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

Автор книги: P. Singer

Соавторы: August Cole
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

Haleiwa, Oahu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

With a dirty hand, the woman opened the plastic sandwich bag. The blue and green dinosaurs that decorated it gave her a shiver of discomfort. Her fingers muddied the small garage clicker she pulled out. She tried to wipe it off on her black T-shirt, but the fabric was so grimy with sweat and earth that she only smeared the mud around.

Stop. It doesn’t matter if it’s clean, she told herself. The batteries were good to go. That was what mattered.

She nodded at the prone man beside her, the signal to start filming with the GoPro camera he’d mounted on his rifle.

She held her breath and moved her thumb over the Open button.

Exhale.

“May all our enemies die screaming,” she said. It was a line from a show she used to love, and it seemed apt today.

Send.

A hundred yards away, four IEDs detonated in sequence, starting at the front of the convoy and moving toward the rear. The Wolf armored personnel vehicle in the lead tipped over in flames. The next three trucks in the convoy disappeared in a phosphorous bloom. The fourth truck was untouched, its driver ducking down below the dashboard.

Major Carolyne “Conan” Doyle of the U.S. Marine Corps put the garage-door opener back in the plastic sandwich bag and shoved it into the cargo pocket on her pants. Nothing could go to waste in this kind of war.

It was all so different from any of the combat she had seen in Yemen from the pilot’s seat of an MV-22K Osprey gunship. Here everything itched, everything rusted, and everything had to be scavenged. There was no just-in-time delivery of whatever ammunition or spare part you needed. And instead of government-issue combat footwear, they fought in sandals and running shoes, the group being made up of a few escapees from the captured bases and those who’d been lucky enough to be on leave the day of the attack.

Between the dirty civilian clothes and the tactical playbook they were cribbing from, the insurgents quickly realized they were becoming the very bastards they’d spent most their professional military careers fighting. That’s where their name had come from, the North Shore Mujahideen, or NSM, as they spray-painted it when they were in a rush. It was the darkest of jokes, born not out of admiration or even respect – they’d lost too many friends in the Sandbox for anything like that – but because the goal was the same: to become what the other side loathed, the danger that waited around every corner, the nightmare that just wouldn’t go away, the opponent who wouldn’t play by the rules.

Doyle raised her left arm and waved the trucks forward. Two quick shots came from Conan’s right. Finn, a retired Navy comms specialist who’d spent his time in a forward operation base in Marjah Province, Afghanistan, on an individual-augmentee deployment, shot at the passenger-side window in the undamaged truck’s cab with his M4 carbine. The thick bulletproof glass held but cracked and spider-webbed from the bullets’ impact.

Nicks, an army military police staff sergeant with the Twenty-Fifth ID who had made her bones on detainee operations in Iraq and Syria, sprinted up to the truck, jumped on the running board, and repeatedly smashed at the cracked glass with the butt of her rifle, finally punching a small hole. She pressed a flash-bang grenade into the cab and jumped back down. It detonated with a flash of light equivalent to a million candles and a deafening 180-decibel bang. They’d lifted a box of the grenades, used by SWAT teams for storming rooms, from an abandoned police station. The flash-bangs were considered nonlethal weapons since they stunned and dazed targets but didn’t actually hurt them. That is, unless they were used in an enclosed space the size of a truck cab.

Nicks jumped back up, stuck her rifle barrel through the hole in the window, prodded one of the bodies, and then fired a single round.

“Clear!” Nicks yelled, louder than she thought because she still had the earplugs in.

“Anything?” Finn whispered to Conan, now rummaging around in the back of the truck.

“Not yet; still looking,” said Conan.

Finn checked his watch. They had maybe two minutes until the drones arrived. This was a new route for an ambush, so they might get a little extra time. Given the way the convoy ran unprotected, it seemed like the Directorate forces had not expected to get hit. Or it was a trap to lure them in and they were wasting valuable seconds before the counter-ambush force arrived.

“I’ll get the bikes,” said Nicks, disappearing into the forest. “We need to go.”

Conan appeared from the back of the truck holding up two shoebox-size metal containers.

“All blues?” said Finn.

“I think so,” said Conan. “Might be some greens and reds too.”

“At this point, I’ll take anything,” said Finn.

Nicks emerged from the woods wheeling a pair of mountain bikes draped in thick wool blankets mottled with stains. Sweat dripped off her nose.

“What are we waiting for?” asked Nicks.

“Nothing; let’s move,” said Conan. “Anything in the other trucks?”

