Fiction Week

By Philip Kiley

The pilot boat’s horn cut twice, a warning that flattened chatter across the lock wall. LT Mara Delgado raised her head from the operations console as a bright speck wavered over the Miraflores chamber, a silver seed fighting against the crosswind. Someone near the observation deck shouted. The quadcopter dipped, steadied, and then kamikazed toward the pilot boat’s bow.

The coxswain threw the helm over. The drone missed by a breath and pinwheeled into the fendering with a brittle snap that sounded smaller than the video would later make it. The pilot boat’s wake sloshed against concrete. Phones went up in a twitching forest of arms. The containership in the chamber blew a long, angry blast that made coffee ripple across the ops room desk.

A news ticker crawled beneath the surveillance feed, half ignored by the ops team: Panama Canal Coalition ministers reaffirm joint stewardship; U.S. chairs safety board this quarter. The line blurred into weather alerts and insurance warnings, but the reminder was constant, an allied consortium led by Washington now managed the Canal’s safety and operation.

“Not a toy,” Mara said.

Across from her, Engineer Rogelio Paredes sat with his hands tented beneath his chin. His cuff was damp with sweat or the ever-present humidity.

“Accident,” he said. “A yacht lost a toy.”

Commander Ethan Rowe, on liaison orders and already impatient with the room’s mixture of civilian engineers and administrators, leaned on the console and peered at the playback. “You don’t throw away two thousand dollars by mistake, and you don’t test a ship’s luck where it can’t move. Drones make a sitting target of a carrier in a channel.”

On the wall screen, a social feed erupted in captions and looping clips. #CanalAttack popped up, as did an insurance desk’s automated alert banner: POSSIBLE INCIDENT — REQUESTING RISK UPDATE.

Mara muted the feed. “Miraflores, status,” she said into her headset. “Any damage to fenders or the pilot boat?”

“Negative,” came the reply. “Plastic bits in the basin. No injuries.”

“Then we do not give the world reason to panic,” said Paredes. “We have a schedule.”

They had more than a schedule. The drought had shaved inches off Lake Gatun, inches that translated to drafts and tonnage and the velocity of money across oceans. The Canal Authority had been using water-saving basins, cross-filling, everything short of rainmaking. Someone had scribbled on the whiteboard: 36 HOURS — LNG WINDOW. When the level dropped again, the heavy gas carriers would have to wait. And risk did not like to wait.

In theory, drones were an amplifier to airpower rather than a force that redrew frontlines. In practice, Mara thought, they were a perfect weapon for the canal: cheap, anonymous, and deadly where maneuver was impossible. A tanker in a lock had the evasiveness of a parked building. Against a swarm that used surveillance to find a seam and kamikaze strikes to exploit it, the ships felt exposed.

Rowe tapped the whiteboard. “Your window just narrowed. If the insurers decide transiting is unsafe, they’ll price the crossing out of reach.”

“Not if we do not feed the fire,” Paredes said. He looked at Mara. “Lieutenant, we will maintain safety messaging. Hobbyist drone. No deliberate intent.”

Mara adjusted her headset to hide the flicker of annoyance on her face. She had learned in her first week at the Canal that the infrastructure was as much a stage as a machine. The world watched every squeak of gate and wash of water for signs of weakness.

“Copy,” she said. “No deliberate intent.”

She didn’t believe it, and she could tell from Rowe’s silence that he didn’t either.

____________________________________________

By evening, the coalition board was restless, insurers dialing up their risk models. The Canal Authority issued a Special Transit Order before doubt hardened into cancellations. It was written in the calmest language they could craft: three LNG carriers, staggered entry, all safety measures, minimal public drama. The word drought appeared only once, as if to name it would make it worse. The order carried a request: Lieutenant Delgado will act as convoy safety officer.

Mara skimmed the line twice. She did not protest. Her orders had pulled her from a cluttered emergency management office in Miami to this control room with its domed cameras and stale coffee smell because she was good at threading people and procedures through chaos without making noise. They needed that now. She texted her mother in Spanish that night, a quick I am fine, the work is busy, it is beautiful here. Her mother sent back six praying hands and a photograph of the cousins eating pastelitos in Hialeah.

At the evening coordination meeting, Paredes sketched the plan with markers on a laminated chart. “We will take advantage of the basin cross-fill,” he said. “Miraflores to Pedro Miguel, Pedro Miguel to Gatun. The carriers will not move nose-to-tail. We stagger entries to preserve levels.”

“Spacing helps risk too,” Mara said.

Rowe nodded, but didn’t smile. “Spacing makes each ship a more discrete target.”

The word target hung a beat longer than the others.

“Words matter,” Paredes said. “We have no target. We have ships, and we have water. We also have tourists with cameras.”

“And we have someone with drones,” Rowe said.

“Someone with a hobby,” Paredes said.

Rowe looked at Mara. “Do you want to bet your license on hobbyists?”

Mara kept her voice even. “I want to bet my license on not creating a headline. We can harden without turning this into a war movie.”

Paredes lifted a finger. “Exactly.”

Rowe exhaled through his nose. “Fine. Harden with your theater lights off. But if you see something that even smells off, you act, you don’t present a PowerPoint.”

Rowe cut in before Paredes could finish, tapping the laminated chart. “This isn’t just Panama’s headache anymore. The coalition board wants those LNG carriers moving, Washington in the chair, Tokyo and Madrid watching every metric. If we slip, we don’t just answer to insurers, we answer to twenty different flags.”

____________________________________________

AIS showed a tug called Santa Marta drifting off Taboga Island, but the radar signature was bigger than its paperwork suggested. Mara flagged it; Paredes shrugged it off as a transponder error. Rowe wasn’t convinced.

“A wolf in tug’s clothing,” he muttered.

The name tugged at something in Mara’s memory, a line from a regional intelligence brief she’d skimmed her first week in-country. Analysts in Bogotá and Miami had worried aloud about “low-cost disruptive capabilities” targeting chokepoints in the Americas, the Canal mentioned but never underlined. Nothing specific, nothing actionable, just another vague paragraph buried beneath piracy statistics and cyber intrusion data. Still, the phrasing stuck with her: “Aden, Yemen reborn, only this time with algorithms.”

Now, staring at Santa Marta’s heavier radar return, it no longer sounded academic.

The tug’s false transponder remained an itch in her head. She chased small things that day, a patrol report about an unlit vessel sliding along the breakwater, a pilot’s offhanded complaint about a “toy” crossing their path, and then, at a warehouse inspection earlier in the week, a manifest that did not sit right. In a crate stamped MARINE SPARES she found neatly packed lithium cells, the kind sold in bulk to electronics shops and cheap enough to make a drone swarm disposable. Alone on the dock she pictured carbon-fiber arms and tiny autopilots clipped to those batteries, a hundred plastic insects with a single-minded, replaceable life.

