Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (15 page)

When Lindsey went inside to clean up, there was no longer a way for Jamie to avoid talking to his father. The two men took their drinks and stood on the back patio, their silhouettes indistinguishable from each other. They looked down at the Fort Mason Green, toward the piers that had once hosted jazz concerts and winetastings. A pair of pockmarked Littoral Combat Ships and four Mark VI patrol boats
⁶
nuzzled the piers. Their tiny silhouettes made the absence of the larger warships that should have been there all the more obvious.

“Helluva nice house, Captain,” said Mike. “Can't say I've ever had any admirals for neighbors. Must go with the promotion.”

“What's going on here?” said Jamie, ignoring his father's attempt at small talk.

“I figured Lindsey could use the help,” said Mike.

“You did? You don't even know her, or the kids. You didn't even come to our wedding,” said Jamie.

“War changes things for all of us,” said Mike.

“I'll say.” Jamie looked at the walnut-size knuckles he knew were as hard as stones. “I don't think I ever saw you drink a soda in my entire life.”

Each man took a sip of his drink and waited for the other to speak. The silence was occasionally broken by the laughing and howling of kids.

“The Navy Cross is a helluva thing, James,” said Mike, changing tack.

“It's because I got the
Coronado
out,” said Jamie. “Riley died right in front of me at Pearl.”

“Still don't know how you did it with an LCS,” said Mike. He growled out each letter with disdain. “Better ships didn't.”

“Easy, Chief,
Coronado
is still my ship,” said Jamie. “At least, what's left of it.”

“Well, she made you captain; you're always gonna owe her that,” said Mike. “Any idea what they're going to do with her?”

“Maybe make a museum or memorial out of it, when the war's over,” said Jamie. “Or maybe turn it into dog tags. All that metal we need has to come from somewhere . . . We could patch up the hits we took at Pearl, but the missile hit we took in the Guam relief op wrecked the whole engine room for good.”

“You don't belong here with her. You belong at sea.”

“Of all the people to say that,” muttered Jamie.

“So now we're starting again?” said Mike. “Okay, I deserved that. I wasn't as good at the home stuff as I was at the job.”

“You could have been,” said Jamie. “If you'd just tried half as hard at your more important job of taking care of your kids. Both of them.”

“Goddamn it, don't you lay that blame on me,” said Mike. “Even if I'd been home, I couldn't have saved her.”

“It's
Mackenzie
. Say her name,” growled Jamie.

The two stared at each other in silence as Martin and Claire played tag in the yard beyond them.

“So, how is it really for the fleet?” said Mike, trying again to steer the discussion to easier ground.

“There's a word for doing the same thing over and over and thinking it will have different results,” said Jamie. “I'm sure you heard, they sunk the
Ford
⁷
and the
Vinson
.
⁸
The exact minute we crossed their Eastern Pacific Stability Zone line, just like they had warned. Both the carriers and even the subs. We still pushed on after that, and things got worse.”

“What the hell is going on? Too much power in those ships for 'em to be just torn apart like that.”

“Air Force's toy planes are all hacked and can't get off the ground while the Directorate owns the heavens—satellites, space stations, everything. They can see every move we make and target at will. We knew they'd eventually be able to do that to the surface ships, but now even the subs can't hide. And if they can't hide—”

“They go from sharks to chum,” said Mike.

“Only the boomers
⁹
were left untargeted,” said Jamie, referring to the ballistic missile submarines that made up the strategic nuclear force.

“They wouldn't hit them, not unless they wanted us to cut their population by half,” said Mike. “We should have done that when the Chinese first showed up at Pearl. After what the airstrikes did to the Twenty-Fifth ID base in Hawaii and all those Marines on Oahu? Fucking butchers. They were asking for us to nuke them. We still should.”

“I really hope it doesn't come to that,” said Jamie.

