Blackbird, Chapter 1
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.
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.”
Wow. Lots of good tension. War is bubbling on the surface. Great post.