Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven

by Dennis Chamberland

  The young Lieutenant gasped, “But sir, we have lost the ARA52!”

  Luan’s face directly assumed the rigidity and the mask of all commanders at sea just before they order the flogging and hanging of select members of the crew. The young Lieutenant could obviously see it clearly, and his own face reflected the fear of becoming the first of the Captain’s examples.

  But Captain Luan was seasoned and experienced. He well knew that the whole pretense of sending a junior to fetch the Captain was a deliberate effort of the more senior Officer of the Deck to give himself time to correct the problem, to give him time to generate his raft of excuses and to give the skipper time to become a little more accustomed to the impending disaster de jour. And most fortuitously of all, he did not have to be the one to break the unpleasant news.

  Luan’s face softened. He looked back to his red-faced Lieutenant whose blood pressure had obviously climbed way off the charts.

  “Dongkea, fetch me some hot coffee and bring it to the bridge, will you?” he asked with all the patience of a loving father, as he added a slight, but genuine, smile.

  “Yes, sir. Of course, sir! Right away, Captain,” Dongkea responded with a shudder, ducking out of the skipper’s cabin and nearly running toward the galley.

  Luan stood slowly, removed the headphones and placed them on his desk, his mind spinning with the possibilities and several resolutions. He grasped his cap, sat it firmly on his head and walked purposefully toward the bridge.

  “Captian on deck!” a seaman shouted two minutes later as Luan walked onto his bridge.

  “Good morning, Mr. Yan,” Luan greeted his Officer on Deck as though he was just returning from a pleasant walk in the country. “Is there something you wish to tell me?”

  Sen Yan looked as though he had just been caught with both hands elbow deep in the cookie jar – Luan’s cookie jar. His khaki shirt was soaked with perspiration and his hands visibly trembled.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Yan; I am waiting for your word,” Luan toyed.

  “Ah, ahem,” Yan stumbled, “The ARA52 has been lost!”

  “Lost? The entire vessel has been lost? With all hands?” he asked unmercifully. “Imagine that!”

  “Ah, no, sir… I mean, contact with the ARA52 has been lost.”

  “I see,” Luan responded slowly, acerbically. “You lost contact with an object in the middle of the ocean that floats with the current on the surface, one that has no means of self propulsion and is the size of a ten story building?”

  “… er, yes, sir…”

  “And how long ago did you discover that your elusive quarry was missing?”

  “About an hour ago, sir…”

  “Quartermaster, did you log the time?” Luan asked over his shoulder.

  “Yes, sir,” a young man responded.

  Luan paused and waited, knowing the rules of the shipboard game were being played out in order just as they had as long as man sailed the seas.

  “Well…” Luan finally pressed.

  “Ninety two minutes, sir,” the Quartermaster responded quietly.

  “In retrospect, how long ago should you have contacted your Captain, Mr. Yan? About an hour ago? Or ninety minutes? What?”

  “I have failed you Captain,” Yan responded, utterly defeated and shamed before his shipmates.

  “Do you believe in God, Mr. Yan?”

  “Of course not!” Yan instantly retorted, visibly insulted by the question.

  “Well, perhaps you should start,” Yuan responded with an equally reflexive repartee. “At this moment you are in need of a supernatural agent to help extract you from this incredible pit of linked blunders you have dug for yourself and have fallen into. I will assume that during the past 90 minutes, you have been frantically looking for ARA52?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I assume that since you did not have the courage to contact your Captain, that you have also not contacted the surface vessels as well?”

  Yan just slowly shook his head.

  “Then I assume that in the past 90 minutes we have backtracked – probably backtracked over our backtracks – and have now not only lost the ARA52 but are out of range of the surface vessels as well? How am I doing so far, Mr. Yan?”

  Yan said nothing then looked as if he wished he had a gun to finish himself off more quickly rather than have his limbs slowly sawed off one at a time.

  “How many times have you pinged for ARA52, Mr. Yan?” Yuan asked, referring to the number of acoustic signals emitted by the Jiang Zemin’s powerful sonar.

