“I will run diagnostics and flush the laser power systems,” said Chang. He kept moving in order to avoid thinking about what was happening on the Earth’s surface below.

“Good,” said Huan. “Then see if you can pull up the imagery from the attack; I want to watch it again later.” Of course you do, thought Chang.

The coffee was just like that first cup his father had allowed him to sip from, back when he was seven. No sugar. No cream. It had tasted acrid, awful, not like the vanilla-flavored coffee his mom had loved. “When you’re in the Navy, you don’t have time onboard to add in all that junk,” his father had explained, typical of the kind of advice he gave his kids.

The boatswain’s mate in charge of brewing up the coffee on the USS Coronado was no barista either, and so the bridge crew all sipped his awful coffee, watching the harbor wake up around them. Stim tabs and the other pharm provided by the corpsmen worked better, but the Navy clung to its traditions. The bitter coffee was as much a part of the morning watch as the sunrise.

Simmons set down his mug and eyed the sunlight illuminating the Coronado’s deck. The LCS had just celebrated its tenth birthday, but Jamie still thought the sharp, triple-hulled trimaran design gave it the look of a futuristic starship, like out of a Star Wars movie. His dad loved that old stuff, so much so that he had taken Jamie and his sister, Mackenzie, to one of the reboot movies when they were way too young to understand it. Their mother had gotten so mad when she’d found out. It was still a good memory, though, Mackenzie coming home with the empty paper popcorn bucket, cherishing it in the way that little kids make souvenirs of the most mundane objects. That was one of the few happy memories from before his father left, before Mackenzie died.

Simmons walked over to a spot near one of the port windows to inspect a blemish no bigger than a quarter. He ran his finger over the epoxy patch. On the last anti-piracy patrol, a burst of machine-gun fire had gone right through the window and two spots below in the ship’s aluminum superstructure, now also repaired. No one had been hurt, fortunately, but it reminded the crew that the LCS had been designed for speed, not for heavy combat. Some of the crew had later wrapped Captain Riley’s chair in aluminum foil as “ballistic protection,” a joke that went over poorly with the captain.

As Simmons watched the morning sun paint the other warships in the crowded harbor orange, he savored the moment, knowing this was one of the last times he would command the bridge. He’d let Riley know what he’d decided when they arrived in San Diego.

Petty Officer Third Class Randall Jefferson, a young sailor on the bridge, approached, looking almost sheepish when he saw the XO lost in thought.

“Sir, I am sorry to disturb you, but you asked me to notify you if anything came up,” said Jefferson. “The sonar grid picked up movement. It just flashes in and out, right up near the ship. It’s probably some fish or a dolphin…”

“Don’t apologize for not letting your guard down in port. Deploy REMUS and let’s take a look.”

He gave the orders to lower what looked like a neon-yellow torpedo into the water. REMUS, the remote environmental monitoring unit, had actually started out in the commercial sector, much like its mother ship’s original design as a high-speed ferry. The unmanned underwater system, essentially a robotic miniature submarine, had been developed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, mainly for civilian applications like port facility inspection, pollution monitoring, and underwater surveying. It was a mainstay of Discovery and Travel Channel sims. But what worked to capture Shark Week footage also worked for underwater guard duty.

Simmons entered the bridge and stood behind Jefferson, who was now operating the mini-sub with a first-generation Sony PlayStation — type controller. The handheld video-game-style controller was supposed to be intuitive for the sailors, but it felt more like a relic to a generation who now gamed in 3-D immersion. The vid from REMUS played out alongside a live overhead satellite feed of the ship’s position, a pattern analysis of surface and air traffic around their position, and a multicolor spherical chart that showed status reports of the crew and ship systems.

“Not picking anything up on thermal, sir,” said Jefferson. “Let’s see what visual has.”

“Give me the full screen,” said Simmons.

The camera pivoted and showed a gray mass of shadows on the screen. Simmons squinted, as if willing the murky water to reveal its secrets.

“Hello there,” said Jefferson. He zoomed the camera in on a dark form slowly circling under the ship’s stern. The camera began to focus.

There. No mistaking it. Against the dark blue background was the faint silhouette of a diver.

“Some damn fool local out messing around where he shouldn’t,” said Jefferson.

But then the diver stopped and raised his arms above his head as if praying beneath the LCS’s hull.

“He’s got something in his hands,” said Jefferson. The diver held what looked like a trash-can lid. He lazily kicked his feet and inched closer to the Coronado’s hull.

Simmons fought down the coffee climbing back up into his throat.

“Sound Force Protection alert! Possible terror attack, FP Condition Delta!” shouted Simmons. “And wake the captain. Tell him we have a diver placing what looks like a limpet mine on the hull.”

He picked up a headset and steadied his voice, knowing any fear in it would resonate throughout the ship.

“This is the XO. Force Protection security team to the port side. Cycle rudders and energize sonars. Set Material Condition Zebra,” Simmons said. “FP team, we have a diver attempting to place an explosive device on the hull. I want him off. Batteries release. Fire at will.”

Chaos broke out as sailors ran to the port side and tried to see where the diver was. Through the bridge’s open hatch, Simmons heard the shouts getting increasingly desperate.

“There he is.”

“No, he’s over there!”

“Get the hell out of my way!” yelled Petty Officer Anton Horowitz. He had been standing guard duty by the gangway on the starboard side, and he pushed his way through the scrum to the port side.

Horowitz leaned as far over the railing as he could and fired his M4 carbine methodically into the water, making a looping pattern of splashes from bow to stern. It was a strange thought to have in the middle of a terror attack, Horowitz knew, but this was actually fun. He had reenlisted only two months ago for just this kind of work, with a promise from the skipper that he’d be allowed to try out for the SEALs. He’d already submitted the required DNA and blood samples for SEAL selection and had been maxing his hypertrophy workouts.

Back on the bridge, Jefferson saw the ripples that Horowitz’s bullets made as tiny white lines on his screen that stopped after a few feet. When he switched to thermal view, they looked like a series of yellow needles jabbing into the water that quickly disappeared as their heat dissipated. Many were perilously close to the REMUS, but few were near the diver.

“Sir, they’re not getting him,” said Jefferson.

“Swing REMUS around and maneuver fifty meters away. Then I want you to bring it back full speed at us,” said Simmons.

“Sir?” asked Jefferson.

They had said Tokyo was big, but up close it seemed to go on forever.

Major Alexei Denisov’s MiG-35 fighter-bomber was doing 875 kilometers per hour, just beneath the sound barrier, to avoid leaving a telltale sonic boom. And yet the dense buildings below seemed like they would never end. The plan seemed to be working, though. The threat-detection icon on the luminous screen at his right did not register anything urgent. He kept his finger on the toggle switch for the plane’s multifunction self-protection jammer, but so far the fighter had been unchallenged.