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

Автор книги: P. Singer

Соавторы: August Cole
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

Part 3

All warfare is based on deception.

– Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

Duke’s Bar, Waikiki Beach, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

She was a goddess.

Xiao Zheng knew he would never have had a chance with a girl like this back home in Wuhan. When he was in elementary school, he’d thought being surrounded by so many boys and so few girls was a good thing. But at eighteen, Xiao realized that all it meant was that even the ugliest ducklings had their pick of the boys. And he was not the kind of boy they picked. He wore thick black bamboo-framed glasses because he was the only one in his unit whose eyes hadn’t responded well to the mandatory vision-enhancement surgery.

The goddess wore a flowing blue skirt and a tight white tank top; she had a leather backpack-style purse slung across her shoulder.

As she entered Duke’s, she adjusted her white-framed sunglasses on the bridge of her nose and let down her ebony hair. Xiao had to tell himself to start breathing again. He’d been deployed in Honolulu for three months now and he still had trouble working up the courage to speak to the female marines in his unit.

As she crossed the room, a group of sailors shouted at her in broken English to come drink with them. She ignored them, and Xiao’s heart soared.

The vision made her way through the crowded bar, smiling at the other girls scattered among the tables drinking vodka shots or white wine with the various Directorate soldiers. These were prostitutes, most of them flown in from back home. But this one was clearly something different. Xiao Zheng knew he was staring, but the young Directorate marine couldn’t help himself. She stopped at the bar and pushed her sunglasses up on the top of her head. The way she held herself made it clear she could not be bought. She had to be earned.

For the next hour, he watched her. With someone so beautiful, he’d found that sometimes watching was enough.

“Another round!” shouted Bo Dai from the barstool next to Xiao Zheng, elbowing Xiao in the ribs. A microphone on Bo’s digital dog tags around his neck transmitted the command to a small translator he wore on his belt. The card-deck-size device scratchily conveyed his bellowed command in tinny English a moment later. Bo was the senior enlisted marine in Xiao’s squad, and he usually looked out for him.

Nine brimming shot glasses arrived quickly, as if the bartender had anticipated the order.

“Drink, you pussy,” Bo shouted at the top of his lungs before putting Xiao in a gentle headlock. The translator device started to convey the bawdy order before Bo silenced it with a drunken slap.

Xiao cringed and downed the shot. It was warm tequila, and he gagged as Bo whooped.

“Okay, no more of this mooning over some local whore. I need to know my best assistant machine gunner is not afraid of girls, because if he is, then what’s he going to do when the Americans from California come for us with both barrels?” Bo mimed an enormous pair of breasts.

The big sergeant dragged Xiao over to the goddess and set him down on the barstool next to her like an offering. Xiao stood. His knees trembled. He had to get out of there. Go anywhere but where he really wanted to be.

Xiao’s legs were unsteady; he turned to go but knocked over the stool. A lithe and deeply tanned arm reached out to catch him by the shoulder before he fell too. “Easy there, sailor,” she said.

She touched me! Xiao wanted to shout.

What to say? What was the Hawaiian phrase for “hello” they had learned? O-la-ha? No – he wanted her to hear his own words, even if he didn’t know what they should be.

But before he could say anything to the goddess, her sunglasses fell to the floor, and she slipped off her stool and bent down to pick them up, giving Xiao an unforgettable view.

“I need to go wash these off. Then you can buy me a drink?” she asked.

Xiao nodded silently and she smiled before disappearing into the back of the crowded bar. He fished in his pocket for some bills to pay the bartender for another wine for her so it would be waiting when she returned.

“Shit!” he cursed out loud. He stumbled and rushed back to the table where he had been sitting earlier. His wallet had to be there.

His squad mates registered the intense look on Xiao’s face as he dropped to all fours in front of everyone in the restaurant and began crawling under the table, looking for his wallet. There. Under a wrapper of soy chips lay his wallet, damp with beer. He stuffed it into his back pocket and stood up.

