“What happened to the other two ships?” said Torres.
“There are worse fates for a ship than being here,” said Mike, thinking about the half-built sister ships being sold off for scrap during the last budget crisis.
“So what do we gotta do after we get aboard it?” asked Torres.
“Aboard her,” said Mike. “Not it.”
“Chief, you can’t say that anymore,” said Torres. “Her.”
“Jesus, Torres, you can call the ship him if you want,” said Mike. “But don’t ever, ever call any of these uglies it. No matter what the regs say.”
“Well, she, he — whatever — looks like an LCS,” said Torres, referring to the littoral combat ships used by the Navy for forward-presence patrol missions all over the world. “That’s where I wish I was.”
“An LCS, huh? Dreaming of being off the coast of Bali in a ‘little crappy ship,’ wind blowing through your hair at fifty knots, throwing firecrackers at pirates?” said Mike. “Get the line ready.”
“Didn’t I hear your son was aboard an LCS?” asked Torres. “How does he like it?”
“I don’t know,” said Mike. “We’re not in touch.”
“Sorry, Chief.”
“You know, Torres, you must have really pissed somebody off to get stuck with me and the Ghost Fleet.” The old man was clearly changing the subject.
Torres fended the launch off from a small barge at the stern. Without looking, he tied a bowline knot that made the old chief suppress a smile. Maybe the new kids weren’t all bad.
“Nice knot there,” said Mike. “You been practicing like I showed you?”
“No need,” said Torres, tapping his glasses. “Just have to show me once and it’s saved forever.”
USS Coronado, Strait of Malacca
Each of the dark blue leather seats in the USS Coronado’s wardroom had a movie-theater chair’s sensory suite, complete with viz-glasses chargers, lumbar support, and thermoforming heated cushions that seemed almost too comfortable for military life — until you were sitting through your second hour of briefings.
This briefer, the officer in charge of the ship’s aviation detachment of three remote-piloted MQ-8 Fire Scout helicopters, thanked her audience and returned to her seat. A few side conversations abruptly stopped when the executive officer rose to give his ops intel brief.
When the XO, the ship’s second in command, stood at the head of the room, you felt a little bit like you were back in elementary school with the gym teacher looking down at you. The twenty-first-century Navy was supposed to be all about brains. But physical presence still mattered, and the XO, Commander James “Jamie” Simmons, had it. He stood six four and still looked like the University of Washington varsity heavyweight rower he’d once been, projecting a physicality that had become rare among the increasingly technocratic officer corps.
“Good morning. We’re doing this my way today,” said Simmons. “No viz.”
The crew groaned at the prospect of having to endure an entire brief without being able to multitask or have their viz glasses record the proceedings.
A young lieutenant in the back coughed into her fist: “Old school.”
Coronado’s captain, Commander Tom Riley, stood to the side holding a gleaming black ceramic-and-titanium-mesh coffee mug emblazoned with the shipbuilder’s corporate logo. He couldn’t help himself and smiled at the impertinent comment.
The display screen loaded the first image and projected it out into the room in a 3-D ripple: a heavily tattooed man on a matte-black electric waterbike firing an assault rifle one-handed up at the bridge of a container ship. Simmons had picked up this technique from an old admiral who’d lectured at the Naval War College: instead of the typical huge slide deck with immersive animations, he used just a single picture for each point he wanted to make.
“Now that I’ve got your attention,” said Simmons, switching the image to a map of their position at the entry to the Strait of Malacca. A swath of red pulsing dots waited there, each marking where a pirate attack had taken place in the previous year. “More than half of the world’s shipping passes through this channel, which make these red spots a global concern.”
The roughly six-hundred-mile-long channel between the former Republic of Indonesia and Malaysia was less than two miles wide at its narrowest, barely dividing Malaysia’s authoritarian society from the anarchy that Indonesia had sunk into after the second Timor war. Pirates were a distant memory for most of the world, but the red dots showed that this part of the Pacific was a gangland. The attackers used skiffs and homemade aerial drones to seize and sell what they could, mostly to fund the hundreds of militias throughout the archipelago.
None of the gangs bothered with hostages ever since Chinese special operations forces, at the behest of that country’s largest shipping concern, had wiped out the population of three entire islands in a single night. It didn’t end the attacks, though. There were six thousand inhabited islands left. Now the pirates just killed everyone when they seized a ship.
“This is Coronado’s focus during the next three days,” said Simmons. “It’s a standard presence patrol. But it connects to a bigger picture that Captain’s asked me to brief you on: We will be linking up with the Directorate escort force at eighteen hundred, making this a true multinational convoy.”
The XO then changed images, zooming out from the Coronado’s present position in its southeast corner to a larger map showing the strategic landscape of the entire Pacific.
“This leads me to the main brief this morning. It’s a long one. But there’s a bonus: if you don’t fall asleep on me, I’ll make sure you get double your PACE ed cred.” That brought a few smiles; the Program for Afloat College Education, a quick way for sailors to earn college credits on the Navy’s dime, was popular among the young crew.
“We’re breaking some ground here on this multinational undertaking. It’s the first joint mission with Directorate naval forces since Washington started the embargo threats,” he said. “Which means our friends from Hainan are taking it seriously. As you can see on the screen, the Directorate will have one of their new oilers here for refueling, which it doesn’t really need. They want us to see that in addition to having the world’s biggest economy, they’re buying their naval forces the range to operate anywhere on the planet.
“To understand why having a ship like an oiler is a big deal, you need to take a step back. Let’s start with Dhahran three years ago. When the nuke — well, more technically, the radiological dirty bomb — went off, it made the Saudi house of cards fall down. Between Dhahran glowing and the fights over who comes in after the Al Saud family, the world economy’s still reeling from the hub of the global oil industry effectively going offline,” he said.
His next slide showed a graph of energy prices spiking. “Oil’s finally coming off the two-hundred-ninety-dollar peak after the attack, but you don’t want to know how much this cruise is costing the taxpayers. Put it this way: enjoy yourselves and all this sunshine because your grandkids are still going to be paying the tab.”
“They’ll be paying in ramen,” said Lieutenant Gupal, one of the ship’s newest officers. Ramen was slang for RMN, renminbi, the Chinese currency that, along with the euro, had joined the American dollar as the global reserve currency following the dollar’s post-Dhahran crash.
“At least we can sail with our own oil now,” said Captain Riley. “When I joined back in the Stone Age, Middle East oil owned the market.”
“True enough,” said Simmons. “And shale extraction is coming back at even higher levels than before the moratorium after the New York quake. Dhahran made people stop caring so much about groundwater seepage.”