Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (19 page)

“If you are going to be my student, you have to learn to trust me. We'll meet next Monday. The moon will be full, and so amazing,” she said. “I know just the place; it's quiet and there's not a better break on this side of the island.”

“It is a date, then,” said Frank.

USS
Zumwalt
, Mare Island Naval Shipyard

From the water right now, Jamie Simmons thought the
Zumwalt
looked less like floating death and more like one of those ramshackle floating tidal towns off what used to be Indonesia, people weaving sheets of metal, plastic, and wood into improbable geometries to create homes.

What Vice Admiral Evangeline Murray thought of the
Z
, Simmons could not tell. She'd hardly spoken to him during her waterside tour of the ship. But her eyes didn't stop moving. She was coming to understand the ship, Simmons felt, in a way he'd never bothered to. At one point, she had the launch brought up alongside the hull, and she put her hands on the ship like a healer and closed her eyes. What she heard or saw, he did not know. What he did know was that she had a status within the Navy that was unmatched. She'd been the first woman to command an aircraft carrier strike group before the war. More important, she'd been fortunate enough to be serving as president of the Naval War College
²⁹
when the shooting started, meaning she'd escaped both the Stonefish missiles and the congressional inquiries that had decimated the senior ranks.
³⁰

She signaled for the launch to return to the pier.

“Captain, before we go aboard, I want to say that it is an honor to meet you,” she said. “We don't have a lot of heroes in this country right now to inspire us. Your leadership and experience are invaluable and I just want you to know that if this ship does not work out, I will personally ensure that your talent is not wasted.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” said Simmons.

“In fact, they tell me we could use someone like you right now in Washington, perhaps more than out here,” said Admiral Murray. “You survived when nobody else did; that has a huge value to the war effort.”

Simmons did not blink; he kept his eyes locked on hers. Was she evaluating him too, not just the ship? This was one of those moments with a black-or-white outcome: Lindsey or the sea. Safety or duty.

“You're right, ma'am. I don't belong here,” said Simmons.

She nodded and furrowed her brow.

Simmons pointed toward the Golden Gate Bridge. “Admiral, this ship, or any ship we have, has to be out there at sea, where the fight is,” he said. “That's where we belong.”

He said it instinctively, then paused to question whether he was voicing his father's opinions or his own.

An elfin smile revealed the admiral's yellowed teeth; unusual, because most people had had theirs whitened or replaced by her age. “That is for damn sure,” said Admiral Murray. “Now why don't you introduce me to the crew.”

They didn't pipe the admiral aboard, as she preferred not to disturb the work at hand.

“One thing that impresses me is all the camouflage here,” said Admiral Murray as they walked the deck.

“It might look like camouflage, but the reality is that all the scaffolding and tarps are really necessary. We ended up having to do a top-to-bottom overhaul here,” said Simmons.

As they approached a knot of crewmen—some in their teens, others decades older—clambering over a scaffold, the admiral said, “Tell me about the crew. How is the new mix going?”

“The mix of generations has its strengths and weaknesses. We have the remnants of the pre–Zero Day fleet. I was given my choice of the best of my old crew, which I understand I have you to thank for. Then there are the draftees, some of whom have never seen the real ocean, let alone been out on it,” said Simmons. “But what they do know are computers; they've been with viz in one form or another since birth. They see problems differently than regular sailors, even sailors who were in the Navy when the war started.”

Simmons pointed to a pair of teenagers with facial tattoos that were partially obscured by their brushed-titanium Apple glasses. The kids were having a conversation with one of the Mentor Crew.

“And then, Admiral, there are our most experienced sailors, the Mentors, many of whom joined the Navy before the First Gulf War,” said Simmons. “With the sense of history the younger sailors have, they might as well have been on Noah's crew for all that means to them.”

“This is going to take some adjusting for all of us,” Admiral Murray observed, “and I don't mean just those in the Navy. It's the same everywhere now. People who wouldn't have had a thing to do with each other a few months ago now have no choice but to join together, whether they're growing food in a condo's victory garden or working in the same shipyard. Bottom line, are the Mentors working out? We've had some conflicting reports from the other ships.”

“On the
Zumwalt
, they prefer to be called the Old Farts. I had my doubts, ma'am, but the older guys drive everyone hard. More important, they know the old tech and its secrets better than anyone else.”

Simmons led her farther astern.

“You can't separate the people and the technology, really. But it's not just about the old gear. What we've done in upgrading the ship's wireless nets will help us run the ATHENA replacement but also give us some more protection against network attack.”

“Local networking is going to be essential; focus on that,” she said.

“These are the vertical launch cells
³¹
for the cruise missiles,” said Simmons, continuing the tour.

“Magazine capacity?” asked Admiral Murray.

“We're at eighty now,” said Simmons. “But we have to reevaluate what that means while the Office of Naval Research is figuring out a new targeting system. Without GPS, they aren't going to pack the punch we need. To have any kind of effect, we'd have to give up the magazine-allotment space for the air-defense missiles.”

Admiral Murray leaned forward. “We've been working on a GPS replacement for years, but it's the same story—it just isn't panning out,” she said. “It's now or never, but if it's not ready in time, then you've got the right approach. Make up for lost accuracy with volume of fire. Use the space for anything that has a strike capability. We need to bring as much fire as we can.”

They ducked beneath a tarp and stood before a slate-gray box with a honeycombed face. Known as the Metal Storm,
³²
it was a kind of electronic machine gun. But instead of dropping bullets in individual rounds to be fired out of a single barrel, one after another, here, bullets were stacked nose to tail inside the multiple barrels that honeycombed the device. Sparked by an electronic ignition, the rounds would fire off all at once, like a Roman candle.

