Strike Force

by Robert Stanek

  He was a soldier of fortune to some, a facilitator of the illicit to others. To those who sought to right perceived wrongs and injustices, he was God's just instrument. In truth though, he was none of those things. He was simply a man who understood the dangerous dynamics of wealth, power and inevitable iniquity.

  He provided services for a price, often in support of causes he believed in. He built his reputation as one of the best in the business on three basic tenets.

  Never take a job you do not intend to see through to the end.

  Never pass judgment on those who hire you.

  Never reveal your client's identity.

  Never. Never. Never.

  The director had lived up to those tenets for over two decades. His clients knew his firm handshake that sealed every deal was an absolute guarantee that not only would the job be done, but it would be done exactly to the specifications negotiated.

  This afternoon, as he walked along the sundeck and stared out at the vast expanse of sea before him, he felt a deep disquiet that was settling in his bones and he knew there was nothing he could do to ease it.

  He'd had contracts that had gone wrong before, contracts that he'd regretted, but he'd always seen them through and made things right. His years of successes had made him many powerful friends and allies. Friends and allies who would do anything for him. He had only to ask.

  Today, however, as he stood out under the hot afternoon sun and stared at the endless sea, he felt utterly alone and broken. Almost as if it were Judgment Day and he was standing naked before God. It wasn't that he was Godly person, rather it was because of the weight of his conscience on his every waking thought.

  Contrary to what his detractors said, the director wasn't soulless or without conscience. He didn't only take jobs to expand his fortune and influence. He did in fact try to follow a moral and ethical code--a code he'd just broken and perhaps irrevocably, even if not knowingly.

  He only knew the truth of the events because Alexis had broken protocol and reached out to him. He pictured the lithe, short-haired operative. She'd been with him for many years and he'd chosen her for this mission because she was one of the best. A flawless marksman. A perfect commando.

  Except she'd missed her target, not once but twice. Her first error she claimed was the result of plain old-fashioned bad luck. The target had unexpectedly ducked behind a riot shield as she fired on him with her 7.62mm semi-automatic rifle. His own ship had a sizeable armory, anti-missile weapon systems, a hidden radar-guided 20 mm Gatling gun, but not a single riot shield. Who has the foresight to bring riot shields onto a ship anyway?

  Her second error was due to someone else getting in the way. A red-haired woman, who had jumped ship with the target and had gotten clipped in the shoulder instead of the target. No matter, collateral damage was to be expected. But two lost opportunities were not to be expected, nor were they the result of bad luck. He'd simply chosen the wrong operative and now it was too late to do anything about it.

  The director realized he was obsessing over details--details that no longer mattered. What mattered was what else Alexis had told him when she'd broken the golden rule of radio silence until mission complete. Something that made him certain that whatever part of his soul wasn't already blackened was now as dark as the rest.

  He'd spent hours trying to figure out how to correct her mistake, how to distance himself and his enterprise from what had happened. After all, he had not known what was going to happen. He'd been hired to do a job--a simple termination of a rogue asset.

  According to Alexis everything had gone sideways quickly and things had been done that couldn't be undone. Knowing what had happened and how it had happened, he felt used. It was a terrible mistake, an oversight, but there was nothing he could do to change choices already made.

  His only remaining tack was a clean and burn. He needed to clean up the loose ends, to make it so it was if he and his organization never had any connection to what had happened. He needed to disappear his operative once she was no longer of use. After all, what was done was done and there was no way to undo it.

  Chapter 5

  Mediterranean Sea

  Afternoon, Tuesday, 19 June

  A master chief pushed his way into the briefing room. From the wide berth given and insignia, Scott assumed the man was the ship's Command Master Chief. "One more," the chief announced. "SAR inbound now. That makes six."

  The statement was short and simple but it was met with reserved cheers that quickly spread throughout the operations room. To Scott, inbound search and rescue and "one more" meant hope. Search and rescue teams were still finding survivors and pulling them from the dark waters of the Mediterranean. But how many more would they find? How far off was sunset? Or had the sun already set? And why were there so few survivors?

  "Thank you, Command Master Chief," Captain Howard said. "Any status update on the others?"

  "Cooper's still in surgery. He was tore up pretty bad, but I hear the field medic did a damn fine job. Damn fine job. Saved Cooper's life for sure."

  Being the unnamed field medic, Scott stood a little taller and some of the day's weariness fell away. His thoughts went to the USS Harry Truman, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier that was the heart of the strike group. Truman was a floating city: 1092 feet in length and 252 feet abeam, with about 6,000 crewmembers aboard. In addition to 90 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters aboard, Truman had three radar-guided 20 mm Gatling guns; two short-range anti-aircraft and anti-missile weapon system; and two infrared homing surface-to-air systems.

  No doubt, USS Harry Truman could take care of herself, but the job of USS Bulkeley, USS Mason, USS Gettysburg, and USS San Jacinto was to ensure nothing and no one got close enough to cause any actual damage to the floating city. All four warships carried a standard complement of about 350 crewmembers.

