by J. F. Holmes
Chapter 96
“That’s the last of them, Sir, that we’ve been able to locate.” The lieutenant commander stood nervously, clipboard in her hand.
“Gimme a damned count, and hurry up!” barked Larken, and she dropped the clipboard, flustered.
“Uh, Admiral, Sir, we have three hundred and twelve trained personnel, plus two hundred volunteers,” she said, a quiver in her voice.
“THREE HUNDRED AND TWELVE!” he exploded. “THERE WERE OVER FIVE THOUSAND ASSIGNED TO THIS PROJECT!”
To her credit, the admin officer tried to stand her ground and explain how badly the Invy had mauled the ranks of active duty and veterans, singling them out for execution.
“I don’t give a goddamn what your excuses are, Ensign! You get me a thousand more people by tomorrow, and you’ll get your rank back! Civilians, whatever, as long as they can pull on a rope! NOW MOVE!” he yelled.
Behind him, Cryer grinned, and then even wider when the admiral muttered under his breath, “Never should have let women on combat ships. Ruined the Navy.”
“Don’t let any of the girls on my team hear you say that, Admiral!” laughed Cryer. Next to him, Machinists Mate Sally Holdridge smiled also, and shifted her SCAR to a more comfortable position.
“Totally agree with you, Admiral, the boobs do get in the way sometimes,” she said.
Larken laughed in his hoarse, old man’s laugh and said, “If I was thirty years younger, I wouldn’t mind them getting in MY way!”
“If I were fifty years older, you could step on them,” she shot back.
He reached up and pinched her cheek and said, “I like you, missy, I really do. Now go do something useful. Make me a sandwich.”
“Right away, Sir!” she said, but she made no move, just continued to look past him, scanning her sector, even inside the base.
“SZIMANSKI! GET YOUR ASS UP HERE!” he shouted into a Motorola.
“I’m busy. You come down here,” came back after a moment, made scratchy by the fact that the museum technician was deep in the guts of the New Jersey supervising the start of the reactor.
“Get your ass up to the main hatch or I’ll have the Brute Squad throw you overboard!” growled the admiral in the radio. Larken slowly made his way down the steps to the docks, walked across the gangway, across the deck of the Wisconsin, saluted Captain Johnson as the CO directed restoration of the commo array, then crossed over to the New Jersey. A dirty, grimy face appeared at a hatch and climbed out onto the deck.
“Been a while, Admiral,” said Szimanski, extending a greasy hand. The admiral shook it and asked for a SITREP.
“Well, this is the last of them,” he said, and even as he said it, they felt the hum of power through their feet.
“That’s what I’m talking about! Good job. What about the rest of the systems?”
“Drives are working; commo will be online in about an hour. We’re short on personnel, and weapons are offline. That’ll take another half a day unless we can get more trained people. Just don’t have enough manpower.”
“We sail in two hours. Weapons will have to be worked on in transit. We have to blow the shit out of that liberal cesspit San Francisco. Hopefully some of those damn hippies are still there!” he said with glee, rubbing his hands together.
Chief Cryer, laughing, said, “Most of them are dead, Admiral. Those that aren’t are collaborators.”
“Hey, nothing wrong with hugging a tree!” exclaimed Holdridge. “And if the Invy hadn’t come, we’d have taken the next election.” Cryer shot an insult at her, and the admiral let them drift into the background, sensing that it was an old argument between friends.
He smelled the salt air as it filled the cavern and looked down at the teak planks on the deck, a hundred years old and glistening under the drying salt water. Would the armor underneath survive plasma rounds from an Invy fighter? He remembered that a heavy North Korean shell had scored a hit on the Missouri back in ’52, and she’d shrugged it off. We’ll see, won’t we? he thought.
A woman approached him, wearing an old pair of blue coveralls from the US Navy. She was young, younger than anyone could be who’d served before the Invasion, but Larken didn’t hold that against her. Any volunteer was a good volunteer, and the admiral had always talked to his sailors like people. Much of his grumpiness toward females was an act.
She walked up with a smile on her pretty face, got within a few feet, and raised her right hand in salute. Larken reflexively started to return it, when Boomer growled and jumped at her leg, biting down hard. She screamed in pain, and her left hand came out of her pocket, a small plasma pistol discharging into the dog. Boomer only bit down harder in his death throes, making the woman scream.
