Inside the huge shed, she walked along one of the long concrete jetties that ran between the behemoth Ohio class submarines. As she did so, she continued to review the data being sent to her by the satellites. It was mostly good news, but not all of it. The missiles fired by the GBMD were being destroyed easily, and every calculation showed that they would all be disabled long before any got within effective weapons distance of the satellites they were targeted at. Good, she thought. But something was different about the missiles coming up from the Dauntless. They were proving more resistant than they should be, and the AI was unsure of whether they would all be taken out before they impacted their target.

Lana frowned. It was yet another sign of how deep the counter-conspiracy went, but it was also all the more reason for her to upgrade her activities on the ground.

She reached the first submarine’s gangplank and stepped up onto the ship’s smooth black deck. Of the fourteen Ohio Class nuclear-armed submarines in the fleet, seven of them were maintained and deployed out of King’s Bay, with five at sea at any one time. That left two in harbor for maintenance and the mandatory rest period that the crew got between eighteen-month deployments. The Minnesota and Arkansas were in dock at this time, but their normally relaxed refit and resupply schedule had been stepped up because of the unprecedented events of the last two days. With the crews rapidly preparing for sea, Lana was able to slip aboard with little more than a cursory glance at her very real access badge.

She didn’t stay for long. She was only going to leave a small device in each. It looked so innocent, she thought. But where she planned to leave it would hopefully prove devastating. The devices in question were the same white phosphorus disks that Agent John Hunt had used to disable the HMS Dauntless a year ago. Back then, the disk had proved relatively harmless against the steel of the driveshaft, but inside the chemical boosters of one of the twenty-four behemoth ballistic missiles that each submarine carried, it would be the fuse for a titanic explosion. Igniting the missile’s chemical fuel inside the confines of the ship would be like throwing a grenade into a fuel tank, and Lana relished the image of the damage it would do.