Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (48 page)

He hoped the great strategist of old was right one last time.

Kahuku, Oahu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

The tactical view showed Conan a blinking yellow light on the blue
Z
icon out to sea. They waited several minutes for whatever it was indicating to arrive.

Then there was a sudden roar overhead, almost like an airborne locomotive. A massive explosion erupted miles away, almost certainly at the old Wheeler Army Airfield, where the Directorate had a mobile search radar the SEALs had marked coming in. Her tac-view showed one of the red icons flash with a yellow overlay. Then another wink, and another round of explosions: a mobile Stonefish ballistic-missile launch site in Waialua to the west, the firing pattern prioritizing any mobile targets before taking out the fixed sites.

They watched below as the golfers stood confused; one stopped in midswing and threw himself to the ground. After figuring out the fire wasn't aimed at them, they piled into the electric cart and drove off toward the resort complex.

“Yes, that's it, boys, pack it in. You're shit golfers anyway,” Hammer said.

The firing continued above them, a whooshing sound every six seconds, some followed by an explosion close, others in the distance. More and more of the array of red icons began to blink yellow. Below them, the base became a beehive of activity. Two of the helicopters on the tennis court began to spin their rotors.

“Come on, come on,” Duncan whispered, starting to grow antsy.

“Nemesis, this is Longboard,” the comms link crackled. “Verify friendly position Augusta, over.”

“Longboard, Nemesis, affirmative,” said Duncan. “And don't leave a scratch on that comms tower or there'll be hell to pay, out.”

Again, a wait of minutes. The rail-gun rounds moved at 8,200 feet per second, but they had almost two hundred miles to travel. Then another whooshing sound came in, this time almost upon them, and the tennis courts disappeared in a massive cloud of dirt and fire. Several smaller explosions followed as helicopters and vehicles just beyond the blast site began to cook off. Then another whoosh, and a series of tents set up around the golf course's clubhouse as a command complex disappeared. Six seconds later, a third rail-gun round hit the parking lot, leaving a gaping crater where the unit's motor pool had been. The team was well beyond the strike zone, but they still felt the pressure in their eardrums change and their stomachs turn at each of the explosions.

Duncan scanned the complex with his binoculars and saw that the tower was still standing, the tiny robotic lobster still clinging on.

“Longboard, Nemesis Six. Confirm targets serviced and communications link strong. Nice shooting, over.”

“Thank you, Nemesis. We aim to please, out.”

The strikes began again, the locomotives rushing by every six seconds like clockwork, some directly overhead, some at a distance. Then the intervals between strikes began to shift, first to twelve seconds, then to eighteen. Conan panned her view and saw icons on neighboring islands starting to flash. Maui, then the Big Island, even Lanai. She'd been so focused on her own fight, she hadn't known what was happening on the other islands.

Duncan brought her attention back. “Time for the seaside fireworks.” He pointed off to the coast just as a flash of light about five miles away rose from the ocean and streaked into the clouds. A few seconds later there was a flash above, followed by the sound of a distant explosion, and debris started to rain down.

Conan's visor said those were AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles fired by the
Orzel
using a system developed by the Navy's Littoral Warfare Weapon program;
⁶⁸
it allowed the heat-seeking missiles, which were normally carried by fighter jets, to be ejected underwater from the submarine's torpedo tubes using gas pressure and a watertight capsule and then launched into the air.

“That's our ride,” said Duncan. “Never a good idea to park your combat air patrol above a submarine full of pissed-off Poles who haven't won a war in a few hundred years.”

Lieutenant Nowak, lying prone in the dirt just a few meters away, smiled at Conan, gave her a thumbs-up, and then flipped a middle-finger salute at Duncan.

Two more streaks shot up from the water, and another shower of flame and sparks appeared behind the veil of the clouds. The visor registered them as formerly being Chengdu J-20 fighter jets.

The waiting stretched into almost an hour. They watched as the Directorate troops began to sift through the rubble, pull out bodies.

