Ghost Fleet

by P. W. Singer, August Cole

  She wouldn’t let him join her inside the 3-D environment. “Too much for you to handle, plus they scatter when any outsider comes within a mile. That’s how we’ve kept it going,” she said. Aboye watched Silkins navigate on a screen above her fireplace.

  He saw Silkins’s avatar, a bizarre yellow-and-blue cartoon fish that looked like Salvador Dalí had designed it, swimming alongside what looked to be an abstract, submerged rendition of Las Ramblas, in Barcelona. She darted and drifted among other resplendent but unnerving avatars, everything from Hello Kittys to nude supermodel bodies with robot heads. Then, trailing bubbles, each apparently an encrypted key that verified who she was, she stopped at the open door of a hat store. She flicked open her visor and looked at Daniel, jumping from the online world back to the real world.

  “Let me make this clear. This is not about patriotism,” she said. “Our reasons are not yours — you know that, right? We’re about the net itself. Songs about flags, sending kids to die, mom and apple pie, all of those lies? We don’t buy any of that crap the system sells. But in this case, our interests align. We’d like to help you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’?” he said.

  “You don’t need to know that. My friends prefer to remain anonymous.”

  USS Zumwalt, Mare Island Naval Shipyard

  Mike moved as fast as a man his age could move through a warship’s cramped passageways and ladder wells. The shouting got louder, and he forced himself to move even faster. The clanging of metal on metal had him nearly running.

  “She’s one of them,” said Petty Officer Parker. “Just look at her.”

  Mike took in the scene in less than a second: Parker. Wrench. Vern.

  He swung a left-handed punch with his entire body weight behind it and hit Parker square in the stomach. A following jab from his right hand landed just above Parker’s heart, knocking the sailor back into the bulkhead. Just like he’d taught Jamie to do in the garage so many years ago.

  Vern was sprawled on her back on the deck. He reached down to give her a hand just as she looked behind him and screamed.

  Mike ducked at the last moment, and the blow from the wrench glanced off his shoulder. He grunted with anger, more at himself than Parker. It had been over twenty years since he’d last gotten into a fight, but some things he should not have forgotten. As he had been told by a senior chief when he was starting out in the Navy, there were two rules to remember in a bar fight: punch second, and leave first — but only after you’re 100 percent sure the other guy is completely out of the fight.

  The arc of Parker’s swing had left him off balance in the tight corridor, so Mike bent lower to duck the backswing. He turned, feinted with his right, then moved in close and punched with his left, a short, stiff uppercut, a liver shot; he felt his knuckles crack as they smashed into Parker’s side at the ninth and tenth ribs. He’d taught Jamie that move, told him to use it only when the fight moved from boxing to brawling. A liver shot was shocking and debilitating, causing the other guy to lose his breath and sometimes even consciousness. It was also excruciatingly painful.

  Parker’s desperate suck of air energized Mike. He hit him again hard with a close-in combination. And then another. He couldn’t hear the thuds that echoed inside the room; the adrenaline made his own ears ring. But he could feel the impact of the strikes resonating through Parker’s flesh.

  He caught his breath, and as Parker crumpled, he struck with one more combination. Though he knew Parker was in too much pain to hear anything, Mike shouted at him: “You coward! How’s it feel?” This was a show for the others who had gathered and were now standing back in a mix of awe and fear of the old man.

  And then he stopped hitting him. Parker, like Vern, was equipment. He was part of the ship, and Mike was responsible for him too. Through it all, none of Mike’s blows had touched Parker’s face. Stand him up at attention before the captain, and no one would ever know he’d just gotten his ass kicked by a man old enough to be his father. That was the way of his Navy.

  He turned to the thick crowd of sailors.

  “Who else agrees with him? Maybe you want to intern all the Chinese in San Francisco? Ship ’em out to Angel Island like in the last world war?” shouted Mike.

  Parker, trying to get up, was now on his hands and knees, wheezing.

