Brooke didn’t look convinced. The commander turned to his chief, “Wags, show me the EE of the trawler.”
Brooke watched as a cloud suddenly appeared over the blip of the trawler.
“That cloud is a representation of the boat’s electronics emission, the sum total of every piece of equipment that is using electricity, plus the transmitters and receivers operating at this moment. Now, Wags, scan us.”
Brooke watched as the scale expanded on the scope and the blip was joined by a new blip, which she knew was the “fishing” boat she was on. There was a small set of lines hardly noticeable.
“Our cloud is consistent with a standard ship-to-shore radio, loran radar, fish finders, and crew personal equipment like iPods, a TV or computers.”
“Impressive; how do you do that?”
“PFM. The specifics are classified, but in broad strokes, every emission from this room is first shielded by Mu metal, which is a little like lead to Superman; you can’t see the majority of EE through it. Then we have EE monitor/transducers on this ship. They send out exact, but oppositely phased, signals of our emissions, in effect canceling out each and every wavelength that might escape from this room.”
Brooke was aware that the Navy term PFM stood for “pure fucking magic,” and after his explanation she agreed it was. “So that is what the Russians see electronically when they look at us?”
“As far as they know, a bunch of Japanese fisherman on this here boat are watching sumo wrestling right now.”
Deep below the Indian Ocean, eighty-five hundred yards off from the Russian trawler and fifteen thousand yards from the U.S. control ship, the crew of the submarine USS Halibut, not one of whom was close to the age of the boat in which they were submerged, were focused on the “vid” feed from the Deep Sea Recovery Vehicle as it plumbed through eighteen thousand feet, a depth which could have crushed the Chrysler building, to slowly descend onto the magnetic anomaly on the floor of the ocean another two thousand feet below.
Like her sister ship Growler in the 1950s Pegasus missile system, Halibut had two giant structures on her bow that were originally hangers that held two cruise missile type nuclear tipped rockets. From the bridge, the pregnant bulge on her foredeck resembled a large double-barrel shotgun with two giant cue balls sticking out of the end — the curved shape pressure doors. These hangers now housed the DSRV and its support equipment. It made the perfect delivery platform to silently and secretly deliver the ability to plumb the deepest depths, in many cases right under the nose of the Russians or any other adversary.
This was the Halibut’s final trip to this site. Although the Navy was betting with Hiccock’s money, it was still something of a big gamble. Of course, they had gotten far less money than they had wanted, since Hiccock suddenly balked at the cost estimate for the mission. It was as if he had seen their books and realized the Navy had inserted a 300 percent mark-up in the cost. With pressure from the president, the SECNAV magically found a sharper pencil in that ring of the Pentagon and the mission had been ordered.
The risk was that the Halibut had already made five stealth trips. The first had been a magnetometer search of the one thousand square miles in which the probable debris field of the Vera Cruz could be located. Then four trips to drop off, like parachute drops, pre-positioned supplies and equipment which the DSRV needed to retrieve the nuclear crucibles the president wanted as evidence in the world court. If however, their guess that this anomaly was the Vera Cruz proved to be wrong, all the equipment and supplies would never be retrieved. Two of the units, with classified equipment, would be destroyed by a remote signal to onboard bombs. For its part, the supposedly decommissioned Halibut was nearly undetectable. Originally, the hull was laid as a diesel electric sub in 1955, but she had been outfitted in dry dock, before her maiden voyage, with a nuclear plant to enable Russ Klaven to use her for the most secret of cold-war missions. Refinements and noise cancelling modifications were added as the technology advanced. Combined with her smaller size, it made her quieter than a fish’s sneeze. In war games with American and NATO forces, the Halibut slipped effortlessly in and out of sonar nets and lines of air-dropped sonar buoys from Orion sub hunter-killer aircraft. Its level of silent stealth rivaled that of the vaunted boomers, which were fifty years younger and $1.9 billion more expensive. Halibut had been officially scuttled in 1994, but in reality it was the hull of a never-finished sub that had been taken from mothballs and in the dead of night, and with much fanfare, scuttled in her place. Thus, the USS Halibut, thanks to Clay Klaven, added one more notch to her decades of stealthy service with the greatest cover story of alclass="underline" she didn’t even exist.
The descent of the DSRV was necessarily slow and cautious. Inside the command and control center of the fishing boat, Brooke watched the various screens and was starting to come to terms with the realization that this was the last page of the final chapter of a mission that had been written into her life. A mission that started as curiosity over the whereabouts of a Russian general turned black market czar. It was Brooke, whose antenna went up when she looked deeper, who had gotten the assignment from Bill with the blessing of the president. It had led to her meeting Mush. Being around a sub mission and back in the Indian Ocean made thoughts of him come at even greater frequency than usual. Right now she was on a make believe fishing boat, playing hi-tech hide and seek with a similarly configured, make-believe Russian trawler, and she found the game fully engaging. Of course, Mush played “catch me, kill me” every second he was on patrol against at least three nations who would love to hear of an “accidental” sinking of a U.S. Ballistic Sub, especially if one of those nations caused the accident.
“DSRV, now minus one thousand feet,” a seaman called out.
Brooke looked up, observed the blip representing the DSRV that was now one thousand feet above the sea floor, then went back to her line of thought. Her career had gone well,and this mission would be a big feather in her cap. Maybe she should think about leaving at the top of her game. She could put this all behind her and sleep well at night, knowing she served her country with distinction and valor. She could do the Hawaii move. Maybe hire on as a local cop, no, as corporate security — as a consultant. There must be corporations in Hawaii. Then she’d have time for a life with Mush when he was home from patrol. And maybe in a few years, he’d take a desk job at Pearl or Bangor, Washington. Oooo, Groton, Connecticut, that could be great! Good schools. I wouldn’t be too old by then, maybe a kid or two.
A sigh escaped from Brooke, and it got the attention of the commander. “You okay, Agent Burrell?” Randell said.
“Sorry, just got lost there a second; where are we?” Brooke tugged at her uniform skirt. The commander had given her permission to wear her uniform below deck, but said she’d have to change into “civvies” if she went anywhere on-deck or into the superstructure. Normally, she opted to be in uniform when she was on a Navy ship. It helped her avoid unwanted attention from seamen who had been away from their wives or girlfriends for many months. Today, not so much; this particular vessel was a super-secret spy ship, operated on deck by U.S. Japanese-American sailors in civilian clothes. The daily uniform for everyone onboard was always civilian, so now she stuck out like a Girl Scout at a Sunday picnic.