Sanders saw the red stars on the tanks. What were Chinese tanks doing coming off the ship? The manifest said nothing about that. And who the hell would be buying those? Maybe they were for training exercises out at Camp Schofield?
Jakob looked around and realized he was alone.
His next move was to bring out his phone and start shooting video. It would be worth a couple beers; maybe he could even sell it on the viz-net.
Then what looked like six beer kegs flew up into the air and raced toward downtown. “Drones?” Sanders said in a whisper.
Each squat Pigeon surveillance drone was indeed about the size of a fourteen-gallon beer keg, and each had a small rotor bay at its bottom. They all took off to seek out the highest points in Honolulu, where they would land. From these perches, the unarmed Pigeons would suck in electromagnetic and digital signals and then throw out an island-wide wave of electronic disturbance.
Just then Jakob heard another bang on the pier. It was the ramp coming down off the Hildy Manor, another RO/RO tied up beyond the Golden Wave. None of this shit was authorized. They didn’t have the paperwork, and the lot was already going to be jammed. There was no way he’d be able to fit the cars from not one but two ships into the waiting lot, let alone a bunch of tanks.
He held the phone at arm’s length, cursing his stupid job again, this time because he couldn’t afford some viz glasses.
“Jakob Sanders at pier twenty-nine in Honolulu,” he said, staring into the pinhole camera. “Got an unauthorized delivery here as you can see,” Sanders said. “Some trucks, Geelys, and check this out, tanks! Chinese tanks. Not sure what the drill is today, but we’re about to go find out. Bet you never saw anything like this in real life. Me either. Stay tuned.”
Sanders set his phone on the windowsill in his shack so that it was recording the scene and then marched with a bold step toward the Golden Wave. Dumb-ass sailors. They’d just have to stay on the pier until it all got sorted out.
By the time Sanders had made his way to the ramp that connected the pier to the parking lot, he could literally feel the power of the tanks’ engines in his chest. The tanks slowly moved forward, a few feet at a time, testing the ramp.
A flash of movement and an earsplitting clang made him whip his head around. Big metal panels were being tossed over the side of the Evening Resolve — a 480-foot cargo container ship registered in Dalian — and landing on the pier. Then a miniature air force began to assemble in formation above the Evening Resolve. To Sanders, the quadcopters looked like those spy drones the paparazzi used to buzz any Hollywood star dumb enough to still have an outdoor wedding. The Directorate’s electric V1000 drone actually shared a heritage with the commercial systems, but its agility and stealth had made it the platform of choice for covert Chinese “risk-elimination” strikes in Africa and the former Republic of Indonesia.
The tanks throttled their engines again and regained Sanders’s attention. He raised his right hand in the universal sign to stop.
“Halt! You are entering private property. I need you to stop that vehicle immediately.”
The lead tank slowed and then stopped at the bottom of the ramp, just ten feet away. Sanders looked down and raised his voice, more confident now that he had established who was in charge.
“Good. Now, I don’t know what’s going on but you need to turn that vehicle around and get back on the ship… immediately.”
The engine belched smoke, and the tank suddenly bounded forward.
Seen on the screen of his phone, it looked like a symbolic act of bravery. In actuality, all Jakob could think about was running, running as fast as he could, to get out of the sixty-ton beast’s path. But his feet just wouldn’t move.
Marine Corps Base, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii
Captain Charles Carlisle was losing patience with his crew chief. In other words, it was just another day in paradise with a jet more finicky than his fiancée.
The 25 mm gun pod on his F-35B Lightning II fighter kept jamming after each helicopter-like vertical landing he performed. This was the fourth time this week, but no one could figure out why. The plane’s autonomic maintenance computers were supposed to point fingers at any gremlins, but adding more to the twenty-four million lines of software code already in there just proved Murphy’s Law beat Moore’s Law every time.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Worm,” said Miller, the civilian crew chief, using the call sign Carlisle had earned after losing his rations and living off worms during the survival-and-evasion phase of his pilot training. “I didn’t design these planes; I just fix ’em.”
Worm shook his head. He’d never gotten why the Marine Corps put the world’s best pilots in the cockpits of the world’s most expensive weapons system only to turn maintenance over to the lowest bidder.
Worm was about to offer another round of profane observations about what $1.5 trillion ought to buy — like, for instance, a working gun — but then he held his breath and listened. Weird. A series of bass-like thumps. Then he heard the buzzing of rotors. It came from the direction of Pearl and moved toward the air station located on the Mokapu Peninsula. The blood drained from the aviator’s face when he saw the flight of choppers and tiny quadcopter drones.
“Get the fuel hose off, now!” Worm shouted.
The crew chief was about to argue when he tracked the pilot’s gaze and saw the formation of incoming choppers. Miller looked old, but he was down on the ground before the first wave of rockets hit the hangar complex on the other side of the 7,800-foot runway.
“Miller, up! Get up!” shouted Worm.
Lying prone, Miller watched four of the quadcopters dive and attack a communications tower at the end of the runway. Just before the V1000s launched a volley of micro-rockets, they flared back into formation, which made them look like Xs on a fiery tic-tac-toe board.
“I’m on it!” said Miller. You could question his competence, but you couldn’t fault the man’s bravery, thought Worm.
As the two men worked to pull the fuel line from the F-35, Miller spoke between panting breaths.
“Chinese?” he said.
“Does it matter?” said Worm. “Get me up there, and I’ll send a few down here for you to pick through and find out.”
They could see the drone helicopters methodically working their way across the base’s hangar buildings, hitting one aircraft after the other. That they remained in an X formation the whole time made the attack seem all the more menacing. A few Marines shot rifles at them, only to be taken out by rocket fire from above. Fortunately, Worm’s F-35B, like its predecessor the Harrier jump jet, didn’t need to approach the killing field of the runway. The aircraft had a shaft-driven fan in the middle of its fuselage that could lift the plane into the air like a helicopter, after which the plane’s main jet engine would push it forward with over forty thousand pounds of thrust.
The tradeoff of packing a second engine in the middle of the plane was that the Marine version of the F-35 couldn’t carry as much payload, but Worm’s jet would be flying with a light load anyway. The good news was that the training exercise they had been prepping for was a live-fire drill. The bad news was it was for close air support, so he was loaded with only dummy air-to-air missiles and a gun pod he couldn’t trust.
Worm clambered into the cockpit and looked down at Miller, the top half of his head encased in a heads-up-display visor-and-helmet combination that looked like a bug’s carapace. He shouted and pointed at the jet’s fuselage: “The gun? The gun?”