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.”
A new map of global energy reserves appeared on the screen. Simmons
stepped closer to the crew and continued.
“The captain hit the key change to focus on. The scramble for new energy
resources, heightening regional tensions here, here, and here, are sparking a
series of border clashes around the world. The fact that the South China Sea
oil fields were disappointments put new pressure on the Directorate. The hunt
goes on,” said Jamie. “The oilers are the Directorate’s way of showing that
their interest in this is now global.”
A screen shot of a smoking mine in South Africa replaced the map.
“That’s the Spiker mine, near South Africa’s border with Mozambique.
Remember that? These trends all connect. Even the renewed push toward
alternative energy sources has caused more conflict than cooperation.
Technologies like solar and deep-cycle batteries depend on rare-earth
materials, rare being the operative word,” said Simmons.
The picture shifted to the iconic photo of the green Chinese People’s
Liberation Army tank bulldozing into the Ministry of Public Security’s riotcontrol
truck as the crowd in Shanghai’s People’s Square cheered the soldiers
on.
“This is important, so pay attention,” said Simmons. “You all know the
history of the Directorate. When the world economy cratered after Dhahran,
the old Chinese Communist Party couldn’t keep things humming. Their big
mistake was calling in the military to put down the urban workers’ riots,
thinking that the troops would do their dirty work for them, just like back in
’89. They failed to factor in that a new generation of more professional
military and business elite saw the problem differently than they did.
Turned
out the new guard viewed the nepotism and corruption of those ‘little princes’
who had just inherited their power as a bigger threat to China’s stability than
the rioters. They booted them out, and instead you’ve got a Directorate
