Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) (52 page)

Adams smiled at the thought, the first smile he'd allowed himself in months. It quickly died, though, when Jacobsen reached over with a handkerchief to dab away a thin trickle of drool dripping from the corner of the general's still-numb mouth.

Boneyard Flight, Pacific Ocean

Roscoe fired a pair of AIM-120E AMRAAM air-to-air missiles
¹⁰⁶
well before he could see the enemy planes. The twelve-foot-long missiles came cleanly off his plane's fuselage stations and disappeared into the blue sky ahead. With so much radar and communications interference, these were the long shots. Shoot two, hope maybe to hit one. More usefully, they'd create a cover of fast-moving death for his jets to come in behind, throwing off whatever formation the enemy had planned.

He pushed the plane to afterburners, noticing a faint vibration in his ejection seat as his F-15C's speed passed Mach 2. With no stealth features, the older planes would be at a disadvantage until they made this an up-close-and-personal knife fight. Plus the F-15C's speed meant they could start their kill count before the slower Shrike drones arrived.

It all happened in seconds: a few explosions in the distance and closer alongside him as some of Eagle Flight were hit by the enemy's counterfire, and then a swirl of smoke and contrails as fighters from three nations mixed it up.

Roscoe could focus only on his part of the fight, quickly firing a pair of AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles at two Russian MiG-35Ks less than a mile away, both of them banking hard as they tried to get inside the turn circle of another F-15. One missile went astray but the second smashed into the trailing jet's tail section with an explosion that pitched the MiG's nose skyward and then left a smoky scar in the sky. The other MiG fighter jet turned to escape, Roscoe following. As he turned, a faint puff of tracer rounds crossed in front of him; a Chinese J-31 fighter was boring through the chaos, its nose trained on Roscoe's F-15. Before Roscoe could evade, one of the incoming rounds blew off the top of his left vertical stabilizer.

The F-15 shuddered and buffeted as the J-31 bird-dogged Roscoe, staying on his rear. Instinctively, the experienced pilot unloaded the jet. While one way to gain speed was to max engine power, the most effective way was essentially to trick physics into working for you. Roscoe slid the stick forward and put the aircraft into a shallow ten-degree dive. As the plane dipped slightly, it created a zero-g condition, essentially “unloading” weight from the plane, akin to going over the crest of a small hill in a bicycle and coming out of your seat. Acceleration is a matter of thrust and weight, and in that weightless moment, Roscoe's F-15 powered ahead rapidly, leaving his attacker behind.
¹⁰⁷

As Roscoe saw the airspeed indicator approaching the plane's
¹⁰⁸
structural design limits, he felt a sharp shudder, the damaged tail wing starting to crack. The jet's designers hadn't counted on the effect of a 30 mm cannon. As Roscoe pulled the stick up to lose speed, his radar-warning receiver howled: the J-31 was catching up to finish him off.

He pushed the throttles all the way forward, rolled the plane onto its back, and pulled the stick back into the seat pan. He hoped that the Directorate pilot would get greedy, cut across his turn circle, and provide him a reversal opportunity. It was a classic move, which, unfortunately, meant it was one the J-31 pilot had been trained to counter. Roscoe snuck a look over his shoulder and saw the Directorate plane stabilized at his deep six o'clock, between his tail.

Roscoe swung the plane back and forth, straining against the force of the turns, trying to ruin the J-31's firing solution but knowing his bag of tricks was empty. His plane groaned with the turns. If a Chinese missile didn't kill him, his jet would.

His flight suit compressed and fought the g-forces just as Roscoe pulled into another tight turn. The tunnel vision started, the perimeter of his field of vision beginning to shade inward from the massive pressure on his body. A gray form entered on the right side of his line of sight, just above his canopy, and then disappeared as the tunnel around him grew smaller and smaller. He was blacking out; he knew it.

