Polaris

by Todd Tucker

He turned his hat backward and stooped over, adjusted the eyepiece, and looked toward the island. He stared a bit, and then turned slowly, a complete circle, looking around them.

  “No surface contacts,” he said.

  “They are keeping their distance,” said Carlson.

  He was pointed back at the island now, his eyes refreshed. “It looks like…”

  “What?”

  “Something is flying.…”

  She took the scope back and stared on the same bearing. She now saw it, too.

  “You have good eyes, Lieutenant Banach,” she said.

  It looked almost like a flock of birds, but she could see the sun glint on parts of them. They were too big to be birds, if they could see them at this distance, but flew with too much agility to be airplanes, swirling and looping into the air.

  “Some kind of airplane?” she said.

  “Surveillance craft maybe? Cruise missiles?”

  “Too many of them,” she said. She tilted the right handle of the scope toward her, tilting the lens to look upward. She saw nothing but clear blue sky.

  When she turned the scope back down to the waterline, she was startled to see, directly in front of them, two plumes of water erupting from the sea, a deep V of spray and foam: a fast surface ship. Heading right for them.

  “Surface contact!” she said. “Arm tube one, prepare to fire!” She pushed the button on the scope, marking the bearing and sending it to fire control. She was down to five torpedoes, and badly wanted to save them for something big—a carrier or, better yet, another submarine. But this little shit was heading right for them, and she might not have a choice. How had they found her? They might have sensors mounted on the seabed, she thought, or perhaps their silhouette, just a few feet beneath the surface of the clear, tropical water, had been spotted by surveillance in the air, a plane or even a satellite. The white boat was hurtling toward them, going at least 30 knots.

  “Solution is ready!” said Banach. “Ready to fire!”

  She watched the boat approach, still debating whether or not to fire. It was small, she noted, with a shallow draft, shallow enough to pass right over the shoals. “Prepare to fire on this bearing…” she said.

  Suddenly, she noticed a formation of those small, odd planes flying directly behind the craft. Pursuing it.

  “Wait!” she said. She looked down to confirm that they were recording the scene through the scope, for later study.

  The planes were closer now, and they were like none she’d ever seen. They were small, and there was something odd about them. She realized they had no windows.

  “Captain…”

  At that moment, following some unseen cue, the planes attacked the speeding boat. The ship disappeared in a series of bright, small flashes. None of it stayed afloat long enough to burn. After a short delay, she felt the concussions of the explosions reach the hull through the water, a rapid series of dull thumps.

  The planes pulled up, maneuvered excitedly, and returned to the island.

  “Captain, what did you see?”

  She took her eye away from the scope and looked at Banach. “I’m … not sure.”

  * * *

  They stayed at periscope depth for six hours after that, Banach and Carlson taking turns on the scope. Carlson watched the sun go down, and a few lights began to twinkle on the Alliance’s odd little island.

  “Tea, Captain?” Banach had appeared at her side. She handed over the scope so she could have a drink. It was strong and heavily sweetened, like she preferred.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You might make commander after all.”

  “You flatter me, Captain.” He adjusted the scope, took a quick swing around, made sure nobody was sneaking up on them. “Have you figured it all out yet? We’re all waiting for you to tell us what is happening.”

  “You’ll have to keep waiting,” she said. “I have no bloody idea.”

  “Oxygen has drifted down to sixteen percent,” he said. “Shall we ventilate, Captain? As long as we’re up here?”

