All eyes shifted to the video feed from the SEAL fire team targeting Wheeler. At the airfield, a pair of fighter jets raced down the runway. From the design, twin-engined and twin-tailed, they appeared to be J-31 Falcon Hawk strike fighters, each wing loaded with a YJ-12 anti-ship missile. The shells were moving too fast for the camera to pick up from afar, but the evidence of the rail-gun rounds’ arrival was immediate. So massive was the force of the explosions that even though the first fighter made it into the air, the shock wave tossed it onto its side and it fell back onto the runway, adding a fiery secondary explosion to the devastation.

“Sir, Erinyes reports target destroyed,” said one of the crew. “Says good hits. Moving to site Torrey Pines and will report back.”

“Now the real test,” said Vern.

Cortez looked over at her quizzically, somewhat lost in the information on his viz glasses. “Turning the system off is easy,” said Vern, smiling. “Getting it back on is the part that always worried me.”

Brigadier General Gaylen Adams tried to focus on the taste in his mouth, the familiar mix of bile, dirt, and blood. He hadn’t tasted anything like that that since Kenya.

“Nearly there, sir, this one piece is a bitch,” said Lieutenant Jacobsen. They were huddled in a culvert just beside the concrete roadway. The young officer was new, pressed into duty after Adams’s executive officer had died in the crash. The saniband liquid he had sprayed on Adams’s wound would set in sixty seconds, creating a hard but porous membrane over the wound site. It also contained a long-acting local anesthetic. But the lieutenant needed to work quickly to debride the wound before the spray set or the wound would seal around the dirt.

Adams kept silent, both cursing himself for wanting to be the first Marine to land and counting himself lucky for surviving the fall that had made that wish come true.

Using a pair of tweezers from his med kit, Jacobsen worked out one last piece that had been lodged just under the general’s lip.

“Got it,” said the aide, proudly holding up in his tweezers a sliver of a wooden golf tee the size of a matchstick. Adams could only think that it made the young officer look even younger, like one of his sons playing the board game Operation.

Fortunately, the numbness from the anesthetic had set in by this point. As the general rubbed his jaw, testing the edge of it, a helmetless Marine jumped off the roadway and into the culvert.

“Sir, Colonel Fora sent me back to let you know that we’ve got enemy armor coming,” said the Marine, trying to catch his breath. Adams couldn’t read his name, a scarlet slash of blood painted across the body armor, just his insignia. A corporal.

“How fah ut, Cupril?” Adams asked, his speech slurred by the anesthetic. He looked over in anger at Jacobsen.

“How far out are they, Corporal?” the general’s aide translated.

“Scouts tracking them about a klick away from our position, headed out from the old Schofield Barracks,” said the corporal, unfazed. It was the first time he’d ever talked to a general up close; for all he knew, they always had their aides translate for them. He handed the general a muddy map he’d been given to deliver; the units had been ordered to stay off networks as much as they could.

“Knew ur luck run ut ventually,” Adams said, mostly to himself. Except for his falling out of the back of an Osprey and onto a golf course, the operation had gone about as well as could be expected. Stealing a play from the Russians, they’d launched from the fleet almost four hundred miles out, the maximum range they could fly without refueling.

They had cut it close, all but one of the tiltrotor aircraft making it in on fumes. The strikes from the Z and the Poles had given them a lane through the air defenses, and even better than expected, the initial reaction from the ground defenses had been fierce but localized. It was as if the various Directorate units were operating without any leadership from the top. Adams didn’t know if it was due to the jamming or a lucky hit from the shore bombardment that had killed a Directorate general. He didn’t care; he would take a confused enemy every time.

The downside of their long-range method of infiltration was that his units were fighting lighter than normal. While each of the Ospreys that had landed at locations all up and down the North Shore could carry twenty-four combat-loaded Marines, they couldn’t carry the unit’s complement of artillery or vehicles. The Marines had commandeered civilian vehicles to stay mobile, but they would have to wait for the landing craft to bring them their own armored firepower.

“Colonel Fora said to tell you that he can bring them under fire to delay,” said the scout, “but he is requesting to blow the two bridges just north of town, sir.”

Adams studied the cracked screen of his tablet computer, matching the map to the locations he knew by heart. They could blow the bridges over the Anahulu River, but that would leave his forces on the wrong side of the little harbor in Haleiwa. And he wanted that harbor. As dinky as it was, hosting mostly deep-sea fishing charters before the war, Haleiwa had the only pier on the entire northern side of the island. His Marines could cross the beach, but that little harbor would make offloading the vehicles of the Eleventh Cavalry far easier. And, more important, he didn’t want to lose momentum. Never give an enemy the opportunity to catch his breath; instead, grind your boot down hard on his neck.

He pointed on the map to the juncture of Highways 83 and 99 and the section just beyond Haleiwa, where the main road was raised on concrete pillars above the marshy land and small streams.

“Tell da Z to hut huh and huh.”

He looked over at the young marine corporal, who was waiting to be dismissed.

“Num, son?” said General Adams.

“Name, Corporal?” the aide asked.

“Snyder, sir,” said the corporal.

“Gut joh, Sny-drr,” Adams said slowly, trying to enunciate each word. He nodded at the aide to get to work.

Jacobsen pointed a baseball-bat-size antenna out to sea and set up a directed microwave-burst transmission to the task force; the signal’s frequency hopped with each transmission, allowing it to slip through the Directorate jamming.

“Longboard, Longboard, this is Ares, requesting fire at fo-wer, Quebec, delta, kilo, zero, tree, niner, ait, tree, tree, zero, six, two, niner, and at fo-wer, Quebec, delta, kilo, zero, fo-wer, wun, two, fo-wer, tree, zero, two, niner, zero. Confirm, Longboard,” said the aide, using the military’s phonetic pronunciation for the grid coordinates to ensure distinct sounds.

“Ares, this is Longboard Actual. Copy all, but what’s the situation? Where is Ares Actual? Over.” Adams recognized the voice as Admiral Murray’s.

“Longboard Actual, I’ve got Ares Actual right beside me, but he is, um, verbally incapacitated. I’ll be speaking for him, wait,” Jacobsen said.

“Tull er dat —”

Before Adams could finish the young officer started. “Longboard Actual, present status strong but precarious. Enemy armor column advancing down Route Ninety-Nine. We’ll need fire support to block threat. But not just yet. It’ll cost us, but we want to wait for max effect… I will relay fire order to time for exactly when their column crosses Helemano Stream.”

Adams eyed the young lieutenant with newfound respect. He was crap at surgery, but he was a bloody-minded killer, just the way they’d taught at Quantico.

“Snyder, are you sure this is what the general said to do?”

Lance Corporal Ramona Vetter fired off another ten-round burst from her M240 machine gun. The bullets bounced off the lead tank, a Type 99 whose brown-and-green camouflage paint stood out on the highway’s black asphalt. It was belching smoke from where its engine used to be after a direct hit from a Javelin shoulder-fired rocket. Their machine-gun fire wouldn’t cause any damage, but it would keep the crew from exiting.