Back in 1941, the Haleiwa fighter strip had been a satellite landing field away from the main U.S. Army Air Corps base at Wheeler airfield. As soon as the attack started, without waiting for orders, two young fighter pilots, Lieutenants George Welch and Kenneth Taylor, had jumped in a car and raced to the secondary field. They made the twisting sixteen-mile drive in under fifteen minutes. When they arrived, the crew chiefs told them that instead of flying out, they should disperse the aircraft on the ground. “The hell with that,” said Welch.

Ignoring the usual pre-takeoff checklists, each pilot climbed into a P-40 Warhawk fighter plane and took off down the airstrip. Only once they were in the air did they figure out they were about to take on over three hundred enemy aircraft. Undeterred, Welch and Taylor plowed straight into the second wave of the Japanese attack. They didn’t stop the attack, but they did manage to shoot down six planes before they ran out of ammunition. More important, the two pilots put up enough of a fight that Japanese planners assumed there were far more defenders in the air. They decided against sending in a final, third attack wave designed to pummel Pearl Harbor’s fuel storage, maintenance, and dry-dock repair yards, an attack that would have set back the American war effort at least another year.

The airstrip stayed in use up to the 1960s and was then turned over to the locals. Eventually owned by Kamehameha Schools and renamed Pua’ena Point, the real estate remained undeveloped, the concrete tarmac becoming cracked and gradually overtaken by the jungle. The only human presence for the past decades had been a squatters’ camp and an occasional rave party.

This real estate was now priceless to Adams. All the other active airstrips on the island, even the small civilian fields, had been used by the Directorate for basing and drone-landing strips, and they’d been taken out by the Z’s bombardment. A platoon of his Marines had been tasked to prep the old field as best they could, clearing away the squatter shacks, bushes, and concrete fragments that blocked the field. When word of what they were doing spread, civilians had started showing up to help. Retirees with garden tools, surfers with their bare hands, the now truly homeless squatters, all filling in holes in the tarmac and hacking away at the jungle. That had been unexpected good fortune. A corporal was now directing eighty of them in the cleanup of a helicopter-landing site, over where the hangars used to be. That would mean Adams could keep the runway clear and still bring his attack helicopters off the ships ahead of schedule. Even better, a SEAL fire team had appeared out of the jungle with two bulldozers and a Polish navy officer driving a massive yellow roller. He couldn’t even begin to fathom where they had found construction equipment in the middle of a battle, but he’d take it.

“Sir, they’re here,” his aide Lieutenant Jacobsen said.

“Dank you, ’Tenant,” Adams responded, his jaw still numb. “Clear um ut.”

Jacobsen ordered those still on the runway to clear as an F-16 buzzed low and waggled its wings. Typical pilot hot-dog bullshit, thought Adams. Despite all the work, the runway was still far too rough for any plane to land on. He forgave the pilot as the F-16 flew on toward the front, where it could do some actual good.

What Adams cared most about were the big lumbering planes that were appearing in the sky, the massive C-5 Galaxies that could carry over two hundred and seventy thousand pounds of payload, the sleek C-141 Starlifters that had ferried troops to Vietnam and the First Gulf War, and even some of the more modern C-17 Globemasters. He knew they were the early production models, built before the full reliance on electronics.

Three missiles arced up toward the planes from the east, somewhere behind enemy lines. The spray of countermeasure flares distracted one missile, but the other two smashed into a C-5 and sent it careening into the ocean. Adams could see the F-16s in the escort, 20 mm Vulcan cannon firing, swoop down to punish whoever had committed the transgression of harming their flock.

Undeterred, the other big planes moved closer, the first wave filling the air with tiny dots that blossomed into parachutes, each C-141 dumping a string of 123 paratroopers as it flew overhead.

As they landed on the airfield, Adams blessed those civilians yet again. Every filled pothole in the tarmac meant one less twisted ankle or sprained knee taking a soldier out of action. Marines ran out to help the paratroopers stow their parachutes and find their rally points.

At each unit rally point, a line of civilian vehicles waited on the road leading out to the main town. Just as World War I French troops had been ferried to the Battle of the Marne in Parisian buses, the Third Brigade Combat Team of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division would join the Battle of Kamehameha Highway in a mix of pickup trucks, SUVs, and even a few minibuses from the local tour companies.

The next wave of cargo planes came down low, almost at sea level, staggered out in a long line, one behind another. As each plane raced down the length of the runway with its rear door open, a drogue parachute deployed out the back, caught the air, and then yanked out a large pallet. The plane then pulled up, its wheels never having touched the ground, and the pallet slid and bumped down the runway at over a hundred miles per hour before friction caused it to grind slowly to a stop. Teams of civilians directed by a paratrooper then swarmed over the pallet, tearing at thick belts strapping down everything from aviation-fuel bladders to combat vehicles. With all that extra manpower, the offloading went at least twice as fast as anticipated, and it freed up more forces for the frontlines. Adams heard Jacobsen yelling at the workers to prioritize the M1128 Stryker mobile-gun systems. Damn, that boy was good. The eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicles each mounted a 105 mm tank gun, which meant Adams could soon start punching back, hard.

The most lethal supplies to come in on the pallets, though, were what looked like two ordinary fuel-tank trucks. In fact, the tanks were filled not with fuel but with a mix of resin-based binders. When sprayed down and smoothed out over the base of the old runway, the substance would form polyurethane polymer concrete. After just thirty minutes of drying time, he would own the only operative airfield on the island.

Adams smiled at the thought, the first smile he’d allowed himself in months. It quickly died, though, when Jacobsen reached over with a handkerchief to dab away a thin trickle of drool dripping from the corner of the general’s still-numb mouth.

Roscoe fired a pair of AIM-120E AMRAAM air-to-air missiles well before he could see the enemy planes. The twelve-foot-long missiles came cleanly off his plane’s fuselage stations and disappeared into the blue sky ahead. With so much radar and communications interference, these were the long shots. Shoot two, hope maybe to hit one. More usefully, they’d create a cover of fast-moving death for his jets to come in behind, throwing off whatever formation the enemy had planned.

He pushed the plane to afterburners, noticing a faint vibration in his ejection seat as his F-15C’s speed passed Mach 2. With no stealth features, the older planes would be at a disadvantage until they made this an up-close-and-personal knife fight. Plus the F-15C’s speed meant they could start their kill count before the slower Shrike drones arrived.

It all happened in seconds: a few explosions in the distance and alongside him as others in Eagle Flight were hit by the enemy’s counterfire, and then a swirl of smoke and contrails as fighters from three nations mixed it up.