Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (11 page)

“Almost ready,” said one of the crew. “It's still booting up.”

“Wake the bitch up! I want targets. And I want this ship protected,” said Captain Riley.

“Sir, even when it's online, ATHENA's going to have trouble in port,” said Simmons.

“We're already in trouble,” said Captain Riley.

“The data flow might overwhelm it. If ATHENA crashes, it'll drag down the rest of the ship's systems, or we might get some blue-on-blue, given the range we're dealing with,” said Simmons. “Let the crew fight the ship. Trust them.”

Captain Riley squinted the way he did when he knew someone else was right. “Good call, XO,” he said. “When ATHENA comes up, keep it in watch mode.”

This gave Captain Riley, still in his skivvies, the chance to deliver the order he'd yearned to give all his life. “Main gun, batteries release! Engage enemy ship, the fucker that fired at us,” he shouted.

The
Coronado
's 57 mm main gun came to life; the turret pivoted, pointed an accusing finger off the port side, and then fired across the harbor at the Directorate freighter from which the rocket's smoke trail still extended.

After seven rounds, the main gun's firing paused. And then the realization sank in among the bridge crew. The tiny cannon's five-pound shells were far too small to do any real damage to a hundred-thousand-ton freighter twice the size of a World War II battleship. The LCS had a main gun fit for chasing away pirates, but not much more.

Tracer rounds began to flash toward the
Coronado
, yellow lines reaching out from the freighter and two other ships in the harbor. Their fire hadn't had much of an effect, but it had gotten the other side's attention. Heavy machine-gun rounds clanged into the
Coronado
's superstructure. A sailor struggling to untie the ship's forward lines from the pier's cleats disappeared in a puff of red.

Simmons peeked his binoculars through the open bridge hatch and panned them quickly around the harbor. He frowned. He could see small boats being launched from the freighters. There were at least nine Navy ships sinking and four others being swarmed by what looked like boarding teams. A fast-moving black dart, a helicopter of some sort, sent a volley of rockets into the bridge of the USS
Pinckney
.
⁴⁵
In the distance, green tracked vehicles moved down the road closest to the shoreline. He suspected they were not friendly. He put the binoculars down when he heard Captain Riley shout into his headset, “Just someone cut the damn mooring lines!”

The
Coronado
's foredeck was empty. Bloodstains on the deck marked where two more sailors who'd tried to free the ship had been cut down. Simmons winced, knowing that they would need every sailor they had to get the ship out of this kill zone.

Nearing the
Coronado
's bow, Horowitz looked up at the bridge. He'd run out of 5.56 mm rounds for his M4 and had been ferrying ammunition to a sailor firing an M249 machine gun
⁴⁶
at the nearby freighter.

“On it!” Horowitz shouted. He raced inside the nearby passageway and pulled out the fire ax. He ran toward the rope but slipped on a pool of blood and cut his palm on the blade of the ax. He couldn't help himself and laughed. The absurdity of slicing yourself with an ax in the middle of a gunfight.

Horowitz belly-crawled out to the mooring line, staying low to avoid the fire. When he reached it, he jumped up, held the ax high over his head, and then smashed it down on the thick braided-Kevlar line tying the
Coronado
to the pier.

It made little impression; the ax parted only a few strands. He lifted it again, and again. Soon his chest heaved and his arms burned, and he couldn't hear anything but the buzzing in his ears. At some point, a bullet struck the ax head, but Horowitz held it fast despite the ache in his hands.

One of the ship's caterpillar-like SAFFiRs (Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robots)
⁴⁷
crawled onto the deck nearby and was immediately hit. The child-size robot sprayed a cloud of chemical retardant all over the deck before rolling into the water. “One last time,” Horowitz said to himself with a grunt, “and then we are out of here.”

He didn't see the Directorate PGZ-07 antiaircraft vehicle
⁴⁸
that rounded the corner on the rise above the pier. Without any targets in the sky, the PGZ trained its twin-barreled 35 mm cannon on the U.S. ships in the harbor, the closest being the
Coronado
.

