USS ENTERPRISE. TASK FORCE SIXTEEN

At least he didn’t have to drink the admiral’s terrible coffee. Admittedly, it wasn’t much fun stamping back and forth
along the empty flight deck at night, either. For the first days of June, this was miserable weather in the northwest Pacific. With the fog so cold and dense and rain sleeting in sideways, it was enough to make Lieutenant Commander Daniel Black long for the South Pacific, where temperatures belowdecks could climb to well over a hundred and touching the exposed metal topside raised painful burn blisters. But Black could take a little expo- sure, as long as it meant he didn’t have to stomach another cup of that goddamn poison green java Admiral Raymond Spruance insisted on grinding for himself every morning.
Black, a big rawboned copper miner in his former life, was Spruance’s assistant ops chief in this one. He jammed his hands deep into the pockets of his old leather flying coat and turned out of the wind as they reached the safety lights surrounding the first aircraft elevator. There had been a freak accident there just a few days ago, when Ensign Willie P. West and Lieutenant “Dusty” Kleiss were strolling the same path. Neither had heard the elevator warning signal, and West had stepped abruptly off into empty space. Kleiss found himself teetering on the edge of a gaping hole, and it took him a moment to regain his balance. Having done so, he peered over, expecting to find his friend ly- ing in a crumpled heap.
Instead he found West smiling and waving from thirty feet
below. He had landed on the elevator just as it started its de- scent, and said the sensation was like “landing on a feather bed.” Commander Black didn’t feel like repeating the stunt and gave himself plenty of time to turn around. Admiral Spruance veered away, too, his black leather shoes squeaking on the wet deck. It was a small thing in a way, a pair of black shoes, not re- ally worth noting. Except that they shouldn’t have been here on a flattop. William “Bull” Halsey, the man who would have been in charge of the Enterprise, if he wasn’t trapped in his sickbed back at Pearl, would have worn brown shoes, because he was a flier, not a cruiser jockey. And Halsey wouldn’t have needed to constantly pound the flight deck with his officers, picking their brains about flight operations and the basics of naval air power just days before they went into battle. Because Bill Halsey had
been flying planes and driving carriers for years.
The men revered him, and with good reason. When Ensign
Eversole had gotten lost in fog on the way to attack Wake Is-
land, Halsey had turned around the entire task force, searched
for and found the downed torpedo plane, then resumed the at-
tack a day later. Everyone agreed it was a damn pity the old man
was stuck back in Pearl. It meant they were steaming into battle
at Midway against a superior foe, under a man with no expertise
in carrier operations at all.
During a rare break in Spruance’s relentless cross-examination,
Black brought up something else that had been nagging at him
since they’d set out. “It’s a real shame about losing Don
Lovelace.”
The admiral, who was a quiet, self-contained man—so differ-
ent from the booming, good-natured Halsey—took so long in
replying that Commander Black wondered if he’d even been
heard. The Enterprise was making nearly thirty knots, adding
its speed to a light blustery crosswind, and it was possible a gust
might have carried away his words. But, true to form, Spruance
was just mulling over the statement before fashioning a reply.
“It’s a blessing we’ve even got the Yorktown at all,” he said.
That seemed harsh. Don Lovelace was the XO of Fighting 3,
the Yorktown’s squadron of twenty-five portly but rugged F-4F
Wildcats. Or he had been, till another pilot had screwed up his
landing and jumped the barrier the first afternoon out of Pearl,
crashing into the plane ahead and killing one of the most expe-
rienced pilots in the whole task force. The Yorktown’s VF3 was
less a squadron than a pickup team, thrown together at the last moment before the big game. They’d never flown together, and for some this would be their first time on a carrier. Lovelace was supposed to have whipped them into shape.
“It still would have been good having Lovelace.” Black shrugged. “Zeros are gonna eat those boys up. Chew us all up, given a chance.”
“Jimmy Thach will knock them into shape,” Spruance said. “Or close enough anyway. We have to cut the cloth to suit our budget, Commander. Pearl performed miracles getting the Yorktown ready in three days. I know the pilots are green, and their planes are no match for the Japs, but that doesn’t matter. We have to beat them anyway.”
