Nightwatch, p.1
Nightwatch, page 1
NIGHTWATCH
A MIRANDA CHASE ACTION-ADVENTURE TECHNOTHRILLER
M. L. BUCHMAN
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ABOUT THIS BOOK
As the Arctic melts, the fabled Northwest and Northeast Passages are opening. But are they opening to war?
A Chinese freighter attacked. A sabotaged passenger jet crashed in Quebec. And high overhead an E-4B Nightwatch, America’s fortress-in-the-sky, sees all.
With nations shifting to high alert, Miranda Chase lands once more in the midst of the fray. But first she must fight battles of her own. Can she conquer the emotional chaos her autism unleashes amid the loss of her past? In time to save her team? —And avert the disaster playing out under the Northern Lights?
A tale of high adventure, airplanes, and espionage.
PROLOGUE
Sea Level
77°10’50” N / 67°42’ 23” E
20 km north of Severny Island, Russia
Arctic Ocean
Captain Yú Ling never saw the missiles that struck his ship, though they hit in broad daylight at 0300 hours local time.
An hour before, Ling had woken at 0200 during the depths of the soft twilight that served as night this far above the Arctic Circle. He often shrugged on a parka to stand out here on the bridge wing of his ship to observe his first voyage through the Arctic Ocean. The complete lack of true night made sleep feel almost irrelevant.
Worries drove him from his bed as well. This maiden voyage of a new ship through the Arctic without an icebreaker escort would become a highlight upon his record as a sea captain. All of his previous journeys had taken the forty-eight-day southern route past Southeast Asia, India, and up through the Suez Canal. Never before had such a large container ship sailed unescorted through this nineteen-day Northeast Passage from Shanghai through the Bering Sea to pass over Russia to Europe. A full month faster. Knowing it for fact made it now less amazing.
Ling could only shake his head at the modern wonders. To travel Beijing to Rotterdam so quickly was unimaginable until only the last few years. And now the melting Arctic ice was making it a reality. The new Polar Silk Road would let China sell more to the hungry maw of Europe faster and with much lower transit costs than ever before.
He much preferred the peace here in the high Arctic. The waterways along southeast Asia and up through the Suez were clogged with constant traffic. Even the vast stretches of the Indian Ocean were hazardous as hundreds of massive cargo and oil ships jostled for the most fuel-efficient route. Here they traveled these waters alone, except for the occasional Russian oil tanker or fishing boat.
The September air was so fresh and crisp, matching a cold winter day in Beijing, a few degrees below freezing but none of the throat-catching pollution. It made him daydream of soft snowfalls. He could almost pretend he heard the crackle and smelled the smoke of long-ago wood fires.
Standing out on the bridge wing of the Lucky Progress, he could see the far white horizon of the pack ice to starboard as little more than a thin white stripe between the dark blue of the ocean and the deep blue of the sky. They were in a land and time of no true night, but the aurora danced in brilliant greens and smooth pinks. They faded with the slow rising twilight and disappeared, though it would be hours before the sun crested the ocean’s surface.
His wife’s photographs of their vacations by the sea always looked the same. They must have a thousand pictures of a stripe of sand, a stretch of ocean, and a sky of blue. She could never explain in a way he could understand how each wove a unique image, but the thought of her taking such photos made him smile in this barren place. She certainly still looked fine in her sleek black one-piece. She rarely went in the water now except with their grandchild, even then rarely past her own knees, though the girl at six was as fine a swimmer as her grandmother had been.
Someday they would have unrestricted bandwidth from anywhere in the world. For now Ling took a photo with his phone to send to her the next time he was in port. The curiously dark sea, the distant white line of ice pack, the crisp blue of the morning sky.
He leaned out to look down the twenty-story steel cliff of his container ship’s side. Waves less than a meter high and no free ice at all—they’d left that behind twenty-one hours and eight hundred kilometers ago in the Vilkitsky Strait. His ship—with the strengthened hull to brush through the occasional patches of new ice at speed—had worked flawlessly. Here lay nothing but clear water to the distant horizon.
He crossed the seventy-five meters through the warmth of the main bridge and out to the far end of the port-side bridge wing. The sea ran much the same, but the view of the horizon held more interest. Twenty kilometers due south, Severny Island shone brilliantly white. It boasted the largest glacier in all of Europe. As the northernmost extension of the Ural Mountains, he could actually see their transition from Asia to Europe happening while churning past this island.
It was also where the Soviet Union had exploded nuclear bombs totaling a hundred times more than all of the ordnance of WWII, including the two American bombs. The largest bomb ever built had been exploded here. He didn’t take a photo as he had of the polar ice to starboard. His wife wouldn’t appreciate the irony of so much destruction now being replaced by Chinese commerce.
Then he looked ahead. Like his father had told him on his first sailboat when they would venture out on Chao Lake in Anhui Province, Put your nose into the wind, Ling. He split the wind with his nose, turning his head until the breeze landed evenly on both his cheeks. Now he was facing exactly into the apparent wind—ten degrees to port of straight ahead. Knowing that the ship was making twenty-three knots told him they faced only the lightest of winds from the southwest, a fact confirmed by the faint ripples upon the sea far below.
