Operation Malacca (4 page)

There was a large hatch, which he investigated, making sure that the camera picked up a good image of the hatch and its opening mechanism. He swam around the structure and then under it. Beneath was a heavy steel plate that flared upward, supplementing the spheroidal steel structure. This steel plating was featureless, without even rivet holes, which would have been meaningless to Charlie anyway.

The dolphin bumped at it with his nose, smelling the steel, but not tasting it. He had learned his lesson. He became aware of the chafing of the equipment belts around his shoulders in the form of a violent itch. To scratch it, he tried to rub his back against the plating. Suddenly, his ears were filled with an insistent chattering. At the same time, Keilty began sending excited pulses to tell him to stay where he was. Charlie held motionless, his back bumping against the plating while the chattering continued. Keilty pulsed the code that indicated to him that he was to swim slowly forward. As he did so, the chattering lessened in frequency.

He backed and turned in obedience to the pulses until Keilty had him swimming slowly beneath and almost touching the flattened sphere. The chattering was continuous now.

After about fifteen minutes, Keilty directed him to get what pictures he could from beneath the structure. By the time Charlie had finished, the sun was halfway below the horizon. In response to Keilty's signals, he surfaced cautiously some five hundred yards from the tower structure.

The red sun painted the white steel tower golden in the dwindling twilight, licking drops of quicksilver from the long swells pushing up the strait. Charlie paused to breathe and then began swimming slowly towards the structure in a circling maneuver. The main deck of the tower was clearly lighted against the deepening blue of the eastern horizon.

Lights were appearing on the tower and the superstructure of the drilling rig. The monotonous clanking of the drilling machinery served to cover the faint noises the dolphin made as he swam to within fifty feet of the tower and began to circle it.

The figure of a man appeared briefly near the railing, clearly outlined against the sky.

He fumbled briefly with something

near the railing and Charlie sounded, startled as floodlights bathed the area around the tower. Charlie's thoughts were strictly dolphinic as he rose again to the surface, this time staying completely underwater, except to breathe. He began to swim away from the lighted area, until the shadows were deep enough to surface. By now he was some eight hundred feet away from the station. He took a good look, letting the cameras pan over the scene. The tower was too far away to detect details, and his sonar told him that there were several surface craft making random search patterns around the station.

He let himself settle again until he was about twenty feet below the surface, and began extending his sonar field. His maximum sonar range was ten miles or so, although he was not aware of the distance in human terms.

The station commanded most of his field to the east, and to the west he could just barely make out the dim echo of the Bradley. The sharply defined echoes and subechoes from the station said 'human' to Charlie, as they were sharp but vibrating at the same time. He concentrated on the station, laying out its underwater pattern until he was sure where every underwater leg and support was. Then he began to examine the area around the tower – the island rising beyond, the slope of the channel bottom to the island shore.

Except for the crosscurrents which he could detect, the picture was relatively un-interesting: volcanic sand bottom with a profusion of marine growth.

Charlie narrowed his sonar beam until it was pulsing outward in a forty-five-degree arc, and started sweeping around in a circle:

A clearer, tighter picture built up: the island sloping away into a narrow channel, the bases of several more distant islands showing, and schools of unfamiliar fish. Charlie pivoted slowly on until the beam was fanning an open area of channel between two islands that led away to the South China Sea.

A reflection appeared. At first Charlie thought it was a whale. Then he noticed it was resting on the bottom. The object was near the limit of his sonar's capability. Keilty had said to get back as fast as possible, so he could not waste any time for a closer look. He waited, sorting out the multiplicity of reflections until he isolated the one he wanted.

There, shimmering near the limits of his awareness, was the peculiar echo and sub-echo of metal. Charlie was puzzled. The object seemed to be resting less than a mile from the base of a large island. He

watched it for a while, examining the blurred image as best he could until he had it as sharply defined as possible. Suddenly he remembered. He had seen a submarine once before in his home waters, and had chased it for miles, watchings its strange antics as it maneuvered around several surface ships in the area.