“Got a few dozen mags, some nanoplex bricks, some protein bars,” said Finn.

“It’ll do. This was really about the footage,” said Conan. The NSM moved constantly, by bike when they could and on foot when they had to. There was no time for a full night of rest or a solid meal. But all that they really needed was in the metal boxes from the back of the truck.

“Time to go!” shouted Conan. “Children, back to school!”

Fourth Floor, B Ring, Pentagon

As an aviator, Commander Bill “Sweetie” Darling had spent his career chasing the horizon. But it wasn’t until his assignment to the Navy staff offices at the Pentagon that he realized he’d been taking the sky for granted. It had been two weeks since he had seen the sun.

In truth, he had almost seen it once. A week back, a construction detour had forced him to walk across the Pentagon’s inner courtyard. It was daytime, and he knew the sun was somewhere up there, hidden behind the finely woven anti-exploitation netting that covered the whole building now, making it look like it was wrapped in a silk cocoon. Christo City was the nickname going around, a play on the name of the nearby military-industrial complex of office buildings known as Crystal City and the renowned artists who used to wrap monuments in fabric.

But even if Darling’s work was unrelenting, he still had to eat. Maybe it was the pilot in him, but he was damned if he was going to let some drone get him his food. You have to draw the line somewhere, he thought as a train of iRobot Majordomos purred by carrying their honeycomb-like storage containers filled with wraps and sandwiches.

He found Jimmie Links waiting next to a vending machine in front of the entrance to the new Naval Intelligence office. The two men had known each other since the Naval Academy, but their careers had taken very different turns. Though neither of them enjoyed being assigned to the Pentagon, both were happy to be back within a few minutes’ walk of each other.

“Darling, you shouldn’t have waited,” said Links, trying to sound like a housewife in an old commercial.

“Original,” said Darling.

“Tough crowd today,” said Links. “Let’s get going. I’m about sixty seconds from humping the vending machine.”

Darling peered through the finger-smudged glass of the machine and sighed.

“Maybe that Snickers bar and two of those mango squeezes, then you might have the ingredients for a pretty good time,” said Darling.

“I knew you flyboys liked it kinky,” said Links.

They set off, but Links stopped after only a few paces. “Shit, I forgot my wallet.”

“Go get it, I’m not buying,” said Darling.

“Come with me, you can check out the new DIA analyst, the one I was telling you about,” said Links.

“You didn’t invite her?” said Darling.

“I have to work with her, so better to watch you crash and burn with her,” said Links.

He led them into his office, first going through a retina scan, then swiping his access card, and finally punching in a number code. After they entered the secure cell, the door locked behind them with a magnetic click.

They passed through an inner door of frosted glass with the words Non-Acoustic Anti-Submarine Warfare stenciled across it. Fresh drywall dust covered the door handle.

Links led Darling into his cubicle, a drab, sterile space. The only decorations were a 3-D topographical map of Oahu and, hanging from a thumbtack, a lipstick-smudged Chinese air-pollution-filter mask.

“So this is where the magic happens?” Darling asked dryly.

“There’s damn little magic happening here, I’m afraid,” said Links soberly. “We still don’t have much of a clue how they’re tagging our subs.” The opening missile strikes that had hit the Pacific carriers had been a shock to the fleet, but the way the enemy had found and destroyed the Navy’s submarines was a more disturbing mystery. The U.S. intelligence community had known the Chinese were catching up in surface-ship construction, but they believed that, under the sea, the U.S. had an asymmetric advantage. Ever since the Cold War, if an American sub didn’t want to be found, you couldn’t find it. But somehow the other side had figured out how to make the ocean transparent and thus deadly to the sub fleet that was supposed to give the U.S. its overwhelming edge.

Darling sat down and, picking up on Links’s sober mood, said quietly, “Tell me more.”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” said Links. “I keep thinking of what this lecturer once told us, back in training. He was old-guard CIA, had done Afghanistan both times, during the Cold War and then again after 9/11. He compared the intelligence task to solving a jigsaw puzzle, except that you didn’t get the box cover, so you didn’t know what the final picture was. And you got only a few pieces at a time, not all of them. And even worse, you always got a bunch of pieces from some other puzzle thrown in.”

“Start with the detection, and then the targeting,” Darling suggested.

“We spend all our time looking backward, trying to understand how,” said Links. “One argument is that the Directorate is using its own subs to shadow ours. And we just keep failing to detect them somehow.”

Darling stiffened in his chair as he recalled losing the John Warner to a Chinese ballistic missile.

