by F X Holden
The ghost signal, the one with the icon that said it was coming from an armored personnel carrier, that one had just popped up on the screen again, and it was showing inside the 5km ring now! He tapped the screen, in the way of all the non-digitally inclined through the ages, and as he did so, the icon disappeared. He was still seeing the portable handset taken by the troops, but the APC radio had winked out.
Maybe he’d read it wrong. There was that wrecked APC down by the town hall. That must be the one transmitting, not one of the ones out by the airstrip. The screen he was looking at only showed range, not direction, so he must have been mistaken thinking it was coming from way out at the airstrip.
It was right down the street!
He stood up, ground out his cigarette, finished the cold coffee in the bottom of his cup and pulled his thick padded jacket on. It was still about 12 degrees outside, but the wind out there could freeze a man’s tits off. He picked up a 39mm AS VAL rifle, stumped down the corridor and looked in on the wounded. There were seven of them lying on makeshift beds laid across desks. One had an IV drip in his arm that Zubkhov had to change every day. Two of them had abdominal wounds that couldn’t be treated, so they couldn’t be moved. One of them had a fever. They weren’t expected to make it, so all he could do was make them comfortable. In reality, the ones with abdominal wounds were already dead, but luckily none of them were fully conscious; they were on big doses of intravenous painkillers. There were several with leg wounds, including one soldier who’d lost his entire lower left leg. They were doped up on painkillers and antibiotics, sleeping or reading. One gave a small wave to Zubkhov and indicated with a sign that he wanted a smoke, so that he didn’t wake the others. Zubkhov nodded back to him to show he had seen him. Sitting in the corner, mumbling to himself, was Captain Demchenko. He was loaded up with antibiotics too, and Zubkhov had expected him to contract some sort of encephalitis in his brain and clock out sooner or later, which if you asked Zubkhov, would have been a mercy. But the red-hot metal splinter that had sliced through his head had apparently been surgically sterile. The guy didn’t even have a temperature and he looked perfectly normal, for a man who had just had accidental brain surgery that is.
It was only thirty minutes since he’d asked the civilians if anyone needed a toilet break, and an hour until he was supposed to go around and check on them, and hand out some rations for lunch.
But during his first morning of playing combined nurse and prison camp guard, Private Zubkhov had decided. Screw being left behind to play nurse and prison camp guard. Screw the 14th Spetsnaz Squadron. He’d been near-drowned in interrogation simulations, beaten on the soles of his feet with an ice hockey stick for coming last on a cross-country march and had to take a solid shotgun slug in his protective vest just to get through basic training. Hell, he’d survived a US cruise missile landing less than a block away from him, without even a scratch.
He was technically a free man. So, he was going to find that damn radio, call his buddy the fisherman in Anadyr, and get off this shitpile.
A high-value unit like a supercarrier is very well protected indeed. Two hundred miles out from it, covering all quarters, are the ‘picket’ ships, combat air patrol aircraft and airborne early warning drones. Inside that is the outer screen of ships anywhere from 10 to 20 miles from the carrier, positioned to provide anti-missile and anti-air defense. The ships making up the outer screen for the Enterprise were primarily there for anti-submarine defense - ‘delousing’ as it was called - and maintained a constantly patrolling swarm of drones around the formation using thermal imaging and towed sonar, looking and listening for any sign of a subsea intruder.
And inside that, the inner screen. This was the dedicated anti-air warfare screen. For the Enterprise, nothing but the latest HELLADS armed anti-air frigates, supplemented with more conventionally armed anti-air missile destroyers fitted with close-in ballistic defenses. The entire group was tactically data linked; if one of the pickets detected an inbound missile it was engaged if possible, and simultaneously handed off to the outer screen and inner screen to engage if needed. With a hypersonic missile able to get from detection range outside the pickets to its carrier target in less than two minutes, it was unlikely the pickets would be able to successfully engage, but at quantum computing speeds, the inner screen would theoretically have ample time to lock a target and bring it down. Even a target moving at 5,000 miles an hour.
That was the theory.
Russia was well versed in the theory, and in the practice. It had led the race to develop hypersonic missiles and aircraft for decades, and was also aware of the counter-measures developed against them. It had had many years in which to wargame a hypersonic missile attack on a carrier strike group, and had done so in secret using dummy missiles sent against its own (and only remaining) carrier, the TAVKR Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Kuznetsov. These exercises had revealed that penetrating the multilayered defenses of a carrier task force even using multiple sub launched hypersonic missiles fired from inside the picket screen, had a less than 50% likelihood of success against HELLADS armed carrier defenses.
Attacking a US supercarrier was also an unambiguous declaration of full-scale war. Which is why Russia’s chosen strategy for taking the USS Enterprise out of the Battle for Bering Strait was … a rowing machine.
