"Let's not try and eat the elephant in one whole bite," Halabi muttered to herself.

She was about to open a report detailing distribution of the fleet's remaining war stocks when a window opened on the screen, displaying the rather drawn features of Captain Margie Francois.

Halabi was on site, grimly shaking hands with the combat surgeon twenty-five minutes later.

The scene looked chaotic from the air, with helicopters, Humvees, Honolulu PD cars, old-fashioned jeeps, and at least a hundred or more individuals all buzzing around the victims. When she touched down and exited the chopper, Halabi got an even stronger sense of barely controlled mayhem. A small group of Colonel Jones's marines was butting heads with the local police and MPs, trying to keep them from stomping all over the crime scene. Jones himself stood as still and silent as a black granite obelisk while a heavyset white man in a bad suit turned beet red, screaming and gesticulating at him.

"What the hell is going on?" the acting task force commander asked.

"Nothing good," said Francois. She took Halabi by the arm and walked her away a little. "One of our platoons was out on a run this morning when they found the bodies, and they called us before the locals. Well, of course, Honolulu PD's tear-assing around with an atomic wedgie over that and…"

Halabi's puzzlement must have been written all over her face, because Francois backed and filled for the Englishwoman.

"They've got their knickers in a twist," she explained.

"Oh right. Thanks."

It was going to be a scorching hot day. Halabi noticed that even at so early an hour she didn't cast much of a shadow. She could hear another siren approaching, possibly two, as the marine went on. Francois didn't seem to care who overheard her.

"We can't have these dumbass crackers all over our crime scene," she complained, sweeping a hand in the general direction of the local authorities. "Granted we're not a homicide squad, but we've got a lot of expertise in war crimes investigation and we sure as hell got better procedures and equipment. These guys don't even know what DNA is. You gotta get them to step back, Captain. Let us take care of our people."

Halabi ran her eyes over the beach again. A hundred meters away Jones was still doing his stone face. The suit was still screeching at him and flapping his arms like a giant flightless bird. The marines and the cops and military police were getting even more muscular with each other.

And the corpses of Captain Daytona Anderson and Sub-Lieutenant Maseo Miyazaki had begun to stiffen with rigor mortis.

"What were they doing out here?" the British officer asked.

Francois squinted at the bodies. She shrugged.

"We don't even know they got whacked out here. Could have been hit in town and dumped. There's a team from the War Crimes Unit coming over to work the grid."

"Was it working out, having Anderson and her people on the Siranui?"

Francois shrugged again. It seemed to be a compulsive gesture with her this morning.

"Far as I know, but I couldn't tell you for sure. I wasn't there. But I didn't hear anything. Why? Did you?"

Halabi shook her head. "No. Just wondering."

"Well, they had good reason to be together," said Francois. "It can't have been easy, integrating the two crews. Language difficulties and so on. If I had to take a guess, I'd say they were having a drink at the Moana, probably just sorting some shit that was better handled through back channels. Maybe they went for a walk. I doubt they'd have strayed too far, though. We're not encouraging any of our people to mix it up with the locals yet."

"Looks like they did," said Halabi.

"Maybe," the marine surgeon agreed. "But it's all guesswork and that's all it's ever going to be if we don't quarantine this site and let the CSI team go to work."

Halabi nodded. She checked her watch.

"Okay. I'll call Nimitz. I'm sure he can sort out the turf war. And then I'd better see if I can raise Kolhammer, but I'll be buggered if we can contact him so far. I'll tell you what, Captain, I'd sell my arse for just one little satellite."

A cold, unseasonable wind blew down off the California mountains, across the howling wastes of saltbush and hardscrabble. Outside the corrugated iron arch of the Quonset hut, grit hissed through the air and dead leaves spattered against windows covered with heavy blackout curtains. Dust devils swirled across the new concrete tarmac. A single oil lamp lit the knot of men gathered in the Spartan setting.

A rifle squad stood at ease at the rear of the room, separated from two loose knots of men in uniform and civilian clothes at the other end. The two groups coalesced around a frail figure in a wheelchair. He had a blanket draped over his legs and was forced to shoo off a young officer who unwisely attempted to wrap another around his shoulders. An older man, one of the civilians, detached himself from the conversation he'd been caught up in and wandered over to the wheelchair. He sported a shock of white hair, and his deeply lined face had worn a perpetually harassed and haunted expression for years. His wife had died not long ago, but that wasn't what lay behind his melancholy. He hadn't laughed freely since fleeing from Germany in 1933.

He affected a cheeky smile now, however, and offered up a book of matches.

"Mr. President. Do you need a light?"

"Why, thank you, Professor. I wouldn't have thought it would take a genius to work that out," said Franklin Delano Roosevelt, throwing a severe glance at his disapproving aide, the one with the blanket.

As Albert Einstein struck a match and leaned in to light the Camel at the end of FDR's long black holder, a distant roar reached them, like a single bass note from a thunderstorm, drawn out for an impossible length of time.

"They're here," said Einstein, as the tobacco caught light and the president took in a deep draft of smoke.

"I want to see this," FDR declared.

His aide hurried forward.

"Mr. President, I don't think-"

"Just push me to the door," snapped Roosevelt. "I want to see these rocket planes."

He stubbed out his cigarette with a show of annoyance.

"There! You can wrap me up like a granny, if that makes you feel better. But I'm going to see these things with my own two eyes."

He clamped the cigarette holder back between his teeth. The broken, stubbed-out butt, still stuck in the end, lent him a slightly crazed air as he gripped the wheels of his chair and began to push himself toward the flimsy wooden door of the hut. Half a dozen military men moved to help, but Einstein was closer than any of them. He took the handles of the chair and leaned into it.

"Let's go see what the future brings, Mr. President."

A few of the civilians, scientific advisers for the most part, managed to scramble out into the biting wind before Einstein parked the president's chair in the doorway, effectively bottling up everyone behind them. An undignified scramble for position took place, with Brigadier General Eisenhower and Admiral King grabbing the best spots on either side of Einstein. The rest either gathered at two small windows or tried to see over the shoulders of the men jammed in the entryway.

Shivering slightly under his blankets, but determined not to show it, the president leaned forward until he could make out the end of the runway. An Army Air Force colonel had briefed him about the rush job to prepare the landing strip. It was three times longer than the main runway at Muroc, he'd said. It seemed a hell of a wasteful thing to Roosevelt, all that extra cement and hard work for a couple of planes. But it surely wasn't the craziest thing he'd heard in the last week.