Ghost Fleet : A Novel of the Next World War (9780544145979) by August P. W.; Cole Singer

25 mm gun pod on his F-35B Lightning II fighter kept jamming after each helicopter-like vertical landing he performed. This was the fourth time this week, but no one could figure out why. The plane’s autonomic maintenance computers were supposed to point fingers at any gremlins, but adding more to the twenty-four million lines of software code already in there just proved Murphy’s Law beat Moore’s Law every time.
    â€œI don’t know what to tell you, Worm,” said Miller, the civilian crew chief, using the call sign Carlisle had earned after losing his rations and living off worms during the survival-and-evasion phase of his pilot training. “I didn’t design these planes; I just fix ’em.”
    Worm shook his head. He’d never understood why the Marine Corps put the world’s best pilots in the cockpits of the world’s most expensive weapons system only to turn maintenance over to the lowest bidder.
    Worm was about to offer another round of profane observations about what $1.5 trillion ought to buy—like, for instance, a working gun—but then he held his breath and listened. Weird. A series of bass-like thumps. Then he heard the buzzing of rotors. It came from the direction of Pearl and moved toward the air station located on the Mokapu Peninsula. 41 The blood drained from the aviator’s face when he saw the incoming flight of choppers and tiny quadcopter drones.
    â€œGet the fuel hose off, now!” Worm shouted.
    The crew chief was about to argue when he tracked the pilot’s gaze and saw the formation. Miller looked old, but he was down on the ground before the first wave of rockets hit the hangar complex on the other side of the 7,800-foot runway.
    â€œMiller, up! Get up!” shouted Worm.
    Lying prone, Miller watched four of the quadcopters dive and attack a communications tower at the end of the runway. Just before the V1000s launched a volley of micro-rockets, they flared back into formation, which made them look like
X
s on a fiery tic-tac-toe board.
    â€œI’m on it!” said Miller. You could question his competence, but you couldn’t fault the man’s bravery, thought Worm.
    As the two men worked to pull the fuel line from the F-35, Miller spoke between panting breaths.
    â€œChinese?” he said.
    â€œDoes it matter?” said Worm. “Get me up there, and I’ll send a few down here for you to pick through and find out.”
    They could see the drone helicopters methodically working their way across the base’s hangar buildings, hitting one aircraft after the other. That they remained in an X formation the whole time made the attack seem all the more menacing. A few Marines shot rifles at them, only to be taken out by rocket fire from above. Fortunately, Worm’s F-35B, like its predecessor the Harrier jump jet, didn’t need to approach the killing field of the runway. The aircraft had a shaft-driven fan in the middle of its fuselage that could lift the jet into the air like a helicopter, once the main jet engine pushed it forward with over forty thousand pounds of thrust. 42
    The tradeoff of packing a second engine in the middle of the plane was that the Marine version of the F-35 couldn’t carry as much payload, but Worm’s jet would be flying with a light load anyway. The good news was that the training exercise they had been prepping for was a live-fire drill. The bad news was it was for close air support, so he was loaded with only dummy air-to-air missiles and a gun pod he couldn’t trust.
    Worm clambered into the cockpit and looked down at Miller, the top half of his head encased in a heads-up-display visor-and-helmet combination that looked like a bug’s carapace. He shouted and pointed at the jet’s fuselage: “The gun? The gun?”
    Miller scrambled up the ladder to the cockpit and leaned in close enough to Worm that he could smell the sharp stink of sweat mixed with jet