“No way,” he said. “The Directorate sub we were following was too far away from the Warner to be able to get any kind of pinpoint tracking. And there were no transmission traces. If their sub had communicated the Warner’s position back to Hainan, we would have caught it. Besides, that sub was too busy running from us to do anything. About the time the Stonefish were firing, it was sinking. We got it, that’s one thing I am certain of.”

“Could they have used your comms to track the Warner, maybe even gotten into ATHENA?” asked Links. “Did you pick up anything like that?”

“Nope, nothing. Have you thought about big-data collection from environmental sensors, like how those fishermen kept detecting our Trident missile subs off Bremerton a few years back? Or what about space-based underwater detection? Tracking the IR or even something like the Bernoulli effect, from the water distortion?” said Darling. “Maybe a Ouija board?”

“We’ve run them all down. The sensor one is out, as you have to seed the area beforehand. There’s no trace of that, plus the Chinese are picking up our sub traffic everywhere, no matter where we go. The Oregon paid the price for us testing that theory off the Aleutians. Space-based detection is the working theory, but no one knows how the Chinese could manage that either. NAASW is looking at synthetic aperture radar as an option for undersea detection,” said Links. “During the Cold War, there were some attempts to make that work in tracking Soviet boomers, but nothing stuck. More important, they can’t cover an ocean area without broadcasting enough energy down from space that we’d pick it up.”

“How about the other way around?” Darling suggested. “How about magnetic detection of the sub’s hulls? That’s the working theory at the analysis section we have set up down at the B-ring urinal.”

“No, that’s another Cold War tech that was tried and failed,” said Links. “It just doesn’t work from space. There’s too much backscatter to pull out anything metallic at that range. They’d be plinking pretty much every piece of metal on the sea floor with Stonefish warheads. Plus, you also have the mystery of how they were able to track the subs and the carriers but couldn’t pinpoint the escort ships,” said Links.

“Maybe the escorts weren’t worth the trouble? Maybe the Chinese didn’t have enough missiles?” said Darling.

“No way. You think they’d try to save a few bucks if they could take out all of our Aegis ships?” said Links.

“So if that’s the case, it’s something that’s letting them track the nukes,” said Darling.

“Yep, which puts us at, as we call it in the intelligence community, square one,” said Links.

“So the real question is, what’s so special about a nuclear reactor?” said Darling. “If you want to find one from really far away, you have to be able to collect whatever it emits. But, shit, at range it’s never going to emit anything more than low-level Cherenkov rays.”

“What did you say?” Links asked with a catch in his voice.

“Cherenkov rays,” said Darling. “Did you sleep through the nuclear physics class at the Naval Academy? It’s what gives nuclear reactors their blue glow, something about charged particles passing through the medium that surrounds the nuclear reaction at different speeds than light. Some Russian named Cherenkov discovered them like a hundred years ago. He won the Nobel Prize for it.”

“Star Trek. You bastard,” whispered Links to himself. He tossed his wallet onto the desk with a shaking hand. “Lunch is on me. I’ve got to run, got an idea.”

“Whatever, man. Your DIA analyst better be worth it.” Darling picked up the wallet and was just beginning to stand when he heard the security door shut with a heavy thud.

Moana Surfrider Hotel, Waikiki Beach, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

“Ms. Shin, please, over here,” said the voice box, translating the guard’s Chinese into English. The guard was male, but the device had been set to speak in a digitized voice that matched the gender of the person being spoken to. Carrie wasn’t sure if it was a joke or if some Directorate scientist had concluded that if a woman heard a female voice coming out of a burly, armed male Directorate marine, she would somehow find it more reassuring than a male’s voice.

“Okay, okay,” Carrie said. She put her arms out and threw her head back, cruciform-style, her long hair reaching to her waist.

“We have selected you for extra assurance measures,” the marine said. He stood at about her height but had around twice her mass in muscle. The telltale acne and thick neck showed how he had gotten so big. So many of their marines had that look.

“Do you understand?” said the voice box.

“Yep,” said Carrie.

“The Directorate appreciates your compliance,” said the device. That was the latest phrase the voice boxes were spitting out. She couldn’t tell if it was what the guard had actually said or if it was just a stock phrase from an automated setting.

The chem swabs tickled when they ran down her arms and legs. It felt like a spider exploring her.

“I am complete,” said the voice box.

She opened her eyes. The swab had not turned red, as it would have if it had detected explosives. Instead, it was a light brown. The guard looked quizzically at the swab, unsure of what the earthy substance was.

