coffee, which Dan's slightly panicky outburst forced her to cut short.

"Just be cool," she gulped. "I'm not going to New York yet. They still haven't let us contact our offices, those of us who actually have them. No, I'm going out with the Clinton."

Dan fumbled in the dark to set his cup down on the bedside table. His eyes were adjusting to the dark, and he could see the defiant set to her arms.

"You're going into combat?"

"I have no idea where we're going. They'll tell us just before we need to know. But Kolhammer decided he wants us there. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, I guess."

"But-"

Julia made a chopping gesture.

"Let's not do this scene, okay, the one where you tell me it's no place for a woman, I could get hurt, you're only trying to protect me."

"But all those things are true."

"They're not. Not all of them."

"But-"

"No. Dan, I've seen more combat than you. End of story. I'm touched that you feel strongly enough to be an asshole about it, but if you and I are to have any sort of future, you'll have to accept that it's me you're with. Not your idea of me, and what I should be. I don't know what's coming, but I know my job. Ninety minutes from now I clock on again, so drink up. We'll split a ride back to Pearl. They're sending a couple of Humvees. They'll be downstairs in half an hour."

Dan Black was in free fall. He had never been spoken to like that, had never even heard of a woman speaking like that. Julia stood there in the dawn an intruder, raking at the secret places in his heart.

"Will you marry me?" he asked.

She didn't even give him the benefit of a slight hesitation.

"No, Dan, not yet anyway. I'd like us to live together for a while first. See how we go with the daily grind when we don't have all this bullshit to keep us entertained. If we're still fucking like rabbits at the end of that, ask me again."