By the time she left the chandlery, the pilots were whispering. Confidence is contagious in both directions; worry moved through the pilot corps faster than any official notice. The coalition was restless, and the insurers were already turning their calculators. The 36-hour LNG window on the board ticked like a clock.

It was not a case for a PowerPoint. Evidence would come, if Santa Marta slotted into the usual bureaucratic traps, but evidence came too slowly when tonnage and weather had a timetable. If someone wanted to exploit the drought, they would do it in the hours that mattered most.

So Mara drew on the whiteboard, erasing as fast as she wrote. “We stage a decoy barge with a lure and false schedule. It won’t be a tanker, but it will look like one on the trackers, a dummy stand-in to draw their attention. The real convoy enters staggered, under cover of the drill.”

Paredes pressed his temples. “If this leaks, the coalition will accuse us of theater.”

“It’s survival,” Mara said. “They can call it whatever they like.”

Rowe leaned in. “Fine. But you own it if it goes wrong.”

“I own it,” she said.

____________________________________________

Later that night, under the hum of diesel pumps, the decoy barge crept toward the locks, its false transponder flashing the identity of a full LNG carrier. The real tankers waited upriver, engines idling, their silhouettes blacked out to satellites and livestreams alike.

Dawn was just a thinning of the dark when the first drones came, two, then four, then six, whining like angry bees. They arrowed straight for the decoy’s heat and radar signature. One clipped the rail and shattered. Another struck high on a lock fender, scattering screws across the concrete like hail.

The real LNGs held position in their basins, their rudders barely twitching within the narrow confines. All that mass, nowhere to go. The drones didn’t need accuracy, any ship in the channel was an aimpoint.

Another drone found the lure and exploded harmlessly against the barge’s hull. Off Taboga Island, the tug Santa Marta, the same vessel Mara had flagged days earlier, lit up the radio net with a sudden “medical emergency.” Its engines spooled to full.

Mara leaned over the console. “There it is,” she said quietly. “That’s our launch platform, it has to be.”

Rowe’s hand hit the desk. “She’s running for the edge of jurisdiction. Take her down now.”

“Not with the world watching,” Mara said. “We soft-block her inside the channel. Docking issue, not a firefight.”

The operations center dispatched an intercept team. The patrol boat swung across Santa Marta’s bow and signaled to heave to. The tug hesitated, then eased back toward the quay as if it had planned to dock all along. Boarding officers went aboard calm and professional. Under the tarps they found racks of drones, charging cables, and spare carbon arms. The tug was no tug at all.

Behind them, the decoy’s smoke drifted away over the water. The three real LNG carriers made their transits later that morning, unharmed, the damage limited to scorch marks and scattered drone debris inside the lock.

____________________________________________

They issued the press release at noon. The final draft circulated with coalition letterhead across the top: Panama Canal Coalition — Joint Statement. It praised resilience, thanked “international partners for their steadfast stewardship,” and referred to the drone wreckage only as “malfunctioning hobby devices.” The statement boasted of drills and resilience and the importance of the Canal to global commerce. It did not mention Santa Marta or the decoy barge.

The second LNG carrier transited under a sky so blue it looked synthetic. The third entered with tourists recording from the overlooks. The pilots worked with the muscle memory of a thousand quiet crossings. Rowe spent the afternoon on calls full of words like escalation ladder and confidence building. Paredes drafted a memo titled Program for Physical and Electronic Hardening of Lock Approaches, benches that doubled as bollards, new rules for drones, and fences disguised as landscaping.

Mara walked the lock walls at dusk. The water breathed. A dragonfly drifted across a launch’s wake. She leaned on the rail, remembering her father teaching her to thread a needle on a rocking porch: don’t fight the motion, move when the wind does. She thought of the Santa Marta captain’s hot lies about a sick crew member, and of lithium batteries and drones on board without an adequate explanation.

At midnight she wrote her mother that it was still beautiful here, that she had eaten a mango that stung her lip, that she had learned a new word for the day’s wind. She didn’t mention the drones. She didn’t mention Santa Marta. She promised to visit in September, and she meant it.

The morning came with a freighter’s horn rolling across the houses. The decoy barge sat tarped in a maintenance lane with a stray cat asleep on it. Insurance sent a qualified sigh. The social feed moved on to a football match.

At noon a new tug took Santa Marta’s place off Taboga Island. Its AIS was clean, its radar return matched. Confidence was the product, and it sold another day of normal.

Mara sipped coffee gone bitter in the pot and watched the locks cycle. The Canal had two lanes carved into the isthmus by men who had died and men who had been paid, and water that could be commanded only by gates. The third lane was not concrete. It was belief. If the world believed the Canal would hold, it would. If they believed it would fail, it would fail faster.

She grimaced at the coffee and smiled at her reflection in the glass. Neutral did not mean safe. Neutral meant necessary. It meant being the gap in a ridge where the wind always blew, and learning to stand there without being knocked over.

The afternoon thunderheads built and did not break. The water whispered through the basins, and for that day at least, it was enough.

Philip Kiley is the Senior Reserve Officer of U.S. Coast Guard Base Cape Cod. His career has brought assignments in port security and emergency management.

Featured Image: Art created with Midjourney AI. 

Fiction Week

By Sandro Carniel

The bridge of the offshore patrol vessel Frosch smelled of diesel and wet steel — the residue of a storm that had just lashed the Barents Sea with four-meter-high waves. Commander Jonas Meyer bent over the tactical display, his eyes following a jagged line of red anomalies pulsing on the screen.

Behind him, Dr. Aisha N’Dour adjusted her headset over still damp curls and sat at the auxiliary console. She rarely left her post in the labs below deck, but tonight her acoustic models were feeding directly into the ship’s combat systems, and she knew her presence was required. That was why she had climbed one deck up — and why she hadn’t bothered to properly dry and straighten her hair.

“Commander, I need to reconfigure the sonar parameters,” she said firmly, eyes fixed on the keyboard. It wasn’t a request so much as a concise notification.

Meyer raised an eyebrow, hesitated a moment, then replied with equal firmness, skipping the academic title she had earned — PhD in Acoustic Oceanography, after nearly four years in a joint program between Lisbon and the Shanghai Climate Center. “That’s my weapons officer’s job.”

“Not tonight,” Aisha replied, more quickly than she thought she was capable of. “Your sonar arrays are calibrated on last year’s sound propagation profiles. But after that warm surface layer we’ve just encountered, reshaped by the storm’s mixing,” — she pointed to the orange gradient on the screen overlaying the blue — “the sound bends upward. If we don’t recalibrate now, we won’t see what’s hiding below the thermocline — the sharp temperature step dividing warm and cold layers.”