“It will, mark my words,” said Mike. “I'm telling you, we should have nuked 'em the minute things started to go south. At least the chairman of Joint Chiefs had the honor to resign when the so-called commander in chief pussied out.”

“That's just the spin he put on it after he got fired,” said Jamie. “By the time the national command authority figured out what was happening, it had already happened. After that, strategic calculus changed; going nuclear would just be revenge to the point of suicide. Hell, given how deep the Chinese penetrated our comms net, no one could even have known if the nuke orders would go through. We might just have been giving them a pretext to strike us first.”

“We should still just do it, and do it now. Just nuke Beijing, Shanghai, and make sure you get Hainan too,” said Mike. “No diplomacy, no more of that ‘reimagining-our-world' bullshit from those eunuchs on TV. We should make their cities glow.”

“What about Moscow?” said Jamie. “Should we nuke that too? How about Paris, Rome, and Berlin, for not stepping up to join a fight an ocean away from them that was already over? And Tokyo, for kindly helping us clean up our bases and then asking us to leave? If we went with your plan, the whole world would be glowing, including here.” He nodded over to where the kids were still chasing each other.

Mike tipped his Coke can to the unlit Golden Gate Bridge and the black void separating San Francisco and Marin.

“The greedy bastards could have just bought the Golden Gate,” said Mike.

“I thought they already did, four years back,” said Jamie.

“No, that was the Carquinez Bridge, some toll-road crap,” said Mike.

“Well, this isn't over. Hawaii's not giving up either. Resistance is heating up there. A lot of the troops who made it out fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. They saw insurgency up close, and I hear they're trying it themselves now,” said Jamie.

“Payback is a bitch,” said Mike.

Both men paused to listen to the chorus of kids' laughter as they ran by in the dark.

“Lindsey's been really good through all this,” said Mike. “Some people, they literally forgot how to drive, so they've been paralyzed since the Chinese knocked out our GPS. No more auto-drives, and they're just stuck without anyone at the wheel. Like America. Not your wife, though; I wish there were more like her in this country,” said Mike.

Jamie paused mid-sip and gazed silently at his dad. How was it possible that he was here? How was it possible that he knew better than Jamie how his own wife was doing?

“Just look at this party,” Mike continued. “You'd never think her husband's ship had been shot to pieces and assumed lost just a little while ago. You will not find a stronger or better woman. You know how I know that?”

“How?” said Jamie.

“She let me in the front door,” said Mike.

“That's because she doesn't know you,” said Jamie.

“James, I made the effort. It's been fourteen years since you saw me. I'm different now, because of your mom, because of your sister's death, because of a lot of things,” said Mike.

“And here you are. Like I should just forget it all,” Jamie said.

The two men stared at each other in silence.

“All right, then, have it your way. I tried. I should get going anyway,” said Mike. “I've got an early day tomorrow.”

“Aren't they all now?” said Jamie. “Mentor Crew job, eh?”

The initial wave of losses had whittled down not just the frontline fleet but also its human capital. The Mentor program was started as a way to tap into the expertise that still remained among those too old to be drafted back into service. The old, retired noncommissioned officers had been spread out among the fleet, the idea being that they would help guide the transition for all the new crews that had to be trained up.

“I damn well wasn't going to fight this war as a contractor,” said Mike.
¹⁰

“So, where do they have you working?”

“I can't get into it right now,” said Mike. “Not even with you.”

“Some things don't change,” said Jamie, with a bitter edge in his voice.

“You'll see. They really do,” said Mike, turning and walking down to say goodbye to the kids.

Directorate Command, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

I live in lonely desolation
,

And wonder when my end will come.
¹¹

Pushkin should have joined military intelligence, thought Colonel Vladimir Andreyevich Markov. The Russian Spetsnaz officer poured himself another glass of hot tea and continued to read, the world of poetry his one escape from the stack of memos from General Yu Xilai's office. The collection of Pushkin poetry was well traveled, having accompanied him to Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Sudan, and Venezuela. And now another war zone's humidity and grime was working its way into the book's spine, softening it, loosening its grip on the pages one by one.

