Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (18 page)

He found Jimmie Links waiting next to a vending machine in front of the entrance to the new Naval Intelligence office. The two men had known each other since the Naval Academy, but their careers had taken very different turns. Though neither of them enjoyed being assigned to the Pentagon, they could commiserate within a few minutes' walk of each other.

“Darling, you shouldn't have waited,” said Links, trying to sound like a housewife in an old commercial.

“Original,” said Darling.

“Tough crowd today,” said Links. “Let's get going. I'm about sixty seconds from humping the vending machine.”

Darling peered through the finger-smudged glass of the machine and sighed.

“Maybe that Snickers bar and two of those mango squeezes, then you might have the ingredients for a pretty good time,” said Darling.

“I knew you flyboys liked it kinky,” said Links.

They set off, but Links stopped after only a few paces. “Shit, I forgot my wallet.”

“Go get it, I'm not buying,” said Darling.

“Come with me, you can check out the new DIA analyst, the one I was telling you about,” said Links.

“You didn't invite her?” said Darling.

“I have to work with her, so better to watch you crash and burn,” said Links.

He led them into his office, first going through a retina scan, then swiping his access card, and finally punching in a number code. After they entered the secure cell, the door locked behind them with a magnetic click.

They passed through an inner door of frosted glass with the words
Non-Acoustic Anti-Submarine Warfare
stenciled across it. Fresh drywall dust covered the door handle.

Links led Darling into his cubicle, a drab, sterile space. The only decorations were a 3-D topographical map of Oahu and, hanging from a thumbtack, a lipstick-smudged Chinese air-pollution-filter mask.

“So this is where the magic happens?” Darling asked dryly.

“There's damn little magic happening here, I'm afraid,” said Links soberly. “We still don't have much of a clue how they're tagging our subs.” The opening missile strikes that had hit the Pacific carriers had been a shock to the fleet, but the way the enemy had found and destroyed the Navy's submarines was a more disturbing mystery. The U.S. intelligence community had known the Chinese were catching up in surface-ship construction, but they believed that, under the sea, the U.S. had an asymmetric advantage. Ever since the Cold War, if an American sub didn't want to be found, you couldn't find it. But somehow the other side had figured out how to make the ocean transparent and thus deadly to the sub fleet that was supposed to give the U.S. its overwhelming edge.

Darling sat down and, picking up on Links's sober mood, said quietly, “Tell me more.”

“I don't even know where to begin,” said Links. “I keep thinking of what this lecturer once told us, back in training. He was old-guard CIA, had done Afghanistan both times, during the Cold War and then again after 9/11. He compared the intelligence task to solving a jigsaw puzzle, except that you didn't get the box cover, so you didn't know what the final picture was. And you got only a few pieces at a time, not all of them. And even worse, you always got a bunch of pieces from some other puzzle thrown in.”

“Start with the detection, and then the targeting,” Darling suggested.

“We spend all our time looking backward, trying to understand how,” said Links. “One argument is that the Directorate is using its own subs to shadow ours. And we just keep failing to detect them somehow.”

Darling stiffened in his chair as he recalled losing the
John Warner
to a Chinese ballistic missile.

“No way,” he said. “The Directorate sub we were following was too far away from the
Warner
to be able to get any kind of pinpoint tracking. And there were no transmission traces. If their sub had communicated the
Warner
's position back to Hainan, we would have caught it. Besides, that sub was too busy running from us to do anything. About the time the Stonefish were firing, it was sinking. We got it, that's one thing I am certain of.”

“Could they have used your comms to track the
Warner
, maybe even gotten into ATHENA?” asked Links. “Did you pick up anything like that?”

“Nope, nothing. Have you thought about big-data collection from environmental sensors, like how those fishermen kept detecting our Trident missile subs off Bangor a few years back? Or what about space-based underwater detection?
²⁶
Tracking the IR or even something like the Bernoulli effect, from the water distortion?” said Darling. “Maybe a Ouija board?”

