The rubberized casing felt odd, like nothing he’d ever touched before. The thing seemed light, but solid and kind of dense, too. He and Mohr stared at the screen, which showed something that looked like a weather map. But it was in motion, like a short movie, repeating again and again. As strange as it was, Evans could tell that it covered a thousand square miles of the Wetar Strait off Timor.

It was every bit as baffling as anything else they’d seen so far.

He couldn’t shake the idea that he was staring through a small window hundreds of miles high, directly down onto the earth’s surface. Overlaying the picture was a mass of thin red lines. The image shifted rapidly, like a movie spooling too quickly through a projector, allowing Evans to watch clouds moving through the strait.

Anderson’s voice broke the spell.

“You need medical attention, Commander Evans. I can see that from here. We have a sixteen-bed hospital on the Leyte Gulf. It hasn’t been compromised. The sort of injuries some of your men are carrying, it’d go a hell of a lot better for them to get treatment from us.”

“You inflicted those injuries, Captain.”

It was the first time Evans had addressed her properly.

“Yes, we did, Commander Evans. We’ve probably killed more than thirty of your men by direct fire belowdecks. I don’t know how many have died elsewhere. Our defensive systems went offline, but Nix tells me some of them functioned independently anyway. Your casualties will be heavy, I’m afraid.”

“You killed everybody on the bridge,” he said, unwilling to mask his bitterness. “Shot the hell out of them. They were friends of mine.”

Anderson let it pass. She ripped open a flap holding her vest in place and lay down her shotgun before stepping right up to the thin sliver of clear space through which they were forced to communicate.

“I’m sorry Commander. But you’ve killed an unknown number of my people, as well.”

“Just fucking niggers and . . . ,” Seaman Molloy muttered, before a backhanded slap from Chief Mohr silenced him. Captain Anderson let that one slide, too.

“Who are you people?” Evans asked, his voice nearly cracking.

“I told you. We’re Americans,” Anderson replied. “Just like you.”

Chapter 8

8

USS HILLARY CLINTON, 2312 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

“This is Spruance! Who the hell are you? What’s the idea of breaking in on my transmission. By God, you’d better have a good explanation, or you’ll hang for this.”

The voice filled the flag bridge of the USS Hillary Clinton, of a man long dead when Phillip Kolhammer had finished the last brush stroke on his model dive-bomber. Kolhammer listened in dread and wonder. In a way, that voice was more awful than the firestorm raging down on the flight deck.

He took a long breath before speaking.