His curiosity satisfied, he completed his sonar sweep and surfaced for a last look around.

The sun had set and darkness had swiftly blanketed the area. He could see nothing of the tower now but the lights in the rigging and the floodlit expanse of water all around.

He wondered again about the submarine and its presence near the base of the island, then forgot about it as a wide beam of light, mounted on the drilling rig, began to sweep the water beyond the limits of the floodlights. He watched the distended oval of light ripple across the water to him, and taking a breath, settled slowly. Seconds later, it passed over him, creating a pattern of tangled silver on the mirrorlike underside of the surface. They were certainly being careful, he thought, then turned away and swam strongly for the netting.

A few minutes later, he surfaced again only twenty feet from the net. Complete darkness had fallen by now, and turning, he could see the bright ring of floodlights glowing like a broad band of fire on the surface. Above was the flickering searchlight, with the aircraft warning lights dangling below.

He had done as Keilty had asked him to. Keilty had explained about the Geiger counter before they left the Keys. The fact that it had worked — the loud clicking — meant they had found the bomb. Now, he wondered, what was the next step?

He thought he knew enough about humans to guess. The bomb posed a threat to one side

— Keilty's side. But it was the upper hand for the other side. That meant that Keilty's side would have to go and take it away. In the process, a lot of people could get killed.

That last fact meant little to him, no more than if he were a human and knew that several dolphins might be killed if, say, sharks attacked. If you could find enough foolhardy sharks, he thought seriously.

So long as Keilty was not killed, the death of a human meant little to him, because beyond Jack, Margaritta, Keilty, and now Rawingson, he knew very little of humans.

And, he suspected, he knew little — important data, that is — about the four he did know.

The fact that he had found the bomb meant that he had now taken sides in human affairs.

Something he had wondered about

– and had halfway decided not to do – ever since he had started watching the TV set Keilty had installed in his pen.

He thought to himself, without humor, that he had come to the point were he was studying humans, as much as Keilty was studying his people. Who had the upper edge here: Keilty, because he was a trained observer, or himself, because the television and the microfilmed books gave him – with his totally fresh viewpoint – a greater insight into the mind of humans, a mind which he was coming more and more to discover was not only a product of the particular society in which a man lived, but in addition, contrary to the widespread human concept, did little to shape an individual's relations with other humans?

As Keilty had once told him, a human was a totally selfish animal. He loved because he liked the feeling. He helped someone in need because it made him feel good. He was patriotic because it satisfied what was left of his almost atrophied herd instincts. Charlie took this one step further. Man did not live on a rational level, but on an emotional level.

Charlie's people, on the other hand, more closely approached the rational level, and he was discovering, in reviewing his past life now that he had the mental tool – vocabulary

– to work with, that in the dolphin, emotions were almost atrophied and the herd worked and existed together on a rational level.

Now that he was discovering the effects of emotions, he was beginning to realize just how strong they could be.

Not far away, the silence was shattered by the passage of a patrol boat touring the net perimeter. Startled, he dove, suddenly aware of the dangers to which he had left himself open. He executed a fast 36o° turn, sonar and hearing tuned to the sharpest possible degree. The images were familiar: the tower; odd schools of fish, nothing big; the patrol boat; and dimly, the Bradley. The submarine was completely out of range now.

He watched the patrol boat, and as soon as it was far enough away, he cleared the nets in one jump and headed quickly back to the Bradley.

CHAPTER FIVE

The lights went up in the crowded wardroom, highlighting the wreaths of cigarette and pipe smoke coiling suddenly in the steaming air. Keilty sat to one side of the long captain's table, silently listening to the quiet arguing of the gathered officers and civilians.