Their return journey had brought them back to the ship’s is- land superstructure, which offered some shelter against the wind that was blowing across the deck. The rise and fall of the swell was also much less evident here. The time was coming up on 2245. They would blow tubes in a few minutes, and the working day would end for most of the crew. Black was already dead tired. He had eaten breakfast at 0350.
In a few days, he knew, he’d just be dead. Or so exhausted as made no difference.
He wondered how Spruance did it. How he kept running like a windup toy, seemingly capable of absorbing every piece of minutiae and fitting it into his grand battle scheme. They’d been discussing the relative merits of the Zero and the Wildcat, mas- saging the comparisons, the Zero’s greater range and maneuver- ability, the Wildcat’s higher ceiling, the Zero’s lack of armor, the Wildcat’s steel plating and self-sealing fuel tanks. The ad- miral turned to him now, a rare, soft smile playing across his thin, severe features.
“Still worried that they might sucker punch us again at Pearl, Commander?”
This time it was Black who was quiet for a few seconds. At a special briefing in Spruance’s cabin, earlier that day, he had asked the admiral what would happen if the Japs bypassed Mid- way and made straight for Hawaii, which lay open and defense- less. Spruance had stared at him for a full half minute before offering his reply—that he hoped they would not.
Black had been startled by that reply—and more than a little
disturbed. Unless Spruance knew something his subordinates did not, he was relying heavily on faith—which Black consid- ered a poor basis for strategic planning.
Now the admiral seemed on the verge of saying something more when an earsplitting crack knocked them both to the deck and left them gasping for breath. Black felt as though he’d been nailed by a jab to the guts.
The gusting wind that had been tugging at their clothes died down. It was curious, though—it didn’t just drop off. It stopped dead. It almost seemed to Black as if it was “different air.” That didn’t make sense, he knew, but he couldn’t shake the feeling. It smelled and tasted different, too; vaguely familiar in a way, earthier, heavier. Like air in the Tropics, which always seemed laden with the weight of rot and genesis.
The night had been very dark, with low cloud cover, no starlight, and banks of dense fog. Even so, Black had the dis- tinct impression of being wrapped, however briefly, in a denser, closer form of darkness. A rush of unsettling, half-formed, al- most preconscious abstractions clawed at him. He had the sen- sation of being trapped in a tight, closed space, what he imagined it would feel like to be stuck in a downed plane as it sank in thousands of fathoms of black water.
Then they both became aware of a rising clamor of shouts and cries, coming from above. Lookouts in the superstructure, up on Vulture’s Row, were screaming and gesturing wildly down to the sea on the starboard side.
“I think somebody’s gone overboard,” coughed Black, still struggling for breath.
“Come on,” Spruance said, with some difficulty.
They hurried forward, around the base of the island and the
antiaircraft mounts, only to be confronted by a sight that
stopped them cold.
“Holy shit,” said Black.
There, less than a hundred yards away, lay a ship of some
sort. A foreign vessel for sure, completely alien, its bow was an-
gled away from the Enterprise, opening up a gap as they plowed
through the foaming breakers. She was lit well enough that they
could make out her strange lines. The decks of the vessel were
mostly clear. There was an island of sorts, but it was located
squarely in the center of what would have been the runway. It
was raked back, like a shark’s fin, with no hard edges anywhere on its surface. Only one line of windows was visible, within which he could make out strange glowing colors and lights, but no people.
As his mind adjusted to the outrage, he began to take in more detail. The forward decks seemed to be pockmarked with the outlines of elevators, but they were ridiculously small, each no more than a few yards across. There was one small gun em- placement, a ludicrous-looking little cannon, with the same strange, raked contours as the bridge. As the angle of diver- gence increased and the warship pulled away from them, Spru- ance pointed to the outline of what had to be an aircraft elevator down toward the stern. But it made no sense. Any plane at- tempting to take off there would crash into the bizarre-looking island on the vessel’s centerline.