  “Fifteen, sir.”

  “I see. Fifteen pings, alerting the entire naval acoustic tracking grid of the planet to our predicament. And, I will also ask, Mr. Yan, since our onboard computer will store only a dozen acoustic images before it recycles and overwrites the image banks, did you at least have the presence of mind to archive the last ten or so images of the ARA52 before we lost contact?”

  Yan’s face was now ashen white and he did not reply.

  “I see,” Luan responded. “Now we have only the single image that I archived and none to compare it to. Is there any part of this exercise that you have not mismanaged, Mr. Yan?”

  Again, Yan stood silent.

  “Do you and the rest of the complement of this great ship now see why it is so essential that when a problem of this magnitude is encountered that you contact your Captain immediately? It was just us and the ARA52 in the ocean, that’s all. Am I not correct, Mr. Yan?”

  Yan remained motionless and silent.

  “Then what you have just accomplished is to completely screw up a two car parade, am I correct?”

  The bridge was deathly silent and Luan allowed the silence to penetrate the whole of his assembled company.

  “I have the con,” Luan finally asserted.

  “Captain has the con,” Yan rasped. “Request permission to retire to my quarters, Captain,” he added, his eyes downcast.

  “Denied, Mr. Yan. Stand by and watch; you may learn something that will come in handy when you command your own ship one day.”

  Yuan could see the life flush back into Yan’s face. By this comment, he had just let Yan and everyone else know that while he was in very deep, Yuan still considered him a worthy officer.

  “What is the elapsed time from the last good contact until now?” Luan asked.

  “210 minutes,” Lieutenant Loo, the ship’s navigator, responded.

  “Mr. Loo, please display our course over the past 210 minutes,” Luan asked.

  Before him on a wide, full color, center projected screen the underwater tracks of the Jiang Zemin appeared. “Now project the DR positioning of the surface vessels. Zoom out if necessary.”

  The image obeyed; the screen widened and displayed the surface vessels positions.

  “Now display the DR track of the ARA52 from the last known contact,” Luan expertly commanded.

  A blue line snaked across the image and centered itself between the surface vessels.

  “Mr. Xaou, contact the surface vessels by whatever means necessary and request they alter their course to this position and standby there until they hear from me,” Luan said as he centered a laser pointer on the projected chart.

  “Quad 14.76.456,” Loo said as he picked off the position of the pointer.

  “Aye, sir,” Xaou responded.

  “Now project a spheroid from the surface of the DR position out to the 98th set and drift probability line,” Luan said. Several minutes later, a football shaped object appeared on the chart.

  “Our target lies within that spheroid, Mr. Yan. And since they are incapable of submerging or altering their position outside the current, and since the Jiang Zemin has the most advanced acoustic imaging in the oceans, then it will be as easy as finding a skyscraper on the Gobi, agreed?”

  “Yes, of course, sir!” Yan readily agreed.

  “Right full rudder. All engines ahead one third. Make your heading zero five zero. Run her out at periscope depth, Mr. Yan,” Lu
an confidently asserted.

  “Aye, Captain,” Yan responded self-assuredly.

  Twenty minutes later, Luan barked, “All engines stop. Inform me when we are drifting.”

  Minutes later Loo announced, “Captain, we are drifting with the current.”

  “Very well, what is our heading?”

  “Zero five five.”

  “Give me a ping, now, fifty percent power,” Luan commanded.

  The unmistakable sound of the sonar’s ping could be heard in the background. All eyes were fixed on the sonar’s screen projected before them. No image was returned. The screen remained blank.

  Luan drew a fan shaped pair of lines across an engineer’s pad before him and made several tick marks along the sides of the fan. Then he said, “Using the stern thrusters only, maneuver to a heading of zero two two and ping again.”

  Minutes later, the process was repeated with no result. Again, Luan drew a pair of lines across his pad. Again and again he repeated this process until they had searched in a fixed 360 degree arc around the Jiang Zemin .