The other marines were laughing at him. Some barked like small dogs.

“Little friend, if you need a condom, I’ve got plenty,” Bo said.

Xiao turned away from Bo’s crude hand gestures and pushed through the crowd to the back of the bar, stumbling over toes and slipping on a slime of spilled liquor and beer. He made it without falling and stood in the darkened entrance to the bathroom. Was this the right place to wait? It was quieter. He cast a look over his shoulder to make sure none of his squad were going to humiliate him again.

All clear. When he turned around, there she was, standing close enough for him to kiss, if he had had the courage.

“Did you forget my drink?” she said.

Xiao flushed and looked down at his feet, again catching another eyeful of her breasts. She put a hand on his belt buckle and tugged slightly. He leaned back, and she tugged just a little bit harder.

“That’s okay, we don’t need it. Come with me,” she said and led him away from the bathrooms. “Where it’s quieter.”

“Yes, better,” he muttered, but not loud enough for the translator to pick up. He followed her down the humid stairway that led from the bar’s main room to a pitch-black storage area.

As they reached the bottom of the stairs, he realized that she was taller than him. But as she drew his face into her breasts, he decided he was just the right size.

Lavender and talc. It felt like all the blood that had rushed to his cheeks was now flowing to his groin. He felt a new courage rising up inside him. Bo was right! I should have gotten a condom when I had the chance.

She sighed and held him closer, drawing the moment out.

His body stiffened and then spasmed as the sharpened stem of the white sunglasses drove in just behind his jawbone, severing his internal carotid artery.

University of Wisconsin, Madison

When she saw the two men in matching gray suits enter the back of the lecture hall, Vernalise Li realized she should have listened to her mother’s warnings.

But instead she’d told her mom that she needed to stop reading Wikipedia, that what had happened to the Japanese Americans in the 1940s wouldn’t happen in the twenty-first century. People were better than that now, or so she’d thought.

She continued lecturing, unconsciously adopting a more Southern Californian accent with each word.

“From here, you can see that a rack-mount power system has its limitations. What are they? Space, for sure,” she said.

So what if she’d been born in Beijing? She had grown up in Santa Monica.

“But the advantage? Density. By using a fluid-based energy-storage system that, with a conformable design, we can address industrial pulse-power applications where the current rack designs fall short.”

She had played beach volleyball in high school. Varsity!

“The switch today operates for four milliseconds, and we are working to increase power density. That goes back to the question of how to store the energy. It always comes back to density, and fluid is the answer.”

She watched the two men take seats. The suits were evidently cheap, likely Dockers, but it didn’t matter. If they wanted to blend in, wearing suits and ties on campus any day but graduation wasn’t the way to go. Then she noticed they weren’t wearing viz glasses, so they weren’t even recording the lecture. Were they just checking in to make sure students were actually in class? It wouldn’t be surprising; the whole campus knew conscription was coming.

“The other element is addressing contamination in the switches, which always, always, always leads to shorter minority carrier lifespan. Plus, we’re maximizing peak power again, which makes contamination a major cause of degradation in these light-activated switch designs.”

So what was their deal? No one attended a lecture on the mathematical dynamics of pulsed-power systems for fun.

“Okay,” she said, wrapping up. “You know where to find me on the course sim later if you have any questions.”

“I’d like to ask one, with your students’ permission, of course,” said Professor Leonowsky, who’d stopped by earlier and was sitting in the front row. He perched his viz glasses atop his bald head and smiled with the ease of someone for whom the pressure of the tenure clock was a distant memory.

“Everyone, we’re not done yet. Have we all got a few more minutes? Of course we do,” said Leonowsky, as ever answering his own question.

“Certainly,” said Vern, hiding her trembling hands behind her back. Why did believing you were about to be accused of an unnamed crime make you feel guilty, even when you knew you were innocent? She could barely speak Mandarin, at least not without a horrible American accent, as her mother never failed to remind her.

