by David Poyer
The harsh chatter of a launch buzzer chiseled Dan’s eardrums. He toggled to his helmet cameras. The large-screen display went from nighttime dark to glary, then blanked from smoke. Nine seconds later another star lifted from the foredeck. It rose, rose, canted, then shrank to a departing comet as the booster separated and the sustainer turbojet ignited.
“Missile two away,” the 1MC announced. “Three away … four away…”
“The die is cast,” Simko murmured.
Miles above the night sea, Dan rotated in space. Golden lines crisscrossed the scarlet reticulations of electromagnetic signals. Data beams were vertical lavender pillars, each marking a task force unit. Satellites twinkled above. Reports from secure chat scrolled up to the left of his vision. Callouts winked on and off. There seemed to be fewer blue ones over the coast.
The soft, agendered voice directed his attention to a second group of aircraft approaching from the east. From the airfields on Taiwan. “Correlates to YJ-12 air-launched antiship missile,” it observed. “Range two hundred and fifty kilometers. Two-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram warhead. Supersonic sprint final approach. P-sub-K over eighty percent.”
Dan hadn’t expected this, either. The range was too great. But obviously the Chinese air force had refueled in midair. And the Allied diversions had been flimsy. Penetrable. Brushed aside like the first morning web of a summer spider.
A vibrating red dome of radar coverage wheeled into position overhead. He twisted in midair, but couldn’t make out its source.
“Find this radar,” Simko said in his ear, whether from headphones or his natural voice Dan could no longer distinguish. The real and virtual worlds were merging. But he couldn’t get disoriented, or both would come crashing down. “EW, find it for me. Take it down, or we’re going to get nailed by a ballistic homer.”
Dan spun helplessly, turning in the air.
In a very few minutes, they could all be dead.
The Tomahawks would avenge them. They’d carry out the mission. Deliver the message.
But none of them would live to see that.
To the west, the red inverted carets of the CM-709s jumped ahead with each update. To the east, the air-launched YJ-12s drew quickly closer to the inverted boxes that meant friendly surface.
At twenty miles out, they accelerated to burst speed and streaked inward.
To contact. One after the other, elements of the strike group reported engaging. Emerson Martin. Michael Kuklenski. McFaul. O’Kane. Detroit. Wichita. Fort Worth.
The frigates went down first. Their symbols blinking dark on the displays. Then the destroyers.
Dan couldn’t watch. He had his own mission to track. He toggled out of the high-altitude overview and dropped, dropped, until he was low to the sea, south of Hainan.
The Tomahawks inched ahead, creeping like snails compared to the hypersonic enemy weapons. But they flew below radar coverage, only a few feet above the surface. Spread out. Only as they approached the twin islets that guarded the entrance to Longpo Bay did they converge, joining up, falling into step in the triple waves he’d planned.
He tensed, zooming low to observe as the first flight threaded the needle.
They turned onto their courses for the piers, the ammunition storage, the administration buildings.
Then they began tracking around.
The lead missiles wheeled, making 90-degree turns to the left. They headed west, flashing over a long walkway connecting two of the islands.
Still powering westward, they crossed the empty bay, and, one after another, their callouts winked out as they slammed harmlessly into a bare rocky cape, fully five miles from any of their intended targets.
Thirty seconds behind, the second wave followed them. Instead of heading for the tunnel opening, blasting apart the gun batteries and steel nets that blocked it, they too made a hard left turn. Crossed the bay, and immolated themselves on the deserted cape, just as the first flight had.
He hovered, unable to draw breath, as the final two BGM-109Gs tracked in. They passed the outlying islands, running hot, straight, and normal. Jinking, to throw off any gun-radar tracking. Aiming straight for the tunnel entrance.
But at the last second, they too turned away, as if suddenly given a “by the left flank, march” order. Making the same 90-degree turn to port as the preceding flights, they angled away from the base, crossing the bay, heading for the cape.
But before they reached it, they leaned into another 90-degree turn.
To port.
Now they were headed back out to sea.
A Priority message glowed on his helmet screen.
SHRAPNEL: STRIKE, THIS IS SHRAPNEL.
