Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979)
Page 36
So she waited under her blanket, sweating, with nothing more to do than pick pieces of the gummy stims from her teeth.
She heard a slight rustle and swung her rifle; no one would get the drop on her twice. It was Duncan this time. He motioned her to follow him to the observation post the team had set up on the perimeter, just on the edge of the brush. It had a clear view out, overlooking the golf course and the resort beyond. Oblivious to their presence, a threesome played on the fourth hole of the Fazio-designed course;60 clearly they were high-level officers or dignitaries, as two armed escorts followed in a second electric cart commandeered from the resort.
“So this was the unit that got your guys?” said Duncan, hooking her up into the tactical-glasses rig.
Conan nodded, taking in the full-enhanced scene as the system filled the panorama with red and blue icons, this time many more of them. The team had certainly been busy while she was picking her teeth.
“We never learned which unit, but they were good,” she replied. “Too good,” she added, giving credit where credit was due.
“You’re owed some payback, then.”
“How soon?”
“Three minutes good enough for you?”
“Typical man, but it’ll have to do.”
She watched and waited as the team finally started to show their nerves, checking and rechecking their weapons. Duncan kept his binoculars trained on the little robot still affixed to the tower that would be their relay station.
“Okay, mission clock is good, open the comms link,” said Duncan.
A voice came through their earpieces, modulated from the digital encryption, but recognizable as having a slight Latino accent. “Nemesis, this is Longboard. Authenticate Zulu, One, Bravo, Two, Three, X-Ray, Four, Two, Golf, Golf, Five, Seven, Papa, Delta, Mike, Six, One, Eight, Mike. Counter-authenticate with match code Polski.”
Peaches began the receipt code, speaking in Polish. The language’s unique combination of Latin and Greek diacritics gave it thirty-two letters in total, and the letters that were modified with glyphs were almost incomprehensible to computer-decryption algorithms.
“Ś, jeden, pi, ą, ź, ztery ń, siedem, ę, szesna, cie, pi, ł, dwana, cie, ż.”
“Roger, Nemesis, match code received. Quick hit human confirm, query mission commander: Best pizza near your home, over?”
“Gino’s, New York–style,61 over,” Duncan said quickly into the comms net. He turned to Conan. “They give you five seconds to outrun any algorithm guessing. Good thing they didn’t ask favorite Mexican or we’d have been cut off. Too many choices.”
“Confirmed, Nemesis,” the voice said. “We’ll order out for you, over.”
“We’d prefer your special delivery today, over,” Duncan replied.
“Affirmative. Any updates to the targeting data, over?”
“None, all active and confirmed,” Duncan said. “We have a small unit out golfing near us, but we don’t think they’re worth your while. We can take them on our own if it comes to match play, over.”
“Roger that, Nemesis. Standing by for authorization, over.”
Duncan looked at Conan, his expression and tone serious for once. “Major, I can’t even begin to understand what you’ve been through, but . . . I just wanted to say how much we respect it, what you had to do.”
Conan’s face remained impassive.
Duncan, knowing not to go any further, changed tack. “You know why we chose Nemesis as the call sign?”
“Greek god of trouble,” she replied.
“Almost. A goddess. Technically, the goddess of vengeful fate; her name translates as ‘to give what is due.’ That’s us, but in this case, I think you’re due the privilege of giving the order.”
Conan just nodded and said into the microphone, “Longboard, this is Nemesis, you are cleared hot . . . and may all our enemies die screaming.”
Duncan smiled, but then he saw her face. It was no longer an expressionless mask. She truly was Nemesis.
Admiral Zheng He, Four Hundred and Fifty Miles Southeast of Kamchatka Peninsula
At this moment, Admiral Wang felt that the flagship’s windows on the bridge had the best view of the war. And he could see nothing except the line where the blue water met the horizon.
Everything was happening beyond that horizon, out of sight. He had enemies waiting for him well beyond that horizon but no sure way to find them. He had weapons that could reach well beyond that horizon but no sure way to aim them.
He could sense the crew was discomfited by the absence of vital information; they had expected it would always be there, as certain as the stars. The satellite signals had gone down, the long-range radio was jammed, and the network-data links were worse than severed—they were feeding the crew information and navigation positions that were clearly in error. All the more reason for Wang to exude calm.
It was as it should be, part of him felt. This was naval warfare as it had been for centuries, not as it had been imagined for the past few decades, an organized and predictable exercise with defined and computable odds. If he was going to measure up to his ship’s namesake, it would be on a day just like this.
“Show me the last reported positions and scenarios three and four for distance traveled since contact lost,” he instructed a young officer.
The screen displayed the potential locations of the enemy task forces. For their Arctic force, there were not many choices. At some point, they had to come down through the Bering Strait. Yes, they could certainly continue on to the Chukchi Sea and harry the Russians on their northern coast, but then it wouldn’t be his problem.
