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.