Vetter was saying something, but Snyder couldn’t hear her over the ringing in his ears. He scanned across the scene of destruction with his eyewear, tagging each smoldering crater and piece of smoking wreckage with a red circle. The message to the Zumwalt’s ATHENA system was simple: Targets destroyed.
USS Zumwalt Ship Mission Center
The battle had settled into a rhythm, a steady monotone patter of queries and replies as the ship and its crew carried out fire-support missions onshore. The only physical indicator that they were at war was the sound of the room’s cooling fans, which seemed to be working extra-hard.
The holograph map now showed the Z joined by the rest of the task force, an arc of escort ships surrounding a convoy of transport vessels, all moving closer to shore. A blue bubble overhead extending almost a hundred and ten miles out indicated the air-defense range provided by the USS Port Royal,78 the Aegis cruiser accompanying the task force. Beyond it, small moving icons indicated the Mako ships sweeping for underwater threats and a small combat air patrol of six F-35Bs overhead. They were from the USS America,79 the amphibious assault ship at the center of the task force. The America also served as Admiral Murray’s flagship and so was marked by a bolder icon.
The America lacked an aircraft catapult launch and arrestment recovery equipment, which meant it could carry only those aircraft that could take off and land vertically, like F-35Bs, helicopters, and Ospreys. But for all other purposes, it was essentially a forty-five-thousand-ton aircraft carrier that could also load twenty-five hundred Marines, and, most important, it ran on non-nuclear engines. The mission planners had swapped out its normal heavy helicopter complement for the bulk of the first Osprey wave, which were joined by other Ospreys that had flown off the accompanying San Antonio– and Austin-class landing ships80 brought out of retirement in the Ghost Fleet. The arrival of so many of the big, slow, non-stealthy ships meant Task Force Longboard’s presence would now be much more evident to any Directorate sensors, but being surrounded by other ships felt comforting to all in the Z.
“Captain, we have an incoming drone from the north,” a sailor announced. “Its squawking code says point of origin is Shemya?”
Cortez started to read off his glasses. “Shemya . . . Aleutian Islands.81 There’s an old Air Force weather station there that has an emergency-landing airfield. Not so great for that; says the wind never drops below sixty miles per hour and there’s a ten-foot visibility fog three hundred days of the year. That explains it; robots don’t mind the weather. Op plan has it used as a relay station for secure drone comms. A Pony Express–style handover.”
“Allow download. It is about time we finally get some news on what’s happening up north,” said the captain.
Within a minute, Cortez appeared at Simmons’s side with a tablet screen. It showed an animated map of the current and projected locations of the U.S. forces making their way through the Arctic passage. Noticeably absent was the Directorate battle fleet that was supposed to have been drawn north.
“Shit,” said Simmons.
Cortez nodded, and he winced slightly as he read the message aloud.
“‘No contact Directorate battle fleet. Undetected from searches in Bering and off Aleutians. In absence of further information, must assume strong substantial attack force proceeding towards your area of operations. In carrying out the task assigned in operation plan twenty-nine–forty-two, you will be governed by the principle of calculated risk,82 which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting greater damage to the enemy. Given communications link delays and uncertainty, decision authority is now with task force commander. COMPACOM will support. But priority is to protect the fleet in being.’”
“Sir, we have Admiral Murray on the localized net for you,” Cortez said. The video link opened, and the admiral appeared.
“You’ve seen the message?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then you know what it means?” she asked.
“Yes. PACOM is not going to say it, but they’re giving us the option to withdraw if the situation turns too hairy,” he responded. “Which would hang the Marines onshore out to dry.”
“That is indeed what it means, Captain,” she said. “That’s the tradeoff. Instead of being puppeted from afar like in the last war, we get the kind of command freedom our predecessors dreamed of. But it also means the hard calls get piled on our shoulders.”
Simmons’s eyes flashed up to the monitor bank showing the array of system updates and videos of Marine combat footage. How many hours had it been since he’d seen the sea? It should have been easy to follow a cold-hearted, calculated order like this because he was devoid of any physical contact with the war and was essentially playing a video game in this floating box. It wasn’t.
