Ghost Fleet Read online

  The silent progress of an icon in his jet’s heads-up display told him he had arrived: Kadena Air Base. His war started here.

  A flash of movement caught Denisov’s eye as four dark gray darts raced ahead of his squadron. It was a volley of Sokols (Falcons) fired by his second flight. A sort of miniaturized cruise missile, the electromagnetic weapon used pulses of directed energy to knock out air-defense and communications systems. Following a preprogrammed course, the flight of Falcon missiles separated, each leaving a swath of electronic dead zone behind it.

  If his flight’s opening shots were silent, the next wave of destruction would be heard for miles. Denisov released four RBK-500 cluster bombs over the scores of unprotected U.S. Air Force planes parked near the base’s three-and-a-half-kilometer-long runway. As he banked his MiG, he caught a glimpse of an F-35A Lightning II being towed out of its hangar in a rush to confront him. His MiG was designed to be a match for the F-35, and the pilots of both had always wondered how the planes would actually stack up against each other. It would have to wait for some other time. The RBK canisters opened up behind Denisov’s plane, releasing hundreds of cluster bomblets, each the size of a beer can. Tiny parachutes deployed and the cans drifted toward the ground.

  When proximity fuses detected that they were ten meters from the ground, the cans exploded, one after another. Hundreds of explosions ripped across the air base, blowing open scores of the U.S. Air Force’s most advanced fighters.

  Denisov’s wingman made the next run and dropped three penetrating anti-runway bombs. The hardened tips of the massive bombs buried themselves almost five meters into the runway’s concrete and then detonated with more than fifteen hundred kilograms’ worth of explosives. While the limited number of American jets protected in hardened hangars might survive Denisov’s bombs, none would be taking off from the biggest U.S. air base in the Pacific for days, if not weeks.

  Six kilometers away, the flight’s trailing two MiG-35s split past each other and then banked back hard as they raced toward the center of an imaginary X. That X was located in the middle of the largest U.S. Marine Corps base in Japan. The nine thousand Marines living there were supposed to have been moved to Guam five years earlier. But political wrangling between Congress and the Japanese government over just who would pay the $8.6 billion tab to relocate the Marines had delayed the transfer of forces. Time had run out.

  The two planes passed each other at less than a hundred meters. At the imaginary point of their crossing lines, the MiGs dropped four KAB-1500S thermobaric bombs, each weighing just over thirteen hundred kilograms. The bombs opened to release a massive cloud of explosive vapor, which was then ignited by a separate charge. It was the largest explosion Japan had experienced since Nagasaki, and it left a similar mushroom cloud of smoke and dust hanging over the base as the jets flew away.

  Denisov finally turned off the spoof audio recording and ordered his flight to report in. The strikes on the air bases, the ground bases, and even the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier harbored offshore had been a success. He’d lost only five jets to the late-reacting air defenses. Amazing.

  He wasn’t sure the Americans would appreciate the irony of the Russians following the plan of attack the Americans had used on the Japanese some eighty years earlier, but Plan Doolittle had worked. Trying to conceal the relief in his voice, he ordered the remaining fighters to bank toward the Chinese coast.

  That was the other part they’d copied from the raid the Americans had pulled back in the early months of their previous war in the Pacific: by coming in from an unexpected approach and making it a one-direction flight, they could strike at twice the range the enemy believed possible. The Russian navy had held up its end; now it had to trust that the Chinese aerial refueling tankers would be there as promised.

  The raid wasn’t Denisov’s idea, but neither had the original raid back in World War II been Jimmy Doolittle’s idea. Maybe, he thought, history would call this one after its commander as well; Denisov’s Raid had a nice ring to it.

  USS Coronado, Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Hawaii

  From the deck of the Coronado, Horowitz saw a sudden ripple in the water where the REMUS had turned, almost like what a fly fisherman would take for a fish rising. It made him pause, then he focused on firing at the threat. The shell casings bounced off the deck and into the water, sizzling as they floated for a brief moment and then sinking beneath the surface.

