If you missed earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

POTOU, ZHANJIANG, GUANGDONG PROVINCE, CHINA

“Mom.” Jing tugged at her arm. “Mom, we have to go, now.”

Eddies of the acrid blue-gray fog of spent rifle cartridges stung Shi’s eyes. She turned away from Jing to hide the welling moisture. Chunks of wallboard and white dust covered her kitchen counter. Assault rifle bullets punched sooty donut holes in cabinets, glass spiderwebs on her microwave, and funnel-shaped aluminum dents in her oven.

Until this moment, the idea of being on the run was something other people did. Dissenters. Not her; her husband was a decorated PLA Navy Captain. Even when the MSS agent, now dead on her kitchen floor, poked his pistol through the door of her condo, running had been a distant, unreal choice.

“Mom.” Another arm tug.

“Give me a minute, Jing.”

“We don’t have time to argue. We need to go before someone comes and discovers the body.”

The world was upside down. Her teenage daughter was the calm one, telling her what to do. The PLA toppled everything she’d worked for and tried to crush her family. “What happened to the guard outside?”

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There was silence for a beat, and then a young male voice answered, “I tranqed him.”

Li Heng, the son of Ding Heng, her husband’s Executive Officer.

“That was horse tranquilizer in those darts, did you know that? You’ve probably killed the guard too,” she said to the blue cloud drifting through her kitchen.

Silence.

His mother was a veterinarian, and he helped in her clinic. Surely he knew the dosage.

Killing the guard bought them more time. The idea had probably occurred to him as he pulled the trigger of the dart pistol. But Li was smart, well-mannered, and so wouldn’t admit to intentionally killing the guard or the agent.

Red and white liquids dripped from bullet holes in the refrigerator in slow motion and pooled around the MSS agent’s body. She struggled to breathe and think. They couldn’t leave the guard outside.

Her daughter should be the one paralyzed and crying, not her. She wanted to scream, “Why did they do this to her?” She swallowed the scream, not wanting to alert the neighbors or scare her daughter. Then she laughed through her tears. If she screamed, the neighbors would think the MSS agent was torturing her. They had heard the automatic gunfire, but a lifetime of fear had turned people into minimally compliant sheep. She’d been foolish. Her family was nothing more than mutton to PLA party officials. Her neighbors weren’t coming out, lest they be slaughtered too.

She felt as though she was waking from a nightmare. “Go take his rifle, his phone, everything, and drag him in here—quietly”.

“Mom.”

“Don’t Mom me. Go do it. We can’t have the neighbors stepping over the guard outside. It will buy us more time.”

“Come, Jing,” Li said, and then she heard footfalls. The front door creaked open.

Her mind was as foggy as her kitchen, as if the horse tranquilizer dart that killed the MSS agent on the floor had struck her instead. She wanted to lie down and sleep. Her ears still rang. The rifle fire had pummeled the energy out of her.

On her hip, the agent’s black pistol, with QSZ-92, stamped on the slide like millions of others made in factories around China, except this one distinguished by smears of the pink ooze flowing across the bamboo floor. Her left hand held a cell phone with a smudged thumbprint on the screen.

It was the dead MSS agent’s. She’d unlocked it, but she wasn’t sure what to do with it. She should ditch it. It could be tracked.

Scrolling through the phone, she found her husband’s number, as she expected. The MSS agent came here to negotiate a trade. Instead, his soul was being led through the underworld. Let him negotiate his harsh punishment for his life with the Ten Courts of Hell. She wanted to spit on him, but her mouth was dry and tasted of bitter, burned gunpowder.

They faced a long, treacherous journey through their own earthly underworld now. Maybe she could use the phone as a decoy, leading the MSS away from them as she escaped.

She scrolled and dialed. Her husband picked up, which meant he was not far offshore, or still in port. He said, “I told you, when you deliver our families—”

“Xia, it’s me.”

During the beat of silence, she heard machine noises and electronic blips. He was on Fuzhou’s bridge.

“Have they hurt you?” He asked.

Almost, she wanted to say, but there was no point. “No. I am at home with Jing and Li. The MSS agent they sent is—unalive.” She said it indirectly, superstitiously, as if there were gods listening who she might offend, or censors. As she said it, she felt foolish.

“I see. Is Jing ok? May I speak with her?”

“Jing is—she is cleaning up. Where are you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I will come to you.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. The agent knew we were to meet at the beach. I think they will be waiting for us. One other thing, Li’s mother is missing.”

Shi heard muffled voices, and then her husband said, “Lieutenant Commander Heng says today is Monday, so Li’s mother will be at the medical library.”

Shi squinted. “Why the library?”

“Just tell him that. Go to the bedroom, into the closet. Under the rug you will find what you need.”

Her husband was talking in riddles. Then, it occurred to her that the MSS may have bugged her house, or was recording the phone conversation. “Xia—”

“Go now. This is very dangerous.”

“How will I—” Shi was listening to silence on the phone, and Li and Jing tussling with a body in the hall.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and moistened her mouth, trying to wash away the stinging particulates of gunpowder stuck to her lips. Inhaling one ragged breath and then a second, she gathered herself and wobbled to the bedroom, past the bathroom door hanging off its hinges. The soldier who’d kicked through her house to search it had removed every drawer from her bedroom dressers, dumped them on the bed, and then swept nicknacks onto the floor. Cheap theatrical intimidation tactics, like shooting up her kitchen, but it gave her an idea that might buy her more time.

Her closet was in the corner. She climbed over the mess and dug through the clothes that the soldier ripped off the hangars, clearing her closet floor. She felt along the baseboard and around the edges of the beige pile carpet until she found a loose corner of rug and jerked.

The rug came up along with a square section of padding. Underneath, a rectangle of plywood had been cut, like a trapdoor.

“Mom? Mom where are you?” Jing was in the hall.

“I’m in the closet.”

“We need to go.”

Shi shook her head and wiped her face. Jing should be in school, studying to prepare for university. A fingernail broke as she tried to pry the wood floorboard open. “Drag the bodies in here.”

“They are heavy, Mom.”

“Do you need me to help?”

“No.” Li’s voice, standing at the bedroom threshold.

“Drag the bodies into the bedrooms and hide them under the beds,” she said, as she found two wood screws slightly raised, like handles.

She wedged her fingernails under the screws and pulled. A thick, rectangular section of plywood subfloor lifted. “Bury them in this mess. It will buy us more time.”

She should be telling her daughter to finish her calculus, or yelling at her for spending too much time on her social app, not teaching her how to hide two dead bodies. Or, she should be helping her write a political science essay about the hypocrisy and failure of the Party.

Shi screamed and battered the wall and floor of her closet with the plywood floorboard. Splinters flew.

“Mom?” Jing said meekly.

“Do as I say. Drag the bodies and hide them under the bed. Li, help her.”

Li said, “Come, Jing.”

They disappeared. She propped the cracked plywood against the closet wall and exhaled a ragged breath.

Underneath the floor, her husband had hidden a black backpack.

As she opened the backpack, she heard Jing and Li wrestling the guard’s body to the bedroom door. Li entered, pushing the drawers and clutter to the side of the bed. He lifted the mattress and propped it against the wall.

The backpack held wads of cash, a zippered black pouch, a gun identical to the one on her hip, and framed pictures of her parents and his. She rubbed her thumb over the pictures. Was it synchronicity? Xia’s mother had been a Hong Kong dissident before party officials sent her to be re-educated. People died, but ideas could never be censored or murdered or erased. They could go dormant for a period, underground, like seeds after a great forest fire. The Party could burn the country to the ground in its crusade for control, burn her family to the ground, but ideas were bigger and would always sprout from the ashes.

In the hall, she heard groaning and scuffling. She put the pictures aside and riffled the cash wads. Renminbi. Euros. US Dollars. New Zealand Dollars. Rupees. Her husband had hidden a lot of money.

Inside the black pouch, three forged Vietnamese passports, one for her, one for Jing, and one for Xia. Nothing for Li or his mother. A problem to be solved, but later.

The mattress crashed onto the bed frame behind her.

Under the bundles of money, two cellphones inside signal-blocking black suede faraday bags. The government had AI that monitored for burner phones, or those with unapproved software. But the faraday bags blocked signals. So as long as the phones were in the bags, they were invisible.

She retrieved the MSS agent’s phone from her pocket, turned it off, and stuffed it into one of the faraday pouches.

Hurriedly, Shi crammed the money and other items back into the backpack, then replaced the plywood and rug.

She stood, kicking clothes and shoes into the closet. As she turned around, Li and Jing were doing the same, dumping jewelry and clothes onto the bed and then tossing the drawers after.

Jing grinned. “Like reverse-cleaning my room.”

Shi shook her head and frowned. “Where is the second body?”

Jing paused, eyes wide, hands over her head, holding a drawer in mid-toss, as if the gravity of what she’d been doing only then crashed on her.

Setting the drawer on the bed, Jing said, “Under my bed. They both wouldn’t fit under this one.”

Shi surveyed the floor. The place looked like a typhoon hit. Clothes and shoes were on the bed and floor, tangled with jewelry. Who was going to come in and look under the bed with this mess?

It would take a few days for the bodies to smell. Maybe they had a chance.

“Let’s go,” Shi said, swinging the black backpack over her shoulder and marching from the room.

“Where are we going?” Li asked.

A good question.

She halted in the hall, eyeing the streak of pink liquid on the floor. Not blood. Milk from the fridge mixed with—something, she wasn’t sure what. She grabbed a towel from the bathroom and dropped it under her feet, dragging it through the hall to wipe the streak away.

Passing by the washing machine, she opened it to see Jing had not finished her laundry. The one and only time she was glad to see this. She tossed the towel in the washer and pressed start.

In the kitchen, she opened her stove door and microwave as if the soldier had searched there too, and then overturned her dining room table and chairs.

“Mom?”

She waved at the sofa. “Pull out the cushions. Toss everything. Li, my husband said, today is Monday, so Li’s mother will be at the medical library.” She guessed it was a code in case someone eavesdropped on the conversation. “Do you know what that means?”

Li thought for a moment, and then nodded. “I do—”

Shi put her hands to her lips. “We will go there first.”

Jing and Li snatched the couch cushions and tossed them across the room. Jing looked irritatingly pleased as she trashed the house, smirking and smiling at Shi. When they were finished, Jing stood at the door and turned out all the lights. Shi waved at Li and pointed at the curtains. He hurried to the window, tugged and hung on the curtains for a moment, and then the curtain rod snapped from the wall and collapsed on him.

Jing giggled. Shi shushed her. Nothing about this was funny.

Jing and Li exited first. As Shi closed the door, she thought about all the roadblocks, the checkpoints, the patrols, and the border guards between here and Vietnam. Her husband told her often of dissidents caught escaping through the mountains. Was he warning her, or preparing her? He said that getting over the border was relatively easy. Immigration used minimal effort to stop people and often overlooked obviously flawed passports. Complacency was the enemy. In Vietnam and Laos, the police in border cities were corrupt and paid to report illegal Chinese immigration. They would not be safe simply because they crossed the border. In China, it was illegal to leave. In America, it was illegal to enter. An irony she never considered until now.

In the hallway, Li and Jing stared at her expectantly as she closed the door. Li was dressed in an army uniform, with a rifle slung across his chest. He looked the same age as the soldier who came in, destroyed her house, and shot up her kitchen. Jing, also in an army uniform, held the tranquilizer dart pistol.

“How many darts do we have left?” She asked Jing.

“We have two.”

Shi put her hand out. “Give me that. My daughter is not killing anyone.”

The look on Jing’s face said it was too late, that she’d fired the dart gun. Jing withdrew the dart gun, hugging it to her chest.

Shi shook her head and led them down the hall and down the stairs.

They exited the front door. On the right, under a lamp, the soldier she’d watched from her window stood by a jeep, his QBZ-95 bullpup rifle slung over his chest, and his hand to his face as he inhaled the red flame from his cigarette.

Smoking again. He shouldn’t be smoking on duty. What would her husband say? Nothing kind.

But he wasn’t looking at them. Instead, his eyes were fixed on a point three hundred meters down the street. Shi saw torches, and people dressed in head-to-toe black and waving placards. A protest. She would praise her luck, except almost every night there was a protest happening somewhere now.

The jeep was green, like every other 4-door 4x4 jeep in Chinese military inventory, with a soft top canvas roof. There were thousands like it, in highway convoys, traveling to snuff out protests. It was nothing special, except that it was empty, the soldier was alone, and they needed transportation.

“Wait here, in the shadow,” she told Li and Jing. She handed Jing the backpack.

Walking towards the smoking soldier, she shouted at him, mustering words she thought her husband might use to scold him.

As she hollered and admonished the soldier for smoking, he quickly threw the cigarette butt on the ground, stamped it, and then stood at attention.

“You are a disgrace!” The soldier was a head taller and kept his gaze fixed beyond her. She snatched the pack of cigarettes from his arm sleeve and trampled them under her boots. Then she released the quick snaps on his rifle sling. It clangored to the ground.

“Go! Run down there and help!”

The soldier hesitated, squinting.

“Now, soldier!”

“My rifle.”

She unholstered her pistol. “I should shoot you where you stand. You have dishonored the Party and that uniform. Prove to me you deserve to wear it.”

Her heart trembled in her throat. Did he recognize her? Would she have to shoot him?

The soldier blinked and darted down the street. She watched him until he was a hundred meters away and then reholstered her pistol and picked up the rifle.

She got in the jeep and put the rifle beside her seat. Chinese military vehicles were simple. No keys, because it made no sense to require soldiers to look for keys during a firefight. And no GPS, because the vehicles were usually in a convoy, and the soldiers themselves carried electronics.

The soldier was now a running shadow two hundred meters down the road.

She smiled and started the jeep, allowing herself a moment of optimism as the diesel engine growled to life. It was about eight hours to the North Vietnamese border. But first, she needed to pick up Li’s mother and get them passports. She exhaled. One problem at a time. She removed the parking brake and tamped the accelerator, rolling the steering wheel towards Jing and Li, who were obscuring themselves at the corner of the building in the dark. Maybe they’d escape after all.

If you missed earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

BENGALURU, INDIA

Piyush closed his eyes and took a ragged breath. He tried to visualize where he was going. If he revealed he knew the location of Blackbird…He saw himself, hooded, tied on a bench seat, in a sweltering van with the air conditioning off, his mind in a fugue as the drugs wore off. The breeze on his face and smell of green onion pancakes over diesel fumes meant the window was open. He heard road noise. A heavy truck moaned to his right. His stomach lurched with the van’s creaky suspension every time it hit a pothole or slowed to a stop. Grilled mango and tandoori fruit floated in with the green onion and sesame oil smell, which made his stomach lurch with the van.

Ding. He opened his eyes to see the elevator doors sliding closed. His overactive imagination. His boss’ message said to report to the eighth floor, office 8110, so he stepped in and pushed eight.

If the Americans had not tipped Salman Singh, if he had left when his shift was over, he’d probably have turned in his resignation to the Indian Intelligence Bureau and be back at his apartment with a pint of Kingfisher in his hand working on Act II of his screenplay. Instead, he lingered.

The Hindu Vedas taught that the world was a cosmic drama, a Leela, and his soul was inside a machine made of material energy, like a character in an artificial simulation. The universe was a maya, or illusion, that his brain interpreted and reworked, sometimes falsely. He very much liked this viewpoint, since he was a future playwright. A curse of being a future playwright, an overactive imagination. All the elevator’s smells were real: the elevator motor sounded like a truck engine; diesel fumes drifted from the basement, where there were spare generators to keep the building running during a blackout; two blocks from his office, there was a food cart that sold green onion pancakes and grilled fruit that was popular for lunch. With his eyes closed, he was hooded and in a van, but with his eyes open, the cooked onion smell made his stomach growl, reminding him that his material machine had a fast reactor and needed fuel. He was hungry.

The elevator stopped on the fifth floor. The doors opened.

“namaste, Piyush. aap kaise hain?” Hello, Piyush. How are you? Asked a woman in a navy pantsuit entering the elevator. She was important. She worked on this floor, but he couldn’t remember her name.

She smiled, as if approving that he was rising to the eighth floor.

He remained in the elevator corner, bewildered, returning her smile. Did the woman know why he was here? Her smile might mean she was a member of the Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW, a sister organization of the Indian intelligence community infamous for covert action—assassinations, counter-terrorism, and counter-espionage. If so, he was a chicken, and she was a lioness, smiling, waiting to torture him as a plaything before ripping his guts open.

His boss wouldn’t summon him to the eighth floor to be killed; no, they would murder him in his sleep later tonight because he knew too much. Maybe he’d been summoned to be fired.

He blinked sweat from his eyes, saying, “main bahut badhiya hoon. aur aap?” I’m great. And you? But he was feeling sick and terrified.

She returned a smile that made him feel like dinner. She had long, thick, brown hair and never-ending brown eyes. He wondered what it would be like to be a male praying mantis.

The doors closed.

He’d read about a former IIB analyst who’d left to work cybersecurity for a big retail company, and then received a book deal, which was now being made into a Bollywood movie directed by Atlee. It had a terrible cast, terrible plot, but it was still expected to gross thousands of crore (hundreds of millions of USD).

He had a brilliant idea for a screenplay, where the main character was a triple agent, working for India, China, and America. Action, adventure, explosions, knife fights. China would attempt to invade Taiwan and India would rescue them to bring world peace. It irritated him to read about America promoting itself as the arsenal of democracy, like his elderly, braggart grandfather remembering his youthful escapades. India was the largest democracy in the world and would soon be richer than America. He didn’t mind cooperating with them. Any ally that opposed Islamic fundamentalism and Chinese aggression was a good ally. But every empire had about a century of fame, and America didn’t yet realize that its time was up.

His script would be big. Bollywood would be the new center of the entertainment universe. His parents would no longer be embarrassed that their son did not become a doctor, or nuclear scientist, or learn the sitar. They would not have to lament that he’d be reincarnated as a mosquito. He could hear the gossip at the preta-karma, the traditional funeral ceremony to release the soul. “I am so sorry your son was an IIB analyst-turned-screenwriter,” his cousin would tell his mother. Not sorry he died; sorry he’d turned out to be a disappointing intelligence bureau drone, writing reports about video feeds. His mother would sigh, saying, “perhaps he’ll learn his lesson as a mosquito.” Or maybe his parents wouldn’t have a preta-karma, because the embarrassment would kill them.

His mother’s attitude would change after she’d seen the premier. He’d buy them a bigger house, which would have a sunroom and a temple with statues of Ganesha and Shirdi Sai Baba and Shiva and Krishna and Radha, where they could do yoga in the afternoons.

All he needed to do…The elevator doors opened again. The woman in the navy pantsuit cocked her head and squinted at him.

His mouth stuck in neutral.

She said, in English, “Isn’t this your floor?” The doors were sliding closed, but hooded men weren’t kidnapping him.

Eight was his stop.

He rushed through the elevator doors as they slid closed.

The eighth floor was square, the perimeter lined with secure, closed office doors, all painted in office-standard-cream with white trim. In the center of the floor, a plexiglass room like a fishbowl containing a U-shaped couch, tables and chairs, and two televisions hanging from the ceiling playing the news without sound. To the right of the elevators, a kitchen, lavatories, three vending machines, and then rooms labeled as sleeping rooms. Code word classified information couldn’t leave the floor if people didn’t leave the floor, so analysts were encouraged to sleep and eat here until their assignment ended.

He sighed. People spoke of this floor as if it were a temple to Shiva. But it looked exactly like every other floor he’d seen. Nothing special. His overactive imagination again.

Counting down the office numbers, he passed the kitchen, lavatories, sleeping rooms, and then rounded the corner to 8110. The plaque read DIRECTOR AJAY CHATTERJEE. Director of what, he wondered? After knocking, a distant voice told him to come in.

The Director’s office was deceptively large and painted gray-blue, the pallor of death. At the front, a high, round table that sat four. Bamboo bookshelves lined the walls, crammed with awards. Trophies. Diplomas. Pictures of him shaking hands with the previous two Prime Ministers. Two large black monitors hung on the right wall.

The Director sat behind a mahogany veneered desk. He was late fifties, with short, stiff gray hair and a mustache, and wrinkled, leathery skin that was battle-worn but didn’t appear to have seen sunlight in years.

He waved Piyush to a seat while keeping his eyes on a tablet. “Normally we have recruits go through a very rigorous basic training. A month, where we cover subjects like tradecraft techniques, codeword classification, finance, space technology, cybersecurity, and foreign language skills.” He shook his head. “You have no language skills, no useful weapons training—”

Piyush remained standing, frozen, close to the door in case he needed to escape. “I speak Bangla. And I’ve trained on a pistol.”

The Director shook his head again, the way his college professors sometimes did when he’d given a ridiculous answer or failed a test. “Tell me, do you understand the geopolitical importance of microchips?”

Piyush had written three reports on it, four hundred and sixty-two pages, collectively. It would be in his file, so why would the Director need to ask? He blinked away sweat dripping into his eyes. “I think so, yes.”

The Director harrumphed as if expecting more, then swiped his tablet. “Tell me, you are familiar with Blackbird? It says here you know where its manufactured.”

Piyush’s stomach clenched, and he stopped breathing. Should he lie? He didn’t have clearance and only happened upon the location by accident. But he never disclosed what he saw, only that the previous analyst had violated security procedures by leaving the computer unlocked and the feed running for him to see. But maybe the question was a test? Maybe the IIB investigators knew what he saw, and this was the final interrogation to close the case?

