The giant ship was pitching slowly, making it a little difficult for him to get back to the light armored vehicle he was supposed to ride in. It was dark in the hold, but they'd showed him how to use the infrared setting on his goggles. It turned the darkest place into a world colored red and pink. It was unsettling at first, but a hell of a lot better than barking your shin.

There were very few men-or women-moving around now. He could see some of them here and there: a head popping up out of a turret, the driver sitting in the front of a Humvee, somebody checking the missile racks on a LAV. But most of the six hundred or so who were going ashore were already buttoned up in their vehicles.

A huge noise, like the sound of a speeding train in a tunnel, suddenly filled the hold. Shapcott jumped a little, but didn't panic. It was the shore bombardment beginning. Rockets were screaming away to destroy the Japs' gun batteries and command centers at the beachhead they were supposed to assault. The captain hurried a little faster-he didn't want to get left behind. And he had the impression that once those big gated doors opened in the bow, there'd be no stopping these guys. They'd just roll right over the top of you if you got in the way.

He reached the LAV just as another racket joined the roar of the barrage.

"What's that?" he asked, without raising his voice. He'd learned not to do that. A microphone in his helmet meant he didn't have to.

"Choppers going in," explained Second Lieutenant Biff Hannon, as he reached a gloved hand out to Shapcott to haul him inside. The captain barely had time to strap himself in before the vehicle lurched into motion.

Shapcott felt their departure from the assault ship as a dizzying drop down the ramp, a sickening crunch as the front tires dug into the sand of Besar Beach, and a moment of floating ambivalence while the light armored vehicle swam through the breakers and up onto the sand.

Twelve movie screens glowed in the body of the LAV. Lieutenant Hannon seemed capable of following the action on all of them at once. To Shapcott the world outside was a confused inferno of burning vehicles, secondary explosions, mammoth, rumbling tanks firing at Christ-knew-what, and satanic-looking flying machines that pirouetted through the sky like giant mechanical dragonflies, spitting fire and thunder at distant, unseen enemies. Even inside the LAV, with his ears protected by the "smart gel" lining of his bulky helmet, he still thought the sound of battle was painfully loud.

He was strapped into a large, admittedly very comfortable chair. But the violent stop-and-go motion of the armored vehicle still threw him around unnervingly. They seemed to speed everywhere, swerving and stopping frequently. At one point the automatic cannon on their own turret fired for a few seconds. Shapcott noticed the movie screens light up as something detonated somewhere.

"Nice shooting, Maryanne," said Hannon.

But Shapcott never figured out what they had just shot.

After fifteen minutes the bedlam and madness of the beachhead subsided. They bounced over one last rough section of ground and then swung onto a smooth surface.

Hannon spoke into the tiny, wire-thin microphone that emerged from his helmet. "All units, all units, this is the Biffmeister. We're on the road. Let's roll, chickadees."

"Go go go!" Hannon yelled.

The armored doors of the LAV sprang open and the six-man crew leapt out into the night. Captain Tom Shapcott leapt with them. Instantly, Hannon flew back into him, knocking him to his knees.

Shapcott tried to help the fellow to his feet, but right away he recognized the feeling of dead weight. That unnerved him. He'd been assured that the body armor would protect them, and not just by Hannon. He'd spoken to sailors on the Astoria who had gone on about the virtual impossibility of killing a man who was protected by the battlesuits these people wore.

But as he scrambled out from under Hannon's inert form, he saw that the lieutenant had died from a shot to the face. His jaw and half his nose were gone, and a gluey mess of shattered bone and brain tissue was oozing out of the massive wound.

"Up you get, Captain."

The voice in his ears was quiet but he heard it without any trouble, even as the battle raged around him. Hundreds of troops in black body armor ran forward toward the smoking breach in the prison wall. Choppers flew over them, rockets and machine guns pouring out a solid river of destruction. There was still some resistance-here and there a lone Japanese sentry, or a machine gun that had escaped the initial rocket swarm. But the marines charged forward as though nothing affected them, not rifle or machine-gun fire, not grenades or mortar rounds. He did see one or two go down, though. Killed or wounded by stray shrapnel or bullets that found flesh and bone instead of armor padding.

Shapcott started forward even as the most primitive parts of his brain screamed at him to get down, to dig the deepest hole he possibly could, and stay there.

He'd turned off the schematics in his goggles. They were just too confusing. But he left the infrared on, moving through a hellish twilight of bloody carnage. Three Japs appeared to his right, screaming incoherently.

He fired on them and they burst into a shower of entrails and bloody fog.

Jesus Christ.

"Come on, come on!" a voice yelled in his ear, almost uncomfortably loud.

Something hit him. He spun under the impact, and staggered but did not fall. It felt like he'd been punched by a prizefighter.

Bullets snapped and cracked everywhere, their passage clear to him by the heat trails that showed vividly in the infrared. Enormous volumes of fire saturated the faintest sign of enemy resistance.

He found himself panting at the breach in the wall. A tank had muscled through and was demolishing a stone building a hundred yards away with its main gun. Bright red streaks of light shot out of the rubble, but not many of them. The tank's gun boomed again, twice. Shapcott felt the pressure wave in his chest and guts, and the wreckage of the blockhouse jumped under the impact of high explosives. No more shots came from there.

Hannon's troops moved with practiced certainty through the slaughter and turmoil. They jumped and ran and fired without seeming ever to halt. It was as though they knew the terrain better than the Japs. He had to admit, it was beyond him. He slowed the pace of his advance to a walk, giving himself time to properly examine the surroundings for the first time.

He seemed to be in a large courtyard. The walls of the prison soared above him. Fires burned all around, and Japanese bodies lay everywhere. They were all hideously disfigured, as though they had been torn apart by wild beasts, not gunfire.

He became conscious of his thirst. It seemed as though he'd had no water in days. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt swollen and numb. He fumbled at his unfamiliar webbing and managed to unclip a water bottle. As he tipped the sweet, cool liquid down his parched throat he saw movement, someone waving, in the corner of his eye.

Shapcott turned and saw a woman. She was thin, and filthy, and unkempt. He suddenly realized she was also in a cage. In his tunnel vision, he hadn't noticed it before. There were others in there with her, all of them waving him over now. He held the muzzle of his gun toward the ground as he approached, but he didn't safe the weapon.

"Over here!"

"We need help."

"We need a doctor."

He stepped up the pace. The sounds of battle seemed to be falling away. He wondered whether it was over for the moment.

"Who are you?" the woman cried. "Have you come to rescue us?"

They shrank back as he drew close. Some of them looked quite fearful of him. When he thought about it, he realized he would look pretty intimidating in the armor, and they would have seen the others sweep though, killing everyone who resisted them. He carefully unhooked the strap that held his helmet in place and took it off. He pushed the goggles back up in his forehead and was surprised to discover he could see quite well by moonlight.