Jones snorted quietly beside him. “Commander Chalmers never walked into a fucking claymore,” he whispered.

Chalmers carried on without seeming to notice. “However, the Japanese navy has made some significant advances in the use of radar-controlled gunnery, Close-In Weapons Systems, night-fighter operations-both submarine and antisubmarine warfare-and ship-launched missiles, probably through close cooperation with Germany, which has poured a lot of effort into rocket research.”

Kolhammer had to admire Yamamoto for the focus he’d brought to Japan’s defenses, if nothing else. The Pacific War was a naval battle. As savage as the fighting had been through the island chains, the side that controlled the seas would prevail. Japan could not hope to keep up with America’s accelerating technological superiority. It simply didn’t have the industrial or research bases to compete. But Yamamoto, for all of his talk of staging a Kassen Kantai, had instead fought a tremendous holding effort since the Japanese had been kicked out of Australia and Hawaii. Whatever internal battle he’d had with the Japanese army, he’d won, because hundreds of thousands of troops had been pulled out of China and redeployed into the Pacific, not to take new territory but to keep the Allies away from the Home Islands long enough for the Axis powers to develop their own atomic arsenal.

As MacArthur and Spruance fought their way toward Japan, it became obvious that most of the bounty from the Emergence, as the Japanese called the Transition, had gone to Yamamoto’s surviving fleet rather than to the army. Yamamoto knew that slowing the Allies’ inevitable advance on Japan meant slowing the U.S. Navy.

It always came back to the bomb, though, didn’t it?

Who would get there first? He didn’t believe for a minute that Germany could hope to compete with the combined industrial and scientific muscle of the English-speaking world. Not with the advantage the Allies enjoyed in raw computing power. Yet…

The admiral pushed aside these thoughts. They weren’t his immediate concern, whereas the next five minutes of this briefing were. He gave Jones a light pat on the shoulder as he stood to make his way to the lectern. Slotting home a data stick, he nodded to Spruance, his only superior in the gathering, and waited for the PowerPoint files to arrange themselves on the screen behind him.

“I’m going to quickly run you through some of the capabilities of the Clinton’s battle group,” he said, “and outline how these will be used in strategic support of Admiral Spruance’s plan, as well as tactical support from General Jones and the Eighty-second Expeditionary Brigade’s attack on Guam.

“First, a strategic strike on enemy capital ships…”

He ended up speaking for twenty-five minutes, mostly in answer to questions from the floor. Jones seemed distracted during the presentation, even taking a couple of silent messages on his flexipad. Kolhammer would have been pissed off, except that the hulking marine flashed him a private message that immediately explained his agitation. The text came up on Kolhammer’s flexipad as it was resting in front of him.

Hidaka captured. Rogas queries Sanction 5?

Oh shit, Kolhammer thought.

Neither Chester Nimitz nor Bill Halsey was buried on Hawaii. Their remains had been found, after much distressing effort, and flown home to be interred at Arlington National Cemetery.

The short rule of the Japanese had been as horrific here as it had been in northern Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines, and Indonesia-or the Dutch East Indies. As a matter of fact, thought Kolhammer, it had probably been worse. The civilian death rate had run to 90 percent, and almost no military personnel had survived to greet the liberators. Some of the higher-ranking officers had been transported to Japan for interrogation. With them had gone anybody from the Multinational Force, civilian or military. Almost everyone else had perished in a long orgy of abuse and mass murder to rival the Rape of Nanking.

A memorial to the dead and the missing had been erected. It stood near the ghost town of Waipahu on the site of one of the many mass graves that covered Oahu. The Japanese had used the former sugar-milling town on the north shore of Pearl Harbor’s Middle Loch as a gigantic slave camp. At least twenty-five thousand people had been interred there while they worked on clearing debris from the harbor. As they died, they’d been dumped in a series of open pits to the west of the town. Kolhammer could only imagine what a hellish sight it must have been. The death pits contained thousands of children, women, and old folks.

War crime investigators, trained by his own people from the Clinton’s WCI Unit, had determined that at least half of the dead from the Waipahu Site had been summarily executed in the days before the Liberation-killed simply to deny them the hope of freedom.

Kolhammer had thought himself inured to horror by thirty years of active service, most of them spent fighting medieval savages with a fetish for degrading their victims. But standing with Jones on a small rise outside Waipahu, where more than a hundred of their own people were buried, he knew that he had but a scant understanding of the evil of which humans were capable. And now he had within his power the man responsible for this atrocity.

Jisaku Hidaka.

It was a glorious day to have to contemplate such dark matters. A cool southerly breeze ruffled his shirt and dried the sweat on his exposed forearms. Thin strands of altocumulus clouds softened the hard blue sky. The mass graves, six of them combining to make one enormous burial ground between here and Pearl City, had been declared part of the national cemetery and were now tended by the Department of the Army with the same care it lavished on Arlington. Blinding white gravel paths meandered between lush green lawns, small stands of shade trees, and dozens of memorial sites devoted to honoring specific acts of sacrifice and resistance that were deemed especially notable. Other mourners moved slowly though the site, stopping here and there to pay their respects, to pray, and to grieve. Almost all of them were in uniform. Very few civilians remained on the island nowadays. A short distance from Kolhammer and Jones a contemporary marine kneeled in front of a small marble plinth commemorating five Boy Scouts who’d hidden out in the Ko‘olaus, reporting on Japanese ship and troop movements via a salvaged army radio until they were captured and beheaded. His shoulders hitched and shuddered violently as he wept. He might have been a father or uncle to one of the boys. He might have been a complete stranger. Even Jones had rubbed his eyes after reading their story on the little brass plaque at the base of the plinth. It was nearly buried in flowers and wreaths, and at some time in the past few months somebody had draped a military medal over it. A Silver Star. Hundreds more had joined it.

“So what are we gonna do about this fucker?” Jones rumbled. “I don’t think I can remember a man more in need of sanction than this evil little shit.”

Kolhammer watched the weeping man cross himself, climb to his feet, and walk away from the Boy Scout Memorial. High above them two contrails traced the flight of a couple of jet fighters. Skyhawks probably. He thought he could just make out the delta-winged silhouette.

“I don’t know, Lonesome. You’re right that hanging’s too good for this little bastard. He’s a living, breathing argument in favor of Sanction Five…”

“But?”

Kolhammer chewed his lip. “But, as much as we have a claim on him, the ’temps have a stronger one. Look at this place, would you. I don’t know that I’ve ever been anywhere sadder than this. Don’t know that I ever will. I passed sanction on Hidaka, but I’m thinking that for once, their way might be better than ours.”