Shrapnel was Peralta’s call sign. For some reason, “Bluebeard” had been assigned to Dan.
Dan typed, without looking at his physical fingers.
BLUEBEARD: STRIKE, OVER.
SHRAPNEL: ARE YOU MONITORING OUR SPECIAL WEAPONS? THEY’VE BEEN CYBERJACKED. HEADING BACK OUT TO SEA.
BLUEBEARD: ARE THE WARHEADS STILL LIVE?
“What’s happening, Captain?” Simko’s avatar asked him.
Dan felt sick. “Someone’s taken control of our 109Gs.”
“Are they still live?”
He had to force out the words. “As far as we know.”
“Fuck. Fuck,” Simko cursed softly.
Dan lifted, ascended, rising like Elijah until he could make out both the outlines of the bay and his surface group itself, 120 miles out. The pulsing blue extended tracks of the remaining Tomahawks intersected the Allied force.
Three hundred kilotons of thermonuclear hell was headed their way.
The picture wavered, swam, dissolved. It blanked, then regenerated. Wavered again.
“Cyber intrusion detected,” the sexless voice said. “Outside entity attempting to crash Aegis. Attempting to lock out our defensive systems. Virus intrusion alert! Rebooting. Regenerating. Re—”
The virtual universe went black, and the voice cut off.
When he doffed his helmet, the ship’s officers were snapping out orders, assigning weapons to incoming threats. Long-range Standards to the incoming Tomahawks and the lead elements of the incoming CM-709s. Shorter-range but supersonic Evolved Sea Sparrows, quad-packed in the vertical cells fore and aft, to the faster weapons arriving from the east.
The command screen in front of him, the large-screen displays, the radar picture, all wavered and blanked, then lit again as the ship’s computers dueled the invisible intruder. Hollow thuds sounded from overhead as chaff mortars flung infrared flares and millions of millimeter-wave reflective dipoles into the air.
But the jaws were closing, east and west. Clamping down on the ships like a snacker on sweet morsels. On nuts, destined for crunching.
“We don’t have enough to take down both strikes,” Simko grated. “I’ve got three units in mission kill status already. Even if we can stop our own nukes, we need air support. We need more defensive weapons. Shit. Shit! They’re going to decimate us.”
Dan balanced the helmet in his lap. Pondering.
Then a choking noise, a harsh rapid panting, snapped his head around.
A rictus contorted Simko’s face, which had gone purple. He clutched at his left arm, then his chest. Dan stared, then grabbed his hand. Their eyes met. “Admiral—you okay?”
“Chest…” Simko blinked rapidly, panted four rasping, laborious breaths. “Crap,” he whispered. “Not again. Feels like my fucking…”
His eyes rolled upward, and he sagged back in the command chair.
“Holy crap,” the staff TAO gulped.
“Corpsman—get a corpsman up here,” Dan ordered. “ASAP. Right now.”
The TAO hit a lever. “Corpsman to CIC, on the double,” boomed out over the 1MC.
Dan stared for one more second at the motionless form slumped beside him. He was still breathing, but barely. He didn’t want to accept that Simko wasn’t going to open his eyes again. That he wasn’t going to resume command.
> Then Peralta’s CO was bending over the admiral. “What happened?”
“He’s out of action. Looks like a heart attack.”
Their gazes crossed, and the CO’s dropped. “Where’s his number two?”
“His deputy’s on the bridge,” the TAO said.
Dan glanced back at the vertical displays. They flickered again, then steadied.
“Get the word to Higher,” he told the CO, who looked startled, but nodded. He spoke rapidly to the TAO, who relayed the news. But Higher was a hundred miles astern.
Dan typed rapidly, addressing the group’s air coordinator. The only thing he could think of to do. But if that action was to succeed, it couldn’t wait for the admiral’s chief of staff to get to CIC, get read in to, and be convinced to give the order.
He’d just have to give the command himself, and own up after the fact.
If they survived.
Seconds later, someone touched his arm. “Helmet’s back up, sir,” a female petty officer said.
When he lowered it over his head again, a blue haze fogged the northern horizon. “Come on,” he muttered. “Come on.”
