Nanten craned his head skyward and slitted his eyes against the sun's glare. It was a hot, gray day, and it felt like he was sitting in an oven. Ammunition popped and burned around him. The moaning stopped, and he knew he was finally alone.

It seemed perversely safe inside this little ghost ship now. The war was a distant murmur. Surely nobody would fire upon a vessel full of dead bodies. Even the gaijin were not that uncivilized. Although, given the rumors he'd heard of their atrocities in Australia, perhaps they were.

Seagulls began to gather now, and they shrieked and swooped down to feed on the rich pickings. Yutaka Nanten felt outrage boil up inside him. He was preparing to shoot at the nearest bird, which was attempting to tear a strip of meat away from the charred rump of a comrade, when the barge hit something with a grinding clang and a great lurch sideways.

The boat tipped over about twenty degrees, as the keel scraped across sand, and possibly a coral bottom. He had been so conditioned to leap forward when he heard those sounds that the failure of the bow doors to drop actually surprised him. But then he remembered that there was no one to operate the lever.

The boat slewed around, beginning to rock along its axis, as it turned side-on to the surf.

Nanten's eyes opened wide, cracking the thin crust of dried blood that had formed in the folds of his skin. Big waves bore down on him. Big enough to see over the side of the boat. For some reason that terrified him even more than the strafing of the fighter plane. The barge rolled to and fro, tipping itself toward the swell like an open bowl. A breaker slammed into the seaward side with a sound as loud as a small shell going off. At least two feet of water poured in on top of the corpses.

It was too much to bear.

Without thinking he scrambled to his feet and over the side that seemed closest to shore. Another wave struck as he attempted to get free, threatening to tip everything over on top of him. A pitiable sound crawled up out of Nanten, a mewling animalistic protest against the fates. And then he was thrown free. He sailed through the air, hit the water, and tumbled over and over without a hint of control. Salt water rushed in through his nose and down his throat, and he began to cough and choke, which caused him to suck in even more water. His arms and legs, no longer shaking, scrambled for purchase, but he could not touch bottom. In the swirling chaos, he wasn't even sure which way was up and which was down.

His feet struck out on their own accord, desperate to find something solid from which they might propel him to safety. He was vaguely aware that the water was turning pink, and then red. His head broke surface just long enough for him to grab one precious mouthful of air, and then he was under again, tossed about like flotsam.

His left toe touched something.

And then he felt sand underfoot. He pushed off and broke free of the surf again. Sucked in clean air. Once… twice. A wave slammed him, but this time when he went under, gritty sand scraped at his face. His hands and knees touched bottom.

He beetled forward, riding in on a small pink wave of mutilation and blood froth.

But he was safe. He had made land.

Nanten crawled up from the water's edge. The sea rushed up the incline of the beach, and flowed back again, sucking the sand out from beneath his hands. Despite the contamination of the water, from the contents of the barge, he'd never felt cleaner. The awful gummy sensation of being bathed in human blood was gone. The sun was warm on his neck. The sand hot beneath his hands.

"Going somewhere, Tojo?"

But Corporal Yutaka Nanten was beyond the point where his heart could possibly leap in fright. It had been racing so fast, for so long, that the meaningless words actually seemed to slow his pulse.

Then he looked up.

Three gaijin stood in front of him. Two men and one woman. The woman was pointing something at him that could only be a gun from the future. She was going to disintegrate him, turn him into dust that would blow away on the breeze.

"I said, going somewhere?"

Nanten turned his head slightly toward the larger of the men, the one who had spoken. He looked like a civilian, dressed in a business suit, which struck the corporal as funny, down here on the sand, with the remains of his platoon bobbing around him on the tide.

The businessman was also carrying a gun, but it was a standard contemporary weapon. A shotgun of some sort. The muzzle stared back at him, a circle of darkness. Eternity.

Suddenly it flashed white…

Rosanna Natoli jumped as the shotgun went off. She hadn't expected Cherry to actually kill the guy. She hadn't really expected anybody to crawl out of the barge when they'd seen it wash up on the beach. It'd been shot to pieces long before they got to it.

Nobody said anything, though. A day or two back, Curtis might have protested, but they were all well past that sort of bullshit now. None of them were going to risk leaving a wounded survivor in the barge who might later bring them undone.

She filmed Cherry as he bent forward and unhitched four grenades from the dead man's webbing. The detective passed one to Curtis, kept one in his hand, and pocketed the other two.

"On my count," he said.

The young officer nodded.

"One… two… three…"

They pulled the pins-actually they looked like pieces of string to Rosanna-and lobbed the grenades, one after the other, into the barge. The muffled crump of detonation came a few seconds later, as they hurried back up the sand to the walking track that passed through the dunes. They'd given up on cars after the last one had been strafed by a Zero.

"You getting a signal?" Curtis asked as they pushed back into the thick growth from which they'd emerged to check on the barge.

"Yep," she said. "Still there."

They were all curiously comforted by the continued presence of the Big Eye drones that were circling over the island. They were so high up, it'd be impossible to spot them-or to shoot them down-and they weren't armed, as far as she knew. So there was nothing the drones could do to help, really. But just the knowledge that they were there, that the Multination Force could still keep tabs on them-that was enough to make them feel as if they weren't completely alone. And it gave them faint hope that they might be rescued.

"How're your batteries?" asked Cherry.

"Good," she said. "These babies were approved by the Energizer Bunny himself. They'll be sweet for another couple of days."

The looks on their faces told her that neither man knew what the hell she was talking about.

Another ten minutes of walking through the scrub brought them to the tree-shaded hollow where they'd made their camp. Though it was pretty generous to call it a camp. Three folding cots under a canvas tarp. A solar sheet to recharge Rosanna's battery packs. Big cans of fresh water. Five days' worth of canned food looted on Cherry's say-so from an abandoned shop in town.

"There's a lot of other barges coming ashore," said Natoli. "You think we should get out of here?"

Cherry dropped onto a foldaway cot, grunting with exhaustion. "We'll be all right, sister. They're beaching around the point. The way the land lies, they'll move inland away from us, not toward us. I say we lay up until dark, and then see if we can move back over to the Koolaus. Get you a better vantage point to film what's happening at Pearl."

"The Japs are going to be all over the roads by now," said Curtis. "How do you plan on getting past them?"

Cherry rubbed at the back of his neck as he rooted through the pile of tins for something to eat. "People I used to know, Lieutenant. They did most of their business out of plain sight."

They were all tired, so they left it at that, and sat around in silence. Cherry opened a can of baked beans and ate them cold, sitting on the edge of his cot. Curtis washed down a Hershey bar with a cup of water.