The Director’s brown eyes were staring into Piyush’s soul. He knew Piyush knew. They hadn’t hooded him, or blown his brains out yet, so maybe they would just fire him.

“I—it was an accident. The previous analyst left the feed unlocked and I walked in—”

The Director raised his hand to signal for Piyush to stop talking. “Understand, this is not my idea. This is an arrangement of convenience.”

“Arrangement?”

The Director sighed, then swiped through three screens on his tablet. “I need you to sign this.” He pushed the tablet across his desk.

The Director’s eyes felt like two brown neutron stars pulling Piyush to the edge of the desk.

On the tablet, awaiting his fingerprint, a nondisclosure agreement for a project, codeword KRAIT. The countersigner was DIRECTOR OF RECRUITMENT, AJAY CHATTERJEE, RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS WING.

He wasn’t being fired, or tortured, he was being recruited. Why? What was the project? Inside India, RAW enjoyed vigorous support. They’d adopted the same tactics as the American’s CIA and the Israeli Mossad, although perhaps RAW was not as ruthless as China or Russia. Outside India, RAW, notorious for assassinations, often received scathing foreign press. Last year, Italy expelled and reprimanded RAW officers for poisoning a separatist who’d masterminded a car bomb in Punjab. Hypocrisy. India was strong, and a powerful country tracked and hunted its enemies wherever they were, even if they were sipping wine on the Spanish Steps while raising international capital for more car bombs.

He’d murdered people, but only in short stories and screenplays. To be read into project KRAIT, he needed to press his thumb on the screen. The nondisclosure said he couldn’t tell anyone, not for a hundred and twenty years, certainly not in a screenplay, and not even the future wife he didn’t have yet.

Piyush pressed his thumb. The Director reeled the tablet towards him like a trap had just snared Piyush. His heart leaped in his chest. The Director pressed his thumb, swiped the tablet closed, and then stood.

A wide, wrinkled, leathery hand reached across the desk. “Welcome to the RWA, Piyush Kumar. Your basic training is over.”

“What?” His voice sounded like the yelp of a dying animal.

The Director didn’t reply. His hand stuck across the desk like a coiled snake, waiting to spring and bite Piyush.

Piyush shook the Director’s hand limply. His palms glistened with sweat. “Why me?”

The Director withdrew his hand. “One less person we have to tell about Blackbird, of course. You’re already in the club.” Another harrumph crossed his lips, and he sat. “And now to the briefing. We have an assignment for you.”

The Director tapped his tablet and to Piyush’s right, one of the wall monitors blinked on, displaying a woman with brown eyes, in a steely gray cabin, wearing an American naval officer’s blue digital camouflage uniform and a hijab under a blue digital camo cap.

The Director said, “This is Chandi Faridi, who will be your handler.”

Her mouth was moving. Another tap by the Director and she was saying, “Hello? Piyush? Can you hear me?”

“We can hear you,” the Director said.

“I don’t have a lot of time. Piyush, it’s good to meet you.”

He stared. For how long, he wasn’t sure. Her headscarf and American naval uniform made his stomach angry, and he didn’t know why. He blurted, “I’ll be working with an American?”

She said, “A disguise, Piyush. I am not American. I worked with them years ago, very briefly. I am RAW, like you.” She unwrapped the hajib and took it off.

He wasn’t RAW, at least until a minute ago. Wasn’t there a training period, or a probationary period, or something? The Director said basic training is over, but when did it start?

He was sure that if he was going to kill people, he needed a gun. Something big and brutal. Indian special forces carried Brügger & Thomet MP9 machine pistols with detachable silencers. A nine-hundred rounds per minute firing rate, a one-hundred meter effective range, and the lightest machine pistol made because it was primarily polymer. If he was going to sneak into his apartment and kill himself, forty rounds from a B&T MP9 would pulverize his skull and paint his walls in a pink mist. He smiled. All the good guys in his screenplay carried them.

“It is a very good disguise. Can I choose my gun? I’d like to request a Brügger & Thomet MP9.”

Faridi’s smile creased into the mocking you’re-cute-but-naïve smirk his mother gave him as a child.

The Director said, “This isn’t a video game, Piyush.”

“I qualified on an IOF 9 millimeter. I request that.” The IOF was puny. A copy of a Browning Hi-Power designed in 1914. Archaic and insignificant compared with the Swiss precision of the Brügger & Thomet machine pistol. But it was still a gun.

“Better not to carry,” the Director said. “You could shoot yourself in the leg. Or worse, blow your cover. For this mission you won’t need a gun.”

No gun. He was starting

“ to think he was the redshirt, the random character Brahmin inserted into the story who died near the end.

“Listen I don’t have a lot of time,” Faridi said. “Piyush, the Director will give you a USB flash drive. I will send encrypted instructions. You will make a video per the instructions and deliver it.”

“To who?”

“I will tell you that, later.”

“When?”

“When I set it up. Do you know what a dead drop is?”

“That’s like when I drop a package in a random toilet stall for another spy.”

“Something like that. You will load the flash drive and then drop it where I tell you to drop it. Meanwhile, I need a report on Fuzhou, and the storm, every fifteen minutes, along with status from the Blackbird facility.”

The storm. A cell had formed in the Pacific and was metastasizing into a typhoon aimed for the same target as Fuzhou, Zhanjiang.

“The Americans know about Blackbird,” he said.

“I know, Piyush,” Faridi said. “I made sure they didn’t get the parts from the drone strike. But Salman will lead them to the other copy. I will lead them away. We need to make sure the Chinese copy of Blackbird does not fall into American hands. It would be a disaster.”

“And kill Salman?”

“Yes, but maybe not before he experiences the savagery he inflicted on those women.”

The Director said, “Now, Faridi, we aren’t China. Don’t make a spectacle of it. Get on with it.”

Faridi didn’t respond. She and the Director appeared locked in a virtual staring contest.

After a few beats, Piyush broke the stalemate. “May I ask what will be the nature of the video?”

“I will provide detailed instructions. We’ve received intelligence that suggests China may know the true location, but you will deliver information that will lead them into a trap.”

If he were to deliver information, he should look the part. Double agents always wore expensive suits in movies. “I should buy a new suit.”

Faridi resumed mocking him with her half-smile and eyebrows. The Director said, “You look like you sleep in those clothes. Perfect.”

Faridi said, “Your cover is an IIB analyst with access to Nakshatra Six. Just be you, it’s believable.”

Nakshatra Six was the name for the constellation of sentinel satellites watching the facility where Blackbird was manufactured.

Just be you. His cover was himself, and he was not the redshirt. He was bait for a lethal geopolitical trap.

Terrified, he couldn’t breathe. Chinese MSS agents were ruthless and liked to torture their prey by drilling toes. Would it be worth it?

“Do I have a choice?” he asked.

“Of course you have a choice, Piyush,” the Director said, scowling, plainly insulted by the question. “We can’t force you. This is not communist China. Being a field operative always carries great risk and we only take volunteers.”

“What about the fact that I know the location of Blackbird?”

“If you decline, you will still be bound by the nondisclosure. There are civil and criminal penalties for revealing code word classified information.”

But not torture. The elephant on his chest lifted. He had a choice. The IIB wouldn’t kill him in his sleep. Those nightmares were just his overactive imagination.

If he weren’t doing this, he’d be at home finishing his manuscript and then querying agents to accept it. The odds were fifty to one that someone would buy his first screenplay. The query process trammeled authors until only those willing to eat their fingers off to sell a manuscript survived. But as a former RAW spy, it was a certainty he’d get published. The best way to become a tortured artist was to become an artist who’d been tortured and humiliated at the hands of the Chinese. It might be the only way. He smiled. Yes, it would be worth it. What author wouldn’t submit to having their toes drilled to get published? Every author would, because bones healed, but the sting of a thousand rejections lasted a lifetime.

“No problem,” he said, puffing his chest.

“Good. The Chinese, we think, are preparing a raid, so its imperative that we deliver the video soon. Prepare for a long night ahead.”

Faridi’s hand reached towards the camera, and then she closed her laptop. The screen went black, reflecting his squinting eyes and perplexed face. A raid. He didn’t see how that was possible. Blackbird was manufactured on HabiSat Eight, and HabiSat Eight was three hundred and seventy-five thousand kilometers away, completely secure in the vacuum of space.

If you missed earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

THREE YEARS EARLIER

MCLEAN, VIRGINIA

The building was red brick, colonial style, with three white-trimmed windows bordered by green shutters on the second floor, two identical windows on the first floor, and a cherry red door. It could have been a condo, but it wasn’t. The sign read HEALTHY MASSAGE in oiled bronze block letters, and below that, Burton Park Esq and Associates Attorneys at Law.

It was a sunny, clear blue day. One of those crisp, Virginia winter days where the sky belied the frigid air. The parking lot was a quadrangle encircled by conjoined fraternal twin buildings, all colonial style, but with varied masonry. To the right of HEALTHY MASSAGE, two units with a sandy yellow brick facade, red trim windows, black shutters, and a black-on-blue plaque Transitwide National Insurance Company and Benjamin, Harper, Greenwood Physiotherapy Associates. Around the circle, counseling offices, another law firm, WINNING PURPLE STRATEGIES, two realty offices, a two-story rock and quarry stone-style building holding LOFT LASH AND BEAUTY LOUNGE, a few unlabeled doors that could be apartments, and so on.

There were three empty parking spaces in front of HEALTHY MASSAGE, so they pulled their stolen Mercedes EQS 680, Alpine Gray, with tinted windows affixed with the Virginia Tech logo, cat paw stickers, and a rainbow MOLON LABE Gadsden flag, to the space two from the door. Kane replaced the license plates and hacked the car’s GPS and cameras. They had three days. A stolen car in Virginia was returned on average three days later, and if they didn’t meet that, they’d return the Mercedes gently used with a car wash and steal another.

On such a bright day, the Mercedes’ deep tinted windows would conceal them, but the Mercedes was flashy, even for suburban McClean, and they were exposed in this parking lot, hemmed in by four dozen windows and a tight exit to Leesburg Pike. But that was the idea. They made themselves bait. The eye-catching rainbow Gadsden flag was Kane’s brilliant addition.

Kane, looking snug in the tan leather passenger seat, her black hair freshly cut and wearing a smart blue blazer that covered her white blouse and holstered black Glock, flicked the tablet in her lap with her middle finger. Then, she cast her sapphire-blue eyes three buildings down as she rapped her tablet with her blue-polished fingernails. Stone knew what she was thinking because it was the same thing he was: they were missing something.

More precisely, the previous team had missed something. This, their first assignment as civilian contractors, was to handle a hand-me-down asset, a sex worker who called herself Caroline, no-last-name, and who’d been funneling information on a potential target. They followed Caroline 33.4 miles, from a little strip mall in Laurel, Maryland, to this location in McLean, Virginia. The buildings in this McClean plaza were as clean as the ones at the Laurel strip mall were filthy. Here, not a speck of pollution sullied the perfectly pointed masonry. In Laurel, roofs leaked and the asphalt lot had been reduced to potholes and gravel. Caroline came out of a door labeled Jute Massage, entered a smoke shop with neon signs hawking HOOKAH KRATOM SHISHA GLASS VAPE CBD, then exited, walking past a greasy pizza shop, a nail salon, SUSHI CHICKEN AND BEER, KEBAP PALACE, a boarded-up former liquor store, finally getting in her pink Jeep, which Kane had twenty minutes earlier hacked so they could track its GPS signal. Caroline led them to McClean. Kane shook her head and swore at the Jeep in the cold, wondering why the previous team hadn’t done it. Sloppy work. They’d been handed this assignment because the previous team was burned, and it became obvious by the minute why.

The asset, Caroline, drove straight to HEALTHY MASSAGE, while he and Kane meandered, running a surveillance detection route, or SDR, randomly zigging and zagging off and on beltway exits on the way over. To their disappointment, they weren’t followed.

Kane’s blue eyes stared through the tinted glass of the Mercedes, surveying the rest of the cars in the parking lot. Caroline had parked her pink Jeep ten spots over.

“The file only goes back 3 years,” Kane said, clicking her fingernail polish against her tablet’s glass.

Stone shrugged. Caroline’s real name, confirmed by Maryland motor vehicle records and Howard County police, was Ciara Ruffin Gaffney, 33 years old, of Atlantic City, New Jersey. She’d lived in the area at least three years, in an apartment in Laurel, Maryland, and while she’d never been arrested, Howard County Police had long ago stopped arresting the sex workers. Instead, HCPD arrested the johns and human traffickers. But her name was all over the reports.

“We have no surveillance inside her place,” Kane clicked.

Stone shrugged again. The target Zhi Zhang, who went by Jeff, was a Chinese executive for their largest video game company, Lóng Huǒ Inc., which translated to Dragon Fire. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence wasn’t interested in video games, of course. ODNI was interested in Lóng Huǒ's other businesses, including military contracts for drone avionics, rocket guidance, and military simulation software.

Jeff was in the US on an economic development visa. There was little in the file about Jeff’s life in Hong Kong, but while here, he had a healthy appetite for alcohol and women. Caroline, or Ciara Gaffney, was the asset, the honeypot used for bait, and the previous team only dug far enough to confirm her qualifications: She loved her country, for a price, and Jeff liked her enough to be a repeat customer.

For five months, the previous team reported little progress. His laptops and phones were pristine. He didn’t download porn. He rarely had people to his condo, except Caroline and a few of her associates for drunk romps in the sheets, and when he did, he never said anything useful. His business meetings were snoozefests, discussions of data hosting contracts and reducing game latency rates and ping times. Caroline reported every sweaty thrust and dirty word. The previous team dutifully recorded it all and forwarded to a team of ODNI behavioral profilers, who recommended standing down until the CIA uncovered more about Jeff’s personal life in China. The CIA was in its own logic trap, unwilling to prioritize fieldwork in Hong Kong. Absence of evidence either meant he was Mr. Big Player, who maintained the strictest professional operational security throughout his visit (the prostitutes simply being dismissed as a common lifestyle choice), or meant he was Mr. Small Fry with nothing valuable to reveal. The CIA was short-staffed and wouldn’t authorize fieldwork in Hong Kong until someone proved he was Mr. Big, but no one could prove he was Mr. Big without CIA fieldwork.

So, Jeff’s reports spun around D.C. like cars on the beltway, a lot of traffic but little movement. Jeff’s visa was up in a month, and the team was ready to give up.

The problem with the intelligence business is that you don’t know what you don’t know until it sneaks up and shoots you in the back of the head.

The previous team, now recovering in a guarded critical care ward at Inova Fairfax Hospital under induced comas, got lucky, saved because the white panel van that pulled up behind Hot Pig, the restaurant where Jeff took lunch every day at 12:15 PM, unknowingly parked in the middle of a DEA sting, because the Hot Pig’s secret menu included Cocaine Congee. Machine pistols out, a hooded fire team of unknown nationality attempted to abduct them after they’d dutifully recorded Jeff eating dim sum. The DEA crew, thinking they had a cartel kidnapping, moved in. Bullets and fists flew. Miraculously, no one died, but the hooded fire team in the white panel van melted into the confusion, and their predecessors went to the hospital, bruised, beaten, and broken. Burned.

ODNI shifted the case to NextGenSys LLC, to Kane and Stone, although the chain of command didn’t change. Their three-up boss was the President of the United States, their two-up boss was the Director of National Intelligence, and their immediate boss was a four-star Space Force general, with a vision of special operators in space and who preferred to disguise her voice with AI and communicate over burner phones. NextGenSys LLC itself was a shell company, with an empty office and a bored receptionist in Vienna, Virginia, created for maximum budget flexibility and minimal Congressional oversight.

The AI-disguised voice on the burner told them they needed to find how the previous team was burned. A higher priority, milk Jeff, who had gone from “meh” to “fuck yeah” on the ODNI-target tier list in the time it took a hooded fire team in a panel van to slide the safeties on their machine pistols. But being free of the oversight and paperwork also meant they had none of the usual bureaucratic excuses for failure. With great pay and freedom comes great responsibility and personal accountability. The burner told them to get results, fast.

“I think its got to be the asset, Caroline, or Ciara Gaffney, if that’s even her real name,” Kane said to the window. “Her trail only goes back three years.”

“Something in her past.” Stone was watching a mother in a thick yellow winter coat through the rearview mirror. She’d exited a red-brick counseling office and was now wedging her stroller into the back of her champagne SUV after buckling her toddler into his car seat. It was a sunny day; cold; she was wearing the appropriate gear; but the coat was puffy and she could be carrying a hand cannon underneath. But this was Virginia, a shall-issue state, and she’d have the right. There were probably a lot of guns in the buildings around the parking lot, but he didn’t see any pointed at them.

“Could be," Kane said. “Or just Occam’s Razor for hookers. Why sell the information once, when you can sell it twice at twice the price? I’ll bet a taco the leak is her.”

“All she’s reported is his dick size.”

“The previous team met with her and took notes. Someone comes into Jute Massage, asking Caroline the same questions. Caroline lets it slip there is another team looking into Jeff…and sells the information.”

“A theory.”

“I want to go in and talk to her. If he sticks to his schedule, he’ll be out soon.”

“We should stay on him.” They could track his cellphone and car GPS, and had access to every traffic camera between here and his house, but without direct eyes, Jeff could vanish into electronic background noise. He had a month on his visa, but high value targets were known to disappear early.

“If he sticks to his routine, he’s headed back to his house,” Kane said. “He’s never run an SDR, not once, and so far we haven’t seen the slightest tremor in his pattern.”

“He’s a trained operative pretending to be a low level gaming exec who knows he’s being watched.”

“Which also means he’s unlikely to deviate from his cover.” She looked at him, one eyebrow higher than the other, her blue eyes transmitting, checkmate.

As if for emphasis, Jeff opened the cherry-red white-framed door of HEALTHY MASSAGE and Burton Park, Esq. He was tall, six foot two, in aviator sunglasses, wearing a gray seersucker suit, power red tie, and matching polished maroon suede shoes. He let the door swing closed on its spring and proceeded away from them with the pace of a businessman onto his next meeting, never looking their way.

Stone took a good long look, watching Jeff stride to his blue Bentley, his gut twisting with each step. The Bentley chirped. Jeff opened the door and got in. The door thunked closed. The Bentley’s ten cylinders woke with a deep growl, and then Jeff was backing out. Getting away.

“Wait until he’s out of sight, then we go in,” he said, knowing they’d just made a mistake.

Kane leaned forward in the Mercedes’ luxurious tan leather seats and reached under the seat. She retrieved a blue pen, twisted it, and shoved it in her left pants pocket.

“You think?” Stone asked.

“Leave nothing to chance,” she said, reaching for the black door handle and then opening the door to the bright winter sun.

The pen delivered an ampule of ketamine and scopolamine through a compressed air dart. After sixty seconds, Caroline, aka Ciara Ruffin Gaffney, would tell them the truth.

Stone stepped out, squinting into the blue sky over the colonial red brick office building for a few seconds before donning sunglasses. On the second floor, a shadow wisped over the white curtains.

The cherry red door opened to a foyer, a short oatmeal-colored hall with stairs to the second floor, and a door to the right with a sign, 101 Burton Park Esq. and Associates, Attorneys at Law. Kane was three steps ahead, climbing the hall stairs to HEALTHY MASSAGE.

Once at the top, Kane opened the door, peeked around, and then gestured thumbs up. He followed, entering an empty reception area with the personality of a doctor’s office. Bulging from the center of the puke-yellow ceiling, a mirrored half-sphere the size of an apple. A camera wired to a security system. His adrenaline spiked, and he had the urge to go back down the stairs. If a fire team was on their way, they were trapped at the top of a long hall with stairs and no cover.

To his left, Kane had her hand on a doorknob and her shoulder on a door marked NO EXIT. Holding one finger up, he retrieved his phone from his jacket pocket, pressed his fingerprint, and swiped through to the map tracking Jeff, who was on his usual route, delayed by predictable traffic denoted by red lines on Leesburg Pike. He swiped to the Mercedes’ 360-view exterior cameras. Seeing nothing but a bright sunny parking lot, he exhaled and put his phone away, nodding for Kane to open the door, still unable to convince his gut that Jeff was getting away.

She opened the door to a hall with six massage rooms, each the size doctors use for exams, three on either side. All the doors were open, confessing they were empty. At the end of the hall, what looked like a break room or kitchen, and the unmistakable odor of cigarette smoke. Illegal indoors, but so was prostitution.

They proceeded slowly, double-checking each room. Towards the end of the hall, Stone realized that they’d gone to the back of the building, up the stairs, made a u-turn, and were now returning to the front of the building. The sunlight in the break room was from the center window overlooking the parking lot.

Caroline waited for them in the kitchen, lingering in the sun, her back to the sink, with her left hand holding a cigarette at high-ready and blue smoke drifting over her aniline black shoulder-length hair. She crossed her right arm to hold her left elbow. Her Middle Eastern, or maybe Southern Indian, complexion was darker than her most recent photo and her half-almond eyes curled into sarcasm.

“You are my new Space Force handlers?”

Stone blocked the exit. Kane stepped through the fog of second-hand smoke to the window over the sink. Caroline didn’t budge, instead letting the smoke curl over Kane’s face.

Kane peeked out of the window and then announced, “Clear.”

