by Jeff Edwards
Ann felt the heat rise to her face. “What?”
“Scared,” the Sailor said. “You know … afraid?”
Ann wanted to slap the little bastard. Was that was this was about? Popeye the Sailor Man getting her to open up, so he could laugh in her freaking face?
His Sailor buddies must have been talking up a storm, all about the crazy civilian woman who had yakked all over Combat Information Center. They’d probably laughed their asses off about that.
But the kid wasn’t smiling, and there was nothing critical in his voice.
“I’m scared,” he said quietly. “I’ve been to the head twice, and I still feel like I’m going to piss my pants.”
The kid paused, and Ann realized that he wasn’t jerking her around. He really was scared. Maybe even as frightened as she was.
“I told my Senior Chief,” he said. “I figured there’s no point in hiding it if I’m not tough enough for combat. You know what Senior Chief said?”
Ann shook her head. “What did he say?”
“He told me everybody is scared shitless in combat. Everybody except maybe crazy people, and complete idiots. He told me that’s natural. Fear is an instinctive reaction to danger. Somebody’s trying to kill you, you’re gonna get scared. Senior Chief says you have to learn to work through the fear—get past it, so you can do your job, even if you’re scared half to death.”
The Sailor picked up the coffee pot and used a white dish towel to wipe the spot where it had been. “You think that’s true, ma’am? You think it’s okay to be scared, as long as you do your job?”
“I don’t know,” Ann said. “I’m probably not the best person to ask. I mean, it sounds true. Maybe it is true.”
“Are you scared?” the Sailor asked again.
“I’m terrified,” Ann said.
The kid turned away and carried the silver pot back to the coffee maker. “Me too,” he said. “It’s not so bad right now. I’m on mess attendant duties. I clean, I serve meals, and I clean some more. There aren’t exactly lives hanging on my every action. If I screw up, the coffee gets cold, or breakfast is late. Nobody dies.”
He shook his head. “But this is only temporary duty for me. When I go back to my division, I’ll be a Fire Control Technician again. If I get scared then, I mean really scared—too scared to do my job—people are going to get killed. You know what I mean?”
Ann nodded. That was a lot of weight to hang on the shoulders of a nineteen-year-old kid. Hell, that was a lot of weight to hang on her shoulders. But it was true for the frightened young Sailor, and it was true for Ann.
What was it that Sheldon had said? “How many nightmares will we get, if we let a million people die?”
It all came back to that again—Ann’s fears and her doubts, weighed against the lives of countless human beings. Or more precisely, Ann’s personal safety weighed against the safety of thousands, or even millions, of people. Put in those terms, it wasn’t a very difficult decision to make.
Ann glanced at her watch. She was late, but not that late. The boat crew would still be up there, waiting to lower Mouse into the water for the next phase of his search.
Ann stood up; the spell that had bound her to the chair was broken. “Can you help me find the boat deck?” she asked. “I have to go do my job now.”
CHAPTER 48
USS TOWERS (DDG-103)
WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN
THURSDAY; 07 MARCH
0603 hours (6:03 AM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
The beefy Sailor who called himself Boats stared down over the side of the ship at the robot circling slowly in the dark ocean swells. The big man shook his head sadly. “If you can’t get your machine to sit still, ma’am, I don’t see how we’re gonna be able to get a line on the damned thing.”
Ann followed the Navy man’s gaze. Sunrise was still two hours away, and the waves looked like liquid obsidian under the cold illumination of a three-quarter moon. But Mouse’s brightly-colored hull provided enough contrast to be faintly visible in the moonlight.
Ann burrowed her hands more deeply into the pockets of her foul weather coat. Even with the gloves on, her fingers were freezing in the raw subarctic air. She didn’t even want to think about how cold the water was.
“Mouse’s emergency maintenance subroutine has been triggered,” she said. “When he gets damaged, he’s programmed to return to his launching coordinates, drive to the surface, and circle until he’s picked up for repairs.”
