Piranha (2 page)

Scott opened his eyes, peeked through the tarp's hole to get his bearings, and saw that he was just opposite the forecastle. He was about to make a try for it when the door swung wide and two sailors, Taylor and Quashey, reached out and dragged him inside.

They closed the door and covered the portholes with mattresses, trunks, anything they could find. When the room was sealed, they huddled beneath the tarp and blankets, waiting for the end—either of the firestorm or their lives.

After what seemed like an hour but could have been no more than ten minutes, Scott felt the heat abate. Hoping the worst to be over, he stood and opened the door.

With one look, he realized that the worst was just beginning.

The deck was littered with charred corpses. Men, women, and children were burned horribly or coated with enough ash that they appeared to be frozen in concrete. He could not tell passenger from crew.

He stepped gingerly around them, searching for any signs of life, when he found someone facedown, the back of the clothing burned away. The poor wretch was moaning in pain. Scott gently turned the person over and reeled backward when he saw the awful visage.

The man's hair was gone completely, his skin blackened and his nose and ears misshapen and melted to his face. The only reason Scott knew it was a man and not a woman was because of the remnants of coat and tie that were still intact beneath his folded arms. His lower half was burned to a cinder. Scott figured the man must have been lying on his stomach when the fire scorched him.

“Help me, Mr. Scott,” the man sputtered through cracked lips.

Scott looked at the man in confusion. “Do I know you, sir?”

“Don't you know
me
, Mr. Scott?” he croaked, every word an excruciating effort. “I am Lutzen.”

Scott gaped at Gunther Lutzen. He would never have recognized the German.

Lutzen trembled as he raised his arms toward Scott, who thought the man was reaching out for aid. Instead, he lifted his precious notebook and held it toward Scott. Now he realized that Lutzen must have thrown himself on the notebook to protect it from the flames.

“I'm dying. Give this to my sister.”

Scott did not want to see another man die, so he desperately searched for any signs of help coming to them. A cargo vessel he recognized as the
Roddam
was turning to port to head out to open sea, and he could see that the entire stern was on fire.

“Please, Mr. Scott,” Lutzen said, drawing Scott's gaze back to him. “Ingrid Lutzen, New York City.”

Seeing that there was nothing more to do for the man, Scott nodded and carefully took the notebook and tucked it into his waistband. “Of course, Mr. Lutzen. I'll see to it.”

Lutzen couldn't smile, but he nodded in understanding. “Tell her I was there,” he said with a pitiful wheeze. “I made the breakthrough. It will change everything. They shined like emeralds, as large as tree trunks.”

He coughed violently, his body shaking from the strain. Scott tried to stand to go find him water, but Lutzen grabbed his sleeve and pulled him close so that Scott's ear hovered over his mouth. He whispered three words, then his hand fell away from Scott's coat. Lutzen became mercifully still, finally free from his pain.

Scott remained kneeling for a moment, confused by what he'd heard. Then more groans caught his attention, and he was on his feet. With the captain dead or mortally wounded, he was now in charge.

Scott gathered as many survivors as he could find, a total of only thirty out of the sixty-eight on board, and half of those would likely not make it through the night. Scott and three other crew members were the only ones not badly injured. They set about constructing a raft out of the remains of a lifeboat, but their efforts were rendered moot when the French cruiser
Suchet
arrived in the afternoon and took them aboard, leaving the
Roraima
behind to sink. The officer who gave him coffee told him that they feared not a single soul in Saint-Pierre had lived through the holocaust.

With nothing more to do now that he and his few charges were safe, Scott took Lutzen's journal from his waistband and flipped through it. As he'd suspected, he couldn't understand a word of it. Not only was every page written in German but the majority of the writing consisted of equations and scientific mumbo jumbo. Scott hoped Lutzen's sister would know what to make of it and vowed to keep his promise to return it to her.

Scott thought about what he'd tell her when he met her upon his arrival in New York, whether to save her from the horror of what her brother had suffered. He thought she deserved the whole truth, including Lutzen's last message to her.

He wanted to make sure he remembered it verbatim in the days it would take for the trip north, so he scrounged a pencil from one of the
Suchet
's sailors and leafed to the first blank page. Scott scribbled the cryptic phrases he'd heard, Lutzen's raw voice in his head.

Tell her I was there.
I made the breakthrough. It will change everything. They shined like emeralds, as large as tree trunks.

Scott paused, still unsure whether he'd heard Lutzen's final three words correctly. He shrugged and reproduced Lutzen's strange message exactly.

I found Oz.

Chesapeake Bay

Nine months ago

The X-47B prototype attack drone made a sweeping turn, only minutes away from the target eighty miles northwest of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Frederick Weddell adjusted the frequency-hopping algorithm of the jamming transmission. His mission was to block the control signal coming in from the drone's operator at Naval Base Ventura County in California and recode its onboard navigation system, causing the aircraft and its one thousand pounds of fuel to smash into a derelict barge.

Even without the two smart bombs it was capable of carrying, the drone could cause a deadly terrorist attack on the U.S.

