The two ratings did not need reminding that they were stuck on board while most of their friends were off drinking, and they eyed the officer suspiciously. Lead Rating Peter Killarney summoned up his resolve and said to the well-liked officer, “Loading up, sir? Well, if you have to load then you have to load, but you’ll understand of course that we can’t leave our post to help you.” The man glanced at his colleague for support and they both stood firm. It was one thing to be stuck on board on guard duty when in port, especially in Hawaii, but it was a whole other level of punishment to have to work as well.
John, meanwhile, had counted on just this response, “Now, now, guys, I’m not asking you to step away from a lowered gangway, you think I want to explain that to the big man?” They all laughed a bit and the two other men were visibly relieved at the lieutenant’s reaction. John went on, “They aren’t heavy and it shouldn’t take more than an hour or so. One of the yard’s crane operators is still on duty and he will work the gantry. We’ll load them in the forward bay and then I’ll take care of it in the morning.” He looked at them and shrugged.
It all seemed harmless enough. The forward access bay was sealed from the upper deck down, so it was just a holding bay for now anyway. Without a reason to question the well-liked and famously competent officer in front of them, they both nodded and waved the lieutenant on his way. They were already distracted by their previous conversation when the lieutenant returned from for’ard and the now open loading bay and then jogged back down the gangplank to the wharf. As he saw John coming back down off the warship, Mike Lombardi stepped down from the driver’s seat of the second truck and met him on the pier.
They came close and talked quietly, “All right, Mike, you’ve got the keys to the crane?” Mike nodded. He had procured the keys along with a cursory lesson in the crane’s operation through a sternly worded letter from Admiral Hamilton to the base commander demanding the strictest of secrecy on his part. It was the kind of letter that, when backed up by an otherwise innocent sounding phone call from the admiral using a certain denoted codeword, could open pretty much any door on the base.
“So, we’ve got twenty-six crates to load in two hours.” said John.
Mike nodded once, hesitated, and then shook his head as he took in the scale of what was being demanded, “Wait, I thought we had
ten
hours?” he said quietly.
John shrugged, “Yes, but I want to get the casings all fitted tonight, plus the longer we spend loading them the greater the chance we could be discovered.”
Before Mike could comment further, John went on, “Look, that crane is rated up to twenty tons, that means that if we are smart about it we can do this in four goes.”
Mike shook his head, “But they aren’t set in four pallets, they are all crated separately.” he said with outward calm but inward confusion.
But John smiled, “Leave that to me, Mike. I’ll get them hooked up, you just lift them and drop them like we discussed.”
Mike shook his head. But John felt confident they could do it, and so with a final nod of assurance, he stepped passed the master chief and went around the back of the truck to peel back the awning that covered the flatbed. Mike steeled himself and walked over to the foot of the rail-mounted crane, launching himself into the long climb to the control cabin.
In the back of the first truck, John bent and grasped the first of the twenty-six crates. The satellite watching above inquired what was going on and he replied via his relay onboard the
Dauntless
with a story about loading last minute supplies. He had recalibrated his built-in weight sensors so that the information being sent back to the satellite would show the crates as weighing only fifty pounds each, more fitting to the report he had filed with the AI.
He bent and picked up the first of the hefty crates and placed it on top of the one behind it. Then he turned to the next one and put that on top of the first two. He continued doing this till he had a block three crates high, two crates wide and one crate deep. Six crates, good. Now he picked up one more and hefted it over his head. Flexing his vastly powerful arms and legs, he thrusted the half-ton box into the air and deposited it on top of the stack to make up the seven crates he would need to get this done in four goes.
The tall, shore-mounted crane above started as easily as it had that afternoon, thought Mike, its electro-diesel engines powering up under the master chief’s unskilled but quick-to-learn guidance. If a dockworker came along, he would have to decide how best to handle it. But his orders were clear. His utmost concern was the secrecy of the mission. Mike was authorized to use lethal force to protect that secrecy if necessary, and he was both willing and able to do it.
