“A thousand years ago our ancestors crossed the oceans of the world. We are not becoming a new navy, as the Westerners believe; we are the world’s oldest and greatest navy, reclaiming our lost heritage, reclaiming our lost territories, reclaiming the vast resources of our waters from the thieving hands that stole it. We are the guardians of the blue soil of our homeland and will defend it with our blood and our honor.
“Today is a great day. Today we lay claim to that which was always rightfully ours. Someday you will tell your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren that you were here this day, on this ship beneath our glorious flag, taking another step in the long march toward our rightful destiny, our rightful place under heaven.”
The admiral paused for effect, surveying the proud young faces before him. He twisted around and whipped off the linen shroud behind him. An engraved white-marble stele gleamed in the bright sun, thick and rectangular like a giant headstone. Admiral Ji nodded to four muscled sailors. They marched forward in lockstep and lifted the heavy stone off the fantail and heaved it into the rolling blue water in a geysering splash.
The admiral shouted out the words from the national anthem, “Arise! All who refuse to be slaves! Let our flesh and blood become our new Great Wall!”
The officers and crew shouted and cheered as they pushed forward to the end of the fantail, but the marble stele had already sunk beneath the waves.
Ji’s weathered eyes caught a speck of gray in the faultless blue sky far above. A drone.
He smiled.
And so it begins.
TWO
I can even see the admiral’s gleaming brass buttons.”
Commander Hiroshi Onizuka had his eyes glued to the crystal-clear HD flat-panel display. A Sandia Multimodal Volant drone fed its images directly into his control console. Pearce Systems had just developed the integrated drone and sensor system, and installed it on the Sword Dragon for testing. Onizuka preferred his beloved periscope, but he was impressed with the expanded capabilities of the new electro-optical sensors in the retrofitted photonics mast married to the far-ranging surveillance drone. “But that’s not what worries me.”
Troy Pearce stood beside him, watching the same images. The former CIA SOG operative’s black hair was flecked with gray — one for every bullet ever shot at him over the years, he joked — and the laugh lines in the corners of his world-weary blue eyes were anything but. As the CEO of the world’s premier drone security company, he’d seen plenty of surveillance video before, but never while standing in a submerged submarine. “Looks like some kind of ceremony. A burial at sea?”
Onizuka pulled off his ball cap and ran a hand through his thick hair. At thirty-six, the handsome naval officer was the youngest sub captain in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) and commanded one of its newest vessels. The diesel-powered Soryu-class submarines were the largest and most advanced Japan had built since the war, but the stealthy Sword Dragon carried only short-range conventional torpedoes and antiship missiles as befitting the JMSDF’s mission limitations.
“The way he was flapping his arms? I don’t think so. Definitely a ceremony of some kind, but not a burial.” Onizuka’s English was slightly accented, but perfect — one of the reasons Pearce was assigned to his boat. “Too bad we don’t have audio.”
“The Volant is too high up.”
“Yes, of course.”
“But we can get a closer look at the object they threw overboard.”
This was a perfect real-world scenario for Pearce to demonstrate the extreme value of drones to the skeptical Japanese captain and, by extension, the JMSDF establishment. Pearce’s covert assignment was to privately reassure the Japanese that the United States was willing and able to help the beleaguered nation find another way to defend itself against recent Chinese aggression without a massive conventional naval rearmament program. The prospect of Japan rebuilding another blue-water navy was too problematic for its Asian neighbors, especially the Chinese.
But tensions between China and Japan in the East China Sea had risen dramatically over the last few years, focused symbolically on what the Japanese called the Senkaku Islands, a collection of five small islands and three uninhabitable rocks situated in an area of vast new oil and gas reserves recently estimated at triple the original forecast. Both China and Japan claimed them as sovereign territory, partly to control the incredible resource wealth buried beneath the ocean floor. But Pearce was quickly learning that symbolism and history were just about as important as oil and gas on this side of the planet.
Onizuka nodded to the ensign at the Volant’s control station. “Engage.”
A thousand meters above the Chinese missile destroyer, the modified Sandia Volant slowed as it began a programmed descent. Within minutes, the delta-winged aircraft dove effortlessly into the water, the ailerons on its wings’ trailing edges now serving as dive planes. It traveled much more slowly beneath the surface than above it, but the Volant proved highly maneuverable underwater.
Thanks to a partnership with MIT and the Pearce Systems research team led by Dr. Kirin Rao, the new, highly reliable spread — spectrum signaling technology deployed today made long-distance underwater wireless communications possible. Rao did her best to explain the physics behind it all, but underwater acoustics was beyond Pearce’s reach. That’s why he let her run his research division with a free hand. Rao’s breakthrough was significant. UUVs could now be deployed beyond the limited reach of tethered communication lines and manipulated more adroitly than automated underwater navigational software, which was still in its relative infancy.
Automated sensors onboard the Sandia Multimodal prevented collisions with large underwater objects, but the Japanese ensign could manually direct it with a joystick, steering it via the first-person video perspective from one of the drone’s onboard cameras, illuminating the dark waters by a powerful LED cluster. For the moment, the Volant steered itself, homing in on the Kunming’s location that it had fixed with its laser range finder before it dived.
It wasn’t long before the multimodal drone came within a hundred feet of the engraved marble stone, nestled on the slope of a five-hundred-foot-tall seamount looming like a dark pyramid in the dim waters.
Pearce and Onizuka watched the ensign’s video feed. The air was cool in the cramped but gleaming high-tech control room. Pearce tried to ignore his creeping claustrophobia. He wiped away a bead of sweat on his face with the tip of his thumb.
Onizuka barked an order in Japanese to his navigation officer on the other side of the control room. The navigator tapped on a computer screen, called back to his captain.
“Our Chinese friends apparently have found an uncharted seamount,” Onizuka translated. “Now, let’s see if we can get a closer look at that stele they tossed overboard.”
The ensign eased the drone into the current closer to the stone. Electric-powered thrusters held it in place. The video camera zoomed in. The image was a little wobbly, but clear.
“My Chinese isn’t so good,” Pearce said.
“Nor is mine. But we use the same kanji. I believe it says, ‘Mao Island. China. 1 May 2017.’ It includes longitude and latitude coordinates.”
“‘Mao Island’?” Pearce frowned with confusion. “What does that mean?”
Onizuka laid a hand on the young ensign’s shoulder. “Well done, Kenzo. Please forward that video to fleet HQ.”