“Main garrison. It used to be a Philippine army barracks. Now the Japs are in there.”

The time hack reached zero.

Something flashed across the screen of the smaller window and the whole city block on which the targeted building had stood erupted in a volcanic blast. Even the drone’s sophisticated cameras were unable to cope, and the screen blanked out to white for a few seconds.

Two heavy missiles were assigned to the main Japanese camp, which lay sixteen kilometers from the POW camp. They bore in at the relatively low speed of three hundred knots, just above the tree line.

As Kolhammer and Spruance watched silently, a small pop-up window showed a couple of sentries squeezing off a few random shots into the dark. Alerted by the gunfire, hundreds of figures spilled out of tents and barracks buildings.

The missiles detonated and the army camp, in which fifteen thousand men lay abed, vanished inside a colossal explosion.

“Sweet Jesus,” breathed Admiral Halsey. He had been briefed on the effects of the Wide Area Impact Munitions, but Kolhammer knew that to actually watch such power unleashed—especially for the first time—was a humbling, even a frightening experience. The surveillance drone refocused for a wide-angle shot just before detonation, allowing the audience in the CIC to view the blast from a virtual height of six thousand meters. It was obvious to all that nobody could have survived. Supersonic pressure waves blew out across the landscape from the blast centers, flattening trees and demolishing any structures they met for eight kilometers.

“Is that going to hurt our men?” asked Halsey.

“It’ll dissipate before it reaches them,” said Kolhammer.

“This is better than ladies’ day at the country fucking fair,” Halsey said to Ray Spruance.

“It’s only half the game, Bill.”

“Yeah, but what a great fucking half.”

The whine of the giant hovercraft’s turbofans was enormous, easily drowning out the snarl of the Sea Comanche gunships riding shotgun on the assault force. The sea state was benign, making for an effortless rush across the South China Sea toward the mouth of Manila Bay.

Colonel Jones could see clearly from the small cabin of the LCAC. The fallen island bastion of Corregidor stood foursquare in the center of the bay’s entrance. It was easily distinguished from the black backdrop of the island because it was ablaze. Six subnuclear plasma-yield warheads had speared deep into the concrete carapace of the fortress and detonated, atomizing vast tonnages of concrete and steel, along with the thousands of human beings living within.

“Damn, I’ll bet Krakatoa didn’t look half as impressive as that,” yelled the chief petty officer, who was driving the boat.

They were still a long way out, but the conflagration seemed to fill the sky with a golden guttering light.

“Chief Stavros,” Jones cried out amiably, “I don’t think I’ll take that bet.”