“How did he get damaged?” Boats asked.
“I have no idea,” Ann said. “Maybe he collided with something, or one of his seals started leaking. He might have developed an electrical problem: a short, or a blown component. I won’t be able to tell until we get him out of the water, and I can download his error logs.”
“You can’t stop him?” one of the Sailors asked.
Ann didn’t see which one of the Navy men had spoken, but it wasn’t Boats. The voice was younger: one of the other members of the boat deck crew.
“I can’t control him from remote,” Ann said. “Not when he’s in emergency maintenance mode.”
She shuddered, dreading the very thought of what she was about to say next. “I’m going to have to go into the water, and shut him off by hand.”
Boats exhaled explosively. “No ma’am! Not a chance! You are not going in the water.”
The Sailor’s tone made the hair on the back of Ann’s neck bristle. “That’s not your decision,” she snapped. “That’s my robot down there, and I don’t work for you.”
“No ma’am,” Boats said. “You don’t work for me. But this is my boat deck, and I’m not letting you go in the water unless the captain orders me to.”
Ann made an effort to keep her voice from rising. “I’ve got a wetsuit and swim gear,” she said. “I’m an excellent swimmer, and I’ve done this before. More than once.”
“I’m sure that’s true, ma’am,” the big Sailor said. “But this ain’t Southern California. The water temperature here is low enough to kill you in fifteen or twenty minutes. You’ll be unconscious in half that time. You don’t have the equipment or the training to work in water this cold.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ann said. “I won’t be down there more than a couple of minutes.”
Boats shook his head. “You won’t be down there at all, ma’am. Not while I’m running the boat deck.”
Ann snorted. “How are you planning to stop me? Tie me up, and throw me in the brig?”
“This is a destroyer,” the Sailor said. “We don’t have a brig. But we will use physical force, if that’s what it takes to keep you out of the water.”
Ann looked down at the dim form of Mouse, still driving in wide clockwise circles. “We’ve got to shut him down, or we’ll never get the lifting cable on him.”
“You’re right about that,” Boats said. “We’re going to have to put a swimmer in the water.”
Ann frowned. “You just said…”
Boats cut her off. “Our swimmer. He’s got the cold water gear, and he’s got the training.”
“Wait just a second,” Ann said.
“We don’t have time to argue about this,” Boats said. “The ship is gonna turn south in about a half hour, so we won’t be too close to the ice when the sun comes up. If you want your Mouse gadget to be aboard when we get out of here, we’d better get a move on.”
Before Ann could respond, Boats pointed to one of the shadowy Sailor shapes huddled on the boat deck. “Peters, go get yourself suited up. I’m calling the Bridge for authorization. As soon as I get the thumbs-up, you’re going over the side.”
“Really?” the other Sailor muttered. “That’s just fucking fabulous.”
“What was that?” Boats growled. “I don’t believe I heard you.”
Peters coughed, and spoke more clearly. “Aye-aye, Boats.”
Boats nodded. “That’s what I thought you said. Now, get your butt in gear; we’re running out of d
arkness.”
* * *
Ten or fifteen minutes later, as she listened over a set of headphones to the teeth-chattering grunts and mumbled curses of the Navy swimmer, Ann discovered—to her secret disgust—that she was glad Peters had gone into the water in her place. She could actually hear the bone-numbing cold in the young Sailor’s voice.
Peters had only been in the water a couple of minutes, and his speech was already thick, and slurred.
Ann, who had never been much colder than she was right now—standing on the boat deck, could not even imagine what it must be like down there. Just the sound of the man’s increasing discomfort was beginning to make her own muscles contract and cramp. The frigid water was leaching the life out of him, and Ann was listening to it happen.
“Almost … got … it …,” Peters murmured thickly. “Almost …”
The sound of a ragged exhalation came through the headphones. “Fuck! Missed … I … fucking … missed … it…”
Ann stood at the lifelines, looking down toward the water. The eastern sky was beginning to lighten now, and she could see the swimmer’s orange wetsuit, bobbing near the yellow form of the robot. The suit was thick, and supposedly designed for cold water dives, but it didn’t sound like it was doing Peters a lot of good.
