Текст книги "Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War"

Автор книги: P. Singer

Соавторы: August Cole
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P. W. Singer, August Cole
Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

The following was inspired by real-world trends and technologies.

But, ultimately, it is a work of fiction, not prediction.

Forward

243 Miles Above the Earth’s Surface

“I am so sorry.”

What did Vitaly mean by that? As the sole American astronaut on the International Space Station, U.S. Air Force colonel Rick Farmer was used to being the target of the Russian crew’s practical jokes. The most recent had involved their sewing him shut inside his sleeping bag and then wide-casting his reaction for the whole net to see.

Now, that had been funny. But this was outside. Different rules when you’re floating outside, only a thin tether keeping you hooked to the station.

The odd thing was that Cosmonaut Vitaly Simakov’s voice had been unaccompanied by his usual booming laugh.

Farmer rechecked his tether, more for mental reassurance than any need. It had been twenty-four minutes since he’d been able to raise Vitaly or anyone else in the station on his suit’s radio. That message was the last Farmer had heard from the mission commander after he’d made his way out of the station to repair the fluky number four solar panel. Even Houston was offline. He chalked up the silence to another one of those technical problems that made daily life in space so difficult, rather than the romance NASA still spun for the media.

With a PhD from Caltech in systems engineering and over four thousand flight hours in everything from T-38 trainers to F-22 stealth fighter jets, Farmer knew that big, complicated things sometimes just did not work as they were supposed to. He remembered the time his twin boys had played around with his flight gear on the eve of his first deployment to Afghanistan, half a lifetime ago. “Daddy needs a helmet because sometimes his job can be really hard.” He hadn’t told them that in his line of work, it was the mundane stuff that was the hardest.

Farmer approached the hatch to reenter the space station.

“Farmer, validate. Open hatch,” he commanded the system.

Nothing.

He said it again, emphasizing each word this time to allow the voice-recognition software to lock on.

“Farmer. Validate. Open. Hatch.”

It was as if the system couldn’t hear him.

He reached for the manual override and lifted the cover that protected the emergency-open button. Well, he thought as he pressed it, this was fast on its way to becoming one.

Nothing.

He pressed again, harder, the force of his fingers against the bright red button pushing him backward in the weightless environment of space. If he hadn’t been tethered to the station, that push would have sent him spinning off at a rate of ten feet per second on a trajectory toward Jupiter.

Nothing. What the hell?

The outside of his visor was gold-coated, the world’s costliest sunglasses. Inside was an array of computer displays projecting everything from his location to the suit’s internal temperature.

Farmer couldn’t help noticing the red light flashing in the corner, as if he needed the computer to inform him that his heart rate was spiking. He paused to center himself with a deep breath, looking down at the sweeping span of blue beneath. He tried to ignore the black void ringing Earth, which seemed to widen menacingly. After half a minute of steady breathing from his core, just like the NASA yoga instructor back in Houston had taught him, he stared hard at the door, willing it to open.

He tried the button again, and then again. Nothing.

He reached down for his HEXPANDO. The expanding-head hexagonal tool had been designed by NASA’s engineers to remove or install socket-head cap screws in hard-to-reach places. It was a glorified wrench.

The instructions explicitly said that the HEXPANDO was “not intended for application of torque.”

Screw it.

Farmer banged the HEXPANDO on the hatch. He couldn’t hear any sound in the vacuum of space, but the pounding might resonate within the station’s artificial atmosphere on the other side of the hatch.

Then a hiss of static and Farmer’s radio came back to life.

“Vitaly, you hear me? I was getting worried there. The comms are on the fritz again, and now the damn voice-command systems on the hatch aren’t working,” said Farmer. “Tell Gennady I am going to send him back to trade school in Siberia. His repair job yesterday actually broke everything. I need you to open manually from the inside.”

“I cannot. It is no longer my decision,” said Vitaly, his voice somber.

“Say again?” said Farmer. The red heart light pulsed just outside his field of vision, as if Mars were suddenly blinking over his shoulder.

“I am no longer authorized to open hatch,” said Vitaly.

“Get Houston, we are going to sort this out,” said Farmer.

“Goodbye, my friend. I am truly sorry. It is orders,” said Vitaly.

“I’ve got an order for you. Open the fucking hatch!” said Farmer.