The inverted carets of friendly air marched forward. But they weren’t fighters. They were Gremlins, plus the UAVs the ships had launched earlier. Scores of the autonomous vehicles, called back from their orbits over the coastal bases. Angling seaward again, but not back to their mother-ship C-130s, or to the strike force, for recovery on their flight decks.
He’d ordered the UAVs, guided by their own synthetic intelligences, to head between the oncoming missiles and the Allied strike force.
Directed, now, to take out the attacking weapons. By any means, including their own destruction.
He turned his head to the right and toggled to the goggle cameras. Two corpsmen were hauling Simko out of his chair, laying him out on a litter. Fitting an oxygen mask. Administering an injection. The chief of staff was hovering, apparently more wrapped up in the admiral’s condition than in the tactical emergency. The helmet display, the large screens, the radar pictures, blanked, regenerated, blanked as they crashed again. In the brief intervals they steadied, Dan noted more and more strike group units fading to black. Sweat prickled his forehead. Chatter resounded in the darkened space as human voices, nearly silent until now, shifted to voice circuits to pass targeting commands.
“Leaker. Leaker. Bearing two-seven-two.”
“Engage with five-inch, Sea Whiz, Bushmaster.”
“I say again, all topside personnel, take cover within the skin of the ship. Launch warning bell forward and aft.”
“Activate CID. Activate decoys.”
A flash of imagery from a flight deck camera showed self-defense drones leaping skyward from popped-open casings lining the helicopter nets. The bass BRRR of the Phalanxes filtered through the superstructure, with heavier jolts as the five-inch/62 and 25 mm Bushmasters opened fire.
The cameras cut in and out, a bewildering montage of strobe-rapid flashes on a dark horizon. The black dots of incoming weapons. A glimpse of surging flank-speed wake lit white-orange by gunflashes. A crazily canted quadcopter as it sped to intercept something beyond the camera’s view. The combat system regenerated, then crashed again, jittering and blanking in tenths of a second. The ship’s brain lightninged with epileptoid flashes as internal code clashed with the malignant interloper. The computer status display over the LSDs flickered madly, green-orange-red-green again, then back to red.
The chief of staff loomed over him, fists clenched, shouting, “You had no right. You had no right!”
Gripping the edge of the table, fingers tensed within the thick gauntlets, hunched and sweating under the heavy cowl and gloves and flak jacket, Dan Lenson ignored him. Squinting into the flicker, he waited for fate to decide the battle.
15
The Western Pacific
THE marines waited bowed under their loads, stacked in the slanted passageway. The night illuminations glowed like radioactive rubies. Engines bellowed down the ramp from the flight deck, funneled by slanted steel until their reverberation obliterated thought.
Hector Ramos pressed the switch on his intrasquad radio with his tongue. “Take a knee,” he told his people.
Second Battalion, Third Marines, the same unit he’d landed on Itbayat with. But the only ones left from those days were a couple of lifers in the head shed.
And of course Hector. He walked the squad, looking into each man’s or woman’s face. Then went back to the head of the line and took a knee, fingering, in a pocket, the rosary Mirielle had once given him.
He hadn’t lasted at Pendleton. The second time he’d slapped a recruit after coming back from leave, they’d shipped him back to his battalion. Not putting it in his record, since he wore the Heart and the Pacific Ribbon, but the Top had said he wasn’t cut out to be an instructor. The good thing was, he’d gotten to go through predeployment with the platoon.
Now he was a squad leader, and for this operation, a heliteam leader as well. Tactical dispositions had been reorganized. New equipment and weapons had come through. A Marine rifle squad still had eighteen men and women, organized into three fire teams of six, and each team was still led by a corporal or lance corporal. But the teams were built around an M240B now instead of a light machine gun, increasing both firepower and basic load. All their weapons had suppressors. Their comms and logistics were secure against intrusion. Their jelly armor was tougher and lighter than steel. Their new goggles incorporated both night vision and BattleGlass data, and opaqued instantly when brushed by a laser. Their helmets protected them from explosive shock as well as projectile impact.
