Arisen: Death of Empires Read online

  And then they all heard a high-pitched whining sound, like a giant but distant buzz-saw, also located around under the port side of the ship.

  And in that instant, Homer knew exactly what that was: the Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (CIWS), the surviving one on the port side – that giant six-barrelled Gatling cannon with its big radar-guidance system, which was designed to shoot down incoming anti-ship missiles.

  It was completely out of ammunition.

  But its radar worked just fine.

  And now it was tracking incoming threats, its barrels spinning and whining, and shooting blanks – at one or more objects approaching at 2.5 times the speed of sound.

  Homer snatched up Isabel in his arms and pivoted toward the stern, not having to tell Handon to grab Ben.

  “Run,” he said.

  Shipwrecks

  JFK - Bridge

  “Incoming missile threats, multiple launches, profiling now!”

  These shouted words were from Lieutenant Campbell, down in the Combat Information Center (CIC), and who had just opened a broadcast channel to the bridge, piped through the room speakers. The entire bridge crew unconsciously leaned toward them.

  There was actually little for Drake or Abrams or anyone on the bridge to do now – except listen, wait, and grip the edges of their stations with white knuckles. All the ship’s missile defense systems were completely automated – they’d already seen the two RIM-162 Evolved SeaSparrow Missiles (ESSMs, or just Sparrows) launch from the port-side missile launcher. And anything else that needed to be done in the next few seconds would be done from CIC.

  Everyone on the bridge saw the blossoming explosions as the Sparrows found their targets. No surprise there – they were designed specifically to counter supersonic maneuvering anti-ship missiles. Twelve feet long with an 86-pound blast-fragmentation warhead and proximity fuze, they were extremely hard to defeat, hide from, or sneak past. They were a major part of survivability for the big, fat, slow carrier, which was otherwise – particularly without its escorting strike group – a mouthwatering target.

  The only trouble was: after the Battle of the JFK, the ship was down to its very last two Sparrows. And now those had been spent.

  “Incoming missile profile reads… SS-N-19!” Campbell barked over the open channel. “Swarm of four. Two confirmed destroyed – two still coming in.”

  Drake sat back in his chair, and his face sagged.

  The Russians had called their very best naval anti-ship cruise missile the P-700 Гранит – or Granite. But the NATO reporting designation was SS-N-19, and it was commonly known as the Shipwreck – a damned dramatic name, and not for no reason. This was the anti-ship missile of every surface captain’s worst nightmares, a dark-night-of-the-soul lethal threat to everything that floated, no matter how big, tough, or well defended.

  The 30-foot-long, solid-fuel-boosted missiles packed a 750-kilogram warhead, consisting of either high explosive or fuel-air explosive (thermobaric). And they had a unique guidance mode: when fired in a swarm, one would climb to a higher altitude and designate targets for the others to attack, all of them linked together by live data connections, forming a supersonic-speed network of total maritime lethality. And if the designating missile was destroyed, the next one in line would climb up to take over the job.

  They’re like fucking Skynet, Drake thought grimly.

  And now the carrier’s Sparrows had destroyed two.

  But two more were still on their way, one almost certainly up high, the other skimming the water, looking to hit the Kennedy near its waterline, making for a one-punch killing shot. If one of those things impacted and exploded there, it would all but tear the hull out – and send the carrier to the bottom, possibly in minutes.

  Ordinarily, with the Sparrows having destroyed missile threats farther out, now the CIWS guns would be shredding anything that made it in closer, pouring 20mm armor-piercing tungsten penetrator shells into them at 4,500 rounds per minute. But the JFK had also fired every single 20mm round it had into the storm of the dead. That quiver was empty.

  And the incoming Shipwrecks moved at Mach 2.5, which meant maneuvering out of their way wasn’t even worth thinking about, even if they had time to try it.

  There was nothing Drake or his crew could do but sit and watch. Or, rather, sit there and take it.

  It would all be over in a few seconds.

