Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (35 page)

He sprinted after Martin, whooping as he picked up speed running downhill toward the boy, past the Marines at the air-defense battery. By the time he caught up, Jamie found Martin sitting on the orange-and-yellow ball looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge.

“If you go out past the bridge, how can I see you?” asked Martin.

Before Jamie could respond, a pair of Marine Corps AH-1Z Viper
⁹⁶
attack helicopters thundered past the waterfront, raced out into the Bay, and then disappeared from view under the bridge.

“The whole ship is going with me,” said Jamie. “It's my job. We have to go scare the bad guys away so they won't try any bad stuff here.”

“Grandpa going too?” asked Martin.

Jamie paused.

“He's coming too,” said Jamie. “He loves you, but he has to go.”

“How come you're the captain, but he's older?” said Martin.

“He got to choose his job a long time ago,” said Jamie. “Besides, there can be only one captain. Isn't it good that it's your daddy's job?”

“Make sure to be nice to him, then. Grandpa doesn't come over as much anymore,” said Martin. “I miss him. Is he mad at me?”

“No, nothing like that,” said Jamie. “He's just been really busy with work.”

The knot in his stomach wound itself tighter as Jamie leaned over and kissed the stubble on Martin's shaved head.

“I thought he left already, and you didn't want to tell me. Who's going to take care of us if you're gone and he's gone?” said Martin.

Jamie felt as if he'd been punched in the chest. But he tried to show no change.

“How about you?” Jamie asked. “Can you take care of your mom and your sister for me?”

Martin picked at a piece of grass.

“Okay,” said Martin. “I think I can do it. Because Mom needs somebody to help her out, you know. It's actually hard when you're gone.”

“I know it is,” said Jamie. “Let's go see Mom and Claire now.”

Jamie put his son on his shoulders and walked back up to the house. Jamie noticed the other houses had people in the backyards, all of them engaging in the uncomfortable rituals of goodbye. The next few hours were going to be his last with his family before he left. He had to make them count.

Those few hours passed quickly amid a flurry of well-wishing visitors and their children, giving the day a rhythm of alternating moments of laughter and tears. Before Jamie knew it, he was standing on the porch with his wife, holding Martin in one arm and Claire in the other.

Lindsey reached out and wiped a tear from Jamie's eye.

“Kids, up in your rooms I left something for you,” said Jamie. “Do you think you can wait until I get back to open it?”

They started squirming immediately, and he set them down.

“Okay, okay, go!” said Jamie.

From the front porch, he watched them scamper up the stairs.

He turned to Lindsey and pulled her close in a hug whose pressure built with each second. The only words that came to Jamie's mind were
I'm sorry
. Before he realized he had spoken them, Lindsey said, “I'm sorry too.”

A hoot of joy upstairs punctuated their apologies.

“Not the best goodbye we've had,” said Jamie.

“Not the best war we've had,” said Lindsey, trying to smile. “Just make sure to see the end of it with me. Do everything you can out there to make sure this never happens again.”

“I promise. There won't be a next time. I lost myself in the ship, and I know I had to, but it wasn't something I meant to do.”

“Your dad never knew how to say goodbye, did he?” said Lindsey. “You do. Be safe.”

“I'll send a letter as soon as I can,” said Jamie.

A thunder of eager footsteps came down the stairs.

Martin wore a baseball cap with the
Zumwalt
's silhouette on it and gold braid on its bill. On the back it read
Captain Martin Simmons
. Claire clutched a stuffed gray dolphin wearing a gold-and-blue U.S. Navy T-shirt.

A steady horn blew from down on the pier.

“Captain can't be late,” said Lindsey. “Say goodbye to Daddy.”

Jamie crushed his kids with one last hug, inhaling the smell of shampoo and grass. He stood and kissed Lindsey hard, then pressed his forehead against hers.

“I love you. Forever,” he said.

“Forever,” she said.

He turned and started to walk with unsteady steps across the front yard to the waiting launch.

