Lieutenant Ali Moertopo didn’t know enough about Admiral Yamamoto to be awed. His flagship, the battleship Yamato—now, that was awesome. But the man himself just looked like another pissed-off sushi chef. He’d come to recognize the type. It appeared as if they were all over this ocean.

Moertopo stood beside and slightly behind Commander Hidaka in the planning room of the Yamato, a huge space to the eyes of somebody who had been confined to a comparatively tiny ship like the Sutanto. Before them lay a large table with a map of the Pacific covered in little wooden boats and flags, symbolizing the disposition of hundreds of Japanese naval vessels, surging across the empty wastes of the northern Pacific. Now, apparently, they were in disarray, and the men responsible were facing a solid wall of dark uniforms and darker faces.

Overhead, lights glinted off Yamamoto’s shaven head as he listened to Kakuta and Hidaka attempt to explain themselves. The grand admiral’s face remained utterly impassive, but the men around him glowered with increasing degrees of incredulity and umbrage. When Kakuta finally fell silent, a terrible, ticking stillness blanketed the gathering.

“And you, Lieutenant Moertopo. What say you of all this?” asked Yamamoto at last in thickly accented, but otherwise flawless English.

Moertopo, who had quickly downloaded everything he could find on Yamamoto and Midway from the Sutanto’s Fleetnet storage banks, wasn’t surprised by the man’s grasp of the language. He now knew that Yamamoto had studied at Harvard, and later worked in Washington. But he was nevertheless shocked at being spoken to directly by the supreme commander of the Combined Fleet. He had been rather looking forward to keeping his opinions to himself. Hidaka prodded him forward.

“What do you want me to say . . . sir?”

“Do you really expect me to believe that you are from the future?”

“No.”

“Then why waste my time with this fiddle-faddle?”

Moertopo thought he understood the slant of the question, even though it had been phrased so oddly.

“I do not expect you to believe it. But it is true. I was born in nineteen ninety-seven.”

“I see.”

The room again fell into uncomfortable silence.

“And how did you come to be here?” asked Yamamoto after a short interlude.

“I do not know,” Moertopo answered truthfully. “But here I am.”

“And here your friends are, too, the Americans,” Yamamoto stated flatly.

“You believe that?”

“Our radio intelligence has detected a very large volume of traffic from the Midway area. A battle has been fought there. But not by us.”

Moertopo quickly scanned the faces behind Yamamoto, hoping for some sign of how to play this. All he found, however, was a wall of anger and suspicion.

“We picked up those signals ourselves,” said Moertopo. “It appears that the Americans have hurt each other very badly.”