Despite the cold, a few degrees below freezing, he stayed out on the bridge wing to watch the world and his ship. Maybe those photos were how his wife found inner peace. He himself cherished these quiet moments with only the low thrum of the ship’s engines and the cry of curious gulls to keep him company.
At 0230, an eager zhong wei—a new-minted lieutenant (junior grade)—brought him a thermal mug filled with his favorite jasmine tea, which was much appreciated despite the brief disturbance. Reading his mood with a delicacy that boded well for the girl’s future in the merchant service, she retreated and left him to his thoughts. Voyages were long, and so few crew were required that living together required the greatest diplomacy.
Could she think in knots at all? She could convert their forty-two kilometers per hour in her head readily enough; he trained all of his crew to do that. But to think in knots? That was becoming a lost art over the three decades he’d spent largely at sea. That too was progress of a kind.
Again he studied the ship. Designed to the very limits of the Suez Canal’s abilities, Lucky Progress measured precisely a tenth of a meter under the four-hundred-meter limit in length and the same under the maximum beam width. She carried twenty thousand TEU of containers. Yet another arcane measure—twenty-foot-equivalent units. The power of the Americans to keep the world locked into the outdated English units system rankled.
The Lucky Progress carried her twenty thousand TEU, as ten thousand forty-foot-long containers. And they had to be forty feet or they wouldn’t fit the cranes, trains, or trucks of the Western world.
He sighed. It couldn’t last. One decade, perhaps two, and then China could dictate the international standards of measurement.
Do not expend focus on that which is outside your control, Ling.
And he did. The entire horizon glowed pink and gold as the sun skimmed close below the horizon to the north-northeast, mere minutes from rising. His ship had cruised the Northeast Passage above Russia’s frozen wastelands without slowing once. North from Shanghai, past the Koreas, Japan, and along the Arctic length of Russia. Only Murmansk and the Scandinavian countries remained before he turned south once more. They had cut twenty-four percent off the trip distance from Shanghai to Rotterdam, and because of the open sailing, sixty percent of the time as well.
With a route twenty-five hundred kilometers shorter, they’d saved time, payroll, and twelve hundred tons of fuel. They’d avoided pirates operating in the Malacca Strait of Malaysia, the entry to the Red Sea past Iraqi and Arabian squabbles, and past the Somalis. They’d also saved the six-hundred-thousand-dollar transit charge to pass through the Suez Canal.
He patted the railing he leaned upon to thank the Lucky Progress and to let his ship know they were through the worst of it. From here, the sea was reported clear all of the way to Rotterdam.
On track for a record speed run, all twenty thousand TEU would be coming off in the single port of Rotterdam, rather than five thousand here and five thousand there. Then they’d take on nineteen thousand of empties and one thousand more of luxury items before retracing the same route.
He checked his watch, 0255. Another hour closer to his destination. When they were done, it could be the fastest round-trip ever recorded.
There were rumors he might make senior captain if he succeeded in breaking the record. His wife would very much like the status and pay of that. He must find a new beach for her to photograph as a celebration.
The upgraded CASC Rainbow CH-5 UAV had been built in the Anhui Province of Eastern China. The HALE—high altitude / long endurance—unmanned aerial vehicle had been aloft for thirty-two hours to reach the Arctic Ocean and to loiter twelve kilometers high, watching for signs of a particular ship type passing below.
Due to its heavy load, it only had enough fuel for three more hours before it would have to dump a half-million US dollars of unused missiles into the ocean to save weight and make the trip home. But a lot of hard work, and more than a little luck, had placed it in the sky above the newest jewel of the Chinese cargo fleet.
Its distant operators spotted the Lucky Progress at thirty kilometers, when it was no bigger than a bright dot on the distant sea.
Satcom messages flashed back and forth with the command-and-control center but with little verification necessary. The ship fit the mission profile perfectly.
As the AR-1 missiles it carried were only rated to a maximum of eight kilometers, the Rainbow UAV circled down until it flew ten meters above the ocean’s surface.
At seven kilometers off the stern of the ship, it fired.
Lieutenant (junior grade) Sūn Jia stood as assistant officer of the watch on the bridge of the Lucky Progress. She wished she could have found the nerve to stand by the captain and enjoy the passage in silence, but she hadn’t. Though the captain had never shown anything but kindness, she still had trouble speaking in his presence.
She should have asked the captain a question, she had a thousand of them, but…she hadn’t.
So, after offering him tea, she retreated to the bridge and watched Lieutenant Chen standing his watch. She was supposed to observe and learn, but Chen was lazy. A farmer’s son from Henan province, he was content to set the autopilot and perform only the minimum of required checks—at least those received his proper diligence. She had already learned more than Chen would ever know. Not that she could ever admit that aloud.
He had made a pass at her, but even that had been more perfunctory than enthusiastic.
On the radar scope, there was a faint green blip astern.
Crews of non-military ships rarely paid attention to what lay aft of them. Lieutenant Chen most certainly did not.
