The Mesa Airlines shuttle from LaGuardia to Washington’s Dulles Airport was prompt, as usual, but by the time Ben Whalen’s cab passed through the gate at the Washington Navy Yard on the Anacostia River, a stone’s throw from the Washington Nationals Stadium, the opening bell had already rung at the NYSE.
He’d thought about Cassy and wished that she’d been able to be more open with him about what had been troubling her for the past couple of weeks. It was big, he guessed that much, but beyond that he was at a loss. He’d wanted to help, but he didn’t know what to do.
On the other hand, she’d been funny last night when she’d laughed and said that she’d trade her BP secrets for his work at the Yard.
Lieutenant Commander Chip Faircloth, an old friend from ten years ago on a couple of top-secret missions to Somalia—up around the city of Harardhere, north of the capital, Mogadishu—was waiting in his office in what was called Warehouse 7A. The cavernous building, which was one of the classified facilities, had for the past year and a half been the final test and certification site of the navy’s latest top-secret littoral project.
Faircloth was the project director, and Whalen was the chief SEAL design adviser even though he was no longer on active duty. But he was damned good.
Once Whalen had passed through the three-layer security posts to get into the building and was allowed upstairs to the office overlooking the construction floor, he found Faircloth hunched over a table studying a series of blueprints.
“What’s the issue now?” Ben asked.
Yesterday Faircloth had sounded stressed on the phone; now it seemed worse. “We’ve got troubles,” he said, without looking up.
“W’s failed the pressure tests again?” Whalen asked. The project was named W after President George W. Bush, who’d authorized the one-billion-dollar price tag in 2008. And they were over budget by half that amount with no real end in sight.
“We send your people to sea, and before they get where they’re supposed to get, they’re dead. Drowned.”
“Where this time?” Whalen said, joining Faircloth at the table.
“At the forward and aft hatches, but we expected that, and the engineers promise the problem can be fixed. But the ballbusters are the four exhaust tubes. Soon as we hit fifty percent drive power the seams open up.”
“At what depth?”
Faircloth looked up. He was a compact man, handsome in a rodeo cowboy way, narrow hips, a lot of lean muscle, and an angular jaw like W’s anti-radar profile, almost the same as the B-2 bomber’s. Riding low on the surface of the water, the forty-meter stealth vessel was completely invisible to ground- and sea-based radars, and from the air, all but indistinguishable from sea clutter.
The all but had been the sticking problem almost from the beginning. The ship had been designed to slip just under the water, like a submarine, for short periods of time. Long enough to land a SEAL team ashore completely without detection.
But then deep-sea-penetrating radar had been developed, so the operational depth for W had been extended to twenty meters, something over sixty feet.
“The Chinese S2 system can see to one hundred meters.”
“Jesus Christ,” Whalen said. “The pressure hull isn’t that strong.”
“Look, we just found out three days ago, so I ordered the increased pressure tests, and the hull is fine except for the hatches. No problem. But it’s the MHD drive tubes.”
MHD—or magnetohydrodynamics—was a type of propulsion system that used magnets to electrically charge a medium such as seawater that could be pumped out rear vent tubes to push the ship forward. The advantage was that the drive system made absolutely no noise. Perfect for a stealth ship. The problem now was that at only half power the tubes leaked badly.
Whalen stared at the blueprint sheet open on the table, then went over to the plate-glass windows that looked down on the construction/test floor where W was up on chocks—all 130 feet of her.
Four techs surrounded by scaffolds were concentrating on the underwater profile of the aft end of the ship. Two of them were welding what looked to Whalen like patches around the MHD drive vents.
Faircloth joined him.
“Patches, for Christ’s sake?” Whalen asked.
“Brightman thinks the fix will work.” Donald Brightman was the chief designer, and now he worked as chief of the sea trials and certification team.
Two boats had been built. One was outside, partially submerged in a special pen in the Anacostia River. This was the dummy model on which fixes for problems found in number one would be designed and put into place for testing.
“Like patches on the life preservers our guys used in ’Nam. The ones that killed more SEALs than incoming enemy rounds. Remember the after-action reports we read?”
Faircloth smiled, but without humor. “‘Our equipment is brought to you by the lowest bidder.’”
“This is the same old shit, Skip. It’s a design flaw that needs to be fixed before I’ll sign off on the boat. I’m not going to recommend we send our guys three hundred feet down with those bullshit fixes.”
“They’re on my ass about the cost overruns.”
Whalen turned to face his friend. “What’s a life worth?”
“I’m all ears, Ben. What do you want to do?”
Whalen went to the blueprints and stabbed a finger at where the MHD drive itself connected with the drive tubes. “Let’s take a look.”
They got white coveralls and hard hats from a locker and took the stairs three stories down to the floor, where Faircloth gave a throat-slashing gesture to the foreman in the aft scaffolding. The welding stopped almost immediately.
“We’re going inside to look at something,” he shouted up to the man, who nodded.
The boat was designed to ride low in the water when it wasn’t submerged, and had a very small conning tower, rising less than six feet above the deck. There were underwater hatches to allow the SEAL teams to get out of and into the boat, but the main entry was through the conning tower.
Whalen and Faircloth climbed the scaffolding stairs to the deck and then the temporary scaffold to the convex conning tower hatch, which was open.
Whalen went in first, but Faircloth hesitated for just a moment. “I’ll build these things, but I sure as hell wouldn’t go to sea in one.”
“When someone’s shooting at you, drowning becomes the least of your worries,” Whalen said.
Below, and a couple of feet aft, the control room was designed to accommodate only three people: the skipper, the dive officer, and the sonar operator. Forward were accommodations for six SEAL team operators. Aft was the three-man crew quarters, plus the galley, and the head.
Below were the equipment spaces for weapons and explosives the SEALs would need ashore, along with electronic equipment.
Just forward and aft of amidships the next deck down held the underwater gear, including three battery-operated sleds that would each carry two fully equipped operators up to three kilometers, six meters under the surface.
In the center was the MHD drive itself, in a completely enclosed space. No maintenance at sea was possible, which would be a moot point in any case. There was no room in the design for technicians who could understand a problem and the equipment and spare parts to make repairs.
It was another design flaw, in Whalen’s opinion, but one on which he was overruled.
Faircloth opened a hatch that led to the lowest deck, with not enough room in which to stand, and they both dropped inside.
Whalen went first, crawling on hands and knees to just aft of the center line, where the four drive tubes angled down from the MHD unit aboard.
He sat down and shone his flashlight on one of the titanium struts holding the fourteen-inch-diameter tubes. The problem was obvious.
Halfway between where the struts came from the drive unit and connected with the base of the tubes, hairline cracks were visible.
“Son of a bitch,” Faircloth said. “Stress loads we hadn’t anticipated. No way it can be fixed.”
“Because you guys never thought of harmonic vibrations,” Whalen said.
“And?”
“We start the run-up tests all over again. My guess is these stress fractures only occur at certain sustained power levels. Find out what those levels are, and either run above or below.”
“Problem fixed,” Faircloth said.
“I wish everything were that easy,” Whalen muttered, his mind still on Cassy and whatever was bugging her.