“Don't get too comfortable,” Duncan whispered. “Peaches, tell Butter that sharing is no longer caring.”

“Sir?” Lieutenant Nowak asked.

“Switch the lobster to jamming mode.”

There was no immediate change in the activity below, but soon Directorate troops paused, awaiting instructions that would not come.

Another cluster of blue appeared in the tac-view on the horizon. As it grew closer, icons branched off.

“Major, I think it's time you stopped being the only Marine in this island paradise,” he said.

She tried to say something flip back, but she couldn't. All she wanted was to see them. As the icon grew closer, she flipped up the tactical rig. Duncan waited for her to tear up or something, but her face had returned to its usual impassive mask.

With the naked eye, they looked just like dots in the distance. Then the faint chop of blades could be heard. The flight of six low-flying Marine Corps Osprey tiltrotors slowly drew into view. They were flying incredibly low to the ocean, far below what Conan had been taught to do as a trainee back at New River. Clearly, they were trying to stay below the radar to the bitter end.

Now the Directorate would feel real fear.
She wondered what Finn would have thought of the scene, and then she pushed that idea away.

“Shit,” Duncan said. “They're waking up.”

He pointed to a small quadcopter taking off from Kuilima Bay, apparently protected from the first rail-gun strikes by the shadow of the hotel buildings.

“Break-break!” Duncan said into the radio, telling everyone on that frequency this was a priority message. “Ares Flight, Ares Flight, this is Nemesis Six. Heads up, they have a quad drone in the air.”

They heard only a crackle of radio static.

“Longboard, this is Nemesis, we can't raise Ares Flight,” Duncan said into the secure link to the ship hundreds of miles away. “Can you let them know a quad drone is headed toward them from the east, over.”

“Wilco, Nemesis,” replied the radio, both parties knowing the jury-rigged game of telephone likely wouldn't work in the heat of battle.

One of the Ospreys splashed down on its belly into Turtle Bay, a few hundred feet from the beach, then flipped across the water, parts breaking off.

“I didn't see any weapon strike,” Conan said. “Their propellers just started to feather; fuel or engine trouble of some sort.”

The rest of the flight kept going, beginning to hover above the fairways on the far side of the golf course complex, the section designed by Arnold Palmer.
⁶⁹

“Shit, they still don't know about the drone,” said Conan.

As the lead Osprey touched down over the green of the first hole, the Chinese quadcopter popped up from the swirl of smoke around the destroyed tennis courts and fired a missile. The tiltrotor aircraft pulled up quickly, trying to dodge the missile. A Marine cartwheeled out of the open rear ramp from forty feet up, clutching his rifle the whole way down until he slammed onto the second hole's men's tee box. The quadcopter's missile hit the Osprey's aft fuselage near the horizontal stabilizer, causing the heavily loaded aircraft to swing wildly and then crash into one of the condo units overlooking the fairway.

The second Osprey in the flight, hovering just behind, pivoted. As the aircraft turned its back to the quadcopter, a gunner fired a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the Osprey's rear ramp. The aircraft turned in its hover, and the arc of red tracers edged closer and closer to the quadcopter and then shattered it in a small explosion. The Osprey then pivoted back and touched down on the golf course. Marines poured out the ramp onto the fairway grass. They immediately started to take small-arms fire from the porch of a townhouse that Directorate troops had been billeted in. As the Osprey's propellers tilted forward and pulled the aircraft out of its hover, a missile arced in, fired from the main resort. The aircraft's defensive flares fired, decoying the missile's seeker head and triggering its proximity fuse, causing an explosion a few hundred feet away, but shrapnel slashed the right engine. One of the massive blades broke off and knifed into the Osprey's fuselage just behind the cockpit, and an explosion broke the aircraft in two.

Conan tracked the missile trail back and saw two Directorate troops just at the edge of the main resort's pool complex reloading an FN-8 man-portable missile system.
⁷⁰

“Time for us to get down there and help out,” said Conan, checking her rifle and rig.

