Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (49 page)

The YJ-12 supersonic anti-ship missile carried a four-hundred-and-fifty-pound warhead and could go Mach 4. More important, in addition to their radar, the missiles had imaging seekers, so they could be fired off blind and sent on a hunt for targets in a radius of two hundred and fifty miles, roughly the same range as the rail gun.

“Cease fire,” said Cortez.

“No, proceed with the firing plan, XO,” said Simmons emphatically. “Either they'll find us or they won't. In the interim, we need to get in as many hits as we can.”

“Aye, Captain,” said Cortez. Simmons noticed him tapping the heel of his prosthetic foot, which he did when he got anxious. His voice boomed throughout the ship. “This is the XO. Batteries release. Switching to auxiliary power in three, two, one. Mark.”

A warning siren blared throughout the ship. “All hands, the ship is on auxiliary power.”

The room's LED lights flickered twice then returned to life, powered by their own local batteries. But screens throughout the ship mission center went dark as key ship systems shut down. A low whine followed, giving the crew a sense of dread as the ship powered down.

“ATHENA, bring the tactical map up to air-defense view.” The holograph moved upward, displaying icons for three missiles now performing a search pattern, each moving back and forth across a sector farther and farther out from the island.

“Viper one and two are projecting away from us,” said the tactical action officer. Simmons and Cortez locked eyes. Their unspoken question was how much fuel the third missile would burn up in a search pattern before it found them.

“Viper three inbound, sir. I think it's tracking us.” They watched as the curving search pattern of the missile shifted to a line running directly at the
Z
.

The ATHENA battle-management system began its targeting solution as it tracked the missile approach, and Simmons watched the crew at the desks below steal glances at one another, wondering how long it would take the captain to power back up and activate the defenses.

He answered their concern, but not as they'd hoped. “Immediately after the final rail-gun shot, transfer power to the laser-point defense systems,” said Simmons.

“Firing sequence beginning in ten, nine . . .” said the weapons officer. He stood up in his chair, bracing himself slightly against the console he had been tapping feverishly.

“Viper three down!” said the tactical action officer. “Right in the wet. Looks like it ran out of fuel.” As he spoke, the ship began to hum, at first an almost imperceptible vibration, like you'd feel if you laid your hand on a track just before a train appeared.

A flash of movement caught Simmons's eye in the darkened room. It was Vern, entering the mission center, eyes fixed on the screens showing the thermal image of the
Zumwalt'
s bow section and the rail-gun turret pointing accusingly at the shore. Then there was a series of sharp cracks, every six seconds, as six rounds raced toward the targets. With each shot, a flash engulfed the front of the ship in 1,100°F flames.

All eyes shifted to the video feed from the SEAL fire team targeting Wheeler. At the airfield, a pair of fighter jets raced down the runway. From the design, twin-engined and twin-tailed, they appeared to be J-31 Falcon Hawk
strike fighters, each wing loaded with a YJ-12 anti-ship missile. The rail-gun rounds were moving too fast for the camera to pick up from afar, but the evidence of the rail-gun rounds' arrival was immediate. So massive was the force of the explosions that even though the first fighter made it into the air, the shock wave tossed it onto its side and it fell back onto the runway, adding a fiery secondary explosion to the devastation.

“Sir, Erinyes reports target destroyed,” said one of the crew. “Says good hits. Moving to site Torrey Pines and will report back.”

“Now the real test,” said Vern.

Cortez looked over at her quizzically, somewhat lost in the information on his viz glasses. “Turning the system off is easy,” said Vern, smiling. “Getting it back on is the part that always worried me.”

Highway 99, Oahu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

Brigadier General Gaylen Adams tried to focus on the taste in his mouth, the familiar mix of bile, dirt, and blood. He hadn't tasted anything like that since Kenya.

“Nearly there, sir, this one piece is a bitch,” said Lieutenant Jacobsen. They were huddled in a culvert just beside the concrete roadway. The young officer was new, pressed into duty after Adams's executive officer had died in the crash. The saniband liquid he had sprayed on Adams's wound would set in sixty seconds, creating a hard but porous membrane over the wound site. It also contained a long-acting local anesthetic. But the lieutenant needed to work quickly to debride the wound before the spray set or the wound would seal around the dirt.

