“Somewhere in the Wetar Strait I would hazard. Near the rest of the task force. Tell me, have you all been affected? Is the Nuku okay?”

Hidaka was truly flummoxed. He shook his head in a distracted fashion. “The Wetar Strait, you say?”

“Yes. But enough of this pointless questioning—we’re just wasting time,” Moertopo said as he struggled to get to his feet. “I should see to my shipmates. We may need to consult your surgeon, or the Americans, if they haven’t been attacked, too. Do you know if they have? Or what sort of weapon it was. A neural attack maybe.”

“I am sorry, Lieutenant. What sort of attack?”

“That would mean that it was the Chinese, not the Caliphate,” he said, not really helping Hidaka at all.

The commander’s heart was racing now. He had often wondered how he might fare in combat, and now he had reason to doubt his own courage. He was becoming increasingly unnerved by this encounter. Gooseflesh was crawling up his arms, and he shivered involuntarily.

“Do you know the date today, Lieutenant?”

Moertopo glanced at his watch. “It is the fifteenth today.”

“Of?”

Lieutenant Moertopo gave Hidaka a quizzical look.

“Of January.”

“And the year? Please . . . humor me.”

Moertopo shrugged and, without being sure why, glanced at his watch again.

“Twenty twenty-one.”

“Shit,” said Lieutenant Commander Hidaka.

But he said it in Japanese.

Chapter 12

12

HIJMS RYUJO, 2358 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

Admirals don’t normally answer summons from lieutenant commanders. But Hidaka had been so inured to censure, so insistent that Admiral Kakuta make the trip to this Sutanto, that the commander of the Second Carrier Striking Force had relented.

So it was that he found himself on the bitterly cold flight deck, cloaked in fog, when the strange lights appeared.

All of his doubts about Hidaka’s mental stability evaporated when the giant mechanical dragonfly materialized out of the gloom. Instead, Admiral Kakuta had reason to doubt his own sanity. A monstrous insect was the only image he could conjure up in the face of the abomination. It approached with a sort of thudding buzz, and hovered over the deck. A great gale blew away the fog. An icy, knifing wind painfully lashed at his exposed skin. Grit, spray, and even oil from the deck stung his eyes, forcing him to turn away.

As he huddled, shamefully, against the polar blast, he tried to sort his impressions into some comprehensible form. It had to be an aircraft of sorts. Not a dragonfly or a demon. But it had no wings, and the blurring of the air above the blinding lights suggested a propeller of some type.