Ghost Fleet Read online

  Davidson walked up with a pack of cigarettes in hand. “Smoke?”

  “I thought you’d quit,” said Mike.

  “Yeah, but I know a guy in Vallejo who still sells,” said Davidson. “Figured I’d make it an interesting race between a Stonefish missile and lung cancer.”

  Mike accepted a cigarette as well as a light off Davidson’s butane lighter.

  “These kids are shit workers,” said Mike.

  “You’re right, but you don’t need to ride them so hard,” said Davidson. “They know the stakes.”

  “That’s just it — do they? They can do things I’ll die not knowing how to do,” said Mike. “But do they understand what losing this war will mean?”

  The two watched one of the older men on the Mentor Crew carry a cardboard box unsteadily along the starboard rail. Then a kid with short, spiky dreadlocks pitched in to help guide him inside the ship.

  “They’re just like we were at that age. Full of confidence and full of shit,” Davidson said.

  Mike took a deep drag on his cigarette and then flicked it into the water off the stern.

  “If the Directorate wins but lets them keep all their viz and group sims, will they even know the difference?” said Mike. “I mean, when those goggles are on, they could be anywhere in the world.”

  “You’ve never done it, have you?” asked Davidson.

  “I like the real world well enough,” said Mike.

  “Once you try it, everything looks different,” said Davidson, scratching at a flabby, sunburned biceps. “Or at least it looks like it could be. If I had my viz on right now, I could fly right up to the top of the hangar and look down at us. Well, I could have before the war started. The viz doesn’t work quite the same anymore. I bet a lot of kids want to win this damn thing just to get their glasses working right again.”

  “Atten-huht on deck! . . . Dress-right-dress!”

  Captain Jamie Simmons walked up the gangway, his footsteps quiet for such a big man. He saluted as he stopped to take in the menacing look of the USS Zumwalt.

  The ship was massive: 610 feet long. If the Washington Monument were laid down beside it, the ship would be a full 55 feet longer. Its superstructure above the water had no right angles, a design meant to make it fifty times less visible to radar than any ship before it, while below decks it had the sonar signature of a stealthy submarine. But that was not what made its exterior appear so formidable; it was, ironically, the lack of any apparent weaponry. The Zumwalt had a stripped-down exterior that seemed to conceal countless weapons of destruction.

  But Simmons knew the ship was not as fierce as it looked.

  Once envisioned as the vanguard of the twenty-first-century U.S. fleet, it had instead turned out to be an orphan that no one wanted. The DD(X)-class was conceived in the early 1990s. The design, meant to revolutionize naval warfare, included all sorts of innovations, from the signature box-cutter-blade wave-piercing tumblehome hull to an integrated power system that used a permanent magnetic motor to produce ten times the electric power of normal engines. Highly automated, a DD(X) was to be crewed by half as many sailors as a warship of similar size had needed a generation earlier. This game-changing new design would allow the ship to carry an arsenal of equally game-changing new weapons, most notably an electromagnetic rail gun that would shoot farther than any other gun in history. The U.S. Navy hoped the Zumwalt, the first of what was later renamed the DDG 1000 class, would be a historic vessel, like the USS Monitor, the first ironclad ship of the Civil War, or the HMS Dreadnought, the first true battleship. It was meant to break all the old rules of shipbuilding and so bring in a new era of war at sea.

  That was the plan. By the time Jamie had gotten his master’s degree at the Naval War College, the story of the Z was taught as a case study in how not to build a ship. The design had had too many risky innovations bundled into one project, plus cutting-edge shipbuilding expertise had shifted from the United States to Asia by the end of the twentieth century, and a defense budget focused on fighting land wars in the Middle East couldn’t cover battleships that cost more than seven billion dollars each. The Navy had planned to buy thirty-two copies of the Z. By 2008, it didn’t want any. Only the Zumwalt and two more ships were eventually approved, and then only due to the intercession of a powerful senator on the Appropriations Committee who threatened to filibuster all other Navy contracts unless the project was completed. It wasn’t about saving the ship itself; mainly, she was trying to keep a shipyard in her district from going out of business.

  The actual ship that came out of the yard was revolutionary, to be sure, but it suffered from all the kinks that come with anything that is the first of its kind. It was unsteady at sea; the systems were faulty; the propulsion system was prone to random stoppages and didn’t deliver enough juice. The game-changing hull design leaked water at poorly fitting seams. And because so few of the new ships of the line were actually built, the revolutionary new weapons that were to arm the Z were never put onboard.

  When the defense budget was slashed in the budget crisis after Dhahran, the admirals were delighted to send the Z to early retirement in the Ghost Fleet. One of the two sister ships that were still under construction was gutted and turned into a floating engineering site for a technical college in Newport News, Virginia; the other was used to test a new generation of shipboard firefighting robots.

  “Sir, crew, USS Zumwalt, all present and accounted for.”

  Simmons made his way slowly down the lines of sailors and civilian technicians assembled for his inspection. He offered each sailor a confident greeting, a reassuring smile. Behind him trailed his executive officer, Horatio Cortez, who followed with careful steps, still occasionally catching his new prosthetic left leg and left arm on the hatch edges.

  “XO, how we doing?” asked Simmons as they walked.

  “We’re making progress on the systems rip-out and rewiring, but doing it at the same time as we’re trying to install new uncorrupted and untested hardware just gets harder and harder,” said Cortez. Now belatedly obsessed with hardware attacks, the Navy had ordered the Zumwalt to have any suspect prewar systems removed and destroyed. That the Z and the other ships in the Ghost Fleet had not received the past few years of upgrades had suddenly become one of their strengths. “It’s all about making the old and new gear blend together.”

  Then Simmons stopped abruptly and turned sharply to stand face to face with a man his own height. All along the formation, sailors leaned slightly forward to see what the holdup was.

  “Cortez?” said Simmons, turning back to his XO and trying to mask his evident anger.

  “Sir?” said Cortez.

  “Didn’t you look at the crew roster?” asked Simmons.

  “Yes, sir. They used a NAVSEA selection algorithm based on a mix of qualifications and experience,” said Cortez. He looked from the captain to the old sailor in front of him. The viz glasses flickered with a glimmer of pink and blue. Through his glasses, Cortez could access the Navy records system with a secure version of Google’s PeopleView software. It meant never forgetting a name, but he didn’t need the program when he looked from one face to the other. Cortez started to smile and then hid the grin behind his artificial hand as he feigned clearing his throat. The Navy’s algorithm had seen fit to assign Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Simmons to the ship his son commanded.

  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 d
rab, 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.