“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem, sir. We’ll have you on the Ford in just a couple of minutes.” The helicopter took off a short time later.
Jeremiah watched as they lifted off the deck of his ship. The Azanti still rested where they’d landed her. A slight smile crossed his face. Regardless of how things worked out, she’d flown in space. She’d really flown. Faster than light. Something no other human ship had ever done. He had wanted to go into space himself. But now, that dream was over.
The helicopter tilted forward and away from the ship that had been his home since the plague destroyed the world. He had a good view of the Flotilla from above as the helicopter continued to climb and angled away. When they’d flown back from the Ford a few hours ago, the ships had been scattered and far more numerous. As he’d heard, the few that were left were clustered around the sole remaining functional carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford. There appeared to be more helicopters in the air than ships in the water. Aircraft circled around the outside as they approached their destinations, careful to avoid clustering in the middle.
“Is this all that’s left?” he asked over the microphone.
“A few ships lit out a short time ago,” Dr. Peterson explained. “You can still see some over there.”
Jeremiah followed the doctor’s gesture to the west and could see a ship steaming away. It was maybe a mile distant. It looked a lot like his ship. Perhaps it had also been an oil platform service ship? There was a flash, and the ship seemed to lift out of the water and split in two in the middle. Fire, smoke, and water exploded into the sky as the two parts fell back down.
“That was a goddamn torpedo!” the pilot yelled, and he banked hard toward the carrier just as another explosion flashed.
* * *
USS Gerald R. Ford
Combat Information Center
“Sonar contact!”
Captain Gilchrist slid out of his chair in the Ford’s CIC and moved through the maze of workstations and screens. Normally, a good part of it would be used for launching and recovering fixed wing aircraft, like fighters or E-2 Hawkeye early warning craft. He had exactly three flight-worthy, combat aircraft left after the fiasco at Coronado so most flight ops were rotary wing.
When the damned seals and whales attacked, everything went insane. Who would have thought so many ships would be vulnerable to seals? Navy SEALs, sure, but the marine mammal variety? The animals had flopped onto fantails and slinked up walkways, and dolphins had jumped 12 feet out of the water to land on decks and bite people. Reports included mutated creatures too. Mutated?! Carrier captains had to be good at dealing with adversity, or they’d never get the job. But this was insane!
Only five combat ships remained after the attack. A day ago, there’d been nine. The Marine amphibious assault carriers had proven particularly vulnerable with their open well decks. The only one still reporting in was the Essex, and they were preparing to abandon ship. An outbreak of infected had caused a fire in the hangar deck. Twice, Gilchrist had tried to send a damage control team to help, but both times he’d been diverted.
He wanted to know how so many ships without low-to-the-water access had also had sudden outbreaks of infected. They’d lost the John Paul Jones, and nobody knew why. A lookout had seen gunfire on the bridge, then all comms were lost. The Carl Vinson had seemed fine, then was quiet. She was drifting a mile to the north. He didn’t have the time or personnel to check on her. Both of the littoral class ships were gone as well.
All he had left were the Ford, the Russell, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the Ingraham, the Rodney M. Davis, and the Vandegrift which were all Oliver Hazard Perry-class frigates. He also had the Arctic, a Supply-class, fast combat support ship. He was most worried about the Arctic. Without her, they would quickly run out of food and fuel.
The surviving ships pulled in around the Ford and the Russell for whatever safety they could provide. General Rose, on his bloody cruise ship, had distributed his sparse number of soldiers between the civilian ships to shoot seals and whales. The Marines were largely scattered as well. They’d taken the worst of the losses in Coronado, and many more during the attack. Dozens of RHIBs had sunk, lost to the seals and whales. They were down to using helicopters to move people around. All told, as the Brits would say, it was a right proper cockup.
“What do you have, son?” he asked the sonar tech.