“We've run them all down. The environmental sensor one is out, as you have to seed the area beforehand. There's no trace of that, plus the Chinese are picking up our sub traffic everywhere, no matter where we go. The
Oregon
paid the price for us testing that theory off the Aleutians. Space-based detection is the working theory, but no one knows how the Chinese could manage that either. NAASW is looking at synthetic aperture radar as an option for undersea detection,” said Links. “During the Cold War, there were some attempts to make that work in tracking Soviet boomers, but nothing stuck. More important, they can't cover an ocean area without broadcasting enough energy down from space that we'd pick it up.”

“How about the other way around?” Darling suggested. “How about magnetic detection of the sub's hulls? That's the working theory at the analysis section we have set up down at the B-ring urinal.”

“No, that's another Cold War tech that was tried and failed,” said Links. “It just doesn't work from space. There's too much backscatter to pull out anything metallic at that range. They'd be plinking pretty much every piece of metal on the sea floor with Stonefish warheads. Plus, you also have the mystery of how they were able to track the subs and the carriers but couldn't pinpoint the escort ships,” said Links.

“Maybe the escorts weren't worth the trouble? Maybe the Chinese didn't have enough missiles?” said Darling.

“No way. You think they'd try to save a few bucks if they could take out all of our Aegis ships too?” said Links.

“So if that's the case, it's something that's letting them track the nukes,” said Darling.

“Yep, which puts us back at, as we call it in the intelligence community, square one,” said Links.

“So the real question is, what's so special about a nuclear reactor?” said Darling. “If you want to find one from really far away, you have to be able to collect whatever it emits. But, shit, at range it's never going to emit anything more than low-level Cherenkov rays.”
²⁷

“What did you say?” Links asked with a catch in his voice.

“Cherenkov rays,” said Darling. “Did you sleep through the nuclear physics class at the Naval Academy? It's what gives nuclear reactors their blue glow, something about charged particles passing through the medium that surrounds the nuclear reaction at different speeds than light. Some Russian named Cherenkov discovered them like a hundred years ago. He won the Nobel Prize for it.”

“
Star Trek
. You bastard,” whispered Links to himself. He tossed his wallet onto the desk with a shaking hand. “Lunch is on me. I've got to run, got an idea.”

“Whatever, man. Your DIA analyst better be worth it.” Darling picked up the wallet and was just beginning to stand when he heard the security door shut with a heavy thud.

Moana Surfrider Hotel, Waikiki Beach, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

“Ms. Shin, please, over here,” said the voice box, translating the guard's Chinese into English. The guard was male, but the device had been set to speak in a digitized voice that matched the gender of the person being spoken to. Carrie wasn't sure if it was a joke or if some Directorate scientist had concluded that if a woman heard a female voice coming out of a burly, armed male Directorate marine, she would somehow find it more reassuring than a male's voice.

“Okay, okay,” Carrie said. She put her arms out and threw her head back, cruciform-style, her long hair reaching to her waist.

“We have selected you for extra assurance measures,” the marine said. He stood at about her height but had around twice her mass in muscle. The telltale acne and thick neck showed how he had gotten so big. So many of their marines had that look.

“Do you understand?” said the voice box.

“Yep,” said Carrie.

“The Directorate appreciates your compliance,” said the device. That was the latest phrase the voice boxes were spitting out. She couldn't tell if it was what the guard had actually said or if it was just a stock phrase from an automated setting.

The chem swabs tickled when they ran down her arms and legs. It felt like a spider exploring her.

“I am complete,” said the voice box.

She opened her eyes. The swab had not turned red, as it would have if it had detected explosives. Instead, it was a light brown. The guard looked quizzically at the swab, unsure of what the earthy substance was.

“It's okay,” said Carrie. “It's makeup, from my arm. I cut myself cooking.” She ran her fingers across her cheeks as if putting on foundation and flashed a smile.

The voice box translated for the marine, who nodded, paused, and then muttered a phrase she could barely hear.