The soft pulse of static that followed was the last sound Farmer would hear.

After five minutes of pounding on the hatch, Farmer turned from the station to stare down at the Earth beneath his feet. He could make out the Asian landmass wreathed in a white shroud, the cloud of smog stretching from Beijing southward toward Shanghai.

How much time did he have? The red light’s urgent flashing indicated spiking respiration. He tried to calm himself by running calculations in his head of the Earth’s rate of turn, the station’s velocity, and his remaining oxygen. Would it be enough time for the Eastern Seaboard to come into view? His wife and grown boys were vacationing on Cape Cod, and he wanted to look down at them one last time.

Part 1

You can fight a war for a long time or you can make your nation strong.

You cannot do both.

– Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

10,590 Meters Below Sea Level, Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean

Sometimes history is made in the dark.

As he scanned the blackness, Tzu-long thought about what his wife would be doing right now. He couldn’t see her, but he knew that ten kilometers above, Li Fung would be hunched over her keyboard, ritually tightening her ponytail to burn off the tension. He could imagine her rough sneeze, knowing how the cigarette smoke from the other geologists irritated her.

The screens inside the Jiaolong-3 Flood Dragon deep-water submersible were the only portholes that modern science could offer the mission’s chief geologist. His title was truly meaningful in this case. Lo Wei, the Directorate officer sent to monitor them, had command, but ultimately, responsibility for the success or failure of the mission fell on Tzu.

So it was appropriate at this moment, he thought, that he alone was in control, deep below the COMRA (China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association) deep-sea exploration vessel Xiang Yang Hong 18. This particular pocket of the Mariana Trench belonged to him alone.

Tzu guided the course underwater with a series of gentle tilts of the softly glowing control-sleeve gloves he wore. He was moving too close to the sheer trench walls to consider using the autopilot. He exhaled to clear his mind. There was so much pressure, poised to crush his vessel and everyone’s dreams at any moment.

He adjusted the headset with a nudge of his shoulder. There, just as he thought. Blinking, he leaned forward, as if proximity to the lightly glowing video screen and the crushing darkness beyond the sub’s hull could make the moment any more real.

This dive was the last; it had to be.

A wave of his hands, and the sub backed away from the wall and paused, hovering. Li turned off the exterior lights. Then he turned off the red interior lighting. He savored the void.

The moment had come. It was the culmination of literally decades of research and investment. No other nation had even attempted to plumb the depths of the sea like Tzu and his comrades, which was why 96 percent of the ocean floor still remained unexplored and unexploited. Indeed, the training alone for the deep-sea dive had taken a full four years once the team at Tianjin University developed the submersible. Compared to that, the five days of searching on this mission was nothing.

This descent, with Tzu at the controls, was the mission’s last shot. At some point soon, the team knew, the Americans would be paying them a “friendly” visit, or maybe they would have the Australians do it for them. The Chinese were too close to the big U.S. base in Guam; it was a wonder nobody had come to look into what they were doing yet. Either way, the clock was ticking, both for the COMRA vessel and, he worried, its crew.

He thought of Lieutenant Commander Lo Wei standing over Tzu’s wife’s shoulder, getting impatient, lighting cigarette after cigarette as she sneezed her way through the smoke. Tzu could almost feel the crew scrutinizing her face with the same intensity they viewed their monitors. They would think, but not say aloud, How could he fail us, when he knew the consequences for us all?

Tzu had not failed.

The discovery itself was anticlimactic. A screen near Tzu’s right hand flashed a brief message in blue and then flipped into a map mode. There had been indicators of a gas field here, but as the data streamed in, he now knew why his gut had guided him to this spot. He nudged the submersible on, sorting the deployments of the sub’s disposable autonomous underwater vehicles, which would allow the team to map the full extent of the discovery. Each vessel was, in effect, a mini-torpedo whose sonic explosion afforded the submersible’s imaging-by-sound sensors a deeper understanding of the riches beneath the sea floor. The sound waves allowed the computer to “see” the entirety of the field buried kilometers below the crust. The mini-torpedo technology came from the latest submarine-hunting systems of the U.S. Navy; the resource-mapping software had originated with the dissertation research of a PhD student at Boston University. They would never know their roles in making history.

After thirty-five minutes of mapping, it was done.