“Let’s get to the practicalities. What can anyone really do with a fluid-based battery the size of a house with only short-term storage capabilities?” Leonowsky asked. “There’s no market for that that I can see. Can you?”

He was on the tenure committee and would often drop in on junior professors’ lectures and ask pointed questions, just so no one would forget his role as a career gatekeeper.

“We don’t know. Yet,” Vern said, fighting the stammer welling up inside her. “What I’m saying is, no one can anticipate what future needs might be. Maybe it’s bigger sims, or…”

The men in the back of the room stared intently at her. They did not even blink.

“I’m just not sure. But that we don’t know the applications now doesn’t mean we won’t find a use later. Back when computers were first developed, the CEO of IBM thought the world market would be only five computers in total. We know how that worked out,” said Vern.

“Indeed, but obviously, not every invention is comparable to the computer,” said Professor Leonowsky.

Tenure be damned, Vern just wanted out of the room, away from those men. She looked down at her sandals and back up at her future.

“My answer is that I will have to get you a better answer,” said Vern.

“I think that would be for the best,” said Leonowsky.

Students were bolting out of the room. Vern was embarrassed by her performance but relieved to see that at least the two men were gone now.

Professor Leonowsky was occupied with a pair of first-year graduate students. If she moved quickly, she could get out without having to talk to anyone. Right now she needed something to eat and a half-hour dive somewhere tropical to chill out. Maybe the Turks and Caicos sim.

She was bent over her bag, struggling with the buckle, when the letters FBI appeared a few inches in front of her face.

She looked up. One of the suits stood before her. He held a worn black leather wallet that revealed a badge and ID. The other man was back at the door, blocking the room’s only exit.

“Miss Vernalise Li? We need you to come with us.”

That’s Dr. Li, she thought to herself. But she didn’t bother to correct him.

“No handcuffs?” she asked bitterly. “You’re not even going to frisk me? You’ll at least get a good write-up in the campus paper: ‘Chinese Spy Busted in Our Midst!’ ” The agent shook his head and put his hand on her shoulder. He spoke in a whisper, with the awkward gentleness of somebody not used to caring what other people thought of what he said.

“Miss Li, it’s not like that. Not at all. We’re here for your protection. Everything you said today matters more than you can imagine.”

Fort Mason, San Francisco

Captain Jamie Simmons wiped the sweat from his forehead. Having to take a bus and then walk uphill from the stop was not the way he imagined a Navy officer would return home after nine months at sea. But at least he was home.

Home now meant an officer’s quarters in Fort Mason, in San Francisco’s Marina District. Overlooking the Bay, it was priceless real estate even in wartime. The Navy might have been pushed around at sea, but it was clearly having its way on land. Marines guarded checkpoints and blocked civilian traffic from entering Bay Street. A pair of tan air-defense Humvees, bristling with missiles, were parked at the corner of Laguna and Bay. Each pointed four AIM-120 SLAMRAAMs (Surface-Launched Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles) accusingly to the west. Across the water, high up on Hawk Hill in Marin, were more missile batteries and a radar installation under construction. The Directorate had made no moves to push beyond the edge of its so-called Eastern Pacific Stability Zone, so the only action the National Guardsmen manning the mobile batteries had seen so far were afternoon games of soccer with the neighborhood kids.

On the sidewalk in front of Jamie’s house, a small crowd had gathered. For the most part, they were people he did not know. Squaring his shoulders, he forced a smile and walked up to them. They took in his captain’s insignia and then paused at the scar just above his right eye. They shook his hand. Some even hugged him. He was the hero who’d commanded the only ship that had fought its way out of Pearl. Everyone needs some hope, and people seemed to get it just from touching Jamie. They chose to ignore that everything since that day had gone from bad to worse, both for Jamie and America.

The front door opened and his kids rushed out, crashed into his legs, and hung on with their lovingly desperate grip.

“Claire, Martin, I missed you sooooo much,” said Jamie. “You’re all grown up!”

