A small biochip implanted at the base of his neck, and powered by the electrical charge of his body's cells, picked up the bone vibrations caused by the comment, transforming them into a quantum signal that was captured by the processors in his ear bud and narrowcast to the rest of the soldiers. They heard his voice in their helmets as clearly as if he had pressed his lips there and whispered to them.

"And I thought those pricks were supposed to revere royalty," whispered Mitchell.

They lay on a small ridge that rose twenty meters above a Japanese barracks complex at the edge of the town. Familiar with Singapore in his own time, Harry found himself amazed at every turn by the primitive, colonial outpost through which they'd crept. There were no high-rise buildings, no architecture he thought of as modern in any way. You could see the water from almost every vantage point. Shrieks and chirps and a thousand other noises of the jungle never ceased. Monkeys still roamed everywhere.

A strict curfew kept the captive population of Malays and Indians inside after dark, and most of the Europeans were locked up in the Changi prison camp. Even so, he could tell when they passed near one ethnic neighborhood or another. The Indian quarter smelled of peppers, curry powder, and exotic fruits, the Chinese of fried meat and jasmine rice. The odors must have settled into the skin of the place, he thought. There was very little food in Singapore at the moment.

Since this was far from the war front, security had been allowed to slack off. Singapore was a garrison town. Only three men made a regular desultory sweep of the subtropical jungle around the barracks, sticking strictly to schedule and a well-beaten walking track. Harry's squad members were lurking just off this path, waiting for a signal from three other SAS units that were moving into position closer to the buildings. They'd traversed the city via dense tunnels of verdant growth that ran all over her. Only the very center had been too built up to provide safe passage. A grid of wide avenues ran there, fringed with flame trees and frangipani. The grass verges, untrimmed in the wet heat, were already overgrown, but the white government buildings were all occupied by Japanese troops and administrators now.

They were somebody else's problem. Harry's team was assigned to take out the main barracks on the road to Changi, temporary home to more than two thousand Japanese soldiers.

His tac display went active.

"Payload inbound," he said. "Thirty seconds. Sergeant, fire up the laser strobe."

"Strobe active, targets acquired," said St. Clair as six thin lines of invisible laser light stabbed out from a small, tripod-mounted device in repeater bursts modulated to the microsecond. The photon stream pulsed across the night before silently painting the center of four long huts in which slept hundreds of Japanese. The laser strobe looked a little like a video camera, and indeed it would record what happened in the next few minutes.

"Teams two, three, and four report strobes active and targets acquired," said Mitchell.

The other SAS teams, stationed at the base points of a triangle surrounding the barracks complex, had locked strobes onto the remaining buildings and facilities, including a small guard tower, three machine-gun and mortar pits, and a line of light tanks. With fifteen seconds till showtime one man peeled away from each team, moving silently into the scrub, stalking the sentries who had last passed by.

There was no visual warning that preceded the approach of the cruise missiles. Their turbojets burned without visible flame. Their imminent arrival registered as a time hack in the lower left corner of the goggle displays. The team leaders, had they chosen to, could have watched a missile's progress as a receiver embedded within their goggles picked up a signal from the seeker warhead, which translated into a series of red arrowheads tracking across their heads-up displays. But being pragmatic, they all chose to plant their faces in the dirt and breathe out against the wave of overpressure that would soon hit them.

Harry imagined that he just might have caught a rumble of distant thunder as the missile popped up and chose the closest of the targets designated by the laser strobes, all in a sliver of time too infinitesimal to be comprehended by any human mind. Flaps on its stubby wings purred into position. Gated doors swung open down the length of its belly. A very small, controlled fusion reaction cooked up deep inside the belly of the missile for just over two microseconds, enough to superheat its two hundred tungsten slugs and spit them out of their containment cells with enough kinetic energy in each to destroy a heavily armored fighting vehicle.

The huts, first on the target list, were only constructed of plywood and corrugated iron.

Sixty percent of the missile's submunitions load, 120 white-hot slugs traveling at hypersonic speed, slammed into those frail structures and literally vaporized them. The expanding gas, a molecular mix of human tissue, building materials, and superheated air, manifested itself as a conventional explosion, which blew the rest of the target mass to hell and beyond.

The Japanese crews manning the weapons pits didn't even have time to turn around before the slugs shrieked in on top of their positions. The guard tower bought just 2 percent of the load. A toilet block got 3. And the light tanks took what was left, 30 percent of the package, or sixty slugs.

The explosions sounded like the birth of a volcano.

The missile then swung through 180 degrees to head north for a secondary target, which had been programmed into its seeker head; the naval base, where high-altitude drone flights confirmed a large amount of Japanese shipping was tied up.

"Right, gentlemen," said Captain Windsor. "Let's have at them."

HMAS IPSWICH, 2359 HOURS, 20 JUNE 1942

From the moment they'd helped him into this weird padded armor, Captain Tom Shapcott had done everything he could to stop worrying about the bulky feel of the "ballistic plate," or the awkward weight of his "powered helmet," and the confusing array of little movies, message boxes, and floating screens full of numbers and meaningless letter codes that appeared in front of his eyes when he turned on his "combat goggles." He knew he would need to focus on the job at hand.

He stood within the giant steel cocoon of the Australian ship's vehicle deck, awed into silence. The four Abrams tanks waiting there were generations beyond the Shermans he knew. They were still obviously tanks, but the size of them, the brute promise of destruction that lay within their hulking mass, robbed Shapcott of words. Behind them squatted ten so-called light armored vehicles, which they called LAVs, each seeming larger and more formidable than a German tiger tank, each bristling with an individual missile suite and a twin-barreled 50mm chain gun that they'd told him could reduce a concrete bunker to dust and rubble within minutes-perhaps even seconds.

Beyond those sat giant jeeps and other unidentifiable vehicles. The weight of violence confined within the space was overwhelming. The mass of those tanks, the raw lines of their frames, the solidity… he'd seen a lifetime's worth of burning, metal wreckage and he knew that nothing was invincible. But by God, those awful things did look close to it.

The Aussies were all right, but he found himself more comfortable with the company of marines who'd been detached from the Eighty-second and temporarily assigned to Halabi's task force for the raid on Singapore. They weren't marines as he knew them. There were even a couple of women driving those tanks, but when you got over how different they looked, and you sat down and talked to them, it turned out they loved barbecues and football season, and fishing, and baseball, and beer and the Constitution of the United States of America as much as any man or woman he'd ever met.