Enough time in the dark, Tzu thought. The transition between the deep and the surface, he once confided to Li, was the worst. To die there would be his hell, trapped in the void between the light of day and the marvels of the abyss. But this time it was his joy; the void filled with the sense of anticipation at sharing the news.

When he opened the submarine’s hatch, he saw the entire crew peering over the port rail, staring down at him. Even the cook, with his scarred forearms and missing pointer finger on his left hand, had come to gape at the Jiaolong-3 bobbing on the surface.

He squinted against the bright Pacific sun, careful to keep his face expressionless. He searched for Li among the crew gathered at the ship’s railings. At the crowd’s edge, Lieutenant Commander Lo stood staring at him with a sour face, an unspoken question in his eyes. Tzu locked eyes with his wife, and when he couldn’t contain his discovery anymore, he smiled. She shouted uncharacteristically, leaping with both hands in the air.

The rest of the crew turned to stare at her and then began cheering. Just beyond them, a faint sea breeze lifted the Directorate flag hanging by the ship’s stern; the yellow banner with red stars fluttered slightly. To Tzu, it seemed like perfection, fitting for the moment. When he looked back to the rail, he noticed that Lo was gone, already on his way inside to report the mission results back to Hainan.

U.S. Navy P-8, Above the Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean

Even from eight thousand feet up, they could see that the people on the deck were celebrating something.

“Maybe the captain announced a pool party,” said Commander Bill “Sweetie” Darling from the controls.

Darling and his crew were on their way back from a check-out flight on the P-8 Poseidon’s recent engine upgrades. The plane had been designed for warship hunting, but there were none in the quadrant, and they were bored. The Directorate research vessel offered some excitement, at least as much as could be had in this corner of the Pacific.

The copilot, Dave “Fang” Treehorn, sent a live feed of the Xiang Yang Hong 18’s deck from the P-8’s sensor-pod cameras. The cockpit of the Poseidon, a Boeing 737 passenger jet modified to Navy specifications for sub hunting, was considered spacious by military standards. But military aviators always want more information, and Darling regularly flipped through the available sensor feeds on the cockpit screens to satisfy the craving.

“Time to head down and take a closer look?” asked Treehorn.

“No fair that they get to have all the fun today. If it’s a party, we should have been invited,” said Darling. “Make sure to zoom in and grab shots of that submersible; give the intel shop some busywork.”

“Registry says it’s a science expedition,” said Treehorn.

The P-8 dove smoothly down to five hundred feet, Darling banking the plane in a steep turn that kept the vessel off the starboard wing. A plane that big, that fast, and that low roaring overhead was disconcerting to any observer. The crew of the Xiang Yang Hong 18 would be on notice now.

“X-Ray Yankee Hotel 18, this is U.S. Navy Papa-8 asking if you need assistance,” said Darling. “We noticed you are stopped just over a rather deep hole in the ocean, not the best place for snorkeling.”

Treehorn started laughing, as did the rest of the P-8 crew listening in on the comms.

Darling brought the plane back up to a thousand feet. “That’s good; now maybe they can actually hear their radio,” said Treehorn.

“Got their attention, though,” said Darling.

“I’ll say. Check your screen. They’re hoisting the submersible and trying to put a tarp over it at the same time,” said Treehorn. “One guy just fell overboard.”

Then a voice came on the radio. Darling instantly recognized the command tone of a fellow member of the military brotherhood.

“U.S. Navy P-8, this is Tzu-long, chief scientist of an official expedition of the China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Development Association. We are in international waters, operating under scientific charter. Do you copy?”

“We copy, XYH 18,” said Darling. “I don’t want to get into the legalities, but these waters are protected U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, as designated by the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. Stand by. We will be vectoring a U.S. Coast Guard vessel to ensure that you are not engaged in illegal fishing.”

“Negative. This is a scientific mission. We do not need authorization. Any further interference with this peaceful mission will be considered a hostile act by the Directorate government,” said the voice. “Do you copy?”

“Well, that got nasty pretty fast,” said Treehorn to his pilot.

“Foreplay’s for chumps,” said Darling.

“Are we really calling in the Coasties?” asked Treehorn.

“Naw. I guarantee they aren’t fishing, but no need to start a war over it,” Darling responded.

“We copy, XYH 18,” he said into the radio. “Papa-8 is leaving station. You lost one overboard, don’t forget.”

