2034 by Elliot Ackerman

Author:Elliot Ackerman [Ackerman, Elliot & Stavridis, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

11:19 June 18, 2034 (GMT+8)

220 nautical miles off the coast of Zhanjiang

These waters were a graveyard. As the Enterprise set its course, Sarah Hunt knew the countless wrecks she sailed over. The Philippines were to her east. To her west was the Gulf of Tonkin. She considered the names of the ships—the USS Princeton, Yorktown, the Hoel, and the Gambier Bay—whose blasted hulls rested on the seabed beneath her. And Japanese ships as well, battleships and carriers. Hunt and her crew passed silently above them, taking up a position—for what?

Hunt didn’t know.

Her orders had come in quick succession. Every couple of hours she was summoned to the radio room, an antiquated closet in the bowels of the ship that a senior chief, who everyone called Quint, treated as his own personal fiefdom. The nickname Quint came from his uncanny resemblance to the captain of the ill-fated Orca played by Robert Shaw in the film Jaws. Working alongside Quint was his assistant, a young petty officer third class who the crew of the Enterprise called Hooper, not because he looked like Richard Dreyfuss’s character, Matt Hooper—the intrepid, bespectacled, Great White–hunting marine biologist—but simply because he spent every waking hour with Quint.

Hunt, who had spent a career receiving her orders over lengthy briefings via secure video teleconference, accompanied by kaleidoscopic displays of PowerPoint, was slowly getting used to this fragmented manner of communications. With their Chinese adversaries having the upper hand in cyber, the Enterprise had gone into an internet blackout. Indo-Pacific Command, which was in direct contact with the White House, kept tapping out these minimalist communications to Hunt in high-frequency radio bursts, the same long-range bandwidth employed by the US Navy in the Second World War.

Another of these messages had arrived, so Hunt traveled four levels down from her stateroom to the radio room, where she found Quint and Hooper surrounded by a tangle of electronics, the former with a pair of spectacles perched on the tip of his nose as he unsnarled some wires and the latter holding a smoking soldering iron.

“Gentlemen,” said Hunt, announcing herself.

Hooper startled at her voice while Quint sat frozen with his chin tucked down as though calculating his share of the bill at a restaurant. Undisturbed, he continued to focus through his spectacles as his hands worked swiftly at the tangle of wires leading into the radio. “Mornin’, ma’am,” said Quint. An unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth.

“It’s evening, Senior Chief.”

Quint raised an eyebrow but didn’t take his concentration away from the wires. “Then evenin’, ma’am.” He nodded for Hooper to pass him the soldering iron, which he quickly applied to a connection he was grafting onto a circuit board. For the past two weeks, ever since they got underway, Quint and Hooper had been retrofitting a suite of antiquated VHF, UHF, and HF radios into the avionics of the single F/A-18 Hornet squadron aboard the Enterprise. This made the Death Rattlers the only squadron that would be entirely immune to cyber interference.

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