  While the destroyers were 509 feet long and 66 feet abeam, the cruisers were 567 feet long and 55 feet abeam. Like the aircraft carrier, all four warships had top speeds of 30 knots or more--the equivalent of 35 miles-per-hour--which was pretty impressive considering the warships had displacements of around 9200 long tons and even more impressive when the 103,900 long-ton displacement of the USS Harry Truman was considered.

  USS Bulkeley and USS Mason were Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyers that carried big guns and batteries of missile systems. USS Gettysburg and USS San Jacinto were Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruisers that carried so many big guns and missile systems of so many different classes that they were essentially floating armories.

  Scott came back from his reverie when someone near the front of the room shouted, "And Lieutenant Ansely? What about Lieutenant Ansely?"

  The Command Master Chief turned to face someone who was standing behind him in the hallway and he ushered the young ensign in so that she could speak. Her hospital blues were all the introduction she needed. "The injury sustained to the external carotid--"

  "In English?" someone shouted.

  The young ensign's face reddened, but the room became pin-drop quiet under the weight of the Command Master Chief's scowl.

  "The injury sustained to the external carotid artery," the young ensign repeated, running a hand down the right side of her neck to demonstrate. The ensign stopped, swallowed hard. She looked nervously to the Command Master Chief. The chief prodded her on with his eyes.

  "The injury…" she began again, but apparently was unable to continue.

  As the Command Master Chief walked the ensign out of the room, Scott raised both hands to his head. Ansely had seemed okay--wounded but okay. He could hear Ansely's voice in his head, saying "Don't bother. Blood's not mine." How in the world could Cooper with a sucking chest wound be alive though still in surgery while Ansely with a gouge on his neck be dead?

  Scott couldn't help himself when he blurted out, "Edie? Is Edie okay?"

  The Command Master Chief turned on his heel. "Who?"

  "The civilian female," Scott said. "The civili
an from the Sea Shepherd."

  "The civilian female?" the ensign asked. "She was D.O.A."

  D.O.A. Dead On Arrival. Scott's world spun. He had to push back against the wall to keep from falling over.

  Chapter 6

  Bluffdale, Utah

  Evening, Previous Day

  A few unexpected interruptions followed by staff meetings kept Dave from his desk for hours after he applied the update to the query engine. Although the updates were live and the systems were working, he had yet to perform his final checks and his shift was nearly over.

  Using the native query language, he entered DIFF "BASE X:MEDSEA -24H" & TEST.LOG. This was a standard query to give him the difference between current live activity levels in the Med and those he'd logged earlier. The baseline results would tell him whether the query engine was working as expected.

  Distracted by thoughts of his quantum tests, he turned to his second screen and opened the summary document containing the results from his D-Wave tests. A lot of people in Big Data were envious of him and his research opportunity. Classical computers had been around for decades but quantum computers were new and exotic. Those working with the D-Wave were working to answer the exciting questions of the day. What would happen when computers operated under quantum rules? Could quantum computing really work? How would it work?

  Traditional computers worked with information in the form of bits. Each bit could only be either 1 or 0 at any given time. The same was true about any arbitrary collection of classical bits. It was the foundation of everything mankind knew about information theory and digital computing. It ensured that whenever you asked a classical computer a question, the computer proceeded in an orderly linear fashion to obtain an answer.

  But the niobium computer chips in the D-Wave relied on quantum bits or qubits. Unlike traditional bits, which were always either 1 or 0, qubits used quantum superposition, which allowed them to be 1, 0, or 1 and 0 at the same time. Because they could exist in a superimposed state, it was almost as if qubits existed in a parallel universe, for a quantum bit could simultaneously exist as two equally probable possibilities. Not only was this exceptionally strange, but it was also incredible useful for performing powerful queries and analytics.

  To be effective though, qubits needed to exhibit quantum behavior. They needed not just superstition but also entanglement, which linked the states of multiple qubits together.

  The power of entangled qubits was in their exponential capability to perform calculations. Because one qubit could exist in two states at the same time, one qubit could perform two calculations at the same time. When qubits were entangled, two qubits could perform four simultaneous calculations; three qubits could perform eight; four qubits could perform sixteen; and so on. The chip he was working with could perform more simultaneous calculations than there were atoms in 3 billion quadrillion universes.

  That kind of processing power simply wasn't available to traditional supercomputers no matter how big they were made. Not only did the staggering possibilities have the traditional computing community in an uproar, it was also the reason the NSA's Penetrating Hard Targets unit had invested over $200 million into quantum computing. But PHT wasn't even close to developing anything as sophisticated at the niobium chip he was working with.

  Big Data wanted access to this technology yesterday to start applying quantum-based solutions to the exabytes of information we were burying ourselves in every single day--genomes, search queries, phone records, financial transactions, social media posts, geological surveys, climate prediction data, engineering simulations, real-time global surveillance.

  While the theories behind quantum computing were clear, the actual practice was a stark contrast. No one really knew what to do with quantum computers and those with access to the technology were trying to figure it all out. It was a solution looking for the right problems.

