Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (12 page)

“Oh, shit,” said Worm. “That can't be.”

It wasn't the threat of being shot down that chilled him despite the sweat in his flight suit. What this meant was much worse than that: they somehow already had major forces on the ground.

The Directorate armored column from the
Golden Wave
and
Hildy Manor
had bulldozed through the parked cars in the lot and left pier 29 behind; after that, the column had split, and the two lines headed off in different directions. One column of Type 99 tanks
⁵⁴
and their supporting vehicles raced off to link up with Directorate airborne troops disembarking from a trio of Harmony Airways Airbus A380s
⁵⁵
that had just landed at Honolulu International Airport. The other armored column went down the North Nimitz Highway out of town.

Worm knew where they were heading.

For all the historic value of taking Pearl Harbor, Camp H. M. Smith was the real prize. The headquarters of Pacific Command
⁵⁶
was designed to house the military's peacetime bureaucracy, not fight off an invasion force. The Marines there would fight to the last round, Worm was certain. But there was no way they could stop a column of tanks. And then the command and control hub of the entire Pacific would be in . . . what? Was the right term
enemy hands
? It was incomprehensible.

Worm rechecked his weapon's state: seventy-one rounds.

He took the plane back down for the deck and raced low across the runway. As he passed, he saw the Osprey's wreckage, and then he saw a figure pop out from behind it. And she waved. What a warrior.

“That Marine needs to get the hell out of there,” said Worm, finding himself in conversation with his jet again, as happened when he needed to lock down his fear.

The jet's horizontal situation display revealed a Chinese-made Z-10 attack helicopter
⁵⁷
moving in toward the runway. It wouldn't take long for the Z-10 to discover the woman's position, and she was clearly fool enough to start taking potshots at it. A fellow Marine needed him and he'd been taught since training that you never, ever left a Marine behind.

But there was the force headed for Camp Smith. He didn't have enough rounds left to take the tanks out completely, but a few low passes might stall them. Maybe he could hit a command vehicle or disable the lead tank.

He eased the jet skyward and gained another five hundred feet, seeking an answer and more knots for the next strafing run.

His options were clear. His choice was not.

U.S. Navy P-8, Pacific Ocean

“Too much jamming, turn off the feed,” said Commander Bill “Sweetie” Darling. “Let's focus on Foxglove Two, not the whole war.”

Darling couldn't believe he'd just said
war
so casually. That's what it was. America was at war in the Pacific, and he assumed elsewhere in the world. And a few minutes into the war, he could already tell that a major problem would be filtering out useful data from the flow that gushed over them as if from a fire hose.

“Understood,” said Hammer, the naval flight officer who handled the plane's communications. “I'll bring it back up if the jamming stops.”

Ninety miles from the formation of U.S. ships, Darling's P-8 was on the hunt. A Type 93A submarine
⁵⁸
that had been tagged Foxglove 2 lurked somewhere nearby. The attack on Pearl Harbor was under way, but for Darling and his crew, the task was the same as it always was on patrol: find and prosecute. This particular submarine had been tailing the USS
George H. W
.
Bush
⁵⁹
for a couple of days. Yesterday, it was just a nuisance that had added some edge to their flight ops. Today, it was an immediate threat that they had to shut down in the next few minutes or face a lifetime of knowing they had failed to protect a big-deck carrier with over four thousand sailors onboard.

Fortunately, Darling's crew had help hunting the Directorate submarine. The USS
John Warner
,
⁶⁰
a
Virginia
-class nuclear attack submarine, was herding the submarine away from the carrier strike group into the P-8's picket line of sonobuoys. Pinned in, Foxglove 2 would die.

The main battle-network communications feed blared into their headsets, garbled from the jamming.

“Damn it, Hammer, turn that—” said Darling.

Another voice cut him off. “Hydrophone effects. Sonobuoys just located Foxglove Two,” said Hyde, one of the two crew members who handled the acoustic sensor systems. “It's heading on a course away from the strike group, twelve knots.”

Darling nosed the P-8 over hard to get closer to the sea, pushing the throttles forward and banking the jet toward the intercept point projected on the screen in front of him. The plane's speed edged up to almost five hundred knots as the crew counted down the seconds until they could fire on the submarine.