Of course, Aviation Electronics Technician E-3 Thomas Greyson was, as far as he was concerned, just applying an operating system update to the exercise machines on one of the hangar decks. It was probably the most exciting thing he’d been given to do that day, not because it was technically challenging, but because it involved real risk of bodily harm from the fitness fanatics he had to kick off the equipment so that he could patch and reboot it. Like everything else on the Enterprise, even the fitness equipment was networked. A seaman scanned in their ID, did their workout, and the results were uploaded to a server, then to the cloud, so that they could set goals and track their progress. Some of them were on compulsory scheduled workouts due to weight issues, and the data was used to assess their fitness for service. So yeah, he got a lot of grief when the machines had to be shut down, but life sucks, as he told the grumblers.
The order for the patch had come through a day out of San Diego and landed in his inbox looking like every other routine piece of shit job he had to handle. They were sailing into a war zone, and he was patching the OS on fitness equipment. No irony in that, at all. He pulled the patch down from the attached link, validated it, then called up the interface for the equipment in question, and applied the patch. The reboot had to be done manually, pulling the power and restarting the machines one by one, which meant him trekking all over the damn ship, from deck to deck. By the time he rebooted the last machine at about 1500 Pacific West Coast time, he was the one ready to hit someone.
But he got it done. And tomorrow was sure to be another fun-filled day.
The Russian virus was elegant but complex and it had never been used before. It had been created specifically to attack the USS Enterprise. Once it had gained access to the Enterprise’s local network via the exercise machines on multiple decks across the ship, it copied itself to every available server and networked device, and then went to work. Perhaps not surprisingly, Seaman Greyson was one of the first to notice something was wrong. Back at his station, he turned on his tablet and went to enter the day’s activity in his duty log, only to find he couldn’t connect to the ship’s wireless network. It was there, his tablet just couldn’t log into it. Piece of shit tablet. He grabbed another one, entered his ID and tried to log on with that. No deal. He went over to a stationary computer and was about to try and turn that on when the general quarters alarm began to sound and total chaos broke out!
Grayson was already at his ‘combat station’ and didn’t need to go anywhere, but throughout the ship he heard people yelling, feet running, compartment doors being slammed and locked tight. He waited for an announcement - was it a drill, or ‘vampires’ – enemy missiles - inbo
und?! There had been a lot of talk that they might even see action on the way up to the Arctic if Russia had parked an attack sub on the seafloor ahead of them. But there was no announcement, nothing at all but the blare of the alarm. And that was almost worse than the fear that there were missiles on their way.
The first thing the virus did was take down the ship’s internal communication links. Within minutes, nothing on the ship could talk to anything else, whether it was Grayson’s rowing machine, or the primary flight control center, the bridge, combat direction center or the carrier intel center, the only way anyone or anything could communicate was suddenly, and critically, by yelling. Which there was a lot of. The next thing it did was cut the carrier’s links to the outside world: shortwave, longwave, digital radio, radar, satellite up and downlinks, they all went black. In minutes the most sophisticated ship in the navy had been reduced to the status of a steam driven world war 2 vessel, with its only communication options the infallible battery-backed Aldis lamps, flags and Morse code.
And just like a ‘fly by wire’ aircraft, the Enterprise was ‘steer by wire’; its two 700 megawatt Bechtel A1B reactors drove four shafts which took their orders from the bridge computers, just as the rudders did.
So the only communication channel on the ship that the virus left open was the link from the bridge to the steering and propulsion system. And the last thing it did before locking those down was to push the Enterprise’s speed up to 35 knots and order full right rudder.
Seaman Grayson didn’t have to worry for very long why there were no announcements. As the USS Enterprise slowly but horrifically accelerated into a wide skidding turn, it began to lean over 20 degrees and the contents of a high filing cabinet that Grayson had been using emptied themselves onto his back, knocking his head forward into his desk and taking all his worries away.
If he’d still been conscious, he would have heard the sound of metal tearing and worse, the sound no seaman or officer on an aircraft carrier wants to hear; the sound of inadequately secured aircraft sliding across hangar decks to smash into each other.
Followed by the smell no seaman anywhere, on any vessel, ever wants to smell.
Smoke!
Bunny O’Hare was smoking, but only in the metaphorical sense. She’d gone from fuming, when Rodriguez had told her she’d be left behind in an explosives-filled cave to fly out their complement of drones, to incendiary as she watched the navy launches shuttle her fellow cave dwellers out to their waiting submarine. But now … now she was smoking.
As in, smoking hot. As in the most smoking hot drone aviator in the whole damn US Navy because over the last two days she and Rodriguez had just set a personal best, single-handedly flying 15 Fantoms out the chute over a 30 hour period without one hitch. Of course, if they’d had Rodriguez’s full launch team working they could have got a hex of drones out the chute within 35 minutes but it was just her and the Lieutenant Commander doing all the heavy lifting.
They’d worked out that Bunny wasn’t needed in the trailer between launches. Once she had a Fantom airborne and set its course for Elmendorf-Richardson or Eielson, she was basically a free agent because it was flying itself on full auto until it entered air traffic control range where the Air Force controllers at the other end took over to make sure it got down safely without bumping into anything.