“We will proceed as planned,” said Murray. “But be aware of the option if needed. I’ll give General Adams the bad news myself.”
No more than ten minutes after she had signed off, another urgent transmission came in.
“It’s the bird on the northwest patrol,” Cortez said, pointing to the icon on the holographic tactical display.
“Let’s hear it,” said Simmons.
“Big Bird, Double Down Four,” said the female pilot. “You have an incoming flight of sixty-plus enemy jets. I repeat, six-zero-plus enemy jets, coming from the northwest. They’ve got carriers out there somewhere. Double Down Four is engaging, but . . .” The pilot trailed off.
They all knew. It was best left unsaid. Her F-35B was one of the handful of jump jets squeezed onto the USS America to form the task force’s combat air patrol. Given what had happened to their predecessors, all the pilots had been volunteers. Their planes had been scanned and rescanned and as many of the suspect chips swapped out as possible, replaced with chips scavenged from donated commercial gear. But there was no certainty they’d removed all of the Trojan horse hardware. The technicians likened it to trying to find a particular needle in a haystack made of needles. But finding bad chips was actually even harder than that, as they activated only in the presence of a combination of an unknown frequency and an encrypted transmittal message.
Her voice sounded strained as she braced against the increasing g-load that went with her aggressive tactical turn toward the threat in the northwest. The flight suit fought the physics of the maneuver but it was always a losing battle. “We’ll do what we can, but expect incoming within fifteen minutes. Double Down Four out.”
Double Down 4 stopped transmitting and fired a salvo of joint dual-role air dominance missiles83 at the squadron of Chinese Shenyang J-31 fighters that had entered the defense sector. The Chinese planes were almost her jet’s twins, having benefited during their development from F-35 blueprints stolen by hackers in 2009.84 Her incoming-missile warning alerted her that the closest one had counterfired a PL-21D.85 Powered by ramjets, it closed quickly, so she banked hard and up to get some altitude. Then she activated the broadcast protocol. To counter the risk of some traitor chip signaling out, the whiz kids had dreamed up the idea of flooding all the frequencies. All stealth was lost, but the theory was that whatever homing beacon the missiles were trying to ride in on would be overwhelmed by all the other signals broadcasting.
She rotated the plane so she was inverted, catching a glimpse of the incoming missile exhaust streaking toward her as she did. The F-35 automatically fired off a dozen flares, and she put the plane straight down into a dive that made it crack the sound barrier. The missile kept climbing past her, seemingly fooled for the moment. Double Down 4 turned again, visually hunting for another target, her search radar rendered useless by the mix of the enemy’s and her own jamming. In the distance, she saw an explosion. At least one of her missiles had made contact.
All of this was invisible to the Zumwalt’s crew, still haunted by the clipped tone of her transmission. Jamming made it impossible for them to hear anything more. This spa
red the crew from hearing Double Down 4’s choked scream as 30 mm cannon fire from a Russian Su-3386 gutted her plane’s belly. The only indication of her fate came when the all-frequency jamming stopped and ATHENA changed the F-35 icon from blue to gray and then moved it off the screen.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it seems we have found the rest of the enemy fleet,” said Simmons. “You know what to do.”
Wolf Flight, Pacific Ocean
Some 120 miles away from the Zumwalt, Captain Second Rank Alexei Denisov swept the sky again, craning his neck to look past his MiG-35K’s twin tails. He wanted to confirm what his cockpit displays and flight communications told him: the last of the American combat air patrol had been shot down. He looked around his plane; all that remained was a faint haze of smoke from the dogfight.
This was a perfect coda, he believed. He had been there at the beginning and would be there at the end of it all. How many decades had the Americans claimed the world’s skies? No more.
“White and Red Squadrons, this is Dagger-Three-Thirty-Four. Sky looks clear of any enemy planes.” He checked his radar screen again; still no targets acquired. Both sides were jamming each other, and neither could cut through the electronic fog until they closed.