“Thank you for your compliance,” the box said. By this time the marine was looking to the next person in line.

She walked away slowly, calming herself, unconsciously rubbing the thin scabs on her arm. At least this check hadn't been as bad as the checkpoint at the bus station; there, the guard made her bend over and speak directly into the voice box on his belt. She caught a glimpse of Waikiki Beach across the street and for a moment she found herself thinking of her fiancé, the sunset walk on his birthday. The wind had been up that night.

The grind of rubber wheels on asphalt behind her snapped her out of the memory, and she leaped to the right, onto the sidewalk. The hybrid-electric Wolf armored personnel carrier glided quietly by as the Directorate marine manning the machine gun on the roof offered a timid wave.

Adrenaline pumping, she strode purposefully through the four columns of the hotel's grand entrance and shivered despite the heat and humidity.

Before the war, she'd had to use the staff entrance. The gleaming white hotel had been built just three years after the American annexation in 1898 on land originally owned by the Hawaiian royal family, so having both the guests and the staff use the main entrance was part of some Directorate propaganda about how the Chinese forces were there for similar reasons, to ensure security, but they, unlike the Americans, would show respect for the “true” citizens of Hawaii. The Directorate was real big on who had been on what island first. But whether you were native,
hapa
(of mixed ethnicity), or from the mainland, you still had to go through the screening checkpoint out on the street.

Inside the hardwood-floored lobby, Chinese soldiers, sailors, and marines, along with a few civilians, lounged about, drinking and chatting. Just as it was back in World War II, the old hotel had been converted into a hub for shore leave. She passed through the lobby and went out to the back porch. From her perch at the sports-equipment-rental desk, she couldn't see the ocean, but she could hear it. That counted for a lot.

“That was amazing,” a man's voice said, taking her out of her thoughts. He spoke English without one of the translator devices. “What a beautiful sport it must be for those who are truly skilled.”

He set a still-wet longboard against the wall. There was a brief pause as he stepped back to make sure it would not topple over.

“It's a lot to expect for anyone to pick up in just an hour,” said Carrie. “I bet you did great.”

“I spent most of my time swimming next to the board, not riding it,” said the officer. He was clearly fit, washboard abs, but not bulked out by chems like so many of them. His hair was cropped short, but in a stylish manner. She guessed it had been done professionally rather than in the military assembly line.

“The sport of kings is not for everyone,” she said, offering a wink. “I know we're not supposed to ask questions of the guests, but where'd you pick up English? Yours is excellent.”

“UCLA, where else?” he said, raising two fingers in the sign that went along with the UCLA alma mater song.
²⁸

“Go Bruins,” she said, smiling slightly.

“Listen, I could really use a lesson,” the officer said. “Sorry, I should introduce myself. My name is Feng Wu. My friends in LA called me Frank.”

Carrie looked down at her tablet.

“I can set you up with one of the hotel instructors, no problem. They're great. Several of them were pros before all this,” said Carrie.

Frank leaned closer, dripping seawater on the counter. He smiled, showing perfect white teeth.

“You're a great teacher, I bet,” he said.

“Well, I'm not that good . . .” she countered.

“I can pay you, or give you an extra ration card if you want, or whatever else.”

Carrie pressed lightly on the scab on her arm.

“There's no need for that. Helping out is part of our job, actually,” she said. “Any of us can offer the guests our services. I just thought you would want someone more experienced.”

“When should we meet?” he said.

“Monday night is when the outgoing tide's supposed to be best,” Carrie said. She tilted her head slightly, giving him a glimpse of her neck.

“That's a long time to wait! How about tomorrow night?” he said.

She smiled back, looking him in the eye.

It wasn't just her beauty that made her gaze so striking; it was that she was the first local to look at him directly since he'd arrived in Hawaii. All the others tried to avoid eye contact, some mix of shame and fear. She didn't have that; instead, she was just—what, normal? More like the American girls he remembered fondly from before all this.