Ghost Fleet

by P. W. Singer, August Cole

They dragged her past Charlie’s still body and over to the entrance of the building, and they took cover by the doors. After a moment, the woman stopped crying, and the unsettling calm that followed close combat came over Nicks. Her ears rang, her hands tingled, and she felt like her feet were so firmly planted in the ground, she couldn’t take another step if her life depended on it. The feeling would pass, as it always did after the adrenaline waned, but in the moment, it took everything she had to stay focused and think about what was supposed to happen next.

  “She was on the radio,” Nicks shouted to her squad mates, too loud because her ears were still ringing. “I don’t know if she got someone on the other end. But we gotta tell Conan this place is blown and get clear.”

  She looked up and saw three kids peering down at her from behind the blue-painted railings on the school’s second-floor balcony. They looked blankly at the dead bodies and then at the NSM members. Then, one by one, they began to look skyward, until they were all squinting at the sky to the south.

  That was when Nicks’s ears cleared and she heard it too, the thumping of helicopter rotors coming closer.

  Hidden Valley Estates, Wahiawa, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

  Conan and Finn cut through the empty parking lot of the Mormon church adjacent to the school, jumping off their bikes as they entered a stand of trees separating the church from the houses nearby. They kept beneath a long canopy of thick green foliage that ran through the clusters of one-story and two-story homes in the Hidden Valley Estates housing complex. Seeing a quadcopter zoom down the road toward the school, they ducked down and hid among the trees.

  “Hold here,” said Conan.

  “Screw that, let’s go,” said Finn. “We can get to the cache, arm up, and then get them out.”

  Conan shook her head. “No, we can’t,” she said.

  Neighbors had begun to spill out of their homes into the street, pointing and screaming. Some of them, probably parents, were rushing toward the school, racing against the arrival of the Directorate forces.

  Finn turned to look at her, trying to puzzle it out. “Conan, our guys are one thing, but the kids. There are kids there.”

  “Exactly,” said Conan quietly.

  “What? What do you think is going to happen?” said Finn.

  She didn’t answer, just stared back at him. Finn tried to get up, but she wrestled him down. He had just shrugged off her grip when a pair of Directorate Z-8K assault helicopters roared overhead and then spun to flare just above the playing field next to the school. One after another, black-suited Directorate commandos jumped out. They fanned out around the landing point, the equipment shed with the weapons cache now inside their perimeter.

  Finn ducked back under the brush and looked at her angrily. “Conan. You know our guys — they are going to fight. And those kids and teachers are going to be stuck in the middle of a shitstorm.”

  “It was always a risk that something bad would go down at the school,” said Conan in a whisper. “Why do you think I chose it?”

  Fort Mason, San Francisco

  “I love you.”

  Jamie knew what Lindsey would say when he walked through the door. She said it every night, even when he knew it was a struggle for her to get the words out.

  Nights like tonight when he returned home late, exhausted and drained. The adrenaline had ebbed months ago; what propelled him now was a cocktail of caffeine, stims, and anger.

  The boat hit the dock’s edge gently, perfectly done, and he sharply saluted the shipyard launch that dropped him off at pier 2 in the dark. It was a perk of command that spared him the autobus ride home and kept him on the water that much longer. Plus, it was only a quick walk up to his house in Fort Mason and he could be home in a few minutes once he set foot on land.

  Like every night, though, he first stopped and sat down on a bench, a vestige of a time when this was an area for festivals and tourists. From his seat he looked east through the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge was illuminated tonight, the LEDs woven into the cable wires showing a winking flag displayed, fifty stars bright. It was something the governor had decided to do, against the advice of the Defense Department. The bridge was a symbol of what they were fighting for, he argued, and it should not be lost in the fog of war and the Bay. That speech had gone over well; no doubt one of his public affairs team’s own social-engineering algorithms had come up with it.

  Jamie took a last sip of coffee and slowly dumped the rest out, watching it spatter the ground at his feet. It was oddly soothing and had become a ritual as he tried to slow his mind down from the past sixteen hours at work.

  “Halt!” said a voice in the dark.

  Simmons looked up and saw no one. He was tired, but tired enough to hear things?

  “Identification,” said a sentry. It was one of the California National Guard troops who patrolled the waterfront around the clock.

  “Proceed,” said Simmons. “Captain James Simmons. Navy. I live at the fort, house forty-nine.”

