Doyle raised her left arm and waved the trucks forward. Two quick shots came from Conan’s right. Finn, a retired Navy comms specialist who’d spent his time in a forward operation base in Marjah Province, Afghanistan, on an individual-augmentee deployment, shot at the passenger-side window in the undamaged truck’s cab with his M4 carbine. The thick bulletproof glass held but cracked and spider-webbed from the bullets’ impact.
Nicks, an army military police staff sergeant with the Twenty-Fifth ID who had made her bones on detainee operations in Iraq and Syria, sprinted up to the truck, jumped on the running board, and repeatedly smashed at the cracked glass with the butt of her rifle, finally punching a small hole. She pressed a flash-bang grenade into the cab and jumped back down. It detonated with a flash of light equivalent to a million candles and a deafening 180-decibel bang. They’d lifted a box of the grenades, used by SWAT teams for storming rooms, from an abandoned police station. The flash-bangs were considered nonlethal weapons since they stunned and dazed targets but didn’t actually hurt them. That is, unless they were used in an enclosed space the size of a truck cab.
Nicks jumped back up, stuck her rifle barrel through the hole in the window, prodded one of the bodies, and then fired a single round.
“Clear!” Nicks yelled, louder than she thought because she still had the earplugs in.
“Anything?” Finn whispered to Conan, now rummaging around in the back of the truck.
“Not yet; still looking,” said Conan.
Finn checked his watch. They had maybe two minutes until the drones arrived. This was a new route for an ambush, so they might get a little extra time. Given the way the convoy ran unprotected, it seemed like the Directorate forces had not expected to get hit. Or it was a trap to lure them in and they were wasting valuable seconds before the counter-ambush force arrived.
“I’ll get the bikes,” said Nicks, disappearing into the forest. “We need to go.”
Conan appeared from the back of the truck holding up two shoebox-size metal containers.
“All blues?” said Finn.
“I think so,” said Conan. “Might be some greens and reds too.”
“At this point, I’ll take anything,” said Finn.
Nicks emerged from the woods wheeling a pair of mountain bikes draped in thick wool blankets mottled with stains. Sweat dripped off her nose.
“What are we waiting for?” asked Nicks.
“Nothing; let’s move,” said Conan. “Anything in the other trucks?”
“Got a few dozen mags, some nanoplex bricks, some protein bars,” said Finn.
“It’ll do. This was really about the footage,” said Conan. The NSM moved constantly, by bike when they could and on foot when they had to. There was no time for a full night of rest or a solid meal. But all that they really needed was in the metal boxes from the back of the truck.
“Time to go!” shouted Conan. “Children, back to school!”
Fourth Floor, B Ring, Pentagon
As an aviator, Commander Bill “Sweetie” Darling had spent his career chasing the horizon. But it wasn’t until his assignment to the Navy staff offices at the Pentagon that he realized he’d been taking the sky for granted. It had been two weeks since he had seen the sun.
In truth, he had almost seen it once. A week back, a construction detour had forced him to walk across the Pentagon’s inner courtyard. It was daytime, and he knew the sun was somewhere up there, hidden behind the finely woven anti-exploitation netting that covered the whole building now, making it look like it was wrapped in a silk cocoon. Christo City was the nickname going around, a play on the name of the nearby military-industrial complex of office buildings known as Crystal City and the renowned artists who used to wrap monuments in fabric.
But even if Darling’s work was unrelenting, he still had to eat. Maybe it was the pilot in him, but he was damned if he was going to let some drone get him his food. You have to draw the line somewhere, he thought as a train of iRobot Majordomos purred by carrying their honeycomb-like storage containers filled with wraps and sandwiches.
He found Jimmie Links waiting next to a vending machine in front of the entrance to the new Naval Intelligence office. The two men had known each other since the Naval Academy, but their careers had taken very different turns. Though neither of them enjoyed being assigned to the Pentagon, both were happy to be back within a few minutes’ walk of each other.
“Darling, you shouldn’t have waited,” said Links, trying to sound like a housewife in an old commercial.
“Original,” said Darling.
“Tough crowd today,” said Links. “Let’s get going. I’m about sixty seconds from humping the vending machine.”
Darling peered through the finger-smudged glass of the machine and sighed.
“Maybe that Snickers bar and two of those mango squeezes, then you might have the ingredients for a pretty good time,” said Darling.
“I knew you flyboys liked it kinky,” said Links.
They set off, but Links stopped after only a few paces. “Shit, I forgot my wallet.”
“Go get it, I’m not buying,” said Darling.
“Come with me, you can check out the new DIA analyst, the one I was telling you about,” said Links.
“You didn’t invite her?” said Darling.
“I have to work with her, so better to watch you crash and burn with her,” said Links.
He led them into his office, first going through a retina scan, then swiping his access card, and finally punching in a number code. After they entered the secure cell, the door locked behind them with a magnetic click.
They passed through an inner door of frosted glass with the words Non-Acoustic Anti-Submarine Warfare stenciled across it. Fresh drywall dust covered the door handle.
Links led Darling into his cubicle, a drab, sterile space. The only decorations were a 3-D topographical map of Oahu and, hanging from a thumbtack, a lipstick-smudged Chinese air-pollution-filter mask.
“So this is where the magic happens?” Darling asked dryly.
“There’s damn little magic happening here, I’m afraid,” said Links soberly. “We still don’t have much of a clue how they’re tagging our subs.” The opening missile strikes that had hit the Pacific carriers had been a shock to the fleet, but the way the enemy had found and destroyed the Navy’s submarines was a more disturbing mystery. The U.S. intelligence community had known the Chinese were catching up in surface-ship construction, but they believed that, under the sea, the U.S. had an asymmetric advantage. Ever since the Cold War, if an American sub didn’t want to be found, you couldn’t find it. But somehow the other side had figured out how to make the ocean transparent and thus deadly to the sub fleet that was supposed to give the U.S. its overwhelming edge.
Darling sat down and, picking up on Links’s sober mood, said quietly, “Tell me more.”
“I don’t even know where to begin,” said Links. “I keep thinking of what this lecturer once told us, back in training. He was old-guard CIA, had done Afghanistan both times, during the Cold War and then again after 9/11. He compared the intelligence task to solving a jigsaw puzzle, except that you didn’t get the box cover, so you didn’t know what the final picture was. And you got only a few pieces at a time, not all of them. And even worse, you always got a bunch of pieces from some other puzzle thrown in.”