The intercontinental cable inside the pipe consisted of seven fiber pairs. Two pairs were owned by Olympia.com, and two more by a business consortium jointly operated by the CIA and NGIA. One pair was reserved for CloudCable’s own future capacity, and another for potential sale or leasing to outside telecoms. A seventh and final pair was very quietly reserved for use by the US Office of Naval Intelligence as a data traffic conduit for its IUSS, or Integrated Undersea Surveillance System, a kind of burglar alarm for intruding submarines.

The Kono Head plant was the cable’s endpoint in the terrestrial United States. It was also the critical convergence of an expanding, diversified and increasingly interdependent network of subsea lightwave cables—its branches extending east to California, and westward across tens of thousands of miles of sea floor to Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and finally Australia.

The facility’s interior layout was as boxy and homogeneous as its exterior. Nobody that built landing stations cared about aesthetics. The designers wanted them functional, and they wanted them standardized for personnel rotating from station to station. A schematic of Kono Head would therefore show four typical, environmentally controlled, fire-suppression protected sections: the telecommunications equipment room, power generator room, battery plant and control room.

The latter was staffed around the clock by a handful of technicians who monitored the network for compromises, dataflow interruptions and power outages. At this time of morning, that was an overnight crew of four, though a larger day crew would arrive at nine o’clock. The equipment in the other three rooms ran more or less automatically and only required periodic inspection and maintenance.

Kono Head’s buffers against physical intrusion were in compliance with industry guidelines. There was bright outdoor security lighting inside and outside the fence. There was real-time video surveillance of the perimeter. But the security patrol was light, consisting of a half dozen young Army reservists from nearby Shafter Flats. Government risk-assessment studies had determined the attack and intrusion countermeasures in place made a successful attack on the station unlikely.

Jochi thought the assumption ludicrous. And very advantageous to him.

The Wasps flitted over the water at an altitude of three thousand feet. One of them could have done the job, but Jochi had wanted some redundancy. Say his drone stalled in the air. Or whatever. You needed backup in case of a malfunction. He’d gone with two rafts rather than one for the same reason.

The drone he’d released shot left, and the other right, approaching and circling the target area from opposite directions. High in the darkness above it, they captured high-resolution images of the access road, outer fence and the vehicles in the parking lot. They photographed the station’s roof and outer walls. They took videos of the guards making their rounds. They covered every yard, every foot, every inch of the facility.