Lieutenant Read online

  The Major said, “I’m told the Lieutenant here is the expert. If she says we just need power outlets, I’d go with a room having lots of power outlets.”

  The Colonel rolled his eyes, then glanced up and speaking to his AI, said, “Put me in touch with whoever originated these orders. We need to get this snafu straightened out.”

  They waited a few tense moments, then the Colonel looked up again, “Yes sir! But the Lieutenant doesn’t even know what she needs sir. She’s trying to set up communications without access to the fiberoptic…” the Colonel blanched. “Yes sir… Yes sir… Yes sir.”

  Suddenly, Ell was connected to the conversation also. “Lieutenant Donsaii, are you on the line now?” she heard the Secretary of Defense say.

  “Yes sir.” She saw that Major Geller must be connected too from the way he looked up and unconsciously straightened his spine.

  Secretary Amundsen said, “Lieutenant, I have explained to Colonel Whitt that you are the absolute expert on this issue and that it is a matter of utmost National Security that he cooperate and provide you every assistance for your needs. Colonel, she has authorization to contact me directly if she meets any more obstruction, but it is your job to make sure she doesn’t meet any obstruction, from you or anyone else. If she does, it will mean your career, understand?”

  “Yes sir!”

  The Secretary said, “I have other matters to attend to.” and signed off.

  As they rode down an elevator into the depths of the earth Ell turned to Colonel Whitt and said, “Sir, I’ve realized that you are correct. We will need a connection to the secure military fiberoptic network, I thank you for pointing that out. However, we will be able to just attach one chip to a fiberoptic terminal in your command center though. All the rest of our equipment can be in a separate room.”

  “There aren’t any decent rooms close to the Command Center!”

  “Sir, we don’t have to be close to it.”

  “You’re going to run fiberoptic line down hundreds of yards of hallway?”

  “No sir,” Ell thought about explaining it all to him, but thought he’d argue about that also, “We just need to put a chip in the Command Center, everything else can be wherever you want to put us. Also, please let the gate guards know that we expect a delivery and personnel from PGR Comm in the next thirty minutes?”

  “We can’t allow commercial personnel into this base!”

  “Sir, I need you to make that happen?” Ell raised her eyebrows.

  The Colonel stared at her, thunderstruck, looked for a moment as if he would protest, then said dangerously, “OK Lieutenant, but I’ll file a complaint after the fact.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Ell and the Major were assigned a large multipurpose room and personnel to dust it out. Folding tables were brought in and placed along the walls. Ell went over to the command center and attached a linking chip to the secure military fiberoptic network.

  While she was in there Allan said, “Amy’s calling.”

  “Put her on.”

  “Ell, where are you?”

  “Hmmm, not supposed to say, but I’m on a military base in a safe location. Might not be home for a while though.”

  “OK. I disconnected the power and then disassembled the chamber on your small lab table like you asked. It was full of water? I’m not sure if that’s good or bad?”

  Ell pumped her fist, then realized that Amy couldn’t see it. “Great! That means we’ve successfully moved liquid from one chamber to another!”

  As Ell arrived back in the multipurpose room a couple of Noncoms showed up with some civilians and pallets loaded with equipment.

  Ell said, “Sorry Amy, gotta go.”

  Ell turned to the civilians and said, “Set them up on these tables,” she looked the pallets speculatively, “or are they designed to sit on the floor?”

  The oldest of the civilians scratched his balding pate, “Lady, we’ve been shanghaied away from our jobs and sent down here to D.C. without any explanations and we’re tired. We’ve worked well beyond our normal hours and our contracts don’t specify time and a half or anything. It’s time we got a little rest. We’ll help you set up in the morning but for now we’re taking some down time.”

  Ell tilted her head as she eyed them, “We need your help now, minutes could count in lives. What would it take to get your cooperation?”

