GHOST FLEET: A NOVEL OF THE NEXT
WORLD WAR
PART 1
You can fight a war for a long time or you can make your nation strong.
You cannot do both.
— SUN-TZU, THE ART OF WAR
10,590 Meters Below Sea Level, Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean
Sometimes history is made in the dark.
As he scanned the blackness, Tzu-long thought about what his wife would
be doing right now. He couldn’t see her, but he knew that ten kilometers
above, Li Fung would be hunched over her keyboard, ritually tightening her
ponytail to burn off the tension. He could imagine her rough sneeze, knowing
how the cigarette smoke from the other geologists irritated her.
The screens inside the Jiaolong-3 Flood Dragon deep-water submersible
were the only portholes that modern science could offer the mission’s chief
geologist. His title was truly meaningful in this case. Lo Wei, the Directorate
officer sent to monitor them, had command, but ultimately, responsibility for
the success or failure of the mission fell on Tzu.
So it was appropriate at this moment, he thought, that he alone was in
control, deep below the COMRA (China Ocean Mineral Resources Research
and Development Association) deep-sea exploration vessel Xiang Yang
Hong 18. This particular pocket of the Mariana Trench belonged to him
alone.
Tzu guided the course underwater with a series of gentle tilts of the softly
glowing control-sleeve gloves he wore. He was moving too close to the sheer
trench walls to consider using the autopilot. He exhaled to clear his mind.
There was so much pressure, poised to crush his vessel and everyone’s
dreams at any moment.
He adjusted the headset with a nudge of his shoulder. There, just as he
thought. Blinking, he leaned forward, as if proximity to the lightly glowing
video screen and the crushing darkness beyond the sub’s hull could make the
moment any more real.
This dive was the last; it had to be.
A wave of his hands, and the sub backed away from the wall and paused,
hovering. Li turned off the exterior lights. Then he turned off the red interior
lighting. He savored the void.
The moment had come. It was the culmination of literally decades of
research and investment. No other nation had even attempted to plumb the
depths of the sea like Tzu and his comrades, which was why 96 percent of the
ocean floor still remained unexplored and unexploited. Indeed, the training
alone for the deep-sea dive had taken a full four years once the team at
Tianjin University developed the submersible. Compared to that, the five
days of searching on this mission was nothing.
This descent, with Tzu at the controls, was the mission’s last shot. At some
point soon, the team knew, the Americans would be paying them a “friendly”
visit, or maybe they would have the Australians do it for them. The Chinese
were too close to the big U.S. base in Guam; it was a wonder nobody had
come to look into what they were doing yet. Either way, the clock was
ticking, both for the COMRA vessel and, he worried, its crew.
He thought of Lieutenant Commander Lo Wei standing over Tzu’s wife’s
shoulder, getting impatient, lighting cigarette after cigarette as she sneezed
her way through the smoke. Tzu could almost feel the crew scrutinizing her
face with the same intensity they viewed their monitors. They would think,
but not say aloud, How could he fail us, when he knew the consequences for
us all?
Tzu had not failed.
The discovery itself was anticlimactic. A screen near Tzu’s right hand
flashed a brief message in blue and then flipped into a map mode. There had
been indicators of a gas field here, but as the data streamed in, he now knew
why his gut had guided him to this spot. He nudged the submersible on,
sorting the deployments of the sub’s disposable autonomous underwater
vehicles, which would allow the team to map the full extent of the discovery.
Each vessel was, in effect, a mini-torpedo whose sonic explosion afforded the
submersible’s imaging-by-sound sensors a deeper understanding of the riches
beneath the sea floor. The sound waves allowed the computer to “see” the
entirety of the field buried kilometers below the crust. The mini-torpedo
technology came from the latest submarine-hunting systems of the U.S.
Navy; the resource-mapping software had originated with the dissertation
research of a PhD student at Boston University. They would never know their
roles in making history.
After thirty-five minutes of mapping, it was done.
Enough time in the dark, Tzu thought. The transition between the deep and
the surface, he once confided to Li, was the worst. To die there would be his
hell, trapped in the void between the light of day and the marvels of the
abyss. But this time it was his joy; the void filled with the sense of
anticipation at sharing the news.
When he opened the submarine’s hatch, he saw the entire crew peering
over the port rail, staring down at him. Even the cook, with his scarred
forearms and missing pointer finger on his left hand, had come to gape at the
Jiaolong-3 bobbing on the surface.
He squinted against the bright Pacific sun, careful to keep his face
expressionless. He searched for Li among the crew gathered at the ship’s
railings. At the crowd’s edge, Lieutenant Commander Lo stood staring at him
with a sour face, an unspoken question in his eyes. Tzu locked eyes with his
wife, and when he couldn’t contain his discovery anymore, he smiled. She
shouted uncharacteristically, leaping with both hands in the air.
The rest of the crew turned to stare at her and then began cheering. Just
beyond them, a faint sea breeze lifted the Directorate flag hanging by the
ship’s stern; the yellow banner with red stars fluttered slightly. To Tzu, it
seemed like perfection, fitting for the moment. When he looked back to the
rail, he noticed that Lo was gone, already on his way inside to report the
mission results back to Hainan.
U.S. Navy P-8, Above the Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean
Even from eight thousand feet up, they could see that the people on the
deck were celebrating something.
“Maybe the captain announced a pool party,” said Commander Bill
“Sweetie” Darling from the controls.
Darling and his crew were on their way back from a check-out flight on the
P-8 Poseidon’s recent engine upgrades. The plane had been designed for
warship hunting, but there were none in the quadrant, and they were bored.
The Directorate research vessel offered some excitement, at least as much as
could be had in this corner of the Pacific.
The copilot, Dave “Fang” Treehorn, sent a live feed of the Xiang Yang
Hong 18’s deck from the P-8’s sensor-pod cameras. The cockpit of the
