America had learned a hard lesson early in the war when they had found out that the carrier fleets were vulnerable to a missile swarm attack. It had been a difficult lesson to accept at the time, but now it was paying off through the new design of the carrier fleet’s defensive systems. The JDF and PLAN had just thrown over 2,100 anti-ship cruise missiles at the American fleet, and all but 62 missiles had been destroyed. The Americans did sustain damage, losing three destroyers, four frigates and one cruiser to the missile swarm. However, all three carriers survived with no damage, and the battleships (which packed most of the fleet’s heavy firepower) had taken little damage. The core of the fleet was still intact despite the losses, and now they were moving into their own strike range; soon the JDF and PLAN would feel the wrath of American ingenuity.
Don’t Forget to Turn out the Lights
Neven Jackson and his partner in crime Milo had received a lot of congratulations from the bosses at the NSA for their successful hack of the Chinese exoskeleton suits during the PLAN beach invasion of Oceanside. The Chinese had still captured Camp Pendleton and San Diego, but they had suffered horrific casualties and lost the ability to use their exoskeleton combat suits until their programmers could figure out how to remove Neven’s malware and get the suits operational again. Neven and Milo had even been invited for lunch with President Stein as a reward for a job well done.
Meeting the President was not something high on either of their minds. As hackers, their natural inclination was to have little respect for authority figures, let alone the President. However, after their lunch, they both walked away with a better understanding of Stein, and may have even started to see him as a real person. For a politician, the President had a very strong grasp on cyber warfare and cyber security, something neither of them expected from any president. They also felt a renewed purpose to not let the country down after seeing how their direct efforts were affecting the war.
Colonel Jeff Blount may have been a little jealous of Milo and Neven’s facetime with the President. He walked into their little hacker fiefdom on a mission, and with barely any gesture to politeness, bluntly asserted, “Ok gentlemen, sorry to disrupt the joyful reverie of your ‘lair,’ but it’s time for you to launch your next malware attack. We need you to move against the Japanese Fleet off the Pacific Coast of Mexico.”
As the drone feed was directed to their large screen monitors, they could see that the naval battle between the joint Chinese/Japanese fleet and the Americans was well underway. They saw the missile swarm heading towards the Americans and thought for certain the fleet was finished. To their surprise, they saw hundreds and then thousands of enemy missiles being destroyed, reducing the swarm into a manageable flock.
Several bright flashes could be seen as multiple American ships were hit. Then numerous large explosions occurred.
“What was that?” asked Neven, as he began work on another screen.
Colonel Blount was almost callous as he responded, “That was 291 people being killed. Those ships just blew up.”
As the missiles converged on the battleships and carriers, it seemed that they were all but destroyed.
The Colonel walked to the front of the room, standing in front of the monitors. Then he announced, “Now it is our turn. I need you guys to go in through your established backdoors and turn the Japanese ships off. We know you cannot access the Chinese ships; our fleet will handle them. Disable the JDF ships and let’s finish this battle, bringing the war one step closer to victory.” Then he walked to the side of the room to let the hackers do their work.
Neven pulled another Rip It out of the fridge near his work station, turned on his favorite music and began to type away. Neven was working on three different twenty inch monitors while reclining in a soft leather chair with his headphones on, and Milo was setting up the malware that would jump from the JDF fleet to the PLAN and begin to bog down their communications system with a concerted DDoS attack from every IoT device in the JDF fleet.
As Neven moved from folder to folder, system to system within the carriers and battleships of the JDF fleet, he began to activate a series of viruses and crypto-locker protocols that would shut down the carriers and battleship and then summarily lock them out of their systems when they tried to reboot them. The ships would effectively become dead in the water, unable to move or defend themselves when the American fleet started to carry out their counter attack. It was going to be a bloodbath.
Battleships
An intelligence officer walked onto the bridge and handed Stonebridge a memo. “Admiral, this message just came in from NSA. They said the JDF fleet has been taken offline and is dead in the water. We should conduct our attack now before they are able to bring their systems back online.” The officer waited for the Admiral to finish reading the report and issue his next set of orders.
“Now it’s time for some American justice,” thought the Admiral to himself.
Stonebridge turned to Captain Mason and directed, “Captain, order your attack aircraft to engage the enemy fleet immediately.” Then he turned to his operations officer and said, “Captain Lacey, order the battleships to launch their missiles and continue at flank speed until they are in range of the enemy fleets ships with their laser and railgun turrets. Once they are within range, they are to engage the enemy at will.”
Admiral Stonebridge looked back at the holographic map and the distances between the two fleets; the gap was closing quickly as the Americans were moving at flank speed towards the enemy. The Chinese and JDF continued to move towards the Americans to get their battleships in range to use their main guns, unaware of what awaited them.
Captain Jeremiah Wright had just completed his twenty-first year in the US Navy and his second year as the Captain of the USS Iowa Battleship. He had been selected to be the Captain of the Iowa after completing his assignment as the executive officer of the USS George H.W. Bush just months before it had been destroyed in the Pacific by the Chinese during the opening engagement of World War III. He had felt terrible about the loss of his previous ship; he knew a lot of the officers and enlisted personnel on board that had died, so it’s sinking hit home. He had lost over a hundred people he considered to be close friends. His assignment to the USS Iowa had been a blessing and a curse. He had needed time to emotionally heal and grieve the loss of so many friends; he had gotten that in a way because he had been sidelined from participating in the war up to that point while he worked on getting the USS Iowa ready for battle for more than 18 months.
Now, as Captain Wright stood in the CIC of America’s most powerful warship ever built, he felt almost god-like at the power and sheer destruction he was about to unleash on America’s enemies. His orders were to target the Chinese Supercarriers and battleships and leave the Japanese ships for the drones to destroy. With the cyber-attacks crippling the Japanese fleet, his real concern was the Chinese navy.
He turned to his weapons officer, “Commander Lewis, do we have a firing solution on the first Supercarrier?” he asked.