Meyer’s jaw tightened. He knew the IMARC — the Intergovernmental Maritime Research Center — had insisted that a climate scientist be on board for exactly this reason, and that their written orders specified that in case of conflicting priorities, she would have the final word. Still, part of him struggled to accept it. So he decided to challenge her. “And what do you think is hiding down there?”

Aisha stared at the streaming anomalies. “Intruder drones. Maybe dozens.” Her eyes flicked rapidly from one point on the display to another without moving her head. “And they’re using the storm’s noise as cover.”

On paper, this was supposed to be a routine sea mission: protect a newly-repaired Arctic data cable, the Polar Thread, connecting the Svalbard Islands to mainland Norway. The repair had been completed just two weeks earlier, after an extreme storm — fed by much warmer and more erratic currents than usual — had caused a slight torsion and micro-fractures along the main joint. The operation required a team of specialized divers and maintenance drones to reinforce the sheath and verify the sensors’ integrity.

Even though the work had been executed flawlessly, the Commission on Critical Undersea Infrastructure Risk knew that every newly repaired cable remained a weak point: a sudden environmental fluctuation or accidental contact with a hostile drone could trigger catastrophic outages. The Frosch had been dispatched precisely to monitor the cable’s “recovery” during another, milder storm — still strong enough to jeopardize the repair.

Just hours before departure, the Maritime Intelligence Center had circulated a classified alert: long range interceptions had picked up fragmented radio chatter between two civilian-flagged fishing vessels, identified as shadow assets of a rival nation. The communications referred cryptically to “broken threads” and “sleeping metal fish” — hints of dormant underwater drones possibly stationed near the Polar Thread awaiting activation. Command therefore ordered Frosch not only to maintain passive watch, but to operate at full alert — integrating all ship systems with the scientific models.

The Polar Thread carried petabytes of commercial and military command data daily between Europe and the Arctic. It also served as a vital anchor for environmental monitoring systems — sensors tracking ice retreat, fish stock evolution, and underwater acoustic data crucial for the Consortium’s “subsurface awareness.” All that information coursed through a cable barely thirty centimeters wide. Practically everything that crosses every smartphone’s palm — messages, calls, meaningless videos — passed through it too.

Cables like this were laid in another era, when the polar deep was quiet and still, shielded by thick perennial ice, far from shipping lanes, untouched by fishing — and certainly not contested by rival powers. But the Arctic was no longer isolated or predictable. The loss of multi-year ice around Frosch’s operating area had opened routes to fleets of commercial trawlers — and to hostile actors disguised among them.

The Consortium workshop held in Lerici, Italy, two years earlier had issued a clear warning:

“Climate change is a massive risk multiplier, capable of blurring the line between natural instability and human sabotage.”

Tonight, that warning was coming true. And Aisha was ready. She had worked for years for this. She wouldn’t let a naval officer sideline the science she had studied, refined, and embedded into classified algorithms and tested for months on synthetic data in her computing center.

“Contact bearing two-one-five,” the sonar operator shouted. “Unidentified echo, surface, intermittent.”

“Ghost net,” Aisha said flatly.

Meyer turned to her. “How can you tell? You’ve seen them before?”

“Only in simulation, with millions of synthetic data points,” she admitted, almost apologetically. “But enough to know what they could be — small autonomous bots seeded months ago, when no one was patrolling these waters. They lie dormant until triggered. Think of them as seabed parasites — underwater malware. And when they wake up, the underwater chaos of a changing climate — turbulence after storms, unstable temperature layers, strange bioacoustic surges — gives them the perfect acoustic cover.”

Another wave struck the ship, rattling the bridge lights. Meyer grabbed the railing, muttering under his breath. “And what’s their target?”

“If I had to bet — the joint of the repaired cable. If they damage it during a storm, it’ll look like a natural fault. Almost impossible for the Consortium to assign blame to any adversary. The current uncertainty of deep-sea law will do the rest — it’ll all be logged as ‘non-hostile damage.’”

Meyer couldn’t help himself. “Deploy sentry drones. Boost sonar signal. Weapons ready.”

The crew moved with trained precision, but Aisha shook her head with a faint smile. “That won’t be enough. Remember, your sensors are blind within the refracted ocean layer — they won’t guide the drones properly. I need to recalibrate first…”

She plugged her tablet into the console, overriding the system with her code. Waves of color flooded the display. “I’m integrating Frosch’s real-time oceanographic data — salinity, shear currents, wave height and direction from the storm. I’ll remap the entire acoustic window in under thirty seconds.”

Meyer didn’t like civilians taking control of his systems, but the Admiral had been clear — and the alternative, taking all the blame himself, was even less appealing. “You’ve got thirty seconds,” he said, checking his Submariner and nodding to the sonar officer.

The screen brightened suddenly, well before half a minute had passed. Tiny signals emerged from what had seemed chaotic clutter — now clearly a scattered formation moving along the seabed toward the cable junction.

“Confirmed swarm,” Aisha said. “About twenty units, maybe more. Flattened to the bottom to stay invisible. Clever — but they can’t hide their own thermal wakes. And in this new, warmer ocean, sharper temperature contrasts make those wakes stand out even more — at least to my algorithm.”

Meyer leaned in, surprised to find his right hand resting on her shoulder — right between the collar of her T-shirt and the strap of her bra. “How the hell… Our sensors couldn’t see them at all… Can we stop them?”

Aisha felt herself stiffen — not from stress, but from his touch. “If your small autonomous underwater vehicles, that you all name AUVs, borrow eyes from my model, maybe. You have to act like you’re scattering a flock of birds.”

Meyer almost smiled. “Now you’re speaking my language. Do as she says,” he ordered, integrating her data feed into the drones’ CPUs.

Two Consortium AUVs slid into the black water from launch tubes in Frosch’s hull, their propellers tracing faint luminescent trails. Guided by Aisha’s real-time model, they moved with surgical precision.

“Non-lethal interference charges ready,” the sonar operator reported, his voice trembling with restrained adrenaline.

The charges detonated in sequence — pressure waves and bursts of light calibrated to scramble the intruders’ sensors. Some small robots drifted apart, others froze, disabled. But a handful, now more aggressive, kept advancing toward the Polar Thread’s joint, moving like silent predators through folds of water.

Aisha’s fingers danced frantically across her tablet. “Some are breaching the refracted layer — they’re close. Changing signal gain — you’ll see them better now. Stop them before they reach the cable, but be careful not to damage it.”

Meyer gripped the railing, eyes fixed on the display. The storm still shook the ship, and each lightning flash above seemed to echo the tension below. “Countermeasures, Delta-three pattern — fire,” he ordered, steady-voiced despite his pounding pulse.