“He’s gone. There is no one else coming,” Caroline said as she tapped ashes in the sink.

Kane stepped back and then opened the fridge. “Who did you talk to about our arrangement?”

“I didn’t tell anyone,” Caroline said, taking a puff and then blowing it towards Kane. “Those two stuck out like a hemorrhoid.”

“You have a lot of experience?” Stone asked.

“This is D.C. And this isn’t my first rodeo.” She took another puff, this time making a small O with her lips and blowing it high and away from Kane. “Amateur tradecraft, really. They may as well have worn blazing neon signs.”

Kane closed the fridge door. She twisted her eyes and nose like she’d smelled spoiled meat in the fridge. “You told no one? I don’t believe you.”

Caroline unfurled the hand holding her elbow slowly, like a magician, and reached behind her. From her back pocket, she withdrew a black phone and offered it to Kane. “Check. I am sure you’ve already gone through my apartment, my iPad, my whole life.”

Kane looked at the phone as if it were a ticking time bomb, but then accepted it. “I will.”

“If you had any proof I’d given information to the Chinese, or the Russians, or whoever Jeff works for, I’d already be hooded and in a van.”

“Spy movie stuff,” Stone said, trying to produce a weak smile.

“I am a patriot,” Caroline said, followed by a long drag and a pivot to put the butt out in the sink. “Now if you’ll excuse me, he’s expecting me at his place.”

Stone froze, unsure whether he should let her go. His gut screamed no.

Caroline, aka Ciara Ruffin Gaffney, 33 years old, of Atlantic City, New Jersey, cocked her head to one side, her brown eyes searing Stone and her black hair falling across her shoulders. “Or should I not show up at his condo? Then he’ll know he’s as burned as your other agents.”

Kane shrugged and gestured with her eyebrows towards her pocket. Stone stepped aside, second-hand cigarette smoke drifting under his nose as Caroline marched past him and down the hall. Kane stepped to the threshold, her hand out, and he heard the pop whoosh of the dart.

Caroline slowed a half step, but then resumed her pace, stepping through the far door to the reception area with a wink.

They waited, listening to a door closing; footfalls on the stairs; another door clicking; a clip-clop of heels on concrete; a car chirping; its door opening; then slamming closed; finally it starting.

The drugs only needed one to two minutes. Hurrying through the massage parlor hall, he pictured Caroline slumped over in the driver’s seat. If her pink Jeep had automatic locks, extracting her in the middle of a parking lot during the day would be a complication. They’d have to go in through the rear hatch to avoid the side curtain airbags.

Outside, the car’s engine revved, and it pulled away. Kane jumped stairs two at a time yelling, “shit,” and he ran behind her.

In the parking lot, shimmering in the sun, he saw the pink Jeep. It was still here, which meant Caroline, aka Ciara Ruffin Gaffney, or whatever her name was, took a different car. Unknown make, unknown model, with no tracker.

“Fuck me,” Kane said, walking to the Mercedes and opening the passenger side door. “You drive.”

As he got in and started the car, he said, “The drugs have to take effect sometime, right?”

“My new Space Force handlers. That’s what she said. I am so fucking stupid.”

“And?” He checked his mirrors and reversed from the parking spot.

“OPSEC one-oh-one, jefe. The previous team told her we were FBI.”

“Shit.” He pressed the gas pedal, but then slammed the brake and jolted to a halt. There was a line of three gray SUVs trying to make a left out of the parking lot against heavy traffic.

“Amateur tradecraft is what she said,” Kane said, swiping through her phone. “And she’s not wrong. We’ve been played.”

“These amateur drivers need to get out of my way.” He honked the horn. “Did you miss with the dart?”

“I hit. I think she was wearing a vest. She’s a fucking spook, jefe, and saw us coming a mile away.”

One SUV turned left. He pulled forward, two to go, and then beat the wheel with his palms. “God fucking dammit.”

“Only one agency has the access to hack files and find who we work for—wait I got her.” Kane grinned like Christmas morning and held up an image of a blue Honda civic leaving the parking lot, front view, with a white Maryland license plate and Caroline the spook driving. Alone. “Traffic cameras have her headed out I-66 towards Dulles.”

As Stone exhaled, the gray SUV ahead turned left, and the car in front pulled forward enough that he could jump the curb and turn right. “Lets get her.”

“Another problem, though.”

“Traffic?”

“No. Well—yes. An accident. Looks like a bad one, and Jeff’s car is in the middle of it.”

*******************

They slowed on I-66 West. A Virginia State Trooper directed traffic to the left lanes as they passed the firetrucks, police, and flares surrounding the overturned blue Bentley in the grass at the side of the road.

On the shoulder, Zhi ‘Jeff’ Zhang’s body rested on a gurney under an orange sheet, ready to load into an ambulance, his scuffed, oil-stained maroon suede shoes peeking out.

“Should we stop?” Stone asked.

“I don’t know. We need to be sure it’s him. But, Caroline is headed south on 28, towards Manassas.”

“Manassas Regional Airport. That’s her exfil.”

Kane held up one finger and rolled her window down as they approached the State Trooper. From her jacket pocket, she produced fake credentials and waved them at him. “FBI. Need any help here?”

“Can you make the tow truck come faster?”

“That I can’t do.” She smiled. “What happened?”

The trooper sighed, like he’d already explained the story to five other federal agencies. “Driver lost control. Paramedics think he had a heart attack, or fell asleep.”

“Alcohol involved?”

“Paramedics said no.”

Kane scanned the wreckage behind the trooper. “No other injuries?”

“Luckily. Witnesses say he was drifting across lanes for a few miles, until he went off the embankment.”

“Thanks, officer. Stay safe.” Kane rolled up her window and gestured forward. When they were rolling, she said, “She drugged him.”

Stone sped up in silence. They weren’t going to make the airport.

*******************

Caroline, aka Ciara Ruffin Gaffney, aka spook, hopped aboard a helicopter and lifted off as they drove up, even waving at them as she got on.

Kane punched the window, the sound reverberating in the Mercedes like a bass drum. “Fucking Mossad. They were running this guy right under our nose.”

They sat in silence until long after sunset, watching a map as the red landing lights of Manassas Regional Airport flashed their failure.

Radar tracked the helicopter to a container ship in the Chesapeake, where it hovered for five minutes and then returned to the airport. The container ship was registered to a Greek holding company, the helicopter to a foreign trust based in Mumbai. The Coast Guard refused to interdict the ship. In the dark, as the airport’s landing lights blinked, they watched the container ship on a live map, on its trek through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific unmolested. Caroline the spook might not even be on the boat anymore. By the time darkness fell, she could be on a plane out of Bermuda to Tel Aviv.

“You want to hop the fence and search the helicopter, blue eyes?”

“It’s a waste of time, jefe. Mossad. They don’t leave evidence.”

He was thinking, they don’t wink, or wave goodbye, either.

*******************

At sunrise, they were still in the Mercedes, parked at the side of the airport. Despite the winter chill outside, it was well-insulated, the leather seats comfortable, and they both caught a few hours of sleep.

Caroline’s cell phone vibrated Kane awake. One, two, then three messages buzzed with increasing urgency.

Drowsily, Kane reached into her pocket and fished out the phone. Caroline the spook, whose name was certainly not Ciara Ruffin Gaffney, sent a selfie. She wore a fiery orange dress, smiling, sitting in a comfortable looking private jet.

Sorry about the other agents. It was a misunderstanding. They were amateurs, and we needed to remove them from harm’s way until we completed our mission. We meant no harm. DEA interference was an unwelcome surprise.

The next message had a link, which Kane, as tired as she was, didn’t click. Zhi Zhang was responsible for a hack of our intelligence satellite system, Varuna. For that, we held him responsible. There will be others. As an apology I am sending information on Dragon Fire, which Space Force cyberintelligence will find valuable.

Stone rubbed his eyes and started the Mercedes.

“I’ve never heard of Mossad apologizing,” Kane said.

“It’s not an apology. She isn’t Mossad.” He spun the car, gravel crunching under the Mercedes tires, and headed north, returning to D.C.

“Running Jeff under our nose? Drugging him and making his death look like an accident? An attempted rendition of two agents in a McLean restaurant—hell that’s Mossad, jefe.”

“Varuna is the Indian top secret surveillance satellite network. Better than ours, I’m told. They’ve been putting up rockets and sending habitats to lunar orbit while we’ve been twiddling our thumbs and cutting funding.”

Kane stared at the screen. “You think this intel is legit?”

“Eighty percent. Still, don’t open it until we are in containment, in case there is a virus.”

Kane put the phone face down in her lap and looked out the window. The sun streaked over trees to the East. “They’re bragging, not apologizing.”

“That, and if that intelligence is worth anything—” Stone put his blinker on, checked his mirrors, and then turned onto 28, towards breakfast and coffee. “They will have saved our bacon, and the State Department will call it a win.”

“And we will owe them,” Kane mused, her breath fogging her window. “Payback is always a bitch.”

*******************

PRESENT DAY

U.S.S. ENTERPRISE

Stone had a lot of questions for Chandni Faridi, the Indian Intelligence Bureau operative aboard Enterprise, and no good way to get answers. Sitting in Enterprise’s mess hall, he and Kane debated approaches while gobbling their food before wheels-up in an hour. They’d agreed to a rescue mission of sorts, to sneak onto the Chinese mainland, rescue and exfiltrate a Chinese naval officer’s family, and in return he’d deliver Blackbird.

He had no doubt he and Kane were being played, but he just couldn’t see the angle yet. It was high-risk, high-reward. Murphy’s Law predicted that anything that could go wrong, would, and if it went wrong for them in China, the odds were zero they’d return. Their best future would be a bullet, their worst, torture in a shipping container at the bottom of a stack of nine thousand other containers, on a ship perennially sailing the world.

“A 3 A.M. syringe of scopolamine and ketamine,” Kane said, pushing a french fry through the sticky orange-brown goop that a Navy chef had passed off as honey mustard.

He shook his head, taking a bite of his bacon cheeseburger. “This time don’t miss.”

“I didn’t miss last time.” Kane double raised her eyebrows. “You know, honeypot is still an approved approach.”

“My seduction skills are rusty. And that takes years.”

“Not you. Me, jefe.”

“What makes you think she’s your type?”

“I already put in the requisition for separate cabins,” Kane let a wry smile lift her blue eyes. “Just be on standby for a three A.M. handoff of a cellphone.”

“Maybe she’ll just give up what she knows if we ask nicely.”

Kane chuckled. “You’re the one that said she kicked that broken circuit board off the deck. She’s hiding something.”

“Now you believe me?”

Kane dipped a fry in orange goo and pointed it at him. “You reminded me that there are only two kinds of people in the intelligence business, snakes and bigger snakes. Only the biggest snakes survive in this business.”

“You know what else they say?”

Kane double-raised her eyebrows and grinned. Then she raised her blue eyes, focusing on something over Stone’s shoulder. It meant incoming.

He leaned back as Faridi sat next to him. She asked, “Am I interrupting?”

Kane looked down at her tray and half-smiled. “We were talking about his ex-wife.”

Stone picked up his glass and gulped his half ice tea, half lemonade. While crunching ice, he studied Faridi and decided Kane was right. She looked like his soon-to-be-ex.

Faridi looked from Kane to Stone, and then back.

After swallowing a snicker, he said, “And you know what they say about exes. Payback is a bitch.”

If you missed earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

With one eye through a sliver of glass, the rest of her face in the dark and covered by pale yellow curtains, Shi studied the boyish soldier below her window. The radio in her hand felt like a stone. She wanted to break her living room window and then fling it at the corporal in green camouflage fatigues. But the radio’s smooth black plastic felt slick in her sweaty palms, her hands shook, worried, and anyway, the boy held his assault rifle at low ready, a banana clip extending from the bottom of his QBZ-95 bullpup like a panther’s claw waiting to tear her to shreds. His red dot scope and barrel would pounce on her face before the glass cracked. The last thing she’d see would be the muzzle flash from a boy barely older than her daughter.

No, she exhaled. The boy was probably seventeen or eighteen, five years older than Jing. The boy was old enough for the military to pluck him from a rural area, hand him the latest rifle, put his finger on the trigger and fill his brain with powerful meanness and glorious visions, but too young to understand that another’s death would haunt him forever. Behind his childish eyes and green and gray army uniform, his automatic rifle guarded immature thoughts of roughing up citizens as they walked in their own neighborhood, to their own houses. The streetlamp cast a shadow of malice, an eagerness to whip her neighbors, maybe her daughter, to prove his worth to his superiors.

And where was her daughter, Jing? She fought back a replay of the screaming argument and the terrifying sound of the door slamming.

It started when Jing dumped her backpack on the kitchen table and the radios spilled out. She exploded. Her daughter had radios. How and where did a twelve-year-old child know to get something that protestors used to hide from the police?

I’m almost thirteen, Mom, and I am not saying. You’ll tell someone and get them in trouble.

When did Jing start lying to her? Had she been protesting? Did she understand the police would disappear her? Drag her away? If she were lucky, they’d only shoot her. She stopped screeching before her tongue could lash Jing with all the ways the Ministry of State Security would torture her. A twelve-year-old girl should be innocent, not be thinking of such atrocities.

Mom, we need these radios. Jing met Shi’s anger with an equal and opposite exasperatingly cool sigh and eye roll. It felt like an accusation, as if she’d said of course you would overreact.

Jing lectured that the radios had five buttons, a stubby antenna, silent operation, privacy codes, a knob to switch between one of thirty-six encrypted channels, and a black-on-orange LCD display with signal and battery bars.

Privacy codes and encryption, words that branded her and stung because now she had something to hide.

I am not telling you where I got them. Would you rather I lie to you and make something up? This is our life now. You need to calm down and accept it.

Calm down. Her blood flashed over and her face felt like it was on fire. Her whole body shook with rage. Had Jing been lying? Sneaking around?

I am going to Li’s house. Make yourself ji qing hua tea until I get back.

Such impudence, telling her mother to make passionflower tea to calm down. Shi picked up the teakettle and thrust it towards Jing, but stopped before she hurled it.

Jing pivoted for the door. Shi chased her with the teakettle in hand. She didn’t want her daughter leaving the house and hiding from the police.

And who was this Li? With one hand on the door, Jing cocked her head to the side and her eyes curled up into a provocative smirk. He’s my boyfriend, Mom. What do you think?

Shi screamed at the door as it slammed. Jing was too young for a boyfriend.

When her shrieks of come back died, a new silent terror filled her second-floor condo.

Jing was gone.

Nature was crazy, she mused while watching the corporal below her light a cigarette. It gave teens the hormones and the urge to assert their independence, but not the brains to make good decisions or understand the tradeoffs. Action was better than inaction, but Jing acted impulsively, like her father. Stealing radios would get them both gang raped and tortured.

Who was she kidding? That might be her fate, no matter what Jing did.

She stared at her door after it shuddered on its frame, willing Jing to return, but Jing didn’t come back. Her heart refused to stop beating in her throat, and she felt herself panic.

She watched from the window as Jing walked by the soldier below. What had Jing said as she passed? Something that made him smile. A twelve-year-old girl should not know how to activate that smile in a boy soldier and shouldn’t speak to her mother with that mouth.

That was twenty-five minutes ago. As the soldier chain-smoked cigarettes under the streetlamp, her terror receded to worry. She’d overreacted. Jing was coming back. Li was not her boyfriend. At least, she didn’t think so.

Commander Heng was her husband’s Executive Officer, and Li was Heng’s son, fifteen years old. Her husband’s message said for Li and his mother to meet them and move to the beach so he could pick them up. Jing took it upon herself to get them.

“I’m here, Mother.” A chirp from the radio in her hand and then her daughter’s voice brought a wave of relief. Mother. Jing was still angry.

“I’m sorry I overreacted. But you should have discussed this with me first.”

“You would have said no. Listen, Mom, this is not private. Read the back, follow directions, and then destroy the tape.”

Shi turned the radio over. On the back, a slip of cellophane tape glistening with sweat. Written in black permanent marker on the tape, instructions to change the channel and enter a privacy code.

“I don’t want to lose you. I’d rather wait until you come back.”

“Mom, no, just trust me for once. We need to change channels.”

“You should have told me before you left.”

“You were too busy yelling at me.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“It’ll work. Just do it. I am switching now.”

The radio chirped, and then Shi was listening to silence.

She shook her head, hoping she didn’t lose Jing for a second time. After opening the radio’s menu and entering the codes on the back, the radio chirped twice.

The LCD display informed her she was on a new, encrypted channel with four bars. Jing had explained the math of the bars when she emptied her backpack. Shi had been focused on her own anger, but now remembered that the radios had a range of five kilometers in the city, and four bars meant Jing was close.

“Jing, are you there?”

“Keep it short, Mom. Don’t drain the battery.”

“Don’t talk to me like that, I’m your mother.”

“It’s just a fact, Mom. Talking drains the battery.”

“Talking to you like this drains my battery. Come back here so we can talk about this.”

Jing didn’t respond. Below, the soldier’s cigarette burned bright red, and he tensed, his eyes catching something down the street, out of her view.

She’d never ask her daughter to skulk around like this. But Jing was right, she could move invisibly amongst the soldiers stationed every block.

After a few moments of the soldier’s puffing, Jing said, “Li’s mom is gone.”

“To where?”

“Li doesn’t know. His mom said we are supposed to meet her at the beach.”

“I should go look for her.”

“Li says no.”

Li says no. Her life was controlled by a fifteen-year-old, a twelve-year-old, the military, the PLA, everyone but her. She should go down and rip that soldier’s rifle from his chest and beat him with it.

The curtain tugged against its rod and she realized she was clutching it and almost yanked it down.

Silence. Shi waited a few beats, watching the soldier on the street fumble a cigarette from his arm sleeve pocket and light another. He shouldn’t be smoking so much, and shouldn’t be smoking on duty. Her husband would never tolerate such behavior.

The soldier lit his cigarette, took a drag, but then stamped it out quickly. Someone was coming.

She clicked the radio. “Where are you? Are you on your way yet?”

No answer.

“Jing?”

What happened to Jing? Below, the soldier waved away the blue smoke and then stood at attention.

“Jing?” The radio chirped expectantly.

No answer.

“Jing!” she whispered loudly, as if the soldier could hear her through the window.

“Mom, stop it.”

“Where did you go?”

“I left the radio on the bed while I used the bathroom.”

“What is going on?”

“We are leaving.”

A tall shadow crossed below her window. The soldier saluted it. “Someone is coming.”

She heard the downstairs door slam, and then footfalls in the hallway. She scanned her apartment. Damn open floor plan. She had nowhere to hide. Her phone was on the dining room table with incriminating messages from Yi. Locked. Her fingerprint would open it with or without her finger attached to her hand. The radio in her hand felt electric and heavy.

Her door rattled. Surely, the harsh hand of the Ministry of State Security.

She twisted the radio’s volume knob and tossed it under a pillow on her couch.

Before she could get to her phone, her doorknob clicked and the blazing black steel muzzle of a QSZ-92 pistol was peering through her door. Her husband carried one just like it. Behind the pistol, a burly man in a green uniform with the intimidating blazon of State Security.

She froze like the cornered animal she was, eyeing neither the man, nor the phone on her table.

Behind the MSS agent, a young soldier strode through her threshold, sweeping his assault rifle over first her, then her dining room, and then her belongings. His eyes reflected the same learned hatefulness as the soldier outside her window.

With a wordless gesture from the MSS agent’s pistol, the soldier marched to her bedroom. She heard drawers being emptied on the floor and porcelain breaking as the soldier shoved pictures and figurines off the dresser.

“Where is your daughter, Jing?”

As the agent asked, the soldier stepped out of her bedroom, rifle high, and kicked her daughter’s bedroom door.

She couldn’t work her mouth to answer the question. Drawers and then books and boxes crashed in Jing’s bedroom. It sounded as though the soldier had knocked over an entire bookcase.

“I asked you where your daughter is?”

Shi watched the hall, waiting for the soldier to come out, still unable to move her mouth. The radio under the couch needled her like a splinter in her brain.

“Answer me! Where is your daughter!” The agent barked like a drill sergeant.

The soldier stepped out of Jing’s bedroom and into the kitchen. The agent flicked his head, and the apartment exploded with gunfire. Fireballs thundered from the muzzle like dragon’s breath. Her apartment rattled to its wood-framed bones. A blue and gray, foul smelling hot cloud hung in the air.

Her ears rang, she couldn’t speak, and now she couldn’t hear.

Her kitchen, the center of the soldier’s performance art, was splattered with black, sooty holes. Black holes cracked the microwave’s glass. Holes in the cabinets, her stove, her fridge, and her wall. Her refrigerator door quivered on its hinges. Pink and white liquid drooled from the bottom.

The dining room table had two charred, round holes, and her phone had bounced to the floor.

Through the blue haze, the MSS agent’s mouth was moving. He was waving the pistol, gesturing for her to sit at her kitchen table. The soldier crossed behind the agent and exited, closing the door.

She sat in a chair as a cloud of gun smoke drifted over her. The MSS agent stepped toward her and then saw the phone. He bent over and picked it up. After inspecting it, he tossed it on the table in front of her.

Over the buzzing in her ears, he said, “Your husband is a traitor. He has something we need.”

“If he’s a traitor, you made him that way.” She couldn’t control her mouth. The rifle’s discharge shattered a connection between her brain and tongue.