Sūn Jia noted the new signal off the stern. It was neither big nor bright, definitely not a ship. Barely even a boat. But she remembered the stories her first captain had told her about Somali pirates taking huge ships with little more than a day-fishing boat.
“Excuse me, Lieutenant Chen. But what do you think this is?” she pointed at the screen.
He glanced down and shrugged. “Did we drop a container overboard?” Highly unlikely in this calm sea. The radar atop the bridge was high enough that their visible horizon range reached over twenty-five kilometers—the object lay only seven astern.
“It moves quickly.”
“Maybe it’s a whale,” his tone warned her that this conversation was over. Daughters of her generation were still the unwanted children of the one-child policy. Her father’s generation, and still most of hers, never thought a woman could have value.
Chen was not worth the effort.
The only other deck crew member awake was the captain out on the port bridge wing.
She moved to the end of the starboard bridge wing and looked aft.
At 0259:40, the CASC Rainbow CH-5 fired all six of its AR-1 missiles. Each measured a meter-and-a-half long and carried ten kilos of high explosive.
By 0259:41 they reached Mach 1.
Nineteen seconds remained until the missiles reached their target.
The UAV turned away to the south—briefly reflecting sunlight off its belly and toward the ship—then climbed rapidly. Within moments, it flew above the maximum height of the Lucky Progress’ surface-scanning radar. The low-resolution weather radar would not show the UAV on Lieutenant Chen’s screen, even if he cared to look down. The next weather check wasn’t scheduled for twenty-seven more minutes. He didn’t look.
Besides, he was too busy admonishing himself. Next time he talked to Sūn Jia, he must not turn into the babbling idiot he always became around her. Maybe it’s a whale? She certainly hadn’t laughed as he’d intended. What had he been thinking?
Second Lieutenant Sūn Jia saw a bright flash of the departing UAV far astern at precisely 0259:43. The sun catching an iceberg? She didn’t think so as there were no other icebergs about. But she couldn’t be sure.
For ten long seconds, she continued to lean out to watch astern, but saw nothing more.
She hurried once more into the bridge, wondering if she should disturb the captain from his contemplations. She could see that he once again faced forward and would have seen nothing.
As she crossed behind Lieutenant Chen, she thought she saw—for the briefest instant—a flash on the surface radar. A piece of ice bobbing up astern?
The motion was wrong, it approached the ship.
And very close astern.
But then it was gone below the radar’s lower horizon.
The six AR-1 missiles performed exactly as programmed.
They’d flown at sea-skimming levels half the height of the UAV’s passage, a mere five meters above the low Arctic Ocean waves.
At 0300:01—a hundred meters and a third of a second before reaching the ship—they angled down and plunged into the waves. Fired in a spread to assure a hit, the left-most missile and the three on the right missed the ship. Their detonations weren’t observed by anyone.
At that moment, Lieutenant (junior grade) Sūn Jia was looking for her binoculars. It would be several seconds before she discovered them, not in her drawer where they belonged, but close by First Lieutenant Chen. Too lazy to discover where he’d set down his own, he’d taken hers.
First Lieutenant Chen was watching Sūn Jia while trying to decide whether to speak and what to say if he did.
Captain Yú Ling faced Severny Island off the beam and didn’t see the fountains of water blown upward astern. He didn’t see the island either. Instead, he recalled the look of contentment on his wife’s face. She often slept at the beach. But he never did, for the simple joy he took from watching her easy contentment that he found so difficult.
The vast circles of turbulence from the exploding missiles and the water they threw aloft were erased within seconds by the stern wake as the ship continued forward. The ocean muffled most of the low thump of the explosion, the rest sounded as no more than a murmur above the engine noise.
In the engine room, the watch officer didn’t hear anything as he leaned close to inspect the Number Three hydraulic pump.
The two remaining missiles struck the Number Two blade on the three-story-tall propellor.
Damage to the blade was not initially apparent on the bridge—the hundred-and-twenty-ton propeller continued to turn at eighty-percent revolutions, moving the ship ahead at the twenty-three-knot designed cruise speed. There was no shock transmitted along the ship’s hull and up to the command bridge to alert anyone.
The watch engineer paused, having heard something. So much ice had scraped down the length of the hull earlier in the crossing that he was past any greater reaction, or remembering the odd sound at all when it ceased with no further sign of trouble.
One missile struck in the middle of the vast copper-aluminum-iron alloy blade. It created a cluster of micro-fractures, but nothing that would be significant in the next half-million kilometers of normal usage—if that was the only damage.
The other missile almost missed the blade entirely. If it had, it would have struck the outer hull plate at the ship’s stern a glancing blow and caused a leak in the outer hull, easily managed by the bilge pumps until it could be fixed. However, it caught the leading edge of the Number Two blade and knocked off a piece smaller than a person’s head—an insignificant area on such a large blade.
Yet with each turn of the blade, the fractured surface cavitated more and more. Instead of smoothly slicing into the water, the blunt surface of the break impacted the water like a sledgehammer, creating a high-pressure zone. As the water escaped past the broken edges, the sudden drop in pressure caused the water to explosively vaporize. Each molecule that did, carved a molecule out of the alloy as well.
