Gray Matter Splatter (A Deckard Novel Book 4)
Page 16
Deckard winced as the Barrett’s sights bounced around with the movement of the Carrickfergus. This was a shit show if he’d ever seen one.
“One point one,” Aslan updated him.
Deckard tried to understand the pattern his rifle sights were following as they rocked up and down with the ship. It would be damn hard to get off more than one shot before his sights were off target again. Thinking he had it more or less figured out, Deckard flicked the safety off and breathed out. His finger tightened around the trigger.
“One kilo—”
Aslan’s words were cut off as a .50 caliber round exploded in the Barrett’s chamber, the sudden inflation of gas pushing the thumb-sized bullet out of the barrel. Before his round had even entered the terminal phase, Ivan’s men dropped an HE quick round down the mortar tube.
A spray of silver sparks flew into the air as Deckard’s shot rang the recoilless rifle tube. Deckard fired again and again, each squeeze of the trigger sending the anti-material rifle bucking back into his shoulder. It would leave a hell of a good bruise, but this was a good kind of pain.
The first mortar round came down 50 meters behind and 50 meters to the starboard side of the enemy vessel, exploding just before it hit the water. Aslan began calling on corrections, the first shot not bad at all. Like Deckard, Ivan had to compensate for the forward travel of the enemy ship, intentionally overshooting it and hoping that they would sail right into the burst by the time it landed.
Deckard dropped the empty magazine and reloaded.
“Not sure about the status of the SPG-9,” Aslan reported. “But one of the crew is lying face-down on the deck. Another one is missing, probably in the water somewhere. The third is standing back up. Looks like some more movement, guys getting ready to come out of the hatch.”
“Let’s see what we can do about that,” Deckard said as he racked the Barrett’s bolt.
“Shot, out!” Ivan declared over the net.
“Shot, over,” Aslan responded as he watched for the impact.
The nose of the mortar rounds could be dialed to explode on impact, on a slight delay for destroying dug-in enemy, and in this case, set to quick, meaning they would explode slightly before impact—great for hitting troops in the open. A puff of black and white smoke appeared above the enemy ship, clearing off the deck of remaining troops and toppling the SPG-9 over on its side as one of the tripod legs was severed.
“Fire for effect!” Aslan told the mortar section. Ivan’s men immediately began sliding round after round down the tube as fast as it would fire.
Deckard trained his sights on the open hatch where they had spotted movement and started dumping rounds at it whenever his crosshairs drifted over it. Pausing for a moment, he fired a shot off at the small radar dome, which exploded in a spray of black plastic. Unfortunately, he was unable to spot the direct-energy platform that had been dogging the Carrickfergus with its lasers.
82mm HE quick rained down in the vicinity of the ship, puffing up a ring of a smoke all around it as the mortar section sent a hail of hate their way. None of the rounds appeared to be quite as direct a hit as the first, but mortars were an area weapon, not a point one like a sniper rifle. This was hand grenades and horseshoes; close was good enough.
Now the captain of the black ship threw caution to the wind and floored the throttle. The ship rose out of the water like a black needle shooting through the sea. The mouth of the strait was close, and they knew that the pirates on their heels were just clearing the decks in preparation for a ship boarding. It was now or never.
The ship powered away, another storm of HE quick exploding right behind it. The ship’s captain was good, Deckard thought as he watched them make a last-ditch effort to reach the open ocean. He took them through the rest of the weaving channel, chipping away ice at the sides on several occasions as he sped away.
“Three kilometers out,” Aslan reported.
Deckard smiled. Through his scope, he saw the ship trailing a plume of black smoke. The enemy just had their shit pushed in, and it was about goddamn time. Setting down the Barrett, he walked back inside the bridge. Picking up his laptop, he set it down on the table and typed a message to the mage, who was still standing there waiting for him.
“Is it getting hot in there?”
The mage was silent for a long moment.
“Well played.”
Waving his hands, the mage cast a spell. Yellow fog billowed up around the blade master and banished him from the dark castle.
Chapter 20
The JSOC think tank was deathly silent.
Craig reached for the remote and clicked off the television as the press conference they had just watched concluded, the president walking from behind his podium at the White House.
“That’s it,” Gary said solemnly.
“Are you surprised?” Will asked, his words cutting through the air like a knife.
“America gets hit with the most sophisticated and well-planned terrorist attack in history, and the administration is not seriously considering state sponsors? ISIS takes the blame just like that, case closed?” Craig said.
“They are a convenient scapegoat. Blame a bunch of Arabs with long beards who nobody likes anyway, drop some bombs, and declare mission accomplished, all while the real puppet masters get away clean,” Gary thought aloud.
Will turned to look at him.
“Everything is going according to the enemy’s plan,” Will told him. “ISIS has had some state-sponsored support since shortly after they rose to power. Their propaganda campaign is slick, like something straight out of Madison Avenue, showing a deep awareness of American cultural motifs and norms.”
“What are you alluding to, Will?”