  * * *

  Homer, running powerfully and flat out, with his little girl wrapped around his chest and his strong arms wrapped around her, felt and heard an impact low down on the starboard side of the boat – down at the waterline.

  The incoming missiles were moving faster than the speed of sound, so he knew he wouldn’t hear them coming – but he might just still see them. Now he looked up and back, over his own shoulder, and saw a glinting high in the sky above them.

  His plan had been to get them far away from the prow, where the missile impacts were likeliest. Being down inside the ship wouldn’t necessarily be safer – belowdecks could be a great place to get immolated, or drowned, on a damaged ship suffering chain explosions or taking on water.

  But, seeing now what he saw above them, he changed course, turning and racing at an angle for the nearest ladder that would take them below. He knew the others would be right behind him.

  As they flew through the hatch and started to take the stairs a landing at a time, the whole vessel shook around them with a bone-rattling crash, followed instantly by an angry and powerful rumbling. Superheated air chased them down the ladder, singeing hair and burning exposed skin. All five of them crashed into a pile at the bottom of the landing, the air sucked out of their lungs by the great indraft of a thermobaric explosion.

  Homer, Handon, and Ali felt their bones crack, their flesh bruise, and their backs torque, as they shielded the little ones from the terrible physical forces crashing all around them.

  It felt like Armageddon all over again.

  * * *

  “Commander, the Admiral Nakhimov is under way!”

  “I can see that,” said Drake, who could make this out perfectly well on the aerial drone footage, even as he was picking himself up off the floor, where he’d been knocked by the force of the huge exploding warhead. “Speed and heading.” That was something the radarman could tell him that he couldn’t work out on his own.

  “Speed coming up on thirty-two knots!” Drake knew that was the Russian battlecruiser’s top speed. “Heading two-seven-zero… turning now on two-two-five, through one-eight-zero… coming onto one-seven-five…”

  Yeah, Drake got it. The Russian ship was hightailing it out of the harbor at her top speed, then turning south to skirt down the African coast. They were running for it.

  Drake locked eyes with Abrams, who had managed to stay on his feet. “Shoot and scoot,” Abrams said.

  “Fuckers,” Drake added.

  He punched up the tannoy, setting it to all stations. “General quarters! All hands to battle stations.” It was a little late in the day for this. But they still had an incredibly dangerous and important job to do: damage control.

  Looking out the front screens, Drake could see giant flames burning bright and hot on the foredeck. He punched his hand mic again and sent his voice echoing into every corner of the ship. “Firefighting and salvage crews on deck! Men on deck to fight fires! Repeat – men on deck to fight fires!”

  He then turned to the helm. “All ahead, flank three.” The helmsman’s eyes went wide and he hesitated fractionally. “Punch it! Now, ensign. Navigator, put us on zero-zero-five.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Drake and Abrams locked eyes again, trading looks of understanding. Upon contact with a heavy warship-of-the-line – any serious threat, really – the job of the carrier was simply to get the fuck out of there, and fast. Normally, the rest of the strike group would be hauling ass toward the threat – engaging the enemy and protecting the flat-top.

  But the strike group, including Abrams’s guided-
missile destroyer, the Michael Murphy, was gone. Now his job was to tag-team with Drake on command tasks, and he already had a phone handset to his head and was punching up PriFly – Primary Flight Control, on the top level of the island. “PriFly, Bridge!” he said.

  “PriFly, go.” It was the Air Boss himself.

  “Scramble two F-35s, configured for air-sea battle.”

  “Already happening.”

  “We need a two-bird CAP in the air – two minutes ago.”

  There was the briefest pause on the other end. “Sir, you want air operations off of THAT flight deck? The one that’s currently fucking on fire?”

  Abrams drew a breath and spoke emphatically: “The angle deck is clear, Boss.”

