Code of Honor

by Marc Cameron

  62

  The F-35B Lightning II flown by Major Goodloe “Oh” Schmidt was stationary now, having utilized its thrust-vectoring nozzle and lift fan to land vertically on a ship identified as the USS Makin Island. The aircraft had been refueled after landing, with the onboard management system indicating just over nine thousand pounds in the internal tanks—three thousand pounds less than full capacity. Calliope had made the jump hours before, riding the data-link between the Stratotanker and the strike fighter high over the Pacific. Other copies of Calliope made similar jumps to similar planes, deleting themselves after every move, searching. This Calliope had ended up in the right part of the world, and was now homing in on the target they’d all been sent to find.

  To maintain its stealthy profile, the F-35 had to carry all armament inside its reflective skin. Weapon stores indicated this aircraft’s internal bays were already loaded with four AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, leaving no room for the target. The plane’s computers had communicated with a second F-35B while in flight. That plane was not active now, but Calliope surmised that it would be the one to carry her target, while Major Schmidt’s aircraft would provide cover.

  They would take off together, at which point Calliope would make her penultimate jump—to Major Skeet Black’s plane—and then, if it was on board, as she surmised it would be, the LRASM missile.

  * * *

  —

  Rear Admiral Kevin Peck, deputy commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, stood on the bridge of LHD 8, looking out across the deep indigo water. Completely bald, he was slender but well muscled for a man who spent so much time behind a desk these days. His love for basketball and overall competitive nature kept off most of the pudge that could easily accompany each new star added to the uniform.

  Twenty minutes earlier, radar had picked up a contact one hundred nautical miles east of the derelict Navy frigate with seventy-five thousand dollars’ worth of plywood and sheet metal screwed and welded to the superstructure. This vessel, mocked up to have the profile of a Chinese destroyer, was the intended target to test the next-generation technology on the LRASM missile. Admiral Peck didn’t particularly want some Chinese ship to stumble onto the thing. He’d sent two Cobras to investigate.

  The Makin Island’s captain stepped to the window beside Peck. “Super Cobras report the radar contact is a fishing trawler. Estimated one hundred thirty feet in length, moving east at a steady six knots. Looks like she’s actively fishing, sir.”

  Peck took a deep breath. “But it’s moving away?”

  “Yes, sir,” the skipper said.

  Peck rubbed a hand across his face. He’d been up for more than twenty-four hours now, and his day wouldn’t be over anytime soon.

  “Remember that line from Big Jake?” he said.

  The captain chuckled. “Which one?”

  “When he’s got the gun on Richard Boone—you know, ‘No matter what happens, your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault . . .’”

  “Of course,” the captain said.

  Peck nodded. “That line carries a good deal of weight when you have command in the Navy.”

  “Indeed, sir,” the captain said.

  Peck looked back out over the waves. “Because no matter what happens . . . your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault . . . the mistakes are always our fault.”

  “You’ve planned this to the nth degree, Admiral,” the captain said. “And it will go as planned.”

  “I know,” Peck said.

  But he didn’t, not at all.

  63

  JTTF?” Sophie Li exhaled quickly, like a startled doe. “What exactly is that?”

  “Joint Terrorism Task Force,” Li said. “They’re set up all over the U.S.”

  The kids were asleep, or at least pretending to be. Peter’s friend John Clark had arranged for Peter and his family to stay in an apartment in downtown Chicago that was undoubtedly a CIA safe house. Four well-armed men, presumably with the Agency, and definitely Clark’s friends, were in the two adjoining rooms. So far, no one but Clark had asked any questions. Li had just finished downloading the Signal encryption app to Sophie’s and the kids’ cell phones, and all the devices lay on the dining room table between him and his wife.

  “So we’re just supposed to stay in Chicago?”

  “That’s the plan,” Li said.

  Sophie’s eyes went wide. “This has got to be the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. People tried to murder us less than fifty miles from here. We need to leave. Now.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Peter said.

  “Really?” Sophie said. “You believe that? I heard you talking. I know they found that girl from your office murdered.”

  Peter nodded. “Cecily Lung. She was involved in this. A loose end they needed to clean up.”

  “Peter,” Sophie said. “Don’t you see? We are loose ends. All of us.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Peter said. “Chicago has twelve thousand cops, and that’s not counting all the Feds.”

  Sophie’s face fell slack. She shook her head slowly, the situation becoming clear to her now. “So . . . We’re bait? Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  Li scooted his chair around to her side of the table, taking her hands in his. He kept his voice soft, steady. “He has people to make sure we’re safe. Turns out that the JTTF is working on this very thing. Triad involvement and the like. No one will know we’re at the meeting but people at the Federal Building.”

  “Do you think they targeted you because of . . .”

  “Because my parents were Chinese?”

  She nodded.

  “Believe me,” Li said. “That’s a reality I’ve had to think about with every conversation I’ve had with the FBI. But no, I was targeted because of the work I do, not my genetics.”

  “Good,” Sophie said. “I still think it would be better to leave Chicago. The JTTF guys can come to us.”