  “Dr. Li is one of us,” said Mike. “If we win, it’ll be because of her. If we die, it’s because of ass-hats like you.”

  He reached down and yanked Parker up by his arm. The man cast his gaze down to avoid making eye contact.

  “Look at me. And this goes for the rest of you too. You don’t like it? Then you have five minutes to get off my ship. If you stay and this happens again, I won’t just play patty-cake like today. Test me. See if I am not one thousand percent serious. Dismissed!”

  Parker shuffled out of sight along with the rest of the crowd.

  “Vern, everything okay?” asked Mike, helping her up.

  “We lost time just now that we can’t afford to,” said Vern. She glared at him, angry at Mike for rescuing her as if she were some lost little girl and livid at herself for feeling so damned vulnerable.

  “I’m not asking about the ship, I’m asking about you,” said Mike.

  She didn’t respond, but she leaned into him. He stood there, unsure of what he should do. She started shaking, and he wrapped his tattooed arms around her. He couldn’t see her face, pressed into his chest, so he looked down at his left hand, pretty sure the ring finger was broken. He felt good, though.

  Moyock, North Carolina

  “Please don’t tap the glass, sir,” said Hernandez. “It makes the animals crazy.”

  Cavendish pressed his face right up to a porthole. The container, which was connected to two more in a U-shaped form, had been made watertight and then filled with water. Each container was about the size of a large apartment, or one of the bedrooms in Cavendish’s South Kensington, London, block-long flat.

  “I don’t see anything. Are they in there?” said Cavendish. He tapped on the Plexiglas porthole again.

  “Yes, sir,” Hernandez said. “Why don’t you try the viz glasses they gave us?”

  Cavendish put on the matte-black, special-made viz glasses that had been hanging around his neck; his fingers rubbed the firm’s old bear-paw logo on the side.

  “What a simple proposition this all was. How did the original owner so truly screw the business up?” said Cavendish. “I have my theories but —”

  He instinctively ducked as soon as the glasses clicked on. A long knife lunged for him, and he virtually counterpunched using some kind of ancient-looking brass trench knife. He settled into the fight, watching through the viz, becoming a part of the sparring from the perspective of a mask-cam worn by one of the ex-commandos.

  The lighting inside the container varied; every few seconds, the lights brightened and then faded to almost pitch-black again. The men seemed to be wearing gray-and-black tiger-striped bodysuits that were accessorized with a variety of edged weapons. Swiss micro-rebreather units, the kind used by cave divers, were affixed to their upper backs. When the lights flashed on inside the tank at one point, Cavendish realized that those were not tiger-striped camouflage patterns on the gray bodysuits. They were slash marks.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder.

  “Sir, this is Aaron Best; he was at DevGru with me. Best is the one who provides the adult supervision for selection and training,” said Hernandez. “I’ll let him fill you in on where we are.”

  “Welcome, Sir Aeric, it is an honor to have you here. What you’re watching is the refinement of our tactics, techniques, and procedures. This is a simulation of a partial power-plant failure. That is why the lighting goes in and out. We also simulate total power failure, which plays out the way you would expect: a knife fight in a closet in the dark. This is a ten-minute e
volution. It involves a nine-minute air supply, and the man with the fewest slash marks on his suit wins. He gets to get out first. The loser has to wait until the ten-minute mark before he can exit the tank.”

  “Quite an incentive,” said Cavendish.

  “In a man-on-man scenario, it’s tough but appropriate. Where it gets tricky for the guys is when you put three of them in there,” said Best. “The last guy out has it pretty rough.”

  “What about those outfits they’re wearing?” asked Cavendish.

  “Standard long-range recon swim kit. Blast-proof. Thermal regulation, which we enhanced for the mission. We think it will be effective,” he said.

  Cavendish’s attention wandered and he stared at a set of seven connected shipping-container halves.

