Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (3 page)

Torres fended the launch off from a small barge at the stern. Without looking, he tied a bowline knot that made the old chief suppress a smile.

“Nice knot there,” said Mike. “You been practicing like I showed you?”

“No need,” said Torres, tapping his glasses. “Just have to show me once and it's saved forever.”

USS
Coronado
, Strait of Malacca

Each of the dark blue leather seats in the USS
Coronado
's wardroom
¹⁴
had a movie-theater chair's sensory suite, complete with viz-glasses chargers, lumbar support, and thermoforming heated cushions that seemed almost too comfortable for military life—until you were sitting through your second hour of briefings.

This briefer, the officer in charge of the ship's aviation detachment of three remote-piloted MQ-8 Fire Scout
¹⁵
helicopters, thanked her audience and returned to her seat. A few side conversations abruptly stopped when the executive officer rose to give his ops intel brief.

When the XO, the ship's second in command, stood at the head of the room, you felt a little bit like you were back in elementary school with the gym teacher looking down at you. The twenty-first-century Navy was supposed to be all about brains. But physical presence still mattered, and the XO, Commander James “Jamie” Simmons, had it. He stood six four and still looked like the University of Washington varsity heavyweight rower he'd once been, projecting a physicality that had become rare among the increasingly technocratic officer corps.

“Good morning. We're doing this my way today,” said Simmons. “No viz.”

The crew groaned at the prospect of having to endure an entire brief without being able to multitask or have their viz glasses record the proceedings.

A young lieutenant in the back coughed into her fist: “Old school.”

Coronado
's captain, Commander Tom Riley, stood to the side holding a gleaming black ceramic-and-titanium-mesh coffee mug emblazoned with the shipbuilder's corporate logo. He couldn't help himself and smiled at the impertinent comment.

The display screen loaded the first image and projected it out into the room in a 3-D ripple: a heavily tattooed man on a matte-black electric waterbike firing an assault rifle one-handed up at the bridge of a container ship. Simmons had picked up this technique from an old admiral who'd lectured at the Naval War College: instead of the typical huge slide deck with immersive animations, he used just a single picture for each point he wanted to make.

“Now that I've got your attention,” said Simmons, switching the image to a map of their position at the entry to the Strait of Malacca. A swath of red pulsing dots waited there, each marking where a pirate attack
¹⁶
had taken place in the previous year. “More than half of the world's shipping
¹⁷
passes through this channel, which make these red spots a global concern.”

The roughly six-hundred-mile-long channel between the former Republic of Indonesia and Malaysia was less than two miles wide at its narrowest, barely dividing Malaysia's authoritarian society from the anarchy that Indonesia had sunk into after the second Timor war. Pirates were a distant memory for most of the world, but the red dots showed that this part of the Pacific was a gangland. The attackers used skiffs and homemade aerial drones to seize and sell what they could, mostly to fund the hundreds of militias throughout the archipelago.

None of the gangs bothered with hostages ever since Chinese special operations forces,
¹⁸
at the behest of that country's largest shipping concern, had wiped out the population of three entire islands in a single night. It didn't end the attacks, though. There were six thousand inhabited islands left. Now the pirates just killed everyone when they seized a ship.

“This is
Coronado
's focus during the next three days,” said Simmons. “It's a standard presence patrol. But it connects to a bigger picture that Captain's asked me to brief you on: We will be linking up with the Directorate escort force at eighteen hundred, making this a true multinational convoy.”

The XO then changed images, zooming out from the
Coronado
's present position in its southeast corner to a larger map showing the strategic landscape of the entire Pacific.

“This leads me to the main brief this morning. It's a long one. But there's a bonus: if you don't fall asleep on me, I'll make sure you get double your PACE ed cred.” That brought a few smiles; the Program for Afloat College Education, a quick way for sailors to earn college credits on the Navy's dime, was popular among the young crew.

“We're breaking some ground here on this multinational undertaking. It's the first joint mission with Directorate naval forces since Washington started the embargo threats,” he said. “Which means our friends from Hainan are taking it seriously. As you can see on the screen, the Directorate will have one of their new oilers here for refueling, which it doesn't really need. They want us to see that in addition to having the world's biggest economy, they're buying their naval forces the range to operate anywhere on the planet.

“To understand why having a ship like an oiler is a big deal, you need to take a step back. Let's start with Dhahran three years ago. When the nuke—well, more technically, the radiological dirty bomb—went off, it made the Saudi house of cards fall down. Between Dhahran glowing and the fights over who comes in after the Al Saud family, the world economy's still reeling from the hub of the global oil industry effectively going offline,” he said.

His next slide showed a graph of energy prices spiking. “Oil's finally coming off the two-hundred-ninety-dollar peak after the attack, but you don't want to know how much this cruise is costing the taxpayers. Put it this way: enjoy yourselves and all this sunshine because your grandkids are still going to be paying the tab.”

“They'll be paying in ramen,” said Lieutenant Gupal, one of the ship's newest officers.
Ramen
was slang for RMN, renminbi, the Chinese currency
¹⁹
that, along with the euro, had joined the American dollar as the global reserve currency following the dollar's post-Dhahran crash.

“At least we can sail with our own oil
²⁰
now,” said Captain Riley. “When I joined back in the Stone Age, Middle East oil owned the market.”

“True enough,” said Simmons. “And shale extraction is coming back at even higher levels than before the moratorium after the New York quake. Dhahran made people stop caring so much about groundwater seepage.”

A new map of global energy reserves appeared on the screen. Simmons stepped closer to the crew and continued.