  Thinking about all this, Dave was beyond excited when he started reviewing the quantum test results. His tests were designed to confirm a fundamental theory: that the niobium chips he was working with were ideally suited to solving discrete combinatorial optimization problems, which involved finding the shortest, quickest, cheapest or most efficient way of performing a given task. More specifically, that that power could be tapped into if one simply phrased a given question correctly. If his research was proven true, it would mean that quantum computing was the Holy Grail of Big Data.

  As he reached for his coffee, he glanced at the other screen, noting with some irritation that the dataset was still generating output. Even as he started typing again, his fingers stopped dead on the keys and then he stared at the screen where the results of his earlier query were displaying. Sure there was some kind of problem with the query engine updates, he chastised himself for letting himself get swept up in the usual meetings and distractions.

  He stood up from his desk, suddenly worried about hours of data analysis that could contain invalid results, not to mention the possibility of thousands and thousands of improper automated filings. His face flushed. His heart beat faster. He wondered if he should make the call and issue an Analytics Alert that would stop global data operations so that he could undo the updates. If he did that, hours of data gathering would be invalidated, as would every manual and automated query run against the data since the updates were applied.

  In a panic now, he put his face in his hands, clawing at his forehead. "Think," he told himself tersely.

  He sat back down, decided to run the query again. He typed DIFF "BASE X:MEDSEA -24H" & TEST.LOG. Before pressing Enter, he checked and rechecked every character.

  The Med was hours ahead, so it was very early in the morning of the next day there while his original dataset had been from the deadest part of the night. At those times of day, everything should have been very quiet, but the ceaseless stream of data he was seeing showed that something was terribly wrong.

  He took a deep breath, hoped what he was seeing wasn't a problem with the updates. That kind of problem missed for so many hours could cost him his job--a job he loved and didn't want to lose.

  Chapter 7

  Mediterranean Sea

  Afternoon, Tuesday, 19 June

  Scott was exhausted and wasn't thinking clearly. It didn't matter that he had sat beside Edie in the infirmary. It only mattered that the ensign said she was dead.

  Thoughts of Edie flooded through Scott's mind. He saw her face, her blue eyes, her red hair--sapphires and flames. He smelled her perfume as if it lingered in the air about him. He felt her hand in his.

  He thought of all the times he could have just let go. How he could have just given her the one thing she wanted--her love returned. But his love of her was a thing he kept deep inside, so deep inside that he never shared it--never truly even saw it until just now. Now, he was certain she could have been the love of his life.

  "Blood of czars and gypsies," he told himself with a wretched half laugh, knowing he could have loved her if only he could have pushed aside his feelings and reservations about the two of them being together. It wasn't just the age difference--her 28 to his almost 40. It was Cynthia. Cynthia who he was separated from. Cynthia and little James, his infant son.

  But nothing had been the same after they'd left Baltimore. Nothing. They'd told each other that they could make it alone. They had for a time too but there was really nowhere that a former top operative for the NSA and the daughter of the Chairman of the National Security Council could escape to. They'd known they would be found eventually.

  With each new month that passed though, they'd gained new hope. The first month on the run was true bliss with Cynthia's belly growing every day and little James inside doing his best to capture their attention. The nurse and her Rottweiler stayed with them that first month while they sought out somewhere warm, somewhere tropical.

  It was a case of "be careful what you wish for" though because by the second month it was clear the nurse was wishing she was back in the U.S.A. The Rottweiler seemed to hat
e the jungle too. The jungle just wasn't a good place for anyone or anything not used to the constant heat, humidity, and mosquitoes.

  The nurse stayed until James was born, which was fortunate as the birth was as difficult as the pregnancy. After James was born, things worsened, however. Cynthia didn't want Scott to touch her or James. She just wanted to be left alone, to sit in her rocking chair, to stare out the window.

  Sometime after the birth, maybe a few days or weeks, Cynthia made a plan to return to the states. Her plan was one that didn't include Scott. A trial separation she called it. Scott begged her not to go, not to take little James and leave. Cynthia had anyway. The nurse and her Rottweiler went with Cynthia. Little James went with Cynthia too.

  "I've so much to work out," Cynthia told Scott. "I need time that's all. A trial separation, that's all."

  But Scott wasn't just separated from Cynthia. Separation was a lie she told him and he told himself. Divorce was the truth, for he ultimately signed the papers her attorneys sent even though doing so tore his heart into a million tiny pieces. The actual separation had been six months. Six months followed by divorce papers, followed by 8 months of a fresh hell every single day.

  Sea Shepherd wasn't his first duty as a mercenary for hire. His first duty had been in Afghanistan. As Afghanistan wasn't getting the job of killing him done fast enough, he'd signed up for what seemed a more dangerous mission aboard the Sea Shepherd. With tensions as high as they were in the Mediterranean, his end seemed a sure thing--only the wrong person had been killed. Edie shouldn't have paid his price. He should have.