  “REMUS is coming back around, sir,” said Jefferson on the bridge. “What now?”

  “I want you to ram it up that diver’s ass,” said Simmons.

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Jefferson gently nudged the joystick to the right and then the left, centering the diver on the screen. Then he throttled it to full speed.

  On deck, Horowitz’s M4 clicked; his magazine was empty. Without looking, Horowitz reached into the pouch attached to his belt for another magazine and tried to slam it into the rifle, but his last mag slipped from his hands into the water. Thirty rounds that could have made the difference were lost.

  Horowitz cursed at the water as only a sailor could but stopped when he saw a fast-moving shape coming toward the ship. Great; not just terrorists but torpedoes now!

  The underwater view was projected onto the REMUS control station. The diver was in the midst of attaching the mine to the hull when some sixth sense warned him what was coming. He turned his head to look over his shoulder. The last picture on Jefferson’s video screen was the diver’s surprised expression behind the goggles, just before the REMUS smashed into his left jaw and then plowed into the ship’s hull behind him.

  On deck, Horowitz felt the crunch of the REMUS impact and then saw a roaring wall of white water flash up. And then silence.

  Ruby Empress, Gatún Lake, Panama Canal

  Arnel Reyes picked at a flake of black paint from the rail of the Ruby Empress, a Cyprus-flagged oil tanker.

  “I like blue, you know, like the sky in the afternoon, and as a little boy, he will love it,” said his wife. Arnel wanted to say that neither a newborn baby nor a full-grown man could care less about wall colors. But it was best to humor her with all the love he could scrape up, especially given that he was standing on the deck of a ship in the Panama Canal and she was back home in Manila.

  “Blue it is, my love. I’ll be back in two weeks and we can paint for him then,” he said. “We’ve got plenty of time, you know.”

  “There’s not enough time with you gone. There’s just so much to do. And we haven’t even talked about his name,” Anna-Maria said over the phone. “Baby, I know your mother thought —”

  Then the call dropped.

  He worried Anna-Maria would think he’d hung up on her, but when he tried to reconnect, the call wouldn’t go through. He put his phone back in his pocket and leaned away from the hot deck rail. It didn’t help his mood that the transit through the Panama Canal was the slowest part of the trip, since ships had to wait in line to make their way through the canal locks.

  As Reyes climbed back up the series of ladders, he heard the commotion on the Ruby’s bridge. Everything was squared away aboard the ship, but the radios were alive with traffic. Two ships ahead, the Xianghumen, a Chinese-flagged freighter, had turned on its engines. This was craziness. What was Xianghumen’s captain thinking, speeding up inside the transit zone? The canal master was screaming over the radio for the Xianghumen to acknowledge and stop. But there was no reply.

  Reyes ran topside to see. It was like watching a slow-motion train wreck. The Xianghumen was moving at a mere four knots, slower than a jog. But with a hundred and twenty thousand tons of force behind it, the ship slowly ground its way into the canal locks, crushing the doors inward.

  Reyes wasn’t sure how long it would take the Chinese companies that ran the Panama Canal Zone to fix this mess, but their investment had clearly gone down the tubes.
/>   “Well, it’s not my hundred and eighty billion dollars,” said Reyes to one of the crew, who chuckled in reply.

  In any case, the highway between the oceans was likely going to be closed for a while. He reached into his pocket. He’d better try to call his wife again.

  USS Coronado, Joint Base Pearl Harbor–Hickam, Hawaii

  When Horowitz came to, he was floating on his back in the water. A broken shard of yellow metal drifted a few feet away, and just beyond that was the diver’s body, floating face-down.

  He looked up at the Coronado, trying to remember how he’d gotten here. His ears rang and his head ached worse than any shore-leave hangover. He saw the XO looking down at him from the bridge. He saluted the officer from the water, and the XO smiled and saluted back.

  A launch pulled Horowitz and the black-clad body out of the water. The sailors hauled him aboard with smiles, but they handled the body with fear.

