Kolhammer pointed a smooth black stick at the big movie screen. It filled up with some kind of radar image. But it looked like… Spruance searched for a metaphor, but all that came to mind were the cartoons you sometimes saw before a Saturday matinee. The images looked drawn. They most certainly weren't the fuzzy lights and blurred, sweeping arcs he associated with radar. He could see Nagumo's force neatly illustrated with little boats and name tags. Dozens of vessels surrounded four carriers. Most of them were identified, too.

"What the hell is that?" asked Spruance, unsure whether to be impressed or pissed off.

"It's a computerized representation of our intelligence take," said Kolhammer. "Just think of it as an illustration of what our radars can pick up. It's easier to show you this way."

"Don't patronize me, Admiral. Just tell us what's happening."

The briefing room wasn't large for the number of men and women it contained. They had clustered around their respective leaders, and the dozen or so gathered behind Kolhammer tensed at Spruance's outburst. In turn, the men off the Enterprise stiffened up and jutted their jaws out that little bit farther. Most of their aggression flowed toward three officers of Asian appearance who stood near Kolhammer.

"They're running. I can't put it any more simply," said the Clinton's CO.

"That's all well and good," said Spruance, "but do you have any idea why the Japs are running? If it's true."

Kolhammer motioned to some seats. Spruance thought they looked very odd. They were misshapen and composed of some hard, unknown material. He indicated that he preferred to remain standing. Kolhammer shrugged.

"It's true," he said. "But I don't know why they've turned tail. They almost certainly picked up the radio broadcast I made to you last night, followed of course by the traffic between your own ships and pilots during the battle. Nagumo was, or is, incredibly conservative. The exposure of his plan and your trap may have been enough to cause him to abort the operation."

Neither Spruance nor his men looked at all convinced.

"Are we supposed to just accept that?"

"You'll have to accept that they're running," said Kolhammer, indicating the image behind his back. "Our radar confirms it."

"With all due respect," Spruance said, leaving no doubt he had very little respect for his new, unwanted allies, "you only know these bastards from your books. We know them firsthand. They don't turn and run like that without a very good reason. And I don't see one. You wouldn't have had any other ships with you off the East Indies, would you? Something else that might have spooked Nagumo."

Spruance could tell he'd hit a raw nerve with that question. Kolhammer seemed to be chewing over a very tough piece of gristle as he pondered his answer.

"Well, there has been another development," he conceded. "We may have located a missing ship from our task force. A destroyer, the Garrett. She appears to have emerged in the Southern Ocean. We had a very faint distress signal from her. We've heard nothing since. Weather down there is pretty wretched at this time of year. If the crew were unconscious she may have foundered."

Spruance felt a tingle run up his spine. It wasn't at all pleasant.

"And how many other ships have you misplaced, Admiral?" he muttered, barely able to contain his growing rage.

"First," said Kolhammer in a clipped tone indicating that he did not appreciate Spruance's insinuation, "we didn't misplace them. We're as much a victim of the accident that brought us here as you are. Second, I can't tell you with any certainty which ships are missing because I don't know which came through. But it's possible that others may have arrived. We're following up a ghost return from the southwest that might be a British destroyer, the Vanguard."

"And you've sat on this for how long?" asked Spruance, incredulity struggling with fury in his voice.

"We haven't suppressed it at all. These signal traces are less than fifteen minutes old. I was informed on my way here to meet you. We're still analyzing them."

Spruance exploded.

"Goddamn it! Have you got any of your precious analysts evaluating what sort of a mess we'll b

Later, as the survivors of the combined task forces steamed back toward Hawaii, Kolhammer sat alone, in silence, staring at the flatscreen on his stateroom wall. It displayed an image of his home in Santa Monica, with his wife, Marie, in gardening gloves, attacking a dense wall of agapanthus. Lucy, their black Labrador, lay under a eucalyptus, sheltering from the sun.

As Kolhammer gazed at the scene his throat grew tight and two tears squeezed out like hard little bullets of grief, tracked down his freckled face.

"I'm sorry Marie," he whispered to her. "I promised to come home and now… I just don't know."

He stared a while longer, then reached for the control stick and thumbed through a series of flawlessly reproduced images. More garden shots. A picture of Marie and Lucy on the old couch in the sunroom. A few pictures of their son, Jed, killed off Taiwan. No grandchildren, sadly. But a few much-loved great-nephews and -nieces. And other family portraits, becoming stiffer and more formal as they moved back through the years, tracing the Kolhammer family journey from the German city of Magdeburg in 1934 to the New World, and then west across the continent. Following a trail laid down by generations of the damned.

Kolhammer froze the slide show on a sepia-toned studio image of his great-uncle Hans and great-aunt Hilda. The photograph had been torn before being digitized long ago, and Kolhammer had asked the image bureau to leave the imperfection as it was. He liked it that way. Family photographs, he firmly believed, should be weathered and a little damaged by age and handling. It was proof of one generation handing on history to the next.

He stared at the portrait of Hans and Hilda, peering into the hollow space around their eyes. Knowing and yet not really understanding what misery and horror danced slowly in there. The photo had been taken in New York in 1952, but both were still draped in heavy European clothes. Kolhammer accepted that the long sleeves weren't simply an expression of emigre formality. He remembered spending many hours with his great-uncle as a boy. And he knew that under the heavy serge suit was a tattoo of which Hans was unspeakably ashamed. It had been burned there by a minor functionary of Heinrich Himmler's SS and it marked him as a survivor of the Final Solution.

Hans had kept it hidden for many years, but late in his life-just after a young Phillip Kolhammer had taken his commission in the U.S. Navy-a trembling, wasted Uncle Hans had left his nursing home and traveled across the continent to visit his nephew. The trip was unannounced. Hans simply up and left one day and there was hell and high interest to pay when he got back. He was struggling with the latter stages of Parkinson's by then, a foe that would claim him where the fuhrer's minions had failed.

Young Phillip was surprised, enchanted, and little concerned when the old guy turned up without warning. He hadn't taken his medication with any sort of regularity, and the cross-country road trip in a Greyhound bus had been awfully tough on his old bones. But Hans had waved that aside, seized his favorite nephew in a weak, shaky bear hug, and told him how proud he was to see a Kolhammer in the uniform of his liberators. After a few hours of drinking and bullshitting and of Marie fretting endlessly, Uncle Hans took Phillip aside. They had men's business to discuss, he told Marie, as he led her husband into a bedroom.