  “Mr. Loo, describe the thermal environment,” Luan requested, fearing that the ARA52 was hidden behind a thermocline.

  “The thermal environment in these currents is not totally benign, as one might expect. However, it is not impenetrable, either. At 50 percent power, we should have seen some hint of their presence.”

  “What is your recommendation?” Luan asked, his voice now hinting at some concern.

  “I recommend we repeat the process, correcting for current over the past hour and increase our power to 80 percent,” Loo responded. “If this scan comes back negative, I am willing to confidently assert that she is not in our target area at all.”

  “Very well, let us follow that course of action,” Luan responded.

  Forty five minutes later, the 360 degree search had turned up nothing.

  “Mr. Loo, could she have anchored hours ago and fixed her position while we sailed by?” Luan asked, obviously running out of ideas.

  “Negative, sir. The depth is far too great to anchor.”

  “Then what happened to the ARA52?” Luan asked, now thoroughly frustrated.

  “I believe the ARA52 has sunk, sir,” Yan responded quietly.

  “And what leads you to that rather radical conclusion, Mr. Yan?” Luan asked, his voice now laced with contempt.

  “As you said, Captain, with our advanced technology and with your advanced seamanship, if she were there, it would have been as easy as finding a skyscraper in the Gobi Desert . I believe that if she were there, we could not possibly have missed such a massive stationary object!”

  Luan looked at Yan as though he were about to dismember him on the bridge. Then his features softened as though a secondary thought process had taken hold in his mind. Incredibly, a faint smile spread across his face.

  “Yes, I do believe you are correct,” Yuan said to no one in particular, with narrowed eyes. “It is, after all the only viable conclusion. The ARA52 has indeed been lost with all hands. It sank between our sonar fixes into the abyssal depths. It was, after all, a poorly conceived and utterly useless current floater of American creation. It was as totally corrupt in its function as it was in its design. It was the product of a fraudulent social structure and could have no place in the new Chinese world empire.

  “Mr. Loo, do we have the acoustic environment archived from the time of the last sonar contact until Mr. Yan’s first indication that the ARA52 was missing?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have it evaluated for acoustic anomalies immediately.”

  Twenty minutes later, the report was returned.

  “Sir, at exactly 2345, there was an acoustic trace that indicated bulkheads collapsing.”

  “And what is the assigned probability of that trace?”

  “Sixty five percent, sir.”

  “Why so low, Mr. Loo?”

  Loo looked uncertain, then responded, “I would speculate that the design of the structure was so dissimilar to a standard shipboard configuration that when it collapsed it emitted an acoustic trace that our computers were not entirely familiar with. “

  Luan smiled and nodded. “There you have it, all the proof we need. Mr. Yan, prepare a report for central command. ‘The ARA52 has sunk with the loss of all hands at or near Quad 12.71.110. We have recorded its acoustic signature as it sunk. Awaiting further orders for new assignment.’”

  Yuan looked refreshed as he turned to depart the bridge. “Now we can get on with a task more suitable to the power and purpose of this boat.”

  31

  The Phoenix was nearly 100 nautical miles northeast of the Jiang Zemin when the Chinese submarine began its frenetic sonar pinging, signaling to Legend and crew that they had successfully made their escape from the watchful eyes of the Chicoms. But Legend also knew that his careful plan had only partially commenced.

  Striker Legend stole down a back passageway of his vessel, ever watching behind him as he walked, knowing that either Dr. Lurch or one of his Chinese Special Forces goons could be shadowing him. Confident that he was alone, Legend pulled a square magnet out of his pocket and placed it over a small scratch on a door labeled ‘LIFE RAFT STORAGE.’ He heard a resonant click from inside the door. He then twisted the handle and entered the compartment filled with hanging bags, each marked ‘EMERGENCY RAFT.’ Legend walked three paces to the back of the small room and squeezed in behind a hanging raft. There he faced a door with a keypad. He quickly typed in its combination: ARA52. Following another click, the door opened.