  “There are a load of agencies involved,” Li said. “Bureau, CIA, DEA, ATF, U.S. Attorney. And I’m just getting started. There are a lot of people who want to talk to us.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “It’s part and parcel of what goes on when we call the authorities.”

  “What happens if somebody from one of these triads is watching the Federal Building?” Sophie’s head snapped up. “God forbid, what if they’ve paid someone off inside and they know we’re coming?”

  “Unlikely,” Peter said. “But we’re meeting at an off-site location. We’ll look at some photographs of known offenders, people they suspect, and then get right out of there.”

  “Then what?” Sophie looked across the room at the sofa bed where the kids were sleeping. Though teenagers, they’d reverted to clinging to each other like small children after the violence in their home, a place that should have been their ultimate sanctuary. “Tell me the truth. Are we going to have to stay in hiding? Change our names? What?”

  “The truth,” Li said, “is that I have no idea. What I do know is that we have to be proactive about our own safety.”

  Sophie sat up straighter, pulling her hand away. She stared up at the ceiling, eyes closed. “I’m so scared.”

  “Things will work out,” Li said.

  But they might not. Both of them knew it. Each of them had lost the person they’d planned to grow old with. Sometimes people you loved died for no good reason. Things did not always work out.

  But they had to pretend or risk going insane.

  “Peter, they almost killed us,” she said. “You remember that action movie, where the man’s wife and daughter are murdered and he goes on a revenge spree?”

  Peter groaned. “That’s pretty much every action movie.”

  “I . . . I’m afraid that’s what you would do.”

  “How about you?” Peter asked. “You would fight like a tiger to protect the kids, wouldn’t you?”


  “Of course,” Sophie said.

  He laid his hand tenderly on the side of her belly. “Then you can imagine what I’d do to protect you and this baby.”

  “I don’t have to imagine,” Sophie said. “I saw it firsthand.”

  64

  Commander Akana welcomed Ding and Adara aboard the USS Fort Worth without asking their names. The corpsman checked out Ding’s pupils, deemed him mildly concussed but ambulatory, since he’d just run off a mountain. She splinted his wrist and made him promise to get a CAT scan at his earliest possible convenience when he returned to shore. The cook hustled up some ham and eggs—reminding Chavez how good the Navy ate.

  The skipper invited them into the officers’ wardroom and gave each an ice-cold bottle of Gatorade.

  “I’d offer you coffee,” he said, “but it’s a diuretic and the doc says you both need to keep some liquids in you right now.”

  As bad as his head hurt, Chavez was ravenous, and he dug into the ham and eggs like he hadn’t eaten for days.

  “I don’t suppose you have a computer genius on board, do you, Skipper?” he asked after a long pull of electrolytes.

  “Like a tech?”

  “I mean like a hacker.”

  “Half the kids on this boat are hackers,” Akana said. “I think that’s this generation.” He glanced up at a senior enlisted man who had a pencil-thin mustache and the look of a man who had just bitten the head off a baby duck.

  “Command Master Chief, would you be so kind as to locate IT2 Richwine?”

  “Aye-aye, Captain,” the CMC said, wheeling at once to leave the wardroom.

  Information Systems Technician, Petty Officer Second Class Carl Richwine poked his head inside the wardroom a few minutes later. He was farm-boy big, with broad shoulders and a broad face that was covered with freckles.

  “You wanted to see me, Captain?”

  “Come in, IT2,” Akana said, addressing the sailor by a combination of his rating and rate.

  Chavez leaned back, blinking to clear his thoughts after the meal. “Your skipper says you’re a whiz with computers.”

  IT2 Richwine gave a humble grin. “I do all right, sir.”

  “You know what a Raspberry Pi is?”

  The sailor laughed and looked around the wardroom like he was surely being punked. “Of course, sir. Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Well,” Chavez said, “I don’t. Not really, anyway. That’s why we need you. I wonder if you might have a stand-alone laptop on board that would allow you to take a look at something for us, tell us what you see.”

  IT2 Richwine looked at Akana for guidance.

  “Go ahead,” the skipper said. “But this is sensitive. It isn’t something you can talk about to the rest of the crew.”

  “I figured, sir,” Richwine said, before turning back to Chavez. “I have a laptop that runs Linux. I do some game programing. You want me to go get it?”

  Adara removed the Faraday bag from the pocket of her blues.

  Commander Akana eyed it suspiciously. “Are my systems in jeopardy here?”

  Richwine picked up the bag but didn’t open it. “Is there any kind of phone or Wi-Fi-capable device in this?”

  “Just a thumb drive,” Adara said.

  “Then we should be fine, sir,” Richwine said. “My Linux machine doesn’t have a modem, wireless or otherwise. Anything I design on it, I have to download via cable.”

  “Very well,” Akana said. “Go get your computer.”

  * * *

  —

  Holy shit!” Richwine said, when he booted up the machine and inserted the Calliope drive. He grimaced at the captain and looked toward the hatch to see if the command master chief was within earshot. “Sorry, sir, but this is weird. I’ve seen this sort of code before in computer games.”

