“Aye, sir,” said the weapons crewman. “Standing by.”
Xiang Yang Hong 18, Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean
Lieutenant Commander Lo handed the radio’s mike back to the captain.
“This is taking too long,” said Lo. “We need to be gone before their border-guard ship arrives. Dr. Tzu, do you have everything that your team needs?”
“Yes, we could do more surveys, but it is —”
A roar shook the entire ship. Tzu hit the deck with his hands over his ears. There was a flash of white as the P-8 went overhead at full power less than a hundred feet off the starboard side.
Lo couldn’t help but admire the move. Spiteful, yet audacious.
The scientist felt like he might throw up.
As the jet’s thunder receded, one of the crew shouted, “Something in the water, a torpedo behind us!”
“Calm down,” said Lo, standing with his hands on his hips. “If it was a torpedo, we’d already be dead. It’s just a sonobuoy, maybe one of their Remora underwater drones.”
“Do they know?” said Tzu.
“No, there’s nothing up here of interest. What matters for us is far below,” said Lo, nonplussed, as he eyed the drone now following in their wake.
He turned back to the scientist. “And Tzu?” said Lo. “The leadership is aware of your success. Enjoy the moment with your wife. And make sure the submersible is secured.”
It was the first kind word he had ever said to Tzu.
National Defense Reserve Fleet, Suisun Bay, California
The sun rising over the East Bay gave the fog a paper-lantern glow.
“Torres, you sleep at all last night?” said Mike Simmons. The contractor patiently scanned the water ahead of the battered aluminum launch, seeming to look right through the nineteen-year-old kid he shared it with. His fist enveloped the outboard motor’s throttle, which he held with a loose grip, gentle despite his callused palms and barnacle-like knuckles. He sat with one knee resting just below his chin, the other leg sprawling lazily toward the bow, at ease but ready to kick the kid overboard at a moment’s notice.
“No, but I’m compensated,” said Seaman Gabriel Torres. “Took a stim before I came in.”
Mike took a sip from a pitted steel sailor’s mug. His right trigger finger had a permanent crook from decades of carrying his coffee with him eighteen hours a day. He shifted his weight slightly and the launch settled deeper to starboard, causing Torres to catch himself on his seat in the bow. The retired chief petty officer weighed a good eighty pounds more than Torres, the difference recognizable in their voices as much as in the way the launch accommodated them.
“Big group sim down at the Cow Palace again,” said Torres. “Brazilian feed. Retro night. Carnival in Rio, back in the aughts.”
“You know,” Mike said, “I was in Rio once then. Not for Carnival, though. Unbelievable. More ass than a… how I got any of my guys back on the ship, I still do not know.”
“Hmmm,” Torres said. He nodded with absent-minded politeness, his attention fixed on his viz glasses. All these kids were the same once they put those damn things on, thought Mike. If they missed something important, they knew they could just watch it again. They could call up anything you’d ever said to them, yet they could never remember it.
The gold-rimmed Samsung glasses that Torres wore were definitely not Navy issue. Mike caught a flash of the Palo Alto A’s @ logo in reverse on the lens. So Torres was watching a replay of Palo Alto’s game against the Yankees from last night. Beneath the game’s display, a news-ticker video pop-up updated viewers on the latest border clashes between Chinese and Russian forces in Siberia.
“Game was a blowout, but the no-hitter by Parsons fell apart at the bottom of the eighth,” said Mike. “Too bad for the A’s.”
Torres, busted, took off the glasses and glared at Mike, whose eyes continued to pan across the steely water.
The young sailor knew not to say anything more. Shouting at a contractor was a quick path to another write-up. And more important, there was something about the old man that made it clear that, even though he was retired, he would like nothing more than to toss Torres overboard, and he’d do it without spilling a drop of coffee.
“Seaman, you’re on duty. I may be a civilian now and out of your chain of command,” said Mike, “but you work for the Navy. Do not disrespect the Navy by disappearing into those damn glasses.”
“Yes, sir,” said Torres.
“It’s ‘Chief,’ ” said Mike. “ ‘Sir’ is for officers. I actually work for a living.” He smiled at the old military joke, winking to let Torres know the situation was over as far as he was concerned. That was it, right there. The sly charm that had gotten him so far and simultaneously held him back. If Torres hadn’t been aboard, the chief could have puttered across the bay at a leisurely seven knots and pulled up, if he had the tide right, at the St. Francis Yacht Club. Grab a seat at the bar and swap old sea stories. After a while, one of the divorcées who hung out there would send over a drink, maybe say something about how much he looked like that old Hollywood actor, the one with all the adopted kids from around the world. Mike would then crack the old line that he had kids around the world too, he just didn’t know them, and the play would be on.
The rising sun began to reveal the outlines of the warships moored around them. The calls of a flight of gulls overhead made the silent, rusting vessels seem that much more lifeless.
“Used to be a bunch of scrap stuck in the Ghost Fleet,” said Mike, giving a running commentary as they passed between an old fleet tanker from the 1980s and an Aegis cruiser retired after the first debt crisis. “But a lot of ships here were put down before their time. Retired all the same, though.”
“I don’t get why we’re even here, Chief. These old ships, they’re done. They don’t need us,” said Torres. “And we don’t need them.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Mike. “It may seem like putting lipstick on old whores in a retirement home, but you’re looking at the Navy’s insurance policy, small as it may now be. You know, they kept something like five hundred ships in the Ghost Fleet back during the Cold War, just in case.”
“Floater, port side,” said Torres.
“Thanks,” said Mike, steering the launch around a faded blue plastic barrel bobbing in the water.
“And here’s our newest arrival, the Zumwalt,” Mike announced, pointing out the next ship anchored in line. “It didn’t fit in with the fleet when they wasted champagne on that ugly bow, and it doesn’t belong here now. Got no history, no credibility. They should have turned it into a reef, but all that fake composite crap would just kill all the fish.”
“What’s the deal with that bow?” said Torres. “It’s going the wrong direction.”
“Reverse tumblehome is the technical term,” said Mike. “See how the chine of the hull angles toward the center of the ship, like a box-cutter blade? That’s what happens when you go trying to grab the future while still being stuck two steps behind the present. DD(X) is what they called them at the start, as if the X made it special. Navy was going to build a new fleet of twenty-first-century stealthy battleships with electric guns and all that shit. Plan was to build thirty-two of them. But the ship ended up costing a mint, none of the ray guns they built for it worked for shit, and so the Navy bought just three. And then when the budget cuts came after the Dhahran crisis, the admirals couldn’t wait to send the Z straight into the Ghost Fleet here.”