“Oh? I didn't think Christianity was big over here.”
“It's not particularly. But it's slowly becoming more popular. One convert at a time. Are you religious, sir?”
“No, my mom never went to Mass and neither did I.”
The ensuing awkward silence signaled the end of our meal. “Where are our quarters?”
Priest arched an eyebrow. “I don’t think they're ready yet. I suggest we wait in here for a bit until someone comes to notify us, sir.”
Luckily, there was an e-reader in the mess with recent newspapers on it. I claimed it for myself and let Priest content himself with his Bible.
I was deep in a story about the latest wild swing in oil prices when a crew member entered the mess. In heavily accented English, he said, “The captain wants you upstairs. You come with?”
When we arrived on deck, I saw that the sky had cleared, the warm tropical air having expended its moisture in a torrent, leaving only patches of cloud behind to graffiti the blue sky.
On the bridge, the captain said, "No other Chinese ships in the area, so we've been cleared for rendezvous."
"We're only a couple hours out of port, who's rendezvousing with us?"
Captain Chan smiled and pointed to the north, where the ocean was weakly lit by the rising sun.
I squinted my eyes and saw only the deep azure of the Timor Sea. "What am I looking for?"
"Give it a minute."
My eyes grew accustomed to the horizon so that any perturbation of the ocean jumped out at me. A flukishly large swell, a seagull.
Another bird, gray with a white tail, off in the distance. It glided low across the water, very nearly skimming the surface. But it wasn't flapping its wings.
After a few seconds, I realized that the white section at its back wasn't a tail. It was a wake.
"What is that?"
"That is a Pelican." The captain beamed. "Right on time."
It isn't easy to leave a billionaire like me speechless. I've gone on a sub-orbital space flight, seen the fanciest cars in the world, watched someone gamble $20 million away on a hand of poker. But the Pelican was very different than any vehicle I had ever seen.
It looked something like an airplane designed by an ambitiously creative twelve year old. Four hundred feet long with a five hundred foot wingspan, the Pelican was by far the largest airplane in the world. Four massive engines attached directly to the fuselage near the nose of the plane, and four more graced the wings. In place of a tail, two giant fins stuck above and below the wings. Small canards stuck out from the sides of the fins, making the plane look something like a massive futuristic spaceship.
The captain said proudly, "A friend of mine in the Air Force tells me the Pelican is based on a Russian design. Factoring in the latest advances in materials science, our engineers massively increased the size and carrying capacity. The Pelican can carry 2,200 tons of cargo over 10,000 miles at 500 miles per hour."
I stared at the huge machine rapidly approaching for a landing. "How did the engineers make it fly when it's that big? For Christ's sake, you could fit the next biggest plane in the world in the cargo hold!"
Priest handled the answer. "It's a ground-effect aircraft. When a plane flies low — at a height lower than the length of its wingspan — the ground increases air pressure under the wing, giving extra lift at the same speed. That free lift means you don't need as much engine power to transport the same amount of weight. It means a plane can carry as much as a freighter and—"
I finished the thought " — and it takes ten hours to ferry a ship's worth of supplies to Taiwan instead of ten days. And with the Pelicans being stealthy, the Chinese are left wondering how cargo is getting to Taiwan so fast, bypassing all the naval and air units they've got trying to blockade the island."
I frowned. "But how the hell have you guys kept it a secret?"
The captain said, "We do the cargo transfer to the Pelicans far enough away from land that no one can see, but in relatively enclosed waters so that we can easily detect and destroy snooping Chinese submarines. On the Taiwan end of the trip, the Pelicans have some special floating covered docks where they can unload without having to worry about Chinese air or satellite reconnaissance. They unload the cargo into ships that are identical to the ones leaving Darwin harbor about ten days earlier so that it seems like the same ship made the whole trip."
Priest said, “We've intercepted enough message traffic to know that the Chinese are going insane trying to figure out how the ships are making it through the trip completely unscathed. In fact, it's getting so bad that Command is considering letting the Chinese sink a few ships on a conventional route to Taiwan just so they don't get too eager to solve the great mystery.”
Priest and I watched as the Pelican landed on the water and then backed up to the side of the ship, its cavernous interior opened at the back to accept cargo. The captain, meanwhile, ordered four automated cranes on the ship to begin transferring containers.
The whole transfer took two hours, and the last container placed aboard the Pelican was the one with my men inside. By that time, Priest and I had boarded a skiff and traveled over to the Pelican.
The atmosphere on the Pelican was decidedly less cordial than on the ship. The only crew member who spoke to us was the crew master, who met us at the side hatch where the skiff dropped us off. He handed us each a wetsuit.
"You two board the submersible now. When we land, the submersible will deploy with your containers trailing behind. The submersible does not require any input from you. It will take us seven hours to fly to the waters near China, then your trip to China will last three hours. When the submersible surfaces, get out of the hatch and swim to shore. Your man in China will meet you with a truck to bring the containers ashore. Do you have any questions?"
We shook our heads. The crew member walked us to the rear of the Pelican, passing by dozens of containers that had recently resided on the deck of the ship. Finally, we came to the submersible, a thirty foot long mini submarine with our two containers bolted on top, one in front of the other. Where a conning tower might otherwise have been on a normal submarine, there was only an open hatch.
“Please enter the submersible,” the crew member said.
We did as we were told, climbing a small ladder that was quickly taken away by the crew member. I entered first, and Priest followed behind. When we were both seated, the hatch closed automatically.
Priest and I exchanged a look. Priest said, “I never liked these things. I suspect you won’t either.”
Within ten seconds of the hatch closing, I agreed with Priest. The passenger compartment of the submersible was essentially a hollow tube with flat benches running along either side. There were spare oxygen tanks and first aid kits at several stations, along with emergency rations and one chemical toilet. Luckily, Priest had thought ahead and smuggled aboard a few liters of water and bags of trail mix.
I do not consider myself to be a claustrophobic person by nature. However, the takeoff of the Pelican, accelerating like a passenger airliner while rolling about in the ocean swells, was too much for me. I barely made it to the chemical toilet in time to vomit up everything I had eaten over the past twelve hours.
When I was done, I looked over at Priest. He was holding the cross he wore on a necklace mumbling prayers, his eyes closed and his face serene.
After the Pelican lifted off to its cruising altitude of two-hundred feet, the ride smoothed out considerably. While there was turbulence, the Pelican's bulk did much to smooth out the ride. My inner ear decided that I was now moving in ways it could understand, and my nausea went away.