Chapter 11 - Fire on the Flight Deck
The MH-60 Blackhawk helicopter descended toward the flight deck of the USS *Gerald R. Ford* through a heavy Atlantic squall, sixty miles off the coast of Virginia.
Rain lashed against the cockpit windows like buckshot. Below us, the four-and-a-half-acre steel roof of the supercarrier was bathed in the harsh, sodium-yellow glare of emergency floodlights. The ship was in total electronic lockdown—Condition Zebra.
The ship’s massive phased-array radar panels were dark, killed manually by the bridge to prevent the infected drones from using the carrier’s own transmitters to broadcast the exploit across the Atlantic Fleet.
The helicopter hit the deck with a heavy shudder. The crew chief slid the cargo door open, and the freezing salt spray hit my face like a slap.
I jumped down to the wet non-skid surface, my dress blues covered by a heavy tactical foul-weather parka, my four-star garrison cap pulled low over my eyes. Vance followed right behind me, flanked by a squad of Navy explosive ordnance disposal techs.
Captain Douglas Miller, the carrier's commanding officer, met us at the base of the island superstructure, his face strained beneath the brim of his ballcap.
"General Mercer!" Miller shouted over the howl of the wind and the roar of the ship’s nuclear turbines. "Thank God you’re here. We’ve isolated two of the Mercer drones on Catapult Three, but the other two—they’re locked into the hangar bay elevators. Their avionics are firing blind, spinning up turbines without input from our flight control."
"Did they launch?" I demanded, marching straight toward the catwalk overlooking the flight deck.
"Negative, ma'am!" Miller yelled back. "Our flight deck crews pulled the emergency fuel shutoffs on the catapult lines manually! But the drones' internal reserve batteries kicked in. They’re running a brute-force decryption against our tactical data link. If they crack the ship’s crypto-keys, they can broadcast our entire carrier strike group’s real-time coordinates to every hostile submarine in the North Atlantic!"
"Take me to the hangar bay," I ordered.
We moved down the narrow, watertight steel ladders into the cavernous belly of the ship.
There, secured by heavy chains in the middle of Hangar Bay Two, sat two sleek, matte-black delta-wing aircraft: the Mercer Aegis-X prototypes.
Their turbine engines were whining with a high-pitched, angry frequency, their control surfaces twitching like the wings of dying insects. A glowing red LED array on their forward sensor pods pulsed rhythmically—the signature of an active, unauthorized data extraction.
Standing twenty feet back, looking terrified with a yellow emergency life vest strapped over his tailored Italian suit, was Trevor Mercer.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
"What is he doing on this ship?" I demanded, turning to Captain Miller with an icy fury that made the seasoned naval officer flinch.
"He arrived yesterday with the contractor technical team to oversee the sea trial integration, General," Miller said quickly. "When the lockdown occurred, we couldn't fly him off."
Trevor saw me. He stumbled across the oily steel deck, slipping once before grabbing a structural beam to steady himself. His expensive loafers were ruined, soaked in hydraulic fluid and seawater.
"Kate!" Trevor wailed, his voice shaking with pure, unvarnished panic. "Kate, you have to help me! I didn't know! I swear to God, I didn't know!"
I walked up to him until I was inches from his face. The smell of fear, sour sweat, and expensive cologne was nauseating.
"You didn't know what, Trevor?" I asked, my voice deadly quiet beneath the scream of the drone engines.
"The guys in Cyprus... they gave me four million dollars in an offshore account to bypass the secondary hardware inspection," he sobbed, tears cutting clean lines through the grime on his cheeks. "They said it was just gray-market chips to get around the export embargo! They told me it was harmless! Dad said we needed the margin to make the White House deal look profitable!"
"Four million dollars," I whispered.
I reached out, grabbed the collar of his designer shirt, and dragged him three feet forward until his face was inches from the humming, twitching fuselage of the infected drone.
"Look at it, Trevor," I ordered, my voice trembling with controlled rage. "That machine has enough high-explosive avionics inside it to tear this deck open and kill five thousand sailors. You sold the lives of every man and woman on this ship so you could buy a sports car."
"Kate, please!" he screamed, his knees giving out, forcing me to hold him up by his collar. "Turn it off! The override codes aren't working! I tried my master key and the system locked me out!"
"Because it was never your system, you idiot," I snarled, shoving him back onto the deck where he collapsed into a heap of shivering cowardice. "You were just the delivery boy."
I turned to the Navy EOD team leader standing nearby.
"Master Chief," I said.
"Yes, General?"
"Forget the software override," I commanded, unzipping my parka to reach for the sidearm holstered at my hip. "Bring up the high-voltage EMP disrupters. We’re frying the avionics physically."
"General, if we burn the chips, we lose the forensic evidence for the federal trial!" Captain Miller warned.
I looked at Trevor, who was weeping on the deck, then looked at the humming machine that threatened the five thousand souls aboard this warship.
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"My brother just confessed on open audio," I told Miller, tapping the tactical recorder pinned to my uniform. "We have all the evidence we need. Fry the birds."
***
