“That’s too far from the task force to be from the Bush or any of the escort ships,” said Darling. “What is that? Our Directorate sub?”
“No, Foxglove Two’s last position is on the grid way over there,” said Fang, jabbing a finger at a cockpit screen.
“Shit,” said Jekyll, nervously tapping her hand on her knee. “This is the impact point for that Stonefish we saw. It didn’t miss. That’s what’s left of the John Warner.”
Marine Corps Base, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii
The F-35 rotated its nose up and then looped over in a corkscrew twist, giving Worm one last view of the sky through the bottom of his plane.
Seventy-one rounds. Worm designated the target, feeling the jet adjust slightly.
As he arced back down toward the Osprey’s wreckage, he saw the defiant Marine pop up and begin running.
Just seventy-one rounds.
Worm found the Z-10 strafing a smoking hangar a football field away from her. One of the quadcopters saw her and raced toward her position, then hovered to beckon the helicopter over. Worm dipped the nose of the jet and eased the throttle forward. With a gentle adjustment, he rolled out and centered the helmet-mounted pipper on the Z-10. He relaxed his g slightly to stay on the target and then squeezed the trigger.
The opening burst from the F-35’s cannon went high, passed over the Z-10, and ripped apart the runway just beyond.
Forty-seven rounds.
She ran faster, not looking back even at the ripping sound in the sky behind her.
Worm fired a longer burst and the whole jet vibrated like a tuning fork. The Z-10 jerked sideways, then broke in half, spewing flame and debris in a near-perfect circle. The fuselage groaned in protest as Worm pulled back on the stick to arrest his descent.
The runner was nowhere to be seen. She had made it; he’d done his first duty: he hadn’t left a Marine behind.
Worm jammed the throttle forward to its stops and unloaded to accelerate toward Camp H. M. Smith as fast as possible. Having some American airpower overhead might give the armored Directorate column second thoughts, maybe even force it to divert to another target. He had nothing else to offer. The cannon was empty. Landing to rearm was out of the question. He’d harass the Directorate column as long as he could and then punch out somewhere up north near one of the parks.
As the F-35 accelerated away, the robotic quadcopter turned and loosed an air-to-air missile. It then blithely went back to its original task of raking the row of Ospreys on the runway.
Even before Worm heard the alarm buzz, the plane’s AN/ASQ-239 Barracuda system had automatically activated. The system’s ten tiny antennas embedded in the F-35’s wing edges began to track the enemy missile’s radar. Worm’s visor projected that it was a TY-90, a fire-and-forget missile, so even with its robot master focused elsewhere, it was still a threat. With the missile homing in on him, he pulled the F-35 hard right toward the Ulupau Crater at the end of the base. With just a little bit of luck, he thought, he’d disappear in the clutter around the old dormant volcano. He’d be damned if he was going to be the first Marine pilot to get shot down by a drone.
Worm’s fate, though, had been decided several months earlier. Six microchips had been replaced during maintenance. This was nothing unusual for a plane packed with thousands of chips that ran everything from avionics to the gun camera.
The first microchips that had powered everything from the early computers to the jet planes of the 1960s had all their components visible to the naked eye. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, microchips packed millions of transistors into an area measured in square millimeters. And every chip was further divided into multiple subunits, called blocks, each of which carried out different functions. Much like the chips inside a smartphone, the processor in Worm’s F-35 gun camera, for example, had blocks that did everything from store frames of video to convert files.
When the microchip industry took off, it grew from just a handful of companies to more than two thousand, most of them in China, each creating twenty-five hundred new chip designs every year. These designs involved thousands of people at multiple locations, each team working on a different block, sometimes building it from scratch, sometimes contracting it out, and other times buying it from a third-party specialist. And each of those block designs was integrated into millions of chips, and those chips went into everything from toasters to Tomahawk missiles.
The result was a dangerous combination: The chips became so complex that no single engineer or team of engineers could understand how all their parts actually worked; the design process was so distributed that no one could vet all the people involved; and the chips were manufactured and bought in such great numbers that not even a tiny percentage could be tested, which almost no buyers, including the big American defense firms, even tried to do. Efficiency always beat security.
For a long time, defense analysts had worried about the notion of a kill switch — a chip that would shut down an entire computer system on command. But on Worm’s plane, the opposite happened. In each of just twelve microchips, a tiny piece of technology inside a single block woke up.
The F-35B was protected by its shape and stealth materials that shrank its radar signature to a size smaller than a metal fist. But as the Directorate missile’s radar washed over the plane, it activated a tiny antenna hidden in the ninth block of each of twelve microchips that linked Worm’s helmet-display system to the plane’s flight-control system. Even if the helmet’s manufacturers had performed a security scan when they’d bought the microchips, they still would have missed it. Each antenna was microscopic, hidden inside a one-millimeter square and activated only by a specific frequency of an incoming missile. While each antenna had just a tiny amount of energy on its own, the combination of them sent enough power to broadcast what was, in effect, a homing signal.
As Worm accelerated away, the missile picked up the signal and pursued the fighter.
Worm dove toward the palms of the Ulupau Crater in a bid to mask his plane from the missile’s radar. He grunted as the g-forces pushed him down into his seat, then he jinked hard. He should have been able to shake it. But whatever he did made no difference today; the missile followed his every move.
In his last moments, Worm glanced down at the watch his fiancée had given him for his thirty-first birthday, a Breitling Aggressor digital chronograph. It was as much to think of her one last time as it was to, like a physician, mark the time of death.
The missile rode the giveaway signal like a rail and slammed into the side of the F-35, splitting the jet into two pieces that tumbled into the Pacific.
USS Coronado, Joint Base Pearl Harbor — Hickam, Hawaii
Simmons knew the outcome of the next few moments would be a binary choice: Win or lose. Live or die.
As the Coronado pushed back from the pier, fresh air began flowing through blown-out windows and holes shot through the aluminum superstructure. Only Directorate helicopters and drones circled in the sky. One of the helicopters had just dive-bombed into the open side of the hangar deck of the USS Boxer. The amphibious assault ship, used by the Fifteenth Marine Expeditionary Unit, burst into flames, setting fire to the ship moored behind it, some kind of transport Simmons couldn’t identify.
A chainsaw-like noise and then a line of yellow tracers arcing out from the ship snapped Simmons back into focus. The Coronado’s Mk 110 gun engaged one of the smaller surveillance drones that swooped inside its line of fire.