  She knew it was a good idea. Her oxygen generators were overtaxed, and fresh air was good for morale. It was dark, they were quiet, and nobody seemed to know they were out there. They could raise the snorkel mast and let the ship take a deep breath of the warm, tropical air that surrounded them. But like she told Banach: she didn’t know what was going on. And she remembered those satellite pictures of the island, with its animal pens and medical scientists. Maybe breeding murderous germs and bacteria …

  “No,” she said. “Not this time.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  After defeating the seagulls, the commissioning of the drone station at Eris Island was a triumph. The success rate was higher than their most optimistic projections, the failure rate negligible. In the first few weeks, the drones took a deadly toll on enemy shipping, both military and civilian. Silent, grainy video from the drones was shown on breathless newscasts and widely viewed Internet clips. The clips were always roughly the same. An open, featureless ocean. A ship comes suddenly into view, far below. The ship would seem to grow rapidly as the drone swooped down, details becoming visible, the outlines of the cargo containers or the flash, rarely, of defensive gunfire. A single bomb would fall and explode with a silent white burst, momentarily drowning out all the visuals with the washed-out lightning of its high explosives. Then other drones would come into view, and the screen would become awash in white as they dropped their explosives in force. When the explosions dimmed and an image returned, what had been a ship was transformed into an oil slick and jagged wreckage, and drones were everywhere, drawn to the kill.

  Enemy countermeasures were even less effective than Pete had predicted. Automated gunfire from bow-mounted guns would throw clouds of twenty-millimeter shells into the sky. Clouds of chaff would surround ships under attack, distracting the drones and degrading their sensors. But drones could overcome every countermeasure with sheer quantity. Whatever the enemy could come up with that could defeat ten drones couldn’t defeat twenty. If it could defeat twenty drones, it couldn’t defeat a swirling, relentless swarm of fifty. Enemy tactics evolved quickly from attacking to impairing to evading, until finally, inevitably, submerging.

  Within weeks, the only military ships in the ocean were submarines, carefully staying hidden beneath the waves. Civilian shipping ground to a halt. A month after the initial launch, the second wave of a thousand drones flew all the way from Detroit to Eris on their own, at a lazy pace dictated by the shining sun and the thermoclines they could soar upon. Unburdened with bombs, they were light and efficient as they made their way west. Cities along the route had viewing parties to watch on rooftops and in football stadiums, and they cheered as the stream of drones passed overhead while high school marching bands and country musicians played patriotic songs. Watching the drones fly by made Allied victory seem inevitable.

  With the station at Eris working so well, Pete immediately began planning the drone station in the Atlantic; several suitable locations had already been scouted. He would fly there at once to begin the work. But first, he had to stop on the mainland for a piece of pressing business.

  His wedding.

  * * *

  By then they’d known each other for a year, although you could hardly say they’d dated. Pete had been consumed by the drone project, seeing Pamela mostly from the screen during chat sessions on his tablet computer. She’d broken up with him briefly as a result. That’s when he begged her to meet him in Hawaii. At the head of the Kealia Trail, he’d proposed to her, not at all sure what her answer would be.

  While neither wanted a huge ceremony, Pete kept delaying the wedding anyway, overcome by obligations as Eris neared completion. He felt a twinge of guilt about it. But Pete was spending his days with military men, including many naval officers and chiefs who’d missed every milestone of family life. Missing a child’s birth was so common among the submariners he knew that it barely merited comment. So this made Pete feel better, along with th
e constant reassurances from everyone he was around about how important his work was.

  But by the time he left Eris Island, he was determined not to let Pamela down again. They had a small outdoor ceremony in Calabasas County, near San Diego. Pamela was a vision in a white dress she’d bought, with typical thrift, for four hundred dollars at a department store. At the time of their wedding, it had been two months since they’d seen each other. They stayed at a hotel near the submarine base that night, and Pete gave her a string of Mikimoto pearls that he’d bought at a Navy Exchange. She expressed shock, saying she’d never owned anything so nice or expensive. Pete put them on her, which gave him an inordinate amount of pleasure, fastening the clasp with shaky hands at the back of her neck.

  She gave him a small present wrapped in silver paper. He opened it and revealed a Lucite block, with the ten stages of the honeybee’s life forever trapped inside.

  “I didn’t know what to get you.…”

  Pete turned it over, looking at every angle of the bees, watching the thick honey pour back and forth in its tiny vial.

