Martin shrugged. “Everything’s a video game these days. Believe me, nothing gets built without CAD software and multiphysics engineering simulations. You really don’t want to wait for a gale-force wind and a bunch of overloaded lorries to find out what’s going to happen to your cantilevered cable bridge under those conditions.”
“Point taken. But if I’m understanding this correctly… then we’re totally fucked. We’re simply not getting off this sandbar.”
“Not necessarily,” Martin said, turning to face the display again. “There’s almost always a way to finesse things. To run it another way. To think outside the parameters of the model.”
“Such as?”
“For starters, adding force to it. We can get a tug from the destroyer.”
Drake nodded. “The Murphy. Yes. No. I’ve thought of that. But we can’t risk it. The Murphy has to stay at stand-off distance. If the Kennedy falls, she’s the only way back for the others – for the scientist and his vaccine.”
Martin looked intent. “I understand that. But bear with me. The carrier has two anchors – and the chains for them are a bit over two thousand feet each, according to the specs. Even with droop, and with the moorings, that’s well over a kilometer of distance. Now I don’t know exactly what will be involved in rigging up a tow-chain between two warships like this. But I’m sure it can be done. Look, I’ve simulated that, too.”
As Drake watched, Martin pulled in a destroyer sim, then a slightly sagging, very long length of unspeakably heavy chain, stretching from the stern of the carrier to the destroyer. Then he ran it again.
Drake squinted at the screen. “Nothing’s happening.”
“Yes, I know. It’s still not enough force to dislodge us.”
Drake sighed out loud. “When the battleship Missouri was grounded, in 1950 I think, it took twenty-some tugboats and salvage vessels to get her off the bar. And she only displaced 45,000 tons, less than half what we do.”
Martin nodded. “I take your point. But there are a lot of other variables that differ between the two cases. Keep bearing with me.” Martin clicked around, pulling in more elements and overlays. “I’ve also simulated the storm itself… the mega-herd of dead.”
Drake’s breath caught slightly as he watched an undulating blanket, like an impossibly gigantic swarm of ants, cover the shore, and then begin to crawl out into the sea. “What – you simulated ten million Zulus? Some kind of AI?”
“Yes, in a word. AI zombies. Once I’d programmed one, doing ten million was just a question of brute processing power.” As he spoke, the edge of the insect-like mass, now underwater, reached the base of the carrier and began to pile up against it. “I gave them simple behavioral rules, based on what we were seeing on the drone footage. For starters, they home in on humans, right? They’re also attracted to noise, tend to clump up together, and try to swarm in a mass over structures or other obstructions by climbing atop one another. But, for the simplicity of the model, I mainly have them all trying to reach this room, by any open avenue.”
Drake nodded. “Like goddamned soldier ants.” To their misfortune, that was pretty much what they were seeing on the drone video – something too close to hive behavior. As Drake watched, the swarm continued to pile up against the prow and rise toward the level of the flight deck. Drake assumed, or ardently hoped, that time was accelerated in this scenario.
With the chain still attached to the fantail of the carrier, and being pulled on fruitlessly by the destroyer, the dead finally swarmed up and over the deck. Within a few seconds, they had covered every surface of the boat, including most of the five-story island. It was like watching locusts devour a field.
“Okay, so at that point we’re really fucked,” Drake said, grimacing – but then his expression changed, and he squinted intently at the starboard side of the ship sim, where the heaving piles of dead were being sucked out of view, from some force below.
Martin saw where he was looking. Using the mouse, he rotated the boat around so that side was visible. “I included the hole in the starboard side of the hull. That’s them swarming inside, and filling up the lower decks.” Drake looked horrified, while Martin looked pained at having to bear yet more bad news. But then he steeled himself, and perked up again. “But don’t eat the messenger – at least not just yet. Now look what happens when I run things slightly differently…”
He stopped this round of the simulation and moved the time marker back.
“Okay,” he said, pausing to look Drake in the eye again. “Now I really need you to keep an open mind about this.” He adjusted a few of the parameter sliders. “We just need to bring the tide up about two hours, which entails us holding the storm off for another two hours. That gives us a higher tide, and more buoyancy to work with. Then we tweak the weight of the carrier a bit – and, critically, the center of ballast, both of which should be doable.” Finally, he started the sim again. Soon, the dead were again piling up against the prow, higher and higher…
Martin leaned forward intently. “Now just prepare to suspend your disbelief slightly for a few seconds.” He rotated and zoomed in on the massive, rising pile of dead against the hull – which also extended down to the sea floor below. “Okay, and the destroyer starts tugging now…”
He and Drake both leaned forward to watch the simulation play out.
It finished.
Drake didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
Finally he spoke. “Holy shit. Was that what it looked like?”
“Yes. It was.”
“What else did you change to get that outcome?”
Martin spoke intently. “In addition to the storm itself, just the tide, the displacement of the carrier, and center of ballast. And those are variables we can control.”
Drake frowned. “But what I just told you – about the arrival time and the engines…”
Martin nodded enthusiastically. “But that’s the beauty of it. We need this last factor whether we have the engines or not – and if we have this we don’t need the damned engines.”