“I’ve been getting weird transients since 09:44, sir,” the tech said and pointed to the screen. The colored plot showed the various things surrounding them. The techs had been trying to track the damned killer whales, without much success. The infected whales were quiet compared to normal whales. There wasn’t much conversation between zombies, apparently. “There’s been so much garbage from fights on ships and that yacht full of ammo exploding…”
“I understand, Seaman. Get to it,” Gilchrist prompted.
“Yes, sir. I’ve been spending all morning isolating the garbage. I was tired of trying to do it on a spot-by-spot basis. I finally got it all sorted out a few minutes ago, then I picked up a new set of screws approaching. These are definitely underwater. I’d swear it’s a sub, sir.”
Gilchrist narrowed his eyes as he examined the computer representation of the signal. The data didn’t match any known submarine. Any American sub would approach on the surface, especially in such a chaotic situation. He was about to call for his XO to contact the Russell when the sonarman sat bolt upright, a hand over his ear that wasn’t covered by an earphone.
“Torpedo in the water!”
“Commander Tobias, battle stations!” Gilchrist barked.
His XO called out orders, and the CIC lighting took on a reddish hue. Several crewmen who’d been off duty came rushing in over the next several minutes.
“Report on sonar contact,” Tobias said as a crewman used a grease pen to mark the aggressor on a plotting board.
“Contact is changing aspect,” the young seaman said, his face contorted in concentration. “It’s really weird, sir. The main contact sounds more like a torpedo than a subma…it’s gone!”
“They go silent?” Tobias asked.
“No, it just faded out, like it accelerated out of range.” The seaman looked up at Gilchrist. “Computer estimated the speed at over 350 knots.”
“Impossible,” Tobias said.
“What about those Russian VA-111s?” Gilchrist asked. His XO looked concerned. The Russians had developed a supercavitating torpedo capable of over 200 knots.
“Weren’t they supposed to be powered by rocket engines?” the sonarman asked, still listening. “The torpedo in the water sounded conventional, but also fast. Maybe 150 knots.”
“Who makes a sub faster than a torpedo?” Tobias asked his captain, sotto voce.
“Nobody,” Gilchrist answered. “Do we have a plot on the torpedo?”
“Affirmative,” someone said. “Torpedo is true and active, bearing 295 degrees, course 99.5 degrees, range 2,900 yards. Speed 152 knots.”
A list of ships was written on the board in blue grease pencil. A sailor had already marked the firing location of the submarine, with its escape direction. A squiggle indicated it was no longer being tracked. A red dotted line marked the torpedo’s course, and a red circle indicated the probable target. “Target is the Propseridad.”
Gilchrist looked at one of the seamen tasked with monitoring the ships in the Flotilla. Unfortunately, her job had gotten steadily easier over the last day and a half. She was reading from a laptop.
“Sir, the Prosperidad is a Venezuelan-flagged oil rig resupply ship that was in San Diego, taking on materials, when the plague hit.”
Gilchrist was decidedly not happy. As if zombies weren’t bad enough, he was bobbing in the middle of a tight knot of ships with zero screen. It wasn’t where a carrier boss wanted to find himself when a skunk suddenly appeared in their midst. He would normally have had his own nuclear attack subs to screen at a distance, not to mention a trio of destroyers keeping a
n eye out 12 to 25 miles away. The board indicated the attacker had been less than 10 miles out when he’d fired.
He turned to Tobias. “Get some ASW assets in the air, now.”
Tobias was scanning the board that listed their aircraft, where they were, their status, and their availability. “We can launch that Viking in 5 minutes,” he said and grabbed a phone, “but we don’t have any ordnance to mount on it!”
Gilchrist nodded. “Shoot it.” S-3 Vikings were fine ASW planes. They were equipped with MAD, or Magnetic Anomaly Detection, and they flew low over the ocean, looking for telltale signs of big hunks of submerged iron and/or nuclear reactors. They were effective, and naturally, they’d been taken out of service. The Ford only had one aboard. The S-3 Viking and the now lost F-35 Lightning had been on the ship for ACT, or Aircraft Compatibility Testing, which was part of the Ford’s evaluation as the first in her class. Now last in her class. Having a few of the older planes on board also helped them test the new EMALS, Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System. The Viking was no longer in direct service. Instead, carriers relied on screening vessels and submarines now.
