Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (10 page)

Then the USS
Abraham Lincoln
,
³⁶
a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier tied up just across the harbor, seemed to lift a few feet from the water, as if the hundred-thousand-ton ship were being conjured skyward. The shove of the blast wave pushed him back to the bulkhead.

As he scrambled to his feet, Horowitz stared, agape, as the
Nimitz
-class carrier settled back into the water with orange flames and black smoke pouring from its deck. He watched as the carrier's hull began to break apart about two-thirds of the way down from the bow.

“Oh, shit. The reactors,” muttered Horowitz.

Pier 29, Port of Honolulu, Hawaii

What the hell? They weren't supposed to be offloading for another day.

When he'd first seen the ramp come down, Jakob Sanders had pulled out his tablet to recheck the manifest. The
Golden Wave
, 720 feet, flagged out of Liberia. A RO/RO carrying cars from Shanghai. It had been pre-cleared on the manifest but it was twenty-four hours early. And now it was screwing up his day.

Even standing in the guard shack in the neighboring parking lot, he could feel the impact of the doublewide metal ramp slamming down onto the pier. Sanders had always thought the big roll-on, roll-off ship
had the aesthetic appeal of a Costco plunked down on top of a boat. But that was the idea. It could carry 550 vehicles, and those vehicles could drive right off the ship and into his lot. Then they would sit, waiting to be driven to various dealerships around the island.

Sanders tried to raise his boss on the radio but all he got was static. He shook his head and looked down to check the time and date on his Casio G-Lide watch. Yep, he had it right. They were offloading too soon. More important, the web-enabled watch's last update showed that the offshore buoy readings looked promising for some head-high swells. Just five more hours in the lot and then he'd be free of his guard shack and back in the water at Kewalos. If the surf was as good as his watch promised, it would be one of those days when it just didn't matter where you'd gone to school or that you wore a black polyester uniform on land.

A series of distant booms snapped his attention from his watch. He hit the deck and covered his head with his arms as the shack's flimsy metal walls shook. After a few seconds, he got to his knees and peered through the open door at the fuel-tank farm next to pier 29. No fire. Blue skies didn't indicate thunder. Then the pier began to vibrate again from another low rumble, like an earthquake. Damn, he didn't want to be caught here by the water if it led to a tsunami.

More distant booms echoed off the hills, but the noise was washed out by hundreds of motors starting up inside the
Golden Wave
. What were they doing? Didn't they feel the quake? There could be more aftershocks.

Sanders remembered the public-service announcements he'd watched as a kid said you should stand in a doorway during an earthquake, but he looked at the flimsy shack walls and then crawled outside. He felt more booms reverberate and saw some smoke rising behind the
Golden Wave
, but the bulk of the huge ship blocked whatever was happening across the harbor.

Then one of those new Geely SUVs rolled down the ramp. Maybe they were trying to get the cars off before another quake? But where were they going to park them? They'd be better off keeping them on the ship and riding it out.

Sanders watched as another and then another of the SUVs moved down the ramp and parked. He'd always thought the Geely looked like a ripped-off Range Rover Defilade. But they were so cheap that he could almost afford one. The paint sure sucked, though. The first dozen were a decent silver or blue. But the rest were a faded matte green.

Then he heard a piercing squeal, like something gouging the steel deck of the ship. Behind the last SUV, what looked like a telephone pole on its end gradually emerged and pointed down the ramp. Behind that pole was a massive green bulk that slowly nosed its way out to the top of the ramp and then tilted downward.

Shit, that was a tank! Then another tank moved down the ramp, followed by an eight-wheeled vehicle that looked like a tank's little brother.

Sanders saw the red stars on the tanks. What were Chinese tanks doing coming off the ship? The manifest said nothing about that. And who the hell would be buying those? Maybe they were for training exercises out at Camp Schofield?

Jakob looked around and realized he was alone.

His next move was to bring out his phone and start shooting video. It would be worth a couple beers; maybe he could even sell it on the viz-net.