  Legend stepped into a large compartment deep inside the Phoenix . It was what had become known as “The Real Command Center.” Assembled in the fully functioning Command Center of the Phoenix was his personal assistant, Sam, his brother Baker and two competent assistants: Travis T and Stephen Lawrence, known by all as Stevie Wonder. Wonder was a small man, of African American descent and always wore sunglasses, everywhere, even at night. As far as anyone knew, Travis T had no last name at all – at least none that he would reveal.

  “Status,” Legend said bluntly, taking his seat in the complex and brilliantly arrayed center.

  “Our Chicom pals are missing us for real,” Baker began. “They started multiple pings about three hours ago. Then there was a period of relative silence, and then they changed their position and began a more methodical search. Fortunately for us, they haven’t a clue. But now they’ve gone silent, holding their position. Probably waiting on word from their Command at Quindao.”

  “Good,” Legend responded, his eyes glued to a large status screen showing each contact’s position and track. “They think we’re bobbing on the surface somewhere near them. But since we’re actually capable of submerging to 300 feet below their target area, they’re looking for us in all the wrong places.”

  “Well, hopefully they think we’re sunk,” Baker added.

  “And it’s fortunate that they didn’t suspect that we actually had a propulsive capacity using our Ocean Thermal Energy vents,” Travis T added.

  “Or that Baker here deployed his little fleet of sonar ROVs - our SROV navy - and faked them out for days,” Stevie Wonder said with a wide smile.

  “Baker, what’s the status on your little drones?” Legend asked.

  “All of them are functioning well and holding their positions at their SROV stations, as we speak. Just as planned, they intercepted the Chicom’s sonar energy, recorded it as intended then returned the energy they wanted to see in the position they wanted to see it after each ping until the gig was up, then we sent them to their new assignments, just as planned. One minute we were there, the next minute we were just gone.”

  “Good work, team,” Legend said with a determined, flat smile. “Now let’s cut our Chicom Special Forces team loose so we can go on about our business. Stevie, sound general quarters.”

  “No need, Striker,” Wonder responded.

  “What? Why?”

  “They’re all assembled in their seats
in their Command Center having a staff meeting. They have a meeting every now and then for who knows what reason. See for yourself.”

  Legend looked at a monitor showing the inside of the fake Command Center he had built just for this purpose. As Wonder had said, every seat was filled with the assembled Chicom Special Forces team. The fake Command Center mimicked many real processes and included a fully capable communications center that allowed them to stay in touch with their base. But it was a ruse specifically designed just for this moment.

  “Where’s Dr. Lurch?” Legend asked.

  “He’s wandering about the ship somewhere near D deck,” Sam responded. She had taken it upon herself to track his every movement.

  “His assigned station is in the Command Center during General Quarters, so shall we sound it anyway?” Travis asked.

  “He hasn’t taken it upon himself to appear where he’s assigned during any of our drills and exercises, has he, Sam?” Legend responded. “I suggest we dump ‘em now while we have the chance. I don’t want even a single one of them left onboard. Let’s pop the pod before one of ‘em decides to go to the head. Travis, close the hydraulic doors to the pod,” he ordered.

  THE PHOENIX’S ‘FAKE COMMAND CENTER’ POD

  Travis’ fingers danced over several keys. Suddenly, the Chicoms began to stir on the cameras before them. The hydraulic doors closed slowly but they were noisy and attracted their immediate attention. One of them noted that the clear port between passages was darkening and he ran to the hatchway that led outside. As he noticed the sheet of black metal closing them in, he immediately began to pull on the hatch dogs and frantically began to tug at the wheel. But all the actuators were frozen shut by design. Their faces began to reflect the potential danger they were in and more of the team began to cluster around the hatch, yanking at the wheel and dogs.

  “Baker, are your pods all in position?” Legend asked resolutely.

  “Yes, all in position and ready,” Baker responded.

  “Travis, tell me when the doors are green,” Legend commanded quietly, feeling the full weight of what he was about to do.