His office door slammed open, shaking the flimsy desk and making tea spill all over. He used his sleeve to sop up the liquid before it soaked more of the book.

“What!” he shouted in English, the one language they shared.

His aide, Lieutenant Jian Qintong, stood at attention in front of him.

“A Directorate marine is dead, sir,” said Jian. “A young private from the Hundred and Sixty-Fourth Brigade.”

“It's a war; you should expect people to die,” said Markov.

It had been three weeks since he'd arrived at this former vacation paradise. The assignment was part of the alliance deal: he was to liaise with the Directorate to provide a Russian presence and, supposedly, to pass on his hard-won expertise in counterinsurgency. But so far, no one other than Jian was listening to him, and Jian listened only because he'd been tasked to spy on him, Markov was sure.

At his first briefing for General Yu, Markov had led with the overriding lesson that defeating an insurgency was accomplished not by crushing one's foes but by understanding them.

Maybe it was a translation error, or maybe the general was just too thickheaded to get it, but Yu had taken his recommendation for empathy as a sign of weakness, and the meeting had gone south from there. Yu clearly resented the idea of an adviser being sent into his command, as it required one to admit the possibility that one was in error. At the end of the meeting, General Yu was polite in his thanks but said he had more than enough experience in “population-supervision techniques” from his time stamping out the last rebellion in Tibet. Markov then wondered aloud how long it would take the general to realize they were dealing with something different than holdout adherents of the last Dalai Lama.

After that exchange, the Russian had been kept busy, sent off base on various missions, but he was never again part of the actual command sessions. And for every trip outside the wire, Jian would be by his side, his around-the-clock shadow, not so much to keep him out of trouble but to make sure he didn't cause any.

“The local commander reports it as an assassination by insurgents,” said Jian now.

Markov raised his eyebrows. “Assassinating an enlisted man? The only thing less effective would be assassinating staff lieutenants.” Markov had turned the burden Yu had placed on him into a gift; teasing Jian was one of the rare joys he had during this deployment.

“Some marines likely got rid of a weak link,” said Markov. “There's a runt in every litter, and they don't tend to fare well on tough deployments like this.”

“His unit claims it is not the case, and the screenings back them up,” said Jian.

“Hooking some sergeant up to a brain scan isn't going to tell you what actually happened. Sergeants spend their whole careers learning how to lie to officers,” said Markov. “Let's go.”

The aide blustered that there was no reason for them to leave unless ordered. Markov brushed Jian aside as he stormed out of the room.

They were onsite at Duke's Bar in less than five minutes, driving there in one of the Wolf armored fighting vehicles that General Yu insisted his senior officers use every time they ventured into Honolulu. If Yu had bothered to listen, Markov would have told him that this was a classic mistake, choosing force protection over situational awareness.

Markov strode past the Directorate sentries and walked through the empty bar, Jian following a few paces behind. He closed his eyes once he got to the stairwell and let his other senses absorb all they could. It was dank and humid, the salty-sweet smell of almost-dry blood mixing with that of old beer. He opened his eyes and took in the scene. The body sat against the wall, almost as if taking a drunk's rest. A river of dark red caked the young marine's neck, his face now forever locked in an expression of shock.

Markov smiled at the thought of what Jian would make of this and slowly and intently examined the body. No penetration points other than the neck, no obvious struggle. No sign of sexual trauma.

“So, Lieutenant,” he asked his shadow, “how many people in a war zone would bother to kill a lowly enlisted Directorate marine by gouging a hole in his neck?”

He did not wait for the rote response that anything that did not go according to plan was the fault of the insurgents. Perhaps the lieutenant had been right for once; if it had been the marine's mates who'd done this, they would have beat him unconscious and held him under the surf. He'd seen that one already.