Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (32 page)

“No. I'm an officer,” said Jamie, no longer afraid of that pulsing. “I have actual responsibility.”

Mike leaned forward with the intent look that signaled to anyone, even an officer, that he or she was a single step away from receiving a heavy blow from one of his massive hands.

“The hell with you, Jamie,” said Mike. “I don't care if you embarrass yourself in front of me, but you ought to think twice before you embarrass yourself in front of the crew again.”

Mike turned around and stomped off, each angry footfall muffled by the non-skid rubber in the passageway.

Nautilus Restaurant, Palo Alto, California

Daniel Aboye couldn't help but stare. Before the war, this had been a regular haunt of his investors, the types who had net worths so big they'd stopped counting their money. He'd come here tonight with a new sense of awe, mostly at how wrong the place felt on so many levels.

He watched a tuna as long as his motorcycle swim steadily around the restaurant's tank in the ceiling. The readout on his glasses showed how many other diners had bid on it. Seven. He decided he would be the eighth and end the auction. The other bidders would likely interpret it as his showing off the depth of his wallet, but it was more an indication of the depth of his annoyance that they were all still carrying on this way in the midst of a war.

When he looked down, there she was.

“When you asked to meet for dinner,” said Aboye, “this was certainly not the place I expected you would choose.”

“I like the fresh fish,” said Cory Silkins with mock innocence. “It's at least something that isn't rotting around here.”

Aboye took in the woman across from him. She was always smiling, but ironically. Back at Stanford, they'd been first-year hall mates. It had taken him a while to get used to her sarcasm, but he quickly came to appreciate the fact that she didn't put him on a pedestal like the other students did once they knew his backstory. Instead, she treated him like she treated everyone else: as a target.

They'd even become friends of a sort after Cory realized his gentle nature truly was genuine, and he realized that her acidity meant that she couldn't help but tug and trick. She soon found bigger and better targets than the gangly but confident Aboye. Besides writing code, Cory's main passion on campus had been pranking assholes. Faculty or student, it didn't matter; she'd outed the members of a secret fraternity after they tried to cover up a date rape that occurred at their initiation ceremony, and she'd posed as a former U.S. president, using his hacked e-mail account to carry on a three-month-long online conversation with the old provost.

Of course, Cory had grown up and “sold out like the rest of them,” as she joked at the sale of her software-encryption company, a deal brokered by Aboye. When he asked what she was going to do next, she told him that she was off on a quest for a glass of the most remarkable red wine in the world. He'd thought it was another joke, but she'd spent the past year chronicling it all in real-time for her online followers. Before this, he hadn't heard from her since the post about a Malbec in Argentina.

“So what brings you back?” asked Aboye now.

“I heard you went to Washington,” Cory said. “I thought they might have drafted you, so I had to come back and rescue you.”

“They wanted nothing to do with me,” he said. “That, I must say, hurt deeply.”

“Morons . . . You know, I've gotten a few quiet offers to leave. Finland. Brazil. Argentina,” she said. “I wish France, but I think I am still on some blacklist there.”

He'd heard the same from several of his other friends. From a business perspective, it made sense to him: America's wealthy were distressed assets themselves right now. The right luminaries, along with their intellectual capital and their bank accounts, could be had cheap.

“Are you considering it?” he asked.

“No, I prefer the life of an itinerant bacchanal,” she said.

“That's for the best; you are indeed a national treasure,” he said. “Okay, what is really up, Cory, why did you ask me here?”

A waiter wordlessly brought them their wine. Neither needed to be told what it was because the Firestone Petite Syrah's label was already displayed on their viz glasses. She pulled her wineglass over and held the stem between her long fingers, which were adorned with a dozen slim brushed-platinum-and-diamond rings. The rings gleamed with flecks of light from the fish tank's blue glow overhead and the red wine before them.