“Wait!” said Lindsey.

She ran toward him and tugged on his shirt. He looked down. He was still wearing the baseball jersey. She pulled it off him as he held his arms up to the sky.

 

Use the normal force to engage;
use the extraordinary to win.

—
SUN-TZU
,
THE ART OF WAR

(Note: This is the motto of the PLA Command Academy in Nanjing, displayed on its library wall.)

 

 

Forty Miles North of Thule, Republic of Kalaallit Nunaat

Admiral Agathe Abelsen didn't know what else to do, so she squared her broad shoulders and sharply saluted the first American she saw.

It was all disorienting. First the helicopter ride and then landing on an airfield that was as large as the town she'd grown up in. The airfield's control tower, which the Americans called an island, loomed above, taller than almost every building in her country. And the ship was too large to think of as an actual vessel; it didn't even seem to sway with the sea.

The American sailor Abelsen had just saluted gave her a quizzical look. The seaman second class tying down the helicopter's wheels was now just as confused as the admiral; he had no idea why the senior naval officer from the Republic of Kalaallit Nunaat,
¹
formerly known as Greenland, had just saluted him.

“Admiral Abelsen, welcome aboard,” said Rear Admiral Norman Durant, striding forward to salvage the situation. “We're honored to host you onboard the USS
Nimitz
for the first joint operation between the United States and Kalaallit.”

Instead of saluting him, the admiral squeezed Durant with a powerful bear hug.

Once she let him go, the carrier strike group commander stepped back and threw her a crisp salute, trying to ignore the rest of the deck crew staring in astonishment. The admiral stood at least six inches taller than Durant's five foot ten, and she must have outweighed him by a good fifty pounds. She had delicate features, thick eyebrows, and the kind of pale skin that made her green eyes seem luminescent. Her uniform coat was a sort of down parka, the standardized kind that fishing companies issued their crews, but with a patch sewn on the right shoulder. The patch displayed a flag, a rectangle with a half-red, half-white circle in the middle. Durant had read up on Kalaallit before the admiral arrived, so he knew that the white half of the circle in the flag, the lower part, signified something about icebergs and pack ice, and the red half above signified the sun setting in the ocean.

“I wish it were under better circumstances, Norman,” she said, already on familiar terms with him, it seemed. “But don't you worry. We will get you through. You have let our dream come true, and now we will show you the way.”

Starting in 1721, Greenland had been a colony of Denmark, its population originally living off subsistence fishing. Indeed, for most of the island's history, half its entire economic output had been shrimp exports. By the turn of the twentieth century, the citizens of Denmark saw this last legacy of their failed colonial ambitions as a burden (the Virgin Islands, their only other major holding, had been sold off to the United States in 1917). They resented having to send a yearly subsidy a thousand miles away to feed, house, school, and clothe a population of mostly non-Danish indigenous peoples, or Eskimos, as they were popularly known.

But in the twenty-first century, the relationship flipped. The frozen waters off the massive island opened up due to global climate change, and eight massive oil fields were discovered,
²
totaling as much as eighty billion barrels. Greenland's citizens realized that if they could break that old colonial link, instead of sharing their island's wealth with six million Danes, they could keep it at home and divide it among just fifty-seven thousand Greenlanders. Greenland, or Kalaallit, in the Inuit tongue, could become the world's richest petro-state.

Greenlandic independence had really been just a dream, though, as NATO would never allow the territory of one of its own members to be torn asunder, especially with a key U.S. military base located in Thule. But then, three days after the current conflict began, NATO's North Atlantic Council, its political body, voted not to join a war already seemingly lost in the Pacific. Unfettered by the old politics, American strategic planners had soon after taken note of the fact that the potential new country had nine commercial icebreakers in its ports, while the U.S. Coast Guard had only one remaining icebreaker,
³
and it was sixty years old and presently stuck in the wrong ocean at the port of Bremerton, Washington.