Weddell relished the challenge. “We're gonna do it,” he said to no one in particular, although there were two other men in the small room filled to the brim with electronic equipment and displays. The eighty-foot communications vessel anchored near the mouth of the Potomac was otherwise unoccupied except for its captain, who was topside on the bridge. Weddell adjusted his wire-framed glasses and looked up at the largest monitor to check the view from a camera on the deck. The drone was in its first turn after takeoff, a white wedge against the orange glow of dusk behind it.

To accomplish their mission, jamming the control signal wasn't enough. If the drone's contact with its controller was lost, it would revert to autonomous mode and return to its base at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, the Maryland flight center that served as the test facility for most of the Navy's aerial weapons systems. The key was to establish a new control authorization so that the coordinates for an alternative target designation could be loaded. In this case, the unmanned aerial vehicle would be instructed to crash into the barge at five hundred miles per hour.

This attack was the worst-case scenario for the Pentagon. No one—not the drone designers nor the Joint Chiefs—thought that the onboard systems could be hacked. But ever since a top secret RQ-170 Sentinel reconnaissance drone crash-landed in Iran, top brass had demanded that the Air Force and Navy prove that their communications protocols were unbreakable. Apart from losing a drone that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build, the crash had given Iran a free peek inside one of America's most advanced pieces of technology. If the Iranians could bring it down, they might be able to wrest a drone's control away from its operator. The military was pouring funds into a program to make sure that never happened.

That was the reason for this hijacking simulation.

The call had gone out for the best and brightest in the drone community to put together a team to serve as the enemy infiltration unit. An electrical engineer by education and now the Air Force's top communications specialist, Weddell had jumped at the chance. He was an expert in all manner of signal transmission, encryption, and disruption, so he was chosen to head up the signal intercept mission. His team consisted of two other top-notch scientists.

Lawrence Kensit, a mousy fellow with a stooped gait and an acne-scarred face, was a computer scientist and physicist who had gotten his Ph.D. from Caltech when he was twenty. Despite his penchant for calling anyone he felt didn't rise to his level of brilliance “irredeemably stupid”—including officers who depended on his work—he nevertheless became the military's most brilliant drone software developer. He sat to Weddell's right, tapping away on a keyboard set in front of three screens winking with data.

The second man was Douglas Pearson, a hardware designer responsible for the technology that went into the most advanced drones in the military's arsenal. He was a bear of a man whose bombastic voice and enormous gut suited someone who didn't say no too much and wasn't used to hearing the word, either. He ruled his fiefdom with an iron fist and would argue loudly with anyone who disagreed with his viewpoint. He sat to Weddell's left with his feet up on the counter, a tablet computer in one hand and a coffee mug in the other.

If the three of them couldn't crack the drone's command system, no one else in the world could. After confirming that the drone would in fact proceed on an intercept path toward the derelict barge, Weddell planned to veer it from its course and have it waggle its wings over Patuxent in a final flourish before returning it to Ventura control.

Pearson slurped his coffee loudly before setting it down and tapping his tablet against the counter. “What's happening, Larry? I've got nothing on the linkup so far.”

“Dr. Weddell,” Kensit said without looking away from his screens, “please remind Dr. Pearson that I don't respond to that nickname. I prefer ‘Dr. Kensit,' but I will accept ‘Lawrence,' even though that privilege is usually reserved for people who could be considered equals.” He paused before adding, “If it's not clear, I don't consider him an equal.”

“Equal in what way,
Dr.
Kensit?” Pearson said with a mocking laugh. “We sure aren't equal in height.”

“Or weight.”

Pearson snorted. “Why don't I just call you
shorty
? Or how about
pipsqueak
?”

“My height is lower relative to yours, but close to average,” Kensit replied without inflection. “Much like your IQ.”

“Enough,” Weddell said, fed up with their constant bickering. “We're not going through this right now.” He had spent half of the last six months playing referee between them.

“We're about to win this thing,” he continued, “so try to remain civil until we're done. We'll only have a direct line of sight for two more minutes. What's your status, Lawrence?”

Kensit pressed a final key with a decisive snap. “If Dr. Pearson's hardware calculations are correct, as soon as you are able to wrest the control signal away from Ventura, I will be able to reconfigure the onboard navigation protocols.”

Weddell nodded and put his plan for blocking the transmission into motion. Spoofing the GPS navigation wouldn't work because all U.S. drones relied on inertial navigation to prevent just such a tactic. He had to be much more creative. Using an antenna of his own design mounted on the deck of the boat, he blasted the receiver on the X-47B with an overload spike that would cause the onboard systems to momentarily freeze. The sensitive part of the operation was to do it just long enough so that its receiver would immediately go into search mode again, but not so long that it recognized someone was attempting to compromise its protocols and cause it to revert to autonomous operation.

“Get ready, Lawrence,” Weddell said. “Remember, you'll have only twenty seconds to acquire the signal.”

“I know.”

Of course he does.

Weddell turned to Pearson. He was responsible for disabling the drone's automated self-destruct, which would engage if the drone's sensors detected an unauthorized signal controlling it. “Doug, are you ready to go?”

