An enormous black shape slowly moved through the sea maybe thirty yards beneath him. It surfaced a few hundred feet away, puffed a blast of air, and then went back under. No shark could be that big. He sighed with relief. A humpback whale, perhaps, content to eat krill, not Russian pilots.

He was alone for a little while longer. He was close enough to see the still-smoking USS America, and he was confident the little aircraft carrier had been the one his missile had hit. He watched the chiseled form of a massive destroyer pull alongside it; sailors appeared to be tethering the ships together. He recognized it as a Zumwalt-class ship and decided instead that had been the one his missile had hit; far better to have hit the more exotic creature with his last shot.

With his eyes stinging from the salt and sun, Denisov watched the litters of wounded men and women being passed off the burning America via ziplines strung between the two vessels. The sailors were bound up like mummies as they traveled from their dying ship to another with an uncertain future.

From the stern of the strange-looking ship, three small forms lifted off. When they formed up, he identified them as MQ-8 Fire Scout drones, scaled-down helicopters with pinched noses that looked like they had never made it out of aviation adolescence. Another two lifted off from the ship tethered to the other side of the America; some kind of cruiser or destroyer, he couldn’t tell.

The drone helicopters paused in formation and then each set off in a different direction, looking like a foraging steel wasps. They flew low, hugging the waves. One of the Fire Scouts flew almost directly overhead, the drone oblivious to Denisov as the force of its rotor’s downdraft pushed him under the waves. At that moment, Denisov realized that maybe the Americans wouldn’t come for him.

The tactical holograph still hadn’t come back on, so the fuzzy image was carried across the entire bank of monitors on the wall. Given how the holographic projectors seemed to get knocked offline in every fight, Simmons wondered why they even bothered with the finicky high-tech contraptions. The grainy image they were watching looked like one of those old low-resolution YouTube videos.

“Sir, the task force is a mix of Chinese and Russian ships,” said the Zumwalt’s intelligence officer. “And ATHENA agrees, based on the EM signatures the Fire Scout is picking up.”

The live image kept shaking as if somebody were swatting at the drone, but the shaking was only the drone’s autonomous-flight software keeping the rotorcraft as low as possible to the waves, dipping into the troughs between them for cover.

“Freeze that for me,” said Simmons. The image on the screen locked, and the officer zoomed in on the superstructure of a large ship that the long-range camera had picked up on the upward ride of a wave.

“What a beast. That’s gotta be the Zheng He.”

“Yes, sir. Looks like it,” said the intelligence officer. He moved the still image of the massive Chinese capital ship off to one screen and resumed the live camera view. The video feed began to jiggle and shake, and the Fire Scout picked up speed, giving up its cover, as the wind shifted and the troughs of the waves grew shallow. It was a panic move, the robot’s algorithms having run out of good options to evade detection.

The shaking image then showed a series of smoky trails lifting up from the task force and flying toward the camera.

“Uh-oh” was all the intelligence officer could say before the image blanked out.

Cortez spoke up, reading from his glasses, as Simmons watched the replay of the Fire Scout’s frantic final moments.

“Between the visuals and SIGINT collection, ATHENA is reporting it as seven surface ships: three Sovremenny-class anti-surface destroyers, two Type Fifty-Four frigates, one Luyang-class guided missile destroyer, and a battle cruiser, most likely the Admiral Zheng He. They’re making twenty-five knots. They’re likely coming at us off a loose fix they got from the air attack.”

Simmons took in the small amount of information he had and realized he needed to think like an admiral and consider the entire Longboard task force, not just his own ship.

“But where are their carriers?” said Simmons out loud, mostly to himself.

“No further information, sir,” said Cortez. “ATHENA can run some models to guess where they are, but it’ll essentially be throwing the same darts at the wall as we are.”

“We’ll take what we can get. We need to hit that task force while we can. Release Puffin batteries,” said Simmons.

Cortez barked out the orders. The lines linking them to America were fed out to give space between the two ships. Then the deck hatches for the Zumwalt’s vertical launch cells all flipped up simultaneously, revealing a line of dark openings, each twenty-eight inches wide. One after another, a series of thirteen-foot-long cruise missiles, eighty in total, popped out from the vertical launch cells, like untethered jack-in-the-boxes.

Originally known as the Naval Strike Missile, the Puffin was a stealthy replacement for the old Penguin missile. Though it flew under the speed of sound, the Norwegian-designed missile could evade radar detection and had a range of more than 180 miles, which made it lethal, especially when fired in great numbers.

The missiles seemed to hang in the air for an instant as their solid-fuel rocket boosters ignited, and then they arced off into the sky. When their boosters burned out, they were jettisoned in a rain of metal that bombarded the water below. The missiles then raced through the sky powered by turbojet engines that took them at just over five hundred miles per hour to the general vicinity of the Fire Scout’s last known location. Each Puffin then began autonomously hunting, using its own imaging infrared seeker to match anything it saw against an onboard database of authorized targets.

It was a ship’s wake that gave the enemy’s fleet away. A Puffin missile at the far end of the spread detected the faint V-shaped lines of white foam on the ocean surface and began to circle in the area. An FL-3000 Red Banner short-range air-defense missile rose up to knock it down, but not before the Puffin had shared its data with the rest of the flock and beckoned them to join in.

One by one, the other missiles began to converge on the area. Three more Puffins were sacrificed to defensive missiles, establishing the perimeter of the task force’s defenses. The robotic swarm then circled, just out of range, with machine patience as more and more missiles joined. While they waited, though, the task force below fired off its own volley of cruise missiles at the Puffins’ point of departure.

Admiral Wang now knew his gamble had been the right one; the instant that the garbled radio calls from Hawaii had burned through the Americans’ jamming, his staff had looked at him with new esteem. He truly was the equal of the ancient strategist with whom he had seemed to be conversing before them.

Yet he also knew that the way history would remember this moment depended on all the powers and tools now beyond the realm of human plans. Even the great leaders of old could not have understood this era.

“How many of our cruise missiles were we able to get off at their force?” he asked his aide.

“Sixty-nine, sir,” said the aide, nervously looking at the gathering swarm of American missiles, blurs on the horizon, as they circled the task force. Then, seeming to make up their machine minds, the swarm of American missiles began to approach at sea-skimming level from all directions of the compass. The missiles operated in unison, all turning inward simultaneously, but each individual missile made small, slight hops up and down, randomized maneuvers designed to throw off targeting locks.