  The launch stopped beside the Coronado and the diver was carried up to the helicopter deck at the stern. Horowitz scrambled up after it and joined the small crowd that had quickly gathered around the body. They all spoke quietly around the dead diver, as if worried their voices might revive him.

  “Don’t shove me,” said a sailor. “I gotta viz this.”

  “You can’t do that,” whispered another. “He’s dead. You know the rules.”

  “XO’s coming,” a voice hissed, and the crowd tensed and drew back into order, parting to allow Simmons through.

  “Nothing like a morning swim, Horowitz,” Simmons observed with a smile. “You solid?”

  “Aye, sir,” Horowitz replied. “Can’t say the same for my swim buddy here.”

  A sailor pulled off the diver’s mask to reveal bulging eyes. Horowitz felt his stomach turn. The left side of the man’s jaw was bloody and caved in, but the rest of the dead man’s features were still intact. With his cropped blond hair, he looked almost like a sleeping Viking.

  “We get the right guy?” asked one of the sailors. “He don’t look like any jihadi I’ve seen before.”

  Someone handed Simmons the broken dive mask. He turned it over in his hands, careful not to cut himself on the shards of plastic, and then knelt down to look closer at the body. A delicate scar on the chin and a nose that looked as though it had been broken as regularly as a boxer’s.

  “Roll him over,” said Simmons.

  As they turned the man, Horowitz noticed that the diver’s suit wasn’t neoprene; it was made of something thicker. Then he saw the man wasn’t wearing conventional scuba gear.

  “Sir, that’s a closed rebreather unit,” said Horowitz. “SEALs use them to swim without the bubbles. The wetsuit’s got some thermal masking going on too.”

  Simmons nodded and studied the gear being stripped off the body. The dive computers strapped to the dead man’s wrists looked sleek, clearly mil-grade. They also had Chinese markings on a protective cover.

  The men looked confused as the XO sprinted back to the bridge without a word.

  It wasn’t a big ship, and Simmons was at the bridge within twenty-five seconds. Riley was there now, still in his skivvies but wearing his blue USS Coronado baseball cap with the CO’s scrambled-eggs insignia sewn in gold thread above the brim. Jefferson was playing the REMUS video back for him. Riley turned to see Simmons burst into the room. Simmons didn’t walk around the projected screen but went right through it, rippling the picture.

  “Got him?” said Riley.

  Simmons seemed to ignore him and looked right at the communications officer.

  “Get PACOM on the horn, now! Prep an OPREP-Three Pinnacle message.” Any message with Pinnacle in the identification line was automatically flagged of interest not just to the entire Navy chain of command but also to the National Military Command Center, which monitored events for the Joint Chiefs and the president.

  “That’s a little extreme for one diver, XO. Let’s notify the duty sonar ship first and see if they have any further info,” said Riley.

  “Too slow. We need to send a Pinnacle out now, sir,” said Simmons.

  The communications tech looked from Simmons to Riley. “Sirs, nothing’s working here. I can’t even get my own phone to hook on to the network. It’s like the whole spectrum is down.”

  On the main deck below, Horowitz rubbed the ache at the base of his neck. He angrily slammed another magazine he’d cadged from a fellow sailor into his M4. They’d found his weapon still lying on the deck. He absent-mindedly ran his tongue across his lips, realizing he was thirsty despite being soaking wet. He’d read that this was what happened when you went into shock, but he wasn’t going to say anything about it now. Falling off the ship and then bitching about being scared seemed like a good way to blow his shot at becoming a SEAL.

  Horowitz looked around the harbor at the wall of U.S. Navy steel assembled there. He couldn’t wait to get to sea and wreak some revenge on whoever had done it.

  Then the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier tied up just across the harbor, seemed to lift a few feet from the water, as if the hundred-thousand-ton ship were being conjured skyward. The shove of the blast wave pushed him back to the bulkhead.

  As he scrambled to his feet, Horowitz stared, agape, as the Nimitz-class carrier settled back into the water with orange flames and black smoke pouring from its deck. He watched as the carrier’s hull begin to break apart about two-thirds of the way down from the bow.

