Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979)

by Singer, P. W. ; Cole, August

  A flash of movement caught Jamie’s eye and he peered down into the bow wave. A pod of dolphins surfed along with the Zumwalt. Instead of watching them play, he focused on the map layout and saw that the Mako-class ships racing ahead had not detected any mines or signs of the Directorate’s quiet diesel-electric submarines.

  “All clear ahead?” said Mike. Jamie turned his body slowly to acknowledge his father but kept looking at his screen.

  “So far, so good,” said Jamie. “That won’t last, will it?”

  “Probably not,” said Mike. “Look, I need to talk to you for a minute.”

  Jamie turned off the glasses, not wanting this conversation recorded. “Let’s head over to the turret.”

  In the lee of the rail-gun turret, well out of the wind, Mike spoke first. He braced his back against the rail-gun housing with the kind of effort that betrays exhaustion. His coverall seemed to flap looser, Jamie thought, as if his father’d lost weight.

  “We have to solve this,” said Mike. “We don’t have the time to work together, blow up, work together, and then blow up again. Two steps forward and all that.”

  “Agreed,” said Jamie. “We can’t have an argument every time we spend more than a minute or two with each other. It’s got to stop. The ship can’t have that. Cortez has already brought it up, suggested you transfer to one of the other ships in the task force. But I kept you with this ship. You know why?”

  “I would have stowed away anyway,” said Mike.

  Jamie cracked a smile. “I don’t like having to keep the civilian techs onboard, but the ship needs Dr. Li,” said Jamie. “And she needs you.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Mike.

  “Dad, you can’t bullshit the captain on his own ship. You taught me that,” said Jamie.

  “Vern’s less than half my age—” said Mike.

  “It’s Vern now?” said Jamie.

  “—and got twice the years in school.”

  “Whatever you want to tell yourself. It’s your business, not mine. But I need you to keep her safe,” said Jamie.

  “She’s doing it to show the rest of them that they can’t question her . . . well, her right to serve, I guess,” said Mike. “One of the guys got after her and—”

  “I heard. Is your hand okay?” asked Jamie. “You should have just brought him to me; we could have replaced him.”

  “That’s the thing—now he’s going to be the best behaved sailor on this cruise,” said Mike. “In my Navy, we handled things up front and got it over with. All this bullshit about diversity and the new Navy, and still Vern has to deal with this?”

  “I know. And if anyone is going to protect her on this ship, it’s you,” said Jamie.

  “You’ve already made your point. Would it be hard on you, me with Vern?” said Mike.

  “Actually, this might be difficult for you to hear, but, no, it wouldn’t be,” said Jamie.

  “You still hate me,” said Mike. “When’s that going to stop? That officer’s uniform’s not going to fix things between us. Times like this I don’t fucking understand why you even went in.”

  “So this is our chance to have it out? Okay, then. You left us, Mac­kenzie died, and it all ruined Mom. But that’s not even it. It made me a better man than you. And I prove it every single day.”

  “Jesus, now we’re back to square one,” said Mike. “I’d tell you to quit being a martyr, but you’re not that wrong. I should have been there, and I live with it every single day too . . . And that anger to prove you’re better than me may have gotten you to this point. But you need to get it out of you. There is nothing personal about war. Purge it. Now. Before it poisons the captain you ought to be.”

  Jamie paused and looked off into the distance and then back at his father. “I hear you . . . Chief,” said Jamie, still not able to address him by the name he swore he’d never use again the day his father left. “Let’s get back inside. I need to check in with the mission center to make sure we don’t run over one of the Makos.”

  The two walked carefully along the starboard side of the ship, staying out of the wind and dodging the spray from the growing Pacific swell.

  “You know I’m right on this, Jamie. And I know you’re trying. We can talk more when we get to Australia,” said Mike.

  Jamie leaned in close to his dad’s ear, cupping it against a gust of wind.

  “Going to be a long wait, then,” he said. “We’re going somewhere else.”

  As his son walked away, the ship made a slow, lazy turn, and Mike noticed the faint hint of the rising sun peeking through the fog. Oddly, it was off to starboard. They were headed north.

  Directorate Command, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

  Colonel Vladimir Markov looked across the room and winced as Lieutenant Jian yawned. The boy did not even try to conceal his fatigue, which to Markov was one of the many reminders of the young officer’s weakness, and just when he finally needed his aide/minder actually to do something.

  “Is the model ready?” the Russian asked.

  “I’m working on getting the last of the data to load,” said Jian. “Some of these weren’t meant to be put together, so the system is—”

  “And that’s why we’re doing this,” said Markov. Being a hunter required more than guns. He’d learned that over two decades ago. He needed data. “If there’s one thing I am going to teach you, it’s to stop thinking that things can work only the way you’ve been told they’re supposed to. You can’t win a war that way. Nobody ever has.”

  “Will it be stable enough?” asked Lieutenant Jian, ignoring Markov’s advice, as usual.

  “We’ll find out, won’t we?” said Markov. “Besides, even if it doesn’t work, nobody is going to see. You’re not going to tell the general on me if it doesn’t, are you?”

