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To the memory of the seventeen sailors who
lost their lives on the USS Cole
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
INTRODUCTION
AL-JIHAD
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
LEADERSHIP MATERIAL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
March 1991
GLOSSARY
LASH-UP
One - Unexpected Losses
San Diego, California September 16, 2010
National Military Command Center, The Pentagon September 17
Gongga Shan Mountain Launch Complex, Xichuan Province, Southern China September 23
Skyhook One Seven, Over the South China Sea September 23
USS Nebraska (SSBN—739), On Patrol September 24
INN News September 24
San Diego, California September 24
Two - Suggestions
National Military Command Center, The Pentagon September 25
INN News, September 25
China Lake Naval Weapons Center, California September 26
Crystal Square 3, Arlington, Virginia September 27
U.S. Navy Space Warfare Command, San Diego, California September 27
Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, The Pentagon, September 28
Three - Indecision
Office of the Chief of Staff of the Air Force September 30
Gongga Shan Mountain, Xichuan Province, China September 30
INN News September 30
United Flight 1191, En Route to Washington. D.C. September 30
Office of the Chief Of Staff Of the Air Force, The Pentagon September 30
National Military Command Center, The Pentagon September 30
INN Early News, London October 1
Office of the Chief Of Staff of the Air Force. The Pentagon, October 1
National Military Command Center, The Pentagon October 1
Four - Skunk Works
Andrews Air Force Base, Waghington, D.C. October 1
Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, Near San Diego October 2
October 3
Coronado Hotel, San Diego, California October 4
Space Forces Headquarters October 5
Space Forces Headquarters October 5 0430
Space Force Headquarters October 1
Space Force Headquarters October 13
Five - Exposure
INN News October 26
Gongga Shan Mountain October 28
Space Force Headquarters, Miramar November 5
INN News November 11
Space Force Headquarters, Miramar November 15
Six - Assembly
Gongga Shan Launch Site November 17
Kunming Air Base, Xichuan Province November 18
National Military Command Center, The Pentagon November 19
Space Force Headquarters, Miramar November 21
INN News, November 23
Seven - Deadline
Xichuan Space Center, China November 23
Space Force Headquarters November 25
National Military Command Center November 26
USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) in the South China Sea November 27
Space Force Headquarters, Miramar November 29
Space Force Headquarters, Miramar December 1
INN News December 1 2200
Space Force Headquarters, Miramar December 1 2215
Battle Center, Space Force Headquarters December 2 0200
Eight - Arrival
Gongga Shan December 2
Miramar Marine Corps Air Station 0400
Space Force Headquarters, Miramar 0400
Space Forces Battle Center, Miramar, California 0415
Space Forces Launch Center, Miramar, California 0430
Runway 15, Miramar Marine Corps Air Station 0530
INN News 0532
Space Forces Battle Center, Miramar, California 0532
Gongga Shan, December 1 0540
Space Force Battle Center, Miramar 0552
Gongga Shan 0605
Defender 0605
Gongga Shan 0610
Battle Center 0615
Defender 0620
Gongga Shan 0635
Battle Center 0635
Defender 0645
Gongga Shan 0120
Defender
Battle Center
CAV
The Western Sahara 300 Km North-Northwest of Timbuktu 1454 Hours, Zone Time; October 28, 2021
The South Face of the El Khnachich Range Three-quarters of a Mile West of the Taoudenni Caravan Road 2335 Hours, Zone Time; October 28, 2021
45 Miles Southeast of the El Khnachich Range 0421 Hours, Zone Time; October 29, 2021
GLOSSARY
CYBERKNIGHTS
One - combat.com
Two - Virtual Heroes
Three - www.quest
Four - The Pit
Five - Hack Attack
FLIGHT OF ENDEAVOUR
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
BREAKING POINT
Spring Xiamen, Fujian Province People’s Republic of China
Two Months later The White House
Three Days Later CVN George Washington
1920 Local SSN 405 Hekou
1930 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
1940 Local George Washington
2015 Local SSN 405 Hekou
2020 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
2050 Local SSN 405 Hekou
United Nations Security Council
0405 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
0410 Local SSN 405 Hekou
0445 Local Taiwan
0520 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
Taiwan in Country
East Fleet Headquarters Ningbo
Taipei
YAK 38 Forger A Tail Number 13/13
1920 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
1945 Local SSN 405 Hekou
Chiang Kai-Shek International Airport
Taipei
2120 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
Keelung
2305 Local SSN 21 Seawolf
2310 Local SSN 405 Hekou
2320 Local On The Surface
2329 Local SSN 405 Hekou
2332 Local SSN 21 Seewolf
2335 Local SSN 404 Hekou
2336 Local
SSN 21 Seawolf
2340 Local SSN 405 Hekou
Two Weeks Later United Nations General Assembly
INSIDE JOB
One
Two
Three
Four
SKYHAWKS FOREVER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One - The Boat
Two - Scooter
Three - As Good As It Gets
Four - Gonna Wash That Man …
Five - Thumbs-Down
Six - Post Mortem
Seven - Slaying Dragons
Eight - Dead Eyes
Nine - Manly Man Night
Ten - Almost Human
Eleven - Things Unsaid
Twelve - Who Needs Oxygen?
