“There’s a memorial right here at Pearl Harbor to the same lack of vigilance on December 7, 1941. Like there’s a 9/11 museum at the WTC in New York. Like there should be something for January 6, ‘21 at the Capitol.”

Carmody said, “Say Malkira shuts down the facility. What happens?”

“Probably a big disruption to civilian telecommunications on the islands. Maybe problems for the spooks too. But the IUSS should be OK. There’s built-in redundancy in its system.” Harper considered for a moment. “The real threat point isn’t a shutdown, Carmody. It’s somebody corrupting the network with a hack. That could put it under hostile control...and the computers in there are sitting ducks.”

“Then, we need to assume that’s why Malkira’s there,” Carmody said. “Let’s send your sub-chasers out on patrol. And flip what I was thinking about the ground station. We need to be the ones to take it off-line. Cut the power. So he can’t get at the computers.”

Harper shook his head. “Taking it off the power grid’s doable. We can have somebody at Hawaiian Electric flip the circuit breakers. But there’s a backup generator at the station that can run the computers for days,” he said. “It’s the size of a bus and meant to keep running in a total blackout. I don’t know how we can knock it out. Not from outside the facility.”

“I do,” Carmody said.

It was 3:30 in the morning when the two P-8 Poseidon jets took wing from Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Flown by pilots from the navy’s VP-4 “Skinny Dragon” maritime patrol squadron, the 737 derivatives were joined by a sturdy, fifty-foot long MQ-4C Triton drone capable of staying in the air for twenty-four hours on recon-surveillance missions.

Their sensor suites—and in the case of the Poseidons, weapons packages—varied, but their assignment was singular: they were submarine hunters designed to protect the coastal United States from enemy attack.

This morning they had roughly two-thousand miles of ocean to patrol.

With its outspread wings skimming along inches below the water’s surface, the Ghost left Honolulu Harbor doing a slow and steady five or six knots. As it made the swing west past Kahanamoku and Waikiki Beaches, the craft began to accelerate, building even more speed as it went by Diamond Head, and the man-made loko kuapa fishpond and Hawaii Kai development.

By the time it crossed the Kui Channel and Hanauma Bay—where the Gahjaes had surfaced hours before—the Ghost was doing better than ten knots. Its wings were pulled inward and close together, rising high off the water, lifting the hull up as well.

At fifteen knots it began hydroplaning a dozen feet above the chop, almost soundless, the nacelles powering it along with a pair of three-thousand-horsepower turboshaft engines.