Ghost Fleet Read online

  “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.

  Directorate Command, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

  I live in lonely desolation, / And wonder when my end will come.