Jian looked annoyed and queried the system for her current location. The last image had been her stepping off a city bus a few blocks from her apartment.

“You just asked the wrong question. The question we should be asking is not where is she now, but what is she doing? If she is what I think she is, a female serial killer, she is likely hunting right now… Or is she coming down, grasping at normalcy?”

“Colonel, it is late, and this is a waste of time,” said Lieutenant Jian. “There is no way this one woman has killed so many men. We can pick her up, but first I must report your waste of valuable resources to the general.”

“Yes, go run to your master,” said Markov. “But have a squad ready in thirty minutes. And you had better hope we find this black widow before…” — he paused for dramatic effect and then laughed — “she finds you!”

The USS Mako raced past the Zumwalt’s stern in what looked like a reckless game of chicken. A fifty-seven-foot trimaran, it had a main hull and two thin outriggers attached by lateral beams. The design, often used in racing yachts, was lighter and faster than a standard single-hulled boat’s, having a shallower draft, a wider beam, and less surface area underwater. For the racing yachts, it meant minimal crew space inside the thin hulls, but that wasn’t a concern for a robotic warship.

The autonomous sub hunter sped away to the far edge of the fleet and began to patrol in a racetrack figure-eight pattern with a sister ship, the USS Bullshark. It had been a controversy when ships with no crews had received names at their commissioning ceremonies four months earlier. It was an important cultural shift, and ultimately the secretary of the Navy herself made the decision: these were not disposable robots but warships the fleet could count on to save lives. Nobody questioned the naming on this day as the high-speed vessels worked to keep Directorate and Russian submarines at bay.

The Mako bolted in a straight line to the east, its speed rising past forty-five knots an hour. The Bullshark slowed, its chisel-like bows diving slightly in the Pacific swell, then took off on a different heading to the west. The pair located a Directorate Type 39A submarine six miles away. Following an algorithm developed from research done on the way sandtiger sharks cooperated in their hunting, the two ships coordinated and began to box in the fleeing nuclear submarine. The Chinese sub didn’t know that a third Mako-class ship, the USS Tigershark, lay silently drifting in its projected path.

The Tigershark launched a Mark 81 rocket-powered torpedo from a range of three miles. The supercavitating design allowed the torpedo to reach underwater speeds of almost two hundred knots, giving it just enough time to get up to full speed before it punched through the sub, entering the hull from one side and exiting through the other.

The sounds of the submarine’s hull collapsing were captured by the Mako-class hunters and relayed to the Zumwalt, as was the burst-transmission distress message from the buoy that had been automatically ejected by the sinking Chinese sub. The task force ships were now safe from the undersea threat, but they were leaving a trail of crumbs behind them.

Conan pressed her cheek deeper into the wet mud beneath the hapuu ferns. A moment ago she’d thought she heard the buzz of a small rotary-powered drone. Yes, there it was. The sound ebbed and flowed in the damp air.

She curled her knees into her chest and pressed them tighter, hoping the wool blanket would shield her from the thermal sensors. These were the moments when you were truly alone, when you had to face up to all the things you could have done after the invasion instead of taking up arms. The camps at Schofield Barracks weren’t that bad, people said. The Red Cross visited regularly, as the whole world saw via images collected and broadcast by Directorate social media teams.

The buzzing intensified and Conan held her breath, smelling orchids and damp mud. She felt the prick of a mosquito’s bite near her jaw. Then another. The buzzing stopped. Was that it? Just a pair of fucking bugs?

Conan had expected to be killed within a few moments of setting off down the mountain. Yet here they were. They’d been moving in the dark as quickly as they dared until they’d heard the sound of the pursuer overhead, and then they’d sheltered under their woolen blankets, diving under ferns and into furrows in the forest floor. That was all that was between them and a flechette rocket or autocannon round. Just a half an inch of wool that hid their heat signatures.

They’d gotten the idea from the Taliban, who used them to elude American drone searches. Finding wool blankets in Hawaii had been the hard part. They’d had to sneak into a frozen-fish processing facility off North Nimitz Highway, where Nicks traded the foreman a captured pistol for the blankets. Conan hoped that gun would be on their side someday. Lots of people said they were waiting for the right moment. A podiatrist in Kaneohe who had hidden Conan and Finn in his garage one night had even shown them his great-grandfather’s newa, an old Hawaiian wooden war club with shark teeth embedded in it. He’d sworn that his ancestors would see him smash it into an occupier’s skull one day soon.

Soon. Would that day ever come? Conan lifted the edge of her blanket and listened. Nothing mechanical moved; she heard only the sounds of the forest at night. She raised her head and clicked quietly and saw the spectral shapes of insurgent forms rise up and circle around her. She waited five minutes and then hissed softly, and they began to move with soft steps down the mountain.

“Beautiful night,” whispered Finn. She could tell he was close by the sweetly vile smell of ammonia and musk.

And then the world went white.

The first explosion lifted her off her feet and launched Finn into a tree trunk. A second explosion followed an instant later, shredding trees with hundreds of dart-like metal-flechette rounds.

Conan tried to look around but couldn’t focus, as white static seemed to fill her eyes. When her vision cleared, she looked through the infrared scope on her sniper rifle and saw a dozen Directorate soldiers bounding down the trail. In the distance came the low growl of a quadcopter. Then all the soldiers flicked on their flashlights at once. Confident bastards.

She peered out from behind the protection of a koa tree trunk and pulled the trigger. The shot hit a soldier squarely in the middle of the protective faceplate on his helmet. She panned for another target, but a volley of shots ripped through the leaves to the left and right above her and forced her to dive into the dirt and roll to the base of a tree ten feet away. Turkey-peeking around the trunk, she saw the first soldier, now with a shattered visor, back up and advance, firing steadily.

Let them come. She needed them close so the quadcopter couldn’t fire at the Muj from above the forest canopy without also killing the Directorate soldiers. She waited, her back to the tree trunk, wiping sweat from her forehead with her hand.

This was it.

“Montana! Montana! Montana!” she shouted over the irregular bark of assault rifles. She fired wildly around the trunk, not even looking, and then immediately tossed the cumbersome sniper rifle. She took off running, knowing there was no way they could catch her loaded down with their helmets and armored tac-vests, just like the old mujahideen in the ’Stans had run circles around the U.S. troops hauling eighty pounds of gear up and down the mountains. After a hundred feet of running, she ducked behind a tree, took off her backpack, and tossed it onto the path.