  From the lofty vantage of the island, he could see the missile impact point was way up toward the fore, near the end of the bow runway. The angle deck, however, whose runway started at the stern and swept forward at an angle to the waist of the carrier, was, strictly speaking, unaffected. But Abrams could already see Drake shaking his head at him.

  And the Air Boss was unswayed. “Sir, that flight deck is nothing like safe for launching manned aircraft. You’ve got to get those fires handled first.”

  Abrams shook his head in turn, frustrated but unable to argue. “Get the birds prepped and on the elevator.”

  “Already happening. Fight your fires, sir. PriFly out.”

  * * *

  At the bottom of the landing, as the Alpha operators and the kids untangled themselves and climbed to their feet, Handon passed the little boy over to his father, who sat him down upright.

  “Get them out of here,” Handon said.

  Homer nodded once, not taking time to reply, and disappeared with his family down below. The enclosed space of the stairwell was now filling with dark, acrid smoke. Handon turned back up toward the light from outside.

  “Where are you going?” Ali said, grabbing his arm.

  As he stopped and turned to face her, other figures started to appear from below, running up the ladder and jostling and flowing around them. Most but not all were in heavy tan hazard suits with oxygen tanks on their backs or slung over their shoulders, and masks worn or carried. Along with them were a couple of sailors in fatigues – and at least one Marine in MARPAT camo.

  All were running straight toward the disaster scene at high speed, like it was free Ben & Jerry’s at the beach.

  “Back up top,” Handon answered Ali.

  He didn’t add that there were almost certainly casualties up there, from among those who had been gathered to watch landfall – and few of whom would have reacted as instantly and perfectly as Homer did.

  But Ali still held his arm, doggedly, so finally he said, “There are people hurt up there.”

  “And you need to not be one of them,” she said, having to raise her voice over the tumult – and what sounded like the roar of a serious fire raging up above them. “You’ve got no flame-retardant suit or breather, and there might be unexploded ordnance.”

  Still Handon resisted.

  “These people are trained to do this job. Let them do it.”

  Her implication was clear: Handon had to stay alive to do his job – which still waited for them in Somalia. He finally stopped resisting, nodded, and followed her down, the two of them salmon-spawning against the flow of fire-and-salvage crew heading up.

  It scraped Handon’s soul to run away from danger when others were running toward it. But he also knew Ali was right, as usual. She probably had the coolest head in an outfit full of totally unflappable masters of chaos.

  When they got down to Alpha’s deck, she pushed open the hatch, but Handon didn’t follow. “I’m going down to check on Sarah and Park in the lab,” he said.

  Ali nodded and let him go.

  But a small part of her, a part she didn’t enormously like, wondered which of those two – the all-important scientist, or his lover – Handon was most worried about.

  She instantly regretted the thought.

  But she also knew the reason this bugged her was that she could so easily imagine others wondering the same kinds of things about her and Homer. But now all that could stop. She’d made the right decision to end things between her and him. It had to be the right thing.

  It was too painful to be anything else.

  * * *

  With a phone handset pressed to his own ear now, Drake peered out the front screens like a viper, watching the fire hoses, in the hands of dozens of death-defying naval firefighters, stiffening and unfurling and beginning to power-vomit seawater at the inferno on his flight deck.

  He shot a glance at Abrams. “There’d damn well better be no fuel or ordnance cooking off down there.”

  It wasn’t so much that chain explosions and jet-fuel fires on aircraft carriers were so horrific, and so horrifyingly dangerous, though they were. It was that the Kennedy crew didn’t have their main tool for fighting them: the fire-retardant foam used for fire suppression in high-risk situations, and around dangerous accelerants, and which put out damn near anything.

  They’d used it all up in a very unconventional fashion – turning the flight deck into a slip’n’slide for thousands of attacking corpses in the battle. Now they were left with only seawater, which was being piped up in huge volume from ducts in the outside of the hull, below the waterline.

