"Admiral Yamamoto."

It was Hidaka.

"Who is this?" Yamamoto demanded.

"Lieutenant Commander Jisaku Hidaka, of the Ryujo, sir. I am accompanying Admiral Kakuta on this mission. It was on my initiative that we undertook it."

"No!" mouthed Kakuta as his subordinate bared his neck to the blade. The dishonor of allowing one's inferior to accept blame for such a perilous scheme-he might never live it down.

"So," snarled Yamamoto. "Another mutineer. Or are you just a maniac, Commander?"

"You will think us both maniacs, initially, Admiral. But we have come as saviors. If we speak falsely, let the spirits of our ancestors bear the shame."

"Oh, they shall bear a heavy burden of shame, believe me, Hidaka."

"I believe not, Admiral. You were steaming toward defeat and catastrophe. We can avert that, if you will just hear us out."

"I am listening. No doubt the Americans are listening, as well. The whole world is waiting on you, Lieutenant Commander Hidaka."

"Here we are now, entertain us," Moertopo sung under his breath.

Hidaka shot him a withering look. The reference meant nothing to him, but the potentially disastrous effect of that one line of English did not bear thinking about.

"Admiral Yamamoto, begging your pardon, but we shall not even attempt to explain ourselves over the radio. It would be futile. We shall be over your position in approximately twenty minutes. We shall maneuver to land in front of your forward eighteen-inch turrets. I am informed it will be a very dangerous approach. The pilot requests that you adjust your heading in order to place the wind across your decks."

"It will be more than dangerous," exclaimed Yamamoto. "It will be fatal. You cannot land a seaplane on a battleship. I am warning you. I will have you shot down if you approach the Yamato."

"We are not in a seaplane, and we can land without damaging the Yamato. Please do not shoot us down. You will soon understand. Hidaka out."

He drew his fingers across his throat, motioning Moertopo to sever the link.

The commander in chief was cut off mid-rant.

Admiral Kakuta stared at him as though he had just lost his mind. Nobody spoke to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto like that.

Hidaka gestured helplessly.

"From what I have heard, the Admiral is a gambler. So am I."

Yamamoto's mouth opened and closed. Opened and closed. But no sound emerged.

Perhaps they could land on the Yamato after all. That thing, that giant insect in which Kakuta had so quickly navigated across fifteen hundred kilometers of fog-shrouded sea-and at night!-it seemed to hang in the air as if suspended from a thread. No. No it didn't seem to hang in the air. It simply did hang there.

The seas were running at two and a half meters. The bulk of the Yamato would pass through a single wave as though it were composed of nothing more than smoke. But over the long haul from Hashirajima the ceaseless roll of the northern Pacific had imparted a long and rhythmic plunging motion to the sixty-five-thousand-tonne battleship. Yamamoto, who had quietly ordered the ship brought around when he had finally laid eyes on Kakuta's mysterious "seaplane," stood transfixed in the freezing night air as the pilot hovered over the forecastle. The aircraft dipped when the bow dipped. Rose when it rose. It was almost as though the pilot were dancing with the hulking behemoth beneath his wheels.

Admiral Yamamoto, Captain Takayanagi, all of the officers who had assembled on the high walkway were mesmerized, watching to see if the strange wingless plane would falter, to be slapped from the sky by a rogue surge of the deck. How the pilot could see through the darkness and the typhoon of spray thrown up by that huge propeller was anyone's guess.

But clearly, he could. With one last skillful dip, the craft settled onto the deck and the roar died away as the pilot cut power to the engine. As if by sorcery, giant propeller blades materialized above the cockpit, revealing how this miraculous device stayed aloft. A dozen sailors ran forward with ropes to lash the thing to the deck.

"Ensign Tomonagi, come quickly, the captain is stirring."

Tomonagi followed the crewman back into the wardroom of the Sutanto, where the man whom Moertopo had identified as the ship's commanding officer was indeed throwing off his coma-like unconsciousness.

Tomonagi's stomach heaved, and a thin, greasy film of sweat quickly lacquered his forehead. But Commander Hidaka's instruction has been quite explicit.

"You two, quickly!" he barked at a couple of his own sailors. "Grab him and follow me."

A handful of Indonesian ratings who tried to help with their skipper were roughly forced back by armed guards.

"We shall take care of him," Tomonagi declared. "Go back to your duties."

None of them understood a word he said, but the tone was unmistakable. Reluctantly they stood by as their captain was carried from the room, his body convulsing in the arms of the sailors who bore him away.

Tomonagi led the small party out into the fresh air and over to the plasteel safety rail. He looked around for witnesses but apart from another Japanese sentry, there were none. He nodded at the sailors, who heaved Captain Djuanda over the side. They heard the impact very clearly as his body hit the icy waters. There was no scream.

Lieutenant Ali Moertopo didn't know enough about Admiral Yamamoto to be awed. His flagship, the battleship Yamato-now, that was awesome. But the man himself just looked like another pissed-off sushi chef. He'd come to recognize the type. It appeared as if they were all over this ocean.

Moertopo stood beside and slightly behind Commander Hidaka in the planning room of the Yamato, a huge space to the eyes of somebody who had been confined to a comparatively tiny ship like the Sutanto. Before them lay a large table with a map of the Pacific covered in little wooden boats and flags, symbolizing the disposition of hundreds of Japanese naval vessels, surging across the empty wastes of the northern Pacific. Now, apparently, they were in disarray, and the men responsible were facing a solid wall of dark uniforms and darker faces.

Overhead, lights glinted off Yamamoto's shaven head as he listened to Kakuta and Hidaka attempt to explain themselves. The grand admiral's face remained utterly impassive, but the men around him glowered with increasing degrees of incredulity and umbrage. When Kakuta finally fell silent, a terrible, ticking stillness blanketed the gathering.

"And you, Lieutenant Moertopo. What say you of all this?" asked Yamamoto at last in thickly accented, but otherwise flawless English.

Moertopo, who had quickly downloaded everything he could find on Yamamoto and Midway from the Sutanto's Fleetnet storage banks, wasn't surprised by the man's grasp of the language. He now knew that Yamamoto had studied at Harvard, and later worked in Washington. But he was nevertheless shocked at being spoken to directly by the supreme commander of the Combined Fleet. He had been rather looking forward to keeping his opinions to himself. Hidaka prodded him forward.

"What do you want me to say… sir?"

"Do you really expect me to believe that you are from the future?"

"No."

"Then why waste my time with this fiddle-faddle?"

Moertopo thought he understood the slant of the question, even though it had been phrased so oddly.

"I do not expect you to believe it. But it is true. I was born in nineteen ninety-seven."

"I see."

The room again fell into uncomfortable silence.

"And how did you come to be here?" asked Yamamoto after a short interlude.