It would not be as tidy as he preferred, and the thought of silencing a dockworker, or worse a navy man, did not sit well with him. But the mission had been given to him with the utmost gravity, and if it came to it he would not hesitate. Ours is not to reason why, he thought, ours is just to do and die. With a wry smile, Mike set aside his concerns and watched John manipulating the crates far below. Those had seemed a shitload heavier earlier that night, he thought.
As the large cradle and hook swung over the truck, John reached up and grabbed hold of it, guiding it down and unhooking the two loading cables from its huge steel grapple. He jumped down and quickly ran them through the lowest pallets on the stack and then jumped back up, reattaching both ends to the grapple above and giving the thumbs-up to Mike in the cab. As the tension came on, John used his phenomenal strength to stabilize the load, riding up with it high into the air and slowly out over the ship’s wide deck.
The ship loomed wide below him as John swung out, standing atop the crates like Ahab on the bow. Controlling the big load’s progress with the plethora of levers in the control cab, Mike stopped the crate’s outward movement with a clunk as he saw it range over the yawning forward bay on the
Dauntless
. As the package stuttered to a sharp halt over the entrance to the
Dauntless
’s hold, John felt the huge load start to swing like a pendulum. Mike was a fast study but he was no crane operator, and he had stopped the stack far too abruptly. The sudden stop had set its vast weight swinging back and forth, and at this rate it would collide with the sides of the hatch as it was lowered in, with potentially disastrous results.
John moved fast from his spot on top of the crates, grasping one of the supporting cables and clambering down the side of the stack. On the deck, one of the armed guards that was patrolling the seaward side of the ship stared in disbelief as the officer dropped down to hang from the side of big stack of crates and dangled from it as it swung from side to side.
From Mike’s position in the crane’s cab, it was not possible to see how much the package was swinging until it was almost level with the deck, but as it got closer to the entrance to the hold, Mike suddenly registered the movement and froze. A professional operator would have instinctively stopped the engine that was lowering the crates but Mike had to spend precious moments trying to think of which lever to pull. Shit, what the hell was he doing here, he thought, scrambling to stop the stack’s slow drop into the hold. He could now see the apparently insane John Hunt hanging from the side of the unwieldy stack and trying to get between it and the fast approaching hatchway. A part of his brain registered respect for the brave way the Englishman put himself in harm’s way, but Mike would only appreciate it later, long after he had gotten down from this damn crane.
Dangling from the bottom of stack, John sensed the course of the package, calculating with precision its momentum and the slowly increasing radius of its swing. Sensing which side of the yawning hold entrance the stack would swing into first, John agilely flung himself into place with his back to bottom of the stack, grasping the bottom crate with both hands so he could swing out both his legs to brace himself.
There were now two of the ship’s armed deck guards watching the crates as they swung perilously close to the deck. Having caught a glimpse of the lieutenant throwing the boxes around down on the jetty earlier, they were woefully misinformed as to their real weight and so they did what they thought was best and reached out to help control the package as it came down. But before they could get their hand on it, the two men were astonished to see the lieutenant brace himself between the boxes and the steel lip of the hold. Surely he wasn’t going to … fuck me, he was, they thought, as he extended his feet out to take the pressure of the coming collision.
John had braced his legs, and spread out his arms to spread the weight out over the side of the crates as much as possible but this impact was at the limits of even his machine strength. He felt his powerful body register the forces on each of its limbs. In his mind the deliberately miscalibrated pressure sensors rated the pressure at five hundred pounds, but he knew it was closer to five tons as it forced his feet into his chest. If his emotions had naturally registered on his face, he would have been straining and grunting at the effort, but an unnatural smile remained throughout, looking quite out of place as the hatchway and crate stack groaned with the pressure.
But his legs did absorb the blow, driving the huge force of the stack’s momentum into the reinforced deck of the ship like shock absorbers. The two guards could have sworn they felt the 50,000-ton ship move slightly when John’s feet hit it, but that was ridiculous. Thirty feet below them at the waterline, the ship swayed slightly, sending a tiny ripple out across the still harbor waters.
