Curtis didn't know what weird sense cut in to save them, but he grabbed Rosanna and pulled her down a split second before a Zero roared overhead, strafing the trench line and turning dozens of defenders into chopped meat and splinters of bone. Rosanna was screaming and clawing at his face, trying to get to her feet again as another Zero on a strafing run chewed up the trench. Hot soil and pieces of tarmac poured in on them as Curtis used his body weight to press down on the reporter and keep her safe.
"You're going to get killed!" he yelled over the uproar.
"We're all going to get killed, you stupid sonovabitch," she cried back.
Curtis felt someone grab the collar of his torn shirt and haul him up off Rosanna. He was powerless to fight back.
It was Cherry, passing him a rifle. The stock was shattered and sticky with gore. "I admire your spirit, trying to get laid at a time like this," said the cop, "But your country could use a little help, too, Casanova."
The volume of fire pouring from the trench was a fraction of what it had been, now. Curtis saw why when Cherry turned away. Nearly half the soldiers and air crew were dead, shredded by the cannon and machine-gun fire. The floor of the trench was covered in a thick, semiliquid gruel. Curtis felt his gorge rise and his stomach contract. He vomited up everything he'd eaten for lunch.
"That's the spirit," Cherry called back at him. "Spit in their fucking eyes."
IN TRANSIT TO WASHINGTON
About the only thing to recommend the Connie was the lack of restrictions Eastern had on using electronic equipment while in flight. Kolhammer was able to stay hooked into Fleetnet for most of the trip to Washington. The link was tenuous, and prone to dropouts, but as long as he was content to take compressed data bursts, rather than a live feed, he was fine.
Nothing else was fine, though.
His Secret Service shadows were back. Agents Flint and Stirling, by order of President Roosevelt. At least they didn't crowd him, as they had when he first arrived.
His slate beeped with updates every few minutes. Tellingly, most of them didn't come directly from the remaining Task Force units in Hawaii. There weren't many remaining Task Force units in Hawaii. But there were at least ten journalists from the Clinton who could provide real-time coverage from the islands, so the link had been maintained largely to provide for them. They were allowed to access Fleetnet to file, but on the condition that their raw footage became the property of the Task Force.
Mike Judge had a team of analysts on the Clinton raking the coverage and repackaging it for military use. That was a lot like what used to happen at home, anyway. An almost embarrassing percentage of so-called intelligence was lifted straight from the news media, only to have it returned to them as "inside information."
Kolhammer stretched out his cramped legs in the surprisingly roomy wicker chair of the Lockheed Constellation, and scanned the latest reports from Hawaii. Judge's people had confirmed that Lavals, almost certainly coming from the Dessaix, had struck at a number of points around the islands. The missiles hadn't done nearly so much damage as they could have, partly because some had malfunctioned, or been sabotaged, and partly because the rest hadn't been used to their best advantage.
It was a moot point, however. Enough damage had been done to render the island indefensible against any Japanese force that included the Dessaix or a ship of similar capability. Follow-up strikes by carrier-based Japanese planes had focused on further degrading the islands' air defense net, but those strikes had been unnecessary, as far as he could tell. The piles of twisted, white hot metal, which had been the Clinton's surviving fighter wing, were all Yamamoto needed to see. With those gone, and the Dessaix at large, it was only a matter of time before the Rising Sun flew over Hawaii.
There was little point in turning the Clinton around and sending her back. Without a working catapult or fighter wing, she was just a target, not a threat.
The Kandahar was an option, but not a great one. Jones's forces were spread over a couple of thousand square miles, and it would take more than a week to gather and embark for any counterstrike, and they were running perilously low on ammunition.
The Havoc had run through all her land-attack missiles. She had a small number of ship-killers left, and seemed the obvious choice to hunt for the Dessaix, but he was going to have the devil's own job convincing Canberra to release her.
As they approached the Rockies in near total darkness, Phillip Kolhammer examined his options and could find only one viable response to Yamamoto's gambit.
The Siranui.
HONOLULU, HAWAII
Every window in her apartment was broken, but at least the building still stood. So much of Honolulu had been flattened that Rosanna hadn't expected to find anything but smoking rubble where her home had been.
Cherry's place was gone, along with his police station. And Curtis had been trying all day to find someone to report to, without any luck. He'd given up for now and decided to stick with her. The three of them pulled up outside her place in the gathering darkness of midevening. Her apartment building stood on the side of a hill, and half the island seemed to be ablaze below them.
The time between the Japanese air raids was becoming noticeably shorter.
"They're closer now," said Curtis as a few pathetic lines of tracer snaked up from the fiery cauldron that had been Pearl Harbor. Irregular flashes from exploding bombs strobed away below them.
"You got anything to eat?" asked Cherry.
"You gotta be kidding," said Curtis.
"No, he's right," Rosanna countered. "If the Japanese get ashore, we don't know when we'll eat again before relief arrives. I've got some leftovers in the icebox, and my oven is gas. We should eat now. We'll need our strength. I want to pick up some batteries for my gear, too. I don't know if we'll get back here again, once we leave."
Curtis looked even more despondent. He stopped halfway up the path that led to the front door of her block. "Do you really think the Clinton will come back?" he asked.
Even Cherry seemed interested in her answer.
"No," she said. "The Clinton's out of it for now. But the Kandahar isn't. Or that LAS with her, the Ipswich. Even if the Japanese take over, they could kick down the door and fight their way in."
"Unless they get sunk," said Cherry, "by whatever hit us."
"Yeah," she agreed, feeling very tired. "But let's not think about that right now. Come on, let's get inside."
There was no electricity to light the place, whether from the effects of the electromagnetic pulse or from direct damage to the power grid, she couldn't tell. It didn't matter. Cherry had brought a hooded oil lamp, looted from God knew where. There was so much smoke and dust in the air that the beam was tightly defined, reminding Rosanna of a light saber. That familiar image from her childhood, which now seemed so much more peaceful than this nightmare, lifted her spirits slightly.
Everything was relative, she told herself as they climbed the stairs to the rooms she occupied on the third floor of the Mission-style building. Curtis thought that she'd grown up in a world full of violent lunatics.
"Miss Natoli, is that you?" a quavering voice asked. Cherry's lamp quickly picked out a small, round white face framed by unruly strands of gray hair, peeking out over the landing above them.