“The captain hit the key change to focus on. The scramble for new energy resources, heightening regional tensions
²¹
here, here, and here, are sparking a series of border clashes around the world. The fact that the South China Sea oil fields were disappointments put new pressure on the Directorate. The hunt goes on,” said Jamie. “The oilers are the Directorate's way of showing that their interest in this is now global.”

A screen shot of a smoking mine in South Africa replaced the map.

“That's the Spiker mine, near South Africa's border with Mozambique. Remember that? These trends all connect. Even the renewed push toward alternative energy sources has caused more conflict than cooperation. Technologies like solar and deep-cycle batteries depend on rare-earth materials,
²²
rare
being the operative word,” said Simmons.

The picture shifted to the iconic photo of the green Chinese People's Liberation Army tank bulldozing into the Ministry of Public Security's riot-control truck as the crowd in Shanghai's People's Square cheered the soldiers on.

“This is important, so pay attention,” said Simmons. “You all know the history of the Directorate. When the world economy cratered after Dhahran, the old Chinese Communist Party couldn't keep things humming. Their big mistake
²³
was calling in the military to put down the urban workers' riots, thinking that the troops would do their dirty work for them, just like back in '89.
²⁴
They failed to factor in that a new generation of more professional military and business elite saw the problem differently than they did.
²⁵
Turned out the new guard viewed the nepotism and corruption of those ‘little princes'
²⁶
who had just inherited their power as a bigger threat to China's stability than the rioters. They booted them out, and instead you've got a Directorate regime that's more popular and more competent than the previous government, and technocratic to the extreme. The business magnates and the military have divided up rule and roles. Capitalism and nationalism working hand in hand, rather than the old contradictions they had back in the Communist days.”

The image switched to one of the Directorate Navy's new aircraft carriers tied up next to a pier, Shanghai's skyline in the background.

“The bottom line is that the Directorate has changed China. They took a regime mired in corruption and on the brink of civil war and forged a locked-down country marching in the same direction, the nation's business leaders and the military joined at the hip.

“But net assessment, as they teach you back in the schoolhouse, isn't only about looking outward; it's also about knowing yourself and your own place in history.”

A visual of two maps of the globe appeared, the first of British trading routes and colonies circa 1914,
²⁷
the second a current disposition of U.S. forces and bases, some eight hundred dots spread across the world.

“Some say we're fighting,
²⁸
or rather not fighting, a cold war with the Directorate, just like we did with the Soviet Union more than half a century ago. But that may not be the right case to learn from. About a hundred years back, the British Empire faced a problem much like ours today: How do you police an empire when you've got a shrinking economy relative to the world's and a population no longer so excited to meet those old commitments?”

A montage of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in port appeared, the last shot a lingering image of CVN-80,
²⁹
the new USS
Enterprise
, still under construction.

“And, of course, if that is the case, you can't keep doing things the old way on the cheap. Take capital ships, the way navies back then, and even today, measured force. With the
Ford
-class carriers taking so long to build,
³⁰
although the U.S. Navy has nine CVNs, that actually means four in service to cover the entire globe. And with the cost of keeping our military in Afghanistan, Yemen, and, now, Kenya, well, we've had to get used to working without them.”

“I'd rather be on this ship than a carrier anyway,” said Gupal. “Just a bigger bull's-eye for an incoming Stonefish.”

“Secure that mouth, Lieutenant, or you're not even gonna last one cruise on this ship,” said Riley, jabbing a titanium e-cigar in the air.

“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Gupal sheepishly.

Simmons, as the XO, was supposed to be the bad cop to Captain Riley's good cop, making the reversal of roles that much more amusing to the crew.

“Lieutenant, all jokes aside, you are making my point. You're right that the DF-21E,
³¹
the Stonefish anti-ship ballistic missile, is not really about us,” said Simmons. “But I want you to think about the various trends, the why, and then the what-next. So, what does the Stonefish offer the Chinese?”

“Well, sir, it's like a boxer stretching his arms out farther. Gives them the ability to target our big deck carriers before we can get in range of China,” said Gupal.

“Right, it gives them freedom of action. So if you're Directorate, what do you do with that freedom? And why, or even when? These are the questions I want you asking. Just because you see the world one way today does not mean it will be that way tomorrow. It's pirates today. What will it be next?”
³²
asked Simmons.

Captain Riley stepped over to Simmons. He smiled, but his body language made it clear he was not completely pleased with the briefing. “Thank you, XO. The key, folks, is to assess these threats. There's dangers, but let's not build these guys up to be ten feet tall. And if it comes down to a boxing match, Big Navy's spent literally billions on the Air-Sea Battle concept,
³³
just for the Stonefish threat and more. In any case, given what's playing out on the Siberian border, it might be better for the XO to brief the next Russian ship we see rather than us. If anyone is going to war with the Directorate, it's Moscow.”

“Yes, sir,” said Simmons. “Any questions?” He looked around the room and chewed his cheek to keep from saying anything more.

Lieutenant Gupal raised his hand. “Sir, where does that leave us on the patrol? How should we think about the Directorate forces here? Friend or foe? Or frenemy?”

“Like I said, the Chinese are more likely to go to war with Russia than us,” Riley replied. “And if the idea does cross their mind to tangle with us, well, they just don't have the experience to do it right. The XO's history lesson should've also mentioned that China hasn't fought a major war since the 1940s.”

“Neither has the U.S. Navy,” said Simmons quietly.

Silence followed. A few of the crew started fiddling with their glasses in their laps, trying to look busy. Lieutenant Gupal, though, was too green to understand that the silence wasn't another opportunity for him to gain notice. What worked at the Naval Academy was the wrong call in the wardroom.

“XO, do you think the captain's right about Russia and China, though?” asked Gupal.