* * *
In the end it had only taken them about an hour and a half to load the four stacks of pallets into the ship. Afterward, John Hunt had thanked the various guards and waved to the master chief as he walked off into the night. In the bowels of the ship, John now stood amongst crates and scanned them. Sensing the one that was notably lighter than the rest, he stepped up to it and pried it open. Inside, a disheveled and slightly disconcerted Major Jack Toranssen sat, holding onto some tools and a weak smile as light shone in on him for the first time in nearly two hours. He was wearing Bill Shadley’s uniform, which should help facilitate his departure from the ship once they were done, but getting an unknown man
onto
a naval vessel without the captain’s express permission would have been next to impossible.
Climbing out of the crate, Jack smiled at John and surveyed his surroundings. The hold was large and smelled of grease and diesel, an almost inescapable smell aboard a navy ship. It was a wide rectangular space, ten feet deep, with walls of steel. The now closed bay doors took up the bulk of the ceiling, but under his feet Jack knew the floor could also be opened up, either in sections, or all at once, to give loading access to the lower decks of the ship. In port these more sensitive areas of the vessel were essentially sealed, with only the captain or chief engineer having access rights.
But John was no ordinary junior officer and he had been preparing for this day for several months. Stepping over to a stout-looking metal box on one wall, John placed his forefinger on the fat keyhole and allowed the microfibers that lay hidden inside it to snake out into the complex lock. With practiced ease, they found the necessary purchase and the lock opened with a dull clunk, to reveal a small keyboard and screen beneath.
John had long since hacked into the ship’s central control systems and planted a virus that gave him access even the captain did not enjoy, and he had also supplemented this with a second program that allowed him to erase the evidence of his activities should he need them to remain secret. His fingers worked the keypad at whisper speed, his hands communing with the machine as he accessed his dormant programs and activated them, essentially opening up the sealed vaults of the ship to his control, at least until the captain returned or the chief engineer woke up.
Jack watched curiously as John worked on the pad and was startled when a large hatch suddenly thudded underneath him. John turned and smiled, stepped over to the previously locked platform, and hooked one of his fingers through a latch that usually accepted a special hook designed to allow the sailors to lever open the heavy trapdoors. But John did not need such tools. His mechanical muscles registered the weight without concern as he wrenched the massive door up and heaved it away to rest against the far wall, revealing a far deeper hold beneath them. As Jack came up to stare down into the twenty-foot-deep cavern below, John smiled at him.
“Wow.” said Jack, steadying himself against an instinctive vertigo.
“Welcome to the bowels of the HMS
Dauntless
.” said John.
Jack stared into the dark hole beneath them, aware that it extended back under his own feet. Trying to remain calm, he stepped discreetly back from precipitous drop, saying, “What happens if someone comes down here while we’re working?”
“Once we are down there no one will be able to come looking for us.” replied John as he started to carry the boxes, one by one, to the edge of the hatch, “the more sensitive areas of the ship are sealed by a network of armor-plated doors, each with a code lock. Access is strictly controlled and monitored. Even if the captain opens this door or any of the other ones that we will be going through in a while, an alarm sounds automatically on the bridge and in the captain’s cabin.”
Jack looked slightly horrified at the comment and had to stop himself for looking for an escape route, but John’s easy smile and relaxed attitude calmed the US officer.
John went on, “The doors we are going to go through are also made of two-inch-thick blast-resistant steel and have permanent surveillance cameras mounted on either side of them, recording twenty-four hours a day.”
Jack looked no more comforted at the addition of this good news, but John carried on talking as he moved the crates, “Of course, we have access rights rather better than those the captain enjoys.” He paused to look at the major, his smile broadening, “No alarms will be going off tonight, trust me, and the cameras have just entered a ten-hour-long loop.” Of course John’s own internal monitoring devices had also entered a loop as soon as the hatch above had closed, telling the AI satellites above them that John had gone to bed and was even now lying, in the dark, asleep in his cabin.