The AUV launchers expelled low-charge mini-torpedoes loaded with micro-fragments of synthetic coral. The shots struck with surgical accuracy, severing or jamming the manipulators of the hostile drones. Some floated powerless; others lay inert on the seabed. The Consortium AUVs kept sweeping the area while Meyer and Aisha held their breath for seconds that felt eternal.

“Commander, data flow through the cable is stable,” the communications officer finally reported, barely hiding his relief.

One by one, the warning lights faded. The sonar cleared — the Polar Thread was safe. The operation had succeeded without compromising the cable or disrupting data traffic.

Meyer exhaled slowly as he stepped out onto the deck, the icy wind biting his face, the adrenaline still coursing. “Well done, Doctor. We’d never have made it without your extra eyes. They let us spot and crush those little bastards while our sensors were blind.”

Aisha didn’t look up from the portable display she had carried to the deck, barely concealing her satisfaction. “That was just a small swarm. The corrected acoustic model gave us a tactical edge — but the real challenge will come when these conditions become the norm. Indo-Pacific sector, Mediterranean, and Black Sea…hundreds of cables, thousands of kilometers. It won’t just be drones — it’ll be the sea itself, changing faster than our doctrines. We need to redefine what we know about our waters. And we’re not moving fast enough.”

Meyer nodded gravely, eyes on the now-calmer sea. “And in the whole Consortium Navy, there’s only one of you to handle that?”

Aisha’s smile was thin, ironic. “One isn’t enough. We need trained systems, not saviors — adaptive monitoring, real-time climate models, autonomous defenses. Otherwise…” she gestured toward the waves still striking the hull, “…the sea will win. With or without enemies.”

The cold wind lashed her face, and for a moment the ocean seemed alive — unpredictable, untamable. But among the flickering lights of the Frosch, the steady data flow through the Polar Thread, and Aisha’s models revealing every micro-anomaly, the feeling shifted: the Consortium could still respond. With ingenuity, technology, and foresight, the battle was far from lost.

And that night, as the storm slowly faded, Meyer and Aisha both knew — the real war for control of the seas and their data had only just begun.

Sandro Carniel, PhD, is an Italian oceanographer, science communicator, and award-winning writer whose research explores the intersection of climate change, technology, and maritime security. He is currently Research Director at the Institute of Polar Sciences, Italian National Research Council, Venice, and member of the scientific committee of CESMAR, Centre for Geopolitical and Strategic Maritime Studies, after having served as Head of the Research Division at the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, La Spezia (Italy). Carniel has been presented with the Tridente d’Oro (an honor also bestowed on Jacques Cousteau and Jacques Mayol) and is an International Fellow of The Explorers Club of New York.

Featured Image: Art created with Midjourney AI. 

Fiction Week

By Paul Viscovich, CDR, USN (Ret.)

“What if the People’s Liberation Army lures us to the wrong landing beach?”

“Say again, Commander?” Admiral Dale Lee gave his operations officer a quizzical look.

“Well sir, with the GPS network out of action and dead reckoning iffy, they could replace charted radio beacons with temporary transmitters elsewhere, supported by some decoy landmarks to make the wrong site look like the right one. Maybe they can’t build a lighthouse overnight but they can easily mimic the correct light’s characteristics in the wrong location.”

“Interesting thesis, Ops. But you’re assuming they already know where we’re going.”

“All due respect Admiral, can we assume they don’t?”

“No. No we can’t. Share your theory with Intel, so they can make appropriate inquiries through back channels.”

__________________________________________

 “Jade Gate, this is Qinglong Leader, over.”

At the mobile command post ashore in Taiwan, a radio operator keyed his mic and replied, “Leader, this is Jade Gate, send your traffic.”

“Coastline in sight, over.”

The watch commander, a PLA colonel, ordered the air search radar energized. “Tell me when you see them.”

“Aye, sir.” The operator switched on the radar and looked intently at the scope, assisted by unnecessary spectators staring eagerly over his shoulder.

“Colonel, I hold three contacts in formation, bearing 137 degrees, 55 kilometers.”

“Very good! Place air search in standby. Radio Qinglong Leader to report his position, then FINEX and return to base.”

“Jade Gate, this is Qinglong Leader. My radio navigation position is 24 degrees, 31 minutes north, 122 degrees, 3 minutes east. Shifting back to VFR. Qinglong Leader, out.”

“Plotter, did you get that?”

“Yes Colonel. Qinglong’s reported position is 40 kilometers south of actual.”

The colonel took a long pull on his cigarette and smiled. “Comrades, we have just filled a major gap in our defenses.”

__________________________________________

China’s invasion of Taiwan triggered setting DEFCON 1 for the first time in U.S. history. Manning at NORAD’s Missile Warning Center in Cheyenne Mountain was on a wartime footing. Though the atmosphere in the control room is never relaxed, its intensity now was unprecedented.

“General, PACOM Site 3 reports possible rocket launch from Yulin.”

General Greg Kellogg, laconic at the best of times, had been listening silently to the stream of information directed at him for analysis and action. The unforgiving speed of inbound ICBMs and irrevocability of actions taken in response allowed no time to correct any error in judgment.

“Corroboration?”

“Querying Site 5, sir.” Seconds passed. Tension mounted.

“Clock’s ticking, Major.”

“Site 5 confirms possible launch, sir. Standby. Site 5 now reporting a second launch. Site 3 confirms.”

General Kellogg cocked an eyebrow. One launch in a day is unusual. Two within five minutes? Almost unheard of. “Captain Brewster, put me through to National Military Command Center.”

“General, Sites 3 and 5 both report a third rocket launch. Now tracking three separate contacts.”

“NMCC on the line, General.”

The familiar voice of the President asked, “What have you got for me Greg?”

“Confirmed reports of three rocket launches, southeast mainland China. No trajectory yet but it’s a highly anomalous event. We must consider the possibility of an ICBM strike.”

“What’s your status of silo readiness?”

“Ready FIVE, Mr. President.”

“Okay, what do I need to trigger a counter-strike?”

“Any confirmed inbound trajectories, sir.”

“Okay. Stay on the line, I’m passing the phone to my military aide.”

General Kellogg covered the mouthpiece and called to his track evaluator. “Report any additional launches and trajectories.”

“Aye sir. Still tracking just three. These are not, I repeat not, in attack formation. None are heading towards the U.S. at this time. One is tracking to southwest, away from us. The second is tracking northeast and the third is tracking southeast.”

“Your assessment?”

“These three present no immediate threat to CONUS. Will report probable targets when they attain final altitude.”

The three missiles soon revealed their purpose, peaking in low earth orbits and launching a single satellite each. One settled into geosynchronous orbit, 300 miles above the Molucca Sea; the other two attained 130-mile altitudes, with orbital paths crossing over the Philippine Sea every 90 minutes.