“Shit,” said Simmons as he watched Horowitz's shredded body cartwheel into the water.

“Target, starboard side. Hit that bastard! He's the one who just lit us up,” shouted Captain Riley.

The ship's 57 mm Mk 110 cannon
⁴⁹
rotated away from the freighter and toward the Directorate vehicle as fast as the gunner could pull the targeting joystick. While the main gun couldn't make much of an impact on a hundred-thousand-ton ship, the rounds chewed apart the lightly armored twenty-two-ton vehicle, and it exploded, sending flaming shrapnel through the building behind it.

Simmons was in command mode, listening to his crew on his headset as much as directing them. He heard shouting one moment, then dispassionate descriptions of overheating or damaged equipment. The crew was proving to be good under pressure, which was exactly why he had driven them so hard.

“We've got to go now, Captain. Line's all but cut through,” said Simmons.

“You heard him, get us out of here,” said Captain Riley.

Simmons recognized the false confidence in his captain's voice. They both knew the
Coronado
would have to battle its way out of the flaming harbor.

A sudden buzzing noise made everyone on the bridge duck. A quadcopter appeared right in front of the bridge's windows, nervously hovering, like a wasp looking for a way inside.

The Mk 110 main gun spun to engage the V1000, but the quadcopter hovered inside the gun's arc of fire, feinting and dodging with the turret's jerky moves as the gunner tried to slew the joystick fast enough to get a shot at it.

The bridge crew froze, expecting a volley of armor-piercing flé­chette micro-rockets. The V1000 flared back, flashing a backlit view of its empty rocket pods, and then raced straight up and out of sight.

The crew members looked at one another as if they'd just missed being hit by lightning. Then the quadcopter reappeared a football field's length away and dove between a pair of long warehouses. It popped back up into the air and vectored toward the KITV Channel 4 news chopper that had arrived to collect video of what had been reported as a gas explosion down at the harbor. The V1000 fired a TY-90 air-to-air missile
⁵⁰
that struck the helicopter well before the weapon reached its Mach 2 maximum speed.

The drop-down bow thruster pushed the
Coronado
slowly away from the pier, and then Stapleton, the main propulsion assistant, gently moved the joystick forward. The
Coronado
roared, its engines moving from idle into action, and the water jets roiled the harbor water. The last Kevlar mooring line started to unravel and then parted with a snap. As the ship began to gather speed, another antitank missile arced from the freighter and exploded inside the helicopter hangar. It felt to the crew like someone had driven a garbage truck into the side of the superstructure, but the ship kept moving.

Simmons looked over at the communications station as heavy machine-cannon fire ripped through the ship's aluminum hull and shattered the sailor sitting there. Sparks and blood mingled together in an instant. More gunfire peppered the bridge, blowing out windows that were strong enough to handle the angry ocean but no match for armor-piercing rounds. He fell to the deck and covered his head as shrapnel fell around him.

When Simmons opened his eyes, he saw Captain Riley next to him on the floor, but sitting upright, his back against the mauled captain's chair. Blood soaked his shirt and pooled on the deck around him.

Another burst of fire slapped into the captain's chair. Frantically, Simmons looked around to see who was driving the ship. Nobody. Stapleton lay in a heap next to his chair, and the ship slowly drifted toward the opposite side of the harbor. Only one of the 3-D battle displays was working; the ATHENA system projected fragmented visuals of the chaos across the room.

“Helm! Somebody drive the goddamn ship,” shouted Simmons.

Jefferson ran to the helm and pushed the joystick forward. In one of the many exercises the sailors hated, Simmons had made sure that everyone on the bridge crew was trained to take over the other stations, just in case.

Riley tried to force himself up by his elbows but slid back. Simmons knelt by him and ripped open the captain's shirt, but after that he didn't know where to start or what to do; Riley's entire chest was a bloody mess, his heart pumping more of his life onto the gray deck with each beat. Riley coughed up blood.

“Get back to conning your ship . . . Captain Simmons,” Riley said with a slight smile.

Dylan Cote, the ship's corpsman, entered the bridge at a run but slipped on the blood underfoot. On his hands and knees, he crawled to the captain and pushed Simmons aside.