“Oh, Lord,” muttered Spruance, as the ship peeled away at nearly thirty degrees now, exposing her stern to their gaze. A Japanese ensign flew there. Not a Rising Sun, to be sure, but a red circle on a field of white.
The name printed beneath read SIR ANUI, Japanese for “un- known fires,” if Black recalled correctly. He was aware of a Kagero-class destroyer just so named, which had been launched in June 1938. This thing, however, which was easily more than half the length of the Enterprise, was no Kagero-class bucket. It looked like something out of Buck Rogers.
“What the hell is that thing?” asked Black, in the tone of voice he might have used if he’d seen a large, two-headed dog. “I’m not sure what it is,” Spruance replied, regaining his composure, “but I know who it is. Better put on your Sunday
best, Commander. I think our guests have arrived early.”
As the mystery ship quietly slipped into the night, a Klaxon
aboard the Enterprise sounded the alarm.
And then, the horizon exploded.
Suddenly they were beset by madness on all sides. To star-
board, the eerie Nipponese ghost ship receded into darkness. To
port, there was a volcanic eruption about ten miles distant. It
was a few seconds before the thunder reached their ears, but
they could see clearly enough what was happening as the light
of the explosion was trapped between a heaving sea and the
thick, scudding clouds that pressed down from above.
Black shook his head, determined to remain calm. But as his
eyes darted to and fro across the surface of the ocean, his mind was insulted by the monstrous visions they encountered there.
In the flat, guttering light of the distant inferno Black could see more enemy vessels, none that he recognized, most of them freakish cousins to the thing that had just peeled away from the Enterprise. There was one ship—maybe a thousand yards dis- tant—well, he simply refused to believe his own eyes. As it crested a long rolling line of swell he could have sworn the thing had two, maybe even three hulls. It was difficult to be sure under these conditions, but he simply could not shake the after- image. It was either a ship with three hulls, or three ships some- how joined and operating in perfect harmony.
And randomly scattered on the crucible of the seas all around them were more products of the same Stygian foundry. Over there, he was certain, there was another double-hulled monstrosity, bursting through a black wall of water. To the north lay more ships like the beast that had sidled up to them before. And there, way off the port bow, were two flattops, both of them large enough to be fleet carriers. One was a real behemoth.
“Commander!”
Black was shocked out of his reverie by the harsh call.
“We’ve got work to do, Commander,” Spruance barked. “A
hell of a job, too, unless you want your grandchildren eating
raw fish and rice balls.”
Bells rang and Klaxons blared. Thousands of feet hammered
on steel plating as men rushed to their stations on nearly two
dozen warships.
The first gun to fire was a 20mm Oerlikon on the Portland. It
pumped a snaking line of tracer in exactly the wrong direction.
Forty-millimeter Bofors, pom-poms, and dozens of five-inch
batteries soon joined it, until a whole quadrant of the sky
seethed with gunfire.
Spruance and Black raced up to the bridge, tugging on helmets
and vests, as the big guns of the Midway Task Force began to
boom. Huge muzzle flashes from eight-inch batteries lit up the
night with a chaotic, strobe effect. The bridge was in an uproar
with a dozen different voices calling out reports, barking ques-
tions, and demanding answers where—as yet—there were none.
“Get the bombers away, as quickly as possible,” Spruance
ordered.
“VB-six is ready to roll, sir.” “Coming around to two-two-three.”
The plating beneath their feet began to pitch as the big carrier swung into the wind. Black could only hope that none of their destroyer escorts would be run down by the unexpected course correction. This is insane, he thought, dogfighting with twenty- thousand-ton ships. He braced himself against a chart table in a corner of the bridge, and tried to make sense of the chaos around them. There were hundreds of guns firing without any sort of coordination. They were going to start destroying their own ships very quickly if that went on.
As soon as the thought occurred to him, it happened. The cruiser New Orleans attempted a ragged broadside at that spec- tral Japanese ship that had just “appeared” to starboard, a few minutes earlier. The volley completely missed its target, but at least two shells slammed into an American destroyer a few hun- dred yards beyond. Black cursed as the little ship exploded in flames.
