Ghost Fleet by P. W. Singer August Cole

Author:P. W. Singer, August Cole
Language: eng, eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2014-12-10T17:37:54+00:00

Part 4

Use the normal force to engage;

use the extraordinary to win.

— Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

(Note: This is the motto of the PLA Command Academy in Nanjing, displayed on its library wall.)

Forty Miles North of Thule, Republic of Kalaallit Nunaat

Admiral Agathe Abelsen didn’t know what else to do, so she squared her broad shoulders and sharply saluted the first American she saw.

It was all disorienting. First the helicopter ride and then landing on an airfield that was as large as the town she’d grown up in. The airfield’s control tower, which the Americans called an island, loomed above, taller than almost every building in her country. And the ship was too large to think of as an actual boat; it didn’t even seem to sway with the sea.

The American sailor Abelsen had just saluted gave her a quizzical look. The seaman second class tying down the helicopter’s wheels was now just as confused as the admiral; he had no idea why the senior naval officer from the Republic of Kalaallit Nunaat, formerly known as Greenland, had just saluted him.

“Admiral Abelsen, welcome aboard,” said Rear Admiral Norman Durant, striding forward to salvage the situation. “We’re honored to host you onboard the USS Nimitz for the first joint operation between the United States and Kalaallit.”

Instead of saluting him, the admiral squeezed Durant with a powerful bear hug.

Once she let him go, the carrier strike group commander stepped back and threw her a crisp salute, trying to ignore the rest of the deck crew staring in astonishment. The admiral stood at least six inches taller than Durant’s five foot ten, and she must have outweighed him by a good fifty pounds. She had delicate features, thick eyebrows, and the kind of pale skin that made her green eyes seem luminescent. Her uniform coat was a sort of down parka, the standardized kind that fishing companies issued their crews, but with a patch sewn on the right shoulder. The patch displayed a flag, a rectangle with a half-red, half-white circle in the middle. Durant had read up on Kalaallit before the admiral arrived, so he knew that the white half of the circle in the flag, the lower part, signified something about icebergs and pack ice, and the red half above signified the sun setting in the ocean.

“I wish it were under better circumstances, Norman,” she said, already on familiar terms with him, it seemed. “But don’t you worry. We will get you through. You have let our dream come true, and now we will show you the way.”

Starting in 1721, Greenland had been a colony of Denmark, its population originally living off subsistence fishing. Indeed, for most of the island’s history, half its entire economic output had been shrimp exports. By the turn of the twentieth century, most of the citizens of Denmark saw this last legacy of their failed colonial ambitions as a burden (the Virgin Islands, their only other major holding, had been sold off to the United States in 1917).

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