“No,” he said, his voice breaking. “This is not fair. I cannot become a prisoner. Not after the shame I have already brought upon myself.”

Hot tears welled up in his eyes. He blinked them away impatiently. Kolhammer and Jones seemed surprised. But what would they know of bushido? After all the dishonor he had brought upon his name, to be cheated now of death’s release-it was unbearable.

Even with his hands cuffed he launched himself at Kolhammer, but he had covered only half the distance across the cave to him when a freight train slammed into him and drove him backward. He struck the wall painfully and looked up, expecting to see the admiral advancing on him like a common brawler. Instead, to his horror, a woman stood in front of him, the third American who had come through the blackout curtain. He had ignored her, thinking her some minor functionary. She bent down over him and released the uncomfortable plastic restraints.

He moved to push her aside and she broke his arm, snapping it at the elbow.

Then she went to work on him.

D-DAY + 24. 27 MAY 1944. 0902 HOURS.

“What do you mean you’ve got him? How?”

Admiral Ray Spruance stared at Kolhammer as though he’d grown an extra head.

“Lonesome’s mountain troop was on a training run through the Ko‘olaus. Just stretching their legs after the voyage. They picked up his trail. Figured they’d stumbled across another holdout. Tracked him. Bagged him.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” said Kolhammer. “Luck of the Irish.”

“Master Chief Vincente Rogas is Irish?”

“Could be Black Irish…I suppose.”

Spruance frowned, not appreciating the joke, as he shuffled the photographs of Hidaka on his desk at fleet HQ in Pearl. “And these injuries?”

“He fell down,” Jones said, from the chair next to Kolhammer.

Spruance leveled a cold eye at him.

“A lot,” Jones added with a poker face.

“Has he complained of being beaten?” Kolhammer asked.

Spruance looked vaguely troubled. “No. No, he says he fell down a lot, too.”

Kolhammer dared not look at Jones. Spruance eyed them like a principal with two of his most difficult students, who also happened to be his main hope for the pennant. It was midmorning, the day after Jones’s mountain troop had stumbled across Hidaka-that much at least was true. They were meeting in a prefab hut that substituted for Spruance’s office while permanent facilities were being built-or rather, rebuilt. His office, like theirs, was a mix of old and new. A flat-panel display took up a big piece of real estate on the old wooden desk while paper maps of the Pacific theater were pinned to corkboard on all of the walls. His phone was a heavy old-fashioned lump of black Bakelite with a rotary dial, which sat next to a Siemens C65 flexipad. In the window behind him Kolhammer could see a flattop being nuzzled into its berth by a small flotilla of tugboats. It looked like the Intrepid.

“Well, I suppose congratulations are in order, then,” Spruance said finally. “This news will be very welcome back home. Hidaka is the first high-value war criminal we’ve managed to capture alive out here.”

“They don’t give up easily,” Jones said. “Same thing where we came from. Our bad boys used to just blow themselves up.”

“Is that why you take so few prisoners?” Spruance asked coldly.

“That’s not the simple question you think it is, Admiral,” said Kolhammer, who could tell that Spruance was quite steamed about something, presumably the injuries to Hidaka. “There’s a lot of history behind our policies. I can understand that you’d find them off-putting at first, but they’ve served us well in a war that’s run much longer than yours. And of course, we’ll be reviewing them after the end of hostilities here, when our forces are folded into yours.”

“I think you’ll be doing more than reviewing them, Admiral. I think you’ll be leaving them behind for good.”

“Perhaps,” Kolhammer conceded. “They were appropriate in context.”

“And they have their uses here,” Jones added in his rumbling growl. “Otherwise I doubt Congress would have approved the extension of our rules of engagement.”

“The Australians certainly didn’t complain,” Kolhammer said, turning to Jones. “As I understand the situation, there was a lot of public pressure to turn all the Japanese captives over to you and the Second Cav for field sanction.”

Jones nodded. “There was.”

Spruance gathered up the photographs of a bruised and bleeding Hidaka. “Well, as you say, everything in context, gentlemen.” He didn’t sound as angry.

He placed the prints in a buff-colored envelope and dropped them into his top drawer. Then he turned his attention back to the two men.

“I wonder if I might prevail upon you to be a little more circumspect in the application of field punishment when we reach the Marianas, though?” He shook his head as Jones opened his mouth to speak. “I’m not asking you to alter your rules of engagement. I’m just concerned that we don’t end up indicted for the sorts of things we criticize in our opponents.”

Kolhammer saw genuine discomfort in Spruance’s eyes. He didn’t want to be a party to sanctioned field executions of any type.

Jones was not so diplomatic. “We could run any sanctions through your office, if you’d like, Admiral. Have your counsel sign off the warrants.”

Spruance paled at the suggestion. “No. No, I don’t think so, General. All I’m asking, all the president is asking, is that you don’t…” He groped for the words needed in such an uncomfortable moment. “…that you don’t…”

“Admiral Spruance,” Kolhammer said. “We will fight the good fight. And where justice needs to be done, it will be done. But we won’t embarrass the navy or the country.”

Spruance nodded, clearly relieved. “Thank you. And thank you for this,” he said, indicating the report Jones had brought on the capture of Hidaka.

Later on, out in the corridor, Jones muttered to Kolhammer, “Country would probably vote us all medals if we capped off every one of those murdering assholes.”

“No doubt,” Kolhammer agreed.

“So then, why not just tell Spruance we authorized a Sanction Three on Hidaka? It was legit.”

“It was,” Kolhammer said. “And if he asked directly, I’d tell him. But he didn’t. And now the blood’s on our hands. Not his. You and I can live with that. He shouldn’t have to.”

“We told him the little prick fell down.”

“Well, he did fall down. De Marco kept hitting him. He kept falling down.”

Jones took that in silence, grinning just a little as they walked through a secretarial pool. Tinny music followed them from an old radio. A disco tune, “Born to Be Alive,” covered by Glenn Miller and his big band.

“Kinda weird, ain’t it,” Jones said.

“What?” Kolhammer asked. He sensed a change of subject.

“The way disco, of all the possible music we brought, should be the one to catch fire here. Did you notice Hidaka had a disco station playing when we walked in?”

“Well,” Kolhammer mused, “they’re all over the dial. And I suppose it sounds a bit like swing. Plus, it’s an optimistic sort of music. People want that at the moment. Who needs death metal when you’ve got the Nazis?”

They passed through the main entrance of the building and into the fierce white light of the morning. “I don’t see old Hidaka being much of a fan. Not after Gina De Marco tooled him up like that.”

Kolhammer grunted quietly at the memory. The female marine had beaten Hidaka senseless while singing along to the radio. It had been an entirely punitive retribution with the primary purpose of humiliating the man and breaking his spirit. A level three sanction. They had assumed, correctly, that he would never speak of it, shamed into silence, but even if he had, it was within their accepted rules of engagement.