Syren's Song

by Claude G. Berube

  The Sri Lankan government had chosen the Tamils to do their cheap labor, men like Vanni, his brothers, and his father. Vanni was the only member of his family still alive and able to work. One of his brothers still lived, but a brain injury—there were no hard hats—had left him a helpless invalid in the care of relatives in one of the many tin-roofed shantytowns that lined the coast. Vanni had grown up in one of those shacks and had been lucky enough to attract the attention of an educated Tamil who had been condemned to the labor camp, for that was what the Breakers was.

  During the day the boy worked at the Breakers. At night he learned his alphabet and then read eagerly. As a teenager he read the works of Hegel and Marx as well as the speeches of Ho Chi Minh and other great communist leaders. He read the words and thought about them every day at the Breakers as he saw his family, friends, and neighbors laboring for just enough money to keep themselves alive. And he saw that the workers must organize and rise up against their oppressors, just as Hegel and Marx and Ho said. When the uprising came and civil war tore Sri Lanka apart, the Tamil Tigers recruited Vanni and sent him to their maritime arm: the Sea Tigers.

  While he had been dismantling ships at the Breakers Vanni had learned a great deal about how they were built, and he and the other Sea Tigers became innovative marine architects who constructed craft that could challenge the Sri Lankan navy. Together they built the fiberglass suicide boats and patrol boats that would eventually sink nearly thirty Sri Lankan navy boats. The Sea Tigers even maintained their own system of logistics ships far offshore.

  The leader of the Sea Tigers, Colonel Soosai himself, had recognized Vanni’s intelligence and had taken him as one of his closest advisers. Among his contributions was a communication system that relied on the old signal flags used during the Age of Sail rather than radios, to prevent the Sri Lankan navy from intercepting messages and locating the senders. Indeed, that was how his men had succeeded in their recent attacks at Trincomalee, Colombo, and Galle—by using signal flags from the launching catamaran and the Sea Tiger fishing vessels to coordinate their activities. He was well aware that his only chance to defeat superior forces was to use innovative means of disrupting them and destroying them.

  On the deck of his command ship—a former Soviet Ugra-class submarine tender that had been at anchor for years off the Breakers—Vanni listened calmly to the report on the latest attack. Spies in Singapore had told him of the two littoral combat ships that the United States had transferred to the Sri Lankan navy, and he knew when they would arrive. Almost everything had gone as planned. The catamaran had nearly been taken but had launched the EMP in time. It was fortunate, he thought, that the American destroyer had not been damaged, because that would have brought down the wrath of the U.S. Navy.

  Vanni closed his eyes and envisioned the attack as the messenger described it. The two Sea Tiger fishing boats had successfully towed the lines with the new C4-stuffed buoys that Gala’s 3D printers had made. The buoys had wrapped around the ships just as expected and, set off by a trip wire in the fishing line, initiated a perfectly timed daisy chain of explosions.

  Vanni swelled with pride. Two primitive fishing boats had sent two of the world’s most modern warships to the bottom of the sea. And his vision and planning had brought it about. Of course, the lucky discovery of the mine that contained the exact substance needed to make the EMP weapons had made it possible. But Vanni was the one who had seen the possibilities and directed the project. Vanni’s breathing was slow and steady, like his leadership.

  “There was only one issue, Vanni,” said the messenger who had been describing the attack.

  “Go on,” Vanni quietly replied, his eyes still closed.

  “Another ship was reported in the area, one claiming to be a private security ship working for the Sri Lankan navy. And it nearly succeeded in stopping the attack.”

  Vanni’s eyes flew open. “Continue.”

  “A small armed boat from the ship was near the catamaran and almost stopped the launch of the EMP rocket. The ship itself was too far from the battle to be affected. But we learned its name: Syren.”

  Vanni hummed a simple “mmmm,” acknowledging the statement but offering nothing else. He dismissed the messenger and looked out at the fleet of ghost ships, the two dozen already beached at the Breakers and another hundred at anchor awaiting their fate. That fate would have to wait. The workers had more important things to do. They would be fighting for their independence very soon.