“Don’t be foolish, woman. Where is your daughter?”

“I don’t know. We had a fight. She left. I am sure you know all about it.”

“She went to Heng’s.”

It was a statement. The agent knew where Jing went, so she said nothing, instead looking away. The refrigerator door had bounced open, revealing a punctured milk box and a pink seltzer bottle. Their contents were pooling on her kitchen floor.

She realized she was giggling, thinking she would have to clean it up. No matter what happened in the next few minutes, she would not be coming back here.

“We will find her.” The MSS agent dragged a chair in front of her and sat in it.

Wisps of blue clung to her yellow living room curtains. The fabric seemed to attract the smoke. She hoped the gunfire scared Jing away. “You won’t. Jing is too smart for you.”

“For me, yes. But we will bring people in to hunt her.”

In the hall, there was a heavy thud on the floor, like a body toppling. The agent didn’t turn his head.

“What was that sound?”

He smiled, as if he’d expected the sound, and he had something she wanted. A wave of nausea gagged her, picturing Jing lying on the floor, dead, her eyes open.

“What do you want?”

Her door’s shadow moved. She returned her gaze to the pink ooze dripping from her fridge.

She heard a whoosh, and the agent slapped his shoulder. He said, “You can make this easier on yourself.”

“I won’t betray my husband.”

“We are not asking you to. We want you to redeem him.”

“I don’t know how I could do that.”

“Go to him. Like he asked you to. We will arrange it.” He eyed the phone on the table.

When she returned her gaze to him, she saw a shadow cross the sliver of hallway light at her door.

“And how can I redeem him?”

“He has something he stole from us. He killed his mistress for it. Did you meet Chao? They were sleeping together.”

Lies. This was how MSS agents worked. Sow doubt. Sow confusion. Fake videos. Isolate their prey and then repeat until it was impossible to tell truth from fiction. Her husband would never betray her. She wanted to spit at his feet, but her mouth felt dry, like she’d swallowed a mouthful of hot stone sand from the Aksai Chin desert.

“What is it he stole?” Shi asked.

Something was happening to the agent. He was slurring his words and swaying in the chair. The muzzle of his pistol crossed her once, twice, and she wondered whether he would squeeze and shoot her by accident.

Between the buzzing in her ears from the rifle discharge, and his muttering, she could not understand what he said.

He stood, supporting himself on the back of the chair as if he would vomit, one finger on the trigger of his pistol which was pointed at her oven. She felt sick herself, and if he vomited, she would too.

An eyeball peeked through the crack in her door. Her daughter’s brown eyeball.

Jing watched the agent through the door crack. Shi wanted to shake her head, scream run, but the agent was looking at her with glassy eyes.

The agent shook. The pistol tumbled onto the chair, bounced, muzzle flipping over and threatening Shi, and then crashed to the floor without discharging.

The agent looked suddenly drunk, smoothing his uniform with exaggerated, slow blinking.

He said, “Blackbird,” and then as he collapsed on the floor like a sack of potatoes, Jing and Li rushed in. They were wearing green army uniforms. Li had a soldier’s assault rifle slung behind him.

“Mom, are you ok?” Jing wrapped her arms around Shi and squeezed. Shi squeezed tighter, burying herself in her daughter’s warm body. When did Jing grow taller than her? Waves washed over her, first relief that Jing was home, then love, then her brain reminded her they needed to go.

“I heard the gunfire and thought they killed you,” Jing said.

Shi shook her head, pulling away. “What happened? What did you do, child?”

Li was hiding something behind his back. He brought up what looked like a pistol, except it wasn’t one she had ever seen. It was gray, and long and thin, almost like a toy. He said, “Horse tranquilizer dart.”

Li’s mother was a veterinarian. Shi eyed the agent’s body on the floor. “How long will he be out?”

Li shrugged. “If he were a six-hundred kilogram horse, a few hours.”

Shi bent down. She poked him. The agent was still breathing. She shoved him to roll him over, but the agent didn’t move. “Li, help me roll him.”

“Leave him, Mom—”

“No, he fell on the pistol.”

Li set the dart gun on the table and kneeled to move the agent. They rolled him onto his back, exposing the pistol on the floor. Together, they searched his pockets, finding his wallet, his phone, and two spare magazines. She pressed the agent’s index finger to the phone to unlock it.

While they emptied the agent, Jing dumped clothes from her backpack on a seat in the living room. “I got you an Army uniform. Wear this.”

Where did her daughter steal PLA Army uniforms?

Jing read her face. “We don’t have time to argue, Mom. Just wear it.”

Jing threw the uniform across the room. Shi caught it, shaking her head. “You are your father’s daughter.”

Her bathroom was directly behind her kitchen. She paused at the door. It was crooked and had been shot off its hinges. She wondered what was wrong with her, that she found it funny. The door wasn’t her problem anymore.

After she changed, she yelled at the bathroom ceiling, “Li, where is your mother?”

“She went to the office to do paperwork and never came home. My fathers orders were strict. We go straight to the rendezvous, no matter what.”

Shi eyed herself in the bathroom mirror in the army uniform, tieing her hair in a bun and hiding it under her cap. In the stolen uniforms, they were all second class soldiers, low ranks, and could stay invisible unless a rogue corporal decided sacks of sand needed to be stacked. She adjusted the holster for her pistol and moved the spare magazines around her belt until they rode comfortably. One and a half kilograms of steel and lead felt heavy around her waist.

“Jing, the radio you gave me is under the pillow on the couch,” she said to herself in the mirror, adjusting her cap.

“Got it.”

As she stepped out of the bathroom, she said, “Li, we need to find your mother.”

“But my father’s orders?”

Shi looked at the agent sprawled on her bamboo floor, milk and pink liquid from the fridge pooling around him. He’d stopped breathing. The horse tranquilizer had killed him. She inhaled, thinking she should feel bad about it, but also thinking he was going to torture them, maybe rape her daughter while she watched, and if he wasn’t dead, she’d splatter his brains on her kitchen floor.

She shook her head. “My husband outranks your father, Li, and he always says leave no one behind.”

If you missed earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

Ensign Frick weaved Stone and Kane through Navy-gray corridors, from the hot war roaring on Enterprise’s flight deck, to an electronic war flashing on the hangar deck. To Stone’s left were massive hangar doors, which opened to an aircraft elevator, now resting from its duty chaperoning fighter jets to a dance two levels up, where they landed, refueled, rearmed, and took off.

At the horizon, the setting sun silhouetted a Chinese electronic warfare ship, probably with a drone or telescopic camera peeping through the open bay. Stone averted his eyes, as if the Chinese warship was a vagrant at the far corner of a subway platform staring right through him.

Enterprise’s two football-field-long hangar had been transformed to a theater, with fighter jets primped and grinning for a meet-cute with influencers. Stripped, buxom turbofan engines, bulging from open, low access panels or on platforms for display, wafted the perfume of jet fuel and demanded camera attention. A woman in a freshly starched Navy uniform atop a ladder halted her very serious polishing of an F-35C’s windshield, adjusting her safety goggles as paparazzi paraded by snapping pictures.

“War is hell,” Kane said, her head swiveling as an amoeba of cellphones crawled past. “So much for a communications blackout.”

“We flew in the media to survey the damage done by the drone,” Ensign Frick said. As a mass of phones divided, one half squirming towards a wall blackened by soot from a jet-fuel fire, Frick put up one finger. “I’ll be right back.”

“War is deception,” Stone said, when Frick was beyond earshot.

Frick wedged himself through the blob of cameras and tripods and then gestured as if painting the wall with his index finger, no doubt regaling how the drone flew into the hangar, exploding as it smashed into a helicopter being serviced, and killed people. Fiction, but a good story, and producers fumbled to exchange brimming SD cards for empty ones they could refill with lols and likes.

Stone turned and stepped to the hangar bay door, where he put his arm on the threshold, taking a long breath of the salt air and sunshine. After a twelve thousand mile flight and the bone-rattling din of the flight deck, his muscles ached. He was hungry and exhausted.

Kane wandered to his side. “Some plot holes in the story. How hard will they look into it?” Kane knew the answer, and she knew he knew the answer. She was making idle conversation to avoid the uncomfortable feeling welling from her gut, same as him.

Over his shoulder, the mass of cameras poked a seared, bent airframe, snapping closeups of the melted plastic and scarred steel wall. A woman fifty steps beyond the horde, maybe half a head shorter than Kane, with deep brown eyes and wearing a hijab under her blue digital camo cap, strode towards them. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her. The Navy eight point hat was right, the hijab under the hat was regulation, but everything else was wrong. His stomach clenched. She was fake, like the scene in the hangar.

He wondered whether the internet puppets knew they were being conned, or whether they cared. Creators considered themselves niche, but most were empty vessels, slaves to the algorithm. Big data fed their content to big algorithms to amplify the lies. To them, it appeared random, like surface waves on the ocean, but zoom out and it was all predictable. Influencers were brought here hoping for likes and views, and someone at the Defense Department would guarantee it. A Pentagon employee would talk to a three-letter-agency-employee, who would talk to an agency alum in a Wisconsin data center, who would tweak the algorithms to make virality happen. Sun Tzu said all war was deception. If the creators were empty vessels, the Pentagon was happy to fill their SD cards with patriotism and anger, followed by hoo-rah and revenge. The truth was that no one wanted to hear the truth. The US was losing. China dominated the US in computer chip manufacturing, dominated in shipbuilding, dominated in drone production, and modern warfare required ample supplies of all three. China dominated the algorithms too, but the internet didn’t want truth; it wanted to be blanketed with happy-ending fiction and feel-good dog videos, and the Pentagon was a flush scriptwriter.

He shook his head. “Not hard. I think they will lap it up. The internet loves a train wreck and this looks like a ten-car pileup.” As he said it, he ran his hands down the sides of the hangar door, eyeing the top and sides of the threshold. At his feet, wedged between the sliding barn blast door and the wall, a twinkle.

He bent down. The setting sunlight gleamed off something wedged between the blast door and the wall. Something overlooked when the crew scoured for drone debris.

He picked up a charred piece of a circuit board and stood, handing it to Kane. “Maybe worth fifty-five tacos.”

“Blackbird. You think this is Blackbird? You are not getting out of debt this easily.”

Over his shoulder, brown eyes and navy cap had closed the distance through the spectacle and still aimed for them.

Stone shrugged at Kane’s question and took back the scorched board. The singed circuit piece was triangular shaped, and ragged, like the broken-off corner of an over-baked square pizza. He flipped it to inspect the underside. Maybe everything in his fat file on Blackbird was a lie, disinformation, like the scene in the hangar.

The wedge shape reminded him he was hungry, and his stomach gurgled.

He thumbed sooty residue off the board, revealing a rainbow-colored surface glimmering in the sunlight. “Would you know it if you saw it?”

Before Kane could answer, the woman in the navy digital camo cap had parked and idled next to Kane. The broken circuit board was too big for his pockets, so he palmed it and held it against his pants as best he could to hide it.

Navy cap rolled out her hand, saying, “Chandni Faridi.”

Stone head-nodded and rolled his eyes towards the Chinese vessel on the horizon. On the mast, or an overhead drone, there would be a telephoto lens spying and hooked to lip-reading AI software.

Kane turned her back. “Salute an officer, Lieutenant Faridi.”

Faridi saluted, then pivoted, her back to the sea. “I was told you aren’t US military.”

“Neither are you,” Kane said. “Hell, you’re not even American. We’re contractors, but that’s not the point. In these uniforms we’re all Navy. Admiral’s orders.”

Stone didn’t like this arrangement with Faridi. His back and neck spasmed. The Chinese spy boat hadn’t changed position on the horizon, which meant it was keeping pace. That’s right, get a good look, you bastards.

Holding the microchip board as tight to his thigh as he could, he whirled, his back to the sea. “Chandni, a nice name,” he said, struggling to make small talk. He bit his lip, thinking, of course I’d be happier if I never heard it.

“It means moonlight.”

“I picture vampires skulking around draining our blood.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Kane said. “He’s always a prick. And he’s getting over a nasty divorce.”

Faridi leaned forward and looked his way disapprovingly. “I’ve worked with Americans before.” She retreated behind Kane and after what might have been a sigh, she said, “I was told we will be bunkmates.”

“Lucky us,” Stone said, watching a huddle of cameras drift from an F35C to an F-18 Hornet. Someone with a phone separated from the pack and climbed a ladder to photo the cockpit.

“Is that a problem for you two?” Faridi asked.

Kane bit her lip and eyed her feet, holding back a laugh. “No.”

“I was told you two have worked together for years. It’s natural when two people have worked together so long. I just need to know if it’s a problem.”

Stone glanced at Kane. The same wry smile had crossed her lips as his. He said, “There was that time you had your hand up my thigh.” He leaned forward and raised his eyebrows at Faridi. “She has a really firm grip.”

After Faridi’s eyes widened, Kane smirked, adding, “You were bleeding from your femoral artery.”

“I still enjoyed it.”

“You enjoyed living.”

“It could be a problem,” He said to Faridi. “Maybe you should request your own cabin.” Stone knew a separate cabin for Faridi would never be approved. Space on Enterprise was limited. But the prospect of her walking away to waste time in a futile effort to find her own space on a Navy ship made him smile.

“It wont be a problem,” Kane retorted.

“Good,” Faridi said, unconvincingly, looking away and squinting into the hangar. “You Americans certainly put on a good show. Bollywood-worthy.”

He wasn’t sure he approved of using a Navy demolition as stage hands to set a scene, and then air-freighting influencers with pallets of cameras from San Francisco and Tokyo to take pictures of the charred, faked wreckage. But the plan was hatched far away in a D.C. office, far above his pay grade, and even the weather cooperated, giving the Chinese a sunlit mezzanine view of the charade.

If he complained, Kane would remind him they were intelligence contractors in the fiction business themselves. He decided the stagecraft didn’t bother him. Faridi’s presence was what gnawed his behind.

A sharp edge on the circuit board poked his hand as he squeezed. If it were Blackbird, it would have clues. How it was made, where it was made, who made it, and how it had been smuggled to the Chinese. He was hyper-aware of every nerve ending in his hand and the needlelike metallic texture of the broken circuit board, as if it were a magic object burning itself into his palm and whispering to his brain. They should be on a plane to a Fort Meade lab to analyze it, not standing here with an Indian Intelligence Bureau operative in US Navy digital camo exchanging snide remarks.

“I figure we have a few days before the Chinese figure it out,” Kane said.

“Will you do an at-sea funeral?” Faridi asked, eyeing a mob overburdened with cameras and tripods, standing in a circle planning their attack angles.

“Bodies are typically shipped home, and the Chinese know our protocol. They’ll probably make a big show of loading caskets topside, though,” Kane answered.

“How did you shoot down the drone?” Faridi asked.

Kane glanced sidelong at Stone. The answer was classified, but they’d both read the report. After the drone evaded the Navy’s Phalanx close in weapons system, a minigun with a brain and the Enterprise’s last line of defense, a sonar operator named Javier jumped stations to operate LaWS, the Navy’s Laser Weapons System. Undeterred by the fact that it wasn’t her station, or that LaWS had previously failed to target lock on the drone, she tapped manual and held the laser on the drone long enough to damage its ailerons, sending it tumbling and crashing into the Enterprise’s blast doors. The exact doors at his back, so the circuit board needling his hand could be a part of the drone.

Not mentioned in the report, but facts that Kane and Stone knew personally, Petty Officer Second Class Javier was the captain of the Navy’s eSports team Goats and Glory, her tag name was IHateBots, and she was a two-time international first-person shooter champion.

None of this changed the mission. While they’d beaten Blackbird once—fist bump and score one for humans—unfortunately, there were only three laser weapons in the Navy, and only one Javier on the planet.

Stone said, “Navy secret weapon,” as Kane’s lips stretched into a grin. He doubted the story would stay a secret for long, though. Petty Officer Second Class Javier would soon be Petty Officer First Class Javier with a shiny new medal on her chest. The Admiral promoted her and put her up for a commendation, so if Faridi hung around Enterprise long enough, she’d hear the chow hall chatter.

Faridi shifted uncomfortably, then stiffened her spine. “Fuzhou has left port with Salman Singh.”

“I am renewing my objection to this plan,” Stone said, as if vocalizing his objection could change a decision made twelve thousand miles away.

“Objecting to letting Salman live?” Faridi asked. Then she said something in Hindi that sounded like a sneeze. “He is hideous filth. But we will track him and end his organization.”

“No,” he said. “I mean the part where we hunt a Chinese battleship. All because someone thinks someone saw someone carrying the same green briefcase onto Fuzhou as they saw on the fishing trawler.”

“Chao carried the briefcase onto the fishing trawler. Blackbird came out of it. Captain Yi carried the same briefcase onto Fuzhou,” Faridi stated.

“The same briefcase, as if I can’t buy a million of them off AliExpress. We dont know what’s in that briefcase, or even if its the same one. There are eight million ways hunting a Chinese ship could go sideways and start a nuclear war.”

“Our information is Captain Yi’s political handler is dead,” Faridi said.

“Your information? Political handler? What does that mean?” Stone tried to keep his voice low, but he felt his irritation swelling.

“Decisions aboard a Chinese Battleship are typically made by five people. The Captain, his Executive Officer, and three political officers. The senior political officer, Chao, we think is dead. Fuzhou left port with only Yi, his Executive Officer, and a skeleton crew.”

“A skeleton crew?” Stone asked. He wanted to ask how the Indian Intelligence Bureau knew all this, but Faridi would not divulge it, even if she knew. “Who killed Chao? Do we know?”

“Based on chatter, we think Captain Yi did.”

Stone puffed his cheeks and exhaled. A flock of cameras headed towards him. Or maybe not him, the hangar door behind him. On the opposite wall, the shadows were getting long. Sunset from an aircraft carrier would make an extraordinary reel.

The microchip tingled his palm. “So, we aren’t just hunting a Chinese Battleship,” he said, tracking the cameras coming at him.

“We think the Chinese Ministry of Intelligence is holding Captain Yi’s family, and he plans to trade it for Blackbird. We need to get to his family first.”

“Sneak onto the Chinese mainland, kidnap a Chinese naval officer’s family, hold them ransom for a worthless green briefcase, then start a nuclear war,” he deadpanned.

Kane shrugged. “I’ve never been to the Chinese mainland. Be nice to see it before the apocalypse.”

“Captain Yi has Blackbird,” Faridi said, with such certainty that Stone felt she must have seen the surveillance herself, or been on the pier when Yi boarded.

Stone rocked on his heels and exhaled a ragged breath. The approaching mob with cameras got within fifteen steps, and Faridi stepped away, saying, “Meet me for dinner.”

“I don’t trust her.” Stone whispered as Faridi walked off. “She is going to double cross us.”

“You don’t like her because she reminds you of someone.”

“She doesn’t remind me of anyone,” he said, more sharply than he intended.

“Your ex.”

Soon to be ex, but he didn’t correct Kane, instead he shook his head. “She’s nothing like her.”

“C’mon. The brown eyes, and black hair. And her figure? Same height, same weight, I bet she eats the same rabbit food.”

“Nah. I don’t see it. And how do you know what color her hair was? She was wearing a head scarf under that cap.”

“Hajib. And a few strands stuck out.”

Stone eyed Faridi, now chatting with a producer with a tripod flung over his shoulder at the back of the blob of cameras. “So its fake. Like everything else about her.”

Kane double raised her eyebrows. “Or maybe there is a wild, uncontrollable rebel under there.”

“She’s all yours. Why are you taking her side?”

“Someone has to be nice to her and pump her for information.”

Kane’s casual innuendo irritated him. He’d usually laugh it off, and it irked him more that he couldn’t shake the spasm in his chest. “We are being played.“ He brought up the microchip and held it out as if it were an arcane charm. “We don’t need the IIB to find Blackbird.”

Her eyes rolled, mocking him. “They gave us Salman. And they will lead us to Blackbird. This is their part of the world, jefe. Remember that time we worked with Mossad?”

“Which time? There were a few.”

“The time they played us like a piano.”

“That was all the times we worked with them.”

“Bingo. But we always came out ahead. A win-win for both teams.”

“We’re bunking with a snake, blue eyes. I don’t like it.”

“She looks like the snake you slept with for ten years, that’s all.”

“And how did that turn out? She cheated on me. Faridi will double cross us. You are proving my point.”

Kane shrugged. “Of course we are being played, jefe. But you have to be in it to win it. So, we play back.”

He shook his head, eyeing Faridi talking with an influencer at the back of the horde of cameras now ten steps away. Faridi smiled at him. He quickly palmed the microchip to his side.

A woman walking towards Stone held out a camera. “Will you take a picture of us with the sunset in the background?”

Stone said yes, but as he did, the crowd shuffled and he heard shit. Someone tripped into the woman, sending her flying forward into Stone. He lost his balance, his foot sticking at a rail track at the hangar door. He tripped, stumbled, with his hands wide and fruitlessly trying to grab air, then crashed on his butt. The woman floundered and landed at his feet. The microchip in his hand spurted and slid away, sounding like metal grating on concrete.

He stood, giving the woman a hand and helping her up. She said, “I am so embarrassed. I’m sorry.”

“Are you hurt?”

“Only my pride.” She smiled at him.

He eyed the crowd behind the woman. He couldn’t see who initiated the shoving. Faridi was making a beeline for the door.

