At that moment, Tina emerged from the kitchen, seeing Bill heading out the door with the seat she asked, “Aw, the bambino, he no feel good?”
“Nah, he’s just tired.”
“No, it’s his teeth. You’ll see, I raise five kids. I hear him all the way in the kitchen. It-a rattles my own teeth, that’s how I know. You’ll see, I know.”
“You may be right. I’ll take this out to the car and come back for our order.”
“Its da teeth, I’m-a-tell-a you. It rattles, right here…” She wiggled her fingers in front of her teeth.
Bill got to the car, and of course Richie was now a quiet, happy baby boy banging his stuffed rabbit on the car seat. “Figures; now he’s a little gentleman.”
Janice was smoothing her son’s hair. “He’s just tired, Daddy. He didn’t want to sit in a stuffy restaurant eating apples while you had meatballs.”
“Tina says he starting to teethe. Said she felt it vibrate in her head when he let out that wail.” Bill stopped and froze. His last words reverberated in his head.
“He’s just getting his second year molars, Daddy — Bill, you okay?” Janice was concerned because he looked as if he had just had a stroke.
Bill snapped out of it, “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. I’ve got to call the admiral.”
“Why? Is he a naval pediatric dentist?”
“No — what Tina said; she just told me how to catch the whale!”
At four in the morning, Bill’s SCIAD network chimed, awakening him from his half sleep with his feet up in front of his desk in the den. He wiped the groggy mask from his face with his hand and yawned as he opened the communiqué from element member Thieles. He scanned it and saw the response he had been waiting for. He looked at his watch and figured he could catch the last two hours of sleep in his bed. He banged out a thank you response, closed down the terminal and went up to bed.
The admiral was in Bill’s office at 7:45 a.m.
Bill started right in, “Okay here goes, you were right. There is no way to get a return off the whale, but that’s because our search is the active component, the whale is passive.”
“True, but obvious.”
“Piezoelectric effect!”
“I’m listening…”
“We base it on the same principles as ultrasonic time-domain reflectometers, only we sweep frequencies from one hundred kilohertz through one megahertz. At some point the piezoelectric effect will resonate in the propulsion fluid and that will be like a high string on a piano, resonating when its lower octave is played.”
“Like long range sonomicrometry.”
“Yeah, like that — whatever that is.” Bill was beyond his 4 a.m. lesson in piezoelectric resonance. But the admiral had picked up the ball and was heading for the goal line, so Bill considered his job was done.
“So we bombard an area of ocean with ultrasonic waves. If they hit the electro reactive fluid of the whale, at some point the whole whale starts to vibrate and that becomes an anomaly in the water we can detect.”
Bill summed it up, “Like ringing a church bell with a rifle shot.”
Larson Industries had three hundred ultra-high frequency transducers in its San Diego warehouse. Interestingly enough, they were piezoelectric transducer elements that were capable of the megacycle range Bill’s idea required. The rest of the circuitry was stupid simple: a two-hundred-dollar frequency generator and a wide-band UHF power amp, the kind right from the hefty end of a radar system. Roughly five thousand dollars worth of cobbled together hardware that could thrive on any ship that had an eighteen thousand watt electric socket, and that was most naval vessels. Soon all three hundred of these units were put on every kind and every style of Navy ship in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Water increases the range and efficiency of sound, so that one unit could cover four hundred square miles of ocean one mile deep. Limiting the search pattern to the areas where the whale had struck the Vera Cruz, the Nebraska and the Toyota ship geometrically increased the odds of finding the whale and limited the response area or “box.”
What to do when they found it was not as simple. U.S. Naval Intelligence didn’t want it sunk, they wanted it captured, either to analyze it and effect counter-measures, but more likely to see if they wanted to replicate the stealthy weapon.
These special missions are normally doled out to the next SEAL team up for assignment. So it was that SEAL Team Nine got the call. Rapid deployment was the key. Once identified, no one could predict how long it was possible to track the still passive machine. Hydro-effects like thermal layers and the salinity of the ocean’s water complicated the tracking.
The operational plan was to have half of SEAL Team Nine always in the air, at jump-ready status, working off four Sea Stallion helicopters orbiting the most probable areas. The mission was designed so that one of the teams would always be within twenty minutes flight time to any point within the “box.” Each operator wore a wet suit, air-tanks, assault rifle, detonation charges, and one new piece of equipment they called “the knitting needles.” It was essentially an underwater Taser, capable of delivering a fifty-thousand-volt jolt, but only at the long end tips of the “needles.”
Bill asked for hourly updates on operation Quint, a name the SEALs came up with during the operational brief. Although created as an homage to the Robert Shaw character, Quint, the shark hunter in the movie Jaws, it was close enough to their task that it stuck. Everything about the operation was theory. The sweep might not actually work or not cause the whale to start buzzing and give itself away. To that end there was a two-week time limit put on the entire op so that they wouldn’t keep searching with a potentially faulty methodology.
His phone rang. “Dr. Hiccock, the president would like to see you, in the Oval, now.”
“Know what it’s about, Suzy?”
“No, but the U.N. ambassador, sec nav, and the director of the CIA are in there with him.”
Bill hustled down the hall. Usually he had a heads-up on any presidential meeting, even casual ones. To be called in on the spur of the moment was truly a rare event… Or am I in trouble, Bill thought. He forgot to take the obligatory deep breath before the agent manning the door swung it open.
“Mr. President, Mr. Secretary, Director, Mr. Ambassador.”
“Bill, how did we get here?”
“You mean, Quint?”
“Yes, we were going over our strategy for when we present our case at the U.N., and we noticed we have two hundred eighty ships making circles in the ocean. Some kind of special electronic rig on each and SEALs burning gas in choppers twenty-four/seven.”
Bill still didn’t know where this was going and responded in a cautious tone, “Yeee-yeah — and your question, sir?”
“How did CERN get us here and do we widen our indictment to include what you are investigating in Europe?”
Bill took that deep breath and sat at the chair opposite the president, “Oh, well, through some diverted funds from the U.N., the Maguambi regime was able to secure the electro-expansive fluid that propels this whale. It was made available to the pirates because the original intention was to add it to the liquid helium cooling systems of the Large Hadron Collider and burst the rings. But the amount of electric charge generated by the rings made that plan impractical because the fluid would expand the instant it came within twenty feet of the rings.”
The CIA head chimed in, “So it was on the black market, and Maguambi orchestrated break-ins in America and France to steal and dust off a Disney plan to make animatronic whales for an attraction in their theme parks.”