Final impact

So troubled was she by that development, Willet had ordered Lohrey to devote a primary channel of the Big Eye feed to covering any appearance by the Soviet choppers. One of the main displays carried the continual surveillance, as instructed, and seven split screens were occupied by LLAMPS and infrared vision of hovering, swooping helicopters that looked like the bastard offspring of a Sea King and the old Khrushchev-era Ka-25. Twin-bladed coaxial rotors; a nose-mounted radome structure; towed arrays; a centerline torpedo system; and depth charges fixed to stubby winglets about halfway down the fuselage.

“She’s no fuckin’ oil painting,” her boat chief, Roy Flemming, commented when he saw them for the first time.

“Aye, Chief, but they do the job,” Willet replied.

They more than did the job. Most of the Japanese subs never got a shot off.

They were located and destroyed long before the lead elements of the Soviet fleet arrived. The few that survived looked to have done so by lying on the shallow bottom close to shore, surrounded by the wreckage of their sunken comrades. With her Nemesis arrays, Willet knew exactly where they were, even amid the fearsome background noise of the battle overhead. The Soviets, on the other hand, just seemed to be going through the motions of searching for them now. Having killed the others so quickly in the opening moments, the Russian commanders had probably been lulled into a false sense of security by the clearly demonstrated superiority of their equipment.

The Havoc’s captain wondered idly when the remaining Japanese boats would come to life and charge to the surface looking for a quick kill before the inevitable counterstrike took them out of the game. Unlike her, they didn’t enjoy the luxuries of remote sensor feeds, or the quantum processing power of an advanced Combat Intelligence. They’d be lashing out in the dark. Literally.

She checked the time hack on the nearest screen. It was twenty minutes after midnight.

The boat’s processors were fully engaged filtering the immense intelligence take from the Battle of Okhotsk as it raged through the darkness hours. The Soviets weren’t big on emission control, so in addition to the audiovisual coverage coming in from the Big Eye drone, the Havoc was also scooping up vast quantities of electronic and signals intelligence. Designed to stalk and strike at the infinitely more capable Chinese navy nearly eight decades hence, the submarine had little trouble accumulating data on her current targets. But with such a small crew, and none of them very well versed in post-Transition Soviet naval technology or tactics, Captain Jane Willet had orders to watch, and nothing more. The Sovs had done so much in secret, there were almost no patches or upgrades to the Nemesis files on them. Willet’s people were writing the first ones.

Every two hours Lieutenant Lohrey zapped another compressed, encrypted burst up to the drone, which relayed the package back to an AWACS bird loitering fifteen hundred kilometers to the southeast. From there it went back to the Clinton, where Kolhammer and Spruance had dozens of specialists working on the take and joining the very rough dots her Intel Section had mapped out. Even more analysts were on their way from Hawaii.

Willet grimaced as Master Chief Flemming pointed out an especially gruesome scene in one of the smaller windows. A Japanese artillery position was being overrun. The drone gave them a view of the carnage from a virtual height of one hundred meters. What was that line from Shakespeare, she thought. There’s none die well that die in battle… The Englishman had been writing about Agincourt, half a millennium ago, but he could just as well have been observing the fight for that gun battery.

From the comparative safety of her hiding place, Jane Willet gave thanks that her life paths had led her to the cool and quiet space of her bridge on the Havoc, and not into the middle of the insensate slaughter taking place just over the horizon.

D-DAY + 36. 9 JUNE 1944. 0020 HOURS.

USS ARMANNO, PACIFIC AREA OF OPERATIONS.

For the first time since he’d taken command of the USS Armanno, Captain John F. Kennedy wished he could trade it for his old PT boat. The Armanno, a new Halsey-class guided missile destroyer, was a magnificent fighting ship. Unlike his old boat, though, he didn’t think she was really meant for this sort of work. He would have felt a lot more comfortable slipping in and out of Japanese-held waters on the much smaller, less conspicuous PT boat. He knew he could have accommodated the six-strong Force Recon team. Even with all their equipment and the rigid-hulled inflatable, he still could have squeezed them in.

But then again, if the nips tumbled them, it’d be a lot easier fighting their way out in the Armanno. And of course, Spruance’s armada didn’t include any torpedo boats.

“Coming up on the release point, skipper.”