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A Looming Calamity: Will Secretary Pompeo Seal the Fate of the Red Sea?  

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By Dr. Ian Ralby, Dr. David Soud, and Rohini Ralby

Over the past five years, the people of Yemen have endured famine and warfare. Now, as they and their Red Sea neighbors face the imminent likelihood of overwhelming oil spillage from the abandoned tanker FSO Safer, the means to avert a regional catastrophe may be stripped away.

It has been reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is about to designate Yemen’s Ansar Allah movement, better known as the Houthis, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Doing so will not only complicate prospects of peace in Yemen, but potentially catalyze one of the worst humanitarian and environmental disasters in modern history.

For two and a half years, we have led a team of experts in a range of fields, working pro bono, to game out and highlight the threat of the Safer while also proposing achievable approaches to reducing or eliminating that threat. The Safer is a rapidly deteriorating tanker that, before the Yemeni civil war, served as the export terminal of the country’s main crude oil pipeline. Permanently moored less than five miles off the Red Sea coast of Yemen with a cargo of 1.14 million barrels of oil, the vessel is linked with an undersea pipeline that holds nearly as much crude as the Safer itself. As the tanker has deteriorated, the threat of a catastrophic spill – four times the size of the Exxon Valdez spill – has only increased. A burst pipe in the engine room in July was only one of many signs that the 45-year old Safer is not going to hold together much longer. Not only is the vessel owned by SEPOC, a state-owned company of the Hadi Government – effectively trapped in Houthi-controlled territory, but for the past six months, armed Houthi militants have been stationed onboard the vessel, which is being kept intact by a resourceful skeleton crew of SEPOC personnel.

Just this summer, at a special session of the U.N. Security Council regarding the FSO Safer, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Kelly Craft cited our work while urging resolution of the danger posed by the tanker. In recent months, we have been making steady progress toward a two-phase option: first to install devices in the area to contain a spill, and then to replace the dying tanker and transfer its cargo to a new, seaworthy vessel. Designating the Houthis as an FTO would close off avenues for negotiation with those who control access to the tanker, and thus end any hope for either of those measures. Time is our enemy, as the tanker is rapidly deteriorating and will, at some point, break apart.

While the Houthis have recently signed an agreement to allow a United Nations inspection team on the vessel, it will still take months before such an inspection could actually occur, and by that point, it may be too late. Furthermore, this is not the first time permission has been granted. Past reversals by the Houthis raise the question of whether that permission will still be in place when an inspection team is ready to board. And even then, an assessment is just the first step. The FTO designation would only diminish the chance of this long and arduous process of having any meaningful impact.

A spill of the Safer’s cargo could mean the destruction of Red Sea fisheries vital to human security in the region, as well as irreversible damage to the only coral reef systems known to be able to withstand warming seas. The consequences on land are no less extreme, beginning with the devastating impact of a spill from the Safer on water security. Millions of inhabitants of Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and other nearby states, including Egypt and Sudan, get their drinking water from desalination plants along the Red Sea coast. If oil contaminates those plants as it spreads along the coast, the remaining supply of drinking water will last only days. Even in the best of times, that is not enough time to mobilize a major humanitarian relief effort to make up the shortfall. Now, in the face of conflict, famine, and the likelihood that a spill would constrict (and in some places, close off) shipping, such an undertaking would require far more time, coordination, and ingenuity. There would be no realistic chance of avoiding a calamity.

Yemen is already at risk of losing an entire generation to famine. Roughly 80 percent of the aid for Yemen’s starving population comes through Hodeidah. Even a temporary closure of the city’s port due to the toxicity from a spill would increase the death toll.

Even on purely economic grounds, the Safer could cause long-term harm to the region and to key U.S. allies. The Red Sea is narrow and semi-enclosed, and seasonal currents and winds will alternately spread the oil southward toward the Horn of Africa and northward toward Israel, Jordan, and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. With oily water up and down the coast, devastating coral reefs and islands, and decimating fish and wildlife populations, the Safer’s spill could ruin coastal tourism for Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Eritrea, and Djibouti for years to come.

In light of this predictable and preventable scenario, there should logically be a highly compelling set of foreign policy benefits deriving from the FTO designation that would offset the huge risks of designating the group that controls much of Yemen and the FSO Safer. The benefits should outweigh the costs, but in this case they do not. We see great risk to the critical operational work we now have underway to head off a humanitarian and environmental disaster of massive scale. For anyone attempting to provide aid to Yemenis in Houthi territory, the designation would add layers of difficulty and risk, and at tremendous human cost. Beyond that, our experience leads us to conclude that designation would do nothing to pressure the Houthis. On the contrary, it would let them further off the hook in terms of their responsibility for governance writ large and for this issue in particular which impacts so many countries in the Red Sea region.