“Daniel, do you know why I love wine? It's not the taste. It's the history. And not just the history of the grape or the terroir that defines it. I mean the history of wine itself.
⁸⁷
Wine was the very first drink of equality,” said Silkins. “The ancient Greeks would pour it into a bowl in the middle of a room and guests would gather around. They'd share it, the same bowl, and just talk. Philosophy. Rights. Democracy. Hell, maybe even sports. Anyone and everyone could take part in the conversation, from Socrates to his youngest student.”

She laughed to herself. “Of course, it was all men, and then the Romans ruined it by conquering Greece and turning wine into a prestige item so assholes like me could run around chasing a perfect glass of it.”

He looked at her and took a sip. Clearly Cory was building up to something.

She swirled her glass. “That sense of equality is what made the Internet so great. Anyone and everyone could gather and participate. And that too is at risk of being ruined by assholes.”

“And?” he said.

She looked down at her glass and then directly up at Aboye. “I know what you're up to.”

Aboye distractedly glanced up at one of the divers gently herding a fish into a net. “What could I possibly be up to?” he asked.

“Daniel, you're not a good liar, so let's not screw around,” she said. “I know what you and your buddies are doing in Hangar One, and I know that it's not going well, what with all the water damage to your library.”

Aboye pinched the bridge of his nose, pausing as if to think but mostly to cover his concern. If she knew, who else did? And was Cory going to cause problems just because she was pissed off that he hadn't asked her to join?

“Let's go,” said Aboye in a whisper.

Aboye and Silkins walked out of the restaurant, Silkins paying with her iTab bracelet at the table as she got up. They stood outside in front of the motorbike stand.

“Okay, Cory, what is it you want? And I still don't get why you asked me here.”

“You needed a visual reminder. Restaurants like this? They're for a certain kind of person, the kind you've been hanging out with. Nobody is angry. How far is San Francisco? The city is transforming itself into a Navy town again. Ugly, rusting gray ships being fixed all over the place. Sailors getting drunk and fighting, not out of malice but to release something, anger at not being out there or maybe just some newfound hate. Down here, it's business as usual. Where can I get my fresh fish . . . or my favorite pizza next?”

She climbed aboard his yellow electric BMW C1, as usual taking things without asking.

“You have great people in Hangar One, but they know only how to build. You also need people who know how to tear down,” she said. “You need assholes like me . . . Get on, and I'll show you.”

Aboye folded his body uncomfortably behind her under the C1's canopy and they glided off silently through downtown Palo Alto.

Light from restaurants and storefronts that were being used as sidewalk cafés after hours spilled out onto the road before them. Since the war, everyone wanted to spend more time outside, it seemed to Aboye. It made Palo Alto more festive than he had ever seen it, as if all of the town's residents were Stanford seniors and this was commencement week.

They soon were sitting on Silkins's thickly carpeted living-room floor. She booted up her connection into the virtual world. Daniel watched as she put on a bright pink helmet with a matte-black visor. He thought it made her look like a cross between a teenage skateboarder and a fighter pilot.

She wouldn't let him join her inside the 3-D environment.
⁸⁸
“Too much for you to handle, plus they scatter when any outsider comes within a mile. That's how we've kept it going,” she said. Aboye watched Silkins navigate on a screen above her fireplace.

He saw Silkins's avatar, a bizarre yellow-and-blue cartoon fish that looked like Salvador Dalí had designed it, swimming alongside what looked to be an abstract, submerged rendition of Las Ramblas,
⁸⁹
in Barcelona. She darted and drifted among other resplendent but unnerving avatars, everything from Hello Kittys to nude supermodel bodies with robot heads. Then, trailing bubbles, each apparently an encrypted key that verified who she was, she stopped at the open door of a hat store. She flicked open her visor and looked at Daniel, jumping from the online world back to the real world.

“Let me make this clear. This is not about patriotism,” she said. “Our reasons are not yours—you know that, right? We're about the net itself. Songs about flags, sending kids to die, mom and apple pie, all of those lies? We don't buy any of that crap the system sells. But in this case, our interests align. We'd like to help you.”

