Deep War: The War with China and North Korea - The Nuclear Precipice

by David Poyer

  “I ran into somebody who works there.”

  “I just work in the kitchen, Hector.”

  He put out a hand at last and let it rest on her shoulder. The long shining hair he’d stared at for hours in high school, in the days when he’d sat behind her in class, was lank and dirty now. The hands in her lap looked chapped, the fingernails broken or bitten. “Mir … I thought about you a lot. While I was over there.”

  She blinked into her tea. “I thought about you too, Hector.”

  “You need anything? Money, or anything?”

  “We have what we need. Anyway, it wouldn’t be right.”

  “They pay us, but there’s nothing to spend it on. So you might as well have it.”

  “I won’t take your money, Hector. And that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

  They rocked for a while more. The old glider creaked and squealed. “You need some oil on this thing,” he said. Then, “It was Mahmou’ who told me you were working there.”

  She didn’t say anything. So after a while he added, “He was saying some evil shit about you.”

  “Oh, I can guess.” She laughed dully. “He’s an asshole. Always hitting on us.”

  “He always was a dick, back at the plant. I didn’t believe anything he said. But I don’t think he’ll be bothering you anymore.”

  She rocked, and maybe she was smiling, just a little. “Should I thank you?”

  “Up to you.”

  She said, not looking at him, “Hector, there was never anything agreed between us.”

  “I know that.”

  “It’s not like we were in love or anything.”

  “I know … but I always sort of felt…” He trailed off, then tried again. “I carried your picture, the one you gave me in school. Still got it.” He slipped out his wallet. The plastic lamination was cracked.

  “That old thing,” she said, laughing. “I look so fat. You carried that around? Over there, in the war?”

  “Uh-huh. I always sort of felt you liked me.”

  “I did. Back then, I mean.”

  “How about now?”

  “I don’t know, Hector.”

  He waited, but she didn’t say anything more.

  “I can’t make any promises, Mir. I don’t know if I’m going to come back. If I don’t, I don’t want you to be unhappy. Or if I’ll be worth anything if I do. After all this is over.” He remembered what the old vet in the pickup had said. “If it’s ever over.”

  She looked uneasy. “The war? It’s got to be over sometime.”

  “Maybe, but … The slants are tough. They’re gonna hold on to what they got.”

  He reached over and turned her face to his. When he kissed her, she smelled of tomato sauce. He didn’t mind that. Didn’t mind it at all.

  She whispered, “Do you really have to go back, Hector?”

  “I got to. Yeah.”

  “What happens if you don’t? They say some soldiers don’t. Would they put you in the Zone, or what?”

  He thought about the squads he was training. The helpless, babyish faces. He said slowly, “It don’t matter, what happens to me. Yeah, it’d be the Zone. Or Leavenworth. But that ain’t it. It’s the new kids. They don’t know yet what they’re in for.”

  “Who doesn’t? I don’t understand.”

  “The recruits. Something big’s coming. I got to train them right, or they’re all gonna fucking die.” He pulled her closer. “Mir. I want you to wait for me.”

  “¿A dónde voy? Where else am I gonna go?” she said softly. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound bitter. But I don’t know what to do, or what’s going to happen. To me. To us. To anybody, now. So maybe you’re right. Maybe we shouldn’t make any promises.”

  After he left, coasting down the drive toward the road, shells crackling and popping under his bike tires like distant rifle fire, he looked back. She was still staring after him, hugging herself.

  11

  USS The Sage Brothers Honolulu

  THE noise was like a thunderstorm crammed inside a shipping container. A bellow of acoustic energy no mortal ear could have withstood unattenuated. Even separated from it by a foot of dense insulation sandwiched between layers of steel, Dan’s guts quivered from the subsonics as he peered through a Perspex window two inches thick.

  He stood deep in the ship, between boxlike enclosures painted cream white. Windows permitted a close-up view of the machines suspended inside, braced and strutted by heavy steel. Not much larger than a refrigerator, each General Electric gas turbine produced twenty-five thousand horsepower at full throttle. They were shafted to Curtiss-Wright generators, which supplied power to huge superconducting electric motors housed farther aft.

