She stood in the briefing room of the Kandahar, five hours after Lieutenant De Marco had opened the session. The air in the room felt close and stale to Black, even with the air-conditioning running. Papers and coffee cups littered the floor, and normally crisp uniforms were becoming disheveled. The planning session was taking so long because of the need to constantly explain basic issues such as in-flight refueling to the “temps.” Black wasn’t sure how he felt about being called a “temp.” It didn’t sound very dignified.

“The good news,” Francois continued, “is that the sort of care they’ll require is intense, but very basic. There’s not much apart from some drugs and megavitamin and mineral supplements that we’d need to add to the amenities you already have for treating the sort of malnutrition and illness we’re likely to see. What we need from you are medics and lots of berths on big comfortable ships.”

Nimitz raised his hand to speak.

“Excuse me, Doctor. I can deal with that right away. We have a lot of converted liners that have just finished ferrying troops to New Caledonia and Australia. They moved about fifty thousand men, and their equipment. They might fit the bill. They’re not as luxurious as they once were, but they’d be more agreeable than a hammock in the hold of a Liberty ship.”

“That sounds just fine, Admiral. What about medics?”

“We’ll round them up,” Nimitz promised.

Rachel Nguyen was growing accustomed to these strange conferences that were as much history tutorials as intelligence briefings. This group was smaller than many she’d spoken to over the last few days and was composed entirely of twenty-first-century Special Forces—SEALS, SAS, Marine Recon. They should have been a more intimidating audience, but unlike some others they accepted her right to be here. Whatever she had to say, they wanted to hear.

She keyed a control stick, and the wallscreen split into four sections.

“These are the best contemporary overheads we have at the moment, gentlemen. As we draw nearer, we’ll have drone coverage to verify their accuracy, but the ’temps who’ve just been there vouch for the Singapore maps, and the images of Cabanatuan are drawn from official DoD archives, so we’ll take them on faith until we have real-time vision.”

She clicked the controller again, filling the entire screen with the prison camp in the Philippines.

“This camp is a former army base,” she explained. “It’s surrounded by flat open ground and lies eight kilometers from the village of Cabanatuan, which we can assume contains a heavy concentration of Japanese army units. It sits astride a major transport axis from Manila, and the camp itself is often used as transit base for Japanese army units.