  Lieutenant Jian avoided Markov’s look.

  “Of course you are,” said Markov. “Just do your job and don’t get in the way of me doing mine. When this is all over, they are going to ask you what you did in your war. I bet you thought you would get to do something heroic. It’s your first war, and that’s what everyone thinks. Well, that’s not going to happen. But instead of being some dumb underling, give yourself something to be proud of. At least make me proud. There’s still time.”

  Lieutenant Jian gave him a sideways glance, as if the Russian had said something treasonous. Maybe he had.

  “Yes, Colonel, as you say,” said Lieutenant Jian. “The model is ready now.”

  “Start it,” said Markov. “Let’s go hunting.”

  The lights went off and all was dark. Then the projectors arrayed around the spherical room’s perimeter blinked on in sequence.

  The holographic model wrapped itself around the bodies of the two men. For a moment, Lieutenant Jian gazed at Markov in disbelief, but the face looking at the Russian was melded with the holographic image of the face of the young Directorate marine who’d had his throat gouged in the stairwell of Duke’s Bar on Waikiki Beach. Another horrific image to forget, thought Markov. Then a different dead body was overlaid on the map; the system had been directed to pull from the casualty list all the Directorate personnel who had gone missing or been killed by any method other than firearms or explosives.

  “Now overlay with the movement analysis.”

  A spread of small pictures seemed to spray across the room as if from an imaginary tube. The software allowed the capture and processing of hundreds of thousands of hours of multiple-image-viewpoint recordings simultaneously. The American military had gotten the idea11 from the way media companies covered the Super Bowl and had first used it in Iraq. You could saturate a city with drone cameras flying overhead and record everything, but all those images were useless unless you could process the embedded information. That was where the artificial intelligence came in: it found patterns in the noise of daily life.

  As the small dots filled the room, the faces of the dead soldiers began to flicker.

  “It
’s crashing,” said Markov. “Fix it.”

  Lieutenant Jian barged through the holographic image, leaving a wake of warped faces and streaming video dots behind him.

  “There, okay,” said Lieutenant Jian. “It was the overhead tracking feed from the drones; it does not want to sync up with the traffic cameras.”

  Markov waded into the middle of the model, hands raised slightly to the level of his heart, as if he were inching into an icy pool.

  “Drop the topography now, set to bird’s-eye view.”

  As he stood there, faces and names, numbers, and grid points were overlaid on a 3-D map of Honolulu.

  “Here, here, and here.” He indicated points on a map of the city and its environs. “This is where your personnel were found. Here and here too, this is where these unlucky gentlemen went missing. No women, note.”

  “What’s the relation? Insurgents are everywhere, they can attack at any time,” said Lieutenant Jian.

  “Watch,” said Markov. “Set the system to correlate with known insurgent activity.” A series of red lines began to appear between the various points, forming a random cluster around Markov.

  “I don’t see the pattern,” Lieutenant Jian said.

  “That’s the point,” Markov said. “These deaths were not consistent with any pattern of normal insurgent activity.”

  “What about insurgent activity is normal?” said Lieutenant Jian. “They don’t follow any rules.”

  Markov laughed and walked through the model that now connected the body icons with rainbow-like arcs. From each arc dangled a holographic image, akin to a driver’s license, of every person whose DNA had been tracked in the area.

  “Lieutenant, I have seen the work of plenty of killers. Insurgencies bring out the truly savage side of humanity. Hands used to kill despite fingernails having been ripped out only days before. Broomsticks topped with shotgun shells. Rusty blades dipped in shit to ensure an infection,” said Markov. “And yet, they all followed a simple rule: anything goes in the name of freedom.”

  “You sound like you admire them, these assassins killing our troops one by one,” said Lieutenant Jian. “They are just monsters, all of them.”

  “I don’t admire them, but I seek to understand them,” said Markov. “However, this is something different. Lieutenant, you may finally be right about something. I think we are indeed looking for monsters. Just not the kind or number you think. Pull up the file of Ms. Carrie Shin.”

  “The woman from the hotel?” asked Lieutenant Jian. “If you’re playing another joke on me, this is not the time.”

  Carrie Shin’s face appeared on a wall screen. The photo had been taken by the Directorate security teams for the special ID used by the workers at the Moana hotel. Stunningly beautiful, her tan face beamed. Yet to Markov, something was not right with her eyes; they were almost dead in their expression.

  “Now remove the insurgent activity.” The swirl of red lines disappeared.

  “And now populate for all facial-recognition traces of Ms. Shin.”

  Images of Carrie appeared in tiny flashing pictures and video-stream dots, the viz screen spiraling through still shots from traffic cameras, videos of drone coverage overhead showing her crossing a street, checkpoints where she had shown her ID badge. A person’s entire life couldn’t be recorded, but it left traces. As more and more data was fed through, lines of the patterns of her life formed, all of them crossing again and again with the victims’ locations.

  “Do you see the spider’s web?” said Markov. “She is who we have been looking for.”

  “You can’t be serious,” said Lieutenant Jian. “Just one girl? It’s only because she works in the same areas. I will reboot the system.”

