"We are." She nodded. "How would you like to do me a big favor?"
"Anything for a lady."
Willet gave him a lopsided grin. "That's what I hear."
Kennedy wasn't sure which was louder, the laughter from his shipmates or the rush of blood in his ears as he flushed with embarrassment.
The four officers repaired to the now very cramped flying bridge, while Chief Petty Officer Flemming disappeared on a tour of the boat with Collins. Willet's security detail took up positions fore and aft and politely refused to talk to anyone. Sneaking a look at them occasionally, Kennedy wondered why they didn't faint from heat exhaustion. They were entirely cocooned within their strange battle dress.
Willet caught him looking once as he wiped at the sweat from his own neck.
"The suits are thermopliable, Lieutenant. They're much more comfortable than you or I at the moment."
Kennedy nodded absently, then turned back to the amazing devices that Lohrey had produced from a backpack. The data slates, as she called them, were about the size of a large book, and not much thicker than a packet of cigarettes. One of them displayed about a dozen graphs and readouts that made no sense at all to Kennedy and Ross. Willet explained that this was a live link back to her sub, feeding her updated intelligence. The pictures in the other data slate made a lot more sense, but were hard to believe.
"This is a real-time feed from a Big Eye drone we've got shadowing this Japanese convoy," Lohrey explained. "It's sitting way above the ceiling of any air cover, but as you can see, there's none to speak of anyway."
The two torpedo boat officers had been briefed on the capabilities of the Multinational Force, and when he'd joined the ship's complement, Leading Seaman Molloy had kept everyone entranced for days with stories about the Leyte Gulf and the Astoria. But to experience the future firsthand, that was something else altogether.
The slate taking the feed from the surveillance craft-Lohrey called it a drone-was full of movies, obviously shot from somewhere above the Japs. One large frame, showing all five ships, dominated the screen. Surrounding it, five smaller "windows" carried live images of each individual ship. Lohrey played with another device, a flexipad, and the images danced around, the focus zooming in until it was like they were floating just above the deck of one of the ships. Kennedy could see hundreds of uniformed men there. It looked to be seriously overcrowded, perhaps a sign that the Japs were having transport problems. On one of the destroyers he thought he recognized the signs of an antiair drill in progress.
"These are good kills, gentlemen," said Willet. "But not good enough to justify burning up a couple of my combat maces. We can lead you guys right onto them, though. You can hit them tonight. There wouldn't be much moonlight anyway, but our weather radar says the cloud cover is going to be thickening up, too. You up for it?"
"Hell, yeah!" said George Ross.
Kennedy was just as eager, but he didn't leap in as quickly. "Captain Willet. These, uh, slates are amazing, but we don't know how to use them. Are you planning on leaving anybody with us?"
"I'll be staying," said Lohrey. "And I've brought some night-vision gear in the launch. We've got holomaps of this whole coast, and we've already planted beacons to take a solid position fix, so the lack of GPS won't be an issue."
The Americans stared at her with blank incomprehension.
"Trust me," she said. "It'll be cool."
SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA COMMAND,
Hundreds of kilometers away, Lieutenant Commander Rachel Nguyen sat in a small, fourth-floor office of a colonial-era sandstone building, the headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area Command. There was no air-conditioning, and her workstation pumped out enough heat to make the room extremely uncomfortable, even with the windows thrown open and a couple of old wooden fans spinning at top speed. Indeed, she suspected that their tiny motors probably dumped more heat into the room than the fans took out. Mold had discolored the walls and ceiling, and the smell of uncollected garbage drifted up from the alley below.
She was oblivious to it all, though, her attention focused only on the three Bang amp; Olufsen flatscreens arrayed across the huge desk at which she sat. Two officers from MacArthur's Intelligence Division sat in with her, an American major and an army captain from New Zealand. They were both 'temps, and although they outranked her, they deferred to her technical expertise, which meant that neither of them was comfortable using a wireless mouse. Or any kind of mouse, for that matter.
The screens ran video coverage and data dumps received from 21C assets positioned all over the local theater-vision recorded by a marine recon squad probing the Japanese garrison at Mackay, transcripts of signal intercepts sucked up by the AWACS birds, drone coverage of the frontline battles north of the city, even media packages from embedded journalists like Julia Duffy. Rachel hadn't spoken to the reporter since they'd briefly worked together on the Clinton after the Transition, but she followed Julia's stories whenever she could, and had privately cheered her on as she elbowed her way into the front rank of local war correspondents. She was as big a name as Ernie Pyle now. Somewhere behind the dozens of open windows, Julia's footage of the 'temp marine sergeant who'd turned the ambush earlier that day was running in a silent loop. Rachel had downloaded the feed from the local net as soon as a digital spyder alerted her that the reporter had filed. Nobody was watching now, however.
Instead, all three officers were concentrating on a data burst from the Havoc. The submarine was patrolling just south of the Whitsunday passage, blocking all attempts by the Japanese to land reinforcements closer to Homma. The small convoy of troopships and destroyers was cautiously beating south in a large window on the central flatscreen.
Rachel pulled in close on the largest of the transports, a captured tourist liner by the look of her. "It still doesn't seem right to me," she said. "There's something, I dunno… It just doesn't feel right. C'mon, you guys are the spooks. Do something spooky."
Major Brennan, the amiable American, just shrugged. "None of it makes much sense, Commander. The whole campaign is like the charge of the Light Brigade. They shouldn't have done it. They took New Guinea by balls, and surprise, and sheer weight of numbers. And even then, it cost them badly. They needed at least twenty divisions to take Australia, not the seven they sent. They needed air dominance, which they don't have. They needed secure supply lines, which they don't have. They can't move without you guys spotting them. They can't reinforce the forces they did get ashore. It's not rational. None of it looks right."
Captain Taylor, the Kiwi, leaned forward to squint at the screen. "I would have said it was a diversion. Like the Aleutians were supposed to be for Midway. But they've been here for weeks, and nothing else has happened. They're just running their heads into a brick wall."
Rachel still wasn't satisfied. She pulled the keyboard over and typed quickly for a few seconds. "I'm going to ask for a tighter frame on the big troop transport," she said. Her request flickered along fiber-optic cables scavenged from her old ship, the Moreton Bay, up to a dish on the roof of the building, which pulsed the signal into the ether. It was picked up by an AWACS flight, which relayed it to a communications drone. From there it traveled to the Havoc.