“‘Ponder and deliberate before you make a move.’”62
He recited the instructive quote from The Art of War aloud, more for himself than for the bridge crew, though it was good for their morale, he thought, to see their commander in conversation with the great master. They kept silent, knowing not to interfere with his thinking.
The real question was about the southern force of older ships. By this point, they could almost be off their port of Anchorage. Would they lie in wait there? Or would they risk darting down the Aleutian Islands, perhaps to effect a linkup?
Mentally, he went through the priorities, stating out loud Sun-Tzu’s rankings once more.
“‘The highest form of generalship63 is to balk the enemy’s plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy’s forces.’”
That was certainly what Hainan would want. The integrity of the force and, indeed, the alliance with the Russians would be held by keeping his task force positioned to block that passage and prevent the juncture of the two small American fleets.
“‘The good fighters of old64 first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.’”
He preferred this advice about patience to General Wei’s quote about waiting by the river. It was like Wei to choose the less apt quote, but he was still right. The Bering Strait was not a river, but the effect would be the same. They could simply wait for the American forces to enter the strait and be channeled into their arms.
And yet patience was like any other weapon: it had to be used properly or it would backfire on its owner. And patience was not the weapon his foes would be using; he was sure of that. It was the one thing he could be certain of concerning the Americans somewhere across that horizon. That, and that they had to know their moves north had likely been tracked up to this point.
“‘All warfare is based on deception65 . . . When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.’” Deception, he realized, would be the Americans’ weapon of choice.
He turned to face his aide so that what he said next would be captured for posterity by the aide’s glasses. These words would decide how history would remember him. He would be either the fool who abandoned his post and was shot for it or the great admiral who divined the enemies’ ruse and ended the w
ar by appearing out of nowhere right behind them.
“We shall head south, full steam. The surface task force shall proceed in a sweep arc forward, keeping the carriers protected. I want passive sensors only, though. If we are blind to their presence, I want them to be blind to ours. When in range of Hawaii, the carrier’s attack squadrons shall launch with anti-ship strike packages even if targets are not yet acquired,”66 Wang said. He smiled to show his confidence in what he knew was a gamble. “As Master Sun advised, ‘Never venture, never win’!”67
He hoped the great strategist of old was right one last time.
Kahuku, Oahu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
The tactical view showed Conan a blinking yellow light on the blue Z icon out to sea. They waited several minutes for whatever it was indicating to arrive.
Then there was a sudden roar overhead, almost like an airborne locomotive. A massive explosion erupted miles away, almost certainly at the old Wheeler Army Airfield, where the Directorate had a mobile search radar the SEALs had marked coming in. Her tac-view showed one of the red icons flash with a yellow overlay. Then another wink, and another round of explosions: a mobile Stonefish ballistic-missile launch site in Waialua to the west, the firing pattern prioritizing any mobile targets before taking out the fixed sites.
They watched below as the golfers stood confused; one stopped in midswing and threw himself to the ground. After figuring out the fire wasn’t aimed at them, they piled into the electric cart and drove off toward the resort complex.
“Yes, that’s it, boys, pack it in. You’re shit golfers anyway,” Hammer said.
The firing continued above them, a whooshing sound every six seconds, some followed by an explosion close, others in the distance. More and more of the array of red icons began to blink yellow. Below them, the base became a beehive of activity. Two of the helicopters on the tennis court began to spin their rotors.
“Come on, come on,” Duncan whispered, starting to grow antsy.
“Nemesis, this is Longboard,” the comms link crackled. “Verify friendly position Augusta, over.”
“Longboard, Nemesis, affirmative,” said Duncan. “And don’t leave a scratch on that comms tower or there’ll be hell to pay, out.”
Again, a wait of minutes. The rail-gun rounds moved at 8,200 feet per second, but they had almost two hundred miles to travel. Then another whooshing sound came in, this time almost upon them, and the tennis courts disappeared in a massive cloud of dirt and fire. Several smaller explosions followed as helicopters and vehicles just beyond the blast site began to cook off. Then another whoosh, and a series of tents set up around the golf course’s clubhouse as a command complex disappeared. Six seconds later, a third rail-gun round hit the parking lot, leaving a gaping crater where the unit’s motor pool had been. The team was well beyond the strike zone, but they still felt the pressure in their eardrums change and their stomachs turn at each of the explosions.
Duncan scanned the complex with his binoculars and saw that the tower was still standing, the tiny robotic lobster still clinging on.
“Longboard, Nemesis Six. Confirm targets serviced and communications link strong. Nice shooting, over.”
“Thank you, Nemesis. We aim to please, out.”
The strikes began again, the locomotives rushing by every six seconds like clockwork, some directly overhead, some at a distance. Then the intervals between strikes began to shift, first to twelve seconds, then to eighteen. Conan panned her view and saw icons on neighboring islands starting to flash. Maui, then the Big Island, even Lanai. She’d been so focused on her own fight, she hadn’t known what was happening on the other islands.
Duncan brought her attention back. “Time for the seaside fireworks.” He pointed off to the coast just as a flash of light about five miles away rose from the ocean and streaked into the clouds. A few seconds later there was a flash above, followed by the sound of a distant explosion, and debris started to rain down.