__________________________________________

An alert watch stander near the entrance announced, “The admiral is in Combat.”

Admiral Lee secured the watertight door behind him and stepped into the eternal twilight of USS Tripoli’s Combat Information Center.

“Good morning, sir. Can’t sleep?”

“Actually, I set my alarm for 0400. Since surprise attacks often happen around sunrise, I wanted to be on station early with a cup of coffee. What’s going on? Anything from NMCC on yesterday’s rocket launches?”

“A follow-up came in on the Midwatch. It’s the top item in your message traffic. The quick and dirty is, because of the confluence of those satellite transits over the Philippine Sea, the Joint Staff suspects they’re reconnaissance birds looking for us.”

“That would make sense. How’s the weather, still overcast?”

“Yes sir, Met Officer says we can expect cloudy skies for 18-36 hours.”

A buzz over in CIC’s navigation plot caught their attention but the 21MC intercom at the admiral’s console interrupted before they could investigate further. “Flag Plot, Bridge.”

“Plot aye, Admiral speaking.”

“Good morning sir, Officer of the Deck. We just got a line of position on our GPS receiver. It just came out of nowhere.”

“Are you sure it’s a valid signal?”

“No sir, but we’re rounding up the techs to check it out.”

“Thanks Bridge. We’ll check on this from our end as well and let you know what we find.” Turning to his Staff Watch Officer, “Get the Intel Officer up here.”

“He’s already on watch sir, I can probably raise him on the 21MC.” He punched the appropriate button on the Station Select panel. “Intel, Flag Plot. The admiral has a question.”

“The Bridge reports GPS may be coming back online. Do you have any idea where this signal’s coming from? Zombie satellites saved for use only during war?”

“I can’t say, sir. If so, it’s classified at a higher level than I’m cleared for.”

__________________________________________

The stress in the PLA mobile headquarters was evident in the short-tempered demands of senior officers for more and better information, the frustration of junior staff and equipment operators struggling to find connections among an overabundance of clues, and the resulting clouds of cigarette smoke. Where were the American naval forces and where were they heading?

They knew two large formations of warships were crossing the Pacific. One, an Amphibious Task Group carried a Regimental Landing Team of Marines. The other was a Carrier Strike Group to provide direct support to the amphibs. Their likely mission was to land the Marines somewhere behind the PLA invasion now menacing the beleaguered Taiwanese forces.

Not knowing where or when the blow might fall made this knowledge almost useless. The atmosphere of borderline chaos in the headquarters tent was sustained by the uninterrupted squawk of voice radio messages coming from the overhead speakers. The watch commander noticed an unusual huddle of junior officers around the table of the radio decryption specialists.

“Have you lieutenants learned something interesting or are you merely exchanging gossip?”

“A contact report from Picket #3 has just arrived, Comrade Colonel. We are double-checking the decoding. Sir, the sub has visual contact on several large units with escorts, position 23 degrees, 11.4 minutes north by 127 degrees, 34.8 minutes east. Their approximate heading is 280 degrees at 20 knots.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Chen. I look forward to more useful information like that from you.” He smiled and raised the handset of a landline telephone. “This is Colonel Feng, put me through to General Hui.”

__________________________________________

“Admiral, USS Mahan got a couple of active pings, correlating with a reported periscope feather before losing contact, classifies it ‘probable sub’.”

“Thanks Ops. Likely a diesel boat on picket station. Radio the carrier group, we may have been compromised.”

“Aye, sir. Will this affect the landing?”

“Not likely. With H-hour less than a day away, the Chinese won’t have much time to reposition before we get the Marines ashore. How’s the nav plot looking?”

“GPS is still questionable, but improving after that big correction.”

“About that …”

“Still trying to figure it out, sir. It’s possible that while the Chinese were destroying our satellites, GPS was being slowly degraded without us realizing it. By the time the system was hard down, who knows how far off track we might’ve been?”

“The quality of the fixes was going downhill toward the end. How’s it looking now?”

“The current difference between GPS and the corresponding Ship’s Inertial Navigation System’s dead reckoned position has settled down to a steady mile or less north of DR, sir.”

“Do we know what’s causing this?”

“The Met Office says it could be the wind. It’s been veering from south-east to southwest for the last 14 hours, strong enough to set us off track to the right. On this heading, we’d expect more of an error in latitude than longitude, and that’s exactly what’s happening.”

“Very well, then. Signal a change in base course by another two degrees to the left to get us back on track.”

__________________________________________

Electronic warfare is a stand-off weapon, and so is its management.

The plan to trick the approaching Americans was developed and controlled at the highest levels of the Defense Ministry in Beijing. An assembly of top-ranking generals and admirals rose respectfully as Minister Su Lumin took his seat at the head of the table.

“Comrade Chou, what news of this threat approaching Taiwan Province from the east?”

“Two U.S. naval formations were organized in the central Pacific seven days ago and commenced a westerly transit under cover of bad weather. One formation is an Amphibious Task Group of seven troop transports and one America-class amphibious assault ship. The estimated size of the landing force is about 2,200 Marines. They’re accompanied by four Arleigh Burke Class destroyers.

“About 200 miles behind this group are two aircraft carriers in company with another nine destroyers and two oilers. We expect this force to provide pre-landing fires against our positions ashore, using ship-launched cruise missiles and carrier-based close air support during the landing.”

Minister Su turned to the PLA chief of staff. “General Wu, how would this landing imperil our advance on Taipei?”

“The threat, Comrade Minister, lies not in the enemy’s numbers but his ability to establish a beachhead. Once ashore, he can build airstrips and improve the site with floating piers, fuel dumps and field hospitals capable of supporting division-sized formations to challenge us on the battlefield.”

“Then how can we prevent this?”

“If we divert our forces away from the offensive, it will slow our advance. And not having time to prepare our defenses on the beach will expose us to heavy casualties.”

“I have known you, General Wu, for too long to think you would present me with problems and no solutions.”

The PLA chief of staff relaxed slightly. “We have developed a tactic to lure the Americans away from their planned invasion site, wherever it is, to one at greater distance from our forces. We also believe we can decoy the carrier strike group’s fires to unintentionally hit their comrades at the false landing site.”

“Interesting, General. But this tactic is not original.”

The chief of staff stiffened nervously.

Minister Su continued, “The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by using the enemy himself.” He paused. “So wrote Sun Tzu. Please explain to me how this will work.”

__________________________________________

“Will these seas never calm?” Tripoli’s quartermaster of the watch twisted his body painfully, trying to simultaneously brace his legs against the rolling deck while sighting his sextant on the lower limb of the sun. “Mark. Elevation 40 degrees, 44 minutes.”

“Got it,” replied his chief. “Shoot another as a check. God knows when we’ll see the sun and the horizon at the same time again.”