He turned. The microchip was gone. He stepped all the way to the edge of the elevator, searching as he went. His stomach sank and he couldn’t breathe. He felt the way a crusader must have felt, holding the grail and then losing it. His hand still tingled from the phantom pain of the metal against his skin.

The ocean sloshed and foamed over the ship’s hull. He saw no bubbles, no evidence the circuit board went overboard and splashed in the ocean. There wouldn’t be. It was minuscule compared with the ocean currents twenty stories below. He stood at the elevator’s edge, the blue waves making him nauseous, as if he were going to fall overboard himself.

A shove in his back nearly sent him over, but he felt Kane grab a handful of his jacket and pull him back. “Let’s go, jefe.”

The woman asked, “Did you lose something?”

Stone looked at Kane, who was shaking her head. He said, “Probably nothing important.”

His heart raced. To the woman, he said, “Are you sure we don’t need to get medical?”

After she shook her head, he and Kane walked off the elevator, and then into and through the hangar. He wanted to catch Faridi, but by that time, she’d disappeared.

In the corridor outside the hangar, he said, “She caused that.”

“You’re paranoid. That was a trifecta of coincidences. She couldn’t have known what you were holding, and it wasn’t Blackbird.”

The twinge in his hand disagreed. He’d held it. “A trifecta? What’s the third coincidence?”

“She looks like your ex and she rattled you. And don’t think this erases your taco-debt. You’re at fifty-six now.”

“We had it. It counts.”

“We don’t know what you found.”

“And she lost it.”

“Some klutzy youtubers lost it, jefe. You’re hungry, and when your hungry and rattled, you’re paranoid. I hear tonight is Italian night. Chicken Alfredo.”

Over his shoulder, the finale happened on the hangar elevator. Someone played music and influencers were singing and dancing to the cameras, on the same spot where he’d held Blackbird. He shook his head. There was nothing he could do now. Not even a Navy dive team could find it.

Agreeing with Kane, his stomach gurgled and grumbled, and they walked to their bunk to change for dinner.

You can go back to earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

Synopsis:

When China steals advanced artificial intelligence microchips from an unknown source and uses them to attack the USS Enterprise, Ty Stone and his partner Alexis Kane are called to find its vulnerabilities before China capitalizes on its new first-strike capability.

To defeat this new technology, Stone and Kane need to find the lab making it. But whose technology is it? No known lab can print semiconductors this detailed. Stone and Kane must hunt the globe under the ticking time bomb of war.

Bengaluru, India

The image landed on Piyush’s phone an hour ago with a light jingle but rattled his brain. Now, his top-left display flashed once, twice, then three times. Three smoke trails erupted from the ocean like grisly skeleton fingers from a sea-green tomb. The claws writhed, clutched for purpose, then sped offscreen to send their victims to a watery grave.

Two hours ago, he wasn’t worried. The operation hummed. He strolled through his building’s quadrangle, past its gold-accented marble statue of Ganesha, who oversaw a fountain of water, through security and to the third floor. An hour ago, nobody heard of him, nobody remembered him, and that was ideal. If they did, he was that guy writing code for some overseas movie studio.

Lies should be as close to the truth as possible, so he told people he coded CGI for blockbuster movies, taking parked cars out of scenes, duplicating fighter jets and pasting them in, or making stunt doubles fly farther than the laws of physics allowed. Whatever the script required. Everyone on this block worked in a building like his, walked solemnly past a statue of Ganesha, prayed for the god to remove daily obstacles, then funneled through security to work for an overseas bank, or software company, or graphic design company.

That he worked on movie graphics was believable. He could sell his cover because if he wasn’t working for the Indian Intelligence Bureau, it’s what he would be doing. Above his tower of six 32K monitors, and lining the drab walls of his secure facility, posters of Bollywood actors and actresses tempted him to leave the bureau and join them making actual movies, not the heavily edited and contrived psyops reels the bureau produced two floors above him. Priyanka, both a Bollywood and Hollywood starlet, with flirty brown eyes, thick, wavy black hair, and a fiery copper pantsuit, smiled approvingly over his displays when he read her pages from his screenplay, or strummed his oud.

He blended in. Or so he thought until an image pinged his phone and made him drop his cigarette as he stood outside on his break. The butcher of Bengaluru should be dead, melted, charred, shark food in the South China Sea. He’d seen it with his own eyes and replayed it a half dozen times.

As he stamped out his butt and returned through security, his mind was sure the image was fake. An excellent AI-rendered image, the kind he himself might produce if he was a Bollywood producer, sent by the Americans to rattle him. Or maybe by someone who’d hacked his phone.

Despite his brain’s reassurances, his hands trembled as he plucked fifteen notes from the air, swaying his head and hoping the loud music in his headset and air-thrumming would cool the acid in his stomach.

His parents insisted he play a classical instrument. His mother’s choice was the sitar, while his father’s was the sarod. What they wanted him to learn was good for meditation, or to put a baby to sleep, or make his eyes roll in the car. He talked his father into an electric oud, which looked like a pear-shaped guitar, with a high-end handmade pickup that produced roaring power chords. His mother agreed, so long as he didn’t play garbage from America. Not everything coming from America was bad, he told her, and anyway, half his playlist originated in London. It was far better than the music coming from China that had a bullying, harsh tone with lyrics to match, or from Korea, like his sisters squealing, annoying black and pink K-pop girl bands.

He drummed the keyboard and desk, ending on a finger-stroke that dragged a video of a fishing trawler to the center console. Zooming out, it looked small, drifting in an isolated patch of sea. In the right-bottom monitor, three American missiles raced for the trawler, so low over the ocean they left a wake of green and white foam.

He strummed and tapped, a crescendo of heart-thumping, accelerating bass perfectly mirroring the sinking in his stomach. As the missiles crossed the ocean, he felt like he was free-falling through the floor.

He told himself the face the Americans sent him—or whomever sent him—was a fraud, but his phone was outside in a secure faraday cage. He didn’t need it though, having memorized every wrinkle and pore of Salman Singh, the butcher of Bengaluru, whose terrorist organization livestreamed themselves storming a nightclub and gunning down forty-seven people, including his friends. Not content to kill, they hunted women in bathroom stalls and defiled them during the forty-five minutes it took for the police to enter.

The massacre changed his career choice. An hour and three minutes ago, with Salman dead, he’d taken a drag and contemplated quitting intelligence work. Working for the Indian Intelligence Bureau involved making movies, of a sort. At his desk, three trillion pixels of intelligence-gathering capability piped from Varuna, the Indian Intelligence Bureau’s ruler of the sky. It took him two years to get clearance for this job, and another eight to work his way onto the team hunting Salman Singh. Varuna had eyes everywhere. Working in this building, Piyush saw things and knew things, sometimes because analysts failed to follow protocol and left classified data open on the screens.

Today he was only interested in confirming—reconfirming—the fate of the Butcher of Bengaluru.

His center console exploded three times in quick succession, like legato cymbal crashes. A mushroom cloud of oily black smoke rose above the water.

He shook his head. No one could survive that explosion. But his stomach sank deeper because the face on his phone was remarkably real.

“Kadak,” he blurted out, hammering air-notes as the beat in his headphones swelled with the soot cloud on his screen.

His AI assistant Saraswati stopped the video and the music. “Kadak as a noun means crack, boom; a sudden loud sound. As an adjective, it means intense, strong, stiff, or in slang, hot and sexy.”

He looked at Priyanka, who he imagined shook her head disapprovingly, like she did in the movie where she was a teacher and her student kept blurting out wrong answers.

Being a Bollywood poster, she never spoke. But she did return a wry grin, like she had never seen anything as beautiful as the mushroom cloud. But the feeling was momentary. With the music halted, he found himself eyeing the gray exit to his left.

“I know what it means, Saraswati.” To Priyanka, he said, “That was impressive. No one could survive that.”

A day ago, Salman’s fishing trawler launched a drone attack on the American fleet, using Blackbird. They wore Bengaluru police uniforms to sow confusion, maybe to make the Americans think India had internal security problems, or maybe to remind the world that Salman had bribed the police to escape the massacre. Aided by PLA Navy consultants, the fishing trawler navigated to the center of Varuna’s surveillance swath, as if someone knew where and when the satellites would pass. The consultants wore PLA Navy uniforms, like two middle fingers to Varuna’s peeping. All predictable, but it sickened his stomach.

Staring at the filthy mushroom cloud paused on his center console, he said, “Saraswati, what was the explosive yield?”

“Estimated yield, three kilotons.”

He studied the spanner screws on his brushed aluminum doorknob, shaking his head. “Nuclear?”

“Negative. Probable match, Tomahawk missiles block five, each with a conventional four hundred and fifty three kilogram high explosive.“

Priyanka shook her head. Three times four hundred and fifty did not equal three kilotons. Even a poster of a Bollywood actress knew Saraswati was wrong. The explosion was too big, and no one could survive it, and Salman Singh didn’t.

“Saraswati, replay the video, starting a second before detonation, one-half speed.”

When the video started, streaks of exhaust from the Tomahawks’ turbofan engines intersected the boat, then the boat vanished in a cloud of greasy, billowing soot. When the wind peeled away the smoky curtain, the trawler was in three parts, listing, with its charred crew sliding into the shark-infested waters like blackened sausages off of a griddle. Saraswati’s red squares overlapped the video as the facial recognition software tried and failed to identify burned faces.

Piyush sat forward, clipping that video segment and dragging it to a timeline window where he expanded it to a frame-by-frame view, finding a frame with a blurry streak of missile framed by ocean.

“Re-confirm the weapon used on the trawler.“

Saraswati superimposed a blue oval over the gray-on-blue cylinder. “US Tomahawk Block Five-A.” Saraswati recited details of the US-made cruise missiles’ communications package, guidance system, and warhead capabilities.

“This exceeds the yield of a conventional Tomahawk.”

“Tomahawks can be equipped with a secondary capability to vaporize and ignite the residual JP-10 fuel to create a thermobaric weapon.”

He whistled, folded his arms, and sat back. The Americans sent three missiles to vaporize a rust bucket fishing trawler, when they could have sent one. Or none. Nobody wanted giant angry hornets in their yard any more than they wanted Americans. But poking the nest never made hornets leave, it only made them angrier. China miscalculated, attacking USS Enterprise, and now the Americans would sting everyone on the grounds.

This confirmed most of what he already knew before he walked in. He fast forwarded, watching blackened bodies bob in the ocean, then get torn apart by sharks.

The trawler did not take long to sink, and no one came to the rescue. His mind whispered all the ways there were to fake a face and overlay it on a background image. His stomach tossed acid on each of his mind’s theories.

“No one survived that,” he told Priyanka, as if she had an answer.

“I calculate a high probability of one survivor,” Saraswati deadpanned.

Piyush’s gut wrenched, like someone had ripped a sword across his midsection. “Saraswati, explain.”

The video on his center console reversed. The boat inhaled black smoke, three gray blurs reversed offscreen, and then the trawler sailed backward into its own wake. Two minutes before the boat disintegrated, a black inflatable boat reversed into the frame, stopping at the trawler. A man stood, backed to a ladder on the trawler’s side, pivoted, and then climbed up. Saraswati froze the picture, with the man looking at the sky framed by a red square.

“Salman Singh, Pakistani National, fled the boat before its destruction,“ Saraswati said.

He knew. Salman knew the attack was coming and got off the boat.

The secure bureau phone at his desk pestered him. He took off his headphones, picked it up, and then hung up. He couldn’t prove Salman was warned. The Bengaluru police uniforms, what was the message? Piyush inhaled. They were symbolic. The Butcher of Bengaluru was reminding the world of the act that made him infamous. The use of Bengaluru uniforms was not for him. That the fishing trawler stopped directly in the path of Varuna’s surveillance satellite was nothing but a fluke.

The coincidences piled up as his brain drew ever-smaller loops that felt like a noose around his neck.

He picked up the phone again, on speakerphone, rehearsing an explanation. “McClean. Codeword, cabinet.”

After a pause, an AI-disguised voice answered. He said, “What did you use, a nuke?”

The AI spoke the words, “laughed at nuke,” followed by, “A few Tomahawks. If we used a nuke, he wouldn’t survive.”

Piyush eyed the door handle. It was a cheap government-issued kind. He could turn it and open the door with a flick.

Was the Space Force intelligence analyst on the other end of the AI-disguised voice admitting they let Salman live?

“Good point,” he said. “Where was the picture taken?”

“Yulin Naval Base. With Captain Xia Yi, Commander of the Chinese battleship Fuzhou, who was on the fishing trawler during the attack. In PLAN uniform, too.”

“Chinese are always bragging.”

“They erased Yi from Chinese servers ten minutes before that picture. When did Salman bail the trawler?”

“No one should have survived that. It could have been a coincidence. He’s a smart guy, a survivor, maybe he guessed retaliation was imminent.” As he said it, the words felt hollow. Who warned Salman, and why?

But he knew why.

“I showed you mine, you show me yours,” the AI-disguised voice said.

Piyush considered lying. The IIB cooperated with Americans, up to a point. If Salman had left twenty minutes before the attack, or when the Chinese training crew left, it would be an unimportant detail. But the Americans already knew Salman escaped the missiles. Maybe they’d even engineered it.

“Two minutes,” he said to the door.

“Missiles took four, so he was warned before they launched. The leak must be on our end. State Department will love this.”

That the American analyst offered an admission of guilt so breezily made him stop breathing. No intelligence bureau would admit they had a crack. There would be a close-knit investigation and a disinformation campaign to root out the mole.

The room was silent except for the fans on the tower of monitors, and his blood pounding in his ears. The Americans didn’t send him the image so he could recheck the video. How much did they already know? He felt like he was falling through the floor of a failing carnival ride.

“Kadak ma masaal. A harsh example,” was all he could think to say.

“Indeed. I only wish we got the bastard. Someone will get their ass chewed out for that. It’s been a rough day. They used Blackbird and we had casualties aboard the Enterprise.”

He steeled himself for more lies. “How bad?”

“Two helicopter pilots and a landing safety operator were killed. You can imagine, it’s a circus here. Nobody knows how our defenses were penetrated.“

She was fishing for information. Had they captured Blackbird? He didn’t know what to say, so he said, “Ashwagandha and lemon balm tea is very good to relieve stress. My condolences to the American families.”

“Thanks.” Click. He was listening to silence.

He was paranoid, that’s all. This was not an elaborate scheme to set a butcher free, to trap Piyush into revealing the location of Blackbird. Nobody knew he knew. He’d come across the location because a careless analyst left their screen open and he saw it as Varuna re-tasked. He didn’t tell anyone what he saw.

He closed his eyes. He reported the security violation. Internal security never asked him what information had been breached. Did they have to ask? Even if the video wasn’t captured, the satellite logs and the re-tasking instructions would be in a database. Did someone in the IIB figure out what he saw? And then leak it to the Americans?

He stood, as if a starter pistol fired in his office, and then dialed his boss. When she picked up, he didn’t wait for a greeting. “The Americans let Salman live. They are tracking him.”

“To where?”

“So far, to Yulin Naval Base. With the Captain of Fuzhou.”

Her voice rose three octaves as she swore in Hindi.

He waited for her to pause, and then said, “I think they have Blackbird.”

“Hopefully not. Pieces maybe, from the attack. It would be a disaster if they got their hands on the Chinese copies.”

“What should I do?”

After a few beats of silence, she said, “Nothing. The best thing to do is nothing. If they let him live, its because they are using him to lead them to Blackbird. It means they don’t have it.”

The words hit him like a gunshot to the back of the head. The Americans wanted him to know they’d warned Salman. Why would they let the Butcher of Bengaluru live when three Americans were dead aboard their prize flagship aircraft carrier?

“Salman doesn’t know where Blackbird is.”

“He knows where the remaining Chinese copy is. The Chinese are reckless. Hopefully they didn’t leave a trail he can follow.” She sighed. “I’ll have to talk to the Director, see what he wants to do.”

“Destroy it. Kill him.”

“And everything we’ve worked for? Its a matter of national importance that they learn to manufacture it.”

“If they use the other one in an attack?”

“Aggression was predictable. We have contingency plans.”

“Salman is a butcher.”

“We know where he is. He wont lead the Americans anywhere.”

The words should have soothed the flaming ball in Piyush’s belly. His mind repeated the mantra that his anxiety was unreasonable. The Bengaluru police uniforms were not a message for him. Nobody knew he knew where Blackbird was, and even if they did, he was protected inside this building.

His boss hung up, and then he made the biggest mistake of his life. He sat back down.

Also, I had a friend stop by and watch me write this!

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You can go back to earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

Synopsis:

When China steals advanced artificial intelligence microchips from an unknown source and uses them to attack the USS Enterprise, Ty Stone and his partner Alexis Kane are called to find its vulnerabilities before China capitalizes on its new first-strike capability.

To defeat this new technology, Stone and Kane need to find the lab making it. But whose technology is it? No known lab can print semiconductors this detailed. Stone and Kane must hunt the globe under the ticking time bomb of war.

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Fuzhou’s steely bow and forward guns towered over Captain Yi, demanding he decide quickly. His wife and daughter returned an innocent smile from the phone in his left hand. Shi snapped the photo days ago, from their living room couch selfie-style, and pasted a hurry-up-come-home-soon heart sticker on it. His daughter Jing held the panda bear she’d slept with since she was six, grinning ear-to-ear. She turned thirteen in a few months, and her new pink glasses and matching t-shirt announced she’d soon trade the panda for a boy.

At her age, he earned scowls from his mother for slinking from the house. The tanks and guns outside fascinated him. He thought he’d given up tiptoeing and evading. He’d played by the PLA Navy rules. But the wheel of life had returned him here. Some habits and thoughts were simply too deep for the PLA to uproot and kill.

Something plopped nearby. His spine tensed, but all he saw were ripples rolling away from the concrete pier.

He shivered and his stomach sank. Jing was born two weeks earlier than the doctor expected. She walked early, and talked early. Her first word was no, and her first instinct was to show her independence, emphatically ejecting toys and food from her highchair. She was ahead a grade in school and wanted to be first a fighter pilot, and then an astronaut. She was a good kid. Precocious, stubborn, and smart like her mother and grandmother. Jing meant ‘peace and quiet,’ and was his mother’s name. But names were simply what parents wished for their kids. Life had other plans. Until today, he’d thought living by the rules would guarantee her a peaceful, quiet life.

He shook his head. The name hadn’t worked for his mother, either.

He stared at Fuzhou’s white-on-gray numbers. Weak, muddy waves splashed its hull. Standing here wasted time, but he needed a few seconds to stop shaking and breathe so he could think. He’d killed people in the Navy, but always from a distance, pushing buttons or barking orders to fire missiles, never seeing the burned faces and broken bodies except from a satellite image like a high-stakes video game. He could still see Chao’s tears as he strangled her. A part of his brain repeated that it had been his family or her, like a mantra, to soothe his nerves.

Metal clicked at the pier entrance. The gate was two hundred meters away and hidden by a white concrete building, so he couldn’t see who was coming.

He needed to move. He couldn’t be sure how long it would take to find Chao’s body. As soon as it was, encrypted messages would be sent. Ministry of State Security teams would be activated. Shi and Jing would be picked up, if they weren’t already, where they would be bound and gagged and held for ransom.

MSS agents would demand his surrender, along with China’s only copy of Blackbird, now in his right hand. He clutched the green briefcase like one of those balls the nurse had him squeeze when he gave blood. So tight, someone would have to rip his arm off to steal it. He didn’t doubt that if one of the MSS teams were eyeing him through a high-powered rifle scope right now, they’d blow his arm off to get Blackbird, then fish it from the bay and leave him for the bottom feeders.

Fuzhou’s boarding gangway was seventy-five meters down the dock. Seventy-five steps, each more treacherous than the next. He turned to march towards it before whoever was strolling towards him could catch a glimpse.

How much could he get for Blackbird? A billion U.S. dollars? Or more? Could he get one US dollar for each of Blackbird’s trillion transistors? More valuable than Blackbird, maybe, was Chao’s phone in his pocket. He had China’s last copy, but she’d known where they stole it from. Chao was cavalier with Blackbird. She thought she was protected by her father, the general, and the PLA. Maybe she’d been cavalier with the source of Blackbird, too.

He inhaled and shook his head, his pulse racing ahead of his steps. He knew nothing about foreign bank accounts, cryptocurrency, or however money was laundered. Money was a means to an end. He wanted his wife, his daughter, and safety. A hostage for a hostage. A trillion tiny hostages in a briefcase for the safety of his family seemed more than a fair barter.

A shadow on the silty water inched along the pier. Tall, familiar, but slightly slouched and limping.

Fuzhou’s ardent guns asked him what choices he had? By the time he arrived in Potou, Chao’s body would be discovered. He might die, his family might be killed, but the minute Chao boarded Fuzhou with Blackbird, she’d sacrificed him and his family to the PLA gods of war. Before her re-education, his mother said, people can’t be controlled, they can only submit. His mother submitted to political reform, although she never talked about it. He submitted his entire career, and it led him here.

He smiled one last time at Jing and Shi, then turned his phone over. Did he need to disable it and toss it in the water? Removing the sim card was a two-hand operation and he could not let go of the green briefcase in his hand. He took a slow, ragged breath, then eyed the communications masts atop Fuzhou as he walked by. He’d need to have them disabled.

