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.