The fourth Osprey in the line exploded; machine-gun fire from another townhouse had hit a fuel tank. The Marines on the ground popped smoke grenades and the swirling white smoke added to the confusion.

Duncan shook his head. “No, Major, that's not our fight. We're to stay put and coordinate fires. I know it's not what you want to hear, but those are the orders. Mission comes first.”

“Not this time, not for me,” Conan said.

She took off toward the resort at a jog. Duncan let her go. She was no longer essential to the mission.

USS
Zumwalt
Ship Mission Center, One Hundred and Eighty Miles Off the North Shore of Oahu

The view was majestic in a way, the columns of black smoke rising above the green landscape, the peaks of the Waianae mountain range in the distance. Then the image fizzled and the screen in the ship mission center went blank.

Captain Jamie Simmons swore under his breath. The live video feed from the SEAL team labeled Nemesis had to be considered a luxury, not a requirement.

“Did we lose them or just the connection?”

“Jamming, sir. We're working it,” responded the communications officer.

Simmons took in the scene around him. It was a sign of how different this ship was that the best place for a captain to be in the midst of battle was not on the bridge but in a windowless room. Looking down from the second level of the ship mission center, he could see each of the LCD screens that paneled the walls displaying the various systems' status while in the middle of the room, a holographic map projected the topography of the island of Oahu, the various targets and suspected enemy formations overlaid with constantly updating digital red dots and triangles.

He checked the screen for the SEAL fire team's footage of the strikes, but it was blank. Still, the mission moved on smoothly without it. The anxiousness he felt at that one missing piece of data flow was a reminder of how quickly people took for granted the sea of information they floated in. He only hoped that being thrown back into the dark would be even more disorienting for the Directorate generals and admirals who had enjoyed a war of such data dominance so far.

“ATHENA, display task force with projected time to point bravo.”

The holographic map pulled out, shrinking the island and projecting the rest of the task force several hundred miles behind them. The system predicted just a few hours of steaming time before the forces would tactically link, but those hours could make all the difference, not just to the success or failure of the assault but to getting the
Z
back under their air-defense umbrella. It was an honor to be the tip of the spear, but very lonely.

“We've got it back, sir.” The footage from the SEAL fire team at Turtle Bay Resort reappeared on the screen. Then the video feed began to cycle through the other imagery sent from teams inserted around the island chain.

“Fidelity?” asked Simmons.

“We're at forty percent,” said the communications officer.

“Not good enough. I don't want to risk any more civilians than we have to,” Simmons said, knowing that some would become casualties in any event, “and I damn well don't want to stay powered down any longer than we have to if we're just shooting wild.”

That was the more disconcerting part, having the ship essentially motionless, the engines at minimal turns solely to hold steady. Conceived as Drift Ops, this approach was meant to both maximize power to the rail gun and make the
Z
an even more difficult target to detect. Ships were always moving, it was assumed, so a radar signature the size of a dinghy just floating with the current would be filtered out by automated sensors. That was the hope, at least.

“Captain! One of the recon teams, Erinyes, outside Wheeler Army Airfield, is requesting another salvo,” said a weapons officer from the bullpen of desks below.

“The hangars were taken out as planned, but the runway strike was off target by a few hundred meters.” Simmons winced, hoping they hadn't put one of the rail-gun rounds into the POW compound they suspected was on the base.

“ATHENA has updated the firing solution,” said Cortez, looking over at Simmons, who nodded. “Main gun, batteries release,” said Simmons. The weapons officer's hands flicked at the touchscreen in front of him, giving ATHENA control over the rail gun's targeting. The intelligent system did more than just aim the barrel of the rail gun at the target; it also interfaced with the ship's propulsion and navigation systems to ensure that it stayed on target.

“Commencing power transfer,” said Cortez. “In five, four, three, two—”

The tactical action officer broke in. “Viper, Viper, Viper. ATHENA is reporting two, no, there's three YJ-12 cruise missiles
⁷¹
in the air.”