“We’re going to need better gunnery control,” he yelled at
Spruance. “I’ll get on it.”
The admiral turned away from the sailor he had been address-
ing and nodded brusquely. Black charged back out of the
bridge, heading for the radio room.

HMAS MORETON BAY, 1049 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

Lieutenant Rachel Nguyen had slept six hours out of the last forty-eight. As the defensive systems operator of the troop cat
Moreton Bay, she felt herself directly responsible for the lives of four hundred soldiers and thirty-two crewmembers. The Moreton Bay was a fat, soft, high-value target; so much more tempting for would-be martyrs or renegade Indonesian forces than the Clinton, or the Kandahar, or any of the escort vessels. The software for the catamaran’s Metal Storm CIWS—Close- In Weapons System—had been twitching and freezing up ever since they’d loaded the update patches during the last refit in Sydney. Nguyen, at the tail end of a marathon hacking session, had just come to the conclusion she’d be better off trashing the updates and reverting to the old program.
She rubbed her eyes and swiveled her chair around to face Captain Sheehan. The ancient mariner seemed to read her mind. “You want to dump the new system, Lieutenant?” he asked,
even before she had a chance to speak.Damn, she thought. How does he do that?
“I don’t really want to, sir, but it’s buggy as hell. The pods are just as likely to target us as any incoming.” Sheehan rubbed at his chin beneath the thick beard he had
sported for as long as Nguyen had known him. “Okay,” he agreed after a moment’s thought. “Tell the Clinton we’re going to take them offline for—how long to reload the old software?”
Nguyen shrugged. “A few minutes to deep-six the garbage code, five and a half to reload the classic. Say ten to be sure. “Okay. Tell the Clinton we’re taking the pods offline for fif- teen minutes to change over the programming, so we’ll need them to assign us extra cover through CBL. The Trident’s clos- est, she’ll do nicely.” “Thank you, sir,” said Rachel, genuinely grateful to be re- leased from the burden of hacking the software on her own. Sheehan watched her closely for a moment longer, then turned to peer out through the tinted blast windows of the cat’s bridge. The sea surface was nearly mirror still. Nguyen worried that he might order her to stand down for a few hours. After all, they wouldn’t be deploying for another two weeks, and they’d be in port as of this evening. But she’d never be able to sleep until she was sure the problem had been solved. “How’s your thesis going, Lieutenant?” he asked as she shut down the windows on the screen in front of her. “I haven’t really had time to work on it since we left Darwin, sir,” she confessed. “But it’s not due for three months. I should be right to finish it.”
“Still comparing Haig and Westmoreland?” “With reference to Phillip the Second,” she added, “you know, sent the Armada, started the Eighty Years War, wrecked the Castilian Empire.”
“No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his be- lief in its essential excellence,” quoted Sheehan. “You’ve read Tuchman?” she said. “Many years ago, for my own dissertation,” he nodded. “What was it she called Phillip?” “The surpassing woodenhead of all sovereigns,” said Nguyen. Sheehan smiled in remembrance. “That’s right, she did . . .
Anyway, reload the software, then get some sleep.” She started to protest, but the look on his face stopped her. “I don’t want to see you back here for at least six hours.”

JRV NAGOYA, 1046 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

As diverse as these ships were, one still stood out. The Joint Re- search Vessel Nagoya was a purpose-built leviathan, con- structed around the frame of an eighty-thousand-tonne liquid
natural gas carrier. Her keel had been laid down in Korea, with the fit-out split between San Francisco and Tokyo, reflecting the multinational nature of her funding. She fit in with the sleek warships of the Multinational Force the way a hippo would with a school of swordfish.
Her presence was a function of the speed with which the cri- sis in Jakarta had developed. The USS Leyte Gulf, a stealth cruiser from the Clinton’s battle group, had been riding shotgun over the Nagoya’s sea trials in the benign waters off Western Australia. When the orders came down that the carrier and her battle group were to move immediately into the Wetar Strait the Nagoya had been left with no choice but to tag along until an es- cort could be assigned to shepherd her safely back to Hawaii. It was a situation nobody liked, least of all Professor Manning Pope, the leader of the Nagoya team.