  Drake now cast a baleful eye up toward the horizon, and the sky above it. At any second, he expected to see a second swarm of Shipwrecks, or perhaps other slightly less lethal anti-ship missiles, slamming into them like a reinstated death sentence. And when they did, there would be nothing the ship or its crew could do to stop them.

  They would all be going straight to the bottom.

  “Range to enemy surface contact!” he shouted over the chaos, in the vague direction of the radar station.

  “Range one-six and climbing!”

  “Rate of change!” At least as important as how much ocean they had put between them and the battlecruiser was how quickly they were adding to it. There was a brief pause as the radarman calculated.

  “Approx two-point-two klicks per minute.”

  That’s what Drake wanted to hear – basically, the carrier’s top speed plus the Russians’ top speed. They were steaming in opposite directions, flat out.

  Drake looked to Abrams. “Why?” he asked.

  “Sir?”

  “Why are they running? More to the point – why didn’t they finish us?”

  Abrams knew as well as Drake did that they had their collective drawers around their ankles right now. Then his eyes lit up as he suddenly realized the Russians didn’t know it. “They have no idea our close-in defenses are exhausted.”

  Drake snorted. “And unless they’ve got some kind of eyes on us, they also don’t know we can’t launch aircraft.”

  “No defense, no offense. The Russkies just haven’t figured it out yet. But when they do…”

  Drake bounced to his feet and shouted to silence the trading-room-floor tumult of the bridge. “Listen up! Be advised – right now everyone works on getting control of this fire, on damage assessments, and on safeguarding this ship from follow-on damage. Got it?”

  There was a chorus of aye ayes and roger thats.

  Drake looked at Abrams, and spoke over the resurging chaos around them. “I want casualty and damage reports from all stations. Everything goes through you. You lead.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have the Bridge. I’m in CIC.”

  And with that, Drake was gone, heading down the island’s inside ladder, taking the stairs six at a time. As he leapt, he thought: Of all the rotten fucking luck.

  How the hell did they just find themselves in a punch-up with the goddamned Russian Navy?

  Around big lungfuls of panic breathing, he thought: Hasn’t everybody left alive got enough problems already?

  Blood On the Floor

  JFK - Hospital, Biosciences Lab

  When Handon pushed his way into the lab at t
he back the hospital, he found Dr. Park and Sarah Cameron leaning into a big plastic utility box with the lid back, as Professor Close looked on. All three wore scrubs over their clothes – plus gloves, surgical masks, and goggles. Sarah was holding a high-gauge hypodermic needle – the kind from nightmares and David Cronenberg films – which she had stuck into a body bag inside the box, and was now pulling the plunger back.

  As Handon approached, he could see that the bag was… wiggling.

  “That what I think it is?”

  “Uh huh,” Sarah said, removing the syringe and shutting the lid. She glared at Park. “I told you to stay back.”

  “And I told you,” Park said, relieving her of the syringe, “that this is a Group-4 infectious agent, and not for handling by amateurs…”

  Handon figured this must be the runner Sarah had trapped in a sealed companionway on the bottom deck – the one that had nearly spelled the end of her and Park both. Now it was serving as their culture bed for virus samples. Handon paused to briefly consider that somebody had wrestled that thing into a body bag, and then into a box. He was glad it hadn’t been him.

  Sarah peeled off her surgical gloves and put them in a biohazard box, pulled down her mask, pushed up her goggles, and regarded Handon. “What was that ruckus up above just now? Anything we should be worried about?”

  Handon marveled that this was such a gigantic, heavy vessel that a catastrophic missile strike four decks up and half a kilometer forward only registered as a ruckus. “You need to get all this squared away – now. And get Park and his data ready to move.”

  “Where? And why?”

  “The ship’s under attack.”

  “What? By who?”

  “Unknown at this time. Or unknown by me, anyway. But I need you to be ready to go – to get moving toward the stern, ideally close to the fantail deck and dock, but not out on it. If there’s a call to abandon ship, or it looks like the boat is listing, you need to get Park out onto the water.”