The platoon also had new members. The Chads were lined up on the other side of the ramp. These were different from the ones he’d trained with at Pendleton. The smaller-headed, thick-bodied C models stood motionless, shifting their “feet” only a bit as the ship rolled, multilensed oculars glinting in the red light.
Hector wondered why they always stood together. Wouldn’t it make more sense to stand with the rest of the team? But whenever there were two or more, they clustered. Not under fire—they spaced out to combat distance then, like the human troops—but they seemed to prefer one another’s company to that of flesh and blood.
Lieutenant Ffoulk jogged up the ramp as if surfacing through a deep crimson sea. Staff Sergeant Clay strode behind her. Ffoulk, radio call “Rampart,” was short and African-American. Clay was white and six five. They stopped to talk to Glasscock, in Third Squad, then moved up to Hector. “Just so you’re clear,” the platoon commander shouted over the engines, her voice slightly too high. Hector glanced past her to Clay. “The platoon will land as second wave. Assault, seize, and defend the LZ. Link up to left and right, then push toward the terminal. That’s your first objective. Try to limit damage in the terminal, especially to antennas and control equipment. Clay here will set up a CP, direct the tactical interaction between your squads, and coordinate with the other platoons. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Yeah, we pretty much got all that, ma’am,” Hector told her. “Just like we drilled at Pohakuloa.” He wondered if he should add And don’t feel like you got to be a hero, ’cause I sure don’t, but finally didn’t.
“All right then.” Ffoulk patted Hector’s arm, punched his gut through the jelly armor, and marched on up the ramp.
Clay hung back. “Just keep talkin’ to me,” he asided, flicking Hector’s mike so it popped in his ears. “Long as we got comms, rounds, and water, all gonna be okay. We been here before, Ramos. Claro?”
“Yeah, I got it.” Hector looked after the officer. “Just don’t let Lieutenant Fuck ffoulk us.”
“Ha. I won’t.” Clay squinted the nearest troop up and down. He about-faced and stared at the Chads. Then wheeled again and hiked away, marching up the ramp after the lieutenant.
The illumination deepened to violet and began pulsing. Hector waited until the platoon ahead cleared, then extended an arm aft and swung it forward, palm down.
The marines struggled to their feet and followed him.
Up, up, into the open night. A dark wind staggered them as they labored forward under assault packs, weapons and ammo, chow and water. The night flickered with invisible light, bellowing with the heavy SHUMP SHUMP SHUMP of huge rotors powering around. Navy flight deck crew in colored vests pointed light wands, shepherding them to the pickup point and warning them to stand clear of turbine danger areas.
Hector slapped the manifest into the loading assistant’s palm, gripping it tight against the propwash, then pivoted to face the rear ramp of the MV-22. He bent to each man or woman as he or she boarded, rifle in hand, reminding each, “Strap in and signal when ready.” The Chads came next, after the marines, but he didn’t say anything to them.
When he had everyone accounted for, he gave the assistant the windup signal, and boarded.
* * *
THE sickeningly fast vertical takeoff squeezed his skull down into his shoulders. Vertigo reeled the narrow night-filled tube around him. The marines were lap-belted into fold-down canvas seats facing one another. The Chads sat on the deck, spaced out fore and aft. They’d bunched together during the rehearsal and nearly crashed the aircraft, making it tail-heavy. The interior bulkheads and overhead were lined with pipes and cables laced tight with white zip ties. Except for the bulkhead behind the pilots, which was one big switch panel, like the light console for a rock concert. Oxygen bottles and fire extinguishers vibrated above the seats. The whole fuselage shook. Everything rattled, boomed, or whined. No windows, but even after the rear ramp came up the back was still open. Though all there was to see was darkness.
Hector didn’t want to look out anyway. He hunched, rifle clamped between his knees, trying to forget the last time he’d done this. In an amtrac, with his battle buddy Troy Whipkey, just before they’d been hit and most of the troops in the ’track had been killed.
This time it was the big one. The big island. Taking on the People’s Liberation Army itself.
Taiwan.
A heavy impact from beneath the fuselage quivered the seats. But the crew chief, back by the ramp, didn’t react. Hector couldn’t see his face for the goggles and helmet, but apparently the bump and noise were normal. He hoped.