Keilty's contempt for the military and civil service mind had never been stronger. They had been sitting for hours in the crowded wardroom, all through the hot, sticky late afternoon, debating the pros and cons of the information that Charlie had brought back. It was all there for them to see, but some remained stubbornly unconvinced. Sitting next to him, almost wilting in the heat, was a slight, balding man. He drummed nervously on a small sheaf of papers until they were almost unreadable – the penciled calculations were smeared and blurred with perspiration.

Keilty had been on deck earlier in the evening, shortly after Charlie had returned, when the MTh had come sliding up alongside the Bradley. Lines were secured as he slouched on the railing, watching. The American secretaries of State and Defense, the British Foreign Secretary and Minister of War, and their Australian, Malaysian, New Zealand and Indonesian counterparts, and respective retinues came aboard the destroyer. The seas were beginning to pick up and the ship was rolling heavily in the increasing swells. They had gone below, some of them already green, and a few moments later a messenger had come for him. Keilty finished his cigarette and went below. They were waiting for him, impatiently, and with a barrage of questions.

He produced an extremely black Connecticut-broadleafwrappered and foul-smelling cigar, and lit up. Puffing on it with relish, he began to answer questions. The small wardroom soon filled with the cloying stench but the questions went on and on. Finally Keilty had to admit defeat. The smoke was getting to him as well. As unobtrusively as possible, he extinguished the cigar and covered it with an empty paper cup. Later, the tapes were produced and he narrated the now-familiar scenes as Charlie approached the station, examined the structure and support columns, the blur of motion as he surfaced and tried

to rinse the taste of the oil from his mouth, and the underwater shots of the bomb housing.

The silence was nearly complete when he finished, broken only by the whirring of the overworked and totally ineffective air conditioner.

`There, gentlemen, you have it. It's as plain as the warts on a hog what is going on. What'

s to be done is now your bailiwick.' And he sat down.

As the argument renewed and dragged on, he talked quietly with the balding man next to him. It turned out that he was Dr. Iver Jensen, a Pentagon expert on the effects of nuclear weapons. So far, he had not been asked to speak.

Keilty turned his attention to the discussion. Some Australian official was pooh-poohing the idea first of all, that there was a bomb, and secondly, that the subsequent detonation of said nonexistent bomb could do the damage expected. He was supported by several others, notably the Americans. The Malaysians were looking extremely worried. Keilty glanced across the wardroom at Rawingson's set expression and decided it was time to do something.

He stood up and whistled. The piercing scream of the whistle echoed in the steel-walled wardroom, overriding even the nasal tones of a loud-mouthed American general who turned surprised and angry eyes on Keilty. Keilty paid no attention. He had disliked this man ever since he had seen him on television years before, defending a particularly obnoxious right-wing group.

The American Secretary of State turned and peered at him through his steel-rimmed glasses. 'You have something to contribute, Dr. Keilty?'

'Nope, but Dr. Jensen does. Why don't you all shut up and listen to him for a while. You fatheads are not making much sense anyway.'

Admiral Rawingson, grinning widely, told a junior officer to shut up and sit down, then settled back comfortably and waited.

'Some of you here,' Keilty continued, unabashed at the angry mutterings, 'know who Dr.

Jensen is – you explain to the guy next to you if he doesn't. Dr. Jensen?' Keilty indicated the audience and the speaker's position.

Jensen stood up, all traces of his nervousness disappearing quickly as he adopted his favourite speaking attitude and launched into his speech.

'Gentlemen, we have beyond a certainty established that the Vietnamese have now manufactured, not one, but several nuclear bombs. There is no reason to doubt that fact any longer. At the latest count, there are some fourteen nations with nuclear weapons.

Now, thanks to Dr. Keilty's dolphin, we know where at least one of these bombs is. It is sitting not twenty-five miles from us, forty-five feet below the surface of the entrance to the Strait of Malacca.

He waited until the angry murmuring from both sides of contention died away somewhat.

'Whatever you believe at the moment is of no importance. There can be no doubt about it. That bomb is there. The radiation readings are too strong to be anything but those from a crude fusion device, poorly shielded ...' Jensen raised his hand to forestall a question. 'No, the radiation is much too strong to come from drilling or current-tracing processes.

