“I understand these machines are a bit like having a whole university at your fingertips. What’s to stop them or the Germans from learning how to build superweapons like the ones that destroyed the American fleet at Midway? Granted they couldn’t leap right into the next century. But they could give their scientists and manufacturers a hell of a boost.”

Prime Minister Curtin slowly rubbed his face with both hands. He was a picture of despair. MacArthur took in the questions without visible anguish, but neither did he exhibit any of his usual confidence.

In the end he could only shrug.

“We have to strike first.”

LONDON, 2301 HOURS, 10 JUNE 1942

The dispatch from Her Majesty’s man in Hawaii arrived at Admiral Sir Dudley Pound’s club late in the evening. The first sea lord received the long typewritten note from his man in Pearl Harbor, Rear Admiral Sir Leslie Murray, just before midnight. Pound had suffered from quite terrible headaches for some time, and an absolute blinder was keeping him awake when the Royal Navy courier arrived with a brown leather briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.

Pound took delivery in the club’s library. He wasn’t the only member who was padding about at that time. Many of the older members found their repose had been so badly disturbed by the war and especially by the bombing of London that they slept in fits and starts at all hours of the night and day. A few of them dozed in soft leather armchairs. One had nodded off over a copy of The Times, which had spilled onto the rich Turkish carpet where it lay until spied by a passing servant. Another had propped open Livingstone’s original African journal on his lap, but had fallen asleep halfway down the Zambezi River. A couple of retired brigadiers, one of whom had been quite handsomely shot up with the New Zealanders at Gallipoli, pushed chess pieces around a board in the far corner.

Sir Dudley was deep into his third brandy of the evening when a footman showed through a young man from Naval Intelligence. Quietly grateful for some work to distract him through the graveyard hours, Pound thanked the officer and broke the seal on the dispatch from Sir Leslie.

Three paragraphs into the report he snorted a mouthful of brandy through his nose. With remarkable understatement the Royal Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Pacific Fleet gave a detailed account of the arrival of Kolhammer’s task force.

“I must report a most unusual event in the Pacific theatre,” the message began, before describing in quite spare prose the destruction of the American fleet and a British carrier HMS Fearless. Murray relayed the astounding capabilities of the arrivals in equally detached terms, but it was clear to Sir Dudley that his stiff upper lip failed him when it came time to report on the individuals who had arrived in the ships.