“You’re all good news, today, Doc. Will that injection clear it up?”
“Maybe, sir. I’ll bring some drops for your eyes, for use no less than every hour, two drops, and more if the itching gets more intense. And until this clears up, I want to bandage your eye, to make sure you’re not touching it and possibly spreading this to your other eye.”
“Doc, that would mean re-bandaging my eye every hour. I’ll just wear an eye-patch. I used to wear one as watch officer instead of red goggles for night adaptation of my periscope eye. That’ll keep me from scratching it and I can get drops into it easier than all that bandaging and re-bandaging.”
“Fine, Captain, but if you reconsider, let me know. I don’t mind coming up to redo the bandages.”
Alexeyev nodded. “Thanks, Doc. And listen, I know I don’t need to say this, but this diagnosis—” Alexeyev’s voice trailed off.
“Don’t worry, Captain. This is absolutely confidential. And I won’t keep record of it, in case of a squadron audit, sir.”
“Thanks, Doc.” The medic left and Alexeyev rooted around in his desk drawers for his black eye patch. He hadn’t worn it since he’d been a senior lieutenant. Back then, it made him feel like a swashbuckling pirate, but when he’d gotten more senior, it seemed an immature affectation. But now he had little choice. He’d just found it when the knock came to his door. He opened it. Doc handed him several small bottles.
“Drops for the eyes, Captain. Two drops, once an hour, and two more if irritation and itching get worse. Please let me know if you need more.”
Alexeyev nodded and leaned his head back and put in two drops.
Dammit, he thought, they didn’t offer any immediate relief. He put on the eye patch with some absorbent gauze under it and picked up the phone to call the mess cook to bring him breakfast. When it arrived, the mess cook saw him in his eye patch and gave him a strange look. Alexeyev wondered if Chaykovsky had kept his promise to keep the diagnosis secret.
The radio crackled in the headset of Lieutenant Commander Mark Macallan.
“Dark Rider, taxi into position and hold, runway zero eight.”
“Taxi into position and hold,” Macallan replied, ending with his callsign. “Dark Rider.” Macallan reached for the throttles and gave the plane enough power to move onto the runway, turned to line it up with the centerline, then throttled back down and tapped the brakes.
Suddenly his copilot and golf buddy, Lieutenant Wayne Holder, pointed to the runway ahead. “What the hell? Commander, you seeing this?”
Ahead of them on the runway, three Navy utility trucks with flashing beacons on their roofs pulled onto the tarmac of the runway, one of them putting its rear toward the P-8A’s cockpit. That truck had a large light bar mounted on it, and the lights of that sign read, “DISREGARD TOWER. MAKE NO RADIO TRANSMISSIONS. FOLLOW ME.”
Macallan looked at Holder and was about to call the tower when the tower called him.
“Dark Rider, cleared for takeoff, runway zero eight. Contact departure control at one-twenty-one point zero seven.” When the radio transmission ended, the circuit clicked four times, a secret indicator that something was very wrong.
“Commander, there is no departure control, and there’s no frequency one two one point zero seven.”
Macallan pointed to the utility trucks, which were rolling slowly toward the taxiway off the main runway. The lights of the rear truck’s light bar flashed, reading, “FOLLOW ME.”
Macallan taxied the heavy twin engine jet off the runway and followed the utility trucks, the trucks leading him to his original parking spot. Then the light bar read something very strange: “YOUR POWER WILL GO OUT IN 3, 2, 1…”
Macallan was reaching for the engine shutdown switches when the cockpit suddenly went dark. There was a whining noise that started with a high pitch and slowly came lower until it was a bass growl, then went out.
“Commander, what the fuck is going on?” Holder asked, his voice rising in anxiety.
“Maybe we got hit with an EMP,” Macallan said. “But those trucks sure seemed to know the exact timing of it. Come on, let’s get out of here. Line up the breakers and switch positions to shut-down first.”
Holder complied, then followed Macallan out of the cockpit. The antisubmarine warfare officers, chiefs and enlisted were standing at their consoles. The most senior, the lieutenant, looked at Macallan.
“What’s wrong, sir?”
“Just follow us off the plane,” Macallan said, frustrated that he was in the dark.
At the bottom of the steps a Navy captain stood, wearing tropical whites. Macallan and Holder saluted him.
“Sir, what the hell is going on?”
“A cyberattack, Commander,” the captain said.
“If it’s a cyberattack, how did you guys know about it?”
The captain shook his head. “A tower operator was off watch in the lounge playing a video game. A message came in on it from another user laying out the cyberattack and the timing. The sender said it was serious and to alert the command. The other user mentioned me by name. The operator could have ignored it, but he brought it to my attention. Good thing, too. If we hadn’t waved you off, you’d be in the deep Atlantic right now.”
“Jesus, a video game?”
“Come with me and I’ll brief you and your crew.”
Macallan led his crew toward the door of the operations building, sharing an incredulous glance at Holder.
Lieutenant junior grade Everest Montgomery was standing his first watch as officer of the deck after recently becoming qualified. He was constantly reminding himself of the captain’s advice: you have the deck and the conn, not because of your experience, but because of the trust placed in you, and the trust that when you need help, you won’t be afraid to call the captain. Still, standing officer of the deck watch by himself, after almost a year of standing it “under instruction,” was terrifying. All this ship’s power, entrusted to him. He took a deep breath to calm himself, and then it happened.
Every instrument on the bridge went suddenly black. The constant whining hum always present in the room whined lower and lower in both pitch and intensity while the ventilation ducts with their constant blasting of air into the space died down. Within seconds, the room was pin-drop silent and stuffy.
“What the hell is going on?” Montgomery heard the captain say from behind him. The skipper had been in a videoconference with squadron at the time, and certainly would be frustrated at what seemed a total loss of power.
Montgomery looked out the bridge windows. The ship was slowing in the water, eventually coming to a complete stop in the sea, starting to roll in the gentle swells.
“Captain,” he said, “I’m damned if I know.”
The captain pulled a phone off the aft bulkhead and tried to call maneuvering, but the line must have been dead. He tossed the phone to the deck and disappeared aft. The messenger of the watch, Petty Officer Third Class Philip “Skip” Cresante, came in from the port door.
“Cresante, what do you know about all this?” Montgomery asked.
The messenger looked terrified. “I just came from the engineroom. Total loss of power. Other than battle lanterns, everything is completely black. No power, no displays, no phones.”