Fortunately, at the moment Darling’s crew had help hunting the Directorate submarine. The USS John Warner, a Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine, was herding the submarine away from the carrier strike group into the P-8’s picket line of sonobuoys. Pinned in, Foxglove 2 would die.

The main battle-network communications feed blared into their headsets, garbled from the jamming.

“Damn it, Hammer, turn that —” said Darling.

Another voice cut him off. “Hydrophone effects. Sonobuoys just located Foxglove Two, said Hyde, one of the two crew members who handled the acoustic sensor systems. “It’s heading on a course away from the strike group, twelve knots.”

Darling nosed the P-8 over hard to get closer to the sea, pushing the throttles forward and banking the jet toward the intercept point projected on the screen in front of him. The plane’s speed edged up to almost five hundred knots as the crew counted down the seconds until they could fire on the submarine.

“At five hundred feet, releasing Mark Fifty-Four —” said his copilot, Fang Treehorn.

“Incoming, incoming. Stonefish inbound on the Bush,” interrupted Jekyll, the plane’s other sensor operator. “Goddamn NSA hackers were supposed to be able to keep those things from even getting off the ground.”

Near the horizon, faint white stalks grew skyward from the area around the Bush. The fleet’s defense systems began firing dozens of RIM-161 SM-3 missiles, designed to intercept incoming Stonefish ballistic missiles as they entered the atmosphere.

“Bush’s ATHENA shows it as twenty-six inbound. Our SAMs are countering,” Jekyll reported, giving a play-by-play of the air battle.

“Mark Fifty-Four away,” said Fang. The plane lifted slightly as the Mark 54 was released, and the torpedo splashed into the water below, its propeller already rotating toward the submarine.

The air-defense communications feed coming through the headphones suddenly became intelligible, then quickly reverted back to garbled noise. Fang had a pair of binoculars up, trying to track the dozens of air-defense missiles that raced up into the sky to meet the warheads arcing down toward the carrier and its escort ships.

“Where’d they come from?” said Fang.

“China,” said Darling.

“Yeah, asshole, I know,” said Fang. “Surprise attacks don’t have just one surprise. Think they’re nukes?”

“Nope. If it was a nuke, they’d only send one,” said Darling.

“Stonefish inbound in fifteen seconds,” said Jekyll, her drawl an attempt to hide the stress she was feeling.

“Mark Fifty-Four impact; Foxglove Two destroyed,” said Hyde.

“Ten seconds,” said Jekyll.

“Keep working the sonobuoys, Hyde,” said Darling. He felt no satisfaction from taking out the sub; the Type 93 hadn’t been the main threat after all. He felt worse than unsatisfied — he felt useless. His plane and crew were of no help at this moment.

“Wait, I got one — damn, it’s pretty close to us,” said Fang, watching through his binoculars. “And here it goes… splashdown.”

“Shit, ninety miles off target. That’s quite a miss,” said Darling. “Maybe the Stonefish isn’t the bogeyman after all.”

Fang kept staring through his binoculars.

“Fang?”

A flash on the horizon gave Darling his answer.

“Impact… impact, impact,” said Jekyll.

Darling thanked God that they were so far away from the blast, and then a wave of guilt washed over him.

“Get John Warner on the net,” said Darling, “and see how they want to help with recovery. We need to set up a sonobuoy perimeter around the task force.”

“Update from the Stockdale’s ATHENA,” Jekyll said, naming one of the escort ships. “Confirms what we saw. At least three Stonefish hit the Bush. The ship’s, um, offline now.”

“Can’t raise the John Warner,” said Hammer. “GPS is offline again.”

“Same up front. Checking Warner’s last location,” said Darling. He tried not to look at Fang, who was fiddling with his helmet and surreptitiously wiping tears away.

The P-8 was banked in a turn when Darling saw something in the water below. He squinted, willing the jet lower so he could see. Fang brought his binoculars back up even as the display screens showed the debris in detail.

“That’s too far from the task force to be from the Bush or any of the escort ships,” said Darling. “What is that? Our Directorate sub?”

“No, Foxglove Two’s last position is on the grid way over there,” said Fang, jabbing a finger at a cockpit screen.

“Shit,” said Jekyll, nervously tapping her hand on her knee. “This is the impact point for that Stonefish we saw. It didn’t miss. That’s what’s left of the John Warner.”

The F-35 rotated its nose up and then looped over in a corkscrew twist, giving Worm one last view of the sky through the bottom of his plane.

Seventy-one rounds. Worm designated the target, feeling the jet adjust slightly.

As he arced back down toward the Osprey’s wreckage, he saw the defiant Marine pop up and begin running.

Just seventy-one rounds.

Worm found the Z-10 strafing a smoking hangar a football field away from her. One of the quadcopters saw her and raced toward her position, then hovered to beckon the helicopter over. Worm dipped the nose of the jet and eased the throttle forward. With a gentle adjustment, he rolled out and centered the helmet-mounted pipper on the Z-10. He relaxed his g slightly to stay on the target and then squeezed the trigger.

The opening burst from the F-35’s cannon went high, passed over the Z-10, and ripped apart the runway just beyond.

Forty-seven rounds.

She ran faster, not looking back even at the ripping sound in the sky behind her.

Worm fired a longer burst and the whole jet vibrated like a tuning fork. The Z-10 jerked sideways, then broke in half, spewing flame and debris in a near-perfect circle. The fuselage groaned in protest as Worm pulled back on the stick to arrest his descent.

The runner was nowhere to be seen. She had made it; he’d done his first duty: he hadn’t left a Marine behind.

Worm jammed the throttle forward to its stops and unloaded to accelerate toward Camp H. M. Smith as fast as possible. Having some American airpower overhead might give the armored Directorate column second thoughts, maybe even force it to divert to another target. He had nothing else to offer. The cannon was empty. Landing to rearm was out of the question. He’d harass the Directorate column as long as he could and then punch out somewhere up north near one of the parks.

As the F-35 accelerated away, the robotic quadcopter turned and loosed an air-to-air missile. It then blithely went back to its original task of raking the row of Ospreys on the runway.

Even before Worm heard the alarm buzz, the plane’s AN/ASQ-239 Barracuda system had automatically activated. The system’s ten tiny antennas embedded in the F-35’s wing edges began to track the enemy missile’s radar. Worm’s visor projected that it was a TY-90, a fire-and-forget missile, so even with its robot master focused elsewhere, it was still a threat. With the missile homing in on him, he pulled the F-35 hard right toward the Ulupau Crater at the end of the base. With just a little bit of luck, he thought, he’d disappear in the clutter around the old dormant volcano. He’d be damned if he was going to be the first Marine pilot to get shot down by a drone.

Worm’s fate, though, had been decided several months earlier. Six microchips had been replaced during maintenance. This was nothing unusual for a plane packed with thousands of chips that ran everything from avionics to the gun camera.

The first microchips that had powered everything from the early computers to the jet planes of the 1960s had all their components visible to the naked eye. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, microchips packed millions of transistors into an area measured in square millimeters. And every chip was further divided into multiple subunits, called blocks, each of which carried out different functions. Much like the chips inside a smartphone, the processor in Worm’s F-35 gun camera, for example, had blocks that did everything from store frames of video to convert files.