“Lonesome, it was a personal communication. Granted, it was about military concerns-but I’ll stand behind your decision to release it. It’s not like you sent her the attachments, after all.”

“No, it’s not. And thank you.”

Kolhammer shook his head.

“You don’t have to thank me. You have a right to expect my support, and you haven’t always had it when you needed it, the last few years.”

It was Jones’s turn to shake his head. “You’ve had your own battles to fight, Admiral. That shitty business with Hoover and his pet congressmen. The Zone. The Old Navy. I haven’t been looking for you to get my back because I knew you had a full-time job watching your own.”

Jones’s image loomed in the monitor as he leaned toward the camera.

“Just so as we’re clear. I don’t blame you for the Anderson-Miyazaki thing, either. I know you went to the mat. It was almost like they were using it as a lesson.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Do you really want to go there?”

“Probably not, but go on.”

“I don’t think the little prick was alone. Our War Crimes people said there was evidence of at least four attackers. And as big as he is now, I don’t think he could have avoided the payback unless he had someone protecting him. We don’t even know how he came to cross paths with Anderson and Miyazaki. There was a curfew, if you remember. And that drunken asshole they assigned to the case was like a fucking caricature of a bad cop. He was never gonna make it happen. You want my opinion, someone let the ’temps smack a few of our guys down. Make sure we understood who the big dogs were.

“I don’t think they meant for things to get outta hand like they did, but that cracker asshole was a ticking time bomb. They were probably hoping he’d get himself killed by the Japs, and his buddies with him. But true or not, none of this will ever be tested, because it’s such a septic mess now it’s gotta be buried so deep nobody can ever dig it up.”

“Jesus, Lonesome. You should have written for television or something. You really believe all that?”

Jones threw his hands up. “What I believe is irrelevant, isn’t it?”

Kolhammer opened his mouth to say that no, it wasn’t, but he couldn’t.

“Okay, look,” he said instead. “On your brother-in-law, I’ve already sent a heads-up to Spruance and Pearl, insisting that Danton’s message goes onto the record. Even if you hadn’t sent it on to Duffy, I would have had it released in the Zone. So it is going to happen, one way or another.”

Jones nodded brusquely.

Kolhammer continued. “On this other stuff, I don’t know. There will be consequences. I can’t say what, exactly, but you’re probably right in thinking that somebody wanted us to understand our place in the world, at least as far the investigation went. Making any headway on that case was like pushing wet sand uphill. And I promise you that when I get back, if I don’t get some satisfaction, I’m gonna nuke the fucking hill. And if that gets us nowhere, then there’s always the Room.

“Okay?”

A shadow of a smile passed across the marine’s features. “Okay.”

“Now,” said Kolhammer. “Last I recall, we were supposed to be at war or something. How’s that going on your end?”

Long before the Kuril Islands appeared over the horizon, Yamamoto could see evidence of the firestorm raging around them. The first signs of the titanic battle became obvious as the Combined Fleet steamed up past the southern reaches of Hokkaido. The new Siemens radarscopes picked up faint returns from the waves of tokkotai streaming north to throw themselves on the Bolshevik invaders.

Standing on the bridge of the mighty Yamato, peering into a deep obsidian darkness that seemed to flicker with the intimation of a great storm, he felt like a boy creeping along the edge of a volcano in which lived unknowable numbers of demons and monsters.

He was going to his doom, of that at least he was certain. Of nothing else but that.

It was the third time he had sortied from Hashirajima at the head of the fleet, and only on the first occasion had he done so with anything approaching a sense of confidence-or rather hubris. That was now what he thought of his mental state before the accursed miracle at Midway.

The attack on Hawaii, which had gone surprisingly well, thanks to Hidaka and the Dessaix, had nonetheless occasioned in the grand admiral a crisis of faith. It had been an entirely negative gambit. He’d known then that he had no hope of defeating the Allies. Even before the emergence of Kolhammer’s barbarians, the strategic weight of this struggle lay with the industrialized democracies. Hawaii was taken to buy time, and nothing more.

Time that had proved to be worthless.

Yamamoto steadied himself by laying a hand against the cool metal of a bulkhead as dizziness threatened to sweep his legs out from underneath him. There would be no German atomic bomb. No Japanese revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki-although to be pedantic about it, those events hadn’t yet happened. Even if the Communists had not stabbed them in the back, he doubted they could have held out against the so-called free world. The Americans and British were fanatics, not warriors as he understood the term. They would not rest until their enemies lay charred and dead, in the ruins of a hundred incinerated cities.

“A message, Admiral.”

Yamamoto took the scrap of paper from the earnest young lieutenant. Three seaplanes had gone missing on patrol southeast of the Marianas. They had not reported anything untoward in their last scheduled updates, but their sudden vanishing spoke volumes. Kolhammer and Spruance were moving in.

Yamamoto could not help but feel disappointment that what would surely be his last action would not be against them. He had prepared as well as any man could, given the disparity in the two forces. The battle for the Marianas would probably have ended with the Stars and Stripes flying over the islands, but he was certain that if he had been able to deploy his defenses as he’d planned, he would have struck a heavy, perhaps even a crippling, blow against the old foe.

Instead he was creeping north at the head of a much-reduced Combined Fleet, a force about a third of its original size, to spend himself in a desperate lunge against the emperor’s newest enemies, the godless hordes of Joseph Stalin. He wished he’d never heard of Kolhammer or the Emergence. It would have been better to perish as he was meant to, shot down in 1943. Even defeat and occupation as they had originally played out would have been preferable to enslavement under the Russians, as now seemed to be the fate of Nippon.

He was aware of the grim mood on the bridge of the battleship. There was none of the elation or anticipation of victory he remembered from Midway or Hawaii. How could there be, when he had such limited resources with which to gamble? He had only three carriers under his command, and one of them, the Nagano, was a converted cruiser with nothing but tokkotai aboard. Once they were launched, she would revert to a simple support role, her offensive capacity entirely used up.

He caught himself shaking his head. There would be no Kassen Kantai with the U.S. Navy, no last great decisive battle. His life and the lives of his men would be spent in a hopeless, unplanned stand against an enemy of whom they knew little, other than the fact that he enjoyed a vast superiority in men and matйriel.

Yamamoto flexed his injured left hand, which ached with phantom pain. He had lost two fingers fighting against this same adversary almost four decades earlier, at the Battle of Tsushima. That engagement had been a stunning victory over an old, corrupt European regime.