  He barked a little laugh, “Lady, I mean Lieutenant, I spent some time in the military myself with the old ‘hurry up and wait,’ I doubt very, very seriously that anything will change if we sleep through the night and start fresh on this setup in the morning.”

  For a moment Ell wondered if she could brief them on the situation? She decided not. Working for PGR Comm they likely all had PGR connected AIs and could readily connect to the outside world and she doubted any of them had security clearance. If they spread word on what was happening to the world in general… Ell’s thoughts paused momentarily, Would that be so bad? If the world in general knew what China was doing? Maybe not, she decided, but she didn’t have authority to disclose that information. She glanced up, “Allan, forward 5K to each of these men’s personal accounts.” She looked at the six men, “Please check your accounts, you should find a deposit of $5,000. If you help me unstintingly tonight, I’ll make another deposit of 10K in the morning.”

  They looked at her in startlement, then up at their HUDs, then back at her, then almost as one, they nodded. The older one said, “Unstintingly it is!”

  Another one stepped forward, “Are you Ell Donsaii, Lieutenant?”

  Ell nodded.

  “Oh my God,” he beamed, “I am so proud to meet you. What do you want us to do?”

  “Start setting up the servers while I get you some food and coffee.”

  The men looked around, argued briefly and then started uncrating a pallet over by the far wall. Ell turned to the Sergeant assigned to help them set up the room. “We need food and coffee for these men.”

  He gave her a worried look. “Kitchen’s closed this hour of the evening.”

  “It needs to be opened.”

  He slowly shook his head, “I can’t make that happen.”

  “I need to speak to Colonel Whitt then.”

  He looked agitated, “You don’t want to do that!”

  She raised an eyebrow at him, then when he did nothing she looked up, “Allan, get Colonel Whitt on the line.”

  A moment later she heard Whitt’s angry voice, “What now?”

  “Sir, I need food, coffee and cots for the civilian crew that is helping with setup.”

  “Kitchen’s closed and those civilians need to leave base to sleep. There’s a hotel one mile from the gate.”

  “Sir, I really don’t want to contact SecDef?”

  Thirty minutes later a coffee cart rolled in, and thirty minutes after that some unhappy looking kitchen crew showed up with a rolling cart of MREs. Ell looked at the MREs and turned to the staff sergeant who’d left the cart and already turned back to the door. “Sergeant!” Her sharp command voice brought the sergeant to a halt and to attention. “You need to provide something much better than MREs for this crew.”

  He turned slowly, “Colonel said MREs.” he said slowly and with evident satisfaction.

  Ell sighed and wondered where Major Geller was, he was supposed to be running interference on this kind of stuff. She tapped her foot, “Sergeant, I’ll call Colonel Whitt if you want me to?”

  He gulped, then shook his head. “I’ll be back.”

  Ell said, “Allan, contact Major Geller.”

  “Yes Lieutenant?” Geller sounded impatient.

  “Major, I’m having to spend a lot of time getting cooperation from the local base personnel.”

  “Welcome to life as a Lieutenant, Lieutenant.”

  Ell took a deep breath. “Sir, I need to get this comm center set up. The success or failure of our response to the PRC may well depend on it. SecDef assigned me to do that and he assigned you to p
rovide seniority so that I wouldn’t have to fight all these little battles. Do I need to call and ask him to clarify your orders?”

  There was a pause.

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” His tone was surly but when he appeared, he asked Ell what she needed and began commandeering local base personnel without further complaint.

  Over the next several hours the PGR Comm personnel set up racks of servers and they plugged the chips Ell had brought into the chip sockets that covered the upper surface of each rack insert. The racks had their own CPU that directed connection of one chip to another so that an incoming signal on one chip could be cross connected to deliver an outgoing signal to another chip. That CPU used a disappointingly low powered AI though. It wouldn’t have the intelligence to be able to sift messages and direct them appropriately upon the sender’s request, it could only connect them if the incoming message had a correct address to which to send it. This wouldn’t be a problem for PGR Comm’s commercial use because incoming data streams would have headers directing them appropriately.

