Ammunition bunkers exploded. Boilers and the crew who attended them were atomized. Those slugs that drove all the way down into the keel flash-boiled thousands of liters of water that rushed back in through the ruptured hull. Miyazaki watched the death of the enemy ship in two acts. A rippling torrent of white fire raced down the length of the topside decks and superstructure, followed almost instantaneously by a sudden, violent eruption that seemed to detonate beneath the waterline before bursting the thick steel hull like a balloon. In a flash, the ship that had been there suddenly wasn’t. A few moments later the second mace destroyed another ship in identical fashion.

Maseo Miyazaki had not wanted to be a warrior. He had dropped out of college to surf in Hawaii, then Indonesia, and finally in Australia (where he had met that ugly damn stonefish). He had only returned to Japan and presented himself to the draft board in his home prefecture after a suicide bomber in Malaysia had killed his father, a Sanyo executive. After serving six months in a punishment detail for skipping out on the draft in the first place, he had distinguished himself with his application to duty and his easy familiarity with the ways of their gaijin Allies.

He had never before felt the thrill and weight of bushido. But now, surrounded by dead friends and comrades, he knew the blood-simple joy of vengeance on one’s enemy.

One thing bothered him, however.

The ship he had just killed looked nothing like the pirate dhows or baggala routinely used by jihadi terrorists within the Indonesian archipelago.

USS ENTERPRISE, 2307 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

“Sweet Jesus,” breathed Admiral Ray Spruance.

The death of the Portland bathed the pilothouse in a harsh, flat light. For a few seconds he had an almost perfect view of the cauldron in which the two enemies tore at each other with such blind fury. The Japanese guns poured out eerie needles of light, flash-burning hundreds of shells in midflight, creating a sensational fireworks show. Ribbons of green and gold tracer fire sprayed high into the stars or weaved and twisted low across the wave tops. It seemed as if every minute brought another apocalyptic blast like that which had silenced the Portland forever.

On the flight deck, men still threw their lumbering torpedo planes down the heavy wooden planking, desperate to get aloft and into the enemy. So many of them failed. Those devilish glimmering needles of light struck down most who survived before they could orient themselves.

It was a slaughter.

In a matter of minutes contemporary American naval power in the Pacific had been crippled. More than half of the destroyers from Task Forces Sixteen and Seventeen were destroyed outright. The carriers Hornet and Yorktown were obliterated by one rocket each.

Just one, God help us, thought Spruance.