“Let's do this,” Pearson said, rubbing his hands together.

“Okay. On my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark.”

Weddell pressed the
ENTER
button, and the pulse bombarded the drone. His screen confirmed that he had a direct hit.

“Go, Lawrence!”

Kensit began typing furiously. The seconds ticked by. All Weddell could do from this point was watch. He kept his eyes on the monitor above him. The drone remained on its original heading.

“Status, Lawrence.” The countdown timer he'd programmed into his laptop gave them ten more seconds.

“I'm isolating the control subroutines,” Kensit said, which was as close as Weddell would get to an estimate from him.

More ticks. The wait was excruciating. For the first time in the entire process, Weddell was completely powerless.

“Five seconds, Lawrence!”

More typing.

“You can do it, Kensit,” Pearson said.

Kensit's fingers flew across the keyboard, and then he pulled them away like a concert pianist finishing a minuet.

“I know,” he said. “We now have control.” He looked pointedly at Pearson. “Try not to make my brilliance a moot point.”

Although this drone wouldn't actually explode if Pearson couldn't disable the autodestruct, a switch inside the X-47B would trip in the event the autodestruct sequence wasn't terminated. The inspectors checking the drone later would know that the hijacking mission had failed. There would be no partial credit.

Pearson used the tablet as deftly as Kensit had manipulated his keyboard. Weddell was focused on entering new targeting coordinates into the nav system. He finished just as Pearson called out in triumph, “Take that, Uncle Sam! We done got your drone!”

Weddell and Pearson clapped and slapped palms. All they could get from Kensit was a raised eyebrow and a shrug, as if he shouldn't celebrate something that he fully expected to happen.

The festivities became short-lived when Weddell noticed the X-47B turning on the monitor. It should have been heading away from them on the course toward the barge. Instead, it was flying directly toward them.

And it was descending.

“What the hell is going on, Lawrence?”

Kensit shook his head in bewilderment. “This can't be.”

Pearson took his feet down and stared at Kensit. “What did you do, Larry?”

“I didn't do anything to cause this.”

“Cause what?” Weddell asked.

“The drone is locked onto the signal we're broadcasting.”

“What?” Weddell tried to disengage the signal they were broadcasting, but the computer wouldn't respond. “How is that possible?”

“I . . . I'm not sure.”

Weddell looked up at the monitor. The X-47B was growing larger on the screen every moment. They had less than a minute before the drone and its payload of fuel completed its kamikaze attack and blew the boat apart. “Can you reprogram it?”

Kensit just gaped at his screen, perplexed and mute.

Weddell rushed over and shook him by the shoulders. “I said can you reprogram it?”

For probably the first time in his life, Kensit uttered the words “I don't know.”

“You've got to try or we're all dead.” He wheeled around and pointed at Pearson. “See if you can engage that autodestruct.”

Pearson nodded furiously and hunched over his tablet. Weddell raced for the door at the front of the room.

“Where are you going?” Kensit asked.

“If you guys can't reassert control, I can at least stop our antenna from broadcasting.”

He threw open the door and ran up to the bridge, where he found the captain staring at the drone diving toward them.

“Get us moving—now!” Weddell shouted.

The captain didn't need to be told why and throttled up the engine.

Weddell climbed up onto the top deck above the bridge where the antenna was located. If he disconnected the power cable, the broadcast would cease. Even if the drone had locked onto their initial position, moving the ship would get them out of its path.

He reached the antenna and was about to reach for the cable when the ship lurched forward. He was thrown back, tripped on a railing, and struck his head against the bulkhead.

He saw stars for a few seconds and shook his head to clear them before crawling toward the antenna. The black cable leading to the dish lay exposed on the white deck.

He glanced up and saw the slash of white wing plunging toward them, the drone's black air intake gaping like the maw of a manta ray. The banshee wail of the jet engine foretold a fiery end if he couldn't disable their broadcast. It looked like neither Kensit nor Pearson had been successful.

Weddell grasped the power cable with both hands and yanked it. The cable held firm. He braced his feet against the dish's rotating pedestal and put everything he had into it, his muscles straining in protest.

With a sudden pop, the cable flew backward in a shower of sparks, sending Weddell tumbling.

He picked himself up and saw the cable had completely disconnected from the antenna. There was no way it was still broadcasting.

The water splashed in whitecaps from the bow, indicating that they were now doing a good twenty knots. They'd have plenty of distance from the drone's impact.

Weddell turned his attention back to the drone so that he could tell the crash investigators exactly where it went down. But to his horror, the drone continued to make adjustments in its course.

It was still aimed straight at them, no more than five seconds away.

He scrambled to his feet in a mad dash to jump overboard, but he was far too late. Time seemed to compress as the drone plunged into the ship and exploded.

His last thought before the fireball consumed him wasn't of his wife or his mother or his German shepherd, Bandit. It was focused on the fact that this event was no accident. Frederick Weddell used his brain's final impulses to wonder who it was that killed him.