“It is called reflexive control, a form of information operation the Russians have been studying for over forty years. Essentially, how it works is that you insert socially loaded information into the enemy’s decision-making process in order to elicit a response that favors your strategy. For example, the Russians consider our so-called Star Wars program in the 1980s to have been a reflexive control information operation.”
“We knew that the Russians would seek to counter any type of horizontal weapons proliferation, so we invented a fake weapons program we knew would bankrupt their economy when they tried to match it?” Joshua offered.
“Correct. ISIS has used a propaganda campaign against the West for years now, one which uses our own media outlets to disseminate information they want our public to see. The main images and video they want us to see are the destruction of ancient antiquities across Syria and Iraq, the execution of homosexuals, their use of young girls for sexual slavery, and the mass executions of Christians and Western hostages. These images are peddled to us knowing they will provoke a reflexive response from the West. It was only a matter of time; they just let the pressure build. And the Russians, Chinese, and Iranians behind the terrorist attacks have spent years preparing the West psychologically for this. We are emotionally committed to blaming ISIS. All it took were a few false leads for the enemy to lay out for us to find,” Will finished.
“You are so sure of this simply because ISIS uses a propaganda strategy the Russians have studied in the past?” Craig asked.
“Yes, partially. But you can also look at the Russians, Chechens, Georgians, and others who traveled to Syria to join ISIS. Many of them openly fought as GRU proxy forces in Dagestan, Georgia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. Then they suddenly flip the switch and become committed jihadis in Syria? I think not. They were deployed to Syria. Deployed by the Russian security services.”
Gary’s chair creaked as he sat back and rubbed his temples.
“Good god.”
“He has nothing to do with it,” Will said. “Think about it. In 2011, JSOC was trying to vet rebel forces in Syria who we could sponsor and support with arms against the Assad regime. By sending Chechens and others to Syria, the Russian intelligence services used jihadis as a spoiler force, knowing that we could
never arm Islamists. They effectively re-contextualized the conflict from being about Syrian nationalism to being about international jihad. This was the same technique they used for their second war in Chechnya.
“And if Deckard can’t capture or kill these guys in the Arctic, then the enemy will get away with the entire scheme. Not only will they walk away clean with a geological weapon that can never be traced back to them after it is used against us, but we’ll also be committed to fighting another useless bushfire war in the Middle East.”
* * *
“Take a look at this, Deckard,” Otter’s first mate said with a smile.
“Good news, I take it?” Deckard asked as he walked over to the sea charts Squirrel had been looking at.
“Yeah, finally. We’re moving deeper into Canada’s Arctic archipelago, which would give the bad guys more places to hide, but the Canadians are stepping up in a big way. They take any violation of Canadian sovereignty very seriously, especially in light of what has happened over the last week. The Louis S. St. Laurent and the Des Groseilliers are moving toward us to cut off several key escape routes through the northwest passage.”
Deckard looked down at the charts. The archipelago of islands created a kind of maritime labyrinth in the Arctic Ocean. There were also key choke points that could be cut off by friendly Canadian forces. Squirrel was pointing out several such choke points that would soon be locked down by the Canadian Coast Guard. The Des Groseilliers was moving up the M'Clintock Channel, which separates Prince of Wales Island and Victoria Island. Farther east, the Louis S. St. Laurent was chugging up the Prince Regent Inlet.
Soon, both icebreakers would enter into the Barrow Strait, blocking the enemy from moving any farther east.
“That will force them to head north,” Deckard commented.
“Right, straight into the perma-ice of the polar ice cap. We have them trapped.”
Deckard frowned, knowing it was never that simple.
“If we keep the pressure on, they will have to keep moving. That means running aground somewhere in the Queen Elizabeth Islands or Ellesmere Island.”
“They will probably try to hide out in one of the fjords and hold out for some alternate form of transportation, maybe even try to hijack one of the commercial ships sailing through the northwest passage, but you’re right; if we’re still on their ass, they will have to abandon ship and move into the interior of one of these islands.”
Deckard cracked his knuckles.
Doing some quick math, he estimated that it would be about another 12 hours of navigating through the Arctic archipelago before the enemy ran into a dead end and had to abandon ship.
It was time to get the boys ready for the ground war.
* * *
“The shi is moving quickly.”
“Shi?” The blade master shook his head.
“Yes,” the mage lectured him. “This is hard to explain for your ears. You might describe it as the strategic momentum of an event or an alignment of forces.”
“So shi is tactical patience?”
“No, but a cunning leader uses long-term strategic patience to wait for shi to fall into his favor. Many, many years ago, the emperor would employ a sage who could divine such information. The sage would know exactly when to strike, when the situation had been properly shaped, when the balance of power was in the emperor’s court.”
“And now?”
The mage turned to face the blade master, his eyes sunken like bottomless pits.
“I am probably the closest thing to the emperor’s sage, but we also use computers today for the raw calculations. I wait patiently, sometimes shaping the shi as I see fit. We call it fighting with a borrowed sword.”