Darling brought the P-8 up to three thousand feet and powered back the engines, giving the big jet a near weightless moment. Then Darling brought the P-8 around and pointed the nose down at the Chinese ship’s stern, backing off the twin engines’ power even more, so that the almost ninety-ton jet’s dive was nearly silent.

“We’re not done yet. I’m going to take her low, one more pass, and when they’ve got their heads down, we drop a Remora two thousand meters off the stern,” said Darling.

“Aye, sir,” said the weapons crewman. “Standing by.”

Xiang Yang Hong 18, Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean

Lieutenant Commander Lo handed the radio’s mike back to the captain.

“This is taking too long,” said Lo. “We need to be gone before their border-guard ship arrives. Dr. Tzu, do you have everything that your team needs?”

“Yes, we could do more surveys, but it is —”

A roar shook the entire ship. Tzu hit the deck with his hands over his ears. There was a flash of white as the P-8 went overhead at full power less than a hundred feet off the starboard side.

Lo couldn’t help but admire the move. Spiteful, yet audacious.

The scientist felt like he might throw up.

As the jet’s thunder receded, one of the crew shouted, “Something in the water, a torpedo behind us!”

“Calm down,” said Lo, standing with his hands on his hips. “If it was a torpedo, we’d already be dead. It’s just a sonobuoy, maybe one of their Remora underwater drones.”

“Do they know?” said Tzu.

“No, there’s nothing up here of interest. What matters for us is far below,” said Lo, nonplussed, as he eyed the drone now following in their wake.

He turned back to the scientist. “And Tzu?” said Lo. “The leadership is aware of your success. Enjoy the moment with your wife. And make sure the submersible is secured.”

It was the first kind word he had ever said to Tzu.

National Defense Reserve Fleet, Suisun Bay, California

The sun rising over the East Bay gave the fog a paper-lantern glow.

“Torres, you sleep at all last night?” said Mike Simmons. The contractor patiently scanned the water ahead of the battered aluminum launch, seeming to look right through the nineteen-year-old kid he shared it with. His fist enveloped the outboard motor’s throttle, which he held with a loose grip, gentle despite his callused palms and barnacle-like knuckles. He sat with one knee resting just below his chin, the other leg sprawling lazily toward the bow, at ease but ready to kick the kid overboard at a moment’s notice.

“No, but I’m compensated,” said Seaman Gabriel Torres. “Took a stim before I came in.”

Mike took a sip from a pitted steel sailor’s mug. His right trigger finger had a permanent crook from decades of carrying his coffee with him eighteen hours a day. He shifted his weight slightly and the launch settled deeper to starboard, causing Torres to catch himself on his seat in the bow. The retired chief petty officer weighed a good eighty pounds more than Torres, the difference recognizable in their voices as much as in the way the launch accommodated them.

“Big group sim down at the Cow Palace again,” said Torres. “Brazilian feed. Retro night. Carnival in Rio, back in the aughts.”

“You know,” Mike said, “I was in Rio once then. Not for Carnival, though. Unbelievable. More ass than a… how I got any of my guys back on the ship, I still do not know.”

“Hmmm,” Torres said. He nodded with absent-minded politeness, his attention fixed on his viz glasses. All these kids were the same once they put those damn things on, thought Mike. If they missed something important, they knew they could just watch it again. They could call up anything you’d ever said to them, yet they could never remember it.

The gold-rimmed Samsung glasses that Torres wore were definitely not Navy issue. Mike caught a flash of the Palo Alto A’s @ logo in reverse on the lens. So Torres was watching a replay of Palo Alto’s game against the Yankees from last night. Beneath the game’s display, a news-ticker video pop-up updated viewers on the latest border clashes between Chinese and Russian forces in Siberia.

“Game was a blowout, but the no-hitter by Parsons fell apart at the bottom of the eighth,” said Mike. “Too bad for the A’s.”

Torres, busted, took off the glasses and glared at Mike, whose eyes continued to pan across the steely water.

The young sailor knew not to say anything more. Shouting at a contractor was a quick path to another write-up. And more important, there was something about the old man that made it clear that, even though he was retired, he would like nothing more than to toss Torres overboard, and he’d do it without spilling a drop of coffee.

“Seaman, you’re on duty. I may be a civilian now and out of your chain of command,” said Mike, “but you work for the Navy. Do not disrespect the Navy by disappearing into those damn glasses.”