The hunched silhouette sped up and now slid along Fuzhou’s waterline. Step-limp-step-limp-step-limp. Each footfall made Yi wince as if his own knees and ankles ached. He dared not turn to identify the figure. None of his crew had been injured, as far as he knew, and he saw something sinister along the darkened jawline, something scraggly he recognized. He quickened his step.

What would he say to his Executive Officer, Ding Heng? He could lie to the conscripts, the petty officers, and even some of the senior officers, if they were aboard. His crew was accustomed to carrying out orders without asking questions. But he needed someone to run the ship while he slept, someone to trust. No captain could stay awake forever.

The sun disappeared behind clouds, and with it, the crooked, limping shadow. He only had thirty more steps to Fuzhou’s gangway.

Where were Heng’s loyalties? It was said that to serve with a person aboard a boat was to know them, but not in the PLA Navy. Until this point, Lieutenant Commander Heng was loyal to his career, which meant honing his ability to decipher what the political commissar’s true opinion was, and nodding ferociously when Chao voiced it.

Former Lieutenant Commander Heng. A speech began to take shape as he reached the gangway. He paused, looking up the metal ramp into the belly of Fuzhou. There were no guards today, and why should there be?

The muzzle of the shadow’s gun dug into his kidney at the same time Yi took the handrail. Gripping the pistol, a bloody arm, a tattered uniform, and the angry, bruised face and sooty, scraggly beard of Salman, the leader of the Islamists they’d been training.

“You betrayed us.” Salman’s breath, or beard, smelled like burnt oil, seawater, and cheap tobacco. His yellow teeth sickened Yi.

Sarcasm welled in Yi’s chest. What did he expect from Chao and the PLA? Yi looked up the gangway to Fuzhou and pinched his sarcasm. Somehow, miraculously, Salman survived whatever hell the U.S. Navy had unleashed on the fishing trawler.

His mind germinated an idea. “Chao betrayed us both.”

“My crew is dead because of you.”

Yi felt that was an oddly hypocritical complaint from a religious nut bent on suicide for his god. “Put your pistol away. We have little time.”

“I want Chao. Where is she?”

Yi started up the ramp. “She is in her office, at the end of the dock. Come, quickly. The MSS will be here soon.”

Salman’s shadow raised the pistol to the back of Yi’s head. “Take me to her.”

From five steps, Salman could not miss. Yi shook his head, but kept walking. Salman was fanatical, and greedy, but not stupid. “Chao is dead. When the MSS discovers her body, they will blame you and I. We must go.”

“Why would they blame us?”

“Because you’re not dead, and we’ve been seen together.”

Salman’s silhouette swiveled, his head in profile as he eyed the pier entrance. When Yi was three quarters of the way up Fuzhou’s gangway, Salman’s shadow lowered his pistol, gripped the rail, and hobbled up the ramp. Yi stepped aboard and saluted the flag hanging on the wall. He felt hypocritical and decided he would take it down as soon as he could. He was the captain, this was his ship, and it had no flag now.

As Salman stepped aboard, Yi said, “Push away the gangway and close the hatch. Then find a petty officer on the main deck and help cast off.” The thought of Salman stumbling around and dirtying his ship made him ill.

“Where are we—”

“No time for questions. Once we are underway, we will get you medical attention.”

The idea of medical attention softened Salman’s face. His khaki uniform was frayed and bloody where he’d been hit with shrapnel, and his face couldn’t hide the pain of walking on an aching knee and ankle. But the plan taking root in Yi’s head required Salman to be alive. At least until he rescued his family.

Yi picked up the ship’s phone and ordered the crew to general quarters. Battlestations. That would get the crew’s attention and squelch questions, for now. He didn’t know who was aboard, but the fewer, the better.

Behind Yi, metal creaked as Salman shoved the gangway and closed the hatch. Yi clanged up metal stairs to the bridge. Empty, except for a junior petty officer he didn’t recognize standing at the helm and swiping through display screens.

Where was Lieutenant Heng?

The petty officer noticed Yi and snapped to attention. “Officer on Deck.”

“Petty Officer—” Yi paused, because he didn’t know this man and had to read his nametag. He also needed to be cautious with his words. “Petty Officer Wang, who is the officer on watch?”

“You are sir.”

Yi shook his head. Wang was trained well by drill instructors that posed trick questions. “Before me.”

Petty Officer Wang hesitated a fraction of a second. Yi took this to mean that Wang didn’t know, and was waiting for Yi to give him a hint.

“Where is Lieutenant Heng?”

“In his quarters, sir. Packing, I believe.”

Heng had been reassigned, but usually there was a transition period until new officers arrived to take over the ship. He tried not to let a smile creep across his face. No one had been left in charge. He wouldn’t have to kill anyone else to get Fuzhou out of port. Relief washed over him.

“General Chao ordered Lieutenant Heng’s transfer belayed. Our orders are urgent. I want this ship out of port yesterday.”

Wang saluted. Yi pivoted to find Heng. What would he say? Would he tell Heng the truth?

Five steps from Heng’s cabin, Chao’s phone rang from his pocket. Yi eyed the name on the screen and his heart skipped. He debated whether to pick it up.

He declined.

Heng’s cabin door was open and his cabin a mess, as if a tornado had ripped through. Two open boxes on the bed awaited belongings and clothes piled on the floor. Heng was at the center of the storm, hunched over, sitting cross-legged. His eyes were red and puffy. Crying was unbecoming an officer, but understandable, and until now he’d been alone.

Chao’s phone rang again. Heng looked up and moved to stand, but Yi waved for him to sit.

Yi answered the phone to a deep, gruff voice saying, “I am going to cut your ear off and feed it to you, you know that?”

Yi smiled at Heng. “General Chao. Nice to hear from you.”

Steel creaked and moaned. Fuzhou was leaving port.

“Be nice to the security team when they board. Maybe they will kill you quickly.”

“Salman is alive, did you know that General Chao?”

Chao didn’t respond. Yi heard breathing and clicking at the other end of the phone. Heng’s eyes widened, then he moved a pile of clothes and rose.

“Did you hear me, General Chao, Salman is alive.”

“I am not surprised the Americans fucked that up. This bodes well for our invasion plans. He’ll be dead before he talks.”

“Do you have my family, Shi and Jing?”

“Do you want me to lie to you and tell you they will be safe? Surrender, and they will die painlessly. The guards, I am told, have been asking about Jing—”

Yi cut him off before Chao’s description of guards violating his thirteen-year-old daughter defiled his brain. “Do you have Lieutenant Heng’s family, too?”

Heng’s red, puffy face now gazed at Yi expectantly. Yi read the answer in Heng’s eyes, that Heng’s family was under the same quarantine, but wanted to hear Chao say it.

“He is no longer Lieutenant Heng—”

Yi interrupted because he knew it would anger General Chao. “Assemble them at South Port, on Naozhou Island, within two hours. Set up a live feed so that we are assured that they are unharmed. Prepare a rigid inflatable boat. We will arrive in eighteen hours. Once there, I will send further instructions.”

Yi calculated the trip would take ten hours, seven of which were during daylight. They would hug the coast so beachgoers could witness whatever drama General Chao and his security team created. He said eighteen hours, but they would track Fuzhou by satellite and would know he arrived in ten. They’d wonder what he planned for the other eight hours.

In his mind, the silence on the other end of the phone changed qualities. First, General Chao was indignant that Yi made demands. Then Chao asked himself, who is Yi to make demands? He had no leverage, he imagined Chao telling himself. Next, Chao’s spine would tense, and his stomach churn.

“And why would I do that?” The question came haltingly, because General Chao thought he guessed the answer.

“Your daughter was careless. When I die, it goes to the Americans.”

Yi hung up. It was human nature to fear the unknown more than the known. The known could be described, reduced, disassembled, and analyzed for weaknesses. The known could be defeated, while the unknown was the all-powerful god in the darkness. With its full definition ethereal, there was no way to know how to attack it. Right now, General Chao was wrestling with the unknown: Did Yi have Blackbird? Had his daughter left Blackbird’s source on her phone? What did Yi know, and who in the American Navy had he contacted? How much time did he have?

Heng fixated on Yi’s briefcase. “Is that—?”

“Are you in or out?”

Heng studied his gray cabin wall for a few minutes, then exhaled. “Do you really think I will see my family?”

“No guarantees, except that every second I hold this briefcase, we keep them alive.”

Heng nodded. “What will we tell the crew?”

“Salman. Our cover story.”

Heng’s eyes looked at the ceiling, as if he could see Salman through the steel. “Some won’t believe it.”

“It doesn’t matter, so long as they follow orders.”

Heng nodded. “That they will do.”

“How many aboard?”

“Most of the crew was given shore leave. Two officers, you and I, four petty officers, and twenty one enlisted. Mostly maintenance crew.”

Maintenance crew wouldn’t ask questions, they’d be too busy riveting and drilling. “Good. We need to take all communications offline.”

“What about a place to stash—” Heng glared at the briefcase. “That.”

Yi would eventually tire of holding the briefcase. Later, he would need to eat and sleep. If he held it long enough, would his hand grow around the handle, like a tree grew around an obstacle? He’d seen images of trees that had grown around all sorts of things—golf balls, bicycles, tombstones, even old rifles.

Yi shook his head. “I will hold on to this, for now.”

He stared at his white knuckles clutching the green briefcase. He looked like a skeleton, clinging to hope of an afterlife. For the first time since he could remember, he was operating outside the PLA’s five and ten-year plans for him. On instinct. It took his own imminent death to feel alive. What would he do with Blackbird? And Chao’s phone?

He had less than ten hours to decide and only knew what he wouldn’t do.

He wouldn’t give it back to General Chao and the PLA.

You can go back to earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

Synopsis:

When China steals advanced artificial intelligence microchips from an unknown source and uses them to attack the USS Enterprise, Ty Stone and his partner Alexis Kane are called to find its vulnerabilities before China capitalizes on its new first-strike capability.

To defeat this new technology, Stone and Kane need to find the lab making it. But whose technology is it? No known lab can print semiconductors this detailed. Stone and Kane must hunt the globe under the ticking time bomb of war.

There will be a separate newsletter this week, a deleted scene from The Orionids, and more!

Two words buzzed in Stone’s mind for the last five hours of the flight. The intelligence report zapped to his pad had over a thousand pages. Two words among four hundred thousand were easy to overlook, and he almost did. He stumbled over them underneath a picture, as practically a footnote to the report. No question. He reread it three times. Eight letters, forming two words, a place and a color.

Code words. The analysts writing the report could have left them out. That’s what he’d have done. He wasn’t in a secure facility, hard-wired to the network, and reports were often leaked. Adding those two words to the report, controversial in Congressional circles, would create a lot of D.C. drama. Some private showing off for their internet pals would search every report with those keywords, find a connection to Blackbird, and post it on social media. Then he’d be walking up the hill to a hearing.

Senators would ask why those two words appeared in the report. What did he know, and when did he know it? He’d tell the truth, that he didn’t know. That maybe the analysts slipped.

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The best-case scenario was that someone screwed up. The worst case…he shook his head. The worst case was that he’d have to look into it, and lend credibility to conspiracy theories. Those two words shouldn’t be there at all.

The aircraft lurched, and with it, his stomach. Kane, buckled a knees-length away on a bulkhead-mounted folding seat, reached for a handhold but found only exposed electrical conduit and jagged metal.

Her color drained hours ago as she halted on the rain-soaked tarmac in South Korea. “That thing’s a fucking death trap,” she said, eyeing their ride, a CV-22B Osprey.

Korea was the third leg of the flight. The first, to Okinawa, he slept and downloaded files, taking advantage of wifi access. At Okinawa, they ran bleary-eyed through sheeting rain between planes on a runway. In the air over Midway, they entered a communications blackout, the result of heightened Pacific hostilities.

They’d handed over Trisky, his Belgian Malinois, at the Kunsan Air Force Base in South Korea. Standard protocol required her to be quarantined for a week. Trisky whimpered. He felt bad, but she was in expert hands.

The entire trip, the food was barely a level above MREs. There had been turbulence too, but the worst part was the lack of caffeine. Like the modern military, he ran on coffee, and his veins were empty.

“Page eight-oh-two, bottom,” he said, tapping his fingers on his pad to the rhythm of the Osprey’s chopping rotors. The pilots could overhear him, and the comms might be recorded, so he didn’t want to say the two words aloud.

Kane tapped her headset, showing she couldn’t hear Stone over the rotor chop. The aircraft seesawed. Kane again grabbed for a nonexistent handhold.

On the tarmac in Korea, he wouldn’t have faulted her for refusing to go. The Osprey had been in numerous high-profile fatal crashes and grounded at least three times that Stone could recall. It looked like a maniacal god gave an ornery, gray hamster wings and propellers, with bulging sides like it carried a cheek full of acorns. The nacelles, the engine and prop rotor group on the wing, tilted vertically like two middle fingers to gravity, aerodynamics, and Kane’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Osprey was as safe as any human contraption defying the laws of physics. Certainly safer than the Orbital Transfer Vehicle they’d piloted to hack into spy satellites. Still, it had a reputation for chewing up passengers and spitting them out broken and burned, and Kane had personal experience with that.

She eyed the Osprey on the wet runway, and then grimaced at the silvery sky, flaring her nostrils with a deep sigh and saying, “So today we’re the nuts. Fuck it. Famous words before a bad decision, right?”

“Three minutes out and cleared to land,” the pilot said over the propeller hum in Stone’s headset. “Face force chair blazers buckle up. Fly Navy.”

Reaching through hours of mental haze, Stone vaguely remembered the pilot’s name. So far, she’d been a disembodied hand to his right, jockeying a center console stick in a scornful, crackling voice. Lieutenant McBride, maybe? It rhymed with snide. He was sure of that. Face force chair blazers was a reference to him and Kane. He enjoyed friendly banter between service branches as much as anyone, like teammates on a winning team, but Lt. Snide took it too far. Maybe it was her tone, or his lack of caffeine, but her barbs at Kane grated his skin.

Kane shot a middle finger toward the cockpit. “I’d like to see how these flying fish handle a spacewalk.” She leaned forward and put her head in her palms.

Stone put his hand on her shoulder. “First time is the hardest.”

Kane rubbed her face. “It’s not my first time, jefe. Christ, you know they call this thing the widowmaker?”

“I meant the first time since—” He decided not to argue. “Widowmaker. Why didn’t you say so, we could have invited my ex?”

That earned him a small smile. “No way I’m pulling her fat ass out of the wreckage.”

He chuckled. “We’re all but landed. Just another few minutes.”

“You’re all but divorced. Still plenty of time to disappoint. We’re five hundred feet over water.”

“Look on the bright side, we could be in one of those ghost cats, or whatever they’re called.”

“Ghost Bats. Autonomous fighter jets. They don’t use those for carrier delivery.”

“So that’s good—”

“The last crash happened because the pilot was landing for likes. Did you know that? They steered into a low-altitude maneuver while filming for the ‘gram.”

“Low-altitude steep-angle banks are what we do, Major Kane,” Lt. Snide said as her disembodied hand in the cockpit moved. “It was the clutch, not the pilot.” The Osprey rocked like an unstable canoe. “On final approach.”

Stone winced. He was former Major Stone, she was former Major Kane, and Lt. Snide was on a collision course.

To Kane, he said, “How far did you get in the report?”

“Skimmed. I could use some of whatever Space Force Intelligence was smoking when they wrote it.”

“Page eight-oh-two. Did you catch it?”

Kane glanced at the cockpit. “Right I saw it too. I searched, it was only mentioned in that one sentence.”

“Scratching my head.”

“When you rule out the impossible, jefe, whatever remains fills up two hundred pages of Congressional conspiracy theories. I think they had to say something about the program. Like, a non denial denial.”

The Osprey’s deep rotor chopping turned into a whine and the aircraft shook as they landed. His pad slipped off his lap, tumbling onto Kane’s boot, which saved it from cracking on the metal floor.

Kane picked it up and then sat back and stared at the ceiling, exhaling and puffing her cheeks. “Fucking hate helicopters.”

Stone raised his eyebrows.

Kane covered her mic and mouthed, doctor switched my medicine. She lowered her hand. “Not a good time to be a guinea pig.”

He nodded.

Kane stared at the ceiling and took slow, square breaths.

Hydraulics whined, and the Pacific sun peeked through the rear loading ramp. Her gray pallor matched the aircraft carrier’s deck, while her eyes, sea-blue, matched the water. Salt air brought jet fumes into the cargo bay.

Stone unclicked his restraints and stood. “Let’s go blue eyes. We made it. Next time we send my ex and her attorney on this physics abomination.” He offered her a hand.

Kane cracked a smile, then slapped his palm. She offered him his pad, but when he took it, she held on. She opened her mouth to say something, but Lt. Snide stepped from the cockpit and stood over her. Stone read her nametag, McBride.

“Y’all don’t get much airtime in the face force, do you? This is the safest aircraft in the fleet.”

Kane stood. She was a head taller than the Navy pilot. “Not the way some people drive.”

Stone stepped closer. A cramped cargo hold with jagged metal was no place for a fistfight. “Thanks for the ride, Lieutenant Snide.”

Lt. Snide puffed her chest. “McBride.”

Stone let a smile creep across his face. “My bad. We aren’t big tippers, so we’ll close our tab here.”

Lt. McBride pushed between him and Kane. After two steps, Kane said, “I have a tip for her.”

Stone put his hand up.

Lt. McBride pivoted, eyeing Kane a full measure. “Next time you two can swim.” Then she swiveled and exited the Osprey.

“Doesn’t she need to go through a checklist to shut this down?” Kane shook her head. “Clutch failures, my ass. This is amateur hour.”

Stone blew out a ragged breath, thankful that the flight deck roar prevented Lt. McBride from hearing Kane’s comment. “Back to the report. Bloke una.”

She squinted at him.

“An anagram for the project name. Like, a lob nuke.”

Kane furrowed her brow. “That’s what you’ve been spending five hours thinking about? Anagrams?”

“I’ve dissected it a hundred ways. Why is that in the report? Maybe your right. A non denial denial to cover themselves. What if your wrong?”

“Do I need to sit back down?”

“Indulge me, blue eyes.”

“Tell me your conspiracy theories walking, jefe, I need off this thing.” She waved Stone forward. “Brains before beauty.”

Stone smiled, stepping off the Osprey’s rear loading ramp into a screaming hornet’s nest of jet turbines. USS Enterprise’s crew wore color-coded jerseys—green, white, red, purple, or yellow according to their role—and marshaled aircraft, fuel, and weapons around the charged flight deck.

Kane pointed to crew in red jerseys, leaning under each wing of an F35C fighter at the far catapult. The jet blast deflector was up. Red-shirted crew pulled tags off the jet’s missiles, then backed away. “They are flying weapons hot, jefe. Combat.”

“Could be a drill.” Although as he said it, he didn’t think so. He’d been in enough drills and actual combat to notice the subtle cues, like the facial tension and the dilated pupils. In a simulator, or a drill, you knew you wouldn’t die. You might fail, but your punishment would be a lot of after-action meetings and more drills. Your lizard brain reacted to combat by secreting genuine dread. Drills were for muscle memory, to prevent soldiers’ dread from morphing into panic and paralysis.

USS Enterprise’s crew wore all different color jerseys, but the same fear behind their goggles. All asking the same questions. Who wasn’t coming home? Did I tell my partner I loved them? Why did I miss my kid’s birthday party? The crews’ bodies executed their duties the way they’d been trained. An outsider might see machine-like clockwork. But their minds promised themselves that if they survived, they would never miss another of their kid’s birthday parties.

At the catapult, a horde of thumbs went up. The F35C’s wing and rudder flaps cycled. An officer in a yellow vest, the shooter, kneeled on the deck, pointing forward, and then the fighter jet roared and catapulted off the flight deck. The blast deflector lowered. The crew then shepherded an unmanned aerial vehicle to the catapult.

Kane hung on the Osprey’s metal threshold, watching another F35C volley from catapult two and bank right to follow the first.

Stone surveyed the flight deck. All four catapults were launching planes. At the horizon, leaden smoke soared from a battleship. One missile, then two, then three rocketed and then pivoted for the horizon.

A white-shirted petty officer gestured for them to move, pointing beyond a swarm of greenshirts and purpleshirts hustling to fuel and launch aircraft, towards an Ensign in gray digital camouflage who stood at the edge of the carrier’s island waiting to guide them.

Kane edged through the stinging odor of jet fuel and tail exhaust, finding a space between the island’s gray wall, a two-story white crane, and a pair of redshirts bent over a dolly with rocket munitions.

The Ensign greeted them with a salute and then a handshake. “Major Kane. Major Stone. Welcome aboard USS Enterprise. Let’s get you below deck.” The Ensign’s nametag read Frick.

“Not Major Stone or Major Kane. Alex and I are retired.”

The Ensign swiveled towards stairs at the flight deck’s edge. “My orders are to keep you two invisible. Space Force Intelligence contractors will invite unnecessary—”

Engine roar cut off Frick’s words, although Stone could fill in the blank. Frick emphasized contractors as if spitting sour milk from his mouth. Contractors were suspicious, beneath privates, and not fit to scrub the toilets. They brought news of salaries in the outside world and were bad for retention NCO’s spreadsheets and fiscal year statistics.

Kane smiled, saying, “Invisible is our favorite color, Ensign Frick.”

Stone blocked Kane as Ensign Frick ducked through a gray hatch at the bottom of the stairs.