Then what looked like six beer kegs flew up into the air and raced toward downtown. “Drones?” Sanders said in a whisper.

Each squat Pigeon surveillance drone was indeed about the size of a fourteen-gallon beer keg, and each had a small rotor bay at its bottom. They all took off to seek out the highest points in Honolulu, where they would land. From these perches, the unarmed Pigeons would suck in electromagnetic and digital signals and then throw out an island-wide wave of electronic disturbance.

Just then Jakob heard another bang on the pier. It was the ramp coming down off the
Hildy Manor
, another RO/RO tied up beyond the
Golden Wave
. None of this shit was authorized. They didn't have the paperwork, and the lot was already going to be jammed. There was no way he'd be able to fit the cars from not one but two ships into the waiting lot, let alone a bunch of tanks.

He held the phone at arm's length, cursing his stupid job again, this time because he couldn't afford some viz glasses.

“Jakob Sanders at Pier Twenty-Nine in Honolulu,” he said, staring into the pinhole camera. “Got an unauthorized delivery here as you can see,” Sanders said. “Some trucks, Geelys, and check this out, tanks! Chinese tanks. Not sure what the drill is today, but we're about to go find out. Bet you never saw anything like this in real life. Me either. Stay tuned.”

Sanders set his phone on the windowsill in his shack so that it was recording the scene and then marched with a bold step toward the
Golden Wave
. Dumb-ass sailors. They'd just have to stay on the pier until it all got sorted out.

By the time Sanders had made his way to the ramp that connected the pier to the parking lot, he could literally feel the power of the tanks' engines in his chest. The tanks slowly moved forward, a few feet at a time, testing the ramp.

A flash of movement and an earsplitting clang made him whip his head around. Big metal panels were being tossed over the side of the
Evening Resolve
—a 480-foot cargo container ship registered in Dalian—and landing on the pier. Then a miniature air force began to assemble in formation above the
Evening Resolve
. To Sanders, the quadcopters looked like those spy drones the paparazzi used to buzz any Hollywood star dumb enough to still have an outdoor wedding.
The Directorate's electric V1000 drone
³⁹
actually shared a heritage with the commercial systems, but its agility and stealth had made it the platform of choice for covert Chinese “risk-elimination” strikes in Africa and the former Republic of Indonesia.

The tanks throttled their engines again and regained Sanders's attention. He raised his right hand in the universal sign to stop.

“Halt! You are entering private property. I need you to stop that vehicle immediately.”

The lead tank slowed and then stopped at the bottom of the ramp, just ten feet away. Sanders looked down and raised his voice, more confident now that he had established who was in charge.

“Good. Now, I don't know what's going on but you need to turn that vehicle around and get back on the ship . . . immediately.”

The engine belched smoke, and the tank suddenly bounded forward.

Seen on the screen of his phone, it looked like a symbolic act of bravery.
⁴⁰
In actuality, all Jakob could think about was running, running as fast as he could, to get out of the sixty-ton beast's path. But his feet just wouldn't move.

Marine Corps Base, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii

Captain Charles Carlisle was losing patience with his crew chief. In other words, it was just another day in paradise with a jet more finicky than his fiancée.

The 25 mm gun pod on his F-35B Lightning II fighter kept jamming after each helicopter-like vertical landing he performed. This was the fourth time this week, but no one could figure out why. The plane's autonomic maintenance computers were supposed to point fingers at any gremlins, but adding more to the twenty-four million lines of software code already in there just proved Murphy's Law beat Moore's Law every time.

“I don't know what to tell you, Worm,” said Miller, the civilian crew chief, using the call sign Carlisle had earned after losing his rations and living off worms during the survival-and-evasion phase of his pilot training. “I didn't design these planes; I just fix 'em.”

Worm shook his head. He'd never understood why the Marine Corps put the world's best pilots in the cockpits of the world's most expensive weapons system only to turn maintenance over to the lowest bidder.

