Jones stared again at the rogue vessel. A real dinosaur by the look of her. A destroyer maybe? The Indonesians had bought a bunch of them from the East Germans ages ago, back when there were still Indonesians and East Germans. But what the fuck was it doing here, attacking a clearly superior battle group? He was just starting along that chain of thought when his attention ballooned out to the bigger picture. Jones hustled a pair of powered combat goggles from the trooper, Bukowski, and set the light amplifiers to maximum gain.

“Sir. Y’all right?” asked Private Bukowksi.

“Be cool, Private,” Jones said, quietly but sternly, as he tried to process what he was seeing. A hostile fleet seemed to have materialized in the middle of the task force. Carriers, old battleships or cruisers maybe, a real junkyard collection, but it had snuck in right under their noses and now that small, angry destroyer was lining up for a broadside on the Clinton. Well, she had a cast-iron pair of nuts on her, you had to give her that.

“Oh, shit,” he spat as his peripheral vision picked up an even greater threat to the aircraft carrier. A small plane, obsolete, incredibly slow, was diving straight for the deck of the Big Hill, pulling out slowly, tortuously at just a hundred or so meters. A small black pearl detached from its belly and followed a fatal, parabolic arc. Jones couldn’t tell if the flight path of the bomb would intersect with the deck of the supercarrier, but a heavy, leaden feeling in his guts told him it just might. He reached out and placed a hand on Private Bukowski’s shoulder.

“You got the general principle right, son,” he said quietly. “But you ain’t gonna hit jack shit from here.”

The destroyer exploded about five seconds before the bomb tore into the Clinton’s deck between the number three and four catapults.

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2252 HOURS, JUNE 2, 1942

A few people on the Clinton’s flag bridge ignored the plasma screens and peered through the armor glass windows of the bridge, to watch the destroyer die in real time. The better view was on screen.

The hostile was nine hundred meters away when something took it amidships. Something big and ugly. A ball of fire and steam erupted and consumed most of the vessel’s length. It broke her back, ripped her in half, lifting the separated sections twenty meters out of a boiling cauldron of sea beneath her keel. Kolhammer watched a gun turret pop off like a champagne cork and go skimming across the surface of the ocean. A murmur ran through the crew, those on their feet at least, as the bow knifed into the water and sank instantly. The burning stern remained afloat for just a few seconds before a secondary explosion atomized it.