“I decided to go hiking on the island of Sardinia. Inside the forest of Montes, I went off trail. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. To be completely, truly alone. Deep inside the forest, I found an unmapped cave. In that cave, I found a lake of pure aetherium.”
“No way,” I said. “Why hasn’t anyone else found it yet?”
“Sardinia has some of the world’s most extensive cave systems. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are still unmapped caves there. Also…” She grinned impishly. “After founding Hexenhammer, one of the first things we did was insert a memo into the Ministry of the Environment declaring the area a protected zone. No one can exploit any natural resources found in the forest. Ever.”
“No one questioned it?” Pete asked.
“That’s how bureaucracies work. If a report looks convincing enough and has all the right signatures…”
“How about that,” he marveled.
“That’s only going to stop legal exploitation,” I said.
“Our logistics cell also sealed off the cave with a gate. Only I and a few others have a key to the lock. The last time we checked, it was untouched.”
“Good enough for me,” I said.
“It’s our secret weapon. Our trump card against governments and violent nonstate actors. I’d rather this information not leave our group.”
“Your secret’s safe with me,” Pete said.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I promised.
“Great.”
The flight to Sardinia would take almost nineteen hours. That left plenty of time to explore the airship.
The laundry was on the A deck, a small room next to the galley. At one end, there were five combo washer-dryers ready for use. At the other end, there was a nook with ironing boards. The laundry was fully stocked with detergent, bleach, irons and laundry bags.
Grabbing a laundry bag, I returned to my room and bundled all my used clothes into a washing machine. Then, I headed to the Secure Compartmented Information Facility.
A SCIF is a secure room for processing the most sensitive of classified information. A sign pasted on the door read, “NOT IN USE.” When I peeked in, I saw only half-finished walls and the bare hull. Until the SCIF was ready, we had to do all our business in the war room.
I popped into our printing room. In another life, this was the multimedia room, set up for movies and music. Now it held a collection of industrial-grade 3D printers. If we needed new clothes, spare parts or simple tools, we could manufacture them here. That would be especially useful if we needed untraceable kit.
I wandered into the galley and found Pete peering into drawers and cabinets. Now and then, he took notes on his holophone.
“Just what are you doing?” I asked.
“Inventorying the pantry and the galley,” he said. “We still don’t have a cook.”
Everything here was made of stainless steel. Stove, racks, pots, sinks, food service carts, utensils. They were so new I could see my teeth in them.
“You guys seem all right,” I said.
“I wish. The crew took turns cooking on the way here. You know how horrible the food is?”
I sighed.
Pete groaned. “Brother, I swear it’s that bad. Our first meal aboard was just instant noodles, boiled vegetables and Spam. Our second meal was more of the same. For breakfast we had powdered eggs and more Spam. And somehow the duty cook managed to screw up eggs!”
I sighed again, much louder.
“And for lunch today? You know what’s on the menu? Spam, Spam, baked beans, and more Spam. And even then, they’re going to find a way to screw it up. I guarantee it!”
“I get your point,” I said. “The important thing is, how many provisions do we have?”
“Enough to last everyone for about two weeks. Less if we bring more people aboard.” He flicked through his document. “But, look… all we got are canned food and soups, instant noodles, powdered eggs… We don’t even have any of that fancy coffee you like so much.”
“No fresh food? How did that happen?”
“Everyone was rushing about to get the airship ready. We weren’t sure we could even get the refrigeration system working, so logistics rushed us a shipment of shelf-stable canned food. Now, the fridge does work… but they couldn’t get fresh food to us in time.”
“Getting fresh food would be our top resupply priority once we make landfall,” I said.
“Do you know how to do it?”
“No. Don’t you?”
“We’re shooters, man. We don’t do groceries for airships. But this is something a cook would know.”
“All right, all right, I get your point. But for now, we gotta work with what we have.” I pondered the situation for a moment. “Maybe Captain Harding will know.”
“Worth checking with him.”
The captain was in the control room, monitoring our flight. When I explained the situation to him, he smiled broadly.
“Ah, Pete. Never been one to hide his feelings about our provisions.”
“Indeed,” I said. “I expect to be bringing more people aboard in the coming days, and this cruise doesn’t have a fixed end date. We will need resupply sooner rather than later, and, well, Pete and I are like fish out of water here.”
Harding stroked his chin. “I was actually going to raise the issue with you. Since you’re here, we can get it out of the way. To resupply an airship, we’ll need to contact an aircraft supply company and send them a requisition order. But they need between twenty-four and seventy-two hours’ notice to fill an order. We’re not going to get fresh supplies by the time we reach Sardinia, but if we’re staying on the ground for a while, sure.”
“We’ll be staying,” I affirmed.
“Good. Now, I know you have a lot of work to do, and airship operations isn’t your area of expertise. I propose you leave the running of the airship to me and my crew. If you need something, just let us know, and we’ll take care of it. That’ll free you to do the things you need to do. Fair enough?”