“Damn, Chief! Isn’t GPS sending the Inertial Nav System regular updates again?”

“Yeah, but Gator thinks it’s too soon to trust it. I think he’s right. Every time we get a GPS update, it puts us a mile or two north of where SINS dead reckoning holds us.”

“What’s that got to do with shooting sunlines?”

 “Can’t tell if the problem’s with SINS or the satellites. Won’t be able to either, not without a good celestial fix. So you keep an eye out for topside shadows and a clear horizon. If you see both, hot-foot it up here and take a sunline. Right now, I’d trust even a celestial running fix more than what those high-tech gizmos are telling us.”

A similar argument was taking place down in Flag Plot.

“I’m not comfortable with repeatedly adjusting base course left another degree or two with every new GPS fix. Can anyone explain to me what’s happening?”

“We’re working on it Admiral. Tripoli’s navigator has collected GPS fixes from the ships in company for comparison. The error, if indeed that’s what it is, is consistent. The GPS longitude agrees with our SINS dead reckoning, but there’s an error of about a mile to the north in latitude.”

“And we’re still blaming this on the wind?”

“No, Admiral. Wind speed has dropped by half and we’re still being offset to the right of track by the same amount.”

“It’s probably a fault with the satellites,” offered the ops boss. “I mean, it’s unlikely all the SINS units would have developed the same error independently.”

“I agree,” offered the chief of staff. “It seems we have only three functional GPS satellites and I’ve polled the COs on each of our ships. They all report their SINS units are ops normal.”

“You people are getting too mesmerized by technology. What we really need are some celestial observations. The heavenly bodies don’t break and sight-reduction calculations don’t lie.”

The chief of staff cleared his throat. “I was talking with Tripoli’s CO. He said that for the last couple of days his navigator has been trying to get a fix, but the weather isn’t cooperating. The best he got were a couple of estimated positions that were so poor as to be useless for checking GPS and SINS against.”

“Then I suppose we must work with the tools we have. Change base course another degree to the left.”

__________________________________________

“Gator! Wake up!”

“What? Hells bells! It’s half-past midnight for God’s sake!”

“Chief says he needs you on the Flying Bridge now sir! The skies have cleared and the rising moon’s shining on a good horizon.”

“Tell Chief I’m on my way!”

Forty-five minutes later, Tripoli’s navigation team had plotted a three-point celestial fix. It placed them nowhere near where GPS and SINS indicated.

The navigator rapped on the CO’s Cabin door and entered. “Skipper? We just got a good celestial fix. I hold us 23 miles south track.”

“We have to wake the admiral.”

Ten minutes later, the key decision makers clustered around the navigation plot in CIC. Admiral Lee clutched a mug of stale Midwatch coffee while his staff, the ship’s CO and navigator awaited his decision.

He addressed the navigator directly. “Gator? How long will it take to get us to the correct beach?”

“Nine hours at flank speed, sir.”

“That will delay H-Hour by four. We’ll be landing in broad daylight. Well, it can’t be helped. Signal the task group. Immediate Execute, Base Course 286, Base Speed 22. Ops, gin up an Immediate message to Admiral Funke, info the carrier group. Report that we are off-station, GPS is unreliable, and H-Hour is delayed to 0900. Provide our true current position, time, course and speed. He’ll figure out where we’re going.”

__________________________________________

General Hui was awakened less than an hour later. Nodding in response to his aide’s whispered report, he put on his slippers and a non-regulation silk robe festooned with dragons for this pre-dawn visit to the command center. His aide met him there with a steaming cup of green tea.

“Comrade General, the Americans have discovered our ruse. Our picket submarines report their landing ships are now tracking north-north-west at top speed, toward what we evaluate was their original landing site.”

“Then place reconnaissance teams near that beach to report developments as they occur.”

As this discussion concluded, a Shaanxi Y-9LG long range electronic warfare aircraft launched from Hainan, enroute to the Taiwan Straits. It rapidly attained cruising altitude of 35,000 ft.

__________________________________________

D-Day, H minus two hours. The Boat Group Commander was on station, forming the landing craft into waves for their assault on the landing beach. The escorting destroyers had moved into their assigned stations, ready to provide naval gunfire support.

On the Bridge of the Primary Control Ship, Gator was one of several officers scanning the beach for any sign of enemy activity.

At H minus 15 minutes, the destroyers commenced gunfire support while those 200 miles out to sea launched a salvo of land-attack cruise missiles.

High above the Taiwan Straits a Chinese EW aircraft began emitting a UHF transmission in a focused beam on 1226.7 MHz. Simultaneously a satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the Molucca Sea switched the coded signal of its transmission.

“Gator? GPS is acting up again.”

“What is it now, Chief?”

“We just got a two-line estimated position that puts us right on the beach!”

“Oh, you mean where the Tomahawks from the carrier group are about to hit? Good thing that’s bogus.”

The Bridge 21MC suddenly squawked, “Vampire, vampire, vampire! Incoming cruise missiles! Tomahawks locked on Tripoli with terminal homing! Recommend setting General Quarters!”

“Gator, those Tomahawks must be receiving the same bogus GPS coordinates we are!”

“Damn Chief! We’ve been spoofed!

Paul Viscovich is a retired Surface Warfare Officer with 20 years’ service, twelve of that on sea duty. He is a frequent contributor to CIMSEC.

Featured Image: Art created with Midjourney AI.

Fiction Week

By Malcom Reynolds

Undisclosed Location
Eastern Theater Command
3 March 2027
2125 local time 

“Comrade General, welcome,” said Colonel Pei Yuanqing as he saluted, then sat behind his desk. The general sat, and the meeting Yuanqing had restlessly awaited began.

For years Yuanqing planned this operation, ever since the Chairman revealed his private timeline for reunification with the defiant island to the east. Disguised as foreign students for insertion into the adversary’s homeland, Yuanqing’s teams had rehearsed every conceivable variation on the plan. They’d incorporated observations from Ukraine, Iran, and elsewhere. Their intelligence had penetrated the targets’ lax communication protocols and then simply watched and listened. They passed up myriad exploitation opportunities to retain their access and achieve the Chairman’s goal. The targets remained arrogantly unaware of their vulnerability throughout.

The Chairman had launched the last piece—the qīpiàn, the deception—three days ago. Public self-abasement, a pledge to deal, the humble request for a summit—all to get their targets out in the open. It was Yuanqing’s moment. Yet when he’d received the code word trigger, anxiety long buried within gripped his insides.