  All in all this engine room, plus another staggered aft of it and separated by watertight bulkheads, generated over a hundred thousand horsepower.

  But they weren’t new engines.

  He’d woken up after his chat with his daughter with his course clear in his mind.

  We might not have to invent something new.

  What if we have something available already that we can pitch in there, see if it works?

  Wielding a wartime priority, Kitty and Brett had scoured the planet. Some units had come from other navies. The Spanish, Italian, and South African fleets were now operating on half their former power. Two turbines had come from Queen Mary 2, and two from Celebrity cruise liners. Others were en route from generator stations in Iceland.

  But by far the majority of the two hundred–plus main propulsion engines the Navy was installing in the new-construction cruisers, the Flight V destroyers, and the SBX-2 class of seaborne early-warning radars, had come from the idled American civilian air fleet. The LM2500 had been derived from a high-bypass turbofan aircraft engine, the CF6. Though there’d been changes through the years to fit them for marine use, the cores, with their arrays of finely machined blades, were still so similar that minor work-arounds made them one-for-one replacements.

  Nearly six hundred commercial airliners stagnating in hangars across the country because of fuel restrictions had suddenly become an engine mine. The core roaring at his elbow had come from a Delta Air Lines Boeing 767. The one next to it, also thundering in a full-power test, had been sourced from a pumping station in Saudi Arabia, originally used to compress natural gas. The two in the After Engine Room of USS The Sage Brothers—named after three brothers who’d died off Vietnam in USS Evans—came from a FedEx DC-10.

  The engines had hours on them. And they came in different variants, so installation kits for each version had to be fabricated. But they would serve. Meanwhile, GE and Rolls-Royce had scrubbed down their 3-D printer drivers and were producing new blades and cores. As the used units reached the ends of their service lives, they’d be replaced with uprated cores, producing more power with lower fuel consumption.

  But by then, Dan hoped, the war would be over. One way or another.

  The NCIS and FBI had found the production flaw. It had been a Trojan horse exploit. Someone had slithered past all the safeguards and inserted a surreptitious alteration deep in the code. When the printer hit a certain point in the metal-deposition process, instead of spraying alloy the printer head stuttered, inserting air-filled microvoids deep in the blades.

  How wasn’t his concern, though it was worrying. The really unsettling question was what other malicious code might have been inserted into the other weapons the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army depended on to take the battle to the enemy. And what about the ABM systems that were supposed to keep Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the other cities Zhang threatened safe in case of a major attack?

  “Sir?” The destroyer’s skipper leaned in, shouting over the din. Dan lifted his ear protection. “That’s hour two at fifty percent. Going up to one hundred percent now. You might want to step back.”

  Dan nodded and retreated a few steps, glancing around.

  He remembered crawling rusting, flaking, oil-crusted bilges as a midshipma
n, grease-stained qualification book in hand. In those days, destroyers had burned bunker oil so thick it had to be heated before it would flow. Asbestos-padded overheads had dripped like triple-canopy jungle. Hissing steam from leaky joints waved white plumes in air so hot it scorched your throat when you breathed, unless you were standing directly beneath the huge intakes that whooshed outside air into the faces of the sweating men who tended the boilers. The boilers themselves had towered like the furnaces of Moloch, from massive keel footings up level after level. The air had been solid noise, solid heat, thick with the smells of fuel and steam, sweat and corrosion.

  The Sage Brothers’ white-painted Engine Room was clean as a hospital cafeteria. There wasn’t even a control booth anymore. Coveralled men and women stood studying readouts on handhelds for the tests, but when the destroyer was under way, everything would be controlled from the bridge. The helmsman would press a button on a touch screen, and an engine would start itself. Generators, pumps, and motors would adjust themselves, and in case of damage would shift the load to maximize the ship’s fighting efficiency.