  Unfortunately, in the current situation, incoming messages wouldn’t have correct addresses for their connection. They likely would have voice requests to be connected to a certain officer or ship. For a job like that you needed a powerful AI… “Allan, can you connect to this server?”

  “I can, but at present I would have to reach it through the civilian net, then connecting through that to the secure military fiberoptic network and through it and the chip you installed in the command center, to the server. It would be better if I were connected directly to the server.”

  “OK,” Ell pulled her headband off and picked up one of the pairs of PGR chips that she still had. Most of the chips she had were only one end of a pair, the other end of which was out over the Pacific. She plugged one member of the pair into the empty USB socket on her headband and put the headband back on. Then she picked up the mate to the chip she’d just installed on her headband and carried it over to the rack. “Is there a best location?”

  Allan had downloaded the circuit design for the rack from PGR Comm and said, “There’s a USB port on the CPU itself right at the top of the rack.”

  Ell saw the slot and plugged the chip in, “Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Allan responded, “a moment… OK, I’ve inserted myself in the system and can now screen the data streams and make sure they are directed appropriately. I will forward you any issues I cannot handle.”

  Ell set about helping the civilians plug chips into the boards and then set up another rack. Contacts started coming in from outlying chips that had been installed, first those at the Pentagon, then Admiral Larsson on his flight back to Hawaii, eventually from ships in the Pacific and then Okinawa and Taiwan. Allan was able to handle most of them though she had to run interference on a few. She specifically asked to be contacted as they hooked up their first submarine, because she thought it would be exciting to be the first to provide instant communication for a submarine at depth.

  ***

  General Wang stepped into the room. “We are approved to proceed.” He looked back and forth across the room. “Proceed with the satellite attacks at 10AM. That will be the middle of the night in Washington and the Americans will be confused. By evening here we should have an accurate assessment of the status of any satellites they have remaining. If their observation and control systems appear to be satisfactorily disrupted, we will launch on Taiwan under cover of darkness here. Send out a few of the slow cargo ships over the day today as planned, they can readily be called back if we abort.”

  ***

  Just after midnight, a knock on his door awakened President Teller. “Sorry sir, but, as forecast, almost all of our Asian satellite assets began failing to respond beginning about thirty-five minutes ago. Of the five that had initially continued to function three more have gone down since. We expect to have no space assets over that part of the world shortly. Beijing has issued a statement that ‘they will no longer tolerate ‘space spying’ on their sovereign realm.’”

  The President groaned as he sat up and put on his slippers. “Have they launched their invasion?

  “Not yet.”

  “How are we doing with shoring up our communications using the new chips?”

  “The chips have only begun arriving in Okinawa and Taiwan. The three aircraft carriers have received allotments of chips and been able to successfully hook them into some systems.

  ***

  A knock came on his door. Already awake because he’d felt the changes indicating his sub was surfacing, Captain Allred rolled over, “What is it?”

  “Sir, we’ve received a VLF message to surface for a communication.”

  “OK, I’ll be there before we reach the top.”

  Hardly able to stand the taste of his own mouth, he brushed his teeth and put on his coverall. To his astonishment, once they broke surface with an HF antenna they were queried as to their exact location and told to stand by for delivery of some “chips.” Apparently, an aircraft carrier was within flight range. While awaiting the aircraft that would deliver the chips they were to continue to proceed at flank speed toward the western side of Taiwan!

  An hour and a half later they were instructed to surface again and a jet dropped a package in the water that they picked up with their inflatable boat. The jet also dropped fuel tanks, apparently it was at its own extreme range. The package proved to have a chip with a USB jack on the end of it. The only other thing in the package was a set of actual printed instructions on how to jack the chip into the sub’s main comm board in place of the auxiliary radio system and then to switch to that system and send a test message.

  Allred clicked the mike button and said “Testing, testing, testing.”