“They’re fueling and moving it onto the elevator now,” Tobias said. “A couple of electronics repair techs are filling in for the MAD operators.”
“This should be interesting,” Gilchrist said. “See how long before any surviving destroyers or frigates can equip an ASW helicopter.”
“Torpedo time on target, 10 seconds,” the sonarman announced.
“I’ve got a visual from one of our Seahawks,” a technician said. One of the flatscreens showed a jiggly picture of a ship sailing away from the camera. It was a wide, fat ship with a big, open rear deck and two folded cranes. It reminded him of Jeremiah Osbore’s ship. If they were under attack, having the injured CEO coming aboard for treatment would complicate things. Gilchrist didn’t know the nature of his injuries, only their severity. He was concerned how having him aboard would impact their plans to exploit the alien technology.
“Impact!” the sonarman called out.
On the screen, the Posperidad lifted and split in half, a textbook torpedo attack amidships. The explosion was a big one, too.
“Holy shit,” someone said. Others exclaimed as well.
“Quiet,” Tobias snapped, and the chatter fell off.
Gilchrist didn’t blame them too much. Few, if any, of them had ever seen a live fire exercise. In this case, a lot of people had just died. The stricken ship was sinking, fast. “See about getting an SAR bird airborne.” Tobias nodded; he hadn’t hung up the phone yet.
Minutes ticked by as the off-duty sonar techs came rushing in, and the other combat stations arrived. Tobias announced that an E-2 was being moved onto an elevator. Seconds later, the hull vibrated, and they could see the S-3 Viking shoot off the end of a waist catapult on one of the deck monitors. He silently hoped they didn’t rip the nose off the old airframe. In the books, the EMALS was easier to finetune than the old steam catapults. But the reason they’d been on test runs and not on a shakedown cruise was because the damned thing was proving harder to dial in than the contractor had said it would be.
The Viking clawed its way into the sky, only dropping a meter below the deck before beginning its ascent. A huge cruise ship was only a quarter mile away, and Gilchrist ground his teeth together as the Viking barely cleared the pleasure craft. It was like running flight ops in a fucking bathtub. As soon as it’s gear retracted, the Viking banked westward, toward the attack.
“When is a helicopter coming in that can be equipped for ASW?”
“Beeker said the bird with Osborne is landing now,” Tobias said.
“Tell the airboss to rearm that damned helicopter in record time.”
“Torpedo in the water!”
“We need to maneuver,” Tobias snarled.
Gilchrist wondered if there was something worse than a cockup.
* * *
USS Vandegrift
Bridge
Commander Jeremy Richards, Captain of the USS Vandergrift was proud of his ship. The Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided missile frigates were quietly referred to as the ghetto navy by the admiralty, and they were being phased out faster than the much more prestigious and heavily armed Arleigh Burke-class destroyers were coming online. Regardless of what the brass thought, the Vandegrift had enjoyed a distinguished service since her commissioning in 1984. Well, except for the drunken orgy by her CO in 2012.
Richards had known the commander. He also knew the former CO of the Vandegrift hadn’t done anything a hundred navy commanders hadn’t done before him, except he had broken the first rule—don’t get caught. Especially if you were in a foreign military port. So, Richards had gotten the command. It would have been the last for the Vandegrift, which had been scheduled to be decommissioned later that year, and the ship would have likely become a target for weapons testing. Only now, things had changed. A damned virus was turning people into flesh eating zombies.
He glanced behind his command chair on the wide-windowed bridge. The ship’s plaque read Exercitatus, Conservatus, Paratus. Skilled, maintained, prepared. Who can prepare for a zombie apocalypse?
