Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (36 page)

“Did you leave the seat up again?” said Conan.

“Me? Never,” said Finn.

“All right, then, you're safe for now. How's IP Bravo?” The pair worked out the firing solution so the three shots she fired would hit their targets in close sequence. That was essential to the opening phase of the mission.

The old radar dome building, a sphere atop a lattice-structure base, looked like a dirty golf ball fished out of a septic tank. The site had been built in 1942 as part of Hawaii's first radar defense network
⁷
and had operated through most of the Cold War. Then budget cuts had left it mothballed for decades. But high ground would always remain valuable real estate. The silver aerostat, a faint smile of the sun's final light cast across its crown, hovered three hundred and fifty feet above the old dome, its sensors unobstructed out to the ocean in all directions.

“How are we for time?” said Conan.

“Three minutes,” said Finn.

They covered themselves and their gear with their blankets and waited. Sweat pooled in the crook of Conan's arm and stung her infected elbow.

From under his blanket, Finn said: “Why don't we just shoot the radar up on the balloon? Be a lot easier.”

“Everything worthwhile is hard,” said Conan, her voice muffled by the blanket. “An old gunny said that once to us.”

“You're still a Marine, then, sir?” said Finn. “Then why'd you break the credo of never leaving anyone behind?”

“This is more important. Mission above the man,” said Conan. “Besides, we plink the radar, they'll just reel the bitch in and fix it.”

“That's why they pay you the big bucks, then,” said Finn.

“Don't know why they want it taken out now, but I think you can imagine,” said Conan.

“I don't need the cavalry riding in; I'd be happy with a few dozen Tomahawks. Why do you think they haven't done that yet?” asked Finn. “Just push a couple buttons; that shit's easy. Some days a tactical nuke would be okay by me. If Washington had just gotten off its ass when this first went down, we never would have had to fight like this. Should have just gotten it over with at once. Show your cards, motherfuckers. Instead, we draw them off the deck one by one every day. Is anybody back there afraid to die anymore?”

“You just answered your own question,” said Conan. “Nobody wants to die as bad as we do.”

It all sounded good, but she knew something Finn didn't. She knew she was already dead. After that day on the airfield, it had all been borrowed time. Hunkering behind the Osprey wreckage, she'd decided that if she was going to die, it was going to be with purpose. That the time she had left hadn't been the expected few seconds but had stretched into days and then months didn't matter.

Conan's stomach tightened and she took in a deep breath. She let it out slowly as she peeled back the woolen blanket.

“Sixty seconds,” said Finn.

Finn swatted a fly, causing Conan to flinch. She exhaled deeply, steadying her nerves.

“Damn it, Finn, keep still,” said Conan, feeling a mosquito bore into her forehead.

“Roger,” said Finn. “Ready to launch the zipper?”

Conan nodded.

“Go.”

Finn crouched and lightly tossed a Frisbee-size disc toward the aerostat. This was one of the other gifts they'd received in the duffle bag from the undersea ocean glider. As the disc took flight, a tiny lift fan whirred to life, and the device raced into the forest canopy, disappearing from sight almost immediately. The zipper could fly for only twenty minutes, but what it did during its brief electronic life was what mattered. The carbon-fiber zipper scanned for electronic signals—like from the surveillance systems surrounding the aerostat site—and then repeated those signals back until its batteries ran out. A small green light on a candy-bar-size stick beside the rifle indicated that it was functioning.

“Time to blow out the candles and make a wish?” said Finn.

A click of the rifle's safety and Conan adjusted the aim point on the scope, a final touch to make sure.

“May all our enemies die screaming,” she whispered.

The rifle fired, the noise under the suppressor almost like a muffled sneeze. The first shot took out a camera mounted in a tower overlooking the site. The second round smashed into a mushroom-shaped antenna. A third shot shattered the lens on a camera pointed up at the aerostat. If the zipper did its job, then they could hold on to the element of surprise just a little longer.

“Let's go,” said Conan, wedging the blanket into the webbing on her backpack. They tried to run, but the vegetation was so thick and the roots were so treacherous they could manage only a fast walk.