Jensen pulled the tripod-mounted blackboard around and quickly sketched the outline of the strait – essentially a narrow channel running southeast to northwest and widening gradually at the two-hundred-mile point until it was nearly two hundred miles wide at the five-hundred-mile extreme length. At the entrance to the strait, he drew in the island of Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, and directly south, dotted a group of islands that filled the entrance, leaving only narrow channels. With a series of dots he indicated the major concentration of the various fleets in and around the strait. To the south, he drew the ragged outline of the coast of Sumatra and its islanded shore.

'Now, gentlemen,' he went on, turning to face the others, 'you are all pretty much familiar with this area by now. As you can see, the Vietnamese research station and the bomb –are here in the center of these islands at the head of the strait. These islands are volcanic in origin and their peaks are quite lofty, rising some eight and nine thousand feet. These two islands are our two containment islands.By that,I mean that these two islands will absorb a good portion of the blast and shock wave, thereby protecting the two mainlands from bomb damage per se. The smaller islands forming the apex of the triangle will seal off the South China Sea from both the bomb blast and the resulting tidal wave. Now, because the wind currents in this area are northerly, and quite strong at high altitudes, the majority of fallout in the form of radioactive rain will be carried north across Singapore and southern Malaya state.

`The channel of the Malaccan strait is four to five hundred miles long – only two hundred of which are important to us. These two hundred miles are the narrows, the area where guerrilla infiltration is the heaviest and where the Malaysian and Indonesian patrols are concentrated. I don't think anyone here will dispute the fact that it is only the presence of these fleets that prevents a major infiltration south into Sumatra as well as north into the southerly portions of Malaya.' Jensen beamed around the room. 'As you remember, prior to the Communist coup which failed a few years ago, the Indonesians were ready to mount an all-out offensive on both the Malay Peninsula and the Malaysian-held half of Borneo. A foothold in Sumatra would be an extreme danger to both nations.

`But, to continue, the strait is relatively shallow – roughly twenty-five fathoms – and only about thirty miles wide.

'If, gentlemen, this five-megaton bomb is exploded in its present location, a tidal wave will sweep up this channel, carrying everything with it to destruction. If you don't believe me, and I see a great number of you don't, it can be proven with a few simple calculations. Permit me?

`The shallow underwater bursts,' Jensen said, juggling the stub of chalk, 'of the Bikini "

Baker" tests in the late 1940s, give us a set of data from which we may extrapolate. Our problem is first to determine pressure variance between open-water explosions and open-channel – such as the strait – explosions at equal distances. We do this as the Bikini tests were conducted in open water, and therefore, the data we have is based on open-water explosions.

'If we assume a radius of one hundred miles for easy calculation, and draw a rough sketch of the blast area:

we can find the amount of water moved above the line A—A by the simple relationship: Q equals AV, where Q is the flowrate (in miles 3/hr. in this case), A is the area of the wavefront at a distance which I'll call R, and V is the speed at which the wave-front is moving. If we put them all together in an equation and solve it, we get: Q =0.5(27* R)V = RV

100 * V

assuming, of course, that depth equals unity.

`Now, if we picture the Strait of Malacca as looking like this: we can assume that the arc length of the wavefront at one hundred miles will be just a bit greater than thirty miles; say, closer to forty, since any wave produced will overlap the land. If so, once again we can find the amount of water moved, but in this case, just the amount up the strait, by using the relationship Q =AV again, but adding in the forty-mile wavefront, like this:

Q =AV

=40V

again assuming that depth equals unity.

Now, let's examine this a little. Assuming that there are no flow losses nor any areas where pressures will be equal – equal point pressures, in other words – the amount of water moved by an exploding bomb in the open sea will equal the amount of water moved in a closed channel. Or:

100^V

40V closed

closed 100^

V.... 40

=7.85

`Now, apply Bernoulli's principle: pressure is proportional to the square of the velocity.