  “It’s perfect,” he said. “I love it.”

  * * *

  They flew to Mexico for a two-week honeymoon. Pete had volunteered to handle all the planning, because it felt like he should do something. He planned the entire trip, and paid for it, with one trip to an Internet travel site. At the resort, they fell into an easy routine of waking up early to claim the best lounge chairs around the pool, and then eating breakfast and drinking coffee while watching the sun rise. They eavesdropped on the other honeymooners at the bars and napped together in the afternoons.

  Three days into the honeymoon, they returned to their room from the pool, pleasantly drunk from an afternoon of margaritas and sunshine. An envelope had been slipped under their door. Pete watched Pamela cringe at the sight of it.

  “It’s probably nothing,” he said.

  “I’m actually shocked they left you alone for three days,” she said.

  It was a note from the Pacific Command. Pete had received an invitation to speak at Stanford University. Everyone knew he was on leave, but they wanted to make sure he was aware of what would be a great opportunity. It would the first stop of a victory tour, a chance to gloat in front of many of those who had condemned the program, and him. For just a moment, he considered declining because of his honeymoon, but in the end he didn’t fight hard. It was too tempting to resist. There would be many people in the audience who had doubted him, and maybe doubted him still. He asked Pamela, told her he would be gone no more than forty-eight hours, and she, of course, gave her approval because his enthusiasm left her no choice. He boarded a military charter to Palo Alto and assured her that she’d barely notice his absence.

  Pete had another motivation to return briefly to the project, one that he didn’t reveal. He’d received a disturbing report about some of the drones flying far from their assigned patrol areas, and desperately wanted to investigate the claims. He’d received some of the programming transcripts already but was having a hard time penetrating the code, which had been heavily modified by the Alliance team charged with the final program. Pete was no programmer, but at times it seems like the code had been almost deliberately made complicated, to make it impossible for him to troubleshoot. He needed more data, but couldn’t get the access he needed from his hotel room.

  It was impossible, he knew, for the drones to malfunction that way, to function at all that far from their operating areas. But supposedly some activist on the coast of Oregon had filmed a drone. The government had quickly taken the video down, squashed the report, and detained the purveyors. Some of his more hawkish friends in the Pentagon promoted the idea that it was a Typhon drone, requiring an even greater investment in their drone program. Whatever it was, Pete wanted to find out more, and that was impossible with an unsecured Internet connection at an all-inclusive resort in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

  * * *

  The crowd at Stanford was made up of nerdy engineers and aggrieved college students, with significant overlap between the two groups. The moderator was the university president, who introduced Pete cordially but with a stern, disapproving undertone that Pete was pretty sure he had rehearsed in a mirror. Such a presentation would have been unthinkable even just a few months before, when his program was described in the same way people decades before had described Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars”: it was not only immoral, they said, it was impossible, a crushingly expensive, destabilizing overreach by militaristic fanatics. The threat of SDI had helped bring about the end of the Cold War, as the Soviets knew they couldn’t keep up with American technology. Hamlin and his colleagues envisioned that the drones would have the same kind of transformative power.

  Introduced to the crowd, which filled Memorial Auditorium, he let the polite applause die down before speaking.

  “As long as weapons have flown into the sky,” he began, “we have tried to remove human pilots from the process.” He clicked a button on his remote, and an antique engraving of a hot air balloon appeared on the giant screen behind him. It stopped Hamlin for just a moment. He’d only reviewed these slides on the screen of tablet computer. Seeing the high-resolution image on a screen so many times larger was slightly breathtaking. He could see details he’d never noticed before in the engraving, the tiny soldiers pointing, the puff of smoke coming from the boiler that was generating hot air to give them flight.

  “This was true even before airplanes. In 1849, Austria tried to bomb Vienna with unmanned hot air balloons. Some of these, incidentally, were ship-launched. On August 22, 1849, Austria launched about two hundred unmanned balloons. This, the first aerial drone attack, contributed to the end of the Venetian revolt.”