Worm was about to offer another round of profane observations about what $1.5 trillion ought to buy—like, for instance, a working gun—but then he held his breath and listened. Weird. A series of bass-like thumps. Then he heard the buzzing of rotors. It came from the direction of Pearl and moved toward the air station located on the Mokapu Peninsula.
⁴¹
The blood drained from the aviator's face when he saw the incoming flight of choppers and tiny quadcopter drones.

“Get the fuel hose off, now!” Worm shouted.

The crew chief was about to argue when he tracked the pilot's gaze and saw the formation. Miller looked old, but he was down on the ground before the first wave of rockets hit the hangar complex on the other side of the 7,800-foot runway.

“Miller, up! Get up!” shouted Worm.

Lying prone, Miller watched four of the quadcopters dive and attack a communications tower at the end of the runway. Just before the V1000s launched a volley of micro-rockets, they flared back into formation, which made them look like
X
s on a fiery tic-tac-toe board.

“I'm on it!” said Miller. You could question his competence, but you couldn't fault the man's bravery, thought Worm.

As the two men worked to pull the fuel line from the F-35, Miller spoke between panting breaths.

“Chinese?” he said.

“Does it matter?” said Worm. “Get me up there, and I'll send a few down here for you to pick through and find out.”

They could see the drone helicopters methodically working their way across the base's hangar buildings, hitting one aircraft after the other. That they remained in an X formation the whole time made the attack seem all the more menacing. A few Marines shot rifles at them, only to be taken out by rocket fire from above. Fortunately, Worm's F-35B, like its predecessor the Harrier jump jet, didn't need to approach the killing field of the runway. The aircraft had a shaft-driven fan in the middle of its fuselage that could lift the jet into the air like a helicopter, once the main jet engine pushed it forward with over forty thousand pounds of thrust.
⁴²

The tradeoff of packing a second engine in the middle of the plane was that the Marine version of the F-35 couldn't carry as much payload, but Worm's jet would be flying with a light load anyway. The good news was that the training exercise they had been prepping for was a live-fire drill. The bad news was it was for close air support, so he was loaded with only dummy air-to-air missiles and a gun pod he couldn't trust.

Worm clambered into the cockpit and looked down at Miller, the top half of his head encased in a heads-up-display visor-and-helmet combination that looked like a bug's carapace. He shouted and pointed at the jet's fuselage: “The gun? The gun?”

Miller scrambled up the ladder to the cockpit and leaned in close enough to Worm that he could smell the sharp stink of sweat mixed with jet fuel. “Maybe a hundred rounds before it jams,” he shouted. Shit. At the machine cannon's rate of fire, that was possibly three seconds' worth of shooting.

Worm gave a quick look at the plane's cockpit screens to make sure the aircraft was running the preflight checks. At least something was working as it should.

For a second, maybe two, Worm allowed himself to think of his fiancée. She'd be out surfing about now, working off some of the dark energy her dreams often left her with. They were supposed to meet at the Moana Surfrider hotel
⁴³
that night for a drink. She hadn't told him which of the bars she'd be in, though; she never did. He would have to find her, and then they would sip mai tais and fantasize about what it would be like to get married there. He had promised her a fairy-tale ending to her story.

The image was dashed as the canopy closed down. Worm flashed a thumbs-up to the crew chief below and mouthed a word.

Payback
.

USS
Coronado
, Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Hawaii

An antitank rocket fired from a nearby freighter hit the USS
Gabrielle Giffords
,
⁴⁴
moored nearby. It was unnecessary; the
Giffords
was already taking on water from an explosion below the water line, as were most of the U.S. Navy warships in the harbor.

“Is ATHENA online yet?” shouted Captain Riley. The Automated Threat Enhanced Network Awareness program was like the ship's nervous system, tying together sensors and network nodes with software that was as close to artificial intelligence as the Navy would permit aboard a warship. The ship's autonomous battle-management system allowed a short-handed ship like the
Coronado
to track targets and coordinate with other forces faster than a human crew could manage.