“Nearly there,” said Finn, holding a hand over his right eye; he'd gotten jabbed by a branch. Conan stopped to catch her breath, taking a knee. The heat and humidity, even the altitude, were crushing. Finn reached down to lift her up and dragged her along, tripping over a slimy root himself.

“Why's the goddamn balloon still attached?” said Conan.

Tricky shrugged with a new recruit's look of shame. She was a fourth-generation Hawaiian and had been only seventeen years old and into her second year of surfing sponsored by Billabong when the war came. That they'd brought her along showed just how thin the Muj ranks were getting. She offered Conan an ax that was nearly as tall as she was.

“You deserve the honors,” said Tricky.

“This isn't a damn ceremony, just cut the cable!” said Conan.

Tricky shook her head no, wiping sweat from her eyes. “All right, give me the ax,” said Conan.

The support structure anchoring the aerostat's tether cable looked like a miniature Eiffel Tower. Conan aimed the blade at the juncture where the cable attached and brought the ax down with a grunt. The ax handle was wooden, but the blade had a nano-synthetic diamond edge. It was Chinese military issue, and they'd stripped it from the back of a supply truck a month ago. Conan brought the ax down again with a loud clang that made the rest of the insurgents tense up. Finn instinctively scanned the perimeter of the clearing.

“We better hurry,” said Finn. He held out the control stick for the zipper. The light now flashed red.

She heaved again and smashed the ax into the steel cable.

“Fucker's stuck,” said Conan, bending over to lever the blade out. She turned slightly as a volley of rounds hissed past the place where her head had been a moment ago. The angry sound of autocannon fire followed.

“Contact!” shouted Conan. A quadcopter drone appeared, leaping above the canopy around the site's perimeter. The strobelike muzzle flashes from its cannon lit up the plateau. The NSM insurgents took off at a run away from the cable's tether point and slid into the foliage at the edge of the clearing.

“Target the drone; it'll track your fire, and I'll go after the tether,” said Conan. She sprinted back to the cable's anchor point, clutching the ax.

Finn tried to track the quadcopter but kept losing it as it ducked in and out of the forest canopy. A rapid reaction force would definitely be coming now. They might helicopter up, and if they did, it would be all over soon. If the Directorate soldiers instead drove up from the mountain's base, then they might have a few extra minutes.

Another crash of autocannon fire from the quadcopter, which emerged again from the canopy and started to close on Conan's position. There was a flash of red light to Finn's right as Tricky fired a flare gun they'd scrounged from a sailboat's emergency kit. Temporarily blinded, the drone automatically paused and stabilized itself, following its standard protocol to reset its sensors.
Dumb-ass machines
, thought Finn.

He took it out with his second shot, and the quadcopter spun off into the trees. Then a dark shadow passed overhead: the aerostat, its plump belly faintly lit by the flare's dying red light, a light wind taking it west.

They ran to the tree line, joining the other insurgents. Already, they could see three sets of headlights coming up the Mount Ka‘ala road to the plateau.

Above them, the first stars were already out, joining the array of lights from Schofield Barracks in the distance. Conan could see all the way to the sweep of lights at Diamond Head, and she allowed herself to wonder what those who hunkered down over there thought of the far-off solitary balloon, lifting off into the night.

Then Conan heard another buzzing in the distance. It was another quadcopter, scouting ahead of the Directorate trucks in the dark.

“Let's move,” said Conan. “Remember, we stay together this time.”

USS
Zumwalt
, Gulf of the Farallones,
⁸
California

Captain Jamie Simmons walked forward past the rail-gun turret and stood at the very tip of the ship's bow. The chisel-like bow narrowed to a fine point, but there was enough room that he could stand on steady legs and take in the view while he went over the ship's systems on his viz.