Kane sighed.

“Kona Blue.”

“I am familiar with the rumors of the project, jefe. It doesn’t exist.”

“It’s in the report. Page eight-oh-two.”

“So is Mothman and the Loch Ness Monster.”

“Not literally. Kona Blue was never about reverse engineering alien technology or exploiting extraterrestrial biologics. We are always reverse engineering enemy technology. And friendly technology too. It’s an umbrella project for any time we reverse engineer technology.”

“And you know this, because?”

Stone looked off at the blue water stretching to a clear blue cloudless sky at the horizon. Two words in the report stained his vision and clouded his mind. Once he saw them, he couldn’t unsee them.

“You don’t know this. You clicked some dumb internet video.”

“Its a theory.”

“Well, there are three big problems with your theory.” Kane counted off her fingers. “One, Kona Blue never existed. Two, aliens don’t exist. We’ve been to space a half dozen times and not once did E.T. contact us.”

“Aliens is a metaphor. And that was two problems, not three.”

“Three, you can’t reverse engineer something you don’t have. We don’t have it. We don’t even know who makes it, or where.”

“Maybe we did. And lost it. Maybe we have it, and are covering it up.“

Kane shook her head. “If we had it, why did I just risk my sanity in that giant flying hamster?”

The South China Sea was the most amazing color blue, the same as Kane’s eyes, but staring into it gave Stone no answers. He shook his head.

“Fine. I’ll tell you what. How many tacos you owe me, jefe?”

He had no idea. He had lost so many taco-bets to her intuition. “A few dozen?”

“Fifty-five.”

He exhaled. The number felt like relief. He was sure it was more. “I trust you. Your point?”

“Fifty-five tacos to your one, we don’t have it.”

“To be clear, if I win, and we have Blackbird, my debt is canceled. If you win, I owe you a taco?”

“Another taco. Fifty-six. Are you feeling lucky, punk?” She smirked.

“Deal. Wanna shake on it?”

“I know where your hand has been since you separated from that bitch.”

Ensign Frick poked his head from the hatch. “Major Kane? Major Stone? Everything all right?”

Kane slapped him on the chest and pointed at him, using her you better pay me this time expression. To Frick, she said, “We were discussing options. We haven’t eaten, haven’t slept, and haven’t had hot coffee.”

“Admiral McKay says we have the best coffee in the Pacific. As far as food—”

“Tacos? You serve tacos?”

Frick furrowed his brow. “I think so, Major Kane.”

“Good. My partner here is hungry.” Kane pumped her eyebrows and slapped him in the chest again. “He’ll need tacos. A lot of tacos.”

This is chapter 3. You can go back to earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

Synopsis:

When China steals advanced artificial intelligence microchips from an unknown source and uses them to attack the USS Enterprise, Ty Stone and his partner Alexis Kane are called to find its vulnerabilities before China capitalizes on its new first-strike capability.

To defeat this new technology, Stone and Kane need to find the lab making it. But whose technology is it? No known lab can print semiconductors this detailed. Stone and Kane must hunt the globe under the ticking time bomb of war.

Chapter 3

Yulin Naval Base, Sanya, China.

Captain Yi eyed his laptop, unable to breathe, as if a broad nylon packing strap ratcheted around his chest. He searched for news in his family’s town, a routine before coming home. He expected to be home soon since Zheng Chao, Fuzhou’s political commissar, ordered them to port after boarding.

Former Captain, he thought. Although nothing was confirmed. The startling search results glaring at him were one data point. Another, he should be in his in-port cabin, finalizing paperwork. Instead, Chao shuffled him off Fuzhou to a concrete building and sat him in this blank white office to wait for…whatever was coming next.

He replayed his memory of the conference in his cabin. According to regulations, decisions aboard Fuzhou were made by a five-person committee: him, his Executive Officer Lieutenant Commander Ding Heng, Chao, and her two deputy political commissars. Tactical control was his purview. His military orders came from the Rear Admiral. Political goals were her domain, and he never knew the genesis of her orders.

After boarding, the five of them met in his at-sea cabin, as they often did. Chao suggested they return to port.

When he was young, Yi’s mother told him what democracy was like in Hong Kong before China took over and forced its legislative council to enact national security laws. His mother described people speaking their minds and voting on their concerns. She denied it later, calling her stories warnings and claiming she’d misremembered and misunderstood.

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Every year, he was required to re-read and certify his knowledge of the Chinese Constitution. A passing grade was nothing less than a one-hundred percent score on the certification quiz. If he missed a few questions, he was required to re-read sections. He couldn’t imagine what happened to those who missed a lot. Maybe they’d go on a watch list, or be forced into intensive study at a remote hamlet prison.

So, he knew, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics was defined in the Constitution as a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class. Each year, he needed to recite on the test that the people’s organizations were those that embraced all socialist working people, all builders of socialism, all patriots who supported socialism, and all patriots who stood for the reunification of the motherland.

The shorter version, according to his mother, before she went to her political education in a remote Tibet village, only people who agreed with the party were patriots. If you disagreed, you weren’t the people. China wasn’t a people’s dictatorship. Just a dictatorship.

He never considered it as long as he had his career and family. A fist wrenched his gut as he considered the search results, wondering whether he had either a career or family left.

The conversation in his at-sea cabin, surrounded by Lt. Commander Heng, Chao, and her deputies, went as always. Cramped, his cabin stifled discussion. Chao suggested a course of action. No one disagreed, although there were many reasons to question the idea. Orders to leave the fleet came from the Admiral, not her. They were to start a military exercise soon.

The faces of her deputy political commissars were as stern as hers. They always voted first and always as a block on important matters. That way, there could be no misunderstanding: if someone objected to a political mission, they were going against the party. Lt. Commander Heng stood at attention, every muscle in his wiry body squeezing his face into resignation. He would vote with Chao because he valued his career.

Even if Yi asked why or debated the action, he’d be outvoted at best and written into one of Chao’s reports at worst. The decision was unanimous by all patriots who embrace socialist working people, she’d write. If he opposed, by implication, he wasn’t a patriot.

His only meek objection might be that he needed to consult with the Rear Admiral before leaving the fleet.

He stood, summoning his military discipline and replying before anyone spoke, saying, “I will inform Admiral Zhang.” He tried as much as he could to sound like her suggestion was natural, and that he wholeheartedly agreed. Lt. Commander Heng relaxed, exhaling audibly, and then coughed to cover his relief.

The decision landed him here, in this white office, staring at disturbing search results on his laptop that smacked sense into him, like his mother sometimes did.

When the Chinese censors wanted to suppress results, they set bots to redirect searches and spam news. So, instead of news about his town, he stared at links to porn sites, gambling, and escorts.

Protests. It meant that there had been more dissident protests. Messages to his wife, Shi, and mother were not going through. The strap around his chest constricted. He doubted they were involved in demonstrations, but the police jailed people and then asked questions ten years later.

Was he in this shore office because of the protests? Not likely. Chao received orders to return to port long before they’d armed the Islamists.

A coincidence? The Naval Academy trained him not to believe in coincidences. When there was smoke on a naval vessel, no one waited to see flames.

He leaned forward and typed his wife’s name into the search bar, receiving more ads for prostitution. He tapped the desk, then typed his own name. The People’s Liberation Army Navy was proud of all its officers. His name and picture had a spot on the Navy’s website.

He was, according to the bots spamming the results, one of eight porn actors or six male escorts. All in Navy uniforms, some tattered, opened at the front, with glistening sweat and defined muscles he never had. He guessed the images were AI-faked to bury something else.

He swiped more at the bottom of the results. Dangerous, perhaps, since search histories were logged in personnel files and used in social scores. They might accuse him of amorality. A ship’s officer should not be searching for porn or gigolos.

He found himself on page six. Still a captain in uniform. For now. His career had been buried, like his Navy bio. All that remained was for Chao to walk through the door and click delete.

He sat back and inhaled, trying to stretch the elastic band around his lungs, but could only take a scant breath against its grip. Searing heat radiated down his arms and shoulders.

Chao knocked on his door, and then her scowl leaned through the opening. She’d wrapped her long black hair into a donut bun, a favorite in the military, so tight he imagined it would whip open and lash his face.

“I ask you to come to my office.”

She wasn’t asking. His face burned. He didn’t move.

“I have news of Shi.”

He slammed the laptop closed, then regretted it. He’d done nothing wrong, so why did he act guilty? It didn’t matter. Chao had been monitoring his searches and knew he’d searched for Shi.

He gathered his PLA Navy discipline and marched for the door, following her out and down the ochre hall into her office. Chao sat between a teak desk and a teak bookshelf with family pictures, party leadership photos, and wooden cases displaying her awards. Befitting a general’s daughter, but not a working-class peasant’s office. In the corner, a green briefcase. The same as what she carried onto his ship? Did it contain the second copy of Blackbird? Was she this arrogant?

Not a dictatorship of working-class people, his mother whispered from the grave, a dictatorship of some people. Or just a dictatorship.

He locked the door behind him and stood at attention at Chao’s desk, the band around his gut and lungs squeezing all the blood into his pounding temples. He pinched his lips to stop his thoughts from overflowing.

“Do you know why you are here, Comrade Captain Yi?” The taught bun on the back of Chao’s head stretched her mouth into a grimace.

This was a trick question, one he’d asked of subordinates many times. Yes, an admission of guilt. No, an admission of ignorance. Either way he answered, he was wrong.

“I beg the party’s forgiveness, whatever I did.”

Chao sat back in her chair and eyed the door. Her grimace softened into a frown. “You are an exemplary officer, Comrade Yi—” He noted that she had dropped Captain. Likely, bots were scrubbing his name from military servers as she spoke. “Some, of course, support your decision to attack the American Navy.”

His decision. She ordered the attack on USS Enterprise. She brought Blackbird on his ship and suggested it was time to let it fly. He questioned the use of Blackbird. She’d replied, our victory today is assured, Comrade Captain Yi.

He would not be gaslighted. His fists balled up.

“You said it was a wise decision, launching from that spot, Comrade Chao.” His face burned. He didn’t have the breath to utter her rank.

“Yes, I advocated on your behalf. Some would call your decision patriotism. Unfortunately, with so many dead Americans…”

He saw the plan now. Attack the US Navy and then disavow the action. It was a political message, to show Americans that the Chinese military had a weapon, would use it, and they were powerless to stop it. After China disavowed the attack, America would take no action and retreat.

She would say the attack was his idea. The PLA would paint him as a rogue commander in league with the Islamists.

The PLA Navy uniforms were her idea. She set him up.

He eyed the green briefcase on the floor. Her father was a general—probably the general who arranged this—so it was his word against hers.

His punishment would be as harsh as the diplomatic fallout. He pumped his fists.

She stood, looked him up and down, lingering on his fists, then eyed the door.

He followed her gaze to the locked door, back to hers, then relaxed his fists. His heart pounded in his temples, and his breathing ran a marathon, but the adrenaline cleared and focused his mind like a laser. His mind worked out distances and pictured hopping over the desk.

“Forgive me, Comrade Chao—” He slipped, forgetting her rank again. He inhaled and held it to slow his speech to a more calming pace. Could he kill a woman? He’d simulated it in training. Chao was petite, but she’d taken hand-to-hand combat, like him, and had the advantage of a pistol in her drawer. Or pocket. Surprise was essential, and he needed to watch her hands. “I apologize. I am angry over the traitorous weakness that pervades these halls.”

A smile curled over her lips, and she fidgeted with the buttons of her white dress uniform. Her red tie looked like a waterfall of blood. “My father and I understand your passion. Your sacrifice will be honored.” Chao unbuttoned her uniform’s top button.

His sacrifice. Honored. It sounded like a funeral and an empty promise. He would not die a coward in some remote reformation camp. He was a Navy Captain.

Chao loosened another button and then set her hand too close to the desk drawer hiding her pistol. Her left hand was too close to her cell phone and security.

“I would like to enter a recommendation for my Executive Officer Lt. Commander Heng, to be promoted.”

Chao shook her head. “You are an excellent captain, Comrade Yi, thinking of your people. The party thinks Comrade Heng is tainted by this incident. He will be reassigned to Yixing.”

Yixing was a frigate. Heng, a good man, was being demoted. Yi’s arms tensed. He inhaled, stifling the impulse to squeeze his fists. Chao’s office was hot, with nowhere to settle his eyes except her black hair wound into a bun, her scowling brown eyes, and her lying, wan mouth.

“Through no fault of his. I gave the order.”

“I advocated as much as I could on your behalf.” Chao’s eyes flitted over the door, and she shifted her hips, folding her arms as if ready to deliver his sentence. “Of course, I can talk to my father. There is always room in this office for patriots who support socialism.”

She meant support the party. Or her. He would not be her errand boy. But he needed to distract her and set her at ease. “What news of Shi?”

Chao froze, her mouth half-open, her hands on her lapels, as if she’d forgotten she’d mentioned his wife.

“I’d been searching. You knocked saying you had news of Shi.”

If her offer was a pretext to bait him into her office, he’d kill her a different way. There would be a lot of noise and suffering. The guards would shoot him here. But it might be worth it.

“Yes—there was a virus outbreak in Potou District.” Yulin Naval Base was on Hainan Island. His wife, Shi, lived in Potou, outside Zhanjiang, three hundred and fifty kilometers away. “The city is under quarantine, sadly, including your wife.”

Quarantine. When he was a teenager, during an outbreak of a new variant of coronavirus, authorities ordered lockdowns. Meat, particularly pork, was scarce because meatpacking plants closed. Jobs were as limited as food, too, so people could not afford to feed their families. Residents in one housing unit near his childhood home evacuated and burned it down, an unprecedented demonstration against the authorities. The next day, tanks and military units rolled in and quarantined his town. This was after his mother’s political reeducation, so she said she admired the military’s ability to keep order.

Quarantine had since come to mean any lockdown, including one for a virus of the mind that caused dissent.

He’d only followed Chao’s suggestions. Now, his wife was a hostage, like the people in the housing units. He wondered whether there was a virus, or whether she’d invented a pretense to hold his wife as a bond for his performance as a loyal party patriot. Although, if they thought her grief would turn her into a dissenter, she’d be dead soon after him.

He would not submit like his mother did.

“How long will the quarantine last?” He knew the answer. Until his political reeducation ended, or his jail sentence, or they escorted him to the wall where they shot dissidents.

“This outbreak is an acute—”

He hurdled across the desk, flinging the chair across the floor, and squeezed Chao’s neck and carotids. She retreated a half-step against the bookcase, then gurgled her last word, wide-eyed, thrashing his back and chest.

Her eyes reddened as the blood filled them, then tears rolled down her cheeks. He lifted her body by the neck and smashed her spine against the bookcase’s thin shelf for more leverage. Her legs flailed, booting his knees, but she was lighter than he expected and felt like a rag doll. Her mouth opened and closed. She thumped his back and shoulders, shaking her head from side to side, then tried to push her arms between his. That was a power move taught in hand-to-hand combat training to break a chokehold. But she was ten seconds too late and too weak to thrust.

Her brown eyes rolled up and her pupils dilated, becoming big, black, empty disks. She went limp and heavy. 

His pulse raced, and his lungs scarfed air. Like the end of a long run, he could see the banner, and his mind demanded he push himself to finish. He mashed her carotids, counting to sixty as he’d been trained. Her eyes hemorrhaged, and her tongue lolled from her mouth. 

How much noise had he made? He replayed killing Chao. He’d stamped over the desk. She’d banged her feet against the bookshelf. The chair rolled across the office. 

They made no more noise than if they had sex. He eyed her limp body inside the Navy uniform. Did she have sex in this office? For favors? Why had she unbuttoned her jacket? Was she going to offer to lighten his sentence in return for betraying his wife?

He ground her neck against the bookshelf.

His sixty count ended. He checked Chao’s pulse. None. He lowered her to the floor, curled her up in a fetal position, and shoved her under the desk.

Now what? His heavy breathing reverberated around her office, but he heard no footfalls outside.

He eyed the briefcase in the corner. Freeing his wife was his highest priority. He needed to be quick, but deliberate, and not stupid.

The green briefcase in the corner prodded him. Was Chao that arrogant? A hostage for a hostage.

He kneeled. The case clupped open to the combination 2-6-3-8. Inside, the Ministry of State Intelligence’s only remaining sample of Blackbird. He shook his head. Chao’s stupidity had become his luck.

He closed the briefcase and stood, exhaling and puffing his cheeks. How would they let him walk out with this? How long did he have?

Once on the mainland, the military used lazy conscripts as quarantine security, so there would be many gaps.

But how to get out of the building? And across the straight?

Flopping echoed from under the desk. Chao’s legs shifted and now stuck out. They had the gray pallor of death.

He eyed the bookcase from the front of her teak desk. An admirable office, befitting a general’s arrogant, dead daughter. Pictures, awards, and mementos all remained neatly arranged. He fidgeted with the desk, straightening it.

Her cell phone. It was on her desk. He turned it over. Her fingerprint unlocked it. He inhaled, then blew a ragged breath. The phone could help him. He circled the desk. Chao’s body tumbled to the side, her arm drooped on the floor. He lifted her index finger, pressing it to the phone to open it. He checked to ensure her phone was permanently unlocked and then wedged Chao’s body under the desk again.

Standing, thumb-scrolling through her messages, he found one from security with today’s passphrase.

He smiled. Karma spoke to him. He typed out a message to security: Captain Yi will exit with a briefcase classified red and then the passphrase.

Security didn’t have the authority to search a briefcase classified red. Nor would they challenge the order of a general’s daughter.

As he reached for her office door, he smoothed his uniform, a little rumpled like he’d had sex in her office, and straightened his hair. 

He inhaled and opened her door. An empty hall. He exhaled, puffing his cheeks. The compression band around his chest had broken, and he could breathe.

He locked Chao’s office and clopped down the corridor with the briefcase. All the corridor’s doors were closed. He saw no one until he opened the stairwell door on the first floor to the security gate.

There, two guards, one to the right of a metal detector, the other behind a conveyor to an x-ray scanner. They saluted him. He returned the salute while marching around the metal detector to the front door.

Outside, he gulped the salty ocean air and sunshine. His lungs felt cavernous, like they could retain every last bit of the sea breeze. The sun cooled his face and melted the tension in his stomach. Oxygen to his hands and legs made them tingle.

To his right, two blocks beyond the outer security gate, a cab stand. The majority were automated taxis, but with a handful of human drivers he might be able to bribe to stay off the grid. Then he’d need a ferry across Qiongzhou Straight.

To his left, an insane thought. His ship—former ship—Fuzhou glinting in the sun. Four ropes, two on the bow and two on the stern, tugging its Navy-gray body against the dock. The walkway to the dock was unguarded because, he realized, he was still behind the Navy security perimeter.

It had a skeleton crew, with all but essential officers on shore leave. His Executive Officer Lieutenant Commander Heng was aboard. What about Chao’s deputies? He retrieved Chao’s phone from his pocket. She tracked her deputies, and they were in a bar four blocks down.

The outer security gate and the cab stand were the safer option. He eyed the line of passengers waiting for cars. He should be in that line to get a car, and then a ferry.

He pivoted from the cab stand to Fuzhou’s forward guns and missile batteries, undecided. He squeezed the green briefcase’s handle. A hostage for a hostage.

Synopsis:

When China steals advanced artificial intelligence microchips from an unknown source and uses them to attack the USS Enterprise, Ty Stone and his partner Alexis Kane are called to find its vulnerabilities before China capitalizes on its new first-strike capability.

To defeat this new technology, Stone and Kane need to find the lab making it. But whose technology is it? No known lab can print semiconductors this detailed. Stone and Kane must hunt the globe under the ticking time bomb of war.

You can go back to earlier chapters, here: https://wyattwerne.substack.com/s/blackbird

Davidsonville, Maryland

The thousand-some-page report’s glare impaled his eyes but unraveled nothing. Ty Stone puffed his cheeks and swiped through two more pages. 3:30 am. Outside his kitchen window, a snowstorm drifted through his floodlights. His partner, Alexis Kane, would be here soon in her four-wheel-drive SUV. The planes at Joint Base Andrews could takeoff in Arctic conditions, so he’d be in the air with no sleep, no caffeine, and nothing to go on. Empty moving boxes scattered around his kitchen and dining room squawked resentment, their open mouths demanding he reconsider.

He could close the file and text his boss no to this assignment, but then he’d be back to staring at his bedroom ceiling in a stalemate with the boxes. The shadows couldn’t answer his question: why hadn’t he moved out three months ago, after his soon-to-be ex-wife called him crying that she’d slept with someone else? His mother said to take time and think things through. That the disgust and anger would fade. It was just one mistake, Ty. She told you, and she’s remorseful.

He shook his head, skimming over a few more pages. Remorseful she’d been caught, maybe. Mom was rationalizing why she stayed with Dad.

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He tried to stop the movies reeling through his head. He never had a reason to distrust his ex until three months ago. She told him everything. How they met at the hotel bar, how they flirted, how she invited him back to her room, how they had sex multiple times. All because she’d seen a wrinkle, and wanted to know whether she still had it.

Now, he doubted every memory, like he was seeing his life as an outsider. Every image of her coming through the front door, late. Every work conference and girl’s weekend. His paranoia whispered about her personal trainer at the gym, who he knew was gay. Christ, he was so stupid.