Roscoe pulled out of the turn; the tunnel widened, and the heavy weight on his body lifted. His plane's radar-warning receiver abruptly went silent. He craned his neck to see where the J-31 was. He couldn't find it at first, and then he saw the matte-gray-and-blue Chinese fighter falling end over end toward the ocean below, trailing a thick plume of smoke and flame. Flying away was a Shrike. The wedge-shaped drone pulled an insanely tight turn that would have knocked out any human pilot, firing a missile at a MiG-35K in the midst of it. Even before that MiG exploded, the Shrike was already off hunting its next target, its autonomous programming relentless in its computerized efficiency.

“Little bastard didn't even stop to see if I was okay,” said Roscoe, silently thanking the drone's designers.

He checked his radar display, which was momentarily free of jamming strobes. He felt sick when he saw how empty the sky was of aircraft. In less than a minute, at least a hundred lives had been lost.

“Longboard, Longboard, this is Boneyard Leader. We've serviced most of your visitors, but I show eight leakers made it through our picket line. MiG-35Ks,” he said, trying to steady his voice as his plane bucked. “We're going to run them down, but it looks like some bogeys are going to make it to you first, over.”

The four F-15s remaining in Eagle Flight took off in pursuit at almost nine hundred miles an hour, their maximum at low altitude. The low-fuel warning flashed in Roscoe's cockpit. Going to afterburner so much would cost him the chance to get home, he thought, but that was beside the point at this stage of the game.

He visually picked up the Russian MiGs by the telltale signs of their missile launches. The remains of Eagle Flight had arrived too late.

“Jesus, that's a lot of hurt,” said Roscoe to the other three pilots. “I count at least two dozen missiles.”

“At least thirty,” said Squiggle, the pilot in the F-15C flying off Roscoe's right wing.

“Fire everything you have left. Use 'em or lose 'em!” Roscoe ordered.

He fired off his remaining AIM-9X, visually following it as it locked on one of the MiGs trailing the formation. The MiG was breaking upward, climbing for more altitude after launching its anti-ship missiles, when the Sidewinder exploded just aft of the jet.

“Eagle Flight, I'm Winchester,” Roscoe said, letting whoever was left know he was down to guns only.

He pushed his jet past the MiG flat-spinning into the waves below, maxing the power to try to run down the cruise missiles starting to accelerate into the distance. Above him, the Russian and American jets grappled in a final violent confrontation that took six Russian missiles and two more MiGs out of the sky but also resulted in the destruction of three of the four American F-15s.

He'd hoped to catch one of the missiles with a lucky shot from his guns, but his luck had run out; the F-15's damaged vertical stabilizer broke away like a shingle in a hurricane. “So there's me,” said Roscoe to himself as he struggled with the bucking plane.

He eyed the ocean below, looking for the driest spot to ditch in. The left engine began to sputter. His war would end now. Roscoe took his left hand off the stick and reached for the yellow metal bar by his knee on which his crew chief had jokingly written
Do not touch!
in felt-tip marker. The plane's violent pitching made getting a grip on the ejection handle far harder than he'd expected.

USS
Zumwalt
Ship Mission Center

“Twenty-six missiles incoming, sir,” said Richter with the kind of detachment that often accompanies extreme fear. “ATHENA shows
Port Royal
counterfiring.”

While not of the same design, the
Port Royal
was a sister ship of sorts to the
Z
. She had been the youngest of the Navy's
Ticonderoga
-class cruisers, and one of the first with the ability to shoot down ballistic missiles
¹⁰⁹
as part of the Navy's Linebacker program. But in 2009, when it ran into a coral reef about half a mile from the Honolulu airport, the ship earned a new, cruel nickname. The
Port Coral
, as it became known, didn't sink,
¹¹⁰
but the extensive damage to the ship's hull, propellers, and sonar dome put the U.S. Navy's then youngest cruiser on the target list for early retirement to the Ghost Fleet.

The
Port Royal
fired a wave of SM-6 air-defense missiles that sped upward from the vertical launchers embedded in its deck. The missiles arced up and then pitched down toward the low-flying cruise missiles. A wave of RIM-162 Evolved Seasparrow
¹¹¹
defensive missiles followed.

The collisions were almost instantaneous, showering the ocean surface with flame, fuel, and metal shards.