Adams kept silent, both cursing himself for wanting to be the first Marine to land and counting himself lucky for surviving the fall that had made that wish come true.

Using a pair of tweezers from his med kit, Jacobsen worked out one last piece that had been lodged just under the general's lip.

“Got it,” said the aide, proudly holding up in his tweezers a sliver of a wooden golf tee the size of a matchstick. Adams could only think that it made the young officer look even younger, like one of his sons playing the board game Operation.

Fortunately, the numbness from the anesthetic had set in by this point. As the general rubbed his jaw, testing the edge of it, a helmetless Marine jumped off the roadway and into the culvert.

“Sir, Colonel Fora sent me back to let you know that we've got enemy armor coming,” said the Marine, trying to catch his breath. Adams couldn't read his name, a scarlet slash of blood painted across the body armor, just his insignia. A corporal.

“How fah ut, Cupril?” Adams asked, his speech slurred by the anesthetic. He looked over in anger at Jacobsen.

“How far out are they, Corporal?” the general's aide translated.

“Scouts tracking them about a klick away from our position, headed out from the old Schofield Barracks,” said the corporal, unfazed. It was the first time he'd ever talked to a general up close; for all he knew, they always had their aides translate for them. He handed the general a muddy map he'd been given to deliver; the units had been ordered to stay off networks as much as they could.

“Knew ur luck run ut ventually,” Adams said, mostly to himself. Except for his falling out of the back of an Osprey and onto a golf course, the operation had gone about as well as could be expected. Stealing a play from the Russians, they'd launched from the fleet almost four hundred miles out, the maximum range they could fly without refueling.

They had cut it close, all but one of the tiltrotor aircraft making it in on fumes. The strikes from the
Z
and the Poles had given them a lane through the air defenses, and even better than expected, the initial reaction from the ground defenses had been fierce but localized. It was as if the various Directorate units were operating without any leadership from the top. Adams didn't know if it was due to the jamming or a lucky hit from the shore bombardment that had killed a Directorate general. He didn't care; he would take a confused enemy every time.

The downside of their long-range method of infiltration was that his units were fighting lighter than normal. While each of the Ospreys that had landed at locations all up and down the North Shore could carry twenty-four combat-loaded Marines, they couldn't carry the unit's complement of artillery or vehicles. The Marines had commandeered civilian vehicles to stay mobile, but they would have to wait for the landing craft to bring them their own armored firepower.

“Colonel Fora said to tell you that he can bring them under fire to delay,” said the scout, “but he is requesting to blow the two bridges just north of town, sir.”

Adams studied the cracked screen of his tablet computer, matching the map to the locations he knew by heart. They could blow the bridges over the Anahulu River, but that would leave his forces on the wrong side of the little harbor in Haleiwa.
⁷³
And he wanted that harbor. As dinky as it was, hosting mostly deep-sea fishing charters before the war, Haleiwa had the only pier on the entire northern side of the island. His Marines could cross the beach, but that little harbor would make offloading the Eleventh Cavalry far easier. And, more important, he didn't want to lose momentum. Never give an enemy the opportunity to catch his breath; instead, grind your boot down hard on his neck.

He pointed on the map to the juncture of Highways 83 and 99 and the section just beyond Haleiwa, where the main road was raised on concrete pillars above the marshy land and small streams.

“Tell da
Z
to hut huh and huh.”

He looked over at the young marine corporal, who was waiting to be dismissed.

“Num, son?” said General Adams.

“Name, Corporal?” the aide asked.

“Snyder, sir,” said the corporal.

“Gut joh, Sny-drr,” Adams said slowly, trying to enunciate each word. He nodded at the aide to get to work.

Jacobsen pointed a baseball-bat-size antenna out to sea and set up a directed microwave-burst transmission to the task force; the signal's frequency hopped with each transmission, allowing it to slip through the Directorate jamming.