Yuanqing knew why. The actual landing aside, his operation was the most important ever undertaken by the People’s Liberation Army in its hundred years of history. Should it fail, severe punishment would fall on him and his…and thus he’d struck a deal with the general. Succeed or fail, Yuanqing would join the landing’s first wave. He and the general knew this was a death sentence. But death as punishment for failure, or death in the vanguard of the invasion whose success his team had assured, were quite different legacies. Following the final teleconference with his teams a few days ago, Yuanqing trusted that their performance would ensure his family received a posthumous 1 August Medal rather than join him in death. But the anxiety remained.

“I received word that all is ready,” said the general without preamble. “Has any intelligence suggested a change to the timeline?” Such an innocuous question, thought Yuanqing, about whether the millions of men and machines coiled to strike will win or lose depending on whether my plan succeeds or fails.

“None, Comrade General,” Yuanqing replied. “Only a few hours ago we intercepted further text exchanges confirming the targets’ timelines and locations. I’ll admit, I almost admire their stubbornness in continued use of their texting application despite years of publicized leaks. In some ways they mirror us, refusing to submit to the old order of things.” The general chuckled.

“In some ways, yes. But the old order kept us vulnerable; it kept them safe. They’ll pay the price for misunderstanding the distinction.”

“Indeed,” smiled Yuanqing. “And they seem quite convinced that—” Yuanqing hesitated.

“Go on, Comrade Colonel,” said the general. “Your thoughts match my own. I and the Chairman have full faith in your loyalty.”

“Their…tone. They’re certain we’ve acquiesced. That the Chairman has submitted to their incoherent demands. That we—” Yuanqing paused, tapped the screen of his mobile phone to bring up the precise text from the intelligence intercept—“that we’re the bitch we always knew they were.” He struggled to control his anger. “It is much to bear. Especially watching the Chairman’s public responses appear to confirm their arrogant assessment.” He fell silent, the general watching him closely. Then the general nodded, and something Yuanqing hadn’t even known was clenched inside of him relaxed.

“It is much to bear,” agreed the general. “But such appearances are necessary. They’re the fulcrum of our qīpiàn, to lull them enough to expose themselves. You and I, and the Chairman, know just how temporary our submission is. And if the Chairman can bear it, so can you.” Amusement flickered across the general’s face, though his eyes remained cold. “Your teams are our instrument for punishing that arrogance, and the arrogance of all the decades preceding it.” The general checked his watch. “My apologies, Comrade Colonel. You must head to the assembly area, and I’m delaying you.”

Both men stood, but as Yuanqing brought his arm up for a final salute, the general waved it away, extending his hand instead. “Comrade,” said the general simply. “Serve the people.”

Yuanqing’s voice caught in his throat. “Serve the people,” he whispered back.

The Base by the River
3 March 2027
0930 local time

Looks to be a beautiful day, thought Sergeant Zoë Alleyne as she strode to the hangar after FOD walk. This was one of those few northern Virginia mornings when humans could walk outside without immediately sweating or freezing. The river shimmered in sunlight, the sky was clear. Nothing to keep Marine Two from its quick visit.

Alleyne’s flight line shop had churned all week once rumors of the hasty summit were confirmed. Now all the birds were loaded and gone on C-17s. The Vice was coming to thank his fellow Marines for their hard work before flying back up the river to depart for the summit. The only other white top flying today had already gone up north to bring the CINC to Air Force One. For the moment, the day was beautiful, the air quiet.

A few seconds later, Alleyne heard the faint whop-whop of a helicopter in the distance.

____________________________________________

Wei eased the semi into the pull-off next to the base. He’d rehearsed this endlessly—sometimes going to one of the other three pull-outs, changing the time of day, varying how long he lingered before leaving again. Each time, the tension that this would be the one where his luck ran out gripped him a little tighter. He didn’t fear blowing the actual operation; for their rehearsals, the trailer’s contents were perfectly legitimate. Any inspection would reveal only reams of paper. But Wei was incredulous that he could park a truck carrying who-knew-what next to a military base, sit there, and no one would care. Yet for each rehearsal, he parked in a pull-out by the base, he sat, and then after a while he left again. No one came. No one cared.

He had a different trailer today. Today, they’d regret their indifference.

Wei checked his phone. His extraction driver, Xia, had already texted confirmation that she was staged in the the park just over the rise in the road. Yichen, their spotter, was on the far side of the river, ostensibly bird-watching should a nosey observer wonder why someone was pointing a pair of binoculars in the direction of the base. Everything was on timeline.

 He shut off the engine, then pulled the modified tablet from underneath his seat and woke it up. His phone silently thrummed on the seat, it was a short message from Yichen: five minutes out.

Hotel North of the Executive Mansion
3 March 2027
0938 local time

Ling pulled the phone from her pocket and glanced at it. “The others are in place,” she said, unslinging the heavy backpack. “It’s on us now not to fuck things up.” Bo grunted but kept his attention on pulling the contents from his heavy duffel bag. Theirs was the highest-value target and because of that, the narrowest window of opportunity to strike. And they were already 45 seconds late getting into position. Each second weighed on Ling like a millstone, spurring her hands to help Bo assemble their package.

The hundred-year-old hotel chosen as the launching point had an excellent view. There was clear line of sight to the landing zone on the executive mansion’s southern lawn. But the best efforts of their intelligence agencies hadn’t conjured an excuse for Ling and Bo to loiter on the premises. There were no job openings and no room vacancies. Under other circumstances, the intelligence offices could take direct actions to create those openings, but the Chairman himself quashed anything that might draw scrutiny to the hotel before the operation.

Thus their rehearsals had been conducted on mock-ups derived from secondhand sources along with pictures from a handful of dinners they’d reserved to scout the property. Ling and Bo were pretty sure their rehearsed route to the roof was accurate, but wouldn’t know until the day of execution.

Then there was the timing. Because they couldn’t loiter, they had to blend in with pedestrians while their observer, Zhou, did the same. Zhou was well south near the river, watching the normal route the helicopters took to the executive mansion. So Ling and Bo would walk around until Zhou signaled the helicopter was inbound, and then time their ascent for when they estimated the target would walk out on the southern lawn to board it. They’d studied enough news footage to calculate a rough average for how long after the helicopter landed that the target left the mansion to board it. But again, they wouldn’t know for sure that their target was in the open until they got to the roof.

They had one advantage—they didn’t have to worry about extraction.

But they were late, because after entering the rear of the hotel and starting their climb, they’d first come across a bellhop, and then a janitor, coming down the stairs on different floors. Ling left both to die quietly in pools of their own blood. But it cost time. Eventually someone would discover the bodies and raise the alarm. They had to complete the mission before that happened.

Bo watched the mansion through binoculars as Ling snapped the last rotor of the FPV drone into place. “Target’s in the open,” he said quietly. With a smooth motion Bo dropped the binoculars and slid the FPV headset down from the top of his head over his eyes. His hands activated the controller.

“Power up,” he said, and Ling armed the drone, then the payload. This, right here, was what mattered. She checked payload’s indicator light three times to be sure.

