The grand ballet of steel.

I was reading the early reports of Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian strategic bomber bases, wondering ‘where have I read this before/?’

And then I remembered.

I didn’t read it. I wrote it a couple of years ago. In Zero Day Code. Chapter 17.

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The state-owned China Ocean Shipping Group boasted of a great many vessels in its huge commercial fleet. More than a thousand on the day the container ship COSCO Vancouver left the port of Guangzhou under the command of Captain Bei Zhihui, fully two weeks before Admiral Feng’s battlegroup steamed from Zhanjiang. Bei, a thirty-eight-year-old mariner and native of Guangzhou, looked every inch the grizzled and veteran sea dog as he sat in the captain’s chair in the bridge high over the container ship’s main deck. As well he should. Bei Zhihui had gone down to the sea as a gangly, awkward sixteen-year-old, and most of the following twenty-two years had seen him crewing, and eventually commanding, a line of increasingly important ships.

Not for the masters of the China Ocean Shipping Group, however.

Bei Zhihui was not a captain of the merchant marine. He was a decorated and well-connected officer of the People’s Liberation Army Navy.

Nearly six thousand miles east of Feng, and forty minutes out of Honolulu Harbor, Captain Bei Zhihui received his final orders via an encrypted satellite phone at 0703 hours local. Bei had no idea what was happening at home, only that the time to do his duty had arrived. He was dressed in the uniform of PLA Navy captain. All of the bridge crew wore naval fatigues, but those who had reason to go out on deck still disguised themselves in the workaday coveralls of merchant seamen. Bei regretted the necessity of that. They had discussed it on the long voyage across the Pacific. His men would have preferred to die as warriors, facing the enemy arrayed for battle, rather than skulking and sneaking and striking like hidden vipers.

It was…

He hesitated, his eyes squinting into the morning sun.

It was not… dishonourable, as such. After all, deception was a time-honoured weapon of war. Twenty-four hours before they had departed Guangzhou, engineers swapped out thirty shipping containers for thirty more, which arrived on trucks in the dead of night. The ship’s automatic ID system, a tracking beacon carried by all large commercial vessels no matter their homeport or national flag, showed the Vancouver as still being moored to the wharf near Gate 33. Shortly after Captain Bei and his crew departed, another COSCO ship of the same class did indeed take up that berth. It even loaded out with the same configuration of containers on the main deck. An inquisitive photo analyst at the CIA or DIO could compare the colour palate and even the item numbers painted onto those containers and not find one point of difference.

Thousands of miles away, on the real Vancouver, Bei ordered Lieutenant Tu, the drone specialist, to deploy the weapons.

The lieutenant, who had graduated first in his engineering class at Beijing Polytech, and who might have gone on to found some great company had history run differently, flipped open his ruggedised laptop, a Huawei Matebook X Pro, and bent to the task. The Vancouver – now emitting a transponder signal identifying itself to US customs and port authorities as a New Zealand flagged container ship, the MV Dunedin – maintained station just outside the US territorial limit of twelve nautical miles. She was scheduled to enter port late in the afternoon. The nearest vessel, another container ship, was three thousand metres to starboard.

Like Admiral Feng, so far away to the east, there was little for Bei to do, having delivered his ship to the launch point for the mission. Like Feng, he too sat back and watched the opening moves of the attack. The other officers and enlisted men on the bridge were quiet, the atmosphere palpably tense as Lieutenant Tu worked his computer. For a while, the click-clack of keys was the loudest sound, save for the occasional report over the ship’s tannoy from the engineering and deck divisions. After a quietly fraught couple of minutes, Tu looked up and nodded to Captain Bei, his eyes asking an unspoken question.

“Proceed,” Bei said with a nod.

The young officer breathed in and out, as though preparing to lift some large weight in the gymnasium. He also nodded, but only to himself, as if assuring his conscience that there was nothing unusual happening here. A single keystroke followed, and the course of human affairs was turned from a hopeless but knowable future towards … another fate, perhaps more promising, but ultimately inscrutable to everyone who would now await its judgment.

Bei sat slightly higher in the captain’s chair as sirens sounded down on the main deck. He saw movement on the uppermost layer of shipping containers. Thirty of the long metal boxes cracked open, hydraulic pistons lifting the heavy slabs of ribbed steel like the opening of a child’s music box. The mechanisms were powerful, custom designed for this one task. The profile of the Vancouver’s container stack changed rapidly. Another siren sounded and dozens of dark oblong canisters shot out of the shadowed interiors of the open containers, launched a hundred metres into the air by magnetic catapults. The outer carapace of the massive projectiles popped open just before they reached the apogee of their short, almost vertical flight paths, and the sky around the ship was suddenly filled with hundreds of drones.