And so a deal was struck: The United States would recognize and protect the sovereignty of the nation of Kalaallit, instantly making it the thirteenth-largest country in the world by geographic size and the richest by per capita income. In exchange, Admiral Abelsen and the world's newest navy, made up exclusively of icebreakers, would escort America's Atlantic Fleet through a new path to the east.

Mount Ka‘ala, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

The approach to the mountain had taken Conan and the insurgents two days of slow movement. Hiking up the one gravel road would have taken them only a few hours, but they would have risked bumping into the twice daily patrol from the Directorate guard force at the foot of the mountain.

Judging from the ache deep in her left elbow, Conan guessed that the cut there was infected. All the crawling over the forest's slimy dirt and roots made it inevitable. But this was the best she'd felt in weeks. It felt good to be doing something other than running, which to her had started to feel like slow-motion defeat. Since the ambush at the school, the Muj had done nothing but escape and evade. But now they had a mission.

Maybe that helped too. The fact that someone else had finally made the call eased the weight of decision and the aching heaviness of responsibility. How long had it been since she had just followed orders? Until her D-TAC buzzed and that sea glider showed up, all she'd had was her instinct and Marine Corps training.

The physical toll of getting to the target site might kill them before the Directorate could, though. Mount Ka‘ala was Oahu's highest point. At just over four thousand feet, she told herself, the mountain wasn't that high compared to the ones in the mountain-warfare courses she had done. Yet the sinister way the heavy mist wreathed the jagged range made it an angry reminder of how cruel the world could be. The constantly attacking mosquitoes would not let her forget it. Focus on the mission kept her and the rest of the NSM inching higher, minute by minute, under their sweltering woolen blankets, willing themselves to reach their position before nightfall.

As they trudged along, she couldn't help admiring how the descending sun lit up the Directorate aerostat surveillance balloon. Its silver skin reflected the sunset in orange ripples.

“Like a big fat juicy peach there for the taking,” said Finn, steadying a spotting scope.
⁴
“Ready to go shopping, sir?” He was still making jokes, but there was a palpable tension between the two of them since the school shootings, an undertone of challenge even in the way he now called her
sir
.

“Seems right,” said Conan, trying to ignore the tone. That was what she had been taught at Officer Candidate School: squelch it immediately or ignore it. She couldn't squelch it now; the NSM was too fragile to hold together under the force of discipline. Indeed, she'd already noticed the looks from the other team members they'd met up with and heard their disapproving whispers about the kids who'd died at the school and the comrades who'd been deserted there.

She signaled to the three other insurgents nearby to keep advancing. Shrouded in their blankets, which would help defeat thermal-imaging surveillance, the fighters took the formless shape of decomposing stumps.

“Pass me the suppressor,” she said to Finn.

Conan wriggled out of her pack and set up the Chinese weapon, a QBU-88 rifle.
⁵
The suppressor screwed on easily and within thirty seconds, the rifle's scope had established a network connection with a TrackingPoint spotter.
⁶

“I have the impact point,” said Finn, getting back to business. The scope, which they had taken from a Dick's Sporting Goods, automatically adjusted for range, wind, and ballistics and was connected to a networked tracking engine. Wherever the target, a hit was guaranteed for even an amateur marksman, especially as an auto-lock wouldn't allow the gun to fire until it was pointed exactly at the mark the spotter had laser-designated.

“You know, my brother-in-law had one of these. Point, click, and shoot. Asshole would assassinate Bambis from a thousand meters away, all the while sipping his Pabst Blue Ribbon. And not ironically, mind you.”

“How we looking?” Conan asked.

“Got nothing at IP Alpha,” said Finn. “Pissing in the wind. Well, you know what I mean, right, sir?”

“Roger that,” said Conan. “See the aim point?”

“Got it,” said Finn. “Anyone else you want me to clip while I'm up here? Maybe one of us, sir?”

Conan ignored the bait and adjusted the rifle on her shoulder; the scope and spotting device recalculated the round's impact point.