“Longboard, Longboard, this is Ares, requesting fire at Fo-wer, Quebec, Delta, Kilo, Zero, Tree, Niner, Ait, Tree, Tree, Zero, Six, Two, Niner, and at Fo-wer, Quebec, Delta, Kilo, Zero, Fo-wer, Wun, Two, Fo-wer, Tree, Zero, Two, Niner, Zero. Confirm, Longboard,” said the aide, using the military's phonetic pronunciation for the grid coordinates to ensure distinct sounds.

“Ares, this is Longboard Actual. Copy all, but what's the situation? Where is Ares Actual? Over.” Adams recognized the voice as Admiral Murray's.

“Longboard Actual, I've got Ares Actual right beside me, but he is, um, verbally incapacitated. I'll be speaking for him, wait,” Jacobsen said.

“Tull er dat—”

Before Adams could finish the young officer started. “Longboard Actual, present status strong but precarious. Enemy armor column advancing down Route Ninety-Nine. We'll need fire support to block threat. But not just yet. It'll cost us, but we want to wait for max effect . . . I will relay fire order to time for exactly when their column crosses Helemano Stream.”
⁷⁴

Adams eyed the young lieutenant with newfound respect. He was crap at surgery, but he was a bloody-minded killer, just the way they'd taught at Quantico.

Highway 99, Oahu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

“Snyder, are you sure this is what the general said to do?”

Lance Corporal Ramona Vetter fired off another ten-round burst from her M240 machine gun.
⁷⁵
The bullets bounced off the lead tank, a Type 99 whose brown-and-green camouflage paint stood out on the highway's black asphalt. It was belching smoke from where its engine used to be after a direct hit from a Javelin shoulder-fired rocket.
⁷⁶
Their machine-gun fire wouldn't cause any damage, but it would keep the crew from exiting.

“Well, not exactly this,” said Snyder, pointing his M4 rifle at the next tank in line, which was pushing the damaged tank off the road. Through his tactical glasses, he could see the Directorate tank designated with a bright green halo. With the road cleared, the tank began to advance toward them again. Another Javelin missile was fired off, but it was deflected by the tank's active protection defenses, which shot down the incoming missile with a small rocket that detonated the threat fifty meters away.

When the tank finally reached the small stream, Snyder did just what the lieutenant had instructed him to do. Normally, he knew to ignore what lieutenants said, but the general beside him had nodded his approval.

He toggled the glasses menu with a controller mounted on the forward rail of his M4. The connection relayed back to the young lieutenant's transmission out to sea, and after a few seconds, the system began to push data to Snyder's glasses, detailing the incoming fire's expected blast radius.

“Damn. You should see this, Vetter,” said Snyder. He panned his head left and then right. Hundreds of meters out from the projected impact point on the tank, his glasses showed all red, with a warning signal overlaid in bold:
Danger Close.

“Whatever they're firing, it isn't in the system. Figured it would be a five-incher, but it's something else.”
⁷⁷

“Bigger than a five-incher? You promise?” said Vetter.

“You know, your dirty mouth is going to ruin our Hawaiian honeymoon,” said Snyder. He yelled to the rest of their platoon strung out along the road: “Incoming fire, danger close. Get your asses down!”

“Probably just can't shoot straight. Typical Navy,” said Vetter. The two of them lay prone in a muddy ditch.

“Yeah, well, you know who the colonel is going to blame when this kills us all? Me,” said Snyder.

He'd barely finished speaking when the roadway before them vaporized in a bloom of orange and white flame. The blast wave lifted Snyder and Vetter a few inches off the ground and then dropped them back into the ditch. Their ears ringing so loud they couldn't hear anything, they edged back up to the lip. The roadway was now a massive crater where the two lead tanks had been. Even tanks farther away in the column had been flipped onto their backs like turtles.

A second wave of rail-gun fire came in, lifting Snyder and Vetter up again. The effect on the roadway was like scattering hot coals with a sledgehammer. A few seconds later, another two rounds landed in the traffic circle just to the west; now both roads into town were blocked.

Vetter was saying something, but Snyder couldn't hear her over the ringing in his ears. He scanned across the scene of destruction with his eyewear, tagging each smoldering crater and piece of smoking wreckage with a red circle. The message to the
Zumwalt
's ATHENA system was simple:
Targets destroyed
.