Some were larger than the others, and these boosted themselves away from the flock as stubby winglets unfolded and small jet engines spooled up. They sped off under full power, dropping down to a few metres above the waves and engaging terrain following sensors stolen and aggressively adapted from the True Depth camera system in Apple’s iPhones. Behind them, hundreds of smaller drones began their own flight towards Pearl Harbor and the US Air Force bases Hickam and Bellows. All of the drones were cloaked by radar absorbent meta-plastics developed in the laboratories of the PLA’s prosaically named ‘science and technology committee’—otherwise known as the Chinese DARPA. Powered by miniaturised scram jets, they accelerated to hypersonic speeds in less than a minute, closing with their targets before any of the US military’s early warning systems could detect or respond to the attack.

The development team at the science and technology committee had been given a difficult brief. The drones were to avoid the American defences, naturally, but when servicing their targets, loss of life was also to be kept to a minimum. The Party did not seek a war with the US. Its grand strategy was entirely bent toward avoiding one.

With this admonition foremost in their thinking, the Committee had armed the drone swarm with shaped charges and directed EMPs to strike at the most vulnerable points of the US military’s undeniably powerful war-fighting machine. The swarm arrowed in so quickly that human eyes could not detect them as anything but a rippling blur in the sky, and an eerie, humming whipcrack at they passed overhead. On land, the smart warheads guided by machine-learning algorithms fell upon USAF airfields and onshore naval facilities with a thunderous uproar, belied by a lack of breath-taking cinematic eruptions of fire and devastation. Instead, the almost supernaturally imperceptible kinetic hurricane swept over and chewed up aircraft wings and engine housings, shredded satellite dishes and fried communication hubs. For many long seconds, the fifteen ships and submarines resting at anchor in Pearl Harbor rang to the tiny hammer blows of thousands of micro-munitions, as though some malign hailstorm had fallen only upon the most delicate components of the vessel’s external sensor arrays.

Very few aircraft, and no warships, were actually destroyed at Pearl Harbor, or in the three other drone missions to the 7th Fleet’s home port at Yokosuka in Japan, and to the naval and air bases on Guam. However, the damage to such sophisticated, technology-dependent platforms was such that American military power in the Pacific was reduced to a merely modest variable in the calculations of the PLA’s war planners.

There were some human casualties.

A Petty Officer First Class and two seamen on the USS O’Kane, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer tied up at the Safeguard Street dock, were all killed while touching up the paint on the forward 5-inch gun. The guidance chip in a packet of tungsten penetrators meant to disable the steering works of the submarine USS Santa Fe was faulty, and instead of fragmenting the intricate machinery at the stern of the sub, they passed cleanly through the hull, Seaman Derek Hanson, and the box of cantaloupes he was carrying to cut up for breakfast in the officers’ wardroom.

All up, twenty-three Americans, and one British naval officer on secondment died in the attack, a casualty count which the planners at the Central Military Commission had determined was below the threshold likely to prompt a declaration of war. Especially not given the chaos consuming the mainland US as the full effects of General Chu’s cyberstrike unfolded across the continent, from sea to shining sea.

Captain Bei Zhihui knew none of this.

He only knew that his mission was successful and it was time, if possible, to escape.

He ordered the helmsman to put back out to sea and lay in a course to the rendezvous with the submarine Yuan. There was no urgency to his instructions or to the crew’s efforts as they made ready to withdraw. Bei had been nominally briefed on the effects of the strike he had just launched. He knew it would land as a heavy, but not lethal blow on the enemy, and he waited now for them to reply.

There was a very good chance, he understood, that he would not even realise when he was about to die. Anti-ship missiles fired from over the horizon would tear the Vancouver apart between one heartbeat and the next. He might just experience a split second of blinding white light and searing heat before everything went dark. Or he might not.

“I will have another cup of tea,” he said to Lieutenant Tu, who now found himself with little to do but to wait on the consequences of what they had just done. “Make one for yourself, Lieutenant, if you wish, and tell the men that they have my permission to drink to the success of our mission and to the People’s Republic. A real drink, for them and for you. There are two bottles of Baijiu in my cabin. Break them out for the crew. But I will have tea.”

The bridge crew cheered and Captain Bei smiled.

Much to his surprise, he did not die then or at any point before rendezvousing with the Yuan. He would die later, at home with his family. Like a billion of his countrymen.

Zero Day Code.