Crouched over a console in his private quarters, Pope mut- tered under his breath as he hammered out yet another enraged e-mail directly to Admiral Tony Kevin, commander in chief, U.S. Pacific Command. It was the ninth such e-mail he had sent in forty-eight hours. Each had elicited a standardized reply, not from the admiral himself mind you, but from some trained monkey on his personal staff.
Pope typed, stabbing at the keys:
Need I remind you of the support this Project elicits at THE VERY HIGHEST LEVELS OF GOVERN- MENT. I would not wish to be in your shoes, Ad- miral Kevin, when I explain to your superiors that we have gone over budget while being dragged into this pointless fiasco. The NAGOYA is a research vessel, not a warship, and we should have been allowed to continue our trials unmo- lested in the perfectly safe testing range off Perth. As small as they are, the Australian navy are more than capable of fending off any drunken fishermen who might have strayed too close.
Therefore I DEMAND that we be freed from this two-penny opera and allowed to return to our test schedule as originally planned. I await your earliest reply. And that means YOURS, Admi- ral Kevin. Not some junior baboon!
That’ll put a rocket under his fat ass, thought Pope. Bureau- crats hate it when you threaten to go over their heads. It means they might actually have to stagger to their feet and do some- thing for a change.
Spleen vented for the moment, he keyed into the vidlink that connected him with the Project control room. A Japanese man with a shock of unruly, thick black hair answered the hail.
“How do we look for a power-up this morning, Yoshi?” Pope asked. “I’m anxious to get back on schedule.”
Standing at a long, curving bank of flatscreens Professor Yoshi Murayama, an unusually tall cosmic string theorist from Honshu, blew out his cheeks and shrugged. “I can’t see why not from this end. We’re just about finished entering the new data sets. We’re good to go, except youknow that Kolhammer won’t like it.”
“Kolhammer’s a chickenshit,” Pope said somewhat mourn- fully. “I really don’t care what he thinks. He’s not qualified to tell us what we can and cannot do. You are.”
“Like I said,” the Japanese Nobel winner responded. “I don’t see a problem. Just a beautiful set of numbers.”
“Of course.” Pope nodded. “Everyone else feel the same?” he asked, raising his voice so that it projected into the room beyond Murayama. The space was surprisingly small for such a mo- mentous undertaking, no bigger than a suburban living room really. Large glowing monitors shared the area with half a dozen senior Project researchers, each staffing a workstation.
His question caught them off-guard. Their boss enjoyed a hard-won reputation as a thoroughly unpleasant little prick with an amazingly rigid pole up his ass. A couple of them exchanged quick glances, but nobody said anything for a few moments un- til Barnes, their magnetic ram technician, ventured a reply.
“Well, it’s not our fault we fell behind. But you can bet we’ll get blamed if we don’t hustle to catch up.”
“Exactly!” Pope replied. “Let’s prepare for a test run at point- zero-one efficiency. That should be enough to confirm a stabi- lized effect with the new figures. Are we all agreed?”
They were.

USS KANDAHAR, 1014 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

The marines wouldn’t have been surprised at all to discover that someone like Adil was watching over them. In fact, they assumed there were more than two hundred million pairs of eyes
turned their way as they prepared to deploy into the Indonesian Archipelago.
Nobody called it the Caliphate. Officially the United States still recognized it as the sovereign territory of Indonesia, seventeen thousand islands stretching from Banda Aceh, three hundred
kilometers off the coast of Thailand, down to Timor, just north of Australia. The sea-lanes passing through those islands carried a third of the world’s maritime trade, and officially they
remained open to all traffic. The Indonesian government-in-exile said so—from the safety of the Grand Hyatt in Geneva where they had fled, three weeks earlier, after losing control of Jakarta.
Unofficially though, these were the badlands, controlled— just barely—by a revolutionary Islamic government calling itself the Caliphate and laying claim to all seventeen thousand
islands, as well as the territory of Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, Bougainville, and, for good measure, northern Australia. Nonbelievers were not welcome.