Or in this case, we find that the pressure will be sixty-one and sixty-two hundredths times greater in the channel than in the open sea.

Ìn other words, gentlemen, this all means that the velocity of water moved up that channel will be seven point eighty-five times faster than it would begin the open sea, and further, the pressure behind that wavefront of moving water will be sixty-one point sixty-two times greater in that channel than in the open sea.'

Jensen paused in his whirlwind delivery. 'Stick with me, gentlemen, we've just begun.

And we haven't even come to the bomb yet,' he said with a grin.

Keilty craned closer for a better look. The calculations were just so much Greek to him.

He was a psychologist and had flunked second-year high-school algebra while a freshman in college.

`Do you gentlemen realize the significance of these two equations. They are going to cause a wave, and quite a wave at that, as you will see in a moment. But let's go on.

Based on constants used in the Kutter-Ganquillet formula for open-channel flow: N=0.010 for a smooth surface

N= 0.050 fora natural channel

we can state that the pressure change in the channel will be only one fifth of what we calculated just now, since we have been assuming that the strait's channel had a smooth bottom. So now we have:

AP=61.62/5

=12.32

and because of the bad sea conditions expected tomorrow as well as pressure absorption out into the open sea, we shall assume a maximum dispersion of four and still get: P P=12.32/4

=3.08

which simply indicates that any bomb exploded in a thirtymile-wide channel would effect a water-pressure force equivalent to that produced by a bomb at least three times its size, exploded in open water.

Jensen paused again, this time waiting for the conclusions to sink in. Keilty, who had only a layman's hazy idea of the sizes and potential power of thermonuclear weapons, was puzzled at the deeply shocked silence and then the flurry of activity that followed.

Common sense told him that any bomb exploded in a confined area would do more damage than one exploded in

open surroundings. He did not realize, however, the magnitude, size, and power involved. Slide rules were hurriedly consulted and notes and equations began to fill scratch pads, but Jensen did not wait. He went on at breakneck speed.

'Now, gentlemen, comes the real corker. We know that a five-megaton bomb will be equivalent to a fifteen-megaton bomb in this situation, a seven to a twenty-one, ten to thirty, twelve to thirty-six, fifteen to a forty-five, et cetera. We can extrapolate from a simple chart; I believe it is figure six point seven nine from the Effects of Nuclear Weapons, an Atomic Energy Commission publication – I forgot to write it down earlier,'

he admitted somewhat sheepishly. 'Anyway, figuring our five-megaton bomb to equal fifteen megatons – which is fifteen thousand kilotons for ease in calculation – we can easily extrapolate from known graphs.

'Since the chart is scaled to eighty-five feet, we must rescale the graph: Scale height = 180 / (15,000) 3'

=16.26 ft.

According to this graph, the scale factor will be:

Scale factor= .036(16.26) = .585

and the resultant wave height:

Wave height = .585(15,000)' =71.7 ft.

All of which gives us a wave that even at the two-hundredmile mark from surface zero will be seventy-one feet high for a five-megaton bomb. The wave height from this bomb at thirty miles from surface zero can be derived:

Scale factor= .18(16.26) = 2.93 ft.

Again the wave height would be:

Wave height =2.93(15,000)% =370 ft.

which means that this wave will be three hundred and seventy feet high thirty miles from the explosion site or surface zero!'

By now, the gathered military and government officials had received so many shocks that they merely greeted the result that they had all been afraid to admit was the only answer, with silence.

'A last thought, gentlemen,' Jensen said, rubbing off the blackboard. He turned to face the assembled wardroom. 'The force of this wave along its thirty- to forty-mile-wide front will be on the order of one hundred billion pounds! The coast of Malaya bordering on the strait is low-lying flatlands, while the coast of Sumatra is fairly high, shading up to coastal mountain ranges. A wave of this size and with this much power behind it in a channel as narrow as Malacca will most surely be a breaker type of wave, and not a long swell.