  Or so the theory went. But when fuel fires raged, when shaped charges penetrated with jets of fire, when the shock of a detonating torpedo or warhead or mine or bomb whiplashed equipment on their isolation mounts and the sea poured in through split hulls …

  He remembered those times. Had lived them. Aboard USS Reynolds Ryan, Barrett, Turner Van Zandt, Horn, K-79, Savo Island. When crews had saved their ship and fought on. When they’d coped, made do, sacrificed themselves for their shipmates, and overcome.

  How would the hidden processes of digital intelligence respond? It was a new world. An antiseptic, inhuman, depersonalized world of metal and electrons. But still, one of savage struggle. From a wielder of weapons, the warrior had become the director of machines that wielded themselves; launching on their own, changing course, varying tactics, needing only to have their targets designated. And soon they would no longer require human direction even for that.

  He shivered. Then nodded again to the skipper, and headed for the ladder up.

  * * *

  CAMP H. M. Smith was perched high above the harbor. He’d been here before. The CNO had personally pinned on his stars here, before the opening strike on the Chinese mainland. “Thanks, I won’t need you for the rest of the day,” Dan told his driver, getting out in front of Building 700.

  Nipa palms nodded, fronds clashing in the cool breeze from the sea. The Nimitz-MacArthur Pacific Command Center overlooked the harbor and shipyard. To the north, ridge after ridge of forested green hills receded into the distance, the valleys hazy with mist. To the east, more hills surged like a stormy sea. To the west spread the city, glittering and vulnerable.

  The fronds clashed again, clattering like colliding bayonets. He took off his cap and ran a hand over sweat-soaked hair. He stood for a moment more looking down at the sea. Then headed for a concrete entranceway.

  He told the guards he was scheduled to meet with General Faulcon. They checked his ID against a list, rifled through his briefcase, wanded him, and took custody of his phone. The elevator dropped fast. He swallowed to clear his ears, fighting a claustrophobia that threatened whenever he went underground. Ever since the Signal Mirror mission into Baghdad …

  Still fighting that memory, he stepped out into a coldly lit, low-overheaded, air-conditioned passageway that felt like some W. A. Harbinson fantasy, below the ice cap of Antarctica. Officers and enlisted scurried along, abstracted as ants, avoiding his gaze. Situation rooms and intel spaces opened off the passageway. Every fifty yards the tunnel made a right angle, walls slanting away at each corner. It looked like feng shui, but it was meant to confine blast, in case a bunker penetrator made it this deep.

  The corridor gave way to a higher-ceilinged office space that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Pentagon. “Captain Lenson, for General Faulcon,” he told a digital assistant on the table, and waited.

  “Captain? The general will see you now,” it said several seconds later.

  Dan had worked for Randall Faulcon when the latter had been the joint special operations commander north of Kandahar and west of the White Mountains. Planning black missions into Pakistan. Never admitted, never acknowledged.

  The general was so gaunt now his face looked vacuum-sealed. They said he had only one good eye, but Dan couldn’t tell which. Both, as he inspected Dan, were totally emotionless. Just as in Bagram, his office here was walled with maps, though now they were up on vertical large-screen displays. Callouts from active drones crept across seas and mountains. Comm channels murmured. It was less office than tactical operations center.

  Faulcon saluted Dan’s Medal of Honor, though they were both bareheaded and deep below ground. Feeling foolish, Dan returned it.

  The general’s skeletal fingers gripped his like Death seizing a reluctant soul. “Lenson. We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, sir. Afghanistan. With Tony Provanzano.”

  “With Tony, yeah. You were running the CIRCE program. And I saw your wife not that long ago. In Washington.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “She knows what she’s talking about. But let’s get to business. I hear you reengined our new naval construction with parts stolen from civilian airliners.”

  “Basically true, sir. But I didn’t do it alone.”

  “Welcome to my world.” Faulcon crossed to a screen. It showed the western Pacific. “I understand you left your flagship after she was hit.”

