Lieutenant Wally Curtis just couldn't believe it. He had thought of the jet planes as indestructible. And yet there they were, every last one of them, totally fubar. A dozen or more piles of burning wreckage.
Hickham Field was littered with scrap metal and human body parts, but most of the crash crews and fire engines were clustered about the tarmac where the F-22s from the Clinton had been parked. They were all gone, except for two that had been up in the air when the missiles came over. And he'd heard they had been banged up when they had to land on a normal road surface, because there was no undamaged runway anywhere that could take them. The undercarriage of one had collapsed when it fouled in a big pothole, and the other had clipped a power pole and just about torn off a wing.
That was the scuttlebutt, anyway. He hadn't seen it himself, and as Rosanna kept telling him, unless you actually saw it happen, it probably didn't.
Well, he'd seen this happen hadn't he? Curtis had thought he'd never again see anything to equal Midway, but this came close. They'd driven in to Hickham, flashing three different types of ID at the guard post, which was too busy to check them properly, anyhow. The base was a write-off. It was hardly recognizable as a working facility.
Rosanna was too busy filming to answer any of his questions, so he turned to Detective Cherry instead, which was pretty strange when he thought about it, because the policeman was supposed to be following them.
"You think the Japs are gonna invade, Detective?"
Cherry laughed, but it was a sour, shriveled-up sound. Curtis didn't think there was any humor in it at all. "Sure, kid. You sucker-punch a guy this good, you gotta give him a good kickin' while he's down. Finish him off if you can. That was their mistake the first time around. They shoulda finished us back in December last year."
"What should we do, then? I tried to get back to my unit, but it's just a big crater now. I couldn't find anyone at Pearl."
"Forget Pearl," Cherry said. "The Japs are gonna be over to bomb the rubble soon enough. You know how to fire a gun, boy?"
"I did basic," Curtis protested, feeling as if Cherry was somehow disregarding his martial prowess.
The detective let go another one of his humorless laughs, as a series of explosions destroyed a hangar full of Wildcat fighters a couple of hundred yards away. Curtis flinched and ducked, but Cherry hardly moved. Rosanna swung her little movie camera around to take in the new action.
"Basic, huh?" Cherry said. "Well, that's good. Killing a man is pretty basic, when you get right down to it. Put a bullet in him. Or a knife. Put your hands around his neck and choke him to death. You think you could handle that, son? Killing a man right up close like that? Smelling him as he shits his pants and calls out for his mama?" Cherry's eyes were lifeless as he spoke. In a way, it was more disturbing than if he'd been ranting.
"I can handle myself," Curtis replied weakly.
An air raid siren began to wail before the cop could reply. Curtis spun around, almost describing a complete circle before he spotted the danger: dozens of planes coming in from the west, diving toward the airfield out of the late afternoon sun.
"Rosanna!" he yelled. "Run."
They all ran, heading for a slit trench twenty yards away. About a hundred others hand the same idea as the first bombs began their whistling descent.
Both Rosanna and Cherry surprised him. She by jumping into the shelter and then popping right back up to film the attack while others cowered on the floor. Cherry by the speed with which he covered the distance to safety, and then by pulling his service revolver and taking potshots at the Japanese planes.
The policeman wasn't the only one doing that. A crackle of rifle and pistol fire grew into a minor torrent as men, and even a few women, opened up with small arms. Curtis felt less than useless, having no weapon to shoot. He crouched and hurried over to Rosanna's side. She had turned, and was now filming down the trench, capturing the resistance to the bombardment.
The fury of the attack increased so much and with such speed that Curtis thought the sound alone was going to kill them. He tried to shout at Rosanna to duck down, but the crash of gunfire and the storm of exploding bombs all around them made it impossible to communicate. Fire trucks that had been pouring water onto the burning SeaRaptors were suddenly obliterated by a stick of bombs. Massive roiling balls of filthy orange flame engulfed the tenders, and the firefighters who had stayed with them. One truck was lifted high into the air, turned over slowly like a spitted hog, and smashed back to earth, crushing two men and a woman who'd been running for cover.
Curtis didn't know what weird sense cut in to save them, but he grabbed Rosanna and pulled her down a split second before a Zero roared overhead, strafing the trench line and turning dozens of defenders into chopped meat and splinters of bone. Rosanna was screaming and clawing at his face, trying to get to her feet again as another Zero on a strafing run chewed up the trench. Hot soil and pieces of tarmac poured in on them as Curtis used his body weight to press down on the reporter and keep her safe.
"You're going to get killed!" he yelled over the uproar.
"We're all going to get killed, you stupid sonovabitch," she cried back.
Curtis felt someone grab the collar of his torn shirt and haul him up off Rosanna. He was powerless to fight back.
It was Cherry, passing him a rifle. The stock was shattered and sticky with gore. "I admire your spirit, trying to get laid at a time like this," said the cop, "But your country could use a little help, too, Casanova."
The volume of fire pouring from the trench was a fraction of what it had been, now. Curtis saw why when Cherry turned away. Nearly half the soldiers and air crew were dead, shredded by the cannon and machine-gun fire. The floor of the trench was covered in a thick, semiliquid gruel. Curtis felt his gorge rise and his stomach contract. He vomited up everything he'd eaten for lunch.
"That's the spirit," Cherry called back at him. "Spit in their fucking eyes."
IN TRANSIT TO WASHINGTON
About the only thing to recommend the Connie was the lack of restrictions Eastern had on using electronic equipment while in flight. Kolhammer was able to stay hooked into Fleetnet for most of the trip to Washington. The link was tenuous, and prone to dropouts, but as long as he was content to take compressed data bursts, rather than a live feed, he was fine.
Nothing else was fine, though.
His Secret Service shadows were back. Agents Flint and Stirling, by order of President Roosevelt. At least they didn't crowd him, as they had when he first arrived.
His slate beeped with updates every few minutes. Tellingly, most of them didn't come directly from the remaining Task Force units in Hawaii. There weren't many remaining Task Force units in Hawaii. But there were at least ten journalists from the Clinton who could provide real-time coverage from the islands, so the link had been maintained largely to provide for them. They were allowed to access Fleetnet to file, but on the condition that their raw footage became the property of the Task Force.
Mike Judge had a team of analysts on the Clinton raking the coverage and repackaging it for military use. That was a lot like what used to happen at home, anyway. An almost embarrassing percentage of so-called intelligence was lifted straight from the news media, only to have it returned to them as "inside information."
Kolhammer stretched out his cramped legs in the surprisingly roomy wicker chair of the Lockheed Constellation, and scanned the latest reports from Hawaii. Judge's people had confirmed that Lavals, almost certainly coming from the Dessaix, had struck at a number of points around the islands. The missiles hadn't done nearly so much damage as they could have, partly because some had malfunctioned, or been sabotaged, and partly because the rest hadn't been used to their best advantage.