Thirteen - The Truest Test
Founeen - Questions
Fifteen - Answers
Sixteen - Half-Truths and White Lies
Seventeen - One of Our Carriers Is Missing
Eighteen - Ready Deck
Nineteen - Face of a Stranger
Twenty - Been There, Done That
Twenty-one - The Oscar Sierra Factor
Twenty-two - An All-Up Round
Twenty-three - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Twenty-four - Bogies
Twenty-five - Bandits
Twenty-six - Gomer One
Twenty-seven - Light to Moderate
Twenty-eight - Two V One V One
Twenty-nine - Last One Back
Thirty - Shakeout
Thirty-one - Scooter Flight
THERE IS NO WAR IN MELNICA
Copyright Page
INTRODUCTION
The milieu of armed conflict has been a fertile setting for storytellers since the dawn of the written word, and probably before. The Iliad by Homer was a thousand years old before someone finally wrote down that oral epic of the Trojan War, freezing its form forever.
Since then war stories have been one of the main themes of fiction in Western cultures: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoi was set during the Napoleonic Wars, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was set during the American Civil War, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was perhaps the great classic of World War I. Arguably the premier war novel of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, was set in the Spanish Civil War.
World War II caused an explosion of great war novels. Some of my favorites are The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line, War and Remembrance, From Here to Eternity, The War Lover, and Das Boot.
The Korean conflict also produced a bunch, including my favorite, The Bridges at Toko-Ri by James Michener, but Vietnam changed the literary landscape. According to conventional wisdom in the publishing industry, after that war the reading public lost interest in war stories. Without a doubt the publishers did.
In 1984 the world changed. The U.S. Naval Institute Press, the Naval Academy’s academic publisher, broke with its ninety-plus years of tradition and published a novel, The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy.
This book by an independent insurance agent who had never served in the armed forces sold slowly at first, then became a huge best-seller when the reading public found it and began selling it to each other by word of mouth. It didn’t hurt that President Ronald Reagan was photographed with a copy.
As it happened, in 1985 I was looking for a publisher for a Vietnam flying story I had written. After the novel was rejected by every publisher in New York, I saw Hunt in a bookstore, so I sent my novel to the Naval Institute Press. To my delight the house accepted it and published it in 1986 as Flight of the Intruder. Like Hunt, it too became a big best-seller.
Success ruined the Naval Institute. Wracked by internal politics, the staff refused to publish Clancy’s and my subsequent novels. (We had no trouble selling these books in New York, thank you!) The house did not publish another novel for years, and when they did, best-seller sales eluded them.
Literary critics had an explanation for the interest of the post-Vietnam public in war stories. These novels, they said, were something new. I don’t know who coined the term “technothriller” (back then newspapers always used quotes and hyphenated it) but the term stuck.
Trying to define the new term, the critics concluded that these war stories used modern technology in ways that no one ever had. How wrong they were.
Clancy’s inspiration for The Hunt for Red October was an attempted defection of a crew of a Soviet surface warship in the Baltic. The crew mutinied and attempted to sail their ship to Finland. The attempt went awry and the ringleaders were summarily executed by the communists, who always took offense when anyone tried to leave the workers’ paradises.
What if, Clancy asked himself, the crew of a nuclear-powered submarine tried to defect? The game would be more interesting then. Clancy’s model for the type of story he wanted to write was Edward L. Beach’s Run Silent, Run Deep, a World War II submarine story salted with authentic technical detail that was critical to the development of the characters and plot of the story.
