“We've got people working on it, but everything's been satellites or drones for fifteen years now, so it's pretty makeshift. Then there's the GPS problem. More than two-thirds of our payloads are GPS-guided, and until the GPS system's working again most of ’em won't function at all. Fortunately we've got plenty of Paveways and Mavericks, and we're reworking everything for the next couple of days to use those instead.”
“Good.” It wasn't, not really; the laser-guided Paveway bombs and the optically guided Maverick missiles weren't anything like as accurate as the GPS-guided munitions, and orders from Washington insisted on as close to zero collateral damage as possible. Worse, without satellite intelligence to let them know what had and hadn't been hit, the airstrikes were flying blind. Still, Seversky told himself, you do what you can. “The embassy's got a secure line to DC, and I've got a report and a request for new orders on its way. Once they get the satellite thing sorted out we can—”
A knock sounded on the door. Before Seversky could respond, a lieutenant from communications came in.
“Damn it,” Seversky barked, “I ordered—” Then he saw the look on the man's face. “What is it?”
“Sir, the fleet's been hit by cruise missiles,” said the lieutenant. He was holding out a sheet of paper. “Hit bad.”
Seversky took the paper and answered the lieutenant's salute with a nod, but his mind was reeling, as though it couldn't accept that the words he'd heard could mean what they too obviously meant. He blinked, tried to focus on the paper. Black on white, more words spelled out the same unthinkable news. After a moment, he handed the thing to Mahoney, heard the man draw in a sharp breath, whisper an expletive.
“Well,” said Seversky. He glanced at Mahoney, turned to the lieutenant. “Let me know the moment Mombasa gets any more news. I'll be in the operations room.”
23 July 2029: The White House, Washington DC
The news reached the White House situation room minutes after it got to Seversky. Weed stared at the dispatch for a long cold moment, then handed it to Stedman without saying a word. As it went around from one member of the National Security Council to another, he could hear the sudden gasps and hissing breaths, the whispered profanities and Gurney's loud and characteristic “Fuck!” as the implications sank in.
“Okay,” he said finally. “We're going to have to regroup. Waite?”
“Sir.” Admiral Roland Waite was chairman of the Joint Chiefs; he looked as though someone had just punched him in the gut. After a moment Weed remembered that Waite had been a Navy fighter pilot, and then a carrier commander, before he'd been assigned to a desk at the Pentagon.
“Where are the other carriers?”
“The Kennedy's in the eastern Pacific en route to Okinawa, sir. The others are stateside.”
“Make damn good and sure they stay out of harm's way until we know what happened and can do something about it.”
“Of course, sir.”
“As for the rest—” He drew in a breath. “I don't want a word of this in the media—not until after the shooting's over. The fleet came under rocket fire from Tanzanian shore batteries, and there were some casualties. That's the official story, and we'll stick to that for now. Got it?”
“I'll get the media office on it right now,” Stedman said.
“Please.” Weed turned away. Part of him was still reeling from the shock, but reflexes honed by a life in politics were already coming into play. Play this well, he told himself, and you're Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor or Bush after 9/11; screw it up and your political career is over. Still, the first thing was to win the war, and sort out the rest of it afterwards.
24 July 2029: aboard the USS Gridley, DDG-101
By sunrise, the scale of the disaster was all too clear. Three of the task force's ships—the guided missile frigate USS Crommelin, the amphibious warfare ship USS Comstock, and against all reasonable odds, Gridley—had escaped damage; Ronald Reagan, Anzio, the combat support ship USNS Rainier, and one of the COMPSRON-2 transports, SS Wright, were still afloat and able to make headway; all the others were dead in the water, sinking, or already gone. Deckmann moved his flag to Gridley as soon as a helicopter could get him to the destroyer, and stayed on the scene to coordinate search and rescue, while the four damaged ships limped toward Mombasa and safety. The aircraft from Ronald Reagan were already on the ground at a Kenyan military airfield near Mombasa; what was left of the carrier wasn't fit to land a kite on, much less a Navy jet.