The spiritual leader of the Caliphate, Mullah Ibn Abbas, had proclaimed this as the will of Allah.
The Eighty-second Marine Expeditionary Unit begged to differ.
And on the hangar deck of the USS Kandahar, a Baghdadclass littoral assault ship, they were preparing a full and frank rebuttal.
The hangar was a vast, echoing space. Two full decks high and running nearly a third of the length of the slab-sided vessel, it still seemed crowded, packed tight with most of the Eightysecond’s air wing—a small air force in its own right consisting of a dozen Ospreys, four aging Super Stallions, two reconditioned command Hueys, eight Sea Comanche gunships, and
half a dozen Super Harriers.
The Harriers and Super Stallions had been moved onto the “roof”—the flight deck, thus allowing the ground combat element of the Eighty-second MEU to colonize the space that had been opened up. The GCE was formally known as the Third Battalion of the Ninth Regiment, Fifth Marine Division. It was also known as the Lonesome Dead, after their passably famous
CO, Colonel J. Lonesome Jones.
Not all of 3 Batt were embarked upon the Kandahar. The battalion topped out at more than twelve hundred men and women, and some of their number had to be berthed elsewhere in the
three ships that were carrying the Eighty-second into harm’s way. The USS Providence, a Harper’s Ferry–class amphibious landing dockship (LSD), took the battalion’s four Abrams tanks, a rifle company, and the amphibious assault vehicle platoon. The Kennebunkport, a venerable LPD 12, carried the recon platoon, the regiment’s Humvees, two more Hueys, the drone platoon, and the Navy SEAL team that would be providing security to the Eighty-second during their cruise through the archipelago.
Even as Adil unwrapped his rice cake and squinted into the blue expanse of the Wetar Strait a six-man detachment from the SEAL team was unpacking their gear on the hangar deck of
the Kandahar, where they were getting set to train the men of C Company, 3 Batt.
Charlie Company doubled as Colonel Jones’s cliff assault and small boat raiding squadron, and the SEALs had come to acquaint them with a new toy: the G4, a lightweight assault riflethat fired strips of caseless ceramic ammunition and programmable 30mm grenades. It was to become standard equipment throughout the U.S. armed forces within twelve months. The marines, however, were always at the bottom of the food chain, and would probably have waited two years before they laid hands on these babies. But the battalion logistics officer, Lieutenant
Colonel Nancy Viviani, was an inventive and talented S4. As always, Viviani was determined that the battalion should have the very best equipment other people’s money could buy.
Not that long ago she would have been known as a scavenger, a scrounger, and would have done her job under the cover of darkness with a pair of wire cutters and a fast getaway jeep. She
would have been a man, too, of course. But Lieutenant Colonel Viviani carried two master’s degrees into combat, one of them an MBA from the London School of Economics, and the graduates of that august institution didn’t stoop to anything so crude as petty theft. Not when they could play the Pentagon’s fantastically complex supply programs like an antique violin.
Six and a half hours of extracurricular keyboard time had been enough to release a shipment of G4s from pre-positioned supply vessels in Darwin. Viviani’s genius was in making the process
appear entirely legitimate. Had the Senate Armed Forces Committee itself spent a year inspecting her electronic audit trail, it would have found everything in order with absolutely nothing linking the G4 shipment to the loss of a similar supply package scheduled for delivery to an army public relations unit. “This is the Remington G-four,” CPO Vincente Rogas barked
at the members of C Company. “By the end of today’s lecture you will be familiar with the procedure for maintaining this weapon in the field.” It sounded more like a threat than a
promise. “The G-four is the first solid-state infantry weapon,” he bellowed. “It has very few moving parts.” A slight murmur passed through the tight knot of marines. They were familiar with the weapons specs, having intensively trained with them back in the United States. But still, it was a hell of a thing to wrap your head around. “And this is the standard battle load.” His audience stared at the long thin strip of ceramic munitions like children at their first magic show. “The ammo strip is placed in the barrel like this. An electrical charge ignites the propellant casing, driving the slug out with such velocity that, even with a three-round burst, you will feel no kickback—at least not before the volley leaves the muzzle. “Tomorrow, when we move ashore to the range, each of you will be allotted three hundred rounds. I suggest very strongly that
before then youtake advantage of the full VR tutorial we’ve loaded into your training sets. The base software package is a standard Asian urban conflict scenario, but we’ve added modules
specifically tailored for operations in Jakarta and Surabaya.” With deployment less than a fortnight away, similar scenes were being replayed throughout the U.S.-led Multinational
Force accompanying the Kandahar. Twelve thousand very serious men and women drilled to the point of exhaustion. They were authorized by the UN Security Council to use whatever
force was necessary to reestablish control of the capital, Jakarta, and to put an end to the mass murder of Indonesia’s Chinese and Christian minorities. Everybody was preparing for a slaughter. In the hundred-bed hospital of the Kandahar the Eighty-second’s chief combat surgeon, Captain Margie Francois, supervised her team’s reaction to a simulated missile strike on an armored hovercraft carrying a marine rifle company into a contested estuary.