His brother said to hire a private investigator, to confirm it wasn’t the first time, but why? He was supposed to be a military intelligence specialist. He aced all the Space Force training and handled classified information. It would be like a teacher humiliating him in front of class by making him read aloud every exam question he bombed. Ten years to identify red flags and he scored a zero. He didn’t need a report to know how painfully all his training and instincts failed him.

His kitchen espresso machine interrupted his careening thoughts, humming deep bass notes as it heated water.

He rubbed his eyes and set his pad on the kitchen island.

The file, Blackbird, was the Pentagon’s new Holy Grail, and as enigmatic as the reason he still lived in this house. Allegedly, it was an artificial intelligence chip that packed transistors onto silicon in a novel 3D configuration five times as dense as what was on the current market.

Five times as dense made it five times as dangerous and infinitely more valuable. The National Space Force Intelligence Center had amassed millions of pages on it. An AI-disguised voice on a burner phone yanked him out of bed a half hour ago. It told him to pack for a long flight, then whooshed NSFIC’s thousand-plus page synopsis to his pad.

Destination unknown.

NSFIC’s tome glowered at him, like the boxes, demanding he do something. He’d read the first few pages and then lost focus. Now, at 3:34 am, with his divorce settlement conference in a few days, the boxes pleaded for attention. He’d skipped to the end of the report, then reversed, skimming through random pages in between.

He didn’t need to read the report to know the Pentagon thought war was coming to Southeast Asia, or why the US hunted this technology.

The Chinese Navy had been harassing ships along trade routes for a decade or more. The People’s Liberation Army Navy disabled ship’s engines with water cannons, blinded crews with military lasers, rammed ships, and on and on. In national security circles’ vernacular, these were gray-zone tactics, or creeping annexation, because China operated in the gray zone between peace and war. They didn’t limit themselves to the sea, either. China built roads across contested areas in the India-China border, then sent military units to defend them, provoking skirmishes and troop buildups on both sides. China pressed as hard as they could, wearing down their neighbors. Like a lunchroom bully poking kids in the chest, after each successful shove, China encroached further.

In the last few years, China escalated, adopting tactics Russia used to drive the US out of the Middle East. They’d begun arming terror groups to attack shipping lanes in the South China Sea. China intended to sow chaos, and then declare a security emergency as a pretext to invade Taiwan.

The Pentagon hunted Blackbird because America didn’t have it. America outsourced manufacturing leading-edge microchips decades ago. DARPA had been experimenting with AI coordinating multiple unmanned fighter planes in a dogfight while a human supervised the battle. Blackbird’s computing power took the human out of the equation, which meant the losses in the Taiwan straight would be lopsided against America by ten, maybe twenty to one.

War was about human submission. Kill the enemy until they submit. It wouldn’t take too many youthful death masks on social media before Congress demanded America pull out of the region. China’s megalomaniac dictator would crush Taiwan like it had Hong Kong, using Blackbird’s AI capabilities to silence and censor dissent, and then jail and poison his opposition. Success in Taiwan would make him hungry for more.

America depended on strategic partnerships in Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia to produce chips. China’s gray zone tactics caused the US to look impotent, so those partnerships looked increasingly fragile.

He gleaned none of that from the NSFIC’s magnum opus.

In fact, browsing through the report, he felt sure Blackbird didn’t exist. Every page was like a report on Bigfoot. Here are pictures. We zoomed in and investigated, but it’s not here.

Nobody knew who built it, or where. There were lots of images of warehouses, fabrication plants, and drones, but none of it, Blackbird, which would be a five-inch by five-inch colorful board, or maybe a one-foot by half-foot box.

Most damning, no evidence where Blackbird was manufactured. Making leading-edge chips required hundreds of megawatts of power, thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of concrete, millions of square feet of factory floor space, and billions of gallons of water a year. There would be electric lines, roads, bulldozers, trucks, parking lots, and cooling towers.

Making Blackbird would leave a planetary stain somewhere. Over three years, every suspicious structure bigger than a shed had been imaged, tagged, and engaged.

The AI voice that rousted him from bed to hunt Blackbird promised a new lead. The empty cartons on his floors rasped that every lead was a dead end, urging him to stay and pack.

The burner phone on his kitchen island vibrated, “Two minutes cafe. Roads are fine.” His partner, Alexis Kane. She meant jefe, not cafe. The voice-to-text in her SUV scrambled the word. “Wheels up in 60.”

Decision time.

Trisky, his Belgian Malinois, had been sleeping on her bed in the dining room. She sat up, ears perked, and then strolled over.

His espresso machine hissed and wheezed dark roasted willpower. Trisky sat at his feet and whimpered. She knew what the sound of a vibrating phone and the smell of oh-dark-thirty espresso meant.

Stone kneeled and let Trisky lick his face while he scratched her spine’s gray and black fur.

“I’ll miss you too. Jeff will take good care of you.”

Trisky whined disagreement. Jeff-the-almost-vet, his neighbor, watched his house and ran a dog daycare. Although, Trisky didn’t like the daycare, and this house wouldn’t be his soon.

“I can’t take you where I am going.” Although, he didn’t know that.

Trisky barked. A smart dog. She knew.

“Don’t worry. The little terror won’t be there.” Stone gave her another pet and stood to get his espresso. One of Jeff’s daycare customers had some yappy, stubborn little Yorkie groomed like a drowned rat that growled and barked at shadows. It nipped Trisky. She could have killed it. Instead, she treated it like a playful puppy. Its owner, some pampered stroller mom with thousand-dollar hair, blamed Trisky for scaring her little poo and threatened to call the police.

“We’re only here another few weeks.” Stone eyed the empty boxes lining the walls. “You only need to keep from killing that thing twenty-six more days. Then, we’ll find you a new daycare.”

Trisky moaned and lay down with her head between her paws.

“If I could take you with me, I would.” Wherever that was. The NSFIC report only identified where he wasn’t going.

Stone lifted the half-full vodka bottle next to the espresso machine. Lately, it muted the shrill audiobook of his wife describing blowing another man, crying over it, and then crying over him leaving her.

Before he poured, his front door opened up. Trisky barked and hopped to the door, tail wagging. Metal grated on metal as Kane inserted her door key.

Ty would have bet a taco Kane rolled here in sweatpants or pajamas. Instead, she stomped across his threshold in gray and black digital camo fatigues, leaving a trail of snow. White snowflakes salted her short black hair. Her ice-blue eyes surveyed the empty boxes piled along the walls, then the vodka bottle.

Stone put the vodka down and slugged his espresso.

Kane gave Trisky a pet. “You ready, jefe?”

“Not really.”

“I see that. You need help?” Her eyes flicked over the boxes.

He shook his head. “Want an espresso?”

“I’m good. I thought you’d be packed by now. Didn’t you finalize the settlement?”

“Settlement conference is Friday.”

“You’re not having cold feet, are you?”

Stone didn’t answer.

“I didn’t save your ass twice only to see you poisoned by a snake, jefe. Once a cheater—”

“Right, I know.” Kane acted like she knew more than she let on about his soon-to-be-ex, but he never asked. “Truth is, I go back and forth between leaving it all here and throwing gasoline over it and burning it to the ground. I can’t look at it. Why would I want to take it?”

Her lips curled into a smirk. “Count me in for the housewarming party. But we won’t be back for a while. Definitely not before the closing on this house.”

“I don’t need to be there. Just one more opportunity for her to badger me into counseling. You know she called my Mom last night, hoping she’d convince me not to move out?”

“You can tell me in the car. Do you need any of this stuff?”

He didn’t. He shook his head.

“So leave it here. It’ll give her hope you’re coming back.”

“Why would I do that?”

“So we can crush it later with one of those Ginsu missiles.” Kane meant the RX9, a Hellfire missile equipped with six blades that shredded terrorists inside buildings at Mach 1.3.

“Thanks for having my back through all this.”

“I always have your back. We can continue this on the road.”

Trisky sat at the front door and barked. Kane looked at Trisky panting and wagging her tail, then back to Stone. “No.”

“Message didn’t say not to.” To Trisky, Stone said, “Isn’t that right, girl? You want to go with us?”

Trisky double barked.

“They might not let her on the plane, jefe.”

“Teams take their K-9 units all the time. I not leaving her as a hostage for my marriage.”

Kane and Trisky exchanged looks. Trisky whimpered. Kane shook her head, saying, “Fine,” and then Trisky barked and panted enthusiastically.

Stone grabbed his coat on the kitchen island. “Did you read the file?”

“A who’s who of stalled careers looking for the Pentagon’s latest cryptid.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“My career stalled out a long time ago. That’s why I took a job as a contractor, same as you. More money, less bullshit.”

“I mean, doesn’t it bother you the file has zilch?” Stone asked, sitting on his stairs and donning his boots.

“World biggest disinformation campaign is what I thought a few hours ago. To get us to spend three years and billions of dollars—not to mention burning up top agents. All that’s missing is a meme of General Greer with big hair saying, I’m not saying it was aliens, but…”

“Disinformation was my read too. Why would they wake us in the middle of the night?” Stone laced his boots and eyed the espresso machine, thinking about a second.

“Well, they didn’t wake you, jefe.”

That was true. He’d been tossing and turning. “Wake you then—”

“Who says they woke me?”

“You had a date?” Stone stood.

Kane stood at the open front door, waving Trisky through it. “If you call sitting on a couch for three hours talking instead of kissing a date. She invited me in. Promised kissing. We never got to that, so I was ready to leave anyway.” She retrieved a key fob from her pocket and clicked it. Outside, her SUV started and hydraulics groaned, opening the rear hatch so Trisky could hop in. “The timing, I can explain. I said, thought. Enterprise is in the Pacific and was attacked a few hours ago.”

Stone eyed his expresso machine behind him, and then the snow beyond his front door. “We know who’s responsible?”

“China is responsible. No doubt about that. Some other group pulled the trigger, but they haven’t released a name yet.”

“And you think it’s Blackbird?”

“There’s video,” she said, waving at the open door. “Our satellite was jammed during the attack, but we have something from Indian Intelligence. We can watch it in the car.”

“If China has Blackbird, and they think it works, they’ll be blasting us out of the Taiwan Straight.”

“They know it works, jefe. Five dead.”

“China can’t make it. They’d have used it before now.” He stood and aimed for the blizzard.

“They stole it. Which means, we need to find it before they reverse-engineer and mass produce it.”

A whiteout blanketed Stone’s front porch. Behind him, metal scraped. Kane, inserting her key. “Leave it unlocked,” he said to the wall of snow. “I’ll text her I had to leave in a hurry and she needs to watch the place.”

Stone felt a smirk on his back. “Evil. Giving her hope. I like this plan.”

He inhaled and blew out a ragged breath. Kane crunched past him, towards her black SUV speckled in snow, a duffel bag in each hand. His duffel bags. Distracted, he’d forgotten his luggage.

He smiled. A knot in his chest untied and let him breathe. He knew he’d made this decision months ago and was just now realizing it. The duffel bags reminded him of the first time he met Kane. “Just like old times, when we deployed together.”

“We are being deployed, jefe. The war is in the Pacific this time. And if you keep up with that old-timer shit, you’ll be my first kill.”

Synopsis:

When China steals advanced artificial intelligence microchips from an unknown source and uses them to attack the USS Enterprise, Ty Stone and his partner Alexis Kane are called to find its vulnerabilities before China capitalizes on its new first-strike capability.

To defeat this new technology, Stone and Kane need to find the lab making it. But whose technology is it? No known lab can print semiconductors this detailed. Stone and Kane must hunt the globe under the ticking time bomb of war.

Chapter 1

South China Sea, 400 nautical miles south of the Taiwan Straight.

Waves rocked the bow of the fishing trawler, irritating Captain Xia Yi’s ulcer. Zheng Chao, the political commissar, stood beside him in her Navy dress uniform, an army-green briefcase at her feet. Her austere mouth and eyes judged the South China Sea as if nature answered to the Communist Party of China. The social media censorship algorithms would certainly have him believe so, sometimes scrubbing inaccurate weather predictions. He preferred the sea, where could see the weather with his own eyes. Today, sunny blue skies, with a high probability of thunderous death.

“90 Gōnglǐ.” Ninety kilometers. Petty Officer First Class Wei faked a Beijing dialect to impress Chao, calling distance-to-target with one hand steering and the other supporting the rifle slung over his shoulder. He was young and ambitious. Yi was too, once, when he left Hong Kong. Aged ginger is more powerful and spicy, his father would say, meaning wisdom came with age. Now he knew Chao’s reports only delivered punishment. The best compliment she’d give was an empty text box on her forms.

“Slow to half throttle and stop at eighty-three kilometers from target,” Yi told Wei.

The boat slowed, which brought clanging footfalls up the stairs. Salman something-or-other, the leader of the Islamists they’d been training, stomped within hot, black-bearded garlic breath distance of Yi. Salman wore green-gray camouflage, his shoulders patched with red-on-white missiles.

Yi’s belt squeezed his ulcer. Chao told him this was a covert mission. How did the Central Committee expect him to trust their videos, their writings, her words, when contradictory information filled his senses? Above the blue sky, satellites watched them. This was one of the most surveilled seas in the world.

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The crew he brought from his battleship Fuzhou disguised themselves in khaki police uniforms from an Indian province, Bengaluru, while he and Chao wore Chinese Navy uniforms.

The satellites would spot them, and foreign facial recognition would identify them.

His stomach burned. It could be a tactical mistake. But Chao was a general’s daughter, unlikely to make such mistakes.

“Why we slowing?” Salman spat broken English in Yi’s face.

Yi gestured discreetly to Wei. Wei acknowledged by swiveling and raising his rifle at Salman.

“This close enough,” Yi said, in English.

“No.” Salman pursed his lips and turned to Chao. “You said you’d take us to attack Americans.”

Chao flashed a sidelong glance to Yi before returning to surveying the horizon.

“This close enough,“ Yi repeated. Thankfully his crew disarmed the group before boarding, or by now he’d have ordered the Islamists mowed down. Their crusade made them insolent and too willing to die. Killing them now would mean mission failure, but Chao might overlook it since she was as irritated as he was.

Salman’s head jerked back and forth between Yi and Chao, then his muggy breath paused on Yi. “We can’t launch here. The American’s will launch all their planes and we will miss.”

Salman watched too many American propaganda videos. An alpha strike, the US Navy called it: launch all ninety-seven aircraft from USS Enterprise in under twenty minutes in a massive attack.

Americans wouldn’t have time to launch all their planes. Behind Yi were one-hundred blue drones arranged in a grid on the trawler’s deck like a flock of deranged birds. Each could fly eighty-three kilometers in under fifteen minutes. They had enough time to launch the drones and escape. Enterprise didn’t.

“Next attack, you closer. This test.” Yi didn’t want to waste breath explaining tactics in broken English to a terrorist that wanted to bomb civilization back to the stone age. Salman was arrogant. His group was just another line item in the Central Committee’s five-year plan to expel the West from the South China Sea. His men would soon get the death they sought.

“We launch here.” Yi nodded at Wei, who kept his eyes and rifle on Salman while throttling the engines to stop.

Salman huffed, his face twitching from Yi to Chao, then he rattled down the metal stairs to the fishing deck.

“Good medicine tastes bitter,” Chao said.

Yi inhaled the salt air, eyeing the thin blue-white wisps smiling at the trawler, and swallowing his acid reflux. Advising this group tasted bitter and foolish. Desperate. ‘A single slip may cause lasting sorrow’ was the more appropriate proverb today. The artificial intelligence of at least seven nations watched from orbit and would spot his men in seconds, along with him and Chao in uniform. How would they interpret the message?

She said not to worry about surveillance. Like other commissars, she was stubborn. The first rule in the Chinese Navy, even when the political commissar was wrong, she was right. When the political commissar was the daughter of a high-ranking general, the first rule was a matter of career survival, or maybe just survival.

Chao scanned the ocean, her hands folded behind her back as if she could see the American battle fleet over the horizon. “Clear skies. Today will be a good day for the Chinese people.”

“And a bad day for the Americans,” he grimaced, holding the reflux at the back of his throat. The sharks trailing the trawler for scraps would have a feast.

She bent her knees, lifted the army-green briefcase, and thrust it at him. “I think now is the time to let Blackbird fly.”

Lava erupted in his throat, as if she held a dragon shooting fire into his belly.

The second rule in the Chinese Navy, every commander needed spies. Survival depended on it. He’d surmised the contents of the briefcase from his own network inside the Ministry of State Intelligence.

He eyed the green fake leather, then Chao, swallowing heat and unsure whether he successfully deadpanned his face. The briefcase’s maw scowled, daring him to breathe.

‘Blackbird’ was the code word for the newest Artificial Intelligence chip that the Ministry of State Intelligence stole. Every MSI agent bragged they’d breached the most secure facility in the world and stolen two GPUs.

Who would suspect that Chao brought one of Beijing’s crown jewels onto his boat in an old briefcase? A general’s daughter, she was almost as arrogant as Salman. It should be in a lab, getting scanned and reverse-engineered. The uniforms, the location, the target, the chip, all a message. Someone high up wanted a demonstration. Her father? She thought herself brave. There was no difference between stupidity and bravery, except the boasting afterwards. This was the pinnacle of stupidity.

He reached for the briefcase. She cocked her head slightly, the thinnest smile creasing her mouth. “Two-three-six-eight.”

He clicked the combination, then his thumbs slid over the brass buttons. The locks clupped and the briefcase’s mouth opened like a shy dental patient.

He peeked. On a foam cushion, a gold-rimmed black square, with another a rainbow-colored smaller square in its center. It looked identical to the chips piloting the drone infantry behind him. It could be American, or Korean, or Israeli. There was no way to know.

Blackbird, purportedly, could pilot a drone less than a meter above the water, even in rough seas, and learn American naval defenses in-flight. As smart as a human operator, virtually invisible over the water, without a signal to jam. The drones they’d launch were dive-bombers, with enough payload capacity to deliver a backpack nuke, although today they were armed with conventional explosives. Launch and forget it.

A dangerous game. Chao brought one chip, for one drone, but that’s all that would be needed if Blackbird worked. Even if the US Navy shot down the other ninety-nine drones, one hit could provoke a war. Chao’s father, if he developed this plan, was counting on a limited American response. Or no response. Chinese media claimed Americans were tired of war, but he believed that as much as he believed the weather.

He shook his head, closing the briefcase. “Salt air will ruin this. This is not the place.” He pinched the words over the burning at the back of his throat.

“Our victory today is assured, comrade Captain Yi.” Chao neither flinched nor looked aside while delivering the threat.

He swallowed acid reflux and eyed the crew on the deck. Politicians made war. Soldiers and citizens suffered the consequences. To challenge her further was to invite her to question his loyalty in front of her deputy commissars and his executive officer once they returned to Fuzhou. His family would live a long life, shamed and dishonored. His social score would plummet. They’d be forced to move to the countryside, where even the pigs would look askance and question their loyalty. He’d prefer death.

He swiveled to the stern, taking the briefcase and shouting for one of his crew. A petty officer, Huang, volunteered. He was young and enthusiastic about death, his boots clanging the metal stairs two at a time.

“Install this on a suitable drone.” Yi shoved the briefcase at Huang. Huang eyed Yi, and then Chao, who approved with a slight nod. Huang spun and flew down the stairs with the briefcase as fast as he’d risen. If the salt air ruined Beijing’s crown jewels, there would be bullets waiting for all of them.

Yi pointed and shouted in Chinese for his crew to prepare the rigid inflatable boats at the rear of the trawler. To Salman, in English, he said, “We take rafts. You take trawler to port.”

“She promise me more drones,” Salman said, pointing at Chao. “And she promise me anti-ship missiles.”

Chao nodded, a smile rupturing her lips. “Drones below. Today, you get all missiles you can handle.”

Huang scurried through the grid of blue fixed-wing drones covering every meter of the boat’s football-field-sized fishing deck. He kneeled. An Islamist handed Huang a yellow power drill and tools. In one well-trained, fluid motion, Huang opened a panel, removed the old chip circuit board, opened the briefcase, and then inserted Blackbird. He plugged the drone into a nearby laptop, fingered the laptop’s screen, then disconnected it.

Huang stood and gestured thumbs-up to Yi and Chao.

“Salman watches too much propaganda,” Chao said, inspecting the drone flock. “They won’t use aircraft to destroy this trawler. This was wise, launching from here.”

Yi let a smile sneak across his face. Politics was far above his pay grade. He worked only to stay out of Chao’s reports. But imagining Salman’s group dead gave him some short-term pleasure, and plotting his escape from the trawler soothed his stomach.

“Launch Blackbird.” Yi’s voice echoed louder and harsher than he intended.

He grimaced as the front row of drones’ propellers buzzed like bees.

The first row of drones hummed off the deck. These were China’s latest copy of an Iranian design, vertical-takeoff fixed-wing drones. The flock rose and as it picked up speed, each bird’s propellers swiveled, accelerating them towards the American fleet.

The drones banked east, becoming a swarm of geese against the blue sky. One goose descended and disappeared against the water. A school of sharks splashed in the trawler's wake, only meters beyond the bulwarks.

Chao gave him a sidelong smile, as if reading his thoughts. Yi ordered his crew to the inflatable boats. His crew needed to cover the fourteen kilometers to Fuzhou in under fifteen minutes.

Wei stepped forward, rifle up, and aimed it at the back of Salman’s head.

Chao put her hand over the barrel and pushed it down. “Not this time. No need.”