The
Z
had sliced through the oddly still water of San Francisco Bay at just over ten knots, accompanied by seventeen other ships from the Ghost Fleet, most of them old transport and amphibious ships. They'd left in the foggy darkness. No sendoff with dignitaries and officials. Most of the tearful goodbyes had been wrapped up a day ago, and those who'd thought they could avoid difficult face-to-face conversations by saying goodbye online found themselves with no connection to the rest of the world. The ship was at full EMCON A
⁹
emission control, running dark, electronically speaking, without the connectivity that the U.S. military had taken for granted for decades. Even if Directorate satellites or spies had seen the ships leaving the Bay, they would have gleaned little information, as the fleet was not leaving a trail of data and information in its wake. The ships wouldn't even form a local network connection. Mostly, as Admiral Murray insisted, they would use signal flags and lights, old-school nautical communications methods, to help conceal the fleet's position and course.

The ships passed silently under the Golden Gate Bridge, lit only by the few cars on the road. The scaffolding, ostensibly put up for a construction project, prevented anybody from driving by and taking a close-up viz of the departing fleet. In an age of ubiquitous video capture and Directorate spy satellites, it was a desperate throwback to the early Cold War years.

Jamie watched as, off to port, the sea stacks of the Farallon Islands emerged from the water twenty miles off Point Reyes. Closer in were the remnants of a faint series of triangular wakes left by the three ships leading the way, the USS
Mako
and two sister ships. The stealthy unmanned surface vessels
¹⁰
looked like they belonged in orbit, not on the ocean. But the tiny ships were predators, no question about it. With the fleet operating on radio silence, the fifty-seven-foot-long carbon-fiber
Mako
-class ships were in full autonomous mode, programmed to hunt and destroy anything made of metal that moved counter to the currents underwater. All the prewar concerns about setting robots loose on the battlefield didn't seem to matter as much when you were on the losing side. Plus, there was no worry about collateral damage underwater, no civilian submarines that might accidentally get in the way. The worst the ships could do was torpedo a great white shark that had eaten too many license plates.

A flash of movement caught Jamie's eye and he peered down into the bow wave. A pod of dolphins surfed along with the
Zumwalt
. Instead of watching them play, he focused on the map layout and saw that the
Mako
-class ships racing ahead had not detected any mines or signs of the Directorate's quiet diesel-electric submarines.

“All clear ahead?” said Mike. Jamie turned his body slowly to acknowledge his father but kept looking at his screen.

“So far, so good,” said Jamie. “That won't last, will it?”

“Probably not,” said Mike. “Look, I need to talk to you for a minute.”

Jamie turned off the glasses, not wanting this conversation recorded. “Let's head over to the turret.”

In the lee of the rail-gun turret, well out of the wind, Mike spoke first. He braced his back against the rail-gun housing with the kind of effort that betrays exhaustion. His coverall seemed to flap looser, Jamie thought, as if his father'd lost weight.

“We have to solve this,” said Mike. “We don't have the time to work together, blow up, work together, and then blow up again. Two steps forward and all that.”

“Agreed,” said Jamie. “We can't have an argument every time we spend more than a minute or two with each other. It's got to stop. The ship can't have that. Cortez has already brought it up, suggested you transfer to one of the other ships in the task force. But I kept you with this ship. You know why?”

“I would have stowed away anyway,” said Mike.

Jamie cracked a smile. “I don't like having to keep the civilian techs onboard, but the ship needs Dr. Li,” said Jamie. “And she needs you.”

“What are you talking about?” said Mike.

“Dad, you can't bullshit the captain on his own ship. You taught me that,” said Jamie.

“Vern's less than half my age—” said Mike.

“It's Vern now?” said Jamie.

“—and got twice the years in school.”

“Whatever you want to tell yourself. It's your business, not mine. But I need you to keep her safe,” said Jamie.

“She's doing it to show the rest of them that they can't question her . . . well, her right to serve, I guess,” said Mike. “One of the guys got after her and—”

“I heard. Is your hand okay?” asked Jamie. “You should have just brought him to me; we could have replaced him.”

“That's the thing—now he's going to be the best behaved sailor on this cruise,” said Mike. “In my Navy, we handled things up front and got it over with. All this bullshit about diversity and the new Navy, and still Vern has to deal with this?”