Day 12—Sunday
The robot woke up. Thirty days—720 hours—had elapsed since Yuri Kirov deployed the crawlerbot on the harbor bottom of the PRC’s Sanya-Yulin Naval Base.
After completing its spy mission inside the Hainan Island subterranean cavern that housed ballistic missile submarines, the autonomous amphibian had returned to its launch coordinates. It promptly buried itself a foot deep in the harbor’s silty bottom soil. The robot had waited patiently for the recovery signal or until the thirty-day default time expired.
About the size of a laptop computer and shaped similar to the shell of a leatherback sea turtle, the crawlerbot extracted itself from its temporary grave by activating dual sets of articulated legs. After digging its way out, the crawlerbot expelled seawater from its internal ballast chamber with a squirt of compressed air.
It took a couple of minutes for buoyancy to carry the robot to the surface. As it floated in the protected waters of the Chinese naval base in the early morning darkness, it deployed a wire antenna and commenced transmission. Within five minutes, its encrypted and compressed data package was uploaded to one of the low orbit Russian military satellites that provided continuous coverage of the South China Sea. A U.S. based commercial telecom satellite also uploaded the data.
With its mission completed, the crawlerbot returned to the seafloor and reburied itself, burrowing nearly three feet into the sediment.