  Dan pushed down anger. Would that canard ever stop dogging him? Would that imputed dishonor always stain his name? “I left, correct. In order to shift my—”

  “Transferring your command, I know. There are still questions being raised. But Jim Yangerhans is willing to look past that, at least for now. He wants to know if you’re ready to go back on full duty.”

  “I think so, sir.”

  “Medical?”

  “I’m recovered enough for desk work. As for going back to sea—it might be wise to take a few more weeks.”

  “That’s honest. To be honest right back, there won’t be any sea commands for you. Not until certain political elements get distracted by something else.”

  He forced a nod. “Copy that, General.”

  “All right, here’s where we’re going. There’s not a hell of a lot of strategic guidance coming out of the Chiefs. They’re giving us intermediate objectives, but not defining what could constitute an acceptable end state. It’s up to us to develop the operational approach. So we’re more or less running strategic guidance, concept development, plan development, and plan assessment simultaneously. Just remember, SecDef can reenter the process at any time.”

  Faulcon positioned two hands on the wall display of the Pacific. “The ten-thousand-feet overview: We’re preparing for a two-pronged offensive. The northern prong will begin with filtering-in operations by special ops, to take the islets bracketing Taiwan. They’ll be supported by air strikes from Itbayat. If they succeed, we’ll follow up with a multidivision assault, link up with the resistance, and fight it out with Lieutenant General Pei and the Chinese army we’ve trapped there.”

  Dan nodded, and the general spun the map to show the South China Sea. “The southern prong’s less clearly envisioned so far. You won’t see this on the news, but the Vietnamese are being hammered. They’ve lost Hanoi. The Chinese are still advancing. We’re not ready to put major land forces ashore, but we have to do something or see one of our toughest allies forced out of the war. Planning’s under way for several options. One is landing a tank brigade in the rear of the advancing Chinese forces. Cutting their logistics lines.”

  “Like Inchon,” Dan said.

  “Exactly, like MacArthur’s landing. I have to say the Army chief of staff’s not happy with that idea. But at minimum, we need a demonstration. A major carrier strike, at least. Like the one you vanguarded in Recoil.”

  Dan nodded, and Faulcon spread his fingers on the screen, zoomi
ng in on the southern coast. “Another option is a strike against the naval, air, and submarine base at Yulin, on Hainan Island. An attack there should force them to pull back forces from Vietnam. That effort would leapfrog from our joint Vietnamese-Indian-U.S. base facilities in the Spratlys.”

  “A strike, a raid, or a landing, General?” A strike was a quick blow from the air or the sea. A raid meant commitment of ground forces, but with only temporary occupation in mind. A landing would be fought for tenaciously, with the idea of permanent occupation.

  Faulcon shrugged. He slid behind his desk and pointed to a chair for Dan. “Not sure yet. At the least, as I said, a major strike. Maybe also, factor in consideration of a tactical nuke. Though that might be outside the political box.”

  Dan took the chair. “Outside how, sir? They wiped out a carrier strike group. They went nuclear first. No one I know understands why we didn’t retaliate.”

  The general bobbled his head. “True, and the Chiefs are game, but NCA’s hanging back. Grand strategy? Fear of the next escalatory step? I can only speculate why.”

  “Uh, I understand the Chinese have problems too. Famine. Reduced production. Unrest. And disease.”

  Faulcon frowned. “We can’t depend on a virus to win for us.” He slid open the drawer and plopped a fat red-and-white-striped folder on the desktop. “I’d like you to head up one of our planning cells. Develop courses of action, campaign and contingency plans against the requirements identified in the planning directive. You’ll have forty people. In the second-level basement. With Indian and Vietnamese liaisons. Relieve the colonel in charge. Or keep him as your deputy, if you want. We need these as soon as you can produce them.”

  Dan wondered why the incumbent was being relieved of command, and then, why he was being slotted in. “Yes, sir. Can you give me a readout on his uh, or her, performance?”

  “Osterhaut’s a good man. Just not plugged in enough to naval aspects of the operation. PACOM wants your ass in the chair.”

  Dan nodded. “I had some sharp folks on the engine project. They’re at loose ends now.”