“Sounds good.”
“With that said…” He grimaced. “I don’t know too much about messing operations and neither does my crew, and I’m sure Pete can tell you all about Mister Park’s cooking.”
“Hey!” a voice called from across the room. “It’s not like anybody’s any better.”
Harding smiled gently. “Until we get a culinary specialist, I’m afraid there’s only so much we can do.”
“Very well,” I said. “How’s the rest of the airship holding up?”
“As well as can be expected,” he said. “She can perform any flight and landing evolution you can ask of her. We have the military-grade sensors and crypto gear installed as well. All of them work as individual modules, but integrating everything has been… interesting. And by ‘interesting,’ I mean that if I try to call them up on my console, the entire system will crash.
“It’s easier for us to just shout observations and readings across the room. It’s inconvenient, but so long as we’re not going into combat, I don’t expect it to significantly impact operations.”
“We have everything we need but nothing we want.”
“Indeed.”
I wandered over to the security console. The airship was wired with cameras and sensors, and the crewman on watch was observing the hackers at work. On another screen I spotted Eve inside the gym on the B deck, at the stern of the aircraft. I headed up to meet her.
When Sheikh Fahad had owned the airship, the gym was compact but well-stocked. I remembered treadmills arranged along the wall, free weights stacked neatly in a corner, power racks at the other end, and dummies and punching bags scattered around the room.
The treadmills were still here. So were the power racks and the rubberized floor that designated the weightlifting area. A pair of punching bags hung next the door. That was all.
Eve was leaning over a treadmill. She looked up as I walked in.
“Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Checking out the gym,” she replied. “It’s much emptier than I remembered.”
“Yeah. I think the engineers removed everything that wasn’t bolted down or fixed in place. What’s your assessment?”
“The treadmills are working, but the power racks don’t have any bars and plates.” She shrugged. “There are always bodyweight exercises, I guess.”
“And the bags.”
She wrinkled her nose. “What for?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not like you or Pete. Unless I get lucky, I am not going to be able to knock someone out with my bare hands. I’d rather use a weapon or grapple if I absolutely have to.”
She was well-built, for a woman. Her neck was taut and strong yet not so overbuilt that it appeared masculine. The musculature of her arms and legs was lean and firm, used to long hours of carrying and swinging a longsword. I’d seen enough of her glutes to know she could move swiftly and powerfully.
But while she was nearly as tall as me, she didn’t have anywhere near the same amount of muscle mass. Her neck told me she probably couldn’t eat a power punch to the head. Her limbs didn’t bulge nearly as much as Pete’s—or mine, for that matter. She wouldn’t be able to hit as hard as we could. And her long hair would be a liability in a straight-up fight.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, crossing her arms across her chest.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “You can’t rely purely on striking. Hell, I don’t either. But what you can do is use strikes to set up a takedown. Or just go for the takedown straight away. I could give you pointers if you like.”
A smile crept across her face. “You’re offering to train me?”
“It gets boring sparring with a big, sweaty man all the time.”
She giggled. “Pete?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d rather spar with a woman, hm?”
“It’s been awhile since I trained with anybody other than him. And when was the last time you cross-trained with someone outside your martial art?”
“Too long. I might just take you up on that.”
“Looking forward to that. In the meantime, there’s something I need to ask you.”
“What is it?”
“We don’t have a cook aboard. There’s no one managing the galley and the provisions right now, and from what I hear we only have canned food aboard. I don’t mind it myself, but Pete’s been moaning about it nonstop, and we might have a morale issue if this continues.”
Her right eyebrow arched sharply.
“So you want me to cook?”
“You did a great job in Dusseldorf.”
She ran her fingers through her hair, smoothing it. “That’s all?”
She was fishing for compliments. Had to be.
“Would you rather listen to him and everyone else complain about instant noodles and Spam?”
She blanched. “That’s all we have aboard? You call that food?”
“Yeah. We’ll need someone to help us requisition real food, too. Nothing major, just tell Captain Harding what we need, and he’ll take care of it.”
She transformed her face into a pout. “So a cook and a grocery shopper, too?”
“I think you’re the right person for the job.”
“How very macho of you.”
Placing my right hand to my chest, I stepped my left foot back and bowed, extending my left arm to the side.
“I aim to please, milady.”
She shook her head and looked away, fighting down a grin. “All right, all right,” she said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks.”
She leaned forward, looking up into my eyes.
“And in exchange, you have to show me some of your techniques.”
“Count on it.”
***
“I do declare, this does not suck,” Pete said.
Eve rolled her eyes. “Uh… Thanks?”
Eve hadn’t worked alone. She had recruited everyone she knew with acceptable cooking skills to help.
Lunch began with mushroom soup and plates of brown bread. The main course arrived on several identical serving dishes laden with mushrooms, baked beans, peas and a veritable mountain of Spam.
