“After all we’ve been through together, not even the courtesy of a wave goodbye,” Duncan said.
“So he’s not going out on perimeter patrol?” Conan asked.
“No, Butter’s traveling a little bit farther than we can this time. He’s the key to getting our intel out.”
On the screen they watched as the tiny robot’s icon closed in on the Turtle Bay complex, its advance painfully slow, but steady. The three-dimensional view showed it skittering over the highway and then entering the main hotel complex through a six-inch-wide drainage pipe that ran under a barbed-wire fence the Directorate had put up around the hotel. The robot crossed various gardens and paths, staying in the brush whenever possible. At an open field in front of the hotel, the site of many a wedding in years past, the lobster paused, scanning both directions for movement.
“That’s right, be careful,” Duncan said, voicing a command to Butter from afar, even though the system was set on full autonomous mode.
The robot sensed movement, two Directorate officers walking down the pathway, and buried itself in a pile of mulch that lined the bordering garden. After they passed, it emerged from the mulch pile and crossed quickly, finally edging itself next to the main hotel building’s concrete wall. The tiny robot angled its front four legs up and attached them to the wall. Dry elastomer adhesive in its tiny legs made them twice as sticky as a gecko’s feet and allowed it to hold fast to the concrete. Those four legs then pulled up the rest of the robot, and it climbed up the side of the building, one tiny step at a time, at a rate of two inches per second. When it reached the rooftop, the robot scanned again for human presence and, finding none, scurried over to a radio-transmission tower mounted amid the air-conditioning units. It climbed the tower and attached itself to the top rung. And then it waited.
“There you are, Butter. Good boy,” Duncan said, picking out the robot poised atop the radio tower with his binoculars. He motioned to Peaches, who began setting a metal tube the size of a thermos on a small tripod.
“Laser designator? Is that the strike site?” asked Conan.
“Maybe later, but for now it’s how we communicate without them tracking us. Laser bursts to Butter, who’ll then beam out using their own transmission tower. That way, we sidestep any triangulation protocols they have set up; their scans will show only their own signal locales. And when we decide we don’t want to share their wonderful comms setup anymore, well, Butter can be quite the little terror.”
While Peaches finished rigging the metal tube and linking it to the flex tablet, now unfolded out on the dirt like an old road map, Conan leaned in to Duncan. “You have any stims? We ran dry a while back.”
“That’s rough. We did that in BUD/S, going cold turkey to show we could be SEALs, but now? I couldn’t imagine going without them even for a day,” said Duncan. “Digger there, he can sort you all out. Hammer, we good?” said Duncan as Conan took a handful of packets from Digger, evidently the team’s medic.
“Online already, boss,” said Hammer, a rail-thin man with gray stubble and a scarred scalp who looked to be at least fifty. “All frequencies are green.”
“Let’s make connection, then.”
Conan found the SEALs’ confidence unnerving. They were professional, but not wary enough, which made her even more on edge. She cocooned herself in the wool cloak and inched forward to the edge of the perimeter they’d set to track for any threats. She worried about an ambush even more now that the little gadget the SEALs depended on as their eyes and ears was gone.
As she scanned the perimeter one more time, a tap on her boot heel sent a shot of adrenaline up her spine. She started to swing her rifle around and then realized it was Nowak, the Pole, smiling, redeeming himself in his own mind by getting the drop on her. He motioned her back and took her position watching the perimeter.
“So, are you ready to see what it was all for?” Duncan asked as she edged over.
“Impress me.”
He handed her a lightweight tactical-glasses rig. It was an updated version of the ones she’d first trained with years back. It looked a bit like a hockey helmet, with pinkie-size antennas running over the crest and a trio of golf-ball-size sensors embedded just above the forehead. The device’s conforming battery pack was worn in a harness across Duncan’s chest. She put it on and felt for the power button at her temple. Her body reflexively jerked as the heads-up display changed the darkness around her into daylight.
Conan panned her head about, visually traveling over the island’s topography, seeing it overlaid with bright icons on each of the sites they had marked and on known Directorate bases; flashing icons denoted active ground-based radar and missile sites.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. “The view’s much better that way.” Duncan slowly guided her to look toward the sea. At the edge of the horizon, she saw a cluster of bright blue dots blinking against the dark of the ocean. She focused, and the system tracking her eyeballs automatically began to zoom, taking her farther and farther out to sea. As she closed in, the ball of blue began to separate, becoming a dozen small triangular blue icons dancing along the horizon. Friendly forces. A lot of them. The tab associated with the cluster winked at her: TF Longboard. As she zoomed out from the cluster of blue, she noticed that a single blue dot was a few hundred miles ahead of it; it had a Z for an icon.
Admiral Zheng He, Four Hundred and Fifty Miles Southeast of Kamchatka Peninsula
The Admiral Zheng He pushed through the Pacific swell, each wave slapping the flagship of the joint Directorate-Russian task force, almost like slow applause.
The ship’s namesake was the second son of a lowly rebel captured by Ming Dynasty forces and castrated at the age of eleven. The young eunuch had been trained as a soldier. But by navigating the perilous politics of the age, he rose to distinguish himself, eventually becoming taijian, grand director of the palace servants. Zheng He was remembered for none of this, though, for it was at sea where the eunuch reshaped Asia and went on to become one of history’s greatest admirals.
Starting in 1405, Zheng He set out on a series of tours of the world then known to China. His fleet carried twenty-eight thousand soldiers and sailors in over three hundred ships, with his nine-masted flagship being the largest ship ever built in the age of sail. As it traveled from Asia to Arabia and Africa, the massive fleet cowed some kingdoms into submission and defeated the few that chose to fight. By the end of the voyages, Admiral Zheng He had created the first transoceanic empire, a ring of some thirty vassal states with China at the center.
Subsequent emperors would turn away from the sea, preventing future voyages. Imperial China grew progressively weaker and eventually suffered the indignity of becoming a vassal to others. The greatness of the age became an embarrassment, as did the memory of Admiral Zheng. Not anymore.
At 603 feet, almost as long as the Zumwalt, the ship was officially classified as a cruiser, but it was a battleship by any of the old measures. Initial work on the vessel had begun back during the Communist Party days, and Americans had first learned of it when a picture was leaked to Chinese Internet chatrooms showing a massive mockup ship being built hundreds of miles inland at the test range in Wuhan. But the Directorate had seen the effort to completion. There was no attempt to be stealthy, so the ship lacked the Zumwalt’s strange, sleek lines. Instead, carrying 128 missile cells, 64 fore and 64 aft, the twenty-first-century Admiral Zheng He was all about projecting power, actual and perceived.