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.