Dale Brown - Dale Brown's Dreamland 04 - Piranha(and Jim DeFelice)(2003)

 
          
South China Sea

 
          
August
17, 1997, 0800 local (August 16, 1400 Hawaii)

 
          
The
ocean sat before him like an azure mirror, its surface gleaming with a light
haze of silky heat. His small sloop glided forward slowly, as if too much
movement would disturb the tranquility. There was no wind for the sail and he
had just cut the engine, content to drift into the calm of the open sea. A man
could count on one hand the number of days he might encounter such perfect
peace, and as Mark Stoner gripped the rail of his boat, the
Samsara
,
a sensation of great ease came over him, a taste of the nirvana his Zen
Buddhist teachers promised would come when he managed to shed worldly desire.
The moment lingered around him, vanquishing time in its perfection. As the
thick muscles of his neck and shoulders loosened, the rest of his body seemed
to float upward, assimilating into the universe.

 
          
But
all was not as it appeared.

 
          
A
geyser broke three hundred yards off
Samsara’s
port
bow, the water erupting as if a volcano had tossed a fireball into the sky. The
blue water furled green and black as a thick spear crashed upwards, rising
quickly from the ocean’s surface. It stuttered momentarily, as if it were a
fish shocked at the sudden loss of water flowing over its grills. Then it
steadied and began picking up speed, rocketing north by northeast at something
over five hundred miles an hour.

 
          
“Shit,”
said Stoner aloud, though he was the only one on the boat. “Hole shit.”

 
          
Then
he ran back to the cabin to make sure the recording devices were working.

 
          
Aboard EB-52, “Iowa,” west of Hawaii

 
          
August
16, 1400 local time

 
          
Lieutenant
Colonel Tecumseh “Dog” Bastian slipped the throttle the throttle forward,
continuing to pick up speed as they approached the approximate location of Task
Force Nirvana. The Megafortress’s forward airspeed push up past five hundred
knots as the big plane shot no more than twenty feet over the ocean swells. Dog
hated flying over the ocean, especially at low altitude; he somehow couldn’t
shake the feeling that a massive tsunami lurked just ahead, ready to rise up
and engulf him. Even at high altitude, he had a landlubber’s paranoia about
going down in the water. Something about the idea of struggling to inflate and
then board a tiny rubber raft filled him with irrational dread. It didn’t help
that any time he thought about it, his mind supplied a posse of circling sharks
to supervise the operation.

 
          
“Should
be able to see the test area buoys in sixty seconds,” said Bastian’s copilot,
Chris Ferris. “We’ll have the feed of the Flighthawk.”

 
          
“Roger
that,” replied the colonel. “Zen, how are we looking?” he asked over the
Dreamland com circuit.

 
          
“Ocean’s
clean,” replied Major Jeff “Zen” Stockard. Stockard was flying two U/MF-3’s or
Unmanned Fighters, nicknamed Flighthawk, from Raven, the second EB-52 in the
flight. The two robot planes, roughly the size of Miata sports cars, acted as
forward scouts for Bastian’s three-Megafortress flight. Two other U/MF’s flown
by Captain Kelvin “Curly” Fentress in Galatica, were flying above the EB-52’s
as combat air patrol. The Megafortresses were spread across the water at
roughly half-mile intervals, flying what would have looked like an offset V
from above. Though all shared the basic Megafortress chassis, each craft was
outfitted differently.

 
          
Galatica,
on the left wing, had a radar suite comparable to an E-3 AWACS. Since the
powerful radar would alert their quarry, it was currently in passive mode—for
all intents and purposes turned off.

 
          
Raven,
at the right of the formation, featured a suite of electronic listening devices
that would rival any Rivet Joint RC-135 spy plane. A myriad of antennas picked
up both voice and telemetry transmission all across the radio spectrum; the
computer gear stuffed into the rear compartments provided the onboard operator
with real-time decoding of all but the most advanced encryptions. A second
operator commanded a suite of gear similar to that found in Wild Weasel and
Spark
Vark
aircraft; he could both detect and jam
active radar units at roughly two hundred miles. The rotating dispenser in the
bomb bay included four Tacit-Plus
antiradiation
missiles. Launched from just inside one hundred miles, they could either fly
straight to a known radar site or orbit a suspect area until the radar
activated. A thick, eighteen-inch section had been added to the weapons behind
their warhead. This new section had been designed specifically for the sea
mission. The gear inside the area allowed the missile to use its active radar
on its final leg if the target switched its own radar off. Though relatively weak
and short-ranged, it was hard to detect and also difficult to jam. Once fully
operational, the missile promised to make aircraft essentially invulnerable to
surface ships—at least until enough missiles were used so that an enemy could
figure a way around them.

 
          
The
payload aboard Iowa, Bastian’s plane, was the reason the three Megafortresses
were here.

 
          
Stuffed
into Iowa’s forward bomb bay were a half-dozen fiberglass and steel container
that looked like the old-fashioned milk containers once used to gather milk
from cows on the copilot’s family farm. A thick ring that sat about where the
handles would have been contained just enough air to properly orient the
container’s “head” float a few meters below the surface of the water. Above the
ring was a rectangular web of thin wires that, once deployed, would extend
precisely 13.4 meters. The wires were attached to a line-of-sight radio
transmitter that generated a short-rang signal across a wide range of bands.
These signals could be received and processed by a specially modified version
of the antennas and gear used by the Megafortresses while directing
Flighthawks.

 
          
The
bottom portion of the buoy contained three different arrays, the first was
designed to broadcast audible signals that sounded like a cross between the
clicks of a dolphin and the beeps of a telephone network. The second picked up
similar audible transmissions in a very narrow range. The third transmitted and
listened for long and extremely-low-frequency (or ELF) radio waves. These
devices were actually relatively simple and while not inexpensive, were
considered expendable—which was why the buoyant ring was equipped with small
charges that would blow it off the buoy, sending them to the bottom of the
ocean.

 
          
In
essence, the milk cans were simply sophisticated transmitting stations for
“Piranha,” the larger device strapped to Iowa’s belly. Piranha looked like an
oversized torpedo with extra sets of fins on the front and rear. Once in the
water, the conical cover on its nose fell off to reveal a cluster of oval and
circular sensors that fed temperature, current, and optical information back to
a small computer located in the body of the device. Between these sensors and
the computer was a ball-shaped container that held a passive sonar; this too fed
information to the computer, which in turn transmitted it, whole or in part,
back to the buoy. The rear two thirds of Piranha contained its hydrogen-cell
engine. Pellets made primarily of sodium hydride were fed into a reaction
chamber where they mixed with salt water, creating hydrogen. This part of the
engine was based on the hydrogen-powered, long-endurance, low-emission motor
that powered an ultra-light UAV being tested at Dreamland. The sea application
presented both major advantages—the availability of water allowed the
compressed, pelletized fuel to be substituted for a gas system—and great
challenges—the fact that it was salt water greatly complicated what was
otherwise a fairly simple chemical process.

 
          
Rather
than turning a propeller as it did in the ultra-light, Piranha’s engine was
used to heat and cool a series of alloy connectors that ran through the outer
shell of the vessel. Similar to a keychain or a child’s toy, the outer shell
was connected in sections, allowing it to slip and slither from side to side.
Using a technique first pioneered at Texas A&M, the expansion and
contraction of the alloy strands moved the outer hull like a snake through
water. The process was essentially
wakeless
,
impossible to detect on the surface and almost impossible below. While there
was still work to be down, the propulsion system was nearly as fast as it was
quiet—Piranha could read speeds close to fifty knots, with an endurance of just
under eighteen hours at a more modest average pace of thirty-six knots.