“Information operations. Proxy soldiers. Black operations.”
“These are military terms, but your people have only just discovered these concepts. We have been doing this for over a thousand years. Use the strength of another to do your fighting for you. More recently, we used the Russians to this end; they helped us modernize and industrialize our nation.”
The blade master smiled. The mage was not even trying to hide it anymore. He was speaking of the People’s Republic of China and their eventual ideological split from the Soviets in the 1950s.
“And after the Russians, it was us. America gave you favored-nation status, entry into key economic summits, and shared our military technology.”
“Wai ru, nei fa. It means, ‘On the outside, be benevolent; on the inside, be ruthless.’ This would be obvious to anyone who was properly educated. Americans simply do not learn how to think.”
“I got a crash course in your methodology back in Cairo,” the blade master said casually.
“Cairo?”
“Major Shen Banggen of the General Staff Development’s Third Department.”
The mage looked away.
“Yes, I knew him.”
“I put a bullet between his eyes as he was in the process of purchasing a very sensitive piece of American technology used during Egypt’s Arab Spring.”
“I did not know that you were involved. Banggen was very useful to us. He traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to procure American military equipment that had been captured or lost. Without his help, we would not be able to jam your communications or defeat your defensive systems as easily as we have.”
“You have been planning this for a very long time. Waiting for the shi to align with various other forces?”
“Correct. To engage in a large military build-up, to take overly aggressive military actions, or to announce to the world that we seek unipolar dominance over the United States would have been to invite a catastrophe. We cannot meet America jet for jet or ship for ship, so we have sought out other strategies. But now we are nearly ready to emerge from the shadows and challenge the hegemony of your country. America is in decline and it is now our time. The shi is in our favor.”
“It seems that your plans are currently unraveling.”
“You are attempting a strategy of encirclement against my forces in the Arctic,” the mage said. “Very typical of Americans. It will not succeed. We have reached the point of maximum opportunity; the situation has been shaped for this success.”
“Setting the conditions for success?”
“Ah, yes, this is the American military expression? I like it. We still have great freedom of maneuver, thanks to your Islamic bogeymen in the Middle East. Your president’s advisors are very easy to manipulate. They do not want to see the truth. Even if they did, I wonder if they could.”
“Our shi is speeding up as well.”
“Yes, our little corner of wei qi.”
“Wei qi?”
“A game. Translated, it means encirclement board.”
“I think I’ve played this game before.”
“Shall we play another round?”
Chapter 21
Tampa, Florida
“This is most irregular to say the least,” the nuclear seismologist said.
“Irregular is about the most polite word you could have used,” Deckard replied.
The JSOC think tank in Tampa had brought in one of their consultants, Dr. David Flynn. He was one of the leading seismologists in the country. His speciality was monitoring for potential nuclear detonations around the world, his work mostly focused on North Korea and their alleged nuclear test detonations below ground.
“Simply put, tectonic weapons are not even supposed to exist. Such a thing would violate several scientific principles. There has been speculation, of course, by people like Aleksey Vsevolovidich Nikolayev at the Russian Academy of Sciences. We have done some feasibility studies, but the math doesn’t add up.”
“What is your best guess, then?”
Dr. Flynn squinted on Deckard’s computer screen. The bearded scientist was hesitant.
“Between us girls,” Deckard urged him. “I’m not quoting you in a scientific journal here.”
“The Soviets were rumored to have a class of weapons
called energetics. Action-at-distance, directed energy, even a sub class called psytronics that involves things like telekinesis and mind reading. Personally, I always felt that it was bunk, but the Russians apparently took it seriously, which led to some of our scientists taking it seriously as well during the Cold War. Secretary of Defense Cohen was even briefed on the threat in 1997.”
“On tectonic weapons?”
“And weather weapons as well. The technology that would be used to induce an earthquake would be a scalar interferometer. Again, this is not my hypothesis. Using this type of device, theoretically speaking, electromagnetic energy could be introduced into the fault lines. This could increase stress and cause the tectonic plates to eventually slip.”
“Worst-case scenario, what kind of damage could be done with a tectonic weapon?”
“Well, they would have to use it to trigger an earthquake where there is already natural geophysical pressures present. I think the worst damage they could do is if they were able to push along the caldera under Yellowstone National Park. It is a supervolcano with a magma chamber 50 miles long and 12 miles wide. Eruptions have occurred 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 640,000 years ago.”
“A tectonic weapon could also trigger a volcano?”
“If such a thing exists, then yes. Electromagnetic energy could be introduced into the volcano’s magma chamber, building up internal pressures until it finally erupts.”
“What would happen if the Yellowstone caldera erupted again?”
“Well,” the scientist said with a shrug. “Maybe not an extinction event, but….”
“What?”
“America would cease to exist as we know it, at least for the foreseeable future. The eruption would go on for about a week, but the real damage would come from the blanket of ash that would cover the entire country and float in the sky above our heads. Agriculture would be wiped out, and as a country, we could even be brought to the brink of starvation.”