He lifted a child in each arm, swaying slightly as if he were back at sea. The crowd on the sidewalk backed off, scattering to give him space. They knew how it was.

Martin leaned in to Jamie’s ear. “Daddy, I made you a sign inside. Did you bring me anything?”

Jamie smiled sadly. “Sorry, not tonight,” he said. “Show me the sign.”

“I made it first,” said Claire, trying to win back his attention.

Jamie set the kids down as Lindsey approached.

Her dark brown hair was shorter than he remembered. She stood on her tiptoes and he kissed her, savoring the feel of her hair as it brushed across his cheek. That moment was something no sim could capture.

She also looked thinner than he remembered, likely from the worry he’d put her through. She was even thinner than when he’d first seen her, running the Burke-Gilman trail near the University of Washington on a rainy spring morning. A smile was all it took for him to notice her. Though he had already been exhausted from crew practice, he’d kept running just for a chance to ask her name when she finally stopped, four miles later at a water fountain.

“Over here,” said Claire, pulling on his hand. “Come see the sign we made.”

Martin studied his father’s uniform intently. “I like your ribbons. Do you want some cereal?” he said.

“Later we can have some,” said Jamie. “Right now, I want to see this sign.”

Martin and Claire led their father into the sparely furnished living room, no rug, only a couch and a single chair.

“Not much here,” said Lindsey. “The rest is still in San Diego.”

“Lots of room for parties, at least,” said Jamie, looking around the room as the guests began to file in. Navy dress uniforms, spouses in suits or cocktail dresses, and a lot of kids. Before the war, you wouldn’t have seen so many kids at a party like this, Jamie thought. Now, everyone wanted to keep them close.

“They’ve all been waiting for this moment. I’ve been waiting. All part of Navy life, right, Captain?” said Lindsey, stretching out his new rank.

Jamie took in her smile and brought her close. Wives were usually there for promotion ceremonies, but it had all been done on the fly as they prepped for the shitstorm that the Guam relief mission had turned into.

“Daddy, over here!” shouted Martin. “No kissing!”

Jamie navigated through a series of hugs and handshakes to get to where a three-foot-by-five-foot Welcome Home Dady! sign hung. Purple and green crayon, the kids’ respective favorite colors, covered the entire sign, which meant no one else had been allowed to contribute.

“Wow, this is amazing,” said Jamie.

He knelt down and hugged both kids hard, fighting back tears.

Then he detected a faint, acrid smell. It was the pungent musk of a life pledged to steel ships, to wooden piers coated in tarry creosote, and to a losing battle against rust and rot. Still kneeling, Jamie slowly looked over and saw the black leather work boots. The boots were old, worn, nicked, and creased. But they still shone, the bulbs of the steel toes giving off an eight-ball’s luster. The boots were turned out slightly, maybe ten degrees at the left, fifteen degrees at the right. It was a ready stance, as if the world might pitch or heave at any moment. Jamie’s body recognized it all first and sent an icy blast of adrenaline into his veins before his brain could process the presence of his father.

“Chief?” said Jamie as he slowly stood. “What are you doing here?”

Lindsey jumped in before an answer could come. “Your father’s been here every weekend since we arrived, doing everything from machining a new pedal for Martin’s bike to playing games with the kids so I could take a shower,” said Lindsey. “He’s been really helpful.”

Mike just held out his right hand. It was meant to be a welcoming gesture, yet the sheer size of the hand hinted at malice or injury. The backs of the hands were scrubbed red, but creosote, rust, and grease still seemed to ooze from the pores. The missing tip of the pinkie was more evidence that these hands were tools first.

“Hello, James,” said Mike. He stared at Jamie, daring his son to say what he really thought.

“He’s made a real difference here,” said Lindsey, still trying to smooth over the moment.

“I wish I could take credit for the sign, but I have been able to help with the house. With all the Directorate cyber-attacks, the fridge won’t talk to the phone, and the toilet doesn’t know whether to flush or clean itself without instructions from its Beijing masters. I can’t fix the digital stuff, but I can at least clean up and rig some workarounds,” said Mike.

