“I don’t know, sir. The Galaxy machines can see an infrared heat trace through heavy clouds, maybe even through this storm. I like the idea of getting down under as soon as we can. I liked even more the idea of getting the reactor plant up fast.”

“I may spend some time aft with Walt when we’re starting up.”

“Sir, please don’t. That’ll just slow him down. Walt likes precision and plans. You being back there isn’t part of his… plan.”

Phillips smiled. “You’ve been hanging with Walt for a while, now, right, Scott?”

“Sir, Walt is different but he’s damned good. You tell him what you want, and once he agrees he delivers. He’s not your typical military type.”

“Is there a typical type?”

“My wife thinks so. She says all my friends and I are walking military robots.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we wear uniforms and are trained to behave certain ways, and on the ship we’re a team, but the test is when we’re up against a situation we haven’t been trained for, and we go on our own. That’s when I think we’ll prove that we’re about as far from robots as you can get.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Captain, it could go either way.”

“Guess I should get to the bridge. Is the pilot here?”

“On the tug, sir. It’s waiting for us in the river.”

“Let’s get the hell to sea.”

NORTHWEST PACIFIC

585 NAUTICAL MILES EAST-SOUTHEAST OF YOKOHAMA

USS RONALD REAGAN

Pacino had asked for Donner to come into flag plot, away from the bridge and other ears, so he could talk to him about how they would work together on the blockade. Once that was done he’d assemble the submarine operations people in a room and take over from the submarine operations officer. Then he’d get on with Sean Murphy and go over the fleet deployment. It was already 1000 and Pacino had a mountain of work to do before noon.

The worst of the typhoon had passed through during the night. Pacino had spent the storm in his rack, the motion of the ship, which made him seasick when he was up, had the opposite effect on him when he was lying down. The waves had actually rocked him to sleep and he had slept beyond his wakeup notice, but no one had cared. No one but Donner even seemed to know he was on board. With the storm, the accident with the F-14, the sedative and the jet lag, Pacino had needed the sleep. He had awakened feeling so much better that for a moment he almost forgot about Brad Shearson, but the memory of their flight came back and landed on his conscience with a resounding thump. If he had waited a day the kid would have lived.

Pacino looked out the starboard windows at the horizon, the sea calm now that the storm had ceased. The sky was overcast, but the glare from the brightness was giving Pacino a headache. The other ships of the battle group steamed in formation, the beauty of it breathtaking, the precision, the guns and missiles and radars of the sleek surface ships a powerful display of naval might.

Looking at them, Pacino for the first time felt that the blockade might work out. He turned away from the starboard window and looked at flag plot, a room the size of the bridge on the deck above. The room’s windows were as panoramic as the bridge’s, the floor space taken up with plot tables and conference tables. Now that charts and papers were replaced by Writepads, the room’s broad tables were somewhat out of use. In Pacino’s experience on submarines, which were so cramped for space and volume that the eye never focused on a distance more than fifteen feet away, the openness and wide view from flag plot seemed luxurious, almost sinful.

Finally Admiral Donner came in, dressed in fresh working khakis with no decorations on his uniform other than his surface warfare pin and his three silver stars.

“Morning. I see you’re still with us. How do you feel?”

“Better. After last night anything is better.”

“Good. Listen, you’d better take a look at this. Seems things are picking up steam.”

Pacino squinted in the glare to see the writing on Admiral Donner’s Writepad.

“Warner wants to start the blockade tonight,” Donner said.

“But we’re not in position yet. We’ve got another twelve hours of steaming to get us within fifty miles of Honshu, and that’s just the east side of the islands. We have to get the Sea of Japan task group on the other side of the islands to interdict shipping from the west.

That’ll take at least another day—”

“President Warner has maps, she knows where we are and the timing of getting in close. Admiral Wadsworth is working on it with her.”

Wadsworth strikes again, Pacino thought.

“Mac, what the hell is this? We can’t set up a blockade that fast. What kind of a blockade would that be?

By this evening the Sea of Japan will still be wide open.”

“I thought something like this might happen, Patch. I sent your submarines on ahead a few hours before you landed, if that crash on the deck can be called a landing.