That was probably a false impression, she knew. Without his protective suit, the Sailor might already be unconscious by now, or dead.
She watched Peters thrash in the water as he made another lunge for the cover plate on the robot’s dorsal access port. The trio of propulsion pods on the machine’s stern were still pushing it forward, relentlessly powering through another in a series of continuous clockwise circles.
The retaining latches on the cover plate were mounted flush with the curve of the hull, to minimize hydrodynamic drag. To release them, Peters had to depress each one, and turn it ninety degrees.
Ann knew from experience that this was not an easy task, even in relatively comfortable water temperatures. Mouse was streamlined, wet, and very slippery. The robot pitched and rolled with the waves, and the continuous thrust from the propulsion pods had the effect of constantly scooting the rounded machine away from you.
Peters had three of the latches released. He had only one more to go, but it didn’t look or sound like he was up to finishing the job.
The Sailor wasn’t talking at all now. His breathing had become an irregular rhythm of strangled groans.
Ann looked up at Boats. The sky in the East was still growing brighter, and the big Sailor was becoming easier to see by the minute.
“That’s enough,” she said. “Peters can’t do it. We’ve got to pull him out of the water.”
“Yeah,” Boats said solemnly. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
He nodded to the two Sailors holding the swimmer’s tending line. “Standby to heave around.”
A muffled exclamation came over the headphones. The words, if they were actually words, were totally incomprehensible. But the tone of voice carried an unmistakable note of triumph.
Ann turned back toward the water, her eyes scanning rapidly until they located Peters and Mouse. The access cover on the robot’s spine was open, and Mouse was no longer circling. Peters had released the final latch, and hit the emergency kill switch.
“Good job,” Ann said quietly. She looked up at Boats. “Let’s lower the hook, and get them both up on deck.”
* * *
Ann sat in her stateroom an hour later, drinking crappy Navy coffee and uploading Mouse’s error logs to her laptop. Mouse was safely strapped to the boat deck, and the ship was headed south at high speed, trying to distance itself from unfriendly territory before the sun was too far above the horizon.
The swimmer, Peters, had been half-led/half-carried toward some place called sickbay. Ann wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but it sounded Navy enough to arouse her instinctive skepticism.
Then again, maybe the sickbay thing wasn’t as iffy as it sounded. Sheldon probably knew all about it. She’d ask him later. Right now, she needed to figure out what had gone wrong with her baby.
A soft bleep informed her that the upload was complete. She wiggled her fingers to limber them up, and reached for the computer keys.
The situational response algorithms in Mouse’s core program were written in ARIX, Norton’s proprietary programming language. Like many adaptive computer languages, ARIX had a built-in parser for translating error codes into an easily-understood English-based syntax.
Ann didn’t need the parser. She was perfectly comfortable reading the codes in their native hexadecimal.
She located the most recent time index, the last error recorded before the robot had been powered down. The hexadecimal code read, “46 41 55 4C 54 30 30,” which translated as, FAULT 00.
That wasn’t exactly a surprise. FAULT 00 indicated a critical error that Mouse couldn’t identify. It was a catch-all error designation, common for complex machines in the prototype stages. That particular fault would appear less and less often, as Mouse’s self-diagnostic capabilities were redesigned and improved over time.
The previous time index showed the same hex code, as did the time index before that, and the one before that, and the one before that …
Ann scrolled through several screens of recorded time indexes, seeing hex code 46 41 55 4C 54 30 30 repeated again, and again, and again. The fault—whatever it was—had obviously occurred several hours earlier. She had to work backwards through a few thousand repetitive error codes to locate the triggering event.
After paging through a seemingly endless number of screens, all completely identical except for the time indexes, Ann finally spotted what she was looking for. The triggering event had occurred almost exactly five and a half hours into Mouse’s search mission.
