Ghost Fleet Read online

  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.”

  USS Coronado, Strait of Malacca

  Each of the dark blue leather seats in the USS Coronado’s wardroom had a movie-theater chair’s sensory suite, complete with viz-glasses chargers, lumbar support, and thermoforming heated cushions that seemed almost too comfortable for military life — until you were sitting through your second hour of briefings.

  This briefer, the officer in charge of the ship’s aviation detachment of three remote-piloted MQ-8 Fire Scout helicopters, thanked her audience and returned to her seat. A few side conversations abruptly stopped when the executive officer rose to give his ops intel brief.

  When the XO, the ship’s second in command, stood at the head of the room, you felt a little bit like you were back in elementary school with the gym teacher looking down at you. The twenty-first-century Navy was supposed to be all about brains. But physical presence still mattered, and the XO, Commander James “Jamie” Simmons, had it. He stood six four and still looked like the University of Washington varsity heavyweight rower he’d once been, projecting a physicality that had become rare among the increasingly technocratic officer corps.

  “Good morning. We’re doing this my way today,” said Simmons. “No viz.”

  The crew groaned at the prospect of having to endure an entire brief without being able to multitask or have their viz glasses record the proceedings.

  A young lieutenant in the back coughed into her fist: “Old school.”

  Coronado’s captain, Commander Tom Riley, stood to the side holding a gleaming black ceramic-and-titanium-mesh coffee mug emblazoned with the shipbuilder’s corporate logo. He couldn’t help himself and smiled at the impertinent comment.

  The display screen loaded the first image and projected it out into the room in a 3-D ripple: a heavily tattooed man on a matte-black electric waterbike firing an assault rifle one-handed up at the bridge of a container ship. Simmons had picked up this technique from an old admiral who’d lectured at the Naval War College: instead of the typical huge slide deck with immersive animations, he used just a single picture for each point he wanted to make.

  “Now that I’ve got your attention,” said Simmons, switching the image to a map of their position at the entry to the Strait of Malacca. A swath of red pulsing dots waited there, each marking where a pirate attack had taken place in the previous year. “More than half of the world’s shipping passes through this channel, which make these red spots a global concern.”

  The roughly six-hundred-mile-long channel between the former Republic of Indonesia and Malaysia was less than two miles wide at its narrowest, barely dividing Malaysia’s authoritarian society from the anarchy that Indonesia had sunk into after the second Timor war. Pirates were a distant memory for most of the world, but the red dots showed that this part of the Pacific was a gangland. The attackers used skiffs and homemade aerial drones to seize and sell what they could, mostly to fund the hundreds of militias throughout the archipelago.

  None of the gangs bothered with hostages ever since Chinese special operations forces, at the behest of that country’s largest shipping concern, had wiped out the population of three entire islands in a single night. It didn’t end the attacks, though. There were six thousand inhabited islands left. Now the pirates just killed everyone when they seized a ship.

  “This is Coronado’s focus during the next three days,” said Simmons. “It’s a standard presence patrol. But it connects to a bigger picture that Captain’s asked me to brief you on: We will be linking up with the Directorate escort force at eighteen hundred, making this a true multinational convoy.”

  The XO then changed images, zooming out from the Coronado’s present position in its southeast corner to a larger map showing the strategic landscape of the entire Pacific.

  “This leads me to the main brief this morning. It’s a long one. But there’s a bonus: if you don’t fall asleep on me, I’ll make sure you get double your PACE ed cred.” That brought a few smiles; the Program for Afloat College Education, a quick way for sailors to earn college credits on the Navy’s dime, was popular among the young crew.

  “We’re breaking some ground here on this multinational undertaking. It’s the first joint mission with Directorate naval forces since Washington started the embargo threats,” he said. “Which means our friends from Hainan are taking it seriously. As you can see on the screen, the Directorate will have one of their new oilers here for refueling, which it doesn’t really need. They want us to see that in addition to having the world’s biggest economy, they’re buying their naval forces the range to operate anywhere on the planet.