Drake was still struggling to wrap his mind around this “last factor.” It seemed far too crazy to be possible.
“The equations don’t lie,” Marin said. “Assuming the validity of the underlying assumptions.”
“And there’s no way we can do this before… that?”
Martin shook his head. “Not until it gets here. Every way I run it, we fail. Until that moment.”
Drake stood, his mind racing with the implications. “Can you put this on a laptop?”
“No. But I can export it as a movie.”
“Do it. Ready room, back of the Flag Bridge, in fifteen.”
Captain Martin started to rise and salute, but Drake was already out the hatch.
Lead the Fight
Bridge of the USS Michael Murphy, off the Coast of Virginia
Commander James Abrams, captain of the Arleigh-Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Michael Murphy, gazed out the front screens of his bridge and out at the sea. In the foreground, on the very prow of the ship, and flapping defiantly in the breeze, was the “snake on stripes” flag – with its field of red and white stripes, rattlesnake, and “Don’t Tread On Me” text – which had first been run up at the ship’s christening.
That had been on May 7, 2011 – what would have been the 35th birthday of the ship’s namesake: Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael P. Murphy.
“Captain,” a voice intruded into Abrams’ reverie. “All stations report full readiness.” This voice belonged to Abrams’ longtime Executive Officer (XO), Lieutenant Commander Jones. Abrams slightly absently took the tablet computer Jones was handing him, with its integrated station status updates. He glanced down and flipped through a couple of screens. But it was all as he expected.
He laid it down on the console in front of him and raised his eyes again up to the sea and sky. He still had a few minutes left, a little calm remaining before the storm – though any sense of calm had to be somewha
t internally generated. The bridge of an Arleigh-Burke destroyer was a cramped and crowded place at the best of times, and today was worse than usual. The bridge bustled with officers and men of various ranks and ratings – and the only two who seemed neither to be coming in nor going out were Abrams and Jones.
No, today was nothing like normal. Today was in fact the most thrilling and nerve-wracking watch the officers and men of the crew could even remember.
Today they were going to see action.
* * *
Lieutenant Michael Murphy had been the first person to be awarded the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, for actions during the war in Afghanistan. He lost his life leaving his position of cover, and knowingly exposing himself to enemy fire, to get a clear radio signal and call in help for his four-man SEAL team – which had been surrounded and attacked by a force of 150–200 Taliban fighters.
Their location, in a remote and mountainous area of Kunar Province, had been compromised when they were discovered by local goatherds. When Murphy determined them to be non-combatants, he ordered them released. The herders promptly reported the SEALs’ position to the local Taliban commander – who then attacked with machine guns, AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and 82mm mortars – resulting in a running, tumbling, desperate, hours-long firefight as the SEALs fled down the side of the mountain. When it was over, only one of the four had survived.
And it wasn’t Mike Murphy.
He died fighting, and spent his life without hesitation, trying to save his men.
In a passageway down below on the destroyer that had been named in his honor, a glass display case showed Lt. Murphy’s helmet, vest, boots, and K-Bar knife.
And never for a minute did the men and women who served aboard the Murphy forget the heroism and sacrifice of their ship’s namesake. And his constant, spectral presence aboard the ship steeled the crew’s resolve to demonstrate equal heroism in service and in battle. And, if necessary, equal sacrifice.
The ship’s motto was: Lead the Fight.
* * *
On the other hand, Abrams thought to himself, in the few last minutes he had before the shooting started, that motto had become something of a joke since the start of the ZA. In reality, their role had been more like Follow the Leader, with the Murph trailing around after the carrier like some maid in waiting, never getting its guns in the fight – and, worst of all, never doing the job for which it had been designed.
The job of protecting the carrier.
It was axiomatic that every other vessel in a carrier strike group ultimately had the same sacred task: supporting and protecting the flat-top. At whatever cost.
But all the many threats to a nuclear supercarrier that used to exist in the old world – enemy aircraft, batteries of Chinese anti-ship missiles, stealthy Russian submarines, swarms of Iranian Navy patrol boats, ramshackle dinghies loaded up with explosives by jihadis – had all gone away, seemingly overnight.
Abrams snorted once in mordant amusement. Well, he thought, that was one nice thing about the fall of civilization – no more threats to western civilization…
On the other hand, it made life in the carrier strike group seem a bit pointless at times. The state-of-the-art weapons and technology on the Arleigh-Burke destroyers were legendary – its powerful Aegis combat and radar system, that could search and track over 100 targets out to more than 100 nautical miles; its anti-aircraft missiles and Phalanx CIWS to blast attacking aircraft and incoming anti-ship missiles out of the sky; its anti-submarine warfare (ASW) capabilities with towed sonar array, torpedos, and sub-hunting Seahawk helicopters. When Admiral Burke, for whom the class was named, was asked how the new destroyer compared with the ones he’d had in World War Two, he answered: “If I’d had one of these, there wouldn’t have been a World War Two.”
