Lombardi knew in his bones that some government official was going to walk up at any moment and randomly demand to look at his mobile phone. They had no right, but that didn’t stop authoritarian regimes. That’s what governments did. They screwed the people. He knew he had to be hypervigilant, especially at work. When he went to his job on Naval Base Ventura County, the phone stayed at home, hanging from the string in his wall.
The sun was not yet up when he nursed his rattletrap Ford Ranger up to the security gate a little before five-thirty. The odor of diesel fuel and low tide hung heavy across the blacktop road. He liked to arrive at the construction site early enough to impress his foreman, but not so early as to make security forces any twitchier than they already were.
Comprising three Naval facilities — Point Mugu, Port Hueneme, and San Nicolas Island — NBVC was home to no less than four airborne early-warning squadrons. Three of these E-2 Hawkeye squadrons were assigned to the carriers USS
Security investigations for hammer-swingers and ditch-diggers looked for things that were on the record, not things that weren’t. Sure, they wanted to know where he’d gone to high school, but they weren’t likely to spend the time to send agents out to interview his high school counselor, or anyone who might have known how much he despised the establishment. Lombardi’s California driver’s license said he was twenty-four, far too young to have much of a credit history. Judging from the security forms he’d had to complete, the contracting officer was more interested in bad credit than good, and paid more attention to criminal history than chronological. No history was apparently fine.
He’d been upset at first that his clearance didn’t give him access to any weapons-storage magazines or sensitive areas. Those remained locked up tight, behind impenetrable layers of security. But Kirsten reminded him that he wasn’t here for that.
His job was to observe things that occurred in the open. She was particularly interested in the dimensions of the magazine his construction team was building. Were there special loading doors? Overhead cranes? A track system? Enhanced environmental controls? Additional layers of security?
Kirsten never told him specifically what she was looking for, but he could figure it out easily enough after he found out what she wanted him to watch.
Five minutes online — on his secret phone, so the government couldn’t track him — revealed tests off Point Mugu of America’s hot new weapon — the Lockheed Martin AGM-158C a long-range anti-ship missile, or LRASM. At first glance the technology seemed like a step backward. China already had the Yingji-18. Yingji was literally “Eagle Strike,” and the YJ-18 cruise missile had a range of more than three hundred miles, with a final sprint nearing three times the speed of sound. Russia’s joint venture with India, the BrahMos PJ-10, was the fastest supersonic cruise missile in the world at Mach 3, executing a sophisticated S-turn to avoid interception during the terminal phase. A hypersonic variant, BrahMos II, was under development, supposed to reach speeds over Mach 7.
According to the specs, the LRASM was a lumbering thing compared to Chinese and Russian anti-ship missiles. But no one cared much about the LRASM’s speed. The weapon’s lethality lay in its stealth technology, and its ability to home in on an enemy’s targeting radar — the same radar used to seek incoming threats. Recent tests had shown it could hunt and find targets with extreme precision using an artificial intelligence system designed to recognize the profile of enemy ships. And that was just the stuff they talked about online. Lombardi was sure there was a shitload more they didn’t mention.