  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, the
y 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.

  But the limited numbers were also about the value of an idea, its yield as well as its transformative power. Aboye and his group couldn’t throw hundreds of thousands of programmers at the problem, as the Directorate had done before the war with its so-called human-flesh-search-machine censorship that had morphed into the massive hacker attack that opened the assault. Nor did they want to. They all knew that a great programmer was literally orders of magnitude better than a good one. And they also all knew from experience that the best way to accomplish something considered undoable was merely to bring the right minds together.

  Some of the CTOs had sent their top executives, including a few billionaire founders who relished the chance to get their hands dirty again, while others sent the smelly, misanthropic coding beasts they usually hid away in the basement. The sum total, though, made Hangar One the greatest gathering of geniuses since the Manhattan Project.

  The only other contribution each firm was asked to make was a single corporate jet. That was a key part of the cover. The volunteers would show up at Hangar One as if they were heading out of town, and then the jets would fly off from there to various business conferences and corporate offsite meetings. However, each jet would fly out just a few people short. It had been a perfect cover story, until the matter of pizza had come up. Daniel had solved that by creating another startup company located in an office complex just across the street. Although the business was supposedly an app maker for the health-care industry, its sole purpose was to serve as a destination for the pizza deliveries.

  It had all worked so far. As Aboye waited for the test, he pinched the skin at the inside of his wrist, just as he had done as a boy when the hunger got so bad he would see double. How long had it been since he’d had to worry about his next meal? Thirty years? Forty? The familiar pain soothed his anxiety.

  He had a lot to worry about at this moment. The bank of monitors along the wall in the southwest corner of the control room flashed and winked with a rainbow’s array of colors, each a hue hinting at failure.

  “Here it goes,” he said to the engineers assembled in a circle at the center of the room. Together they stood, staring hard into the shifting light form in the middle of their grouping, moving their gloved hands in syncopated rhythms. They had depicted the Directorate data networks as a library. There were three levels to the holographic building, and a white-painted atrium let in an amber sunset that illuminated the central hall. The hologram rendered six of Aboye’s team in the middle of the atrium, each as a featureless black form that looked to be made of turbid smoke. The wraithlike bodies had no identifying features.

  Aboye watched Taj maestroing his part, his fingers in the gloves dancing away like a conductor’s as he stood uneasily on a swiveling chair mounted on casters. It was something that he swore helped him focus, even if the risk of falling, and failure, was higher now than it ever had been. A few billion richer, he was still the same Taj that
Aboye had met nine years ago during a job interview at which Aboye had told Taj he was so talented that he could not in good conscience hire him. They had been friends ever since, and Aboye now wondered if this was what he had actually wanted Taj to do all along.

  “This is the jumping-off point,” said Arran Smythe, nominated by the group to be the program’s chief engineer, largely because of her comparatively calm demeanor. Outside the hangar, she worked on network design for Amazon. She was a tall, thin woman who moved with precise, choppy gestures whether or not she was working in a sim. Like the rest of the engineers and programmers, she wore the same kind of formfitting one-piece gray utility coveralls used by astronauts. That had been the Tesla team’s idea. At first it seemed to Aboye like they were playing dress-up, but over time he saw how they stood taller and spoke more plainly when they put on the suits.

  “Wyc, you’re first.” Smythe’s voice almost bubbled with excitement. Aboye knew why she and the rest of them were happy. They were re-experiencing the joy of a startup, discovering what their unbound minds could accomplish.

  In the holographic projection, one of the dark forms dashed from the library atrium into the shadows of the stacks. Then another.

  “Taj, next,” said Smythe.

  The casters on Taj’s chair began to creak and he twisted slightly back and forth as he manipulated the control rings on his fingers. What he saw on his goggles was only for him, but the jerky gestures attested to a problem.

  On the holographic screen, the black forms ran in and out of the atrium, dropping off books in what was now a burning pyre in the middle of the room.

  “Fudge!” shouted Taj, still the innocent little boy at heart. “Gosh-darn mother-fudging network!”

  The library’s glass ceiling crashed in and water began to come through, the simulated network’s automated defenses now reacting. First came a heavy rain, which the wraiths tried to shoot fire back at, the visualization of their counterprograms, but then came a vast, unending deluge, as if a river had been diverted and was pouring into the atrium.