Prior to the occurrence of the fault, every time index read, “54 52 41 4E 53 49 54.” That was the hex code for TRANSIT. Mouse had been operating in normal search/transit mode, carrying out his search plan without errors or problems.
At the five and a half hour mark, the instant before the error had been triggered, the hex code had changed to 43 4F 4E 54 41 43 54, for a single processing cycle, followed by hex code 4D 49 53 53 49 4F 4E.
Ann’s heart froze as she stared at the screen. The two strings of characters seemed to stand out more brightly than anything else in the jumble of letters and numerals on the laptop display.
Ann swallowed, and closed her eyes, trying to change those two error codes by force of will. She must have looked at the screen wrong. Her eyes were getting tired. Because those codes couldn’t be right. They couldn’t be.
She opened her eyes. The codes were still there, staring at her out of the laptop screen like a pair of accusing eyes.
Ann tried not to think about what they meant, but her brain performed the translation automatically. The first code translated as CONTACT. The second translated as MISSION.
She slammed the lid of the laptop closed. Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it!
Mouse had done his job. He had found the submarine. And then, when the robot had attempted to shift from transit mode into mission mode, he’d run into the same software glitch that Ann had been wrestling with for weeks. Right in the middle of the mode shift, his software had faulted and then triggered his emergency maintenance subroutine.
He’d been close enough to complete the mission, and instead, he’d turned away and returned to his launching coordinates.
How had that happened? Ann had written a software patch, to bypass that very problem. What had gone wrong? Why hadn’t it worked?
She opened the lid of the laptop, backed out of the error logs, and loaded the program modules she had written to prepare Mouse for this mission.
It took her only a few seconds to find the address in the program where the patch should have been installed. It wasn’t there.
Oh god! How had that happened? Had she forgotten to install the patch? She couldn’t have. There was just no way.
B
ut she had forgotten. She’d been so cocky, so sure that she had done everything perfectly. And she had somehow forgotten a critical step. Maybe even the critical step.
This whole mess with the missile submarine could have been over by now, if she’d done her job. But she’d forgotten.
Or had she? What if it hadn’t been an accident? Or rather, what if she’d wanted to forget? Was that possible?
She didn’t like these Navy people. That wasn’t exactly a secret. And she didn’t want to be party to killing the crew of that submarine. That wasn’t a secret either.
Maybe she had made some subconscious decision to screw this up. She didn’t think so. It didn’t feel that way. But how would she know? How could she be sure?
What if this had been their one chance to get the sub? And she had screwed it up.
She closed the laptop again. What the hell was she going to do now?
CHAPTER 49
3RD EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE DISPOSAL COMPANY
ICE PACK - SOUTHERN SEA OF OKHOTSK
WEDNESDAY; 06 MARCH
0752 hours (7:52 AM)
TIME ZONE +11 ‘LIMA’
The U.S. Marine Corps CH-53D helicopter was flying low—the pilot hugging the ice, trying to blend his aircraft into the ground clutter to minimize detection by hostile radar.
Aft of the cockpit, Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Armstrong and the three other Marines assigned to his EOD response element occupied only a small corner of the helicopter’s 30-foot-long cargo/troop compartment. The team’s detection gear and disruption equipment took up more room than the team itself, but the big compartment was still nearly as empty as the icy terrain they were flying above.
Gunny Armstrong looked over his team. Hicks and Travers were sleeping. Staff Sergeant Myers was peering out through one of the starboard windows. They were good Marines, all three of them. They were trained, and motivated, and damned good at their jobs. Gunny was proud to have them under his command.
He turned to look out of his own window. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said. He spoke at a normal volume, and his voice was lost against the howl of the helicopter’s turbines and the chop of the rotors. He was talking to himself, anyway. No one was supposed to hear. “This ain’t gonna work,” he said again. “It ain’t gonna work … It ain’t gonna work … It ain’t gonna fucking work.”