As quickly and with as little drama as possible, he informed Churchill of the events at Midway, as he had been told of them. The prime minister's expression grew more thunderous with each fantastic revelation. Finally, he exploded.

"Enough! Is this your idea of a joke, Admiral?"

Pound's voice showed not the slightest hint of amusement. "No, Prime Minister, it is my idea of a bad dream."

Churchill's head seemed to wobble on his bulbous, unshaven neck as though he were seeing the room in front of him for the first time. He pushed a piece of paper to one side, dragged it back, opened a drawer, presumably to put the paper away, and then simply crumpled it up and dropped it into a wastebasket. Pound half expected him to haul it out and start over again.

"Well, how on earth did this happen? If it did happen."

The first sea lord was at a loss. Neither Murray's report nor Ambassador Kennedy could provide him any information that made sense of the situation.

"It appears that even these chap's who've turned up don't know how it happened," said Pound.

"And they have Japanese ships and German soldiers sailing with them?" Churchill mused.

"And Russians and Italians and a couple of chaps from places I've never even heard of," Pound added.

"I see. And they've got them under guard?"

"Apparently not." Sir Dudley was just as perplexed by that as the PM.

Churchill sighed deeply. He rubbed his eyes and then his entire face. The rasping sound of his hand on unshaven bristles was the only noise in the room.

"I'm supposed to meet Roosevelt in Washington in a few weeks," he said. "I suppose we'd better bring forward the schedule."

"Yes, Prime Minister."

It was quiet as Lieutenant Nguyen sat outside the Clinton's conference room, nervously holding the plastic folder that contained her briefing notes.

She was the last briefing officer of the day, and she had a tough act to follow: the poor bastards from physics, who were still riffing on old Star Trek episodes. She patted her breast pocket for maybe the tenth time to make sure the data stick was still there and tried to focus on her breathing in an effort to calm down. She wished she could take Julia and Rosanna into the meeting with her. Nothing seemed to freak them out. But they were ashore, having written her a three-page summary of U.S. antisubmarine operations in June 1942.

It was a left-handed gift. She was discovering that when you gave a bunch of admirals a golden egg, they invariably come back at you wanting a dozen more.

She could hear a man speaking with an English accent. He seemed to be saying that they should reprogram Metal Storm to prioritize kamikaze attacks and traditional iron bombs, rather than hypersonic, wave-skimming antiship missiles. It was off-topic, but he had a point, she thought. Resentfully aware that her bloody PhD had come back to haunt her, she quietly cursed her decision to enroll in postgraduate history. That's when an ensign called her in.

Her fatigue fell away as she entered the meeting room. She recognized most of the senior commanders from the Multinational Force, but it was the immediate familiarity of men like Nimitz and Spruance that gave her a start. She'd seen those faces countless times in books and on screen, but here they were, alive and looking to her for… what? Salvation? To their minds they were still in the first days of a war they could very well lose. A couple of the men who sat with them shook their heads at her arrival.

She took her place the lectern and fumbled in her pocket for the data stick, nearly dropping it as she tried to slot it home. She exhaled audibly to settle her nerves as the stick clicked into place and the massive wallscreen behind her winked from neutral blue to a map of the world.

"Good evening. This is a summary of the relevant disposition of forces across the global theaters as of June ninth, nineteen forty-two."

She paused briefly to glance up at her audience. Most of the faces were neutral; some, such as her own captain's, were even encouraging. For the first time, however, she noticed that two men were openly scowling at her; contemporary Royal Navy types, to judge by their uniforms. They sat next to Captain Halabi from HMS Trident, who was acting on Kolhammer's behalf while he was away in Los Angeles and Commander Judge was briefing MacArthur. Their body language betrayed the insurmountable gulf that she would be asked to somehow cross. Unfortunately, her presentation wasn't likely to cheer up the Brits.

"A massive series of battles around Kharkov and Sevastopol, under way at the present time, will eventually see nearly one million Soviet troops killed or taken prisoner. Sevastopol will fall to the Germans on the first of July, two days into the German summer offensive, Operation Blue."

As she spoke, a PowerPoint show filled the giant wallscreens. Two-meter windows displaying archival footage of combat on the Eastern Front played in one corner, directly over a panel listing the various German and Soviet formations that would be involved and their losses over the period of the campaign. Rachel snuck a quick peek at the two sour-faced Royal Navy men. No, they weren't looking any happier.

Oh well, she thought, here goes…

"British attempts to support the Soviet war effort through shipment of materiel via convoy will be severely hampered by the poor judgment of the first sea lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, who is suffering from a brain tumor that will kill him within a few years-"

She got no farther, flinching in surprise as somebody smashed an open hand down on the table.

"How dare you! I've had just about enough of this!" barked the Englishman seated next to Captain Halabi. "We've sat here all night listening to a bunch of darkies and shrews tell us what we've been doing wrong and now this… this… bloody coolie child has the nerve to come in here and insult Sir Dudley, a man who-"

"Admiral Murray," Halabi said through gritted teeth, "I would appreciate it if you would shut the fuck up and listen to the lieutenant, who, I can assure you, is infinitely better informed about these matters than you are."

Ah, that'd be Rear Admiral Sir Leslie Murray, CBE, thought Nguyen.

"I don't have to listen to this!" Murray declared.

"No, you don't," agreed Halabi. "You can leave anytime you want."

Rachel could see that Halabi was only just containing her desire to strangle the man. She won the battle of wills, however, and Murray returned to his silent glaring.

The acting commander of the Multinational Force spoke to Nguyen in a much calmer tone. "Please go on, Lieutenant. I believe you were about to discuss the destruction of Naval Convoy PQ Seventeen."

"I was, ma'am, thank you."

She composed herself, and returned to her notes, determined not to lift her head again until she was finished. "PQ Seventeen is scheduled to depart Iceland for Archangel on June twenty-seventh. It would consist of fifty-six freighters, an oiler, six destroyers, and thirteen other vessels. Admiral Pound, wrongly assuming the German battleship Tirpitz was loose, ordered the convoy to scatter and the escorts to withdraw. Aircraft and submarine attacks then sank twenty-four unprotected ships, carrying nearly three and a half thousand motor vehicles, four hundred and thirty tanks, more than two hundred aircraft, and nearly one hundred thousand tonnes of supplies. The losses, coming at the most critical juncture just before the summer blitzkrieg, and the subsequent refusal of the Western Allies to force the convoy route again for many months, lead to a severe strain on the relationship between the Allies and the Soviet government."