  “Why? Because you don’t like the answer?” said Markov. “You don’t understand what you’re looking at, do you? This is something special, Jian. A true killer hiding in the death of war. A rarity to be observed and understood.”

  This was indeed something new, thought the Russian. It seemed like this war wasn’t going to be such a waste after all.

  He reached into the hologram on his tiptoes and pulled the photo down, expanding Carrie’s image to larger than life-size.

  Markov began pacing around the perimeter of the model, trying to remember the lines from his tattered book of poetry, speaking quietly to himself in Russian.

  Calmly he contemplates alike the just/ And unjust, with indifference he notes/ Evil and good, and knows not wrath nor pity.

  He changed back to English. “Pushkin should have said ‘she,’ Lieutenant,” said Markov. “The hallmark of a true professional is the ability to admit when one is on unfamiliar ground, and that is where we are now.”

  “Colonel, I have to ask, have you been drinking?” said Lieutenant Jian. “I cannot tell the general that we think this woman, this American beach babe, not only killed the minister’s son but also has been brutalizing all our forces.”

  “You coward, all you can think about is what you’re going to tell your master. Look into those eyes,” said Colonel Markov. “She is what you should fear.”12

  Lieutenant Jian’s mouth puckered with dismay, but his eyes showed he could not find the right disapproving words, much less the courage to say them.

  “You and I, we can put on a uniform, but we will always be prey. Mere bodies to be sacrificed by our leaders. She, though, she is a huntress and she wears—what, a bikini? A cocktail dress?” said Markov.

  Jian looked annoyed and queried the system for her current location. The last image had been her stepping off a city bus a few blocks from her apartment.

  “You just asked the wrong question. The question we should be asking is not where is she now, but what is she doing? If she is what I think she is, she is likely hunting right now . . . Or is she coming down, grasping at normalcy?”

  “Colonel, it is late, and this is a waste of time,” said Lieutenant Jian. “There is no way this one woman has killed so many men. We can pick her up, but first I must report your waste of valuable resources to the general.”

  “Yes, go run to your master,” said Markov. “But have a squad ready in thirty minutes. And you had better hope we find this black widow before . . .”—he paused for dramatic effect and then laughed—“she finds you!”

  USS Triggerfish, Task Force Longboard

  The USS Mako raced past the Zumwalt’s stern in what looked like a reckless game of chicken. A fifty-seven-foot trimaran, it had a main hull and two thin outriggers attached by lateral beams. The design, often used in racing yachts, was lighter and faster than a standard single-hulled boat’s, having a shallower draft, a wider beam, and less surface area underwater. For the racing yachts, it meant minimal crew space inside the thin hulls, but that wasn’t a concern for a robotic warship.

  The autonomous sub hunter sped away to the far edge of the fleet and began to patrol in a racetrack figure-eight pattern with a sister ship, the USS Bullshark. It had been a controversy when ships with no crews had received names at their commissioning ceremonies four months earlier. It was an important cultural shift, and ultimately the secretary of the Navy herself made the decision: these were not disposable robots but warships the fleet could count on to save lives. Nobody questioned the naming on this day as the high-speed vessels worked to keep Directorate and Russian submarines at bay.

  The Mako bolted in a straight line to the east, its speed rising past forty-five knots. The Bullshark slowed, its chisel-like bows diving slightly in the Pacific swell, then took off on a different heading to the west. The pair located a Directorate Type 39A submarine six miles away. Following an algorithm developed from research done on the way sandtiger sharks cooperated13 in their hunting, the two ships coordinated and began to box in the fleeing nuclear submarine. The Chinese sub didn’t know that a third Mako-class ship, the USS Tigershark, lay silently drifting in its projected path.

  The Tigershark launched a Mark 81 rocket-powered torpedo14 from a range of three miles. The supercavitating
design allowed the torpedo to reach underwater speeds of almost two hundred knots, giving it just enough time to get up to full speed before it punched through the sub, entering the hull from one side and exiting through the other.

  The sounds of the submarine’s hull collapsing were captured by the Mako-class hunters and relayed to the Zumwalt, as was the burst-transmission distress message from the buoy that had been automatically ejected by the sinking Chinese sub. The task force ships were now safe from the undersea threat, but they were leaving a trail of crumbs behind them.

  Mount Ka‘ala, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

  Conan pressed her cheek deeper into the wet mud beneath the hapuu ferns. A moment ago she’d thought she heard the buzz of a small rotary-powered drone. Yes, there it was. The sound ebbed and flowed in the damp air.

  She curled her knees into her chest and pressed them tighter, hoping the wool blanket would shield her from the thermal sensors. These were the moments when you were truly alone, when you had to face up to all the things you could have done after the invasion instead of taking up arms. The camps at Schofield Barracks weren’t that bad, people said. The Red Cross visited regularly, as the whole world saw via images collected and broadcast by Directorate social media teams.

  The buzzing intensified and Conan held her breath, smelling orchids and damp mud. She felt the prick of a mosquito’s bite near her jaw. Then another. The buzzing stopped. Was that it? Just a pair of fucking bugs?