Final impact

“Not much, no. And you, Ms. Duffy, I’ve seen a couple of newspaper owners here tonight, but no reporters, other than you. Are you working, or is this just a bit of sightseeing for you?”

She cocked an eyebrow at him, one of the most sexually suggestive gestures he’d ever seen. He suddenly felt a little guilty, although for what reason, he had no idea. He threw a furtive glance over her bare shoulders, looking for Ali.

“Well, I haven’t pumped you about your plans for the future, so I guess I must be here for the pleasure of the company,” she said.

Kennedy surveyed the other party guests: a close-packed collection of overweight, gin-fueled bores.

“Yeah,” he deadpanned. “I can see that’d be it.”

Off on the horizon, shooting stars zipped across the sky.

“Cap’n, boat’s away, sir.”

“Thanks, Chief. Let’s hold our position for now.”

“Aye.”

Kennedy dropped the goggles from his eyes, and with them went the illusion of privacy he’d enjoyed for just a moment or two.

The deck hardly moved beneath his feet, so calm was the sea that night. He could hear the muted putter of the marines’ little boat as it carried them away from the bulk of the Armanno. They were headed to an island just below the horizon. It had seemed deserted on the first couple of surveillance sweeps a month ago. But as the fleet drew closer to the Marianas, islands that had been beyond the range of Kolhammer’s remaining drones came under observation by them for the first time.

And this particular piece of real estate needed checking out.

The water jets were so incredibly quiet compared with an old-fashioned outboard motor that less disciplined troops might have been tempted to ride them much closer in to shore. But Gunnery Sergeant Adam Denny cut the engines at precisely the point his mission specs demanded. All six men in the small, rigid-hulled inflatable slipped lightweight paddles into the warm water and began to stroke for shore. They might well be rowing toward a deserted island, but they proceeded as though they were infiltrating Hirohito’s Imperial Palace. Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say at this point. They’d rehearsed this scenario dozens of times back at the Littoral Warfare Training Camp in New Guinea.

The island bobbed very gently up and down in their night vision goggles as they drew closer.

Denny held a three-dimensional model of the atoll in his head. He’d known this was a special case as soon as he’d been authorized to attend one week of pre-mission prep in the Zone. Traffic between the “old” Marine Corps and its twenty-first offspring in the San Fernando Valley was surprisingly rare. It was strange, too, until you looked into the politics of it.

Jones’s people had some great toys in the Zone. Better even than the AT stuff his Force Recon company had been issued at the start of the year. And their stuff was way better than the new gear the rest of the corps was packing nowadays. You’d think everyone would be able to just get along, rather than wasting time and energy that could be more profitably spent killing Japs, but no. Being a simple noncom, Denny wasn’t privy to all the back-room bullshit that went on, but he had a good set of eyes in his head, and he could see that of all the services, the corps seemed to be the one resisting hardest any talk of integration with its uptime colleagues. Happy to take the toys and whizbangs like the beautiful M4 carbine he had strapped to his back. Not so happy to play nice with the new guys who’d brought all those things in the first place.

Denny spat a stream of tobacco juice into the sea.

What a buncha fucking baloney.

Did he give a rat’s ass if General Jones was as black as a fucking eggplant?

Nope. All he cared about was getting his guys onto this island, and off again in one piece with whatever information they might find there. And in his opinion-even though it was just the opinion of a lowly noncom-they were that much more likely to get out of this with their asses intact because of the week he’d spent in the Zone, playing with those amazing holobloc machines. Without ever having set foot on the island, he already knew it intimately.

And if there did turn out to be Japs hiding there, for sure they woulda built a bunch of stuff like tunnels and bunkers that weren’t on the 3-D images he’d examined back in California. Still, he knew all the bays and inlets, the major streams and valleys, indeed all the topography of the joint, and that’d come in handy for a “greenside” op like this, where they’d have to stay hidden from any hostile forces.