A deep breath, held for too long, escaped him.

“Oh darlin’, I do miss you…,” he said softly.

His PA, Lieutenant Liao, appeared in the doorway, coughing discreetly. “General Jones is here, Admiral.”

“Thanks, Willy, send him through.”

The commander of the Eighty-second stepped past the lieutenant into Kolhammer’s day cabin, saluting and standing at attention. Kolhammer waved him in and bid him to sit down on the old brown couch across from his desk.

“Well, Lonesome, are you disappointed?”

Jones let the formality run out of his posture. They were old friends now. “Disappointed at what, Admiral? Not getting killed? Not getting my boys and girls killed? No. Of course not. Some of the youngsters are pissed as hell. But they’ll get over it. I’m already proud of them. And as we both know, there’ll be time and opportunity enough for getting killed in the future.”

“Oh yeah,” said Kolhammer. “There’ll be plenty of that.”

He stood up and made his way over to a side table. A small plate of cookies sat next to a gurgling coffeepot. A new one, just out of the States.

“Would you like a brew, Lonesome? We’ve got ten minutes before the meeting?”

“Sure. And one of those little choc-chip motherfuckers wouldn’t go astray, either.”

Kolhammer smiled as he poured two mugs and handed one, with the plate, to the big marine. “You hear the Sovs have signed up to the cease-fire?”

“Heard on the way over,” said Jones. “Guess they figure they were checked for now.”

“They’ll be back,” said Kolhammer. “For my money, that’s why they nuked Tokyo. They’re preparing the ground. If they couldn’t have the city themselves, they figured they’d give us the ashes.”

“They nuked Tokyo because of Kamchatka,” said Jones. “Getting even. Sending a message.”

“That, too,” the admiral agreed. “Seems just about everyone with a nuke seems to be sending a message these days. Might be an idea if they all took a breather, don’t you think, before there’s nobody left to get the goddamn message.”

Jones dunked a cookie and sipped from his coffee mug. “You think Roosevelt’s gonna let them have half of Japan?”

Kolhammer shrugged.

“He’s going to have a hell of a time telling them no, unless he plans on flash-frying a whole bunch of their cities before they have a chance to hit back.”

“He doesn’t strike me as the type,” said Jones. “He’s no Hillary.”

“No,” agreed Kolhammer. “He’s not.”

They sat in a companionable silence for a few moments, each man alone with his thoughts. Kolhammer was trying to weave some sense of what might happen from everything that had gone wrong. It was not a happy prospect. You’d have thought that knowing how things would have turned out, folks might have been some way along the track to figuring out how they should have turned out. But no. People seemed to have an infinite capacity for willful ignorance. It wasn’t just the Soviets running wild over half the world, or civil wars in places like Palestine and South Africa. It was back home, too. Things would never come to a shooting war there, but you could see there were some hard days coming as the country tried to digest its future.

“What d’you think you’ll do?”

“Huh? Sorry.” Lonesome’s question had caught him off-guard.

“When we get back. Will you stay in the service? Or go private.”

Kolhammer’s answer was delayed by the muted roar of an A-4 ripping down the flight deck not far above their heads. It was a question he’d given some thought to, but without coming to any conclusions yet.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Things will change when peace breaks out. The sunset clause will start ticking, for one thing. But people will feel a lot freer to air their differences and to act on them, too. The Zone, the Valley, or whatever you want to call it, is going to be at the center of that. I feel I should be there one way or another. What about you?”

Jones surprised him with his answer. “I’ll be staying in the corps. I think Truman will get the job come November, and he’ll desegregate the forces. Then the real work will begin.”

“You wouldn’t be working under our system anymore, Lonesome. You’d be in their world. They’ll take your brigade from you, for starters. You know that, don’t you?”

The general nodded. “I do. But because it is going to happen, like you, I feel the need to be there. Besides, I don’t think we’re done fighting. Not by a long way.”

Kolhammer nodded his agreement.

The task force was still steaming eastward but it had turned north, away from the Marianas, after detaching a smaller force to accept the Japanese surrender there. Everything was up in the air. He assumed they’d be occupying the Japanese Home Islands, at least in the short term, but that hadn’t been confirmed yet. Nobody even knew how those islands were going to be divided among the winners. It was a fair assumption that Tokyo was going to end up in the American and Australian sector, though. On the Asian mainland China was still convulsed in war, with the Soviets and Mao’s Communists allied against the Nationalist government. Sheer mass was going to tell in that battle, he was certain. Indeed, Uncle Joe’s minions had been busy all over. They were fighting in Korea, Indochina, Afghanistan, and Persia. Not to mention the huge bites they’d taken out of Eastern and Western Europe.

“Yeah, there’ll be some fighting yet,” said Kolhammer.

Lieutenant Liao appeared at the door again. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. “But we’ve just received a priority encrypted data burst from Captain Willet on the Havoc. Your eyes only. It’s on your desktop now.”

He thanked his assistant and clicked on the flashing icon.

Jones took another cookie while he waited.

“Hmm,” said Kolhammer. “That’s a shame.”

“Can you say what?”

“Captain Willet caught up with the Nagano, that kamikaze transport, and sank her. But she regrets to inform us that it was after the cessation of hostilities. The cease-fire orders didn’t get through in time.”

“She pick up any survivors?” asked Jones.

“There were none,” said Kolhammer, pointedly.

The marine shrugged.

“Fortunes of war, Admiral.”

“I suppose so,” said Kolhammer.

EPILOGUE

If she squinted into the bright morning light and concentrated on the northern headland, where developers hadn’t gained the upper hand back in twenty-one, it was almost possible for Jane Willet to imagine she was home again. Bondi Beach remained the same deep, south-facing bay. That would never change. The biscuit-colored cliffs looked just as they had when she’d last left her Sydney, the beautiful, conflicted, and utterly self-obsessed meta-city of 2021. Standing in the fresh air on the flying bridge of the Havoc’s conning tower, she could see the old art deco apartment she’d rented for a year when studying for her postgrad degree at Sydney Uni, except that here it was a “new” building, standing out rather starkly on the raw, scraped-looking heights of Ben Buckler. The third story had not yet been added and two modern houses that had stood beside it in her memory were gone, replaced by fibro cottages. Goats roamed freely over what would one day be the links of the North Bondi golf course.

“Fancy a drink at the RSL, Chief?” she asked.

Roy Flemming didn’t take the binoculars from his eyes. “They haven’t built it yet, skipper. Just a big sand dune there at the moment.”

The great, black cigar-shaped hull of the most powerful submarine in the world passed smoothly through the cold blue waters of the Pacific as they drew nearer to the end of their long voyage. There was almost no swell to speak of today, no lines of whitecapped breakers rolling in toward the golden crescent of the beach. Her beach. That was fine by Willet. It’d make for a much smoother passage through the Heads.