“Yes, sir,” said Torres.

“It’s ‘Chief,’ ” said Mike. “ ‘Sir’ is for officers. I actually work for a living.” He smiled at the old military joke, winking to let Torres know the situation was over as far as he was concerned. That was it, right there. The sly charm that had gotten him so far and simultaneously held him back. If Torres hadn’t been aboard, the chief could have puttered across the bay at a leisurely seven knots and pulled up, if he had the tide right, at the St. Francis Yacht Club. Grab a seat at the bar and swap old sea stories. After a while, one of the divorcées who hung out there would send over a drink, maybe say something about how much he looked like that old Hollywood actor, the one with all the adopted kids from around the world. Mike would then crack the old line that he had kids around the world too, he just didn’t know them, and the play would be on.

The rising sun began to reveal the outlines of the warships moored around them. The calls of a flight of gulls overhead made the silent, rusting vessels seem that much more lifeless.

“Used to be a bunch of scrap stuck in the Ghost Fleet,” said Mike, giving a running commentary as they passed between an old fleet tanker from the 1980s and an Aegis cruiser retired after the first debt crisis. “But a lot of ships here were put down before their time. Retired all the same, though.”

“I don’t get why we’re even here, Chief. These old ships, they’re done. They don’t need us,” said Torres. “And we don’t need them.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Mike. “It may seem like putting lipstick on old whores in a retirement home, but you’re looking at the Navy’s insurance policy, small as it may now be. You know, they kept something like five hundred ships in the Ghost Fleet back during the Cold War, just in case.”

“Floater, port side,” said Torres.

“Thanks,” said Mike, steering the launch around a faded blue plastic barrel bobbing in the water.

“And here’s our newest arrival, the Zumwalt,” Mike announced, pointing out the next ship anchored in line. “It didn’t fit in with the fleet when they wasted champagne on that ugly bow, and it doesn’t belong here now. Got no history, no credibility. They should have turned it into a reef, but all that fake composite crap would just kill all the fish.”

“What’s the deal with that bow?” said Torres. “It’s going the wrong direction.”

“Reverse tumblehome is the technical term,” said Mike. “See how the chine of the hull angles toward the center of the ship, like a box-cutter blade? That’s what happens when you go trying to grab the future while still being stuck two steps behind the present. DD(X) is what they called them at the start, as if the X made it special. Navy was going to build a new fleet of twenty-first-century stealthy battleships with electric guns and all that shit. Plan was to build thirty-two of them. But the ship ended up costing a mint, none of the ray guns they built for it worked for shit, and so the Navy bought just three. And then when the budget cuts came after the Dhahran crisis, the admirals couldn’t wait to send the Z straight into the Ghost Fleet here.”

“What happened to the other two ships?” said Torres.

“There are worse fates for a ship than being here,” said Mike, thinking about the half-built sister ships being sold off for scrap during the last budget crisis.

“So what do we gotta do after we get aboard it?” asked Torres.

“Aboard her,” said Mike. “Not it.”

“Chief, you can’t say that anymore,” said Torres. “Her.”

“Jesus, Torres, you can call the ship him if you want,” said Mike. “But don’t ever, ever call any of these uglies it. No matter what the regs say.”

“Well, she, he – whatever – looks like an LCS,” said Torres, referring to the littoral combat ships used by the Navy for forward-presence patrol missions all over the world. “That’s where I wish I was.”

“An LCS, huh? Dreaming of being off the coast of Bali in a ‘little crappy ship,’ wind blowing through your hair at fifty knots, throwing firecrackers at pirates?” said Mike. “Get the line ready.”

“Didn’t I hear your son was aboard an LCS?” asked Torres. “How does he like it?”

“I don’t know,” said Mike. “We’re not in touch.”

“Sorry, Chief.”

“You know, Torres, you must have really pissed somebody off to get stuck with me and the Ghost Fleet.” The old man was clearly changing the subject.

Torres fended the launch off from a small barge at the stern. Without looking, he tied a bowline knot that made the old chief suppress a smile. Maybe the new kids weren’t all bad.

“Nice knot there,” said Mike. “You been practicing like I showed you?”

“No need,” said Torres, tapping his glasses. “Just have to show me once and it’s saved forever.”