“Hoo-ah, sir.” Teddy sat straighter.
“What I just briefed is not the actual mission.”
What the hell? “Not the actual mission, sir?”
Harch spun the dial. He unlocked the safe and took out an op plan.
Teddy looked it over. Destroying the sigint site was only the secondary objective. The primary… He looked up, frowning. “Want to give me the short squirt, sir? Or am I supposed to read this encyclopedia?”
“In words of one syllable, the true objective of Operation Watchtower is to plant an intel asset. Taking the site off-line temporarily is nice, it provides diversion for an invasion elsewhere, but more important, it gives us the excuse to get in and plant something for another government agency.”
Teddy said, “I’m not sure I follow. Lieutenant.”
“Think about it this way. Gear’s easy to replace. Radars. Signal processors. Basically, computers and software. We could fry everything on the island and they’d be back online in a week.
“But if the mission looks like it’s for something else, even if it seems like a failure, it can still accomplish the primary objective.”
“So the Package isn’t an EMP, uh, device? Like you said?”
“It is an EMP device,” Harch said. “But it isn’t going to work.”
Teddy blinked. “Isn’t going to—”
“Work.”
Suddenly the already too-small room shrank even more. He half rose, wishing there was just a little more air. “We’re putting the Team, all our guys, at risk for a dud?”
Harch waved him down. “Not a ‘dud,’ Master Chief. The first package will detonate. Sort of. Scatter pieces around. About the same order explosion as a mortar round. But the pulse will short-circuit. They put the fragments back together, they’ll get an EMP bomb, all right. But an American round-eye foreign-devil fuckup.
“They’ll snort and go back to operating. But now we’re looking over their shoulder. We have our own eavesdropping capability, on their eavesdropping capability. They operate, but we see every keystroke. Know everything they know. Read their traffic. Messages. Data. Voice. Even video. See exactly what they see, on their radars. Total access, like we’re inside their heads.”
Teddy sat back, turning it over, trying to shake the feeling of being boxed in. “So where is this gizmo? Oh. That’s Package number two.”
“Correct. It’s not a backup; it’s the eavesdropping device. They call it a QM-10, for whatever that’s worth. Picks up anything, and I mean anything, on a radio frequency. We dig that in, and it self-activates. Transmits via a secure, highly directional uplink called ‘ultrawideband.’ Impossible to overhear. Or so they tell me.”
Teddy rubbed his face. Swager might understand all this better, having been an electron pusher in a previous life. Pick up all this digital stuff, then send it someplace where they could study it, decode it, turn it into useful intel? Some arcane, supersecret CIA technology. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to bomb the shit out of everything, then send in the Marines? But somebody upstairs had decided this was smarter. It was sure as hell more complicated. “Can I share this with my Team leaders?”
Harch grimaced. “No! Pass this to no one, Master Chief. I wouldn’t have told you, except I had to. For the mission.”
Mission first, last, and always. The Team credo. But none of this lessened his misgivings. If anything, they made them worse. He saw now why command wasn’t obsessing about extract, or force ratios, or whether the QRF could get in fast enough to rescue the platoon. Total access to the enemy’s secrets, day in and day out? Yeah. That was worth fifteen lives. As long as they planted this gizmo, maybe it didn’t really matter, to whoever had designed the mission, if any of them made it out.
“Any more questions, Master Chief?” Harch said as Teddy stood. “Hoo-ah, right?”
But all he could do was shrug.
9
The next day Savo Island was still at Condition Three, wartime steaming. That made it hard to get around, even with Ryan’s help undogging door after door, and dogging each again after them. The hatches that led from one deck to the next had also been secured; to climb up or down, Aisha had to wriggle through narrow scuttles. Sometimes the corpsman had to phone to get permission to open an access, and they had to wait in the stale hot air until a reluctant voice granted them passage.
But she persisted. After talking with the chief master-at-arms, the command master chief, and the exec, Staurulakis, she had a few possibilities.
The first was a damage controlman, one Petty Officer Third Class Benyamin. He was tall. He knew the lighting systems. The exec had earmarked him because of his attitude toward the females aboard, and his participation in some kind of computer game that involved rape. Aisha wanted to know more about this so-called game.
“Its name is Gang Bang Molly,” Benyamin said reluctantly. They were sitting in the wardroom, which had been cleared; Ryan stood guard outside. The petty officer had a round, stubbly head. A hawkish nose. A gawky neck. Long fingers twisted as he glanced up at her.
“Tell me more,” she said patiently.
“Well — it’s sort of like Grand Theft Auto. Or DayZ. Or Hitman. Only kind of, you know, backstairs. You can’t buy it at GameStop.”
“I see. And it’s about rape?”
“Hey, that’s not all,” Benyamin said defensively. “Also murder. Looting. Doing hits. Getting wasted.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“You should try it. Get inside the mind of the criminal.”
“I spend enough time there, thanks. You can’t get it at GameStop? So, where did you get it?”
“It was password protected, but you could play it on your workstation.”
Aisha put down her pen, shocked. “It was on the ship’s network?”
“On the LAN, yeah. Everybody played it. They took it down, though, when the brass heard about it. Actually, I think it was the CO figured it out.”
She was still incredulous. “How exactly did you get it on the LAN?”
Benyamin sat up straight. “Huh? Not me. I played it a little, but I didn’t put it up.”
“Who did, then? Do you know?”
“Well, sort of. But, like, it’s all scuttlebutt, what I’m sayin’ here.”
She told him scuttlebutt was worth checking out, but he still seemed reluctant. Until she brought up the possibility of an official charge. He grimaced. “Carpenter. The old guy, who came aboard after the last captain run us aground and got shitcanned.”
“Carpenter. What’s his rate?”
“A ping jockey… sonarman. Stays in his own spaces most of the time, but you see him on the chat boards. Goes by… Poon Pinger, I think.”
“How tall is he?”
“How…? I’m not sure. Like I say, I don’t see him that much. Just on the boards.”
“What else do you know about him?”
The damage controlman said just that he was an older sailor, maybe even retired. Aisha wondered what a retiree was doing deployed, but made the note. She had to get on these boards, and meet this Carpenter. Maybe interview him in his native habitat.
Of course, he’d hear she was asking about him. So it would have to be now, before he had a chance to hide anything incriminating.
Ryan led her forward and down, cautioning her to hold tight to the handrails. They descended level by level, until the sides of the ship squeezed inward. The normal clanks and whirs grew distant. The air grew stale, uncirculated. They threaded storerooms and damage-control lockers walled with expanded metal in a labyrinthine underworld.