Jamie released his two kids and shook the hand, suddenly without the confident grip he had expected to use.

“Okay, kids, go show your friends the sandbox Grandpa built,” said Lindsey.

For the next hour, Lindsey stayed close to Jamie. She had always been good at this sort of thing, the chitchat, the empty How are yous, and all he could think about was his father walking the perimeter of his yard, keeping an eye on his kids, nursing a can of Coke.

Soon, the party began to break up, the guests having put in their appearances but knowing they weren’t supposed to linger.

When Lindsey went inside to clean up, there was no longer a way for Jamie to avoid talking to his father. The two men took their drinks and stood on the back patio, their silhouettes indistinguishable from each other. They looked down at the Fort Mason Green, toward the piers that had once hosted jazz concerts and winetastings. A pair of pockmarked littoral combat ships and four Mark VI patrol boats nuzzled the piers. Their tiny silhouettes made the absence of the larger warships that should have been there all the more obvious.

“Helluva nice house, Captain,” said Mike. “Can’t say I’ve ever had any admirals for neighbors. Must go with the promotion.”

“What’s going on here?” said Jamie, ignoring his father’s attempt at small talk.

“I figured Lindsey could use the help,” said Mike.

“You did? You don’t even know her, or the kids. You didn’t even come to our wedding,” said Jamie.

“War changes things for all of us,” said Mike.

“I’ll say.” Jamie looked at the walnut-size knuckles he knew were as hard as stones. “I don’t think I ever saw you drink a soda in my entire life.”

Each man took a sip of his drink and waited for the other to speak. The silence was occasionally broken by the laughing and howling of kids.

“The Navy Cross is a helluva thing, James,” said Mike, changing tack.

“It’s because I got the Coronado out,” said Jamie. “Riley died right in front of me at Pearl.”

“Still don’t know how you did it with an LCS,” said Mike. He growled out each letter with disdain. “Better ships didn’t.”

“Easy, Chief, Coronado is still my ship,” said Jamie. “At least, what’s left of it.”

“Well, she made you captain; you’re always gonna owe her that,” said Mike. “Any idea what they’re going to do with her?”

“Maybe make a museum or memorial out of it, when the war’s over,” said Jamie. “Or maybe turn it into dog tags. All that metal we need has to come from somewhere… We could patch up the hits we took at Pearl, but the missile hit we took in the Guam relief op wrecked the whole engine room for good.”

“You don’t belong here with her. You belong at sea.”

“Of all the people to say that,” muttered Jamie.

“So now we’re starting again?” said Mike. “Okay, I deserved that. I wasn’t as good at the home stuff as I was at the job.”

“You could have been,” said Jamie. “If you’d just tried half as hard at your more important job of taking care of your kids. Both of them.”

“Goddamn it, don’t you lay that blame on me,” said Mike. “Even if I’d been home, I couldn’t have saved her.”

“It’s Mackenzie. Say her name,” growled Jamie.

The two stared at each other in silence as Martin and Claire played tag in the yard beyond them.

“So, how is it really for the fleet?” said Mike, trying again to steer the discussion to easier ground.

“There’s a word for doing the same thing over and over and thinking it will have different results,” said Jamie. “I’m sure you heard, they sunk the Ford and the Vinson. The exact minute we crossed their Eastern Pacific Stability Zone line, just like they had warned. Both the carriers and even the subs. We still pushed on after that, and things got worse.”

“What the hell is going on? Too much power in those ships for ’em to be just torn apart like that.”

“Air Force’s toy planes are all hacked and can’t get off the ground while the Directorate owns the heavens – satellites, space stations, everything. They can see every move we make and target at will. We knew they’d eventually be able to do that to the surface ships, but now even the subs can’t hide. And if they can’t hide —”

“They go from sharks to chum,” said Mike.

“Only the boomers were left untargeted,” said Jamie, referring to the ballistic missile submarines that made up the strategic nuclear force.

