“I don’t see how they could have done it on their own so quickly,” Spruance said.

“You’re thinking like a liberal. The Sovs wouldn’t blanch at killing two, three million slave laborers to build dockyards and the ships to fill ’em, in the time they had. And I’ll bet they’ve got a lot more twenty-first-century tech than the Nazis or Yamamoto ever let them see during the cease-fire.”

Deep shadows pooled under Spruance’s eyes, giving his face a hollow, haunted look. “So you’re convinced they got your ship. The Vanguard.”

“Without a doubt. It would explain what they’ve been doing on their vacation, where all those wonderful toys they’ve been using against Hitler came from. And it would have given them a big head start building that task force Yamamoto just cleaned up. The electromagnetic signals Willet picked up are pretty backward, even compared with our AT stuff. But they were well ahead of where you’d expect them to be at this point. Unless they’ve been cherry-picking something like the Vanguard.

“It can’t have been Demidenko. Himmler purposely set that up as a waste of resources. They were never going to let Stalin have a look at the good stuff. Question is, what now? Willet has firing solutions on the Japanese. Does she take them down?”

“We’re going to need to refer this back to Washington,” Spruance said, shaking his head. “Normally there would be no question, but…”

He trailed off.

“But,” Kolhammer finished for him, “If we take out Yamamoto, what’s to stop Uncle Joe from raising the Red Star over Tokyo a few weeks down the track. I dunno. Maybe he doesn’t have the power projection capability?”

“Maybe,” Spruance echoed. “But if he does, we end up dealing with a Communist Japan.”

“Yeah,” Kolhammer grunted. “Bottom line, we need to know what’s on those islands up ahead of us.”

It was relatively safe in this part of the jungle. As safe as it could get on an island full of Japanese soldiers guarding a secret facility on which hung the fate of their empire.

Denny’s patrol had hunkered down about three-quarters of the way up the large limestone hill that dominated the island. Hastings, his communications specialist, insisted on calling it a mountain, but then Hastings hailed from Kansas, so you could push a small pile of dirt up with the toe of your boot and he was liable to go christening it Mount Something-Or-Other.

Hastings didn’t seem to be dwelling much on the topography at the moment, though. He was busy taking down the thin wire antennae he’d strung between a couple of trees. He wasn’t grumbling as he did it-he was too well trained, and they were way too deep in the shit for that. But Denny could tell from the awkward stiffness of his movements that he was pissed off.

Hell, they were all pissed off. That last message they’d gotten might as well have been a death warrant.

They’d been told to penetrate the subterranean facility and report back today, at all costs. In other words, do it now, or die trying.

He lay on the spongy floor of the jungle, hundreds of ants and weird unidentifiable bugs crawling over him, and examined the map. They were hiding on a small boggy plateau, no more than fifteen feet long and half that wide, on the heavily forested southern slopes of Mount Something-Or-Other, looking down over the coastal plain where the Japanese had built and then disguised a runway and sunken bunker complex. The last two nights they’d probed the edges of an airfield that was well hidden beneath camouflage that went way beyond a bit of netting and palm fronds.

Mobile garden beds on giant wheels covered the length of the runway. The aircraft were assembled in vast dugouts covered in yet more living vegetation. A keen gardener himself before the war, Denny would have loved a chance to inspect the setup without having to worry about getting run through with a bayonet, but he’d had to settle for a perilous inspection, from a short distance, in the dead of night. It was nonetheless an impressive piece of work.

Impressive, too, was the excavation that had obviously been carried out to enlarge a natural cave system at the base of Mount Something-Or-Other. But a close inspection there had proved impossible. A platoon of Japanese marines was on guard just back inside the mouth of the main entrance, twenty-four hours a day. They very rarely ventured outside, and they never left the post unless relieved by another, equally dedicated bunch of nips.

It was infuriating was what it was.

And now they’d been told to go in anyway.

“This’ll be that fucking Kolhammer, you know,” Corporal Barbaro muttered into Denny’s ear. “Those fucking marines of his, they were pissed about us getting-”

“Stow it, Tony,” Denny said. “Let just get the job done.”

Barbaro shut up, but his face said it all. The others pulled in close as Denny smoothed out the map.

“I figure our best chance is to go in through one of those air shafts they drilled. They cut ’em outta the limestone, so it’s not gonna be like banging around inside a metal pipe. If we’re real careful, we keep the noise down, chances are we can get in and out.”

Chances, bullshit, Denny thought. If he’d really believed the shafts were an option, they’d have used them a day ago. He had no idea whether the things were even navigable. The nearest one, about four hundred yards away, opened out into a rough circle about two and a half feet in diameter. But they might taper down to a fraction of that. Whoever went in might have to negotiate a vertical drop of a hundred feet or more. The handholds would probably be nonexistent.

But orders were orders, and they had to try to get inside.

At all costs.

Barbaro was probably right. Talk was that Kolhammer’s marines, those Eighty-second guys, were pissed as hell that they were being held back from the important jobs because nobody would trust them. They were always bragging about the “special” operations “their” outfit was supposed to have done, even though most of the guys in that unit had never seen combat. In fact, most of ’em were ’temps who’d transferred in. Maybe some of the original Eighty-second guys mighta done something worth bragging about, back up in their own war. They’d sure as hell kicked some ass when they’d helped retake Hawaii. But they were outnumbered about three to one by all the Johnny-come-lately types who’d filled out the two extra battalions the Eighty-second had put on.

So who knew? Maybe they were being sent on some kind of suicide mission, just because somebody in Jones’s brigade had been bragging that his guys coulda done it, and so some two-star asshole up Denny’s chain of command goes, Yeah, well, my guys could beat your guys into those caves any fuckin’ day.

In Denny’s experience with the military, that was exactly the sort of shit that got guys like him killed all the fucking time.

“Right,” he said, “the clock’s ticking on this one, so we have to move out in daylight. Barbaro, you’re taking point. Hastings, you be ready to set up as soon we get there. Even if they tumble us while we’re inside, we gotta get word back to the fleet what we find. Everyone understand?”

They did.

They were dead men.

The five marines moved as quickly as they dared. The jungle was both a help and hindrance. It provided the best possible cover: the underbrush was so dense that a man a few yards away could remain undetected, as long as he had good camouflage and knew how to keep his ass still.

Of course that meant they could easily run into some Jap who knew his business, too, except that Denny was betting they weren’t setting up ambushes on an island they thought they owned. The Japs patrolled, and they were good at it. But his guys were better. Part of the reason they were better, though, was because they were careful-or had been, at least. Now it was to hell with caution, we gotta haul ass.