  The voice of a young woman came back, “We read you ‘five by five.’ Is this Captain Allred?” He thought to himself that the woman sounded very young. Was a brand new seaman handling communications with his sub?

  “Yes.” He said in an irritated tone.

  “You may resume course and maintain a depth of your choosing. PACOM will be able to communicate with you at depth using this chip.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” he said while cranking his hand to indicate to his crew to resume flank speed. “The board you had us install the chip in isn’t hooked up to the ELF system!”

  “Um, sorry Captain. I meant to say that you would be able to communicate at optical data rates using this chip, even at depth. Please, try it out. I’m not sure what data systems you have but I’m turning you over to Admiral Larsson at PACOM now.”

  There was a click from the speaker, before he could yell at the seaman for such a ridiculous statement. Then he heard Larsson’s voice. “Larry?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Are you at depth?”

  “No sir.” Allred was startled that the Admiral thought it was possible that they could speak at depth. ELF messages can be received at depth but not sent and had too low a bandwidth for voice transmission.

  Larsson said, “Ah damn it. I knew it was too good to be true.”

  “What’s that sir?”

  “That you could send and receive at depth. How far down have you tried it?”

  “Sir, I haven’t tried it, but we both know that that just isn’t possible.”

  “Oh. Well… try it, I’ll stand by. I don’t believe it either, but I’ve been told this is gonna work.”

  Allred raised his eyebrows and then motioned for a dive, saying, “OK, we’re going down. I’ll try to keep speaking so you can tell when it cuts out. Where are you sir.”

  “I’m just out over the eastern Pacific on a flight back to Hawaii from D.C., where are you?”

  “We’re still 20 nautical miles Southeast of Taiwan, proceeding at flank speed into the Taiwan Strait as directed.”

  “OK, in case you haven’t been brought up to date since you surfaced to get the chip, the Chinese have shot down all our satellites over the PRC and western Pacific.”
<
br />   “What!” Ice flooded into Allred’s veins.

  “Yes. And we expect them to launch an invasion fleet toward Taiwan in the next few hours. They expect us to be blind but if the chip you just installed actually works we’ll be able to vector you to the best possible locations to ‘discourage’ them.”

  “My God! Are we declaring war?”

  “Perhaps. At present we’re hoping that they’ll lose their nerve if they realize that we aren’t completely blind without our satellites. We expect you’ll need to fire some warning shots though.”

  A tingle shot down Allred’s spine when he saw the depth indicator read 70 meters, “Ramirez, are we trailing the buoyed antenna?” He realized as he asked the question that the comm system was switched to the auxiliary radio system that had been unplugged to install the new chip and so he wouldn’t be able to be picking up signals from the buoyed antenna anyway. In any case the buoyed antenna was for the ELF system which had too low a data rate for voice communication.

  Lt. Ramirez looked up. “No sir.”

  “Are we in contact over hydrophone?”

  Ramirez’ eyebrows rose and after a pause he said, “No sir.”

  Allred depressed the button on his mike, “Admiral?”

  “Yes?”

  “Uh, we’re at a hundred meters depth, sir.”

  “Really! And you aren’t trailing an antenna or anything?

  “No sir.”

  “My God! That’s fantastic! Proceed at flank speed to position yourself half way between Taiwan and Quanzhou. Work on trying to hook data transmission to your auxiliary board. My plan at present is to use aerial observation to place you precisely in front of the PRC fleet and give you GPS coordinates to set off a few torpedoes just in front of them. You won’t be the only sub there, Jim Knight and Al McDowell aren’t far behind you in subs John Warner and Mississippi. Carriers Kennedy and Reagan are already close enough for a little bit of air support but they’ll be at extreme range. Okinawa has a lot of recon birds up to keep us up to date, if you get your data feeds set up correctly you should be able to download the stream from the UAV of your choice to see for yourself what’s happening on the surface.”