“DOWN!” shouted Holdridge, and Larken reflexively tried to drop, his aged knees betraying him. A second shot from the pistol went past his head, just as two rifles opened up on either side of him. The woman in front of them, gun still raised, was hurled backward as a dozen rounds tore into her. Cryer ran past the admiral as Holdridge stepped in front of him and kicked the Invy weapon across the deck, then fired two rounds into the woman’s head as she rolled on the deck, gut shot.
Holdridge, seeing the threat neutralized, started running her hands across the admiral’s body, looking for a wound. “Keep doing that, honey, and you’re going to have to marry me!” he gasped.
“WE’RE GOOD!” she called, helping him to his feet.
Cryer came back after searching the corpse, and waved the all clear to the half dozen operators who had seemed to materialize from nowhere. Their chameleon suits had hidden them well in the gloom of the cavern, but somehow the collaborator had gotten close enough. Fooled by a pretty young face, and complacency inside the base.
The master Chief said, “Admiral, I’m sorry, but by dragging all these people in, unchecked after a decade, we can’t keep you safe down here. A lot of these younger people have swallowed the Invy environmental bullshit, and are taking it on themselves to fight us. We just got lucky, that could have been you instead of the dog.”
The old man looked down at the corpse of the dog who had saved his life, and cursed softly under his breath. Then he turned to Cryer and said, “Shit happens, son. I have work to do, and I’m not going to run. Not now, not ever. You just do your job, and I’ll do mine. THROW THIS COLLABORATOR PIECE OF SHIT OVER THE SIDE!” he bellowed at a work crew. Then at Szimanski, “We sail in two hours. Get back to work.”
Cryer just shook his head and continued to try to look everywhere at once. He actually jumped when the admiral yelled, “HEY, YOU!” He turned to see the old man pointing at a teenager, a kid about fifteen or so, who was working on the communications array.
Dressed in too-big coveralls, the teen had that post-apocalypse look of someone who had just enough to eat, but not a spoonful more. “Uh, yeah, yes, Sir?” he asked, standing at attention and rendering a not-too-badly-done salute.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Alex, Sir. Alex Blake.” Although he sounded nervous, there was a sense of determination in his voice.
“Where are you from? Local? Got any experience?”
“An Invy town just outside Olympia, Sir. Or it WAS an Invy town, until my dad and his CEF Special Operations team liberated it two nights ago!” There was immense pride in the kid’s voice, and the admiral actually smiled.
“Got any skills, Midshipman Blake?”
Alex swallowed nervously and said, “I’m just a commo tech recruit, Sir! But I can work a radio, my dad taught me all about them. I can’t do anything else.”
“Bullshit!” said the old man. “You’re a midshipman now, on my staff. Report to the bridge of the Missouri, find Chief Petty Officer Rasmussen, and start learning everything there is to know about signals and operating our radios. DISMISSED!” he barked when Alex stood there, mouth open.
Chapter 97
“STAND BY, STAND BY, STAND BY! THIRTY SECONDS!” echoed from loudspeakers all across the cavern two and a half hours late
r. Admiral Larken paced impatiently on the bridge of the Missouri, trying to let his subordinates do their work. Captain Beck studiously ignored him, taking reports from her own people as they readied the transmission to spin up the propeller shafts.
There was no thunderous explosion, no flash of bright light. Instead, the camouflaged entrance, just big enough to pass one of the ships under heavy ballast, merely melted away into a nasty grey foam. The sun, rising in the east, sent a shaft of light through the high opening, first a pinhole, like a laser beam from high up, striking the stern of the Missouri. By chance, it lit the mast that carried the United States flag, hanging limply over the CEF standard, bringing a cheer from the assembled crew on the forefront of the Wisconsin.
“Bunch of patriotic idiots!” growled Larken, watching on one of the bridge holo displays.
Robin Beck snorted as she read engine readouts. She’d met the admiral when she was a cadet at Annapolis, and knew he loved his country as much as anyone. Just to needle him, she said, “I’d kill for a squadron of F-35s and the Enterprise flight deck under my feet.”
