“She’s gone, sir,” said Anderson, shifting back to a formal tone now that he saw his old friend was unhurt. “Confirmed by the America’s quartermaster, a petty officer who seems to be all that’s left in command there. Reports all power out. She had to yell over to us with a bullhorn.” He paused. “Captain Simmons, you know what this means. If that petty officer is right, and we have to assume she is, at this point… with Admiral Murray dead, and Captain Brookings on the America…”
“I’m task force commander…” Simmons said, realizing what Anderson was saying.
“Yes, sir,” said Anderson. “Longboard is yours. We’re in good hands, I know it.”
The two of them went silent for a few seconds as the moment sank in, and then they turned to business.
“With your permission, sir, I’d like to begin evacuating the America’s crew.”
Simmons nodded even as he was trying to make up his mind.
“I don’t like the idea of scuttling a ship still afloat,” Anderson continued, “but I like the idea of towing a forty-thousand-ton weight with an enemy fleet coming in behind us even less.”
Simmons finally realized what Anderson assumed their next course of action would be.
“We are not leaving behind either America or the Marines onshore,” said Simmons. “We will evacuate the wounded off the ship, but hold this line of position until our main fleet or the enemy’s arrives, whichever happens first.”
Anderson shifted slightly sideways, as if he did not quite believe what he was seeing and hearing. His eyes squinted and his brow wrinkled in what Simmons recognized was an eloquent objection forming, the kind of argument they might have had back in the Chaffee’s wardroom when they were young officers. Then the look washed away, and Anderson nodded with an exaggerated bob of his head.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“We have to locate the enemy,” said Simmons. “It’s that simple. I’m ordering Orzel out on picket duty and deploying all our Fire Scouts to maximum range. And God help us if they don’t find what’s out there coming for us.”
Vicinity of USS America, Pacific Ocean
He’d been close to greatness, thought Denisov. And yet now here he was, wondering whether he should try to take off his flight boots for added buoyancy. He slowly kicked his legs, knowing he was too far offshore to do anything but drift until something ate him or one of the American ships in the near distance plucked him from the water.
He lay back against the collar of his inflated life vest, watching the strange, thin, wedge-shaped American drones circle high overhead. They were now flying a combat air patrol against an airstrike that wouldn’t come. “I was it, you stupid abtomat, there’s no more!” he screamed. Mindless machines, but lethal; he had to give them that.
A tingling at the back of his neck made him spin around. Seen from thousands of feet in the air, the Pacific looked inviting. But floating in it, he thought these waters were as dark and foreboding as his worst nightmare. Something was nearby, he could feel it.
An enormous black shape slowly moved through the sea maybe thirty yards beneath him. It surfaced a few hundred feet away, puffed a blast of air, and then went back under. No shark could be that big. He sighed with relief. A humpback whale, perhaps, content to eat krill, not Russian pilots.
He was alone for a little while longer. He was close enough to see the still-smoking USS America, and he was confident the little aircraft carrier had been the one his missile had hit. He watched the chiseled form of a massive destroyer pull alongside it; sailors appeared to be tethering the ships together. He recognized it as a Zumwalt-class ship and decided instead that had been the one his missile had hit; far better to have hit the more exotic creature with his last shot.
With his eyes stinging from the salt and sun, Denisov watched the litters of wounded men and women being passed off the burning America via ziplines strung between the two vessels. The sailors were bound up like mummies as they traveled from their dying ship to another with an uncertain future.
From the stern of the strange-looking ship, three small forms lifted off. When they formed up, he identified them as MQ-8 Fire Scout drones, scaled-down helicopters with pinched noses that looked like they had never made it out of aviation adolescence. Another two lifted off from the ship tethered to the other side of the America; some kind of cruiser or destroyer, he couldn’t tell.
The drone helicopters paused in formation and then each set off in a different direction, looking like a foraging steel wasps. They flew low, hugging the waves. One of the Fire Scouts flew almost directly overhead, the drone oblivious to Denisov as the force of its rotor’s downdraft pushed him under the waves. At that moment, Denisov realized that maybe the Americans wouldn’t come for him.
USS Zumwalt Ship Mission Center
The tactical holograph still hadn’t come back on, so the fuzzy image was carried across the entire bank of monitors on the wall. Given how the holographic projectors seemed to get knocked offline in every fight, Simmons wondered why they even bothered with the finicky high-tech contraptions. The grainy image they were watching looked like one of those old low-resolution YouTube videos.
“Sir, the task force is a mix of Chinese and Russian ships,” said the Zumwalt’s intelligence officer. “And ATHENA agrees, based on the EM signatures the Fire Scout is picking up.”
The live image kept shaking as if somebody were swatting at the drone, but the shaking was only the drone’s autonomous-flight software keeping the rotorcraft as low as possible to the waves, dipping into the troughs between them for cover.
“Freeze that for me,” said Simmons. The image on the screen locked, and the officer zoomed in on the superstructure of a large ship that the long-range camera had picked up on the upward ride of a wave.
“What a beast. That’s gotta be the Zheng He.”
“Yes, sir. Looks like it,” said the intelligence officer. He moved the still image of the massive Chinese capital ship off to one screen and resumed the live camera view. The video feed began to jiggle and shake, and the Fire Scout picked up speed, giving up its cover, as the wind shifted and the troughs of the waves grew shallow. It was a panic move, the robot’s algorithms having run out of good options to evade detection.
The shaking image then showed a series of smoky trails lifting up from the task force and flying toward the camera.
“Uh-oh” was all the intelligence officer could say before the image blanked out.
Cortez spoke up, reading from his glasses, as Simmons watched the replay of the Fire Scout’s frantic final moments.
“Between the visuals and SIGINT collection, ATHENA is reporting it as seven surface ships: three Sovremenny-class anti-surface destroyers, two Type Fifty-Four frigates, one Luyang-class guided missile destroyer, and a battle cruiser, most likely the Admiral Zheng He. They’re making twenty-five knots. They’re likely coming at us off a loose fix they got from the air attack.”
Simmons took in the small amount of information he had and realized he needed to think like an admiral and consider the entire Longboard task force, not just his own ship.
“But where are their carriers?” said Simmons out loud, mostly to himself.
“No further information, sir,” said Cortez. “ATHENA can run some models to guess where they are, but it’ll essentially be throwing the same darts at the wall as we are.”
“We’ll take what we can get. We need to hit that task force while we can. Release Puffin batteries,” said Simmons.
Cortez barked out the orders. The lines linking them to America were fed out to give space between the two ships. Then the deck hatches for the Zumwalt’s vertical launch cells all flipped up simultaneously, revealing a line of dark openings, each twenty-eight inches wide. One after another, a series of thirteen-foot-long cruise missiles, eighty in total, popped out from the vertical launch cells, like untethered jack-in-the-boxes.