ARISEN : Raiders, Volume 1 - The Collapse by Michael Stephen Fuchs

Author:Michael Stephen Fuchs [Fuchs, Michael Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Complete & Total Asskicking Books
Published: 2020-08-26T20:00:00+00:00

I Will Defend

USS Michael Monsoor – Bridge

The CO and the XO of the boat sat side-by-side at the front of the small and dimly lit bridge, and watched the great hulking shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge rise up ahead of them.

The ship they commanded, the USS Michael Monsoor, was a latest-generation, Zumwalt-class, stealth, multi-mission, land-attack destroyer. It looked like what Batman would have designed if he needed a large and deadly warship.

And she was deadly almost beyond imagining.

She mounted 20 vertical missile cells, with Sea Sparrow (anti-air), Tomahawk (ground attack), and the amusingly named ASROC (anti-submarine) missiles, all ready to rock and roll. She had twin 155mm deck guns, which rose up from recessed cavities in the deck, ready to provide naval gunfire support from a 920-round magazine. On top of that, she mounted twin 30mm Bushmaster cannons on deck, plus three Fire Scout helicopter UAVs in her enclosed hangar behind the rear flight deck, two of them armed with laser-guided rockets.

She was one of the deadliest warships to ever put to sea. And tonight she was being used as a water taxi service.

The Captain exhaled mournfully as he checked their heading against the piers of the approaching bridge. Looking over at his XO, he said, “Well, looks like its only the two Mikes until there’s a dumb-ass mission. Then it’s just one Mike.”

“Copy that, sir. Definitely dumb-ass.”

The joke was that the Michael Monsoor had been assigned to be the lead ship in the destroyer squadron for the Kennedy strike group. But another ship already in that squadron was the USS Michael Murphy – an older Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. Each had been named for fallen SEALs, who had been awarded the Medal of Honor – posthumously.

Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael Murphy died exposing himself to enemy fire to try to save his four-man team, which was engaged in a running, tumbling mountainside firefight with 150 Taleban fighters, in the Lone Survivor incident in Afghanistan. Team 3 SEAL Michael Monsoor threw himself on a grenade to save the lives of his teammates on a rooftop in Ramadi, Iraq, in the worst moments of the insurgency.

No one had ever more deserved the honor of having US Navy warships named after them. But, at some point, somebody with a lot of gold bars on his sleeves had decided it would be special to throw these boats together in the same strike group. Ever since, most sailors and Marines had been referring to them as: the Mikes.

But tonight, the Michael Monsoor operated alone.

The Captain regarded the black ocean spooling out under their prow, as they crawled forward at one-third engine speed.

They were blacked out and running silent.

It was the Monsoor’s stealth capabilities that had earned her this assignment. Despite being 40% larger than the Arleigh Burke-class, her radar cross-section was more like a fishing boat than a warship, and her acoustic signature comparable to Los Angeles-class submarines. Her stealth features were meant to thwart hypersonic maneuvering anti-ship missiles and swarm drone attacks. But, tonight, Commander Drake had decided the most advanced stealth warship ever floated, at a unit cost of $7.

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