“A hell of a mess, no question,” General Seversky said. The satellite network was still down, but radio could send encrypted data between what was left of the task force and Army GHQ outside Narok. “If you need anything for search and rescue—”
“Thanks,” said Deckmann. “We should be fine. We've had choppers and boats pulling men out of the water since right after the attack.”
“Good. Keep me posted. As for the operation, though, I've got a request into Washington for new orders. Without naval backup, we're in trouble; without GPS and the other satellite services, we're screwed—you never think about how much depends on those.”
“If we back out now, they're going to have a lot of explaining to do in DC.”
“I know,” Seversky said. “I'll let you know when I hear anything.”
“Thanks.” Deckmann waited until the general's image disappeared from the screen, and turned to go.
“Sir?” This from a technician nearby. “Message for you from Ronald Reagan.”
“I'll take it,” said Deckmann, and turned back to the screen.
A moment later Commander Johnston's face appeared, rigid with shame. “Sir,” he said, “The Ronald Reagan is on a sandbar off Ukunda. I take full responsibility.”
Deckmann blinked, then: “Why don't you tell me what happened.”
The man's face crumpled. “There were cracks below the waterline,” he said, “and the bulkheads inside—well, sir, you saw what hit her. So we were taking on water the whole way, faster than we could pump it out. After a while we had to evac the engine rooms. We had a couple of commercial tugs from Mombasa by then, but they didn't have anything that can handle a ship that big. So we fought the current, and we lost.”
“Casualties?” Catching himself: “Any more, I mean.”
“No, sir. We got everyone safely on shore, everything classified destroyed or secured per regs, reactors shut down. All our wounded are being trucked to Mombasa right now; the rest of us will be following as soon as more trucks get here.”
“What you're telling me,” Deckmann said then, “is that you took command of a sinking ship and still managed to get everyone safely to shore. That's what's going in my report.”
Johnston gave him a stunned look. “Th-thank you, sir.”
“I'll be saying the same thing to my replacement as soon as he gets here. In the meantime, stay with your people and wait for new orders. That's all.”
“Yes, sir.”
Once the screen was blank again, Deckmann got up. My replacement, he was thinking. Whichever poor bastard gets handed this mess. His own career was over, he knew that—you didn't lose an engagement that badly and end up anywhere but shoreside on a pension—but there was more at stake than one sailor's bad luck. If the Tanzanians could do the same thing to any other naval force, half the military options Washington took for granted had just been kicked out of reach, and whoever got handed this operation was facing a challenge that might not have any good answers at all.
24 July 2029: The August First Building, Beijing
“Here is a satellite image of the American fleet just before nightfall on the 23rd,” the aide said. Blue water appeared on the screen, with the gray shapes of naval vessels scattered across it. “The Ronald Reagan,” the aide went on, indicating it with the laser pointer. “The helicopter carrier Saipan. The other ships of the carrier group, and the supply ships from Diego Garcia. You may wish to remember the shapes.
“And here is the first daylight satellite image from this morning.
”
Liu watched the faces of the other members of the Central Military Commission as the new image went up, and fought the urge to smile. All of them were as shaken as he had been when the image arrived at his desk earlier in the day.
“Our staff here is still analyzing the satellite data and reports from the ground,” the aide went on. “A preliminary estimate is that four ships were destroyed during the battle; four more were abandoned today; one is being towed into Mombasa; three are damaged but still able to make headway; three more appear to be unharmed.”
“The carrier,” Ma Baiyuan said. “The Ronald Reagan. What happened to it?”
“Abandoned this morning,” the aide said. He clicked the control, and another satellite image appeared: the distinctive outline of an aircraft carrier—but the deck was broken and marked with smoke and fire retardant, the whole thing heeled over at an angle, shadows of a sandbar just visible through the water.