  “That’s the training box,” said Best. “Same idea as what you see here, but it’s for them to practice team on team. Same protocol, nine minutes for the losers. It’s a lot harder, actually, not just because of the teaming, but also because we put a bunch of metal junk in there to simulate the interior. Essentially, it’s like you’re fighting a group of rabid monkeys in an airplane bathroom.”

  An arched eyebrow was Cavendish’s only response.

  Hernandez passed Cavendish one of the weapons. It was a titanium-handled steel-bladed brass-knuckled trench knife about a foot long. The anodized black coating had worn off on the knuckles and blade edges, both of which Cavendish inspected closely with the authority of someone who’d spent a year of his youth cornering the market on Japanese fighting swords.

  “More sword than knife,” said Cavendish. “Can I keep this?”

  Hernandez looked at Best with a nod.

  “Yes, sir. Technically you already own it,” said Best.

  “Too kind,” said Cavendish.

  “We will make the final selection seventy-two hours before launch,” said Best. “The top six out of twenty-four. Four will be in the boarding party, two will remain in reserve.”

  That explained the intensity of the underwater fight he’d just watched, thought Cavendish. “These men really want to go, don’t they?” said Cavendish.

  “Of course, Sir Aeric. The prize fees you’ve offered are more than generous, but really, they just want to get back in the game,” said Best.

  Cavendish returned the viz glasses to Hernandez. “Do you have all the medical-performance investment you need?” said Cavendish.

  Best looked at Hernandez, who nodded.

  “When we make the selection of our final six, I would like to authorize further cognitive augmentation, and a couple other things that the JSOC meat department is now using with the One Hundred Sixtieth helo drivers and the Persistent Operations Group,” said Best.

  “That is, I believe, a permanent change?” said Cavendish.

  “It’s in their contract,” said Best.

  “Very well,” said Cavendish. “Hernandez will see to it. One last question before we meet the team. Something’s been bothering me,” said Cavendish.

  “I am sorry to hear that, Sir Aeric. What is it? We have time before launch to address it,” said Best.

  “What are we going to do about all the blood?” said Cavendish. “It can’t exactly flow out the scuppers. We need to figure out how to clean up the mess afterward.”

  Fort Mason, San Francisco

  Jamie Simmons chewed his pasta quietly and stared at the coffee mug that he’d set on the table.

  As he chewed, he worked his way through the day’s decisions on the Z, especially the regrets, the should’ve and could’ve moments that were all the more important now that they were running out of time. He went over the day from start to finish, but he kept fixating on the fact that he should’ve stopped at the pier-side bench before coming home. He’d let himself rush in to see Lindsey. But that five-minute decompression was one of the most important moments in his day, a time to pause and master his thoughts, to transition through the purgatory zone between duty and home. Between war and family. He knew he was on edge and shouldn’t have rushed back, but it was the fact that he was missing them at home that had made him rush.

  This led him to recall his life before the war, when he’d never thought twice about what he ate or threw away or whether some should’ve, could’ve decision of his would end up leaving his sailors among the many burned carcasses cast into the Pacific. He became angry at himself for not following through on that prewar longing to be with his family, for his failure to act before their separation could turn permanent.

  Jamie looked up and saw Lindsey studying him as he ate. She knew something was not right. His tension was clearly feeding hers.

  “You look tired,” said Lindsey. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Jamie. “Let’s start over. I’m sorry, it’s just been one of those days.”

  “Seems like you have those every day,” she said, a slight edge in her voice.

  “I do,” said Jamie. “The closer we get to deploying, the harder it is. The crew is exhausted, and they know the ship is not where it needs to be.”

  “It’s getting harder for all of us,” said Lindsey. “You need to make time for the kids. They were asking . . .”

  “Asking what?”

  “When you’re leaving again.”

  “What’d you tell them?”

  “You’ll have to go soon, but it won’t be forever.”

  “It better not be.”

  “I need to ask you something. I let it go after Pearl Harbor, but I have to know, I just do. Did you ever tell Riley you were done?”