“Only so much you can do with canned food, but this is adequate,” Pete said.
“See what I mean?” I remarked.
She sighed. “Alas.”
I sat at the head of the dining table. Eve to my left, Pete to my right. Hexenhammer’s hackers occupied the rest of the seats. The rest of the airship crew would eat in shifts. Eve had already prepared enough for everyone; the rest of the food was in the galley.
“Where did you learn how to cook for so many people?” I asked.
“My mother taught me,” she said. “Still… Cooking for so many people at once is a new experience.”
“Are we going to get food poisoning?” Pete asked.
“We made sure to overcook.”
“Better safe than sorry, eh?”
The Spam had more salt than flavor, but at least none of the food was undercooked. Once everyone had started eating, I turned to Frank.
“How’s progress?” I asked.
“Not good. We’re proceeding cautiously but making little progress. I think it’s time to try something new.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“The task force might have established a secure intranet separate from Interpol’s. That could be why we can’t find any trace of it inside Interpol. However, we can identify the Interpol personnel assigned to the task force from the internal memos.
“Instead of attempting to access the task force’s network directly, we will target the Interpol agents. We will locate and attack vulnerable computers and use those to access the task force proper.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
“But this plan assumes that the task force’s intranet isn’t so completely air gapped that we can’t access it,” Frank warned. “If it is, we’ll have to resort to more direct means.”
In other words: physically access the computers ourselves.
“It’s our best option so far,” Pete said.
Frank nodded. “Yes. It is, however, time and resource intensive. Instead of one target, we now have dozens. If you wish to speed it up, we’re going to need better hardware.”
“I’ve put in the request,” I said. “The rest is up to our logistics section.”
“Of course. But the sooner we get it, the faster we can do our jobs.”
Lunch was… adequate. It probably had more to do with the ingredients than Eve’s cooking. After the meal, the hackers retreated to their den. They had converted the airship’s lounge into a warren of slates and phones and diagrams. With a multi-megawatt aetherium reactor at their disposal, they weren’t holding back.
Extension cables and multi-pin connectors ran across the floor, with plugs and adapters occupying every available socket. The viewing screens displayed windows overflowing with code and programs. Captain Harding had given them permission to requisition the screens’ internal circuitry to augment their own processing power, but it didn’t seem to be enough.
I left the hackers to their own devices. I had plenty of work of my own to handle.
***
I retreated to my office and perused open source intelligence. Predictably the major news sources were screaming all about the rise of “Neo-Right terrorism.” The blogs I read followed their cue. Long War Journal interrupted its regular schedule to discuss whether Hexenhammer was an aberration or a reaction to DW indicative of a long-term trend. SOFREP examined footage of the camp and identified the same points of interest Pete and I did, but they operated under the assumption that Hexenhammer were terrorists and reached vastly different conclusions: that Hexenhammer was a well-equipped and well-trained terrorist group that likely counted covenanters among their ranks. Jihad Watch published article after article highlighting DW rhetoric. The actual terrorists were calling for
vengeance against the pseudo-terrorists and the Western world in general.
Later in the afternoon, Eve joined me. On the screens she called up article after article from the media. As she paced the floor, she grew increasingly agitated. She balled her hands and tightened her lips, and an iron tension crept into the sway of her hips.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Lies,” she said. “These are all lies.”
“Have you tried to get the truth out?”
“We tried. We discussed that in our internal forums. We released manifestos and policy positions to the press. Nothing. Not a word came out here. Only a couple of blogs published what we wrot, and even they are catching flak for ‘supporting terrorists.’”
“We’re on the receiving end of information warfare.”
“Yes, exactly. They’ve locked in the narrative, and they can’t afford to publish anything that…” her voice trailed off.
“What’s wrong?”
“What the hell? Luke, look!”
She pointed at an article. It was titled Hexenhammer’s History of Hate. It listed an impressive list of hate crimes dating back a decade: graffiti on mosques, pamphlets denouncing immigration, assaults on Musafiri migrants, culminating in the Chios attack.
“We didn’t do any of these,” she said. “We weren’t founded yet, for God’s sake!”
“And since you’re all wanted terrorists, it’s not like you can just call in and tell them you didn’t do anything.”
She swore bitterly. “Someone is using lies to destroy us.”
I noticed a paragraph describing an attack in Marseilles.
“Well, this one is true. We did kidnap Kateb off the street.”
“Hah. As if one truth wipes away a pack of lies.”
“But it’s our most high-profile job in recent history. And it fits the narrative.” I paused, trying to remember what she had said and did then. “Didn’t you say you’d try to redirect attention? Make it look like a gang war or hate crime instead of a counterterrorist operation?”
“Yes. We had sympathizers post statements on the Internet. But they used dummy names. In Gallian. None of them even mentioned Hexenhammer. Either our enemy got lucky or…”
Hammer of the Witches (The Covenant Chronicles Book 2) Page 18