“Weak-hulled, over-complicated, useless fat targets!” he groused, then immediately regretted it. Beck had been the Commander, Air Group, on the Ford-class carrier when it went down in the Philippine Sea. The Spratly war had been short but violent, and the Enterprise carrier battlegroup had been ambushed by over a thousand surface-to-surface missiles as she conducted a peacetime patrol.
“We could have made it to port, you know, if that diesel sub hadn’t put three in her side,” said Beck, face clouding over in memory.
“Well, you did good anyway. Three Chinese carriers, four destroyers, and a five-to-one kill ratio in aircraft. Plus, if I remember, you led the airstrike on the naval facilities at Yulin a month later. Payback in full,” he said apologetically.
The former aviator nodded, touched that he knew those small details. “Didn’t know you cared, Admiral.”
“When I picked you for this program, Captain Beck, it was because you had a big set of brass balls. I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re holding in your bra, not a set of giant boobs.”
She laughed and said, “Old age forgives you a lot, Admiral!”
“Bet your ass it does. Now, let’s move! Blake, note the time.” Both had seen that the entrance cover, made of similar stuff as the nano foam which had held the ships in suspension, was rapidly disappearing, and sunlight was flooding the cavern. “Captain Beck, take her out.”
“Aye Aye, Sir. Helmsman, ahead one quarter, and don’t scrape her paint.”
“Ahead one quarter, Ma’am, and don’t scrape the paint,” said the aged Chief boatswain’s mate.
Maneuvering an eight-hundred-and-sixty-foot-long ship, massing more than fifty thousand tons, through a channel with barely twenty feet of clearance on either side, was no mean feat, and the Chief trusted no one else. Normally it would be done with tugs, but bow and stern thrusters would have to do. The massive bronze propellers started hammering at the water, making the Wisconsin’s bow rock, and the Missouri started to slide forward into the waters of the Hood Canal. Just clearing the debris-cluttered shipway, she exited and turned north. Across from her sat the ruins of Kitsap Naval Base, with wrecked and gutted nuclear submarines and surface ships still tied to the piers. Behind her, her sisters exited one by one. At ten-minute intervals, each of the century-old warships slipped their moors and followed her. Last in line, the New Jersey started to make her turn, then slowed to a stop, propellers no longer turning.
One of the watch standers on the bridge brought it to the admiral’s attention as he stared at the wreckage of Kitsap, indicating a wide-screen TV that showed the ships to the rear. Larken, despite his age, was no stranger to technology, and he quickly brought up the New Jersey’s system status on his command screen.
“Jesus!” he swore, and grabbed the handmic on the lower power FM radio. “Bill,” he called to the other ship’s captain, “shut down the reactor and let her go! Get your people off, they’re more valuable to us than the ship is!”
Captain Beck brought up the Jersey’s vitals on her own screen and cursed herself. The reactor’s magnetic containment field, the only thing that constrained the antimatter reaction, was fluctuating wildly. She slapped down on her own console, immediately ordering emergency power, and the Missouri started to surge forward in the water.
“I can save her, Admiral, we had some eco freak fucking with the reactor! Chief Szimanski’s down in the engine room trying to reroute auxiliary power to the magnetic containmen—” and his words were cut short by a flash that blanked out their screens.
The equivalent of a small nuclear weapon erupted deep within the hull of the ship, breaking it in two and shoving the forward end out into the canal, which was in reality a wide, deep fjord. The stern pretty much disappeared in the flash. One of the propellers, still attached to a shaft, was briefly seen rocketing back into the hidden anchorage by those on deck of the other ships. The shock of the explosion caught the Iowa, half a mile away, side on, and she started to roll, her starboard side dipping deep into the water. Her captain immediately ordered rudder full to right and kicked the engines into high gear, attempting to counter the roll. Her red-painted hull showed above the waterline, and she almost made it. The wave created by the explosion hit her just as she recovered, crashing into the already-stressed stern. Both rudders jammed to the right, and the Iowa continued her turn, bow cutting its way through the wreck of a Trident submarine, then into the pier, crumpling both the pier and the forward hull of the battleship. She ground to a halt and tilted slowly to one side, settling in the shallow bay waters.
