“Good work, Ms. Wilkins.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Second salvo away.”

Willet felt the submarine shudder with the energy of the launch as another eight heavy torpedoes spat out of the tubes and began their terminal runs. She was no longer concerned with watching their progress, though. The boat’s Combat Intelligence had set the firing sequence, and the Nemesis processors had tracked the initial launch to the point of impact. Diagnostic software agents poring over the data feedback detected a few glitches with the guidance mechanisms, but nothing lying outside an acceptable margin of error.

Every warhead had detonated as intended, a few meters under the keel of its target. The results were spectacular.

On the main display, which was running real-time vision in high-definition color from a virtual height of two thousand meters, it looked as though the ADCAP war shots had broken the backs of the two carriers. Willet distinctly saw them lift a good few feet clear of the water amidships, while the bow and stern merely tilted back up toward the fatal rupture.

“Like snapping a twig,” Lieutenant Lohrey said.

CPO Flemming pointed at the two battleships. Their greater mass had absorbed the kinetic blows with more success, but they were still badly damaged. “More like a big fucking log for those two,” the chief muttered.

“Mmmh,” Willet responded absently. “Weapons. Override the CI and designate both Musashi and Yamato for another two hits.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“Captain. We have four destroyers heading in our direction. Throwing depth charges.”

“Thank you, Mr. Knox. Attack profile?”

Her chief defensive sysop took a moment to consider the pattern of the destroyers’ movements and weapons launches.

“They don’t know where we are, ma’am. They’re making a guess based on the placement of our shots. They’re pretty good, actually. But it’s still only a guess.”

“Okay. Helm, take us down to two hundred meters. We’ll make our away around to the far side of the target group and launch our next sequence from there.”

The first depth charges went off, but they were a long way distant, like the thunder of a late-summer storm you know from experience will pass by without harm.

That damn woman, again.

An entire division of the Imperial Japanese Navy had devoted itself to the study of Captain Jane Willet and her submarine the Havoc. Yamamoto had ordered it after her attack on the anchorage at Hashirajima had gutted the Combined Fleet. As soon as he heard that a submarine had crept in and crippled him again, he knew.

Willet.

The torpedoes had struck like the twin hammers of a vengeful god, their power great enough to wrench seventy thousand tons of iron plating and armor out of shape. Already the deck had begun to list to starboard. It was only slight, but it was noticeable, and it was increasing.

Pandemonium had broken out on the lower decks. Not panic as such, but a rushing, half-desperate haste to respond to a new crisis that was clearly greater than anything the ship and her crew had yet been required to face. Men came up hard against each other in the companionways as they hurried to their stations. A drum solo of deep-seated explosions shook the ship again.

“You must hurry, Admiral.”

The young officer, a sublieutenant, took him by the arm.

Yamamoto slowly and deliberately removed his hand.

“No, Lieutenant. You must hurry. This is most important. Take this,” he said, holding out the flexipad. “You see the information on the screen. The location there. Latitude and longitude.”

The youngster, who looked as though he’d never had to scrape a razor across his chin, nodded. His eyes were bulging.

“Do you have a pencil and a notepad? Give it here, boy. Take this note to the radio room. And make sure this message gets back to Hashirajima. These coordinates. This information. And my instructions. Understand?”

The lieutenant nodded. Clearly he was more fearful of failing the grand admiral than of drowning, if the ship went down.

“Go then. Go! Do not fail.”

The young man saluted and took off running up the slanted deck.

Do not fail, thought Yamamoto. What a bitter irony it is that such a thing should be my last order.

The third and fourth torpedoes exploded under the Yamato’s keel with spectacular effect.

The previous strike had fatally wounded the giant, fracturing her spine beyond hope of repair. When the following shots arrived they detonated, as before, a few meters under the keel. The pressure wave again lifted the monster battleship partly out of the water, and as it came down, the actual explosion ripped into her damaged innards. With a tearing screech, she split and a sixty-five-meter-long section of the stern tilted ninety degrees, lifting her screws clear of the water.

Willet watched dispassionately as the section quickly knifed down into the depths. The greater bulk of the dying vessel was still afloat, but surely not for much longer. Hundreds of men swarmed over the upper decks and threw themselves into the churning waters.

Similar scenes repeated themselves throughout the Japanese fleet, which was now in complete disarray. Both of the conventional carriers had already gone down. The Musashi, like her sister ship, had been cleaved in two. Six heavy cruisers were in their final throes.

“Captain, that converted carrier, the Ohka ferry, is boogying to the south. I can get a target lock in just a few minutes.”

“Thank you, weapons. Just hold on a second. Mr. Knox. What do you have on your threat boards?”

“The destroyers still haven’t found us, ma’am. But there are about a dozen of them, throwing depth charges everywhere. It’s a bit like flying over Baghdad or Damascus, with everyone shooting into the air. Somebody might get lucky.”

Willet made a show of weighing her options. “All right, then. I think we’ve earned our pay for today. Helm, let’s blow this Popsicle stand. Wouldn’t do to get nailed by a random shot.”

“Aye, ma’am,” the helmsman replied.

But Willet wasn’t really paying attention. She was watching the Nagano slip away.

D-DAY + 41. 13 JUNE 1944. 0710 HOURS (LOCAL TIME). ALAMOGORDO AIR FIELD, NEW MEXICO.

The last B-52 ever built rolled off the Boeing assembly line in 1962, thirty years before Caro Llewellyn was born. They were still kicking ass sixty years later, when she was flying Raptors off the Big Hill for a living. The air force had been intending to keep them in service until 2050, at which point the youngest of the airframes would be coming up on ninety years old. Of course, being a navy flier, that meant shit to her.

Or it had until Manning Pope had opened a can of wormholes and dragged Caro’s sorry carcass all the way back to 1942. Now, sitting in the pilot’s seat of a brand-new B-52 Stratofortress waiting for clearance to open the throttles and get the hell out of Dodge, or out of Alamogordo Air Field at any rate, she shifted uncomfortably in her new Army Air Force flight suit and tried not think about the Escher-print metaphysical detour her life had taken that day off East Timor. A year ago she’d been transferred without consultation into the newly formed Strategic Air Command, given the temporary rank of colonel in the Army Air Force, and dropped into the middle of the New Mexico desert. And these undeniably weird contortions in her personal fate were all of infinitely less consequence than the mission she was about to lead: the dropping of three atomic bombs on Nazi Germany.