“What do you mean, ‘we'?” he said.

“You don't need to know that. My friends prefer to remain anonymous.”

USS
Zumwalt
, Mare Island Naval Shipyard

Mike moved as fast as a man his age could move through a warship's cramped passageways and ladder wells. The shouting got louder, and he forced himself to move even faster. The clanging of metal on metal had him nearly running.

“She's one of them,” said Petty Officer Parker. “Just look at her.”

Mike took in the scene in less than a second: Parker. Wrench. Vern.

He swung a left-handed punch with his entire body weight behind it and hit Parker square in the stomach. A following jab from his right hand landed just above Parker's heart, knocking the sailor back into the bulkhead. Just like he'd taught Jamie to do in the garage so many years ago.

Vern was sprawled on her back on the deck. He reached down to give her a hand just as she looked behind him and screamed.

Mike ducked at the last moment, and the blow from the wrench glanced off his shoulder. He grunted with anger, more at himself than Parker. It had been over twenty years since he'd last gotten into a fight, but some things he should not have forgotten. As he had been told by a senior chief when he was starting out in the Navy, there were two rules to remember in a bar fight: punch second, and leave first—but only after you're 100 percent sure the other guy is completely out of the fight.

The arc of Parker's swing had left him off balance in the tight corridor, so Mike bent lower to duck the backswing. He turned, feinted with his right, then moved in close and punched with his left, a short, stiff uppercut, a liver shot;
⁹⁰
he felt his knuckles crack as they smashed into Parker's side at the ninth and tenth ribs. He'd taught Jamie that move, told him to use it only when the fight moved from boxing to brawling. A liver shot was shocking and debilitating, causing the other guy to lose his breath and sometimes even consciousness. It was also excruciatingly painful.

Parker's desperate suck of air energized Mike. He hit him again hard with a close-in combination. And then another. He couldn't hear the thuds that echoed inside the room; the adrenaline made his own ears ring. But he could feel the impact of the strikes resonating through Parker's flesh.

He caught his breath, and as Parker crumpled, he struck with one more combination. Though he knew Parker was in too much pain to hear anything, Mike shouted at him: “You coward! How's it feel?” This was a show for the others who had gathered and were now standing back in a mix of awe and fear of the old man.

And then he stopped hitting him. Parker, like Vern, was equipment. He was part of the ship, and Mike was responsible for him too. Through it all, none of Mike's blows had touched Parker's face. Stand him up at attention before the captain, and no one would ever know he'd just gotten his ass kicked by a man old enough to be his father. That was the way of his Navy.

He turned to the thick crowd of sailors.

“Who else agrees with him? Maybe you want to intern all the Chinese in San Francisco? Ship 'em out to Angel Island like in the last world war?” shouted Mike.

Parker, trying to get up, was now on his hands and knees, wheezing.

“Dr. Li is one of us,” said Mike. “If we win, it'll be because of her. If we die, it's because of ass-hats like you.”

He reached down and yanked Parker up by his arm. The man cast his gaze down to avoid making eye contact.

“Look at me. And this goes for the rest of you too. You don't like it? Then you have five minutes to get off my ship. If you stay and this happens again, I won't just play patty-cake like today. Test me. See if I am not one thousand percent serious. Dismissed!”

Parker shuffled out of sight along with the rest of the crowd.

“Vern, everything okay?” asked Mike, helping her up.

“We lost time just now that we can't afford to,” said Vern. She glared at him, angry at Mike for rescuing her as if she were some lost little girl and livid at herself for feeling so damned vulnerable.

“I'm not asking about the ship, I'm asking about you,” said Mike.

She didn't respond, but she leaned into him. He stood there, unsure of what he should do. She started shaking, and he wrapped his tattooed arms around her. He couldn't see her face, pressed into his chest, so he looked down at his left hand, pretty sure the ring finger was broken. He felt good, though.