With that scenario in mind, Clancy set out to write a submarine adventure that would be accurate in every detail. Never mind that he had never set foot on a nuclear submarine or spent a day in uniform—his inquiring mind and thirst for knowledge made him an extraordinary researcher. His fascination with war games and active, fertile imagination made him a first-class storyteller.
Unlike Clancy, I did no research whatsoever when writing Flight of the Intruder. I had flown A-6 Intruder bombers in Vietnam from the deck of the USS Enterprise and wrote from memory. I had been trying to write a flying novel since 1973 and had worn out two typewriters in the process. By 1984 I had figured out a plot for my flying tale, so after a divorce I got serious about writing and completed a first draft of the novel in five months.
My inspiration for the type of story I wanted to write was two books by Ernest K. Gann. Fate Is the Hunter was a true collection of flying stories from the late 1930s and 1940s, and was, I thought, extraordinary in its inclusion of a wealth of detail about the craft of flying an airplane. Gann also used this device for his novels, the best of which is probably The High and the Mighty, a story about a piston-engined airliner that has an emergency while flying between Hawaii and San Francisco.
Gann used technical details to create the setting and as plot devices that moved the stories along. By educating the reader about what it is a pilot does, he gave his stories an emotional impact that conventional storytellers could not achieve. In essence, he put you in the cockpit and took you flying. That, I thought, was an extraordinary achievement and one I wanted to emulate.
Fortunately, the technology that Clancy and I were writing about was state-of-the-art-nuclear-powered submarines and precision all-weather attack jets—and this played to the reading public’s long-standing love affair with scientific discoveries and new technology. In the nineteenth century Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and H. G. Wells gave birth to science fiction. The technology at the heart of their stories played on the public’s fascination with the man-made wonders of that age—the submarine, the flying machines that were the object of intense research and experimentation, though they had yet to get off the ground, and the myriad of uses that inventors were finding for electricity, to name just a few.
Today’s public is still enchanted by the promise of scientific research and technology. Computers, rockets, missiles, precision munitions, lasers, fiber optics, wireless networks, reconnaissance satellites, winged airplanes that take off and land vertically, network-centric warfare—advances in every technical field are constantly recreating the world in which we live.
The marriage of high tech and war stories is a natural.
The line between the modern military action-adventure and science fiction is blurry, indistinct, and becoming more so with every passing day. Storytellers often set technothrillers in the near future and dress up the technology accordingly, toss in little inventions of their own here and there, and in general, try subtly to wow their rea
ders by use of a little of that science fiction “what might be” magic. When it’s properly done, only a technically expert reader will be able to tell when the writer has crossed the line from the real to the unreal; and that’s the fun of it. On the other hand, stories set in space or on other planets or thousands of years in the future are clearly science fiction, even though armed conflict is involved.
In this collection you will find ten never-before-published technothriller novellas by accomplished writers, a category in which I immodestly include myself. I hope you like them.
STEPHEN COONTS
AL-JIHAD
BY STEPHEN COONTS
One
Julie Giraud was crazy as hell. I knew that for an absolute fact, so I was contemplating what a real damned fool I was to get mixed up in her crazy scheme when I drove the Humvee and trailer into the belly of the V-22 Osprey and tied them down.
I quickly checked the stuff in the Humvee’s trailer, made sure it was secure, then walked out of the Osprey and across the dark concrete ramp. Lights shining down from the peak of the hangar reflected in puddles of rainwater. The rain had stopped just at dusk, an hour or so ago.
I was the only human in sight amid the tiltrotor Ospreys parked on that vast mat. They looked like medium-sized transports except that they had an engine on each wingtip, and the engines were pointed straight up. Atop each engine was a thirty-eight-foot, three-bladed rotor. The engines were mounted on swivels that allowed them to be tilted from the vertical to the horizontal, giving the Ospreys the ability to take off and land like helicopters and then fly along in winged flight like the turboprop transports they really were.
I stopped by the door into the hangar and looked around again, just to make sure, then I opened the door and went inside.
The corridor was lit, but empty. My footsteps made a dull noise on the tile floor. I took the second right, into a ready room.
The duty officer was standing by the desk strapping a belt and holster to her waist. She was wearing a flight suit and black flying boots. Her dark hair was pulled back into a bun. She glanced at me. “Ready?”
“Where are all the security guards?”
“Watching a training film. They thought it was unusual to send everyone, but I insisted.”
“I sure as hell hope they don’t get suspicious.”
She picked up her flight bag, took a last look around, and glanced at her watch. Then she grinned at me. “Let’s go get ’em.”