“That’s a little extreme for one diver, XO. Let’s notify the duty sonar ship first and see if they have any further info,” said Riley.

“Too slow. We need to send a Pinnacle out now, sir,” said Simmons.

The communications tech looked from Simmons to Riley. “Sirs, nothing’s working here. I can’t even get my own phone to hook on to the network. It’s like the whole spectrum is down.”

On the main deck below, Horowitz rubbed the ache at the base of his neck. He angrily slammed another magazine he’d cadged from a fellow sailor into his M4. They’d found his weapon still lying on the deck. He absent-mindedly ran his tongue across his lips, realizing he was thirsty despite being soaking wet. He’d read that this was what happened when you went into shock, but he wasn’t going to say anything about it now. Falling off the ship and then bitching about being scared seemed like a good way to blow his shot at becoming a SEAL.

Horowitz looked around the harbor at the wall of U.S. Navy steel assembled there. He couldn’t wait to get to sea and wreak some revenge on whoever had done it.

Then the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier tied up just across the harbor, seemed to lift a few feet from the water, as if the hundred-thousand-ton ship were being conjured skyward. The shove of the blast wave pushed him back to the bulkhead.

As he scrambled to his feet, Horowitz stared, agape, as the Nimitz-class carrier settled back into the water with orange flames and black smoke pouring from its deck. He watched as the carrier’s hull begin to break apart about two-thirds of the way down from the bow.

“Oh, shit. The reactors,” muttered Horowitz.

What the hell? They weren’t supposed to be offloading for another day.

When he’d first seen the ramp come down, Jakob Sanders had pulled out his tablet to recheck the manifest. The Golden Wave, 720 feet, flagged out of Liberia. A RO/RO carrying cars from Shanghai. It had been pre-cleared on the manifest but it was twenty-four hours early. And now it was mucking up his day.

Even standing in the guard shack in the neighboring parking lot, he could feel the impact of the doublewide metal ramp slamming down onto the pier. Sanders had always thought the big roll-on, roll-off ship had the aesthetic appeal of a Costco plunked down on top of a boat. But that was the idea. It could carry 550 vehicles, and those vehicles could drive right off the ship and into his lot. Where they would then sit, waiting to be driven to various dealerships around the island.

Sanders tried to raise his boss on the radio but all he got was static. He shook his head and looked down to check the time and date on his Casio G-Lide watch. Yep, he had it right. They were offloading too soon. More important, the web-enabled watch’s last update showed that the offshore buoy readings looked promising for some head-high swells. Just five more hours in the lot and then he’d be free of his guard shack and back in the water at Kewalos. If the surf was as good as his watch promised, it would be one of those days when it just didn’t matter where you’d gone to school or that you wore a black polyester uniform on land.

A series of distant booms snapped his attention from his watch. He hit the deck and covered his head with his arms as the shack’s flimsy metal walls shook. After a few seconds, he got to his knees and peered through the open door at the fuel-tank farm next to pier 29. No fire. Blue skies didn’t indicate thunder. Then the pier began to vibrate again from another low rumble, like an earthquake. Damn, he didn’t want to be caught here by the water if it led to a tsunami.

More distant booms echoed off the hills, but the noise was washed out by hundreds of motors starting up inside the Golden Wave. What were they doing? Didn’t they feel the quake? There could be more aftershocks.

Sanders remembered the public-service announcements he’d watched as a kid said you should stand in a doorway during an earthquake, but he looked at the flimsy shack walls and then crawled outside. He felt more booms reverberate and saw some smoke rising behind the Golden Wave, but the bulk of the huge ship blocked whatever was happening across the harbor.

Then one of those new Geely SUVs rolled down the ramp. Maybe they were trying to get the cars off before another quake? But where were they going to park them? They’d be better off keeping them on the ship and riding it out.

Sanders watched as another and then another of the SUVs moved down the ramp and parked. He’d always thought the Geely looked like a ripped-off Range Rover Defilade. But they were so cheap that he could almost afford one. The paint sure sucked, though. The first dozen were a decent silver or blue. But the rest were a faded matte green.

Then he heard a piercing squeal, like something gouging the steel deck of the ship. Behind the last SUV, what looked like a telephone pole on its end gradually emerged and pointed down the ramp. Behind that pole was a massive green bulk that slowly nosed its way out to the top of the ramp and then tilted downward.

Shit, that was a tank! Then another tank moved down the ramp, followed by an eight-wheeled vehicle that looked like a tank’s little brother.

Sanders saw the red stars on the tanks. What were Chinese tanks doing coming off the ship? The manifest said nothing about that. And who the hell would be buying those? Maybe they were for training exercises out at Camp Schofield?

Jakob looked around and realized he was alone.

His next move was to bring out his phone and start shooting video. It would be worth a couple beers; maybe he could even sell it on the viz-net.

Then what looked like six beer kegs flew up into the air and raced toward downtown. “Drones?” Sanders said in a whisper.

Each squat Pigeon surveillance drone was indeed about the size of a fourteen-gallon beer keg, and each had a small rotor bay at its bottom. They all took off to seek out the highest points in Honolulu, where they would land. From these perches, the unarmed Pigeons would suck in electromagnetic and digital signals and then throw out an island-wide wave of electronic disturbance.

Just then Jakob heard another bang on the pier. It was the ramp coming down off the Hildy Manor, another RO/RO tied up beyond the Golden Wave. None of this shit was authorized. They didn’t have the paperwork, and the lot was already going to be jammed. There was no way he’d be able to fit the cars from not one but two ships into the waiting lot, let alone a bunch of tanks.

He held the phone at arm’s length, cursing his stupid job again, this time because he couldn’t afford some viz glasses.

“Jakob Sanders at pier twenty-nine in Honolulu,” he said, staring into the pinhole camera. “Got an unauthorized delivery here as you can see,” Sanders said. “Some trucks, Geelys, and check this out, tanks! Chinese tanks. Not sure what the drill is today, but we’re about to go find out. Bet you never saw anything like this in real life. Me either. Stay tuned.”

Sanders set his phone on the windowsill in his shack so that it was recording the scene and then marched with a bold step toward the Golden Wave. Dumb-ass sailors. They’d just have to stay on the pier until it all got sorted out.

By the time Sanders had made his way to the ramp that connected the pier to the parking lot, he could literally feel the power of the tanks’ engines in his chest. The tanks slowly moved forward, a few feet at a time, testing the ramp.

A flash of movement and an earsplitting clang made him whip his head around. Big metal panels were being tossed over the side of the Evening Resolve — a 480-foot cargo container ship registered in Dalian — and landing on the pier. Then a miniature air force began to assemble in formation above the Evening Resolve. To Sanders, the quadcopters looked like those spy drones the paparazzi used to buzz any Hollywood star dumb enough to still have an outdoor wedding. The Directorate’s electric V1000 drone actually shared a heritage with the commercial systems, but its agility and stealth had made it the platform of choice for covert Chinese “risk-elimination” strikes in Africa and the former Republic of Indonesia.