Ma barked out an obscenity colorful enough that the president glanced his way with a raised eyebrow. The old general showed no sign of noticing, though. “How many hits?”
“We think it was hit by four missiles, sir,” said the aide.
Liu turned in his seat. “What this means,” he said, “is that the era of the aircraft carrier is over, like the era of the battleship before it.”
“And the era of American global dominance?” Chen asked.
“That remains to be seen,” said Liu. “The next phase of Plan Qilin is beginning as we speak. How the Americans respond to it will tell us much.”
24 July 2029: Ukunda, Kenya
Something was up, that was certain. Helicopters racing south at treetop level had shaken Yamaguchi Fumiko awake a few minutes after two in the morning; she'd thrown on some clothes, scooped up her cameras, and sprinted out onto the hotel balcony. Flashes of light on the southern horizon showed that the war was on; she'd gotten fifteen minutes or so of good footage, sweated while a slow internet connection got it uploaded to the Tokyo news bureau that paid her salary, and waited for the next round.
There was no next round, or none that she could see. The next thing to light up the sky was the tropic dawn.
Nobody knew anything at breakfast, and the news media had nothing more to offer. After breakfast, Yamaguchi shouldered cameras and a tripod and headed for the beach, hoping to get some scenic shots if nothing else came up.
She was nearly at the water's edge when he saw it—a gray angular shape breaking the line of the horizon, well out to sea. Through binoculars, it looked like an aircraft carrier. She found a spot with a clear view, popped the tripod open and set it up. Video? Maybe later, she decided; first priority was to get a few stills with the big telephoto lens, identify the ship if possible, and maybe even find out what it was doing so close to shore.
The telephoto lens was as long as her forearm and heavy enough that it needed its own tripod, and it took a couple of minutes to get everything set up. Once that was done, the screen on the back of the camera lit up, blurred, and zoomed in.
It was a carrier, all right—broken, lightless, heeled over so that the deck tilted nearly into the surf on one side. The number 76 in white was still visible on the bow; further aft, black voids showed where something had punched through the steel of the hull like so much paper. In the ocean haze, the ship seemed to hover like a ghost.
Yamaguchi's finger pressed down, gently, so the camera wouldn't shift. A tiny green symbol popped up on the screen, vanished. She adjusted the focus ever so slightly, did not let herself think about what she was seeing: like a good soldier, they said back at the bureau, a good photographer keeps shooting no matter what. Another slight pressure, and the green symbol appeared again. Adjust and shoot, adjust and shoot, until the flashing light warned her that the camera's memory card was full.
Two hours later, the image of the USS Ronald Reagan wrecked and abandoned on a Kenyan sandbar hit the world media. For many people, it would become the definitive image of the East African War.
EIGHT
25 July 2029: The White House, Washington DC
“It wasn't a technical failure, sir,” said the man in the ill-fitting suit. Weed couldn't recall his name; he was the head of one of the departments over at the National Reconnaissance Office, as close as anyone ever got to the heart of the sprawling US military and intelligence satellite net. “We've still got analysts at work reconstructing the shutdown, but our best estimate at this point is that someone managed to upload malware to the satellite network.”
“A computer virus,” said Weed.
“Not just one. We've got protections against malware propagation from one platform to another, and there's no sign those were breached. Someone spent a lot of time over the last five or ten years figuring out our data encryption, uploading malware in small batches, maybe even getting rogue firmware installed in satellites during manufacture—there's a lot of different ways to do it, and no reason to think whoever did this used just one.”
“Whoever did this.” Weed leaned forward. “Any guesses?”
“The ones that shut down first were over eastern Eurasia and the eastern Indian Ocean.”
“The Chinese, then.”
“They're the most likely candidate.”
“If I may, sir?” This from Barnett. Weed nodded, and he went on. “What are we looking at in terms of fixing this?”