As Cote tried to stanch the blood flow, Simmons carefully rose and stood behind Jefferson at the helm. The captain's chair had jagged holes punched in it, and he wasn't ready to sit in it just yet.

Marine Corps Base, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii

Worm banked the F-35B hard to the left immediately after takeoff. The jet shifted smoothly into forward-flight mode, and he tried to gain some kind of situational awareness, just like they'd taught him in flight school.

The AN/AAQ-37 electro-optical distributed aperture system
⁵¹
fed his helmet with data from visual and IR sensors located around the plane, allowing him to “see” through the plane below. And what he saw was chaos. He'd once flown through a forest fire during a training mission in California's Sierra Nevada mountains; this was worse. All the smoke and debris in the air had created a swirl of darkness with patches of bright sun. Chinese drones darted in and out of the smoke at low levels, and on the deck, along with fragments of Marine Corps helicopters, his squadron's fighters lay scattered about like puzzle pieces. He scanned up and around the sky and confirmed what he'd feared: his was the only U.S. jet in the air.

He started to check on the jet's other systems. No sound came over his radios. The fighter's GPS-coupled inertial navigation system was wrong, showing him as flying over Maui when he knew damn well this was Oahu. Electronically generated false targets flickered on the horizontal situation display and then disappeared. The plane, with its novel software systems and millions of lines of code, was designed to be its own copilot, capable of automation and interpretation never before possible in battle. But at this moment, Worm thought, the fighter was having trouble getting out of its own way, electronically speaking.

Marine aviators had flown for generations with just guns and guts, Worm told himself. He could do the same.

At the near corner of the airfield, he saw one of the tiny Chinese quadcopters firing, its autocannon peppering a parked Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. First, the starboard wing buckled, and then the MV-22's massive engine
⁵²
dropped to the ground, tipping over the ungainly aircraft.

With one hand, Worm slowed the jet's approach, and with the other, he targeted the quadcopter on the touchscreens before him. Then he saw her.

The defiance was unmistakable even at this distance. He magnified the image through his helmet optics, effectively creating a picture inside a picture on the screen superimposed in his cockpit. The Marine fired her pistol at the drone that had rocketed the Osprey. She stood with her feet braced and leaned over the still-smoking engine to steady her aim. She fired a full magazine, then ducked down to reload.

As she drew the magazine from a pouch on her flight suit, the quadcopter dropped to within a few inches of the ground and circled back around her position. She spun around too; Worm saw her chambering the next round as she raised her weapon. He willed his jet's cannon-arming protocol to speed up.

She fired and then darted to the other side of the wreckage, racing to keep it between her and the quadcopter, like a lethal game of musical chairs. Then she slipped in a pool of oil seeping out of the gutted Osprey, twisted her left leg, and fell down in a heap. The pistol skittered a few feet away.

“Shit!” shouted Worm.

The gun-pod light turned red. Active.

The jet shifted position slightly as Worm tried to line up the F-35's cannon. But then the quadcopter drone rose abruptly. It had caught on to the game and was moving to gain an overhead shot on the fallen Marine.

Worm nudged the jet up using its thrust-vectoring nozzles, in effect dancing in the air. As he maneuvered to line up his gun pod, his helmet display showed the Marine crawling toward her pistol. It was lodged beneath a smoldering wing from a nearby wrecked F-35. Jesus, what balls she had, thought Worm.

His finger was already over the trigger, and he pressed down lightly; the jet buffeted as the rounds fired off. The drone opened fire at the same time as Worm's jet loosed a line of training rounds that walked their way up the runway to the quadcopter. The image on the helmet display dissolved into an explosion of smoke and flame, and the drone spun down into the burning Osprey wreck.

Where was she?

His headset suddenly growled at him, and a flash of color danced across one of his displays. The warning from the jet's radar-threat-detection system was unmistakable: an air-defense system was tracking him.

The readout showed that the radar that had washed over his jet wasn't a U.S. system but an H-250 phased array,
⁵³
the updated Directorate mobile-SAM type.