  He went below to Gala’s labs. In the first, the 3D printers were manufacturing soda bottle–sized buoys for future operations. Gala and his assistants from China were working on the new EMP rockets in the larger lab.

  Gala was making calculations on a computer and didn’t look up when Vanni entered. His body was bathed in sweat, even though the old Soviet air-conditioning units were working hard to lower the temperature of the lab and cool the heat-generating computers and equipment. Vanni put his hand on Gala’s shoulder. “Again, the Gala rocket succeeded, my friend. Two more warships sunk. How goes your work?”

  Gala looked up and turned to Vanni. “We have much more to do.”

  “I have confidence in you,” Vanni said with a smile. “We shall christen them the ‘Gala IIs.’”

  Seattle, Washington

  When Golzari landed in Los Angeles he had more pieces of the puzzle. Most important, he now had the full name of the foreign scientist who had asked Dr. Sims to loan him a hydrostatic press: Viswanathan Gala, a Sri Lankan from the northern village of Alampil. Gala was twenty-seven and, according to his passport photo, extremely thin. Neither the State Department nor Interpol had any additional information on him, and several attempts to contact the Sri Lankan authorities had failed because of the continuing communications problems.

  Golzari had also learned a great deal about the Tamil Tigers—far more than he knew when he was sent to Singapore to investigate Special Agent Blake’s death. And what he learned was alarming. The Tigers—who called themselves the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE, were among the best organized and most brutal terrorists the world had ever seen. The Tamil people were Hindus of Indian descent, which made them a minority among the largely Buddhist Sri Lankans, who marginalized and disenfranchised them. Since they organized in the late 1970s the Tamil Tigers had waged a war of terror against the rest of Sri Lanka. They bombed public buildings and assassinated the country’s public officials—including President Ramasinghe Premadasa in 1993. They financed their operations with drug smuggling and robberies. The LTTE’s first uprising, in 2006, had been aimed at carving out a homeland for the Tamil people in northeastern Sri Lanka. Their second major offensive had begun a few days ago, and Golzari found himself right in the middle of it.

  If Gala was a Tamil, then the “borrowed” extruder was clearly going to play some role in the LTTE’s new offensive against Sri Lanka. The fire at the Argonne National Laboratory office that killed Dr. Sims had apparently destroyed any hard copies of proposals he received, but Golzari expected to find summaries of research projects and loans in the lab’s central database. Oddly, though, when he had contacted the lab, there was no record of the loan of the extruder; nor was there a record of how it was shipped.

  Golzari remembered Dr. Paddock mentioning zirconium, so he searched online to find information on the element. He learned that zirconium is a malleable metal that resists corrosion and does not absorb neutrons. That latter characteristic makes it useful for coating nuclear reactor fuel. Now Golzari was really alarmed. Does this mean the extruder has applications for a nuclear bomb? He called Dr. Paddock again at Argonne.

  “Not really, no,” Paddock opined. “But Admiral Rickover and his research group did do some work on the idea.”

  “Hyman Rickover—the father of the nuclear Navy?”

  “Yeah,” Paddock responded. “He had this group called the Vulcans in the 1950s and 1960s—young scientists he hand-selected to test the characteristics of different metals.”

/>   “Are any of the Vulcans still around?”

  “Yeah, there are a few. One of them used to stop by here a lot before he retired. Dr. Abraham.”

  Golzari managed to track down Dr. Dov Abraham, who was now living in Seattle. A short flight later and he was welcomed into the older man’s modest home.

  “Zirconium? Why the interest in that?” asked Abraham.

  “I’m trying to find out if it has any special properties, where it comes from—that sort of information,” Golzari said.

  “It’s not an uncommon element,” Dr. Abraham said, his hands shaking badly from Parkinson’s disease.

  “Where is it found?” Golzari asked.