“That's the good news. We've got all our staff on this, and every contractor we can find with a high enough security clearance. They're getting a response from some of the satellites. Current estimates—” He opened a folder, checked the papers inside. “We should have at least some secure communications working again in forty-eight hours or so, the GPS system basic functions around the same time, and the military functions maybe a day later, maybe a little more depending on what booby traps got left behind. Reconnaissance is going to take a little while longer—the recon satellites really got hammered. Worst case, we have two on the ground that are being prepped for launch in a hurry.”
“What's the status of the Chinese satellite network?” Barnett asked.
“As far as we can tell, fully functioning.”
“That should change,” said Ellen Harbin, who had been listening to the whole exchange with a savage look on her face. “We've got enough antisatellite capacity to take down their network for good.”
“That's a very dangerous strategy,” the man from NRO said. “Near Earth orbit is so crowded these days that any ASAT strike could trigger a Kessler syndrome.”
“Kessler syndrome?” Weed asked.
“Your ASAT takes out a satellite, sir.” The man mimed the impact with his hands. “The satellite basically turns to shrapnel at orbital speeds, eighteen, twenty thousand miles an hour. Any of it hits another satellite, and pow, you've got more shrapnel. Worst case, you get a chain reaction that takes out everybody's satellites and fills low Earth orbit with so much junk that they can't be replaced for years.”
“A theoretical possibility,” said Harbin.
“We've had three close calls in the last five years.”
“There's a more immediate point,” said Stedman, who had been sitting in the back of the room. “The Chinese have antisatellite weapons that are as good as ours. We could take out their network, but if they choose to retaliate in kind, ours is gone, too—not just down for a few days—and, bluntly, their military can function without satellites better than ours can.”
Harbin gave him an edged look, but said nothing.
Weed looked from one to the other, then turned back to the man from NRO. “Keep me posted,” he said. “And let your people know that we're counting on them.”
“I'll do that, sir.”
The moment the door closed behind him, Harbin was on her feet. “We can't just let the Chinese get away with this.”
“We're not going to,” Stedman snapped back at once. “I've got two fighter wings and the 81st Airborne on 72-hour deployment alert, with more to follow. We'll have operational plans re
ady in a day or so, and then it's payback time. The Tanzanians are going to find out the hard way that you don't fuck with the United States, and the Chinese are going to find out that any assets they put in our way are just going to get steamrollered.”
“Good,” said Weed. “But Ellen's right, Bill. Once the immediate crisis is over, there's going to have to be some kind of reckoning with the Chinese.” Before either of them could respond, he held up his hands. “No more bickering, please. We've got to get this job done.”
“Yes, sir,” Stedman said, his face rigid; Harbin simply nodded.
As the meeting of the National Security Council broke up, Weed put his hand on the CIA chief's shoulder. “Greg, can you stay for a bit?”
Once the others were gone, Weed said, “I want to know how the Chinese did this. No, let's be honest. I want to know who the Chinese got to do this, and why your counterintelligence people didn't catch it. It's pretty much got to have been a mole, doesn't it?”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” said Barnett. “China doesn't spy the way we do. They don't spy the way anybody else does.”
“That's not—”
Barnett held up a hand. “Let me finish, sir. Say we and the Russians and the Chinese all wanted to know about the sand on a beach. The Russians would put a dozen elite Navy frogmen in one of their attack subs, send them ashore in the dead of night, get a couple of buckets of sand and rush them back to Moscow. We'd drop a billion or two on a satellite with special sand-viewing cameras and send it up into orbit. The Chinese? They'd get a thousand ordinary tourists to go swimming on that beach, right out there in broad daylight, and when they got back to Beijing, every one of them would just shake out their beach towels. They'd end up knowing more about the sand than anybody.”
Weed took that in.
“That's what we tell new people in counterintelligence. They start out looking for the kind of spycraft we do, the Russians do, most other countries do, and we have to teach them to start looking for those towels and the grains of sand.”
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