  “Oh, shit. The reactors,” muttered Horowitz.

  Pier 29, Port of Honolulu, Hawaii

  What the hell? They weren’t supposed to be offloading for another day.

  When he’d first seen the ramp come down, Jakob Sanders had pulled out his tablet to recheck the manifest. The Golden Wave, 720 feet, flagged out of Liberia. A RO/RO carrying cars from Shanghai. It had been pre-cleared on the manifest but it was twenty-four hours early. And now it was mucking up his day.

  Even standing in the guard shack in the neighboring parking lot, he could feel the impact of the doublewide metal ramp slamming down onto the pier. Sanders had always thought the big roll-on, roll-off ship had the aesthetic appeal of a Costco plunked down on top of a boat. But that was the idea. It could carry 550 vehicles, and those vehicles could drive right off the ship and into his lot. Where they would then sit, waiting to be driven to various dealerships around the island.

  Sanders tried to raise his boss on the radio but all he got was static. He shook his head and looked down to check the time and date on his Casio G-Lide watch. Yep, he had it right. They were offloading too soon. More important, the web-enabled watch’s last update showed that the offshore buoy readings looked promising for some head-high swells. Just five more hours in the lot and then he’d be free of his guard shack and back in the water at Kewalos. If the surf was as good as his watch promised, it would be one of those days when it just didn’t matter where you’d gone to school or that you wore a black polyester uniform on land.

  A series of distant booms snapped his attention from his watch. He hit the deck and covered his head with his arms as the shack’s flimsy metal walls shook. After a few seconds, he got to his knees and peered through the open door at the fuel-tank farm next to pier 29. No fire. Blue skies didn’t indicate thunder. Then the pier began to vibrate again from another low rumble, like an earthquake. Damn, he didn’t want to be caught here by the water if it led to a tsunami.

  More distant booms echoed off the hills, but the noise was washed out by hundreds of motors starting up inside the Golden Wave. What were they doing? Didn’t they feel the quake? There could be more aftershocks.

  Sanders remembered the public-service announcements he’d watched as a kid said you should stand in a doorway during an earthquake, but he looked at the flimsy shack walls and then crawled outside. He felt more booms reverberate and saw some smoke rising behind th
e Golden Wave, but the bulk of the huge ship blocked whatever was happening across the harbor.

  Then one of those new Geely SUVs rolled down the ramp. Maybe they were trying to get the cars off before another quake? But where were they going to park them? They’d be better off keeping them on the ship and riding it out.

  Sanders watched as another and then another of the SUVs moved down the ramp and parked. He’d always thought the Geely looked like a ripped-off Range Rover Defilade. But they were so cheap that he could almost afford one. The paint sure sucked, though. The first dozen were a decent silver or blue. But the rest were a faded matte green.

  Then he heard a piercing squeal, like something gouging the steel deck of the ship. Behind the last SUV, what looked like a telephone pole on its end gradually emerged and pointed down the ramp. Behind that pole was a massive green bulk that slowly nosed its way out to the top of the ramp and then tilted downward.

  Shit, that was a tank! Then another tank moved down the ramp, followed by an eight-wheeled vehicle that looked like a tank’s little brother.

  Sanders saw the red stars on the tanks. What were Chinese tanks doing coming off the ship? The manifest said nothing about that. And who the hell would be buying those? Maybe they were for training exercises out at Camp Schofield?

  Jakob looked around and realized he was alone.

  His next move was to bring out his phone and start shooting video. It would be worth a couple beers; maybe he could even sell it on the viz-net.

  Then what looked like six beer kegs flew up into the air and raced toward downtown. “Drones?” Sanders said in a whisper.

  Each squat Pigeon surveillance drone was indeed about the size of a fourteen-gallon beer keg, and each had a small rotor bay at its bottom. They all took off to seek out the highest points in Honolulu, where they would land. From these perches, the unarmed Pigeons would suck in electromagnetic and digital signals and then throw out an island-wide wave of electronic disturbance.