  “Oh, many places. Mostly Australia, the eastern United States, China, Ukraine, and a few small pockets elsewhere—Uruguay, West Africa, northern India, and Sri Lanka.”

  Bingo. “And you used zirconium when you worked for Admiral Rickover?”

  “Yes, we tested properties and applications for many metals,” the veteran scientist confirmed. “I remember those days with great fondness. We were in Tennessee, you know, at the National Security Complex. Building 9211.” Dr. Abraham smiled and his eyes took on a faraway look.

  Golzari brought him back to the matter at hand. “Was there anything special about zirconium that would have interested Rickover? Something with nuclear applications?”

  Abraham thought about it. “You know, my mind isn’t as sharp as it once was,” he finally said. “But I remember that we looked at different ways of separating zirconium from hafnium.”

  “Hafnium?” Golzari was puzzled. “What’s that?”

  “It’s another element, almost always found in combination with zirconium. There were theories that hafnium might occur in its pure form, but no one to my knowledge has ever found a pure lode.”

  “What’s special about hafnium?”

  “Like zirconium, it’s effective for neutron absorption in nuclear power plants. There was one other application . . .” Abraham trailed off as if reluctant to say anything more.

  “What was that, sir?”

  “High-yield explosives. Not on the order of a nuclear explosion, of course, but an order of magnitude greater than a standard chemical reaction—some fifty or a hundred thousand times greater, we estimated.”

  Golzari was stunned. “It’s not something I’ve heard of before.”

  “There’s no reason why you would, Agent Golzari. None of this was ever of much use. We spent years testing theories, but none of them panned out. We needed a pure hafnium isotope, and that was impossible to find. So Admiral Rickover had us move on to other projects.”

  “Did the government ever pursue this?”

  Abraham shook his head. “Again, there was no reason to.”

  “Did anyone ever learn about these experiments?” Golzari pressed.

  “Several of the Vulcan reports became public. I think the ones on hafnium and zirconium separation were declassified about ten years ago,” the old scientist said.

  “I find it odd that experiments with that sort of application were declassified.”

  “So did we, though there were only a handful of us remaining. We fought it, but someone at the Department of Energy overruled us.”

  Golzari thanked Abraham for his time and headed back to the airport on rain-slicked roads. On the way he made some calls to the Department of Energy and learned that the man who had declassified the material had been accused of removing files and selling them to the Chinese government a few years before. But there had been no trial. The matter was hushed up in the interest of national security.

  As his rental car came around a bend, the rain now pouring down, a car began to pass him. Stupid thing to do on a blind curve, he thought. His instincts kicked in and told him to slow down. As he did, the window on the passenger side was lowered and a weapon emerged. The man in the passenger seat missed Golzari but managed to shoot the engine and front left tire, sending Golzari’s vehicle fishtailing as he eased it onto the shoulder. He immediately got out and pulled his Glock from its holster.

  The other car braked and came to a stop fifty yards ahead in the middle of the road. Three men emerged, all armed and in classic shooter’s stance facing Golzari, who lowered his profile behind the engine and stabilized his weapon on one of the men. A couple of their shots hit the car, but Golzari ignored them and calmly fired his weapon. He took out one of the men with a headshot, but at this distance he needed three rounds for the bullets to find their mark.

  The other two men dashed off in opposite directions perpendicular to Golzari; they were trying to outflank him. A tractor trailer approached behind the gunmen’s vehicle and slowed to a stop. Other traffic was visible in the distance. This is a busy highway, Golzari thought. They’re going to want to get this over with quickly.

  One of the men took up a position behind a tree thirty yards away, but the other had not yet reached cover. Golzari took careful aim at the second man and fired two quick shots. The first bullet struck the man in the leg; the next was a direct shot to his chest. It was now a duel between Golzari and the last man.