“They wouldn’t hit them, not unless they wanted us to cut their population by half,” said Mike. “We should have done that when the Chinese first showed up at Pearl. After what the airstrikes did to the Twenty-Fifth ID base in Hawaii and all those Marines on Oahu? Fucking butchers. They were asking for us to nuke them. We still should.”

“I really hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Jamie.

“It will, mark my words,” said Mike. “I’m telling you, we should have nuked ’em the minute things started to go south. At least the chairman of Joint Chiefs had the honor to step down when the so-called commander in chief pussied out.”

“That’s just the spin he put on it after he got fired,” said Jamie. “By the time the national command authority figured out what was happening, it had already happened. After that, strategic calculus changed; going nuclear would just be revenge to the point of suicide. Hell, given how deep the Chinese penetrated our comms net, no one could even have known if the nuke orders would go through. We might just have been giving them a pretext to strike us first.”

“We should still just do it, and do it now. Just nuke Beijing, Shanghai, and make sure you get Hainan too,” said Mike. “No diplomacy, no more of that ‘reimagining-our-world’ bullshit from those eunuchs on TV. We should make their cities glow.”

“What about Moscow?” said Jamie. “Should we nuke that too? How about Paris, Rome, and Berlin, for not stepping up to join a fight an ocean away from them that was already over? And Tokyo, for kindly helping us clean up our bases and then asking us to leave? If we went with your plan, the whole world would be glowing, including here.” He nodded over to where the kids were still chasing each other.

Mike tipped his Coke can to the unlit Golden Gate Bridge and the black void separating San Francisco and Marin.

“The greedy bastards could have just bought the Golden Gate,” said Mike.

“I thought they already did, four years back,” said Jamie.

“No, that was the Carquinez Bridge, some toll-road crap,” said Mike.

“Well, this isn’t over. Hawaii’s not giving up either. Resistance is heating up there. A lot of the troops who made it out fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. They saw insurgency up close, and I hear they’re trying it themselves now,” said Jamie.

“Payback is a bitch,” said Mike.

Both men paused to listen to the chorus of kids’ laughter as they ran by in the dark.

“Lindsey’s been really good through all this,” said Mike. “Some people, they literally forgot how to drive, so they’ve been paralyzed since the Chinese knocked out our GPS. No more auto-drives, and they’re just stuck without anyone at the wheel. Like America. Not your wife, though; I wish there were more like her in this country,” said Mike.

Jamie paused mid-sip and gazed silently at his dad. How was it possible that he was here? How was it possible that he knew better than Jamie how his own wife was doing?

“Just look at this party,” Mike continued. “You’d never think her husband’s ship had been shot to pieces and assumed lost just a little while ago. You will not find a stronger or better woman. You know how I know that?”

“How?” said Jamie.

“She let me in the front door,” said Big Mike.

“That’s because she doesn’t know you,” said Jamie.

“James, I made the effort. It’s been fourteen years since you saw me. I’m different now, because of your mom, because of your sister’s death, because of a lot of things,” said Big Mike.

“And here you are. Like I should just forget it all,” Jamie said.

The two men stared at each other in silence.

“All right, then, have it your way. I tried. I should get going anyway,” said Mike. “I’ve got an early day tomorrow.”

“Aren’t they all now?” said Jamie. “Mentor Crew job, eh?”

The initial wave of losses had whittled down not just the frontline fleet but also its human capital. The Mentor program was started as a way to tap into the expertise that still remained among those too old to be drafted back into service. The old, retired noncommissioned officers had been spread out among the fleet, the idea being that they would help guide the transition for all the new crews that had to be trained up.

“I damn well wasn’t going to fight this war as a contractor,” said Mike.

“So, where do they have you working?”

“I can’t get into it right now,” said Mike. “Not even with you.”

“Some things don’t change,” said Jamie, with a bitter edge in his voice.

“You’ll see. They really do,” said Mike, turning and walking down to say goodbye to the kids.