“It’s okay,” said Carrie. “It’s makeup, from my arm. I cut myself cooking.” She ran her fingers across her cheeks as if putting on foundation and flashed a smile.

The voice box translated for the marine, who nodded, paused, and then muttered a phrase she could barely hear.

“Thank you for your compliance,” the box said. By this time the marine was looking to the next person in line.

She walked away slowly, calming herself, unconsciously rubbing the thin scabs on her arm. At least this check hadn’t been as bad as the checkpoint at the bus station; there, the guard made her bend over and speak directly into the voice box on his belt. She caught a glimpse of Waikiki Beach across the street and for a moment she found herself thinking of her fiancé, the sunset walk on his birthday. The wind had been up that night.

The grind of rubber wheels on asphalt behind her snapped her out of the memory, and she leaped to the right, onto the sidewalk. The hybrid-electric Wolf armored personnel carrier glided quietly by as the Directorate marine manning the machine gun on the roof offered a timid wave.

Adrenaline pumping, she strode purposefully through the four columns of the hotel’s grand entrance and shivered despite the heat and humidity.

Before the war, she’d had to use the staff entrance. The gleaming white hotel had been built just three years after the American annexation in 1898 on land originally owned by the Hawaiian royal family, so having both the guests and the staff use the main entrance was part of some Directorate propaganda about how the Chinese forces were there for similar reasons, to ensure security, but they, unlike the Americans, would show respect for the “true” citizens of Hawaii. The Directorate was real big on who had been on what island first. But whether you were native, hapa (of mixed ethnicity), or from the mainland, you still had to go through the screening checkpoint out on the street.

Inside the hardwood-floored lobby, Chinese soldiers, sailors, and marines, along with a few civilians, lounged about, drinking, and chatting. Just as it was back in World War II, the old hotel had been converted into a hub for shore leave. She passed through the lobby and went out to the back porch. From her perch at the sports-equipment-rental desk, she couldn’t see the ocean, but she could hear it. That counted for a lot.

“That was amazing,” a man’s voice said, taking her out of her thoughts. He spoke English without one of the translator devices. “What a beautiful sport it must be for those who are truly skilled.”

He set a still-wet longboard against the wall. There was a brief pause as he stepped back to make sure it would not topple over.

“It’s a lot to expect for anyone to pick up in just an hour,” said Carrie. “I bet you did great.”

“I spent most of my time swimming next to the board, not riding it,” said the officer. He was clearly fit, washboard abs, but not bulked out by chems like so many of them. His hair was cropped short, but in a stylish manner. She guessed it had been done professionally rather than in the military assembly line.

“The sport of kings is not for everyone,” she said, offering a wink. “I know we’re not supposed to ask questions of the guests, but where’d you pick up English? Yours is excellent.”

“UCLA, where else?” he said, raising two fingers in the sign that went along with the UCLA alma mater song.

“Go Bruins,” she said, smiling slightly.

“Listen, I could really use a lesson,” the officer said. “Sorry, I should introduce myself. My name is Feng Wu. My friends in LA called me Frank.”

Carrie looked down at her tablet.

“I can set you up with one of the hotel instructors, no problem. They’re great. Several of them were pros before all this,” said Carrie.

Frank leaned closer, dripping seawater on the counter. He smiled, showing perfect white teeth.

“You’re a great teacher, I bet,” he said.

“Well, I’m not that good…” she countered.

“I can pay you, or give you an extra ration card if you want, or whatever else.”

Carrie pressed lightly on the scab on her arm.

“There’s no need for that. Helping out is part of our job, actually,” she said. “Any of us can offer the guests our services. I just thought you would want someone more experienced.”

“When should we meet?” he said.

“Monday night is when the outgoing tide’s supposed to be best,” Carrie said. She tilted her head slightly, giving him a glimpse of her neck.

“That’s a long time to wait! How about tomorrow night?” he said.

She smiled back, looking him in the eye.

It wasn’t just her beauty that made her gaze so striking; it was that she was the first local to look at him directly since he’d arrived in Hawaii. All the others tried to avoid eye contact, some mix of shame and fear. She didn’t have that; instead, she was just – what, normal? More like the American girls he remembered fondly from before all this.

“If you are going to be my student, you have to learn to trust me. We’ll meet next Monday. The moon will be full, and so amazing,” she said. “I know just the place, it’s quiet and there’s not a better break on this side of the island.”

“It is a date, then,” said Frank.