The sentry scanned the barcode next to the left epaulet on Simmons’s uniform.
“Thank you, sir,” said the sentry. “Quiet night.”
“No trouble?” said Simmons.
“No, there never is,” said the sentry, suddenly sounding old and tired. “What’s that smell?” He clutched his M4 closer to his chest and inhaled deeply. “Damn, is that real coffee?”
“Yes, from onboard,” said Simmons.
“I knew I signed up for the wrong service. When you work as a barista at Starbucks and then the country runs out of coffee, well, you just can’t drink the fake stuff, on principle,” said the sentry. “That’s when I joined up. Spent the first few weeks of basic with the worst headaches, though. I’d charge the beach myself if they could promise me a fresh cup of Kona reserve on the other side.”
“We’ll get you that Hawaiian coffee soon enough,” said Simmons.
“Thank you, sir. You have a good night,” said the sentry.
“You too,” said Simmons, and he started up the hill for home.
Jamie opened the front door quietly and slipped inside. At eleven o’clock, he’d missed the kids and dinner, but he could still spend an hour with Lindsey. Squeaking floorboards announced his arrival.
The dining room was empty. He looked in the living room to see if she had fallen asleep on the couch reading.
“Hey? Linds, still up?” he whispered.
He looked around the floor of the living room. Where were the toys? Oddly, there was nothing underfoot. He remembered the frenetic cleanups his father had imposed on him when he was the same age as his kids now. The sight of toys out of place, any sign, really, that children lived in his house, would set his father off.
“Linds?” he called again.
He gingerly walked upstairs. A faint glow emanated from their bedroom.
When he walked in, his heart soared and his stomach ached. Lindsey stood before him holding out a glass of sparkling wine, wearing only a red silk robe. Candles from their disaster kit lit the room. From a big pink beach bucket filled with ice, the neck of a long bottle stood at attention.
“Happy anniversary,” she said.
He took the flute and kissed her. How could he have forgotten?
“Fifteen years,” he said.
“I found you, lost you, and got you back again,” she said.
“Happy anniversary,” he said. “Sorry I’m late for it.”
“The kids are asleep, and the house is ours. For the next little while.”
“I have to be in early tomorrow,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “You’re going to be tired.”
“Very,” he said, removing the robe. They made love with the patient pleasure that comes from focusing on each other completely.
Afterward, they lay back and looked out at the bridge in the dark, fog beginning to devour its pillars.
“One day you’re going back out there,” she said.
“I know. And I know what I promised before all this. But I have to be out there now. You know that, right?”
“I’m not going to tell you not to go,” she said. “But all I think about is that we haven’t had enough time together. Fifteen years is not enough.”
“No, it’s not,” he said. “What I do each day, I do to make sure I will be back. That’s it, in its simplest sense.”
“I know,” she said.
“My dad left my mom after fifteen years, did you know that?” he said.
“Is that why you forgot tonight?” she said.
This wasn’t one of those binary choices. He could go in so many different directions. Anger. Denial. Submission. Regret.
“I am so sorry, Lindsey,” he said. “For tonight. For everything. For staying in the Navy when I told you I was done. I’m sorry. It’s all I can say.”
“Just don’t do it again,” she said, and kissed him deeply.
Hangar One, Moffett Field, Mountain View, California
The thing that always jarred Daniel Aboye was the smell. The space was cavernous, 1,140 feet by 308 feet, to be exact, the size of three Superdomes. But the smell filled even that void. To someone from outside the valley, it was the tangy funk of old pizza and people who’d gone too long without a shower. But to anyone local, it smelled like money. Fame. Power. Success. So much had changed in Silicon Valley’s startup scene during the past few decades, but there was one constant. This smell.
And the fact that it now filled Hangar One made it all the more appropriate.
In 1931, the city fathers of Sunnyvale, California, had come up with a unique plan for economic development. They’d raised $480,000 to buy nearly a thousand acres of farmland and then sold off the land to the U.S. government for one dollar. What was to make it such a good investment was the topography of the farmland: it was the only part of San Francisco Bay not regularly shrouded in fog. The deal was that Sunnyvale would then become the home for a new planned navy fleet of “flying aircraft carriers,” massive helium-filled airships that would serve as bases in the air for propeller biplanes.
The plan didn’t work out as anticipated, not for Sunnyvale or the blimps. In 1933, the USS Akron, the Navy’s test airborne aircraft carrier, crashed. The plan was shelved, its only legacy that the airfield was renamed after Admiral William Moffett, the head of the Navy’s Aeronautics Bureau, who had been killed in the crash. But, fortunately for the town, World War II interceded a few years later, and Moffett Field became a base for patrol airplanes and then the home of the U.S. Air Force Satellite Test Center. By the 1950s, several big aerospace firms clustered around the base and the test center. The thousands of scientists and engineers who moved into the sunny valley built close ties with local universities, and the old farmland became the hub of a different industry. The city fathers’ plan of economic growth through blimp basing instead spawned what became known as Silicon Valley.
In the defense drawdown of the 1990s, most of Moffett was abandoned and the facility was handed over to NASA’s Ames Research Center. Little remained of the military presence except for its signature building, the largest hangar in the world.
Bits and pieces of the base were sold off to private industry over the ensuing years, starting when Google acquired Hangar One and turned it into a site for executive jets. When he had first arrived in Silicon Valley and seen all that ambition and vision, let alone cash flow, Aboye felt outgunned. Now, he just had to make a phone call and the massive hangar was at his disposal. Larry and Sergey had not asked what would happen inside; they knew only that he needed a massive space away from prying eyes.
Now Hangar One was the team’s new home, though they had taken to calling it Aboye’s Ark. Taj Lamott, chief technology officer of Uni, had come up with that, a joke about either the size of the place or the crazy vision of the man who’d brought them all together. Daniel had been an early investor in Uni, which was now one of the leading video-game studios in Palo Alto, and in a few of the firms he had quietly reached out to. At other firms, though he wasn’t an investor, his reputation had been enough. That, and the simple lure of the offer. It was the opportunity, he had said, to be part of the valley’s most important startup ever.
The rule for selection had been simple. The CTO of each firm Aboye talked to would designate his or her three best programmers. The limited numbers were ostensibly to keep the project in stealth mode, as the investors called it. The goal was to hide their business not only from Directorate spies, but also from the National Security Agency. Even if the NSA’s networks weren’t pwned by the Directorate, which most people suspected they were, anger over the sneak backdoors of the old Snowden-era scandals lingered. The NSA had cost Silicon Valley hundreds of billions of dollars, and its citizens weren’t in a forgiving mood, even years later.