Police sirens wailed in the distance.

Touching Bo lightly on his left arm, she whispered: “Launch.”

The Base by the River

Wei’s phone buzzed with a message from Yichen: he’s taking a walk. That meant his target was in the open. Here we go.

His movements on the tablet were smooth and rehearsed. First he touched the icon that opened the hatches on top of the trailer, revealing the hidden space housing his flock of drones. Another tap and the repeater drone lofted upward to the altitude where it had line-of-sight to the airfield by the river. A third tap launched the swarm.

Wei’s screen filled with the first-person view from the lead drone. With most of the three miles between him and the airfield covered by forest, he wasn’t concerned about being intercepted en route. Their intelligence was confident the airfield lacked robust electronic countermeasures. The only thing that could stop him now was an inquisitive passerby along the road. But in all his rehearsals, no matter how long he’d loitered, no car had even slowed down. That pattern need only hold a couple minutes longer.

Gliding his fingers across the screen, Wei guided the lead drone along its flight path. The rest of the swarm followed in a loose formation. The drones quickly cleared the family housing area on the base’s perimeter and flew low over the forest treetops. After a couple of miles, Wei bumped the drones over the main base road and then turned them east just above the water of the tidal inlet that funneled to the airfield. Just before the water met the shore near the airfield road, Wei climbed the drones over the roofs of the aircraft hangars. As they cleared the hangars, the people clustered on the tarmac slid onto his screen, as perfectly centered as he could ask for.

Tapping the screen one last time, Wei pushed his drone into a dive. “Serve the people,” he whispered as the screen went blank.

Alleyne shook the Vice’s hand, then grinned as he pushed a challenge coin into it. The Vice’s formal remarks were brief, he’d quickly shifted to mingling with the Marines for handshakes. Alleyne gripped the coin tightly and made room for another Marine to receive the same gift. On the outskirts of the throng, she opened her hand to examine the coin more closely.

Buzzing caught her attention. Alleyne looked up to see a small shape diving toward her. She thought, that’s a weird-looking bird—

Then she tumbled, her skin burned, and screams filled the air.

Near the Executive Mansion

The sirens were close now.

Ling followed the drone through Bo’s binoculars. Their sole drone wasn’t large given that both it and its payload had to be carried on their backs. But the theory was that if they delivered it into the spinning helicopter, the explosion would generate enough dynamic pieces of death to do the job.

It was a short flight, but Bo’s challenge was flying the fiber-optic FPV high enough to keep the wires clear of street traffic and then dive it under the rotor arc into the aircraft before the wires drifted to the ground. They knew electronic countermeasures guarded the mansion, which was why they used a wire-guided FPV. It all came down to Bo’s finesse on the controls.

Bo caressed the controls gracefully. The drone cleared the street, cleared the fence, and then floated gently toward the lawn. Through the binoculars, the finale unfolded in slow motion. No one in the target zone raised any warning. The target himself walked toward the spinning helicopter, waving at a press gaggle behind him. The target was ten steps from the helicopter, then five. Bo plunged the drone into the fuselage just under the main rotor head.

Ling heard banging on the roof access door behind them, followed by shouts. No matter, we’re almost done.

A fireball obscured the helicopter’s fuselage. From the flames chunks of metal corkscrewed out, just as they’d planned. The main rotor blades flew in all directions, some gouging out chunks of turf as they pinwheeled along the lawn, one flying directly into the face of the executive mansion. The tail rotor’s torque ripped the tail boom away and flung it into the ballroom east of the landing zone. Fingers of burning jet fuel arched through the air, setting the lawn ablaze where they landed.

Ling locked the binoculars on the target area. What she saw through the flames made it clear that no living thing was left in, or near, the helicopter’s remains. She pulled out her phone to send a single message: done.

Bo flung his goggles away. The access door sounded like it was about to give way from the pounding. Ling and Bo briefly locked eyes as they removed their final pieces of equipment from duffel bag.

“Serve the people,” said Bo.

“Serve the people,” replied Ling. Together, they moved to the access door, each gripping a pistol in one hand and a blocky device in the other.

Ling unlocked it and pulled violently on the handle; a police officer fell forward and tumbled to the ground. Bo shot the man three times in the back. Ling slid into the doorway to find another officer staring in shock. Ling shot him in the face, then pulled back as a hail of bullets answered.

She and Bo hoped to make it to the ground floor before their own finale, but she knew now this would end on the roof. Ling barely felt the bullets passing through her as she emptied her magazine into the mass of uniforms. Next to her, Bo sighed softly and sank down, his knees shredded by bullets.

He looked up at her and nodded. Ling nodded back. Together, they released the dead man’s switches on the bombs they held.

The Base by the River

Alleyne lay on her back, head tilted toward the river. The screams had stopped. She heard flames crackle, smelled smoke and burning flesh, but couldn’t move her head to see if her squadron mates or the Vice were nearby. She felt cold.

Alleyne tried flexing her hand to see if the challenge coin was still there. She couldn’t move her hand either.

The world around her darkened, which was strange since the sun was still in her field of vision. She tried moving her head again. Nothing. The world got darker, and suddenly she felt very tired.

It was supposed to be a beautiful day…

In the Straits
Eastern Theater Command

Yuanqing leaned on the ship’s starboard railing, black water gurgling below as the vessel churned eastward. Klaxons would shortly call the embarked troops to their loading areas. He’d be on the first landing craft off the ship, in the first wave, just as he requested.

He’d learned of the operation’s success awaiting embarkation pier-side. The general personally delivered the news. The teams had destroyed both targets and left bloody, beautiful chaos behind them.

They’d broken the adversary’s chain of command. Embolisms of rage convulsed the adversary’s population. Half the country didn’t know who to blame and the other half…well, it blamed the first half. Yuanqing knew they’d figure it out eventually. But by then the landing would be over and their adversary left with few good options.

The distant adversary, Yuanqing reminded himself. The near adversary will soon feel the first raindrop that signals the typhoon.

An orange streak flamed through the sky, curving down to the eastern horizon. After a few seconds another followed, then another, and then the fiery streaks came so often that the water glowed orange from their reflection. The glow illuminated the other ships around him. The great fleet, amassed over decades for this moment, stretched as far as his eyes could see. The eastern horizon began to burn on its own. Soon Yuanqing couldn’t tell where the flames from the sky stopped and the flames on the horizon began. It was the gate of Armageddon, and his teams had opened it.

Klaxons blared. Yuanqing turned from the inferno. “Serve the people,” he whispered as he opened the hatch for the ladder to the well deck. The 1 August Medal bumped gently against his chest as he descended into darkness.

Malcolm Reynolds is a pen name for a former Marine officer.

Featured Image: Art created with Midjourney AI.