“It’s the bird on the northwest patrol,” Cortez said, pointing to the icon on the holographic tactical display.

“Let’s hear it,” said Simmons.

“Big Bird, Double Down Four,” said the female pilot. “You have an incoming flight of sixty-plus enemy jets. I repeat, six-zero-plus enemy jets, coming from the northwest. They’ve got carriers out there somewhere. Double Down Four is engaging, but…” The pilot trailed off.

They all knew. It was best left unsaid. Her F-35B was one of the handful of jump jets squeezed onto the USS America to form the task force’s combat air patrol. Given what had happened to their predecessors, all the pilots had been volunteers. Their planes had been scanned and rescanned and as many of the suspect chips swapped out as possible, replaced with chips scavenged from donated commercial gear. But there was no certainty they’d removed all of the Trojan horse hardware. The technicians likened it to trying to find a particular needle in a haystack made of needles. But finding bad chips was actually even harder than that, as they activated only in the presence of a combination of an unknown frequency and an encrypted transmittal message.

Her voice sounded strained as she braced against the increasing g-load that went with her aggressive tactical turn toward the threat in the northwest. The flight suit fought the physics of the maneuver but it was always a losing battle. “We’ll do what we can, but expect incoming within fifteen minutes. Double Down Four out.”

Double Down 4 stopped transmitting and fired a salvo of joint dual-role air dominance missiles at the squadron of Chinese Shenyang J-31 fighters that had entered the defense sector. The Chinese planes were almost her jet’s twins, having benefited during their development from F-35 blueprints stolen by hackers in 2009. Her incoming-missile warning alerted her that the closest one had counterfired a PL-21D. Powered by ramjets, it closed quickly, so she banked hard and up to get some altitude. Then she activated the broadcast protocol. To counter the risk of some traitor chip signaling out, the whiz kids had dreamed up the idea of flooding all the frequencies. All stealth was lost, but the theory was that whatever homing beacon the missiles were trying to ride in on would be overwhelmed by all the other signals broadcasting.

She rotated the plane so she was inverted, catching a glimpse of the incoming missile exhaust streaking toward her as she did. The F-35 automatically fired off a dozen flares, and she put the plane straight down into a dive that made it crack the sound barrier. The missile kept climbing past her, seemingly fooled for the moment. Double Down 4 turned again, visually hunting for another target, her search radar rendered useless by the mix of the enemy’s and her own jamming. In the distance, she saw an explosion. At least one of her missiles had made contact.

All of this was invisible to the Zumwalt’s crew, still haunted by the clipped tone of her transmission. Jamming made it impossible for them to hear anything more. This spared the crew from hearing Double Down 4’s choked scream as 30 mm cannon fire from a Russian Su-33 gutted her plane’s belly. The only indication of her fate came when the all-frequency jamming stopped and ATHENA changed the F-35 icon from blue to gray and then moved it off the screen.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have found the rest of the enemy fleet,” said Simmons. “You know what to do.”

Some 120 miles away from the Zumwalt, Captain Second Rank Alexei Denisov swept the sky again, craning his neck to look past his MiG-35’s twin tails. He wanted to confirm what his cockpit displays and flight communications told him: the last of the American combat air patrol had been shot down. He looked around his plane; all that remained was a faint haze of smoke from the dogfight.

This was a perfect coda, he believed. He had been there at the beginning and would be there at the end of it all. How many decades had the Americans claimed the world’s skies? No more.

“White and Red Squadrons, this is Dagger-Three-Thirty-Four. Sky looks clear of any enemy planes.” He checked his radar screen again; still no targets acquired. Both sides were jamming each other, and neither could cut through the electronic fog until they closed.

“Begin your attack, Formation Wolf Hunt,” said Denisov.

Denisov pulled back on the stick and slowed, allowing the aircraft to reposition itself into the attack formation. Within seconds, the Russian MiG-35s and Su-33s of White Squadron and the Chinese J-31s of Red Squadron were neatly arrayed in a line extending two hundred kilometers, just as they had trained on the simulators for weeks. Like wolves on the Siberian plains, they would sweep forward until some part of the line made contact, then all the others would close in in a circle. It was simple but brutally effective.

“Damn it to hell,” said an angry voice, not bothering to keep her frustration in check. The sailor was just out of Simmons’s line of sight, but her frustration was clear.

He walked down the stairs to the sailor’s workstation. “Patience, Richter, just have patience,” said Simmons in a calming voice.

“Aye, sir,” said Operations Specialist Angelique Richter, a bit surprised to find the captain leaning over her shoulder to look at the three screens at the workstation she was using. A diminutive twenty-five-year-old radar systems operator, she wore a matte-black eyebrow stud like the ones many of the female Marines wore. “Might as well turn the damn thing off, sir, jamming’s only getting worse.”

“Ebb and flow, Richter, that’s how this is going to go,” said Simmons. “You get a glimpse, then you use what little you have. Don’t forget: they’re just as confused as we are.”

The girl nodded, running chewed fingernails over her shaved head.

“Richter, you’ve been in three years now, right?” said Simmons.

“It will be four years in two months, sir,” she said.

“That’s a lot of Navy in your blood,” said Simmons. “Makes you one of the sailors I’m counting on today. There’s nothing here you can’t handle. What we know is all we know. Got me?”

“Aye, sir.”

He was walking back up the stairs to the observation floor when the radar operator called him.

“Sir, we’ve bogeys coming in from the northwest. They’re strung out in a long line,” Richter said. Then, in a lower pitch: “ATHENA counts sixty-two in total.

“Shit,” the radar operator continued. “It’s worse than that. ATHENA is now showing something coming in from the east. It’s patchy, but at least a hundred bogeys… we’re right square in the middle.”

As the information from her screen began to populate the central tactical hologram where all could see it, the room seemed to grow more quiet. A brief groan from the ship’s engines welled up through the hull, as if the Zumwalt had just accepted its fate.

Then a voice rang out over the speakers arrayed around the room. It had a gravelly, Southern twang: “Longboard, this is Boneyard Six Four. You seem to have some party crashers on the way. Can we be of assistance? Over.”

U.S. Air Force colonel Roscoe Coltan ended the transmission and rechecked his position. The twelve-by-nineteen-inch glass-panel Garmin AeroScreen was bolted on shock mounts over the F-15C jet’s original flight instruments. He had rimmed the screen with duct tape for good measure, which showed the level of confidence he had in the technology. It was effective, but it still didn’t seem right, which basically captured just about everything so far in this mission.

Roscoe’s jet had been among the 256 F-15s and F-16s the U.S. Air Force had early-retired in 2014. The argument was that the fourth generation of fighter planes couldn’t keep up with twenty-first-century threats, but the real reason was that retiring the planes created an artificial fighter gap, which helped make the case for keeping the spending up on the F-35, the fifth-generation plane, whose cost had spiraled. The old but still flyable planes had spent the past years stored out in the dry Arizona air of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, aka the Boneyard, the aircraft equivalent of the Ghost Fleet. Alongside some four thousand other retired planes dating back to World War II, Roscoe’s jet had been waiting its turn to be harvested for scrap metal and spare parts.