So once her Fantom was out the chute and on its way, she went down to the flight deck and helped Rodriguez bully the empty cartridge off the Cat and into the reloader, then dropped the next cartridge and drone onto the Cat, locked and loaded it, and helped with the pre-flight check. She learned it wasn’t as hands-off as Rodriguez had made it out to be. The damn things didn’t always come out of the cartridges clean, they tended to stick and sometimes the only solution was a good old-fashioned kick in the ass with the heel of a boot to shake them loose. The launch bars and locks on the Cat that secured the airframe to the catapult shuttle, the carriage between the two catapult beams that flung the aircraft forward, were damn fussy and even when you were sure you had a good lock, they refused to give you a green light, and you had to reseat the damn thing. Finally, every drone was loaded inside its cartridge with wings folded, and an external hydraulic pressure system had to be connected to unfold and lock the wings in place. Only then, could the pre-flight physical and digital inspection be carried out.
The launch schedule wasn’t exactly regular either. Unless they wanted to blow their cover completely, they could only launch when NORAD was showing cloud or mist cloaking Little Diomede and no nosy Russian aircraft overhead. Luckily most of the Russian air activity was centered further south.
With 12 hours on and six off, at the end of their second 12-hour shift, Rodriguez had lost track of whether it was night or day. Her watch was telling her it was 1430 in the afternoon, but her body was ready for food and bed. They could afford to take it a little easier now. With 15 kites away, they only had eight remaining Fantoms to get home. Their lift out of here was the same sub that had ferried the walking and the walking wounded out of here two days ago, and it would be back six days from now to pick them up. Rodriguez wanted to get the job done, but they didn’t have to kill themselves doing it. They could fall back to their planned six launches per day, take two days to launch the rest and spend the last four days making sure there was no accessible data left on any of the local systems and the demolition charges were set to blow.
Rodriguez slumped down at a makeshift mess table in one of the empty hangars, where Bunny was flicking through a digital girlie magazine on a tablet. She smiled, “Sorry to interrupt.”
“Just checking out the competition ma’am,” Bunny said. “They got nothin' on us.”
“Speak for yourself O’Hare,” Rodriguez said. “I’ve got bow legs and a big ass and everything topside is heading south.”
“With respect, I’m calling bullshit on that ma’am. Anyway, these girls, it’s all silicon and implants – me and you are the real deal.” Bunny ran her hand over the fuzz on her head. “I am a bit jealous of their flowing locks though.” She turned her head like she was looking for something. “You think anyone left their hair dye behind in this joint? I’m thinking of dying my stubble black.”
Rodriguez lowered her head onto one arm and looked up at her, “You seriously have the energy to worry about what your hair looks like?”
“We’ve finally got the place to ourselves, no damn men spraying their testosterone everywhere? Hell yeah. I’m thinking a hot bath, paint my fingernails and toenails black and die my hair to match. Might even do the next shift naked, just because I can. What do you say ma’am? You in?”
Rodriguez laughed at the image that popped into her head; a huge, exhausted laugh.
Devlin got back to her apartment in Spaso House, threw her keys on a table near the door, dumped her bag, kicked off her shoes and poured a cold glass of white wine from her refrigerator.
She had unanswered messages and texts to deal with, the US west coast was just waking up with worried business people and congress members wanting to talk with her, and in her bag was a pile of code-word paper ten inches thick that people wanted her to read by morning. She turned off her phone.
Five minutes, just five minutes. She would have a glass of wine, and then get back to it. She sat on her sofa, and turned on the TV news.
She saw the tickertape across the bottom of the news anchors’ desks first; ‘FLASH update…’ and expected it to be about Alaska. It wasn’t. She watched with horror as she read the text rolling across her screen. “Syrian troops enter Lebanon. Government ministers arrested. Hezbollah seize power. Israeli armed forces placed on high alert.”
It was a strategy as old as time. Use your alliances to occupy your enemy with a crisis on two fronts. No ally could demand US support in a crisis like Israel, and providing military support to Israel would mean committing, or at least reserving, significant assets that could otherwise be brought into play against Russia. So creating an existential threat to Israel through Syrian
intervention in Lebanon was a masterstroke. It divided focus in Washington, in the Pentagon, in the armed forces, intelligence and security services and in the State Department.
It told her with certainty this intervention in the Bering Strait had not just arisen out of the sinking of a single autonomous freighter. The speed with which Finland jumped into bed with Russia on the Barents Europe Arctic Council and their probable involvement in the sinking already told her that. But mobilizing an ally, even a vassal state like Syria, to effectively invade a neighboring country and depose its government, on your timetable, not theirs … that took long-term planning, and significant negotiation, pressure, compromise. Syria would have seen an opportunity while the US was distracted by events off Alaska, but it must have been offered something big, and it wouldn’t surprise Devlin if they saw Iran weighing in soon too. With Saudi Arabia and the Emirates weakened by the collapse of oil prices, with Turkey licking its wounds after a bruising border war, suddenly the whole power balance in the Middle East was at risk.
She stood, and found herself in front of her hall mirror, just staring at herself. She was going to break. In two, right down the middle. She felt like she was standing outside herself, watching someone in crisis. She wanted to help, but there was nothing she could do. The woman in front of her was drowning but there was no life preserver to throw, no ladder to help her up. She imagined the water closing over her head, and disappearing without a ripple.