“Captain,” the radio operator called. “The Ford reports a torpedo attack on a civilian ship, bearings follow.”
“Torpedo attack?” Richards demanded. “Who fired a torpedo?”
“Unknown. We’re the only unobstructed warship; they want us to move out and screen ASAP. They’ve launched something called a Viking.”
The XO looked at Richards and laughed. “I thought they retired those.”
“They did,” Richard said, “couple years ago.” He shrugged. Who knew? Looking around the bridge he shook his head. Half the crew was down or missing. They’d had a small outbreak of the infection shortly after arriving with the Ford. Some sections were severely shorthanded. He picked up the phone and punched in engineering. “Engineering, bridge. Report power status.”
“Bridge, engineering,” the reply came immediately. “Turbine one is at 10%, providing power and station keeping. Turbine two is down. I was going to pull a fuel booster pump for maintenance, it’s been acting up.”
“Belay that. Bring number two online, we’re moving.”
“What’s up, Captain?”
“Looks like someone’s shooting bloody torpedoes.”
“What? As if flesh eating infected aren’t bad enough?”
“I know, right? Give me as much as possible on number one and spin up number two as fast as you can.” He hung up the phone and turned to his XO. “Cast off from the Arctic immediately.” They’d been alongside since taking on fuel, providing security against seals, of all things. “Signal our people on the supply ship to stay aboard; we don’t have time to get them off.”
He watched as his crew went to work. The helmsman was a new seaman recruit. He had come aboard when they left San Diego last month to rendezvous with the Ford on her sea trials. His XO would have normally called the senior helmsman, but she was in sickbay after being bitten by a rat. Six others were with her. The corpsman in charge said she had a staph infection. He’d have to transfer them to the Ford for treatment once this torpedo stuff was dealt with.
“We’re clear and ready to maneuver,” the XO informed.
“Port rudder, all ahead, one-quarter.”
“Port rudder, all ahead, one-quarter, aye-aye,” the helmsman said.
“Take us to battle stations,” Richards ordered. “Sonar, coordinate with the Viking. Find the damned sub.”
* * *
USS Gerald R. Ford
Media Center
“Was that a catapult launch?” Kathy Clifford asked.
The young navy media specialist looked up from her sudoku puzzle and blinked. “Yeah, it sounded like the EMALS.” The alarm had sounded a few minutes ago, but it had sounded several times since the marine animal attack.
“I thought there weren’t any more fighters.”
The woman shrugged and went back to her puzzle
.
Kathy scowled and opened her laptop. In a second, she found the deck camera, but there wasn’t anything to see. The men were moving some stuff around, but she didn’t see any planes. Like the last time she’d checked, a cruise ship was visible ahead of them. None of the ships were moving since they’d come closer together.
The marine mammal attack caused her the most frustration since they’d been in space. Nobody would give her any details, and she had the misfortune of being on the only navy ship that had been untouched by the crazy attack. She’d gotten some secondhand stuff. A sailor knew another sailor who’d heard from a guy on another ship that sharks had been leaping up and biting people. Another had said seagulls were divebombing civilian ships. A cook had said sea lions had swum in through the well deck on the Essex and attacked the Marines.
What a crock of shit, she mused and flipped around the camera views. Suddenly, she saw an elevator bringing up one of the AWACs planes. “What’s that called?” she asked the woman.
“An E-2 Hawkeye,” the woman said. There were a dozen civilians in the media center. None of them took any notice. The space had been designated as a gathering spot when on alert. She’d protested, but the deck officer was unimpressed. The ship’s media library was up and running, so the civilians were streaming movies. She had her sights set on something higher than watching Shrek for the fifth time.
The Hawkeye was pulled off the elevator, its wings folding down and locking in place. In just a few seconds, it was being maneuvered into location behind one of the catapults. Its engines spun up, it was hooked to the catapult, and it fired off into the air. It all happened so damned fast! She had to remind herself the Ford was a new carrier and had never been deployed.
Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live Page 28