Perhaps the burn case off the Astoria? They’re used to dealing with burns here. Perhaps he could go ashore.

She reached out to click the mouse and consign the man to dark ages medicine.

“No,” she sighed, stopping herself. “He’d die for sure.”

She spat a quiet curse at the ceiling of her office and went back to the start of the list.

At her elbow lay another file, one she pored over compulsively when she wasn’t working on the patient lists. It was the results of her postmortem examination of Anderson and Miyazaki. It included the DNA profiles of the men who’d raped the Leyte Gulf’s captain. She felt sick every time she read it. But she was convinced that if Anderson and Miyazaki were to have justice, it would come from their own people. Not from someone like “Buster” Cherry.

There was something else about the case that she hadn’t discussed with anyone. It brought back memories. Not just of the war crimes she’d worked for the UN in Srebrenica and Denpasar, but also of her own rape, at the age of seventeen.

Margie Francois had been a premed college freshman when a bunch of drunken jocks had jumped her as she walked back to her dorm from the library, late at night. She’d never told anyone about it. There were times when she still felt ashamed.

Kolhammer stood in the bridge of the Clinton, watching the activity down on her flight deck. Hundreds of men and women toiled around the clock to prepare her for war. The feeling recalled the days before the Transition, when they were still preparing to deploy into the Indonesian Archipelago.

He was still getting by on only four or five hours’ sleep. There was so much to do. The Multinational Force was battered and much reduced, but it was still the most powerful fleet of ships on the face of the earth at this time. He had the Kandahar and the two ships of her MEU intact. The torpedo strike on the marine flattop had been patched up well enough to put her back to sea. The Kennebunkport and the Providence had come through relatively unscathed. HMS Trident lay at anchor just abaft of them, and the Siranui beyond her. She was now crewed by Japanese and American sailors, the latter mostly coming from the Leyte Gulf. Those Japanese who did not feel they could fight against their forebears, about 80 percent of the crew, would await her return on shore.

He couldn’t see the submarine Havoc. She was prowling the approaches to Midway.

The Australian troop carrier Moreton Bay had been patched up and quickly fitted out as a hospital ship. The four hundred members of the Second Cavalry Regiment who had been on their way to Timor in her were now squeezed into the monohulled assault ship HMAS Ipswich with their armour.

And of course, there was the Clinton.