“At five hundred feet, releasing Mark Fifty-Four—”
⁶¹
said his copilot, Fang Treehorn.

“Incoming, incoming. Stonefish inbound on the
Bush
,” interrupted Jekyll, the plane's other sensor operator. “Goddamn NSA hackers were supposed to be able to keep those things from even getting off the ground.”

Near the horizon, faint white stalks grew skyward from the area around the
Bush
. The fleet's defense systems began firing dozens of RIM-161 SM-3 missiles,
⁶²
designed to intercept incoming Stonefish ballistic missiles as they entered the atmosphere.

“
Bush
's ATHENA shows it as twenty-six inbound. Our SAMs are countering,” Jekyll reported, giving a play-by-play of the air battle.

“Mark Fifty-Four away,” said Fang. The plane lifted slightly as the Mark 54 was released, and the torpedo splashed into the water below, its propeller already rotating toward the submarine.

The air-defense communications feed coming through the headphones suddenly became intelligible, then quickly reverted back to garbled noise. Fang had a pair of binoculars up, trying to track the dozens of air-defense missiles that raced up into the sky to meet the warheads arcing down toward the carrier and its escort ships.

“Where'd they come from?” said Fang.

“China,” said Darling.

“Yeah, asshole, I know,” said Fang. “Surprise attacks don't have just one surprise. Think they're nukes?”

“Nope. If it was a nuke, they'd only send one,” said Darling.

“Stonefish inbound in fifteen seconds,” said Jekyll, her drawl an attempt to hide the stress she was feeling.

“Mark Fifty-Four impact; Foxglove Two destroyed,” said Hyde.

“Ten seconds,” said Jekyll.

“Keep working the sonobuoys, Hyde,” said Darling. He felt no satisfaction from taking out the sub; the Type 93 hadn't been the main threat after all. He felt worse than unsatisfied—he felt useless. His plane and crew were of no help at this moment.

“Wait, I got one—damn, it's pretty close to us,” said Fang, watching through his binoculars. “And here it goes . . . splashdown.”

“Shit, ninety miles off target. That's quite a miss,” said Darling. “Maybe the Stonefish isn't the bogeyman after all.”

Fang kept staring through his binoculars.

“Fang?”

A flash on the horizon gave Darling his answer.

“Impact . . . impact, impact,” said Jekyll.

Darling thanked God that they were so far away from the blast, and then a wave of guilt washed over him.

“Get
John Warner
on the net,” said Darling, “and see how they want to help with recovery. We need to set up a sonobuoy perimeter around the task force.”

“Update from the
Stockdale
's ATHENA,”
⁶³
Jekyll said, naming one of the escort ships. “Confirms what we saw. At least three Stonefish hit the
Bush
. The ship's, um, offline now.”

“Can't raise the
John Warner
,” said Hammer. “GPS is offline again.”

“Same up front. Checking
Warner
's last location,” said Darling. He tried not to look at Fang, who was fiddling with his helmet and surreptitiously wiping tears away.

The P-8 was banked in a turn when Darling saw something in the water below. He squinted, willing the jet lower so he could see. Fang brought his binoculars back up even as the display screens showed the debris in detail.

“That's too far from the task force to be from the
Bush
or any of the escort ships,” said Darling. “What is that? Our Directorate sub?”

“No, Foxglove Two's last position is on the grid way over there,” said Fang, jabbing a finger at a cockpit screen.

“Shit,” said Jekyll, nervously tapping her hand on her knee. “This is the impact point for that Stonefish we saw. It didn't miss. That's what's left of the
John Warner
.”

Marine Corps Base, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii

The F-35 rotated its nose up and then looped over in a corkscrew twist, giving Worm one last view of the sky through the bottom of his plane.

Seventy-one rounds. Worm designated the target, feeling the jet adjust slightly.

As he arced back down toward the Osprey's wreckage, he saw the defiant Marine pop up and begin running.

Just seventy-one rounds.

