“Oh yeah. There’s a lot of bullshit talk about this Miyazaki guy. How he might have fucked her before they got waxed. But Wassman says that’s just crap. They can tell, because of the come. It ain’t his. In fact,” he muttered, drawing even closer, “it was a coupla guys.”

Evans nodded slowly. “But they don’t know who?”

Mohr waited while a man who was seemingly wrapped from head to toe in white gauze bandages was wheeled past. When they were alone again he said, “They know it wasn’t one of their guys. They can tell from the DMA.”

“DMA?”

“It’s a like a fingerprint for the come,” whispered Mohr.

Evans took that in without much reaction. He stared at the bright green tube around his arm for a few seconds.

“So what happened?” he said at last.

Mohr shrugged.

“Dunno. Anderson and the Jap were on shore. She’d taken over his ship with a bunch of other officers from the Gulf. Americans. The Japs lost a lot of their top guys when a shell hit the bridge. Captain Anderson and this Miyazaki were probably just walking along talking things through, you know, admin stuff, when they got hit.”

Evans sighed. He suddenly seemed very tired.

“What a mess.”

“Yeah, it’s a fucking pity,” said Mohr. “I thought that dame was all right, you know. A good captain.”

He said it tentatively, as if expecting an argument. But Evans simply bobbed his head up and down.

“Yeah. She was okay.”

Chapter 28

28

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA, 1411 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

Commander Judge, Captain Windsor, and the Australian submariner, Captain Willet, fell into step as they left the hotel and turned down Queen Street, heading for MacArthur’s HQ. Trams that managed to look both antique and brand new rumbled past in both directions. They’d been in town for two days but it was still disorienting in the extreme. None of them had trouble recognizing their surroundings. And yet, they were so different.

Willet shook her head. She’d grown up in Brisbane and kept turning around as if trying to catch her bearings. The absence of skyscrapers didn’t mean she was lost. The street layout was the same, and some of the buildings were even familiar. A few pubs. A couple of old commercial stores and warehouses from the nineteenth century that had been listed as national heritage items in the late twentieth. The cottages on the ridges around the small, undeveloped business district. They’d been snapped up and renovated by yuppies in her childhood and were fetching millions of dollars apiece, last she’d heard. Here they were slums. Dark, wretched, and stinking in a way she recognized from postings in Asia.