“Begin your attack, Formation Wolf Hunt,” said Denisov.
Denisov pulled back on the stick and slowed, allowing the aircraft to reposition itself into the attack formation. Within seconds, the Russian MiG-35Ks and Su-33s of White Squadron and the Chinese J-31s of Red Squadron were neatly arrayed in a line87 extending two hundred kilometers, just as they had trained on the simulators for weeks. Like wolves on the Siberian plains, they would sweep forward until some part of the line made contact, then all the others would close in a circle. It was simple but brutally effective.
USS Zumwalt Ship Mission Center
“Damn it to hell,” said an angry voice, not bothering to keep her frustration in check. The sailor was just out of Simmons’s line of sight, but her frustration was clear.
He walked down the stairs to the sailor’s workstation. “Patience, Richter, just have patience,” said Simmons in a calming voice.
“Aye, sir,” said Operations Specialist Angelique Richter, a bit surprised to find the captain leaning over her shoulder to look at the three screens at the workstation she was using. A diminutive twenty-five-year-old radar systems operator, she wore a matte-black eyebrow stud like the ones many of the female Marines wore. “Might as well turn the damn thing off, sir, jamming’s only getting worse.”
“Ebb and flow, Richter, that’s how this is going to go,” said Simmons. “You get a glimpse, then you use what little you have. Don’t forget: they’re just as confused as we are.”
The girl nodded, running chewed fingernails over her shaved head.
“Richter, you’ve been in three years now, right?” said Simmons.
“It will be four years in two months, sir,” she said.
“That’s a lot of Navy in your blood,” said Simmons. “Makes you one of the sailors I’m counting on today. There’s nothing here you can’t handle. What we know is all we know. Got me?”
“Aye, sir.”
He was walking back up the stairs to the observation floor when the radar operator called him.
“Sir, we’ve bogeys coming in from the northwest. They’re strung out in a long line,” Richter said. Then, in a lower pitch: “ATHENA counts sixty-two in total.
“Shit,” the radar operator continued. “It’s worse than that. ATHENA is now showing something coming in from the east. It’s patchy, but at least a hundred bogeys . . . we’re right square in the middle.”
As the information from her screen began to populate the central tactical hologram where all could see it, the room seemed to grow more quiet. A brief groan from the ship’s engines welled up through the hull, as if the Zumwalt had just accepted its fate.
Then a voice rang out over the speakers arrayed around the room. It had a gravelly, Southern twang: “Longboard, this is Boneyard Six Four. You seem to have some party crashers on the way. Can we be of assistance? Over.”
Boneyard Flight, Pacific Ocean
U.S. Air Force Colonel Roscoe Coltan ended the transmission and rechecked his position. The twelve-by-nineteen-inch glass-panel Garmin AeroScreen88 was bolted on shock mounts over the F-15C89 jet’s original flight instruments. He had rimmed the screen with duct tape for good measure, which showed the level of confidence he had in the technology. It was effective, but it still didn’t seem right, which basically captured just about everything so far in this mission.
Roscoe’s jet had been among the 256 F-15s and F-16s the U.S. Air Force had early-retired in 2014. The argument was that the fourth generation of fighter planes couldn’t keep up with twenty-first-century threats, but the real reason was that retiring the planes created an artificial fighter gap, which helped make the case for keeping the spending up on the F-35, the fifth-generation plane, whose cost had spiraled. The old but still flyable planes had spent the past years stored out in the dry Arizona air of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, better known as the Boneyard, the aircraft equivalent of the Ghost Fleet.90 Alongside some four thousand other retired planes dating back to World War II, Roscoe’s jet91 had been waiting its turn to be harvested for scrap metal and spare parts.
But now, the age of the planes in Boneyard Flight worked to their advantage. They were crude, but they could be trusted. First flown in the 1970s, the F-15s needed only rudimentary electronics to operate; they had less computing power than his grandson’s talking toy bear and were steered by about twenty million fewer lines of code than the F-35. Most important, the chips in their flight systems had been produced long before hardware hacking or even the Directorate itself had been conceived.
