Dan Black hardly recognized the savage, gore-soaked creature he saw in there. But he knew it was Julia.

He'd been happy with the way he had adapted to the arrival of Kolhammer's ships. He prided himself on the ease with which he'd accepted the impossible, and adjusted to the demands of these strange people. But now he found himself staring, uncomprehendingly, at the snarl of rage and bloodlust that flashed across his lover's face, and at the cold self-possession he found in the eyes of her friend, sitting in the chair next to him.

Who the hell are these people?

"How we doing, Amanda?" asked Flight Lieutenant Harford.

Hayes's voice responded inside his helmet, cutting through the dull thud of the rotors. "Three hours of fuel, ten minutes till insertion… You boys get that? Time to get funky."

The five Navy SEALs and Major Pavel Ivanov, of the Russian Spetsnaz forces, checked their harnesses and weapons loads.

The stealthed Seahawk flew low over the jungle, well below any local radar-although the chopper was sheathed in carbon-composite tiles, which would shed primitive scanning like a bride's nightgown. But Harford was a belt-and-braces guy. He already felt dangerously exposed on this mission.

"Three minutes," said Flight Lieutenant Hayes as two gunships accelerated past them. The lead Comanche banked over and began to work a dense clump of bushland with rockets and miniguns. Secondary explosions testified to the presence of some sort of Japanese camp.

"One minute," warned Hayes, who was keeping a close eye on the combined feed of the navigation radar and SINS, the chopper's self-enclosed inertial navigation system. Not a patch on the third-generation NAVSTAR GPS system, but it would have to do.

It was cold in the back of the chopper. The SEAL team donned their helmets and night vision combat goggles. Ivanov leaned forward to peer around CPO Vincente Rogas and into the darkness. He switched from the luminescent lime green of low-light amplification to infrared. Immediately the heat leaking from the chopper's engine cowling shimmered in front of him like a curtain. He adjusted the optimum range and it fell away appreciably. A cluster of buildings, blacked out, but still bleeding cherry-pink warmth into the night, appeared to the south. Flight Lieutenant Hayes's lilting voice sounded crisply inside his helmet.

"As we are preparing to land the captain asks that you return your tray tables to the upright position, unfasten your seat belts, and jump out of the helicopter. We'd like to thank you for flying with the U.S. Navy, and hope you will choose to travel with us again in the future."

"The far fucking future," added Harford.

"Amen," said Ivanov.

As the Seahawk swooped down on the compound, a platoon of the marine fire team opened up. They had been lying concealed in the elephant grass outside the barbed wire. Twelve Japanese guards perished instantly, shredded by the concentrated volley of caseless ceramic projectiles. A couple of Hellfire missiles reached through the darkness to obliterate the single guard tower.

In the back of the big chopper, Airman Toby La Salle checked the fast rope connections as the men prepared to drop the last twenty meters to the ground. The two parties wished each other good luck, and then the small special ops team was gone. Into the black.

The small compound housing civilian prisoners underwent what was technically referred to as vertical and horizontal envelopment. In lay terms the Japanese defenders were swarmed from all sides and above in one mad minute of psychotically violent but finely controlled gunfire and high-explosive bombardment.

The SEAL team signaled to the marines to cease fire and dropped into the compound. First squad assaulted the main gates, now protected only by dead men, and the rest of their unit poured through the breach. Ivanov and Rogas were already moving, running toward the first of the flimsy huts housing the prisoners. The chief grunted as a Japanese slug spun him around, but his body armor saved him and he was up again in a second. The sentry was dead before Rogas regained his feet, drilled with a three-round burst fired from the hip by Ivanov.

A Japanese officer wielding a sword charged at them from the side of the hut. But his pants were undone, ruining the effect. The Spetsnaz officer took his head off with another three-round burst.

Rogas kicked in the door of the hut and spun to his left, shooting another Jap who was coming at him from the darkened corner. Women began screaming.

"Americans! We're Americans" Rogas yelled in English. "Get down on the floor. Get down now! Anybody left standing gets shot."

The infrared night vision lent a nightmarish atmosphere to a scene that already recalled one of the lower levels of Hell. The women were naked, or clothed in scraps at best. They were underweight, covered in bruises, sores, and their own filth. Alternately moaning and screaming, they writhed and groped in the dark, unable to see what was happening, unlike Ivanov and Rogas. They could see at least eight Japs in the room, some of them naked, too.

The SEALs hunted them down one after another. Shooting each man in the back of the head as he tried to crawl along the floor. When only three were left, they jumped to their feet with both hands in the air.

"No shoot. No shoot!" one yelled.

Rogas shot him anyway.

Duffy had visited some stinking Third World cesspools in her time, but this place took the prize. She tried hard to keep the disgust from showing on her face. It wouldn't be fair to the prisoners, especially not these ones.

The reporter moved among the women of Camp 5 and let her minicam run, but they were in no state to be interviewed. She'd just bummed another stick of Zoloft from Bukowski when her flexipad signaled a message. She still had the theme from The Simpsons as her ringer.

Snatching the pad from her arm, she turned away from the marines and walked a short distance toward the camp gates. The signal was strong, which made sense. She was patched into a military-grade comm net. The caller appeared on the screen.

It was Rosanna, back on the Clinton. She'd preferred to not jump into a hot LZ, and Duffy respected the choice.

"How you doing, sweetie?" Natoli asked.

"Fucked my shoulder again, but otherwise I'm fine," said Duffy, her voice shaking a little. "This place sucks, by the way."

"Hot?"

"Not so much. We got pretty busy coming into Manila, but nothing to brag about. The shooting was mostly done within two hours. But I hopped over here to one of the women's camps after the SEALs took it. Jesus, you wouldn't believe this fucking place, Rosanna. It's like a Taliban rape camp for Americans. How's Dan, you seen him? I think I might have been a little harsh with him before I left."

Rosanna chuckled.

"He's fine. I told him you were premenstrual."

"Actually, I am, on top of everything else."

A dull thudding noise told her a chopper was approaching.

"Gotta go," she said. "I really gotta get to work. This'll be a good story if I can keep it together." Duffy signed off as a big Sea Stallion dropped down into the field just outside the camp gates.

A woman in full combat rig pounded down the ramp of the heavy lift chopper and into the compound. As she went past Duffy she appeared to be trying very, very hard to contain her fury.

Lieutenant Chen tried to talk to her as she stormed up, but she sailed right past the platoon commander. The camp women were being tended to in an emergency aid station that the marines had run up next to the former commandant's hut. He was alive, having dived under his bed when the missile attack on the divisional barracks began. Two marines stood guard over him and four other prisoners by the smoking ruins of the guard tower.