Page 47 of Power's Fall

Vadisk stared at him. “What?”

“Ask me what I did.”

Vadisk’s gaze sharpened. “What did you do?”

Montana rubbed his forehead wearily, crossing the room to glance out the window. “I was stationed on a Florida-class submarine.”

Dahlia and Vadisk stared at him blankly.

“I was ground forces,” Vadisk responded. “I have very little knowledge of America’s naval forces.”

“I think the U.S. military is being used like a puppet by private companies to suck money out of the federal government,” Dahlia said. “So I’m not a big military industrial complex enthusiast.”

Well, that sucked some of the drama out of his revelation, and also made it harder. Because for people who knew, his words would start sounding an alarm.

Montana forced himself to turn and face them. “Technically, there’s no such thing as a Florida-class submarine. The tech on board was so classified, they’re basically trying to hide the existence of it, at least from the general population. Sometimes we got support from carriers, so we became a military ghost story, started by seamen on one of those ships. ‘Hey, do you know what we’re doing? We’re escorting a top-secret sub with super-weapons.’” He paused, swallowed. “A state-of-the-art nuclear submarine capable of doing unimaginable damage.”

There was a beat of silence as everyone absorbed that. “What did you do on the sub?” Dahlia repeated the question, leaning forward.

“On paper, I was a software engineer.”

Vadisk studied him. “But really you were building nuclear bombs?”

“What? No. Nuclear subs run on nuclear power. This sub wasn’t a bomber. I was, am, a software engineer, but from the time I was sixteen, the U.S. military realized what I could become, and like a good soldier, I became what they needed.” He licked his suddenly dry lips. “The dangerous tech on a Florida-class submarine? It’s not a weapon. It’s Cyber Ops. People. People like me.”

Montana started to turn away from them again, but Dahlia held her hand out to him. “Come sit with us.”

Rather than join her on the couch, he reclaimed the chair he’d just vacated.

Dahlia studied him. “What happened when you were sixteen?”

“I won a Capture the Flag.”

Vadisk looked confused, but Dahlia cleared her throat. “Montana, honey…”

“A CTF, a Capture the Flag competition, is a hacking competition. I’d always been good with computers, and my parents were supportive. Got me great tutors and special classes. When I was sixteen, me and some people I met at a computer summer camp entered a CTF in Switzerland. It’s a white-hat hacking competition. We won.”

“Hacking?” Dahlia let out a low whistle.

“Don’t whistle indoors,” Vadisk said absently.

“My first year in the Naval Academy they put me on the NCX team. The NCX is a competition run by NSA for all the military colleges. The NSA trains you for a year, and at the end of it, the competition is essentially cyber war games.”

Dahlia was slowly straightening, and he could see the dawning realization in her eyes.

“That year, the Naval Academy won NCX. We were able to break through multiple systems, take them over, and not just take them down but maintain control of them. Think of it like someone else having a keyboard and mouse that connect to your computer. One minute, everything is fine, the next, your keyboard and mouse don’t work, but on the screen, you can see someone clicking and typing.” He swallowed. “Except it’s not just a computer. We’re talking about entire networks.”

Both Dahlia and Vadisk were watching him. Montana had never told anyone his story. Not like this. It was both terrifying and freeing.

“I technically did four years at the Naval Academy, but during my third and fourth years, I was actually in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, interning for Raytheon.”

He was ready to explain who and what Raytheon was and how, no matter what it said on paper, they were in reality the U.S. government’s weapons factory, but Vadisk looked grim, and Dahlia was now sitting up ramrod straight.

They knew what Raytheon was.

“I spent those years learning how to hack into systems. They said it was all CDX—cyber defense exercises—though what I was doing was attacking. They said I was one of the best white-hat hackers they’d ever seen. And that to know how to build defense systems, I first had to understand what the attacks would look like.”

“Wait… Submarines need cyber defense? Aren’t they…underwater?” Dahlia raised a brow.

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