  He started clicking through slides, his pace reflecting the rapid advance of technology. “Development kept pace with every advance in aviation. Remote-control biplanes were tried in World War I, generally with disastrous results. Remote-control single-wing planes were tried in World War II, without much better luck. Joseph Kennedy, Jr., JFK’s older brother, was actually killed in a test flight of this program. Our enemy, the Germans, went a different route in an attempt to bring unmanned weapons to the skies: rocketry. Their success, and the success of rocketry in general, stalled drone development for many years.”

  He put a new photo up, his first in color: a cigar-shaped missile with stubby wings and the word TOMAHAWK painted on the side. “As technology improved, the dream of unmanned aerial weapons took a new turn: cruise missiles. But these weren’t drones; they were weapons in and of themselves. They could be used once, and then they were destroyed along with, hopefully, their target. They couldn’t perform any other missions, like surveillance, and they could never return to base.”

  New slide: a small, fragile-looking plane painted in desert camouflage. “Attitudes changed dramatically in 1982, when Israel deployed these, the Scout UAVs, with great success in their brief, triumphant war against Syria. While the Scout was unarmed, its use as both a decoy and for reconnaissance proved invaluable. For the first time, the drone had proved itself on the battlefield. The US military took notice.”

  “Technology raced ahead,” said Pete. “Soon, it was obvious that drones could do nearly everything a manned plane could do. It could do many things better, like stay in the air for many hours and fly deep into harm’s way without risking an American pilot. The only thing holding back the wholesale deployment of drones were doctrinal conflicts, and squeamishness about the use of unmanned aircraft. It took another historical event to eradicate this squeamishness.”

  He advanced the slides again, this time showing the World Trade Center, smoke pouring from both towers. “On September 11, 2001, all that changed. We had a new kind of enemy, and needed a new kind of weapon.” New slide: a new drone, bigger than the previous, and for the first time, it was holding on to a missile. It had odd, downward-facing tail fins, and a bulbous nose. It was immediately recognizable as an unmanne
d craft: there were no windows.

  “This is the Predator,” said Pete. “On February 4, 2002, the Predator fired a Hellfire missile in the Paktia province of Afghanistan, near the city of Khost. It killed three men, the first time the CIA had ever used the Predator in a targeted strike. The modern era of drone warfare had begun.”

  He flashed through a few slides, showing the rapid evolution that took place after the success of the Predator and its successor, the Reaper. Drones got larger, more heavily armed, and, critically, more automated. “Drones were no longer just an acceptable alternative,” he said. “They were a central part of military strategy and tactics.” Finally he showed a photo of the airfield at Eris Island, a thousand drones arranged in the sun.

  “Modern drones, unlike the Predator, are completely autonomous. They use a complex algorithm to assess targets, and the viability of an attack. Bigger targets are more valuable than smaller targets. Faster targets are more valuable than slower targets. If a drone can’t kill a target by itself, it will gather help until a kill is assured. If it sees a viable target and can’t rearm in time, it will actually crash itself into it.”

  He paused dramatically. “It is the Internet of weapons systems.” It was a metaphor he’d carefully chosen for this Stanford audience, at the place where so much of the actual Internet had been born. “It’s distributed all over the world. It’s survivable. If any one piece fails, the other pieces fall into place, making the system impossible to destroy.”

  He showed a brief video clip of drones taking off and landing, ingesting new bombs in what even to Pete was the creepiest part of the entire cycle. That video stopped, replaced by an old black-and-white photo of a military ship. The long, flat deck gave it away as an aircraft carrier. Crosshairs marked the center of the ship: the photograph had been taken through a periscope.

  “This,” said Pete, “is the Shinano. She weighed sixty-five thousand tons, and on November 29, 1944, she was sunk by the United States submarine Archerfish. Until recently, she was the biggest ship ever sunk by the United States Navy.”