Two thousand meters away, the French missile frigate Dessaix dueled with a pair of Raptors off the supercarrier USS Hillary Clinton. In the other direction, three thousand meters to the west, two British trimaran stealth destroyers practiced their response to a successful strike by suicide bombers whose weapon of choice had been a high-speed rubber boat. Indeed, Captain Karen Halabi, who had been on the receiving end of just such an attack as a young ensign, drilled the crew of the HMS Trident so fiercely that in those few hours they were allowed to sleep, most
dreamed of crazy men in speedboats laden with TNT.

EAST TIMOR, ZONE TIME:0942 HOURS,

The Caliphate spy, a Javanese carpenter known simply as Adil,resettled himself against a omfortable groove in the sandalwood tree. The small, shaded clearing in the hills overlooking
Dili had been his home for three days. He shared it with an aged feral cat, which remained hidden throughout the day, and an irritable monkey, which occasionally tried to shit on his head. He had considered shooting the filthy animal, but his orders were explicit. He was to remain unnoticed as long as the crusaders were anchored off East Timor, observing their fleet and sending reports via microburst laser link, but only in the event of a “significant
development.”
He had seen nothing “significant” in seventy-two hours. The infidel ships were lying so far offshore they were often lost in haze and distance. Only when night fell did he have any real
chance of seeing them, and even then they remained little more than a blurred constellation of twinkling, faraway lights. Such was their arrogance they didn’t bother to cloak themselves in
darkness. Jets roared to and from the flight deck of their carrier twentyfour hours a day. In deepest night the fire of the launches appeared to Adil as though God Himself had lit a torch on the rim of the world.
Occasionally a helicopter would appear from the direction of the flotilla, beginning as a small, indistinct dot in the hot gray sky, taking on recognizable form only as the muffled drone of
its engines clarified into a thudding, growling roar. From his hiding spot Adil could almost make out the faces of the infidels in the cabins of the fat metal birds. American, British, French,
they all looked alike, cruel and overfed, a thought that reminded him of his own hunger.


He unwrapped the banana leaves from around a small rice cake, thanking Allah for the generosity of his masters. They had included a little dried fish in his rations for today, a rare treat.
Sometimes, when the sun climbed directly overhead and beat down with a slow fury, Adil’s thoughts wandered. He cursed his weakness and begged God for the strength to carry out his duty, but it was hard. He had fallen asleep more than once. Nothing ever seemed to happen. There was plenty of movement down in Dili, which was infested with crusader forces from all over the Christian world, but Dili wasn’t his concern. His sole responsibility was to watch those ships that were hiding in the shimmering haze on the far horizon.
Still, Adil mused, it would be nice to know he had some real purpose here; that he had not been staked out like a goat on the side of a hill. Perhaps he was to be part of some elaborate strike
on the Christians in town. Perhaps tonight the darkness would be torn asunder by holy fire as some martyr blew up one of their filthy taverns. But then, why leave him here on the side of this
stupid hill, covered in monkey shit and tormented by ants?
This wasn’t how he had imagined jihad would be when he had graduated from the Madrasa in Bandung.