“For close-in defense, we've rigged the Metal Storm as well as the pair of laser turrets just above the bridge,” said Simmons. “Directed energy should do for single targets, while the Metal Storm can throw up a literal wall of bullets, thirty-six thousand rounds fired in a single burst.” He patted the box softly. “Some of the kids have also been playing with the software to speed up reaction times.”

“Make sure you get that code to the fleet—we need to keep pushing the development,” she said.

“The question is how effective it will be, and then how much of the air-defense missiles we can unload,” Simmons said. “The simulation models give us a pretty wide mix of possible outcomes.”

“Perhaps I wasn't clear,” said Admiral Murray. “I understand why you want to have both options when it comes to balancing this ship's strike capability with its defense systems. But it's a zero-sum game for what I need. I need
Zumwalt
to think of itself as a battleship if we're going to use it.”

“Admiral, this is not a battleship, at least not in the old way people thought of them,” said Simmons, consciously steadying his voice. She was testing him again. “A battleship counted on the sheer throw weight of what it could fire, but also on its own weight. Sixteen-inch guns, but also sixteen-inch armor plating. Big enough to hit hard, but also to be hit hard. We're not that. Yes, the
Z
is the biggest surface combatant in the fleet, but it can't take those kinds of hits. We have to punch first, and kill at a distance.”

“Exactly,” she replied. Test passed. “Then show me how you're going to do that.”

They walked forward to where the ship's original 155 mm gun turrets had been. In their place, workers were welding the fittings on what looked more like an angled tractor-trailer than the usual sleek gun mounting of a warship. Painted on the side was the program's official motto:
Speed Kills
.

“This is the old prototype from the Dahlgren facility?”
³³
asked Admiral Murray.

“The very same. Some of the bits and pieces got lost after they shut down the program when the
Z
class got retired early, but it's most of the original. Shipped over by rail from Virginia.”

“This is why you're here, Captain. A working electromagnetic rail gun will be a game-changer for the fleet; maybe for the entire war,” she said.

The rail gun represented a break point,
³⁴
a shift away from over eight hundred years of ballistic science. Instead of using the chemistry of gunpowder to shoot a metal object out of a long barrel, the rail gun used energy that came from electromagnetic forces. A powerful current ran through two oppositely charged rails on either side of the barrel. When a conductive projectile was inserted between the rails (at the end connected to the power supply), it completed the circuit. Just as the gases expelled by exploding gunpowder propelled a bullet out of a conventional gun, the magnetic field inside the loop created a burst of incredible power, called a Lorentz force,
³⁵
that slung projectiles out of the open end of the gun barrel. There were no fuses to light, but the rail gun did require a massive and reliable supply of electrical current. Without electricity, a ship with a rail gun would be like a nineteenth-century ship of the line with a waterlogged powder magazine.

“We sure could've used it at Pearl,” he said, thinking of the popgun they'd had on the
Coronado
.

“I can imagine. But I don't plan on anyone ever being stuck in a kill box like that again. What do you anticipate the rail gun's effect will be on fleet action?” Another test. Still the college president at heart.

“It gives us speed and range, ma'am. It slings out a shell with a velocity of more than eighty-two hundred feet per second, allowing us to strike targets out to a hundred and eighty miles. It's a double gain. Faster than any missile and impossible to jam or shoot down.”

She nodded, but she seemed to be waiting for more.

“But more important will be their effect. The shells are small, but with that kind of speed they'll hit with a force equaled only by the old
Iowa
-class battleships' cannon shells, and those were the size of cars. It also solves the capacity and targeting problem we have with the long-range strike missiles. Even without a precise GPS location, we can lay down a pattern of fire that saturates a target set. That's where the similarity with the old battleships holds best.”

“The Hand of God is what they called it during development,” said Admiral Murray. “I was a junior officer working on the Navy staff in the Pentagon back then, N-9 Warfare Systems. I remember the rail-gun program; officers had it all over their PowerPoint briefs when they came in. It was a cool name, but it didn't stop us from slashing their budget when the cuts came. How are you dealing with the thermal and power management issues that bugged it then? You can't exactly replace a melted barrel in the middle of an engagement.”

“There's two ways to deal with the heat. This is actually not the original barrel they had problems with back then. It uses a nanostructure that dissipates the heat. Of course, we still have to be careful, but we can fire in what we call a surge strike. The power management is more complicated, and, frankly, Admiral, that's my concern. The rail gun requires the power equivalent of a small city. This ship was supposed to be designed with that in mind, but you know how they overpromised and underdelivered.”

No other surface ship besides the
Zumwalt
had a power system that could generate and, more important, store the tremendous amounts of electricity required for the electromagnetic push that was the essence of the rail gun's design. This was why the Navy had lost its original excitement over the rail-gun program once the
Zumwalt
class had ended. Even with a design tailored for the new weapon, the Navy's models projected that each firing of the rail gun would require stealing energy from other systems onboard, including the ship's propulsion.

“We are all too aware of that problem with the old defense-industrial complex,” she said. “So what are you doing about it?”

“We're approaching it through both tactics and reengineering,” said Simmons, trying to shift his tone so that she wouldn't think he was making excuses. “Tactically, the plan is to use the power drain to our advantage, so to speak, by building drift into the anti-detection protocols. The key is not to get boxed in again, as you put it, but to disappear in the expanse of the ocean. On the reengineering side, we're getting good results from the new energy-dense liquid-based battery being built for the ship. It's giving us added power beyond what the original design in the nineties envisioned. We've been assigned a specialist in liquid-based batteries, a woman from the University of Wisconsin. Frankly, there's a lot riding on her expertise.”

He paused to look directly at her.