  “To understand why having a ship like an oiler is a big deal, you need to take a step back. Let’s start with Dhahran three years ago. When the nuke — well, more technically, the radiological dirty bomb — went off, it made the Saudi house of cards fall down. Between Dhahran glowing and the fights over who comes in after the Al Saud family, the world economy’s still reeling from the hub of the global oil industry effectively going offline,” he said.

  His next slide showed a graph of energy prices spiking. “Oil’s finally coming off the two-hundred-ninety-dollar peak after the attack, but you don’t want to know how much this cruise is costing the taxpayers. Put it this way: enjoy yourselves and all this sunshine because your grandkids are still going to be paying the tab.”

  “They’ll be paying in ramen,” said Lieutenant Gupal, one of the ship’s newest officers. Ramen was slang for RMN, renminbi, the Chinese currency that, along with the euro, had joined the American dollar as the global reserve currency following the dollar’s post-Dhahran crash.

  “At least we can sail with our own oil now,” said Captain Riley. “When I joined back in the Stone Age, Middle East oil owned the market.”

  “True enough,” said Simmons. “And shale extraction is coming back at even higher levels than before the moratorium after the New York quake. Dhahran made people stop caring so much about groundwater seepage.”

  A new map of global energy reserves appeared on the screen. Simmons stepped closer to the crew and continued.

  “The captain hit the key change to focus on. The scramble for new energy resources, heightening regional tensions here, here, and here, are sparking a series of border clashes around the world. The fact that the South China Sea oil fields were disappointments put new pressure on the Directorate. The hunt goes on,” said Jamie. “The oilers are the Directorate’s way of showing that their interest in this is now global.”

  A screen shot of a smoking mine in South Africa replaced the map.

  “That’s the Spiker mine, near South Africa’s border with Mozambique. Remember that? These trends all connect. Even the renewed push toward alternative energy sources has caused more conflict than cooperation. Technologies like solar and deep-cycle batteries depend on rare-earth materials, rare being the operative word,” said Simmons.

  The picture shifted to the iconic photo of the green Chinese People’s Liberation Army tank bulldozing into the Ministry of Public Security’s riot-control truck as the crowd in Shanghai’s People’s Square cheered the soldiers on.

  “This is important, so pay attention,” said Simmons. “You all know the history of the Directora
te. When the world economy cratered after Dhahran, the old Chinese Communist Party couldn’t keep things humming. Their big mistake was calling in the military to put down the urban workers’ riots, thinking that the troops would do their dirty work for them, just like back in ’89. They failed to factor in that a new generation of more professional military and business elite saw the problem differently than they did. Turned out the new guard viewed the nepotism and corruption of those ‘little princes’ who had just inherited their power as a bigger threat to China’s stability than the rioters. They booted them out, and instead you’ve got a Directorate regime that’s more popular and more competent than the previous government, and technocratic to the extreme. The business magnates and the military have divided up rule and roles. Capitalism and nationalism working hand in hand, rather than the old contradictions they had back in the Communist days.”

  The image switched to one of the Directorate Navy’s new aircraft carriers tied up next to a pier, Shanghai’s skyline in the background.

  “The bottom line is that the Directorate has changed China. They took a regime mired in corruption and on the brink of civil war and forged a locked-down country marching in the same direction, the nation’s business leaders and the military joined at the hip.

  “But net assessment, as they teach you back in the schoolhouse, isn’t only about looking outward; it’s also about knowing yourself and your own place in history.”

  A visual of two maps of the globe appeared, the first of British trading routes and colonies circa 1914, the second a current disposition of U.S. forces and bases, some eight hundred dots spread across the world.

  “Some say we’re fighting, or rather not fighting, a cold war with the Directorate, just like we did with the Soviet Union more than half a century ago. But that may not be the right case to learn from. About a hundred years back, the British Empire faced a problem much like ours today: How do you police an empire when you’ve got a shrinking economy relative to the world’s and a population no longer so excited to meet those old commitments?”