The crew members looked at one another as if they’d just missed being hit by lightning. Then the quadcopter reappeared a football field’s length away and dove between a pair of long warehouses. It popped back up into the air and vectored toward the KITV Channel 4 news chopper that had arrived to collect video of what had been reported as a gas explosion down at the harbor. The V1000 fired a TY-90 air-to-air missile that struck the helicopter well before the weapon reached its Mach 2 maximum speed.
The drop-down bow thruster pushed the Coronado slowly away from the pier, and then Stapleton, the main propulsion assistant, gently moved the joystick forward. The Coronado roared, its engines moving from idle into action, and the water jets roiled the harbor water. The last Kevlar mooring line started to unravel and then parted with a snap. As the ship began to gather speed, another antitank missile arced from the freighter and exploded inside the helicopter hangar. It felt to the crew like someone had driven a garbage truck into the side of the superstructure, but the ship kept moving.
Simmons looked over at the communications station as heavy machine-cannon fire ripped through the ship’s aluminum hull and shattered the sailor sitting there. Sparks and blood mingled together in an instant. More gunfire peppered the bridge, blowing out windows that were strong enough to handle the angry ocean but no match for armor-piercing rounds. He fell to the deck and covered his head as shrapnel fell around him.
When Simmons opened his eyes, he saw Captain Riley next to him on the floor, but sitting upright, his back against the mauled captain’s chair. Blood soaked his uniform and pooled on the deck around him.
Another burst of fire slapped into the captain’s chair. Frantically, Jamie looked around to see who was driving the ship. Nobody. Stapleton lay in a heap next to his chair, and the ship slowly drifted toward the opposite side of the harbor. Only one of the 3-D battle displays was working; the ATHENA system projected fragmented visuals of the chaos across the room.
“Helm! Somebody drive the goddamn ship,” shouted Simmons.
Jefferson ran to the helm and pushed the joystick forward. In one of the many exercises the sailors hated, Simmons had made sure that everyone on the bridge crew was trained to take over the other stations, just in case.
Riley tried to force himself up by his elbows but slid back. Simmons knelt by him and ripped open the captain’s shirt, but after that he didn’t know where to start or what to do; Riley’s entire chest was a bloody mess, his heart pumping more of his life onto the gray deck with each beat. Riley coughed up blood.
“Get back to conning your ship… Captain Simmons,” Riley said with a slight smile.
Dylan Cote, the ship’s corpsman, entered the bridge at a run but slipped on the blood underfoot. On his hands and knees, he crawled to the captain and pushed Simmons aside.
As Cote tried to stanch the blood flow, Simmons carefully rose and stood behind Jefferson at the helm. The captain’s chair had jagged holes punched in it, and he wasn’t ready to sit in it just yet.
Marine Corps Base, Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii
Worm banked the F-35B hard to the left immediately after takeoff. The jet shifted smoothly into forward-flight mode, and he tried to gain some kind of situational awareness, just like they’d taught him in flight school.
The AN/AAQ-37 electro-optical distributed aperture system fed his helmet with data from visual and IR sensors located around the plane, allowing him to “see” through the plane below. And what he saw was chaos. He’d once flown through a forest fire during a training mission in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains; this was worse. All the smoke and debris in the air had created a swirl of darkness with patches of bright sun. Chinese drones darted in and out of the smoke at low levels, and on the deck, along with fragments of Marine Corps helicopters, his squadron’s fighters lay scattered about like puzzle pieces. He scanned up and around the sky and confirmed what he’d feared: his was the only U.S. jet in the air.
He started to check on the jet’s other systems. No sound came over his radios. The fighter’s GPS-coupled inertial navigation system was wrong, showing him as flying over Maui when he knew damn well this was Oahu. Electronically generated false targets flickered on the horizontal situation display and then disappeared. The plane, with its novel software systems and millions of lines of code, was designed to be its own copilot, capable of automation and interpretation never before possible in battle. But at this moment, Worm thought, the fifth-generation fighter was having trouble getting out of its own way, electronically speaking.
Marine aviators had flown for generations with just guns and guts, Worm told himself. He could do the same.
At the near corner of the airfield, he saw one of the tiny Chinese quadcopters firing, its autocannon peppering a parked Osprey tiltrotor aircraft. First, the starboard wing buckled, and then the MV-22’s massive engine dropped to the ground, tipping over the ungainly aircraft.
With one hand, Worm slowed the jet’s approach, and with the other, he targeted the quadcopter on the touchscreens before him. Then he saw her.
The defiance was unmistakable even at this distance. He magnified the image through his helmet optics, effectively creating a picture inside a picture on the screen superimposed in his cockpit. The marine fired her pistol at the drone that had rocketed the Osprey. She stood with her feet braced and leaned over the still-smoking engine to steady her aim. She fired a full magazine, then ducked down to reload.
As she drew the magazine from a pouch on her flight suit, the quadcopter dropped to within a few inches of the ground and circled back around her position. She spun around too; Worm saw her chambering the next round as she raised her weapon. He willed his jet’s cannon-arming protocol to speed up.
She fired and then darted to the other side of the wreckage, racing to keep it between her and the quadcopter, like a lethal game of musical chairs. Then she slipped in a pool of oil seeping out of the gutted Osprey, twisted her left leg, and fell down in a heap. The pistol skittered a few feet away.
“Shit!” shouted Worm.
The gun-pod light turned red. Active.
The jet shifted position slightly as Worm tried to line up the F-35’s cannon. But then the quadcopter drone rose abruptly. It had caught on to the game and was moving to gain an overhead shot on the fallen Marine.
Worm nudged the jet up using its thrust-vectoring nozzles, in effect dancing in the air. As he maneuvered to line up his gun pod, his helmet display showed the Marine crawling toward her pistol. It was lodged beneath a smoldering wing from a nearby wrecked F-35. Jesus, what balls she had, thought Worm.
His finger was already over the trigger, and he pressed down lightly, the jet buffeted as the rounds fired off. The drone opened fire at the same time as Worm’s jet loosed a line of training rounds that walked their way up the runway to the quadcopter. The image on the helmet display dissolved into an explosion of smoke and flame, and the drone spun down into the burning Osprey wreck.
Where was she?
His headset suddenly growled at him, and a flash of color danced across one of his displays. The warning from the jet’s radar-threat-detection system was unmistakable: an air-defense system was tracking him.
The readout showed that the radar that had washed over his jet wasn’t a U.S. system but an H-250 phased array, the updated Directorate mobile-SAM type.
“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.