"Captain Thomas Shapcott, ma'am," he said. "United States Marine Corps."

Dan Black couldn't believe what he was seeing.

He was standing at the counter in the carrier's main armory as his girlfriend-Julia let him call her that now-pulled on an outfit that made her look like some kind of character from a Johnny Weissmuller matinee.

"Got your paperwork all filled out, Ms. Duffy?" the chief asked.

"What the hell do you need that for," Black snapped. "You don't even have a job here."

He was tired and irritable. They'd already fought twice over this. Julia gave him a stare that said he was pushing his luck.

"If I get waxed," she said through thin, pressed lips, "I've signed a waiver giving them the right to harvest my organs for immediate transplant. If I get shot in the brain and go into a vegetative state, I've signed another waiver allowing them to take me off life support, and then to harvest my organs. If I just get stitched up and lose a kidney, or an eyeball, or a bit of my spinal cord, they need my certificates to access the stem cell deposit I made when I came on board at Darwin. They can force-breed me some new organs. So you see, Commander Black, the man needs my codes."

She gave CPO Toohey a small gray plastic rectangle. He waved it under a computing machine Black didn't recognize. It must have read the information on the stick somehow, because the screen lit up.

"Whoa! We got us a celebrity!" The chief grinned. He was a tattooed old sea dog who would have fit right in on the Enterprise. "This is a premium piece of tail you got yourself, buddy. Authorized for deployment with main force infantry units. Rated to cover close-quarter combat. And cleared for tactical briefings up to and including the Classified Level Oh Three."

"Thank you, Chief," Duffy cooed, smiling broadly. "Your check's in the mail."

That just irritated Black all the more. Julia had been on his back about the way he spoke to the women in the Multinational Force, even though he was a goddamn paragon compared with most of the other guys. And here was this lughead talking about her like she was some kind of bar girl, right in front of her, and she fucking joked right back at him!

But he kept his mouth shut, because he didn't trust his boiling temper.

The armory was a hive of activity. He had no idea what units most of the men and women who were checking out weapons and armor belonged to. Why they even had an armory like this on a carrier was a mystery to him. But even if they had a legitimate reason to tool up, he didn't see that a lady reporter had any call to be down here. No matter how tough she liked to think she was.

As Black fumed, the long lines of troopers moved through. An amazing array of guns and equipment came over the counter. The chief ran his eyes down the text on the screen, nodding and grunting as if he'd found a great buy on a used car.

"Hey, you embedded with the Hundred and First for South Yemen," he said to Julia, during a brief lull. "My brother was in that. Jeez, what a fucking circus that was."

"Got shot in the ass by one of the clowns," said Duffy.

She was doing this on purpose now. Black was certain. And Chief Toohey seemed to be playing along.

"Okay, Ms. Duffy. You taking body armor?"

She nodded. "Brought my own on board, back in Darwin. You should have it in there somewhere. Serial number's on the data stick. It's a Brooks Brothers, T-nine carbon-titanium weave, size ten."

"I woulda said size eight."

"You're too kind, Chief."

Dan rolled his eyes.

He noticed that one of Julia's fellow reporters had fronted the counter a few spots down. He seemed to want nothing more than a flak jacket and helmet.

"You gonna take a personal weapon, Ms. Duffy?"

"Do bears shit in the woods?"

"I've heard rumors to that effect. Okay, I can let you have a cut-down AR-15, but not the grenade launcher."

"How about a G-4?"

"Sorry, ma'am. You're not rated for that."

Julia chewed her lip. Dan was ready to explode. This was nuts, the whole thing, her going in with the marines, the body armor, the guns. What sort of a reporter was she?

An unemployed one, for starters.

"You got an MP-5 back there, Chief Toohey? They don't get in the way when I'm working. But they do have a knack for bringing unpleasant encounters to a quick end."

"Indeed they do, ma'am."

Toohey tapped a flexipad with his pen. It beeped once.

"How many mags you lookin' at, Ms. Duffy?"

"Four, thanks. Taped in pairs. If I need any more, we're all in trouble. Dumdums would be super, if you got 'em."

The flexipad beeped as he tapped it again.

"Sidearm?"

"Mac 10."

Beep.

"Knife?"

"Got my own. But I could use an empty helmet. I'm gonna load up with a Panasonic Twenty-three Hundred minicam rig. It snaps right in where one of your tac sets would go."

Beep.

"Okay, then, just gimme a second I'll grab your gear."

Toohey disappeared into the storeroom.

"Go on, Dan. I can see you're going to blow steam out of your ears if you don't say something."

Black controlled his temper with great difficulty.

"I don't see the point, is all," he said, his jaw tight.

Julia shrugged. "You wouldn't. It's my job."

"You don't have a job. You keep saying that yourself, about a thousand goddamn times a day."

"That's right," she said, pushing off the scarred counter with a cold fury suddenly lighting her eyes. "I don't have a goddamn job. I have nothing here. Nothing! Except that I know how to move around a firefight without getting my ass blown away."

People started looking their way.

"I got no fucking job. No fucking life. I'm stuck in the wrong fucking century and my fucking Prozac has run out. I am far from fucking happy."

"I don't know why Kolhammer even agreed to let you go," Black countered angrily as his exasperation finally got the better of him.

Duffy snorted.

"Because he knows he's going to need a positive spin on this whole fucking disaster."

Kolhammer, like Halabi, had corralled his guests into the now obsolete satellite warfare section of his CIC. Spruance, Halsey, and a couple of other 'temps he didn't recognize had sat themselves down and were taking in the feverish pace of the center while Lieutenant Thieu tried to explain how it all fit together.

They didn't care that the Clinton didn't have live satellite links to the Singapore task force or the submarine standing off Hashirajima. To them, coordinated strategic strikes hitting three locations at once, and feeding back battlefield images within an hour or two, was the stuff of magic. Every movie screen in the huge, chilly cavern of the Combat Information Center held something of interest, so that they didn't know where to focus. Tanks plowing through lines of Japanese field guns on Singapore. Storm troopers in bulky "armor" dropping out of helicopters. Jet planes roaring off the one working catapult on the Clinton. Armored hovercraft on fat-bellied rubber skirts pounding through the waves toward Luzon. Marine Corps "jump jets" settling down vertically on the deck of the Kandahar. Missiles diving into Yamamoto's anchorage at Hashirajima.

Even the fact that most of the Combined Fleet had disappeared didn't seem to bother them.

As impressive as it all was, Kolhammer knew this was lulling them into a false sense of security. It was awesome, true, but it had its limits. He was running through land-attack missiles at a ruinous rate as they degraded the Japs' ability to resist on Luzon. He envied Halabi her mission to Singapore. Sure, it was a tight trip through some very sharky waters, but she had all of her targets grouped. He had to fire on half a dozen sites over five hundred square kilometers, and even then, without good intel, he could never be sure he'd covered all the bases.