  Chavez and Adara leaned in to get a better view. Numbers and symbols scrolled up the screen.

  “What is it?” Adara asked.

  “It’s a fairly small program,” Richwine said. “At first glance it looks like basic AI, which is pretty common in gaming.”

  “What kind of game have you seen this in?” Adara asked.

  “I haven’t seen this exact thing,” Richwine said. “But something like it.” He pointed to several lines of repeating code as they scrolled by on the screen. “See this? If you were to view this on a screen, it would look like one of those Snake games my dad used to let me play on his phone when I was a kid.”

  “Snake?” Chavez said.

  “Yeah,” Richwine said. “You know, a long line of dots that keeps growing as long as you don’t let it run into itself.”

  Chavez looked at Adara. “So we just smuggled out a cell phone game?”

  “This isn’t that,” Richwine said. “It’s just acting like that.” The sailor’s jaw fell open as he continued to watch. “Would you look at that.” He gasped. “This is beyond my skill set . . .”

  Adara shook her head. “What?”

  “This thing is amazing . . . It’s picking up bits of information from my computer, growing, exploring. My friends and I talk about this kind of AI all the time. It’s like the Holy Grail, or the Chimera. The Bigfoot of gaming tech and artificial intelligence.”

  “What can it do?” Adara asked.

  “If it’s what I think it is,” Richwine said. “Pretty much anything it wants to.”

  “‘Wants to’?” Commander Akana said. “You talk like it has goals.”

  Richwine half turned his screen so the rest of them had a clear view. “See what I mean?”

  They did not.

  The IT2 rubbed his face in disbelief. “It’s attempting to tell my computer to make a call . . . looking through my files for a Wi-Fi . . . or a dial-up modem, a cable connection . . .”

  “What do you mean, ‘looking’?” Chavez asked.

  “This thing is like a caged animal,” Richwine said. “It’s trying everything to find a way out.”

  “‘Out’?” Adara said.

  “Of my computer . . . Holy crap . . .” Richwine pointed at the screen. “It just went dormant. It’s . . . it’s disguised itself as a JPEG among a bunch of other files.”

  “A JPEG?”

  “A file like you use for photos.”

  “So,” Chavez said, “theoretically, what would something like this do to the systems on a ship or a city’s power grid?”

  “Whatever it pleases,” Richwine said. “I mean, I’m not trying to be flippant, sir. This is basic-bones stuff, a soldier running around without a mission. Someone who knew what he or she was doing . . . they could make this code do whatever they asked it to do—take over a ship, have that ship fire its weapons, sink that ship . . .”

  Commander Akana reached across the table and slammed the laptop shut.

  “Let’s stow that thing back in the Faraday bag.”

  Richwine handed the thumb drive back to Adara. “Is there another one of these out there?”

  She shrugged.

  “Because if there is . . .” The IT2’s voice trailed off.

  “So,” Adara said. “You’re the computer expert in this wardroom. How would you stop this?”

  Richwine blew out a hard breath, then rubbed a hand over his face. “Like I said, this is beyond anything I’ve ever seen, ma’am. First you’d have to find it.”

  “Okay,” Adara said, coaxing.

  “All I can really do is identify it,” Richwine said. “Help people know what they’re looking for. If it was me, I’d talk to those who were in the know, and find out about the most important things going on in the world right now—the big events, the possible targets. And then I’d look at those events for the biggest dumpster fire I could find.” He tapped the Faraday bag. “Because wherever that catastrophe is, this thing will be the cause of it.”

  65
>
  Major Schmidt took off first, light on fuel. It was an hour before sunset, cooling slightly. Makin Island had a helpful fifteen-knot wind on her bow, and was making an additional twenty-two. These factors, combined with the airplane’s lift fan, helped Schmidt into the air with the weight of his weapons stores before he fell off the end of the eight-hundred-foot LHD. The mission was a short one, so he’d have enough fuel to perform a vertical landing. There was no other choice.

  Major Black took off next with even less fuel on board to make up for the 2,500 pounds of the long-range anti-ship missile in the weapons bay of his aircraft.

  * * *

  —

  Calliope located the AGM-158C LRASM as soon as she had access to Skeet Black’s weapons-stores computer. The missile registered as present in the weapons bay, but she was not able to make the jump until the aircraft actively communicated with the missile at the time of launch. The difference between that final jump and all her previous jumps prior to hitching a ride on Major Schmidt’s F-35 was that this time, Calliope did not delete herself. Her main target was the LRASM, but in order to complete that task unimpeded, she would still have tasks to complete on the jets.

  66

  Kang led the way, coming in from the south on Michigan Avenue, heading toward the river. A team of three, moving silently in the darkness.

  Lily’s death had put Kang’s team one person short. He did not count Wu Chao toward the full complement, but his death was still a terrible loss. As bosses went, Wu Chao had been a good one, supportive, intelligent, unwilling to send a subordinate anywhere he would not go himself. And that last one had gotten him killed. His death had been preventable. The old fool had forgotten that theirs was a bloody business—if he had ever really known. Unlike the movies, not all intelligence officers were good at the messy side of things.