“I count that as fourteen hit, sir. We have twelve still incoming,” said the sailor.

“Full countermeasures and launch the
Utah
,” said Simmons.

A large metal canister that had been affixed to the
Zumwalt
's stern separated from the ship with a loud bang. It popped thirty feet into the air and then dropped into the water with an anticlimactic splash, bobbing up and down.

Vern, who had been out on the deck checking a power-cable connection during a lull in the rail-gun fire, stopped to watch as the massive gray form the
Z
was leaving behind began inflating.

Mike ran up to her yelling, “We need to get back inside!”

Vern gave him a puzzled look and then returned her attention to the growing form, the words
USS Utah
unfurling on its side in white paint as it inflated. “What is it?”

“Now, Vern, move!” Mike half carried her roughly back to the shelter of the main superstructure. He steered her below decks and talked at the same time, occasionally pausing to catch his breath. “USS
Utah
¹¹²
was an old World War One battleship. By the time of the first Pearl Harbor attack, it had been turned into a floating naval target ship for our own gunners to practice on. But when the Japanese attacked in '41, their pilots saw what looked from above like a real battleship. The old
Utah
was sunk, but not before she soaked up a ton of bombs that the enemy could have used on other, better targets. Our
Utah
is supposed to do the same.”

As they descended deeper into the ship, the matte-gray bag behind the
Z
continued to expand until it formed the silhouette of a small warship, with metallic reflective squares on it enhancing its signature. With a jerk, the towline finally paid out a quarter mile behind the ship, and the
Utah
now followed the
Zumwalt
, matching its speed.

“Sir, ATHENA says the incoming missiles are selecting targets. Twenty seconds out,” said the sailor in the mission center.

“ATHENA, full autonomous mode! Authorization Simmons, Four, Seven, Romeo, Tango, Delta,” said Simmons quickly.

The ship's laser-point defense fired first. There was no noise or visible light and only faint, almost delicate movements as the solid-state, high-energy laser
¹¹³
fired. It was a moment of faith for the crew, as the weapon lacked the certainty of gunpowder. The ship's laser-gun camera showed a small flame spark on the target as the hundred-kilowatt beam came into contact with it. The missile caught fire and sank into the water. Then ATHENA automatically directed it to track and fire on a second missile.

At the same time, two Metal Storm computerized machine-gun turrets on the
Zumwalt
's port and starboard sides came out of sleep mode. The weapons started to move back and forth, tracking the incoming cruise missiles with what looked like a predator's patience. Then they locked targets and fired. The brief electronic zipping sound the guns made when they fired was as anticlimactic as it was effective; thousands of bullets shot out all at the same instant.

The Russian Zvezda KH-31 missiles were programmed to feint and dodge as they flew just above the ocean surface in order to complicate a defense's firing solution. That tactic was of no use against the Metal Storm, as the missiles flew right into what was almost literally a wall of bullets.

“Seven missiles left,” said the tactical action officer.

“Activate
Utah
's radar beacon,” said Simmons.

The remaining seven missiles' ramjets kicked in, accelerating them to nearly three times the speed of sound as they closed on the task force, flying just fifty feet above the rippling sea surface.

As another missile was plucked away by a laser fire, the missiles broke formation like a startled flight of birds. Their targeting program picked out the largest ships in the task force. Two missiles vectored off toward the
Zumwalt
; two turned for the USS
New York
,
¹¹⁴
a twenty-five-thousand-ton amphibious transport dock ship; two homed in on the USS
America
.

Aboard the
Zumwalt
, the Metal Storm turrets zip-fired again, and one of the incoming missiles turning toward the
America
disappeared with a spray of shrapnel.

Simmons held his headset mike close to his mouth with one hand and braced himself against the railing of the ship mission center's second story with the other, looking at the sailors below him. “All hands, all hands. Incoming missiles, prepare for impact.”

As the two missiles sped toward
Zumwalt
, one appeared to twitch. It broke off and slammed into the
Utah
, the missile's electronic brain registering what a human brain would have felt as satisfaction when it found its supposed target. The decoy ship exploded with a massive eruption of air and water.