Worm found the Z-10 strafing a smoking hangar 100 yards away from her. One of the quadcopters saw her and raced toward her position, then hovered to beckon the helicopter over. Worm dipped the nose of the jet and eased the throttle forward. With a gentle adjustment, he rolled out and centered the helmet-mounted pipper on the Z-10. He relaxed his g slightly to stay on the target and then squeezed the trigger.

The opening burst from the F-35's cannon went high, passed over the Z-10, and ripped apart the runway just beyond.

Forty-seven rounds.

She ran faster, not looking back even at the ripping sound in the sky behind her.

Worm fired a longer burst and the whole jet vibrated like a tuning fork. The Z-10 jerked sideways, then broke in half, spewing flame and debris in a near-perfect circle. The fuselage groaned in protest as Worm pulled back on the stick to arrest his descent.

The runner was nowhere to be seen. She had made it; he'd done his first duty: he hadn't left a Marine behind.

Worm jammed the throttle forward to its stops and unloaded to accelerate toward Camp H. M. Smith as fast as possible. Having some American airpower overhead might give the armored Directorate column second thoughts, maybe even force it to divert to another target. He had nothing else to offer. The cannon was empty. Landing to rearm was out of the question. He'd harass the Directorate column as long as he could and then punch out somewhere up north near one of the parks.

As the F-35 accelerated away, the robotic quadcopter turned and loosed an air-to-air missile. It then blithely went back to its original task of raking the row of Ospreys on the runway.

Even before Worm heard the alarm buzz, the plane's AN/ASQ-239 Barracuda system
⁶⁴
had automatically activated. The system's ten tiny antennas embedded in the F-35's wing edges began to track the enemy missile's radar. Worm's visor projected that it was a TY-90, a fire-and-forget missile, so even with its robot master focused elsewhere, it was still a threat. With the missile homing in on him, he pulled the F-35 hard right toward the Ulupau Crater at the end of the base. With just a little bit of luck, he thought, he'd disappear in the clutter around the old dormant volcano. He'd be damned if he was going to be the first Marine pilot to get shot down by a drone.

Worm's fate, though, had been decided several months earlier. A section of microchips had been replaced during maintenance. This was nothing unusual for a plane packed with thousands of chips that ran everything from avionics to the gun camera.

The first microchips that had powered everything from the early computers to the jet planes of the 1960s had all their components visible to the naked eye. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, microchips packed millions of transistors into an area measured in square millimeters. And every chip was further divided into multiple subunits, called blocks, each of which carried out different functions. Much like the chips inside a smartphone, the processor in Worm's F-35 gun camera, for example, had blocks that did everything from store frames of video to convert files.

When the microchip industry took off, it grew from just a handful of companies to more than two thousand, most of them in China, each creating five thousand new chip designs every year. These designs involved thousands of people at multiple locations, each team working on a different block, sometimes building it from scratch, sometimes contracting it out, and other times buying it from a third-party specialist. And each of those block designs was integrated into millions of chips, and those chips went into everything from toasters to Tomahawk missiles.

The result was a dangerous combination: The chips became so complex that no single engineer or team of engineers could understand how all their parts actually worked; the design process was so distributed that no one could vet all the people involved; and the chips were manufactured and bought in such great numbers that not even a tiny percentage could be tested,
⁶⁵
which almost no buyers, including the big American defense firms, even tried to do. Efficiency always beat security.

For a long time, defense analysts had worried about the notion of a kill switch—a chip that would shut down an entire computer system on command. But on Worm's plane, the opposite happened. In each of just twelve microchips, a tiny piece of technology inside a single block woke up.

The F-35B was protected by its shape and stealth materials that shrank its radar signature to a size smaller than a metal fist. But as the Directorate missile's radar washed over the plane, it activated a tiny antenna hidden in the ninth block of each of twelve microchips that linked Worm's helmet-display system to the plane's flight-control system. Even if the helmet's manufacturers had performed a security scan when they'd bought the microchips, they still would have missed it. Each antenna was microscopic, hidden inside a one-millimeter square and activated only by a specific frequency of an incoming missile. While each antenna had just a tiny amount of energy on its own, the combination of them sent enough power to broadcast what was, in effect, a homing signal.