  “Jesus, Lindsey. Does it matter? Does it really matter? He died, bled out in front of me as close as we’re sitting here. You want to know what he thought of my career?”

  “It does matter. To me. There’s no —”

  A banging and a crash from upstairs stopped her. They heard an old man cursing, and then Martin laughing. Jamie’s eyes flicked over to the sound. Lindsey looked down.

  “Why are the kids still up? And what’s he doing here?” said Jamie. He put his fork down with a sharp clink and reached for his coffee mug. Staring hard at Lindsey, he took a pull of the cold, bitter coffee dregs that should’ve ended up at his feet an hour ago.

  “He’s fixing the toilet. It couldn’t wait,” she said. “He came by the other day and worked with Martin to print the part we needed with a three-D printer he cadged from one of his harbor buddies. They had a lot of fun. I know what you told me about him coming here, but I think he just wanted to be with his family before . . . What could I do?”

  “You could actually do what I ask,” snarled Jamie.

  “I could say the same thing,” Lindsey replied coldly. He didn’t know whether she was referring to the broken toilet, time with the kids, or his promise to leave the Navy. He didn’t care. In any case, he knew he was in the wrong. And he didn’t like it.

  “I don’t have time for this. I need to prep for tomorrow.”

  He grabbed the weighty folder full of personnel-assignment reports and walked out of the room, leaving his plate of shrimp and pasta mostly uneaten, a testament to his disappointment.

  He went down the hallway quietly, passing the open bathroom door. He’d disappointed enough people tonight and hoped he wouldn’t run into his father, since that would only lead to the knockdown argument he’d just avoided by walking out on Lindsey. It was probably the wrong call, going to bed angry, especially with so little time left. Yet another bad decision to regret. He quickly rounded the corner and walked into his office.

  Door shut, he sat at his desk. He reached to turn on the desk lamp but then paused in the dark. His eyes slowly adjusted to the room until he was almost able to make out the picture his son had drawn, tacked to the wall next to the window facing west. It was a magnificent green, yellow, and blue warship, taking up three pieces of paper
taped together lengthwise.

  Depending on what part of the vessel you looked at, it was either a triple-decker or a double-decker, armed with red turrets from which bird legs jutted out at all angles. Pink hearts covered the hull, and a small flag with a blue star flew from the stern with the words Win, Daddy on it. His wife called it the Love Boat, and the sight of it made Jamie’s eyes well up with tears.

  A soft click in the hallway meant the bathroom door was closed. The heavy tread of Mike’s boots going down the stairs told Jamie he no longer had to worry about seeing his father tonight. He wiped his eyes, got up from his seat, and looked out the window at the top part of the Golden Gate Bridge. Every time he saw the bridge like this, in the fog, his stomach tightened. He knew the next time he passed under it, he would be with his father on what would likely be their last cruise.

  Moana Surfrider Hotel, Waikiki Beach, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

  “Ten o’clock.”

  That was all he had said when he slid the room card across the rental counter to her. Nothing more, just a wink and a smile before he walked off, his hair still dripping seawater. A gold Rolex dive watch hung loosely on his left wrist, exposing a whisker of paler skin beneath the tan. He hadn’t even given his name, assuming she had to know who he was. And he was right. Supposedly, his uncle ran Bel-Con, the electronics company in Chengdu. One of the maids Carrie occasionally drank coffee with had shared the gossip when he first arrived. “A creature of the night,” she had added with a shiver.

  The really rich were like that, Carrie had seen, no matter what country they were from. They always assumed you knew what they wanted and that you needed to be told only when and where to provide it.

  In this case, he didn’t have to tell her where. The hotel key card had said that for him. It was polished to look like platinum, but really it was cheap aluminum. As she waited in line for another security checkpoint to access the staff elevators to the hotel’s VIP suites and rooms, she ran her finger across the outline of three palm trees cut out of the middle of the card, indicating it was the key to the Moana Surfrider’s penthouse suite number 3.