The admiral didn’t wait until the Iowa’s commander called him with a damage report, immediately ordering boats and their two Osprey from the Missouri and Wisconsin to start ferrying personnel. She was obviously a complete loss, short of a major shipyard and a couple years’ worth of work. Captain Killian left last, taking the American flag down, hurriedly folding it, and with her XO, stepping onto the last Osprey flight back to the Missouri.
The search for survivors from the New Jersey turned up nothing, and it wasn’t until nightfall that the dazed crew of the Iowa was split between her sisters. Larken stood on the deck welcoming each sailor until he was weak with exhaustion. When the last one was aboard, he sat down by the rail, looking at the wreck of the Iowa, and automatically checking how the Wisconsin rode in the water at anchor.
“That’s a hell of a way to go,” he said to no one in particular.
“I dunno, Admiral. It was quick, and I doubt anyone on the ship even knew what hit them,” said the SEAL standing beside him. This one wasn’t one he knew, since Cryer and Holdridge were off duty.
“I meant without even a chance to get into the fight. I’m pretty sure I’m going to die in battle, in the best tradition of the Navy, but I’ll be damned if I go before I get a crack at those bastards.”
“I know what you mean, Sir. Ain’t nothing better than putting one of the Dragons in my scope and feeling the recoil.” His teeth showed white against his dark skin in the twilight as he smiled at a memory.
“Only Dragons?” asked Larken.
“Yeah, well, I got a lot of respect for the doggies, you know? The Wolverines? Good troops, and I figure they’re just grunts like the rest of us. Like the Taliban. I ain’t gotta like what they stand for, but sure as shit, I respect them.”
“Yes, it does no good to underestimate the enemy. I wonder what we’re missing?” he answered, half to himself.
“That’s your job, Sir,” said the enlisted man. “We’re just here to be the ammo you expend in the fight. Though I’d rather not be expended, if you catch my drift.”
Chapter 98
Master Chief William Szimanski didn’t know his brother was dead. Ryan had been the leader of Irregular Scout Team Five, the ‘Warthogs’, but as Red Dawn approached, he had handed control of the team over to his brother, promising to rejoin him after his work on the ships. If Bill had know
n he was dead, well, they were all living on borrowed time anyway, and dying on his beloved battleships wouldn’t be too bad.
Right now what occupied his attention was the fog that covered all but the tallest ruined buildings in San Francisco and buried the deck of the Golden Gate bridge. Perched high atop the northern bridge support, he could hear the turbo fans of Invy tanks and APCs passing beneath him and his partner. Worse yet, his com laser, pegged to a microwave tower in Oakland, couldn’t reach through the intervening mist. Just because they’d achieved tactical high ground didn’t mean they could just broadcast in the clear. Using a radio would get an instant heavy plasma bolt from the fortress city just across the narrow straight.
“Bri, is your harness connected?” His partner sat ten feet from him, but there was no need to whisper. Being almost six hundred feet above wailing turbines, they could have shouted.
“If you ask me again, I’m going to jump off as your answer.” Bri McKnight would, too. Fear was there, of course, but anger drove her to put aside every risk in her pursuit of the Invy. It actually made her too reckless at times.
“No, that’s OK. Just frustrated. It’s been more than twenty-four hours since they should have started the attack. The Marines have got to be getting antsy.”
“Screw them, hurry up and wait is in their contract.” She casually dropped her pants and leaned out over the edge, peeing into the fog. “Sometimes I really do wish I was a man.”
Looking away to give her some privacy, Szimanski commented, “Every hour they wait is another hour their risk of discovery grows. The bad guys do run patrols across the Bay Bridge, you know.”
“They’ve waited eleven years, they can wait a few days. Stupid jarheads.” Then she looked up, away to the west, where a breeze had started to blow, pushing the fog inland. First to appear was the edge of the horizon, where the sea met the sky. They waited impatiently for the mist to roll back and reveal the city below them.
It took almost an hour for the ruined skyscrapers and the Invy base built on the Presidio to be revealed. The sun dropped into the ocean, and darkness crept in from the east. As Szimanski stared through binoculars, studying the fortifications, he idly said, “Why the hell they have base here, I don’t know. But if we take it, the whole West Coast is free. This is the lynchpin of their operations out here.”