But the ZA was nothing like the world’s previous conflicts. And all of the Murph’s overwhelming firepower had more or less lain idle for the last two years. Their weapons were no longer optimized against the threats the strike group actually faced – and neither was the Murphy’s crew, who were exquisitely trained and drilled, but for wars that now would never be fought. The Kennedy basically did its own fighting with its own people. And aside from the utility value of the Murph’s two Seahawk helicopters – which could insert Marines, move things around, and stand by to rescue downed pilots – they had basically performed the same role they were in right now. Namely, redundancy, to be there in case the Kennedy went down.
They still trained hard, and kept up readiness. But no one amongst the crew really expected ever to be called to action. And they struggled to understand what their role in this new fallen world was. So they’d all simply had to reach down deep, and adapt. And endure. Because they still had jobs to do, and some kind of a role to play.
Today, that role would be stepped up – at last.
Abrams and his senior officers couldn’t hide their disappointment that Drake had ordered them to remain at stand-off distance – away from the flat-top, away from the shore, and especially away from the enemy. This stance was meant to ensure that, even if the Kennedy fell, the Murphy could still steam away. And that they could fight on.
Of course Abrams understood that it was absolutely critical for one of the two ships to survive. Somebody had to make it home. And, more importantly, someone had to safeguard and deliver the objective of their great mission. Not all of the operational details had been made available to Abrams and his staff. But he had the broad outlines. He knew it was about trying to find a cure. And a way to bring humanity back from the brink.
No, Captain Abrams understood this imperative. He just didn’t like it.
Positioning his boat so far from the beached and largely helpless supercarrier, wedged as it was on the sandbar off Virginia Beach, also meant he couldn’t properly do his job of protecting it. And this was the very first occasion in the ZA when the Kennedy actually needed protecting.
There was one other reason Abrams didn’t much like the Kennedy looking down the barrel of such mortal peril. And that was a certain Lieutenant who served in the carrier’s Combat Information Center. Someone Abrams had known before all this – and because of whom he had gone way out of his way to get his first command assignment in the Kennedy strike group. Someone he had gone to some lengths to be close to. So, the danger to the flat-top was a matter of absolutely critical professional concern to him.
But it was also personal – intensely so.
Briefly Abrams pictured the gorgeous face of that certain CIC officer… they’d only had a handful of days together, on shore leave, but they’d been unforgettable. And now, as he knew he had to do, he drove that thought and that image far from his mind.
Because, right now, like everyone else in the strike group, like everyone else in the military really, Abrams and his people had to concentrate on doing their jobs – the job they actually had been given in the coming battle. And their first task was that of bombarding the coastline.
It couldn’t be said that destroyers had never done this kind of work before. The D-Day landings at Omaha Beach might well have been turned back – if not for brave destroyer captains and crews seeing the butchery taking place on the strand, and deciding to act. They could see the landing troops were being murdered by machine guns in the German pillboxes – which were supposed to be taken out by Sherman tanks. But few tanks had made it ashore, and the men stumbling out of the surf were paying a terrible price.
That is, until the destroyer captains brought their vessels in perilously close to shore and delivered broadside bombardments against the German positions – saving the day, as well as untold numbers of Allied lives.
But D-Day was a long time ago, and the role of the modern destroyer did not particularly encompass shore bombardment. Then again, the Arleigh-Burke boats were damned versatile, and their armament did include a single 5-inch (127mm) deck gun, for which they had a total of 680 high-explosive rounds. More to the point of their usual
mission, they also had a vertical missile launching system with 96 cells, as the launch tubes were called.
Those cells were partly filled with Tomahawk cruise missiles – an excellent ground-attack weapon. However, the majority of them held surface-to-air-missiles (SAMs), Harpoon and Sparrow anti-ship missiles, ballistic defense missiles (BDMs), and anti-submarine missiles. None of those were intended for firing at ground targets; though all could be made to do so, if clumsily.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one had predicted the fall of civilization; and when the shit started to come down, re-optimizing the destroyer’s missile stocks hadn’t been high on anyone’s list of priorities. Even if it had, Abrams doubted anyone would have predicted a mass of Zulus big enough to be attacked with cruise missiles, for God’s sake. Nor that they would be assigned the mission of firing on, and trying to thin out, a 10-mile-wide front consisting of as many as 10 million ravening, infected, dead bastards.
But Abrams knew full well that Drake wasn’t interested in excuses. Military commanders rarely were. What Commander Drake was interested in was mission success – and the survival of the Kennedy. And Captain Abrams and his crew had somehow to make that happen.
Or at least contribute materially to it.
* * *
Abrams’ reverie was broken once again, probably for the last time, by the sound of the XO going through launch-release protocol with both the missile control room, and their own Combat Information Center downstairs. Their reports came back across the little speakers that dotted the bridge at the juncture of bulkhead and overhead.
“Missile Control to Bridge. Physical safeties are disengaged, and cells eight through twenty-four are prepped, checked, and launch-ready. Birds are ready to fly.”
The 5-inch gun would be getting its workout, as well, in due course. But the shore bombardment would begin with a missile salvo. This was at least something like an appropriate fire-mission for a guided-missile destroyer.
“That’s received, Missile Control,” Jones said into a hand mic. “Stand by.” He turned a knob to switch stations. “CIC, Bridge.”
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 10
