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 and their supporting vehicles raced off to link up with Directorate airborne troops disembarking from a trio of Harmony Airways Airbus A380s 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 the U.S. military’s Pacific Command 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 weapons 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 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 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 patroclass="underline" find and prosecute. This particular submarine had been tailing the USS George H. W. Bush for a couple of days. Yesterday, it was just a nuisance and 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, at the moment Darling’s crew had help hunting the Directorate submarine. The USS John Warner, 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 —” 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, 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,” 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.