His fuel gauge showed he had about two hours of flight time left if he just nursed the plane along. Unfortunately, the dogfight he expected would shave his time aloft down to a fraction of that.
Boneyard Flight had taken off with two dozen desert-worn KC-135s92 that had also been pulled out of retirement. Those things were tougher than cockroaches. First flown back in the Eisenhower days, the 707 passenger-jet derivatives did not have a modern chip anywhere, unlike the new KC-46s,93 which had turned out to be missile magnets like all the other Chinese-chipped gear.
The plan was that another flight of old Stratotankers would be waiting to refuel them on the return leg. He looked down at the rippled sea surface. It was a profoundly deep azure dusted with white lines that reminded him of a light snow on tree branches back home in North Carolina. The tankers would be there, the briefer had promised, and if not, he said, the sea would contain only friendly ships they could ditch near.
After two wives and twenty-four years in the Air Force, Roscoe knew when he was being bullshitted. He also knew when not to care.
“Oscar, Roscoe. You picking up the same fleet data I am? Over,” said Roscoe.
“Roger that, Roscoe,” said Oscar, an F-16 pilot flying the other element of the escort. The pilot had gotten his call sign back when he was a new lieutenant, a way to put him in his place after he’d been hot-dogging it in flight school. “Sky is clear over Oahu, but the squids look like they are in for some major rain, over.”
“I’m thinking we need to give them an umbrella. I’ll take Eagle and Wall-E elements of the escort to mix it up. You take Viper element on with the big boys to keep ’em safe and give the ground pounders some support, over.”
“Understood, Roscoe. Just like an Eagle driver to steal all the glory,” Oscar responded. “We’ll get them through. Good hunting, over.”
“Eagle Flight, I know you heard that conversation. Form up on me.” Then he paused, and when he spoke again, he made sure to enunciate his words. They said the voice-recognition software would work anyway, but he wanted to be certain.
“Wall-E Flight. Authorization Roscoe. Voice authenticate Eagle, Two, Eight, Alpha, Delta. New mission order. Autonomous hunt. Air-to-air weapons authority release. Execute.”
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He turned his head to see if they would follow the order or just start shooting down all the American jets close to them, like some bad movie. But the twelve F-40A Shrikes in the escort all took a smooth, literally perfect turn with a precision that would make a flight instructor orgasm and then formed up on the flanks of Eagle Flight’s F-15 fighters.
To Roscoe, it was one of the war’s many ironies that the jets they most needed to come through today were the very ones his service’s leadership had done its best to fight for years. Unmanned planes had proved their worth in the Afghan war and then in the various counterterrorism campaigns from Pakistan to Nigeria. But the early models had been remotely operated by pilots on the ground, and they were propeller-powered by four-cylinder engines taken from snowmobiles, meaning they had performance capabilities that even a World War I pilot would laugh at.94 The generals had always made sure to tell the public that while they were fine for killing terrorists, the early drones wouldn’t be able to survive in any kind of denied airspace. That was true enough, but oddly, behind the scenes, the critics did everything possible to make sure future models would have those very same flaws. The Pentagon bureaucracy, which had begrudgingly started using armed unmanned aerial systems only after the CIA got into the business, consistently slow-rolled any attempts to make the next generation of drones faster, stealthier, and more lethal.
In the lean years after the Afghan war, the research budget for unmanned systems was slashed four times as much as any other program. The rationales for opposition included everything from worries about pilots losing jobs to defense contractors’ concerns that the better the new technology became, the more it would threaten their already signed multitrillion-dollar weapons contracts. It got to the point that, in 2013, when a test drone successfully took off and landed on an aircraft carrier by itself, the Naval Air Systems Command tried to send the cutting-edge technology95 not out to the fleet, but to the Smithsonian. There, in a museum, one of the most advanced planes on the planet could be “celebrated,” and, more important, it wouldn’t be carrying out any further tests that might make people rethink the existing order of things.
Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) Page 38
