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“The pilots? Harry, get on that.”
There was a blast of a keyboard so close to the speakerphone that Clarissa had to jerk her phone away from her ear.
“C’mon, Harry. C’mon. Didn’t you find them yet?” Heidi’s voice was a barely audible tease over the noise.
She had to wait a full thirty seconds before the roar of the keys turned to a spatter and Harry replied.
“Not exactly. Thirty-eight minutes ago, the AFOSI received a call to Joint Base Andrews regarding a pair of corpses. They’re not saying anything else.” Harry’s keyboard continued to rattle away in the background, now more of a poking-about rate than a blast.
“The Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations aren’t exactly the most chatty of folks.” There was the bright ding of a microwave in the background and Heidi’s voice faded into the distance, but remained audible. How she stayed so slender with the amount of pizza and snack food those two consumed was a mystery. Clarissa felt as if she gained three pounds every time she so much as visited their high-tech cloister.
“I’ll call Drake and have him lean on the Air Force Chief of Staff,” Clarissa let them know.
“We’ll call if we find anything.”
“Heidi, did you hear anything about an accident on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea?”
The next silence lasted about three seconds. Then it sounded as iftwomachine guns had fired off—the sound of Harry and Heidi both attacking their keyboards. They called out single words that must announce one’s progress so that the other didn’t duplicate the effort. It was also a measure of how fast they dug how deeply.
“CNN.” Harry called out.
“CDN.” Heidi responded about the China Daily News.
“Reddit, no. Facebook, no.”
“Sina. Tencent. Renren.” Chinese social media.
“NRO.” “NSA.” They said in unison. She didn’t ask if they were going in through legal CIA access channels or through hacked back doors.
Clarissa had jerked the phone away enough to not have her eardrum pierced, then told the others about the two dead bodies at Andrews.
“The pilots.” Taz’s tone had no doubts. But then neither did Clarissa.
The keyboard buzz finally settled to tolerable, probably only one of them was typing now.
“Nothing surfaced on my first pass,” Harry spoke up, which meant the CIA’s truly big gun, Heidi, was still searching.
Though Clarissa knew that Harry’s first pass was deeper than probably anyone outside the NSA could reach by their third pass, Heidi operated at yet another level again. Finally her typing too faded to a human level of key rattle.
“Two carrier groups have been mobilized into the area. That’s major. Nothing else we can see from here. Not even in the US Navy command stack.” That was a very bad sign and they all knew it. Heidi’s voice was dead sober for a change. Clarissa’s cyber twins could generally cut their way into any system. To block them, the Navy was keeping whatever had happened in a need-to-know, voice-only bubble.
“Start working it. I need answers to what happened and then we need to know who was behind it—especiallythe who. No one is off the table. You start scanning reports, I’ll mobilize our embedded agents as soon as I reach a secure location.” She wanted to find thewhoand then ram itup Drake’s nose so hard it bled for a week.
“But it’s the South China Sea.” Heidi didn’t need to finish that statement.
“But it’s the South China Sea,” Clarissa agreed. That put the People’s Republic of China at the very top of the suspect list. “Unless someone is trying to frame China for us to take them out.”
“Hmm,” Heidi’s hum was thoughtful. “I can think of some folks who would love to do that as a false flag op—ousted Hong Kongese frames the PRC for attacking our carrier, escalation, escalation, escalation, we take out the Beijing government, Hong Kong steps into power vacuum.”
“And the fact that such a scenario is utterly insane?” Clarissa asked.
“Second-guessing extremist groups?” Heidi countered.
Clarissa hadn’t had a moment to think about that yet. It was a possibility, but too unlikely one. “I can’t imagine there are a lot of people left there who could pull off such an attack, but check it out.”
“Will do. Oh, Clarissa?”
“Yes?” She’d long since stopped trying to get aDirector Reeseout of Heidi.
“Based on the timing of the order to move the two carrier groups, the crash there happened within minutes of the one at the George. We’ll watch for possible links there too.”
“Uh, good. Thanks.” She hung up and put away her phone. Two simultaneous strikes half a world apart. Maybe if they found who ordered one, they’d find both. Wouldn’t that be a coup? She could bury the House Intelligence Committee permanently with that.
And then the implications hit her.
Two simultaneous strikes half a world apart. An aircraft carrier—and the heart of the American capital.
It was ninety-five degrees in Washington, DC. Yet a sudden chill made her wish she hadn’t left her jacket in the car.