  Golzari ducked as three more shots shattered the rental car’s windshield. Then silence. This one is better trained than the other two. He waited patiently for his opportunity, aware that the shooter would be getting desperate as more cars approached and stopped. A couple of people emerged from their vehicles to see what was holding up traffic. As a federal agent Golzari had a responsibility to keep them out of danger. He fired two rounds then ran into the woods behind him, his leather soles sliding on the wet grass and moss. He had to draw the third man away from the civilians, so he quickly removed his shoes and ran toward the largest tree in sight.

  Sure enough the man followed. He took shelter behind a smaller tree that almost hid him completely. But Golzari could see just enough, and with one stable shot the agent took off the left side of the man’s face. Golzari breathed a sigh of relief. He stopped long enough on the way back to his car to take a close look at the shooter. Even with half his face gone it was clear the man was Hispanic, not Asian. The Singaporean detective had warned him that Zheng R&D had a long reach.

  The good citizens who had come out of their vehicles to investigate the stopped traffic had disappeared at the sound of gunshots, but several had called 911, and Golzari could hear sirens in the distance. Good. He was going to need a ride to town.

  M/V Syren

  Dusk had given way to night, and Connor Stark closed the porthole to his stateroom and secured the curtain to ensure that no light escaped to betray Syren’s location. His ears were still ringing from the firefight, and just raising his arms generated enough pain in his chest to make him wish he had accepted Doc’s offer of treatment afterward. Gunny Willis and Ranasinghe had been in much greater need—so badly injured, in fact, that both had been transferred to LeFon with her superior medical facilities.

  Syren and LeFon were sailing in company a few hundred yards apart some fifty miles off the coast of Sri Lanka at five knots. LeFon’s helicopter was somewhere above them searching for approaching boats that might pose a threat.

  Stark sat down at his desk and eyed the photograph that held a prominent place on it. He lightly traced the edge of the frame with his right forefinger. Maggie was standing in front of a rose bush on the Isle of Lewis. It had been raining that day, and her water-soaked red hair hung heavily on her shoulders and Shetland wool sweater. But she was smiling nevertheless. It was the first time she had taken more than a day off from the pub in a year. He had spirited her away in his boat without telling her where she was going. That had been just a month before he was recalled to duty in Yemen and everything changed. Before people died on Kirkwall and elsewhere. He understood why she wanted him out of this business. Did she understand why he couldn’t leave it? He wasn’t sure.

  His left hand was shaking uncontrollably from the pain and in reaction to the day’s events. When there was a knock at his door he grabbed a drawer handle with his left han
d and loudly said, “Enter.”

  Olivia Harrison came in first, followed by Jay Warren. “Captain, we’re ready to report,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” he said, motioning with his right hand to have them take seats on the chair and bed.

  Harrison took a deep breath before speaking. “Gaffney and Steiner have been transferred to LeFon for repatriation. We had the home office notify their next of kin.”

  “Should have waited for me to do that, XO,” Stark said, feeling a pang of grief for the coxswain and gunner killed in the fight.

  “I figured you had other things to handle, sir.”

  “Understood. I’d still like the contact information. As soon as we’re out of this I’ll get on the satellite phone with their families.”

  “Will do. The CO of LeFon and her navigator are coming on board momentarily.”

  “Have the steward prep some coffee for them.”

  “Already done, sir.”

  “Jay, what do you have to report?”

  “The RHIB’s back up and operational,” the big scientist said.

  “So fast?” Connor asked.

  “The EMP fried the circuit cards in the engines and radio, that’s all. We just had to replace them, and we’ve got plenty of spares,” Warren replied.

  “That’s it? When they fire an EMP all we have to do is replace cards?”

  “Not quite. If Syren had been hit, all our spare cards would have been fried too. I’m working with the guys on a Faraday cage to protect them.”

  “A what?”

  “A Faraday cage.” Jay said as if the term was commonly known. “Invented by Michael Faraday in the 1830s. We build a wire-mesh cage that looks like a chicken coop in the storage area that will block out electromagnetic pulses, superweld the corners, and then keep all the spare cards in there.”