Homma looked like he was attempting to bristle, but nothing came. Just a sigh. "Yamamoto," he said quietly.

She knew she was going to be haunted by this place for months, if not years to come. Bundaberg was one of the worst atrocities she'd ever been witness to. The tiny hospital was overwhelmed. They'd begun to set up emergency facilities at a nearby high school, but had to find a new location when it became obvious that the Japanese had used the place as a torture and interrogation center.

One civilian health worker, a Rhodesian doctor named Michael Cooper, had survived his imprisonment and proved himself invaluable in triage. He told her of the appalling mistreatment meted out to the most vulnerable members of the community. Hundreds of survivors owed him their lives, but Major Margie Francois knew that wouldn't be enough to save him from himself. He was going to spend the rest of his life mourning the ones he couldn't save. She knew that particular level of hell only too well.

They were standing in the entrance of a giant hospital tent as dusk fell, discussing the likely treatment needs of the surviving locals when a passing corpsman stopped to tell them that the field punishments had already begun.

The major watched as a sickly grimace stole over the doctor's face. His cheeks first drained of color before flushing bright red. His Adam's apple bobbed convulsively as he struggled to say something.

Francois placed a hand on his arm, which was twitching with nervous tension, or possibly exhaustion.

Cooper croaked at her. "We were told that the uh… procedure… was open to the public."

"Why don't you go have a look, Doc," she said softly. "It helps. Sort of. Helps me sometimes anyway. You've done more than enough here. Go on, if that's what you want."

She gripped his arm a little tighter. "But if I was you, I'd be getting some rest, too. You look like a man on the edge of collapse. You've earned a break."

The Rhodesian shook his head. His eyes were a thousand miles away. "No, Major," he said, "I've earned the right to see justice."

"Okay, then, take this," she said, handing him a stick of gum packed with a very mild stimulant. "It'll get you through the next two hours, but then I'm going to send a corpsman to make sure you get some sleep. Two hours, Doctor. I mean it."

He agreed to follow her instructions, and shambled out into the dark. Francois watched him go.

The snap of gunfire was already drifting over the ruins of the town, from the main enclosure of the liberated prison camp. About two hundred survivors had gathered there to watch the rather unceremonious retribution being exacted on their behalf. She didn't need to see it herself again. She'd briefly attended a Sanction 4 execution earlier in the day.

No drumbeat accompanied the condemned men to their final moment. No holy men of any faith administered the last rites. The prisoners' hands were cuffed behind their backs with plastic ties. They were led or dragged over to a deep trench that had been dug in the center of the playing field by a mechanical excavator. The simple charge of "a crime against humanity" was read out to them. They were forced to kneel at the mouth of the pit, and a single bullet was fired into the back of each prisoner's head by a man or woman, officer or enlisted, who had been rostered onto field punishment detail for that day.

Jones and Barnes divided the task equally between their commands. As a medical officer, Francois was one of the few who had the right to claim exemption from the duty, and as long as she had worthy lives to save, she generally exercised her right.

But later, standing in triage, surrounded by a pile of bloody rags that had been cut from the body of an eight-year-old boy who was now in surgery, having a gangrenous leg amputated, she felt the black heat rising inside her head again. It made her wish she'd gone with Cooper.

What the hell is wrong with people that they'd do these things-to little kids?

It was the same fury that had driven her to the edge of reason back at the prison camp in Cabanatuan, when she'd capped off five Japanese guards and their commander. She'd earned a reprimand from Jones for that-for carrying out a Sanction 4 punishment without a properly cosigned authority. But none of those women was complaining, and she wasn't losing any sleep over it.

"Major Francois. I need your okay to release the battalion store of amoxicillin, ma'am. It's the last we've got."

She wrenched herself out of the spiral of dark thoughts that was threatening to drag her under. A corporal was holding out a flexipad and plastic pen.

"Sure," she muttered, more to herself than to the corporal; then she signed out the last of their broad-spectrum antibiotics. They had originally been intended for the Chinese internees at the caliphate's detention centers on Java, back in twenty-one.

"Major Francois, ma'am," another voice called out, "we just lost those 'temp surgeons flying up out of Brisbane, ma'am. Their plane crashed on takeoff at Archerfield."

Then another: "Major Francois, we're going to need you in surgery, ma'am. That antitank round fucked up Bukowksi a lot worse than we thought."

It felt like she'd stepped through a portal into purgatory: the coppery stink of blood, the stench of putrescent flesh, the stink of voided bowels, the screams, the sobbing, the madness and horror that were her natural working environment.

Her flexipad beeped and pinged with constant messages, queries, demands for action, and solutions to impossible problems.

The human part of her wanted to walk away. But Michael Cooper hadn't given up, and he had faced a much more daunting challenge.

"Get me some more surgeons," she told the orderly who'd delivered the bad news out of Archerfield. "We've been training hundreds of them down in Sydney and Melbourne. We got fuckin' surgeons to burn."

Then she turned to the runner who'd been sent to bring her back to the operating room.

"Tell them I'll suit up in five," she said.

She unclipped the flexipad from her belt and ignored the hundreds of messages stacking up in her in-tray. She fired off quick, brutal messages to half a dozen people who were dragging their feet at various points between here and Brisbane. She told them to get their thumbs out of their asses and send her the drugs, dressings, and personnel she had asked for when the battalion left the Brisbane Line. She threatened to personally shoot anyone who didn't do exactly as she ordered.

The stories about what she'd done at Cabanatuan lent the threat some real heft.

Just before she headed back to the operating theater, she grabbed a passing corpsman and tasked him with finding Dr. Cooper in exactly one hour. "Knock him out with a taser if you have to," she said. "That man needs to get some rest. Hell, we may need him back here before long."

She ignored the insistent beeping of the flexipad. It had been doing that ever since she'd jumped from the rear of the LAV and run toward the first cries of "Medic!" hours earlier.

There were close to nine hundred unanswered routine vidmails and e-mails in the lattice memory of her pad. There was only one she would later regret failing to get to in time.