Conan’s visor said those were AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles fired by the Orzel using a system developed by the Navy’s Littoral Warfare Weapon program;68 it allowed the heat-seeking missiles, which were normally carried by fighter jets, to be ejected underwater from the submarine’s torpedo tubes using gas pressure and a watertight capsule and then launched into the air.
“That’s our ride,” said Duncan. “Never a good idea to park your combat air patrol above a submarine full of pissed-off Poles who haven’t won a war in a few hundred years.”
Lieutenant Nowak, lying prone in the dirt just a few meters away, smiled at Conan, gave her a thumbs-up, and then flipped a middle-finger salute at Duncan.
Two more streaks shot up from the water, and another shower of flame and sparks appeared behind the veil of the clouds. The visor registered them as formerly being Chengdu J-20 fighter jets.
The waiting stretched into almost an hour. They watched as the Directorate troops began to sift through the rubble, pull out bodies.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” Duncan whispered. “Peaches, tell Butter that sharing is no longer caring.”
“Sir?” Lieutenant Nowak asked.
“Switch the lobster to jamming mode.”
There was no immediate change in the activity below, but soon Directorate troops paused, awaiting instructions that would not come.
Another cluster of blue appeared in the tac-view on the horizon. As it grew closer, icons branched off.
“Major, I think it’s time you stopped being the only Marine in this island paradise,” he said.
She tried to say something flip back, but she couldn’t. All she wanted was to see them. As the icon grew closer, she flipped up the tactical rig. Duncan waited for her to tear up or something, but her face had returned to its usual impassive mask.
With the naked eye, they looked just like dots in the distance. Then the faint chop of blades could be heard. The flight of six low-flying Marine Corps Osprey tiltrotors slowly drew into view. They were flying incredibly low to the ocean, far below what Conan had been taught to do as a trainee back at New River. Clearly, they were trying to stay below the radar to the bitter end.
Now the Directorate would feel real fear. She wondered what Finn would have thought of the scene, and then she pushed that idea away.
“Shit,” Duncan said. “They’re waking up.”
He pointed to a small quadcopter taking off from Kuilima Bay, apparently protected from the first rail-gun strikes by the shadow of the hotel buildings.
“Break-break!” Duncan said into the radio, telling everyone on that frequency this was a priority message. “Ares Flight, Ares Flight, this is Nemesis Six. Heads up, they have a quad drone in the air.”
They heard only a crackle of radio static.
“Longboard, this is Nemesis, we can’t raise Ares Flight,” Duncan said into the secure link to the ship hundreds of miles away. “Can you let them know a quad drone is headed toward them from the east, over.”
“Wilco, Nemesis,” replied the radio, both parties knowing the jury-rigged game of telephone likely wouldn’t work in the heat of battle.
One of the Ospreys splashed down on its belly into Turtle Bay, a few hundred feet from the beach, then flipped across the water, parts breaking off.
“I didn’t see any weapon strike,” Conan said. “Their propellers just started to feather; fuel or engine trouble of some sort.”
The rest of the flight kept going, beginning to hover above the fairways on the far side of the golf course complex, the section designed by Arnold Palmer.69
“Shit, they still don’t know about the drone,” said Conan.
As the lead Osprey touched down over the green of the first hole, the Chinese quadcopter popped up from the swirl of smoke around the destroyed tennis courts and fired a missile. The tiltrotor aircraft pulled up quickly, trying to dodge the missile. A Marine cartwheeled out of the open rear ramp from forty feet up, clutching his rifle the whole way down until he slammed onto the second hole’s men’s t
ee box. The quadcopter’s missile hit the Osprey’s aft fuselage near the horizontal stabilizer, causing the heavily loaded aircraft to swing wildly and then crash into one of the condo units overlooking the fairway.
The second Osprey in the flight, hovering just behind, pivoted. As the aircraft turned its back to the quadcopter, a gunner fired a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the Osprey’s rear ramp. The aircraft turned in its hover, and the arc of red tracers edged closer and closer to the quadcopter and then shattered it in a small explosion. The Osprey then pivoted back and touched down on the golf course. Marines poured out the ramp onto the fairway grass. They immediately started to take small-arms fire from the porch of a townhouse that Directorate troops had been billeted in. As the Osprey’s propellers tilted forward and pulled the aircraft out of its hover, a missile arced in, fired from the main resort. The aircraft’s defensive flares fired, decoying the missile’s seeker head and triggering its proximity fuse, causing an explosion a few hundred feet away, but shrapnel slashed the right engine. One of the massive blades broke off and knifed into the Osprey’s fuselage just behind the cockpit, and an explosion broke the aircraft in two.
Conan tracked the missile trail back and saw two Directorate troops just at the edge of the main resort’s pool complex reloading an FN-8 man-portable missile system.70
“Time for us to get down there and help out,” said Conan, checking her rifle and rig.