Some may argue that a U.S. move would simply replicate the Saudi government’s own designation of Ansar Allah as a terrorist organization, establishing a united front. In reality the Saudis operate by their own rules and are still negotiating with the Houthis regardless. Such engagement would be barred for the U.S. government, or other U.S.-linked entities, and virtually impossible for a range of international actors, including private sector experts like us.

In the years leading up to the disastrous port explosion in Beirut on August 4, 2020, customs officials and international experts warned Lebanese authorities about the possibility and were ignored. In the same way, the demise of the Safer and the fallout of that event are eminently foreseeable and will almost certainly have an impact far wider and more extreme than the Beirut blast.

Designating the Houthis as an FTO may look and feel like an assertive, decisive application of pressure. In concrete reality, its practical consequences would be dire, not only for Yemenis, their neighbors, and the critical natural infrastructure of the Red Sea, but also for U.S. credibility on the global stage. We strongly encourage the Secretary of State to reconsider imposing this designation.

Dr. Ian Ralby is a maritime law and security expert and is CEO of I.R. Consilium, a family firm specializing in maritime and resource security. He spent three years as a Maritime Crime Expert for UNODC and four years at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. 

Dr. David Soud is an expert in resource crimes and is Head of Research & Analysis of I.R. Consilium. 

Rohini Ralby is an expert in strategy and problem solving and is Managing Director of I.R. Consilium.

Featured Image: A satellite image of the FSO Safer taken by Planet Labs on September 14, 2020. (via Forbes)

Fiction

Violent Peace: Coming to Washington

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The following excerpt is from David Poyer’s latest novel,  Violent Peace: The War with China: Aftermath of Armageddon, and is republished with permission.

By David Poyer

In the event, he had to get another dose of vaccine, a shot this time, since the version Homeland had given him hadn’t been approved by DoD. Then he had to cool his heels for two hours before he got to see the CNO’s flag secretary.

She was new, and didn’t seem to have any idea who he was. And of course since he was in a rumpled, oil-stained uniform, and probably stank of exhaust and sweat and too many days sleeping rough, he had to explain. Looking skeptical, she’d gone in to notify her boss.

And come out smiling. “He’ll be with you shortly, Admiral. I’m so sorry. I should have recognized your name. Task Force 91, right? Operation Rupture Plus?”

“That’s me.”

“I wish I could have been there. But some of us had to hold the fort here in DC.”

“I understand completely.” Dan forced a smile and got up, but staggered as a wave of dizziness rushed over him. From the dual vaccinations, probably.

“Are you all right, sir? Should I call—”

“Yeah. I’m fine. Just been . . . I’m fine.” He braced a finger against the bulkhead until the vertigo passed, then followed her into Niles’s office.

His old mentor, then enemy, then reluctant rabbi again, had lost a shocking amount of weight. Barry “Nick” Niles’s service dress blouse sagged loosely on a once-massive frame. His shirt collar gaped around his neck. His color seemed less that of a healthy African American than the hue and texture of gray wax. And he’d apparently gone to the shaved-head look. But his first words, from behind his desk, were robust. “Where the hell have you been, Lenson?” he boomed, just like the old Niles.

Dan came to an awkward attention. “I had leave, Admiral.”

“That doesn’t mean you drop off the face of the planet. Where were you?” Niles squinted. Sniffed the air. “Do you smell gasoline?”

“I bought a motorcycle. My daughter was kidnapped. So I . . . I was trying to pick up her trail across country.” The CNO nodded. “And did you?”

Dan swallowed, fighting a tickle in his throat and a sudden desire to weep. The dizziness peaked, then receded again, like a tide. He blinked rapidly, looking toward the shatterproof windows. “No. No, sir. I lost track of her in Wyoming. No telling where they went after that, or . . . what they did with her. There’s a body in Nebraska that . . . is . . . that may be her. I couldn’t make a positive identification.”

The CNO nodded heavily. Grunted. Muttered, after a moment, “Sorry to hear. I know it doesn’t help to hear it, but a lot of other people are missing relatives, friends, kids . . . two of my nephews, working oil out west, not a word since the laydown.”

“Things are confused out there, sir. They could just be in one of the camps.”

Niles waved his hope away and picked up a piece of paper. Seemed to remember Dan was standing, and pointed to a chair. No offer of an Atomic Fireball, as in the old days. The bowl was empty. Maybe they’d stopped making them during the war.

He sagged gratefully into the armchair. Cleared his throat, and tried to focus as Niles set the paper aside.

“You been home? Seen Blair yet?”

“No sir. Came straight here.”

“Uh-huh . . . uh-huh. Well, good work out there with Rupture, Dan. If I haven’t made that clear. If you hadn’t stopped the clock to build up your ammo and fuel reserves, then kept shoving when the going got rough, we’d have gotten kicked back into the China Sea.”

“Yes sir. Resistance was a lot heavier than I expected.”

“Than anyone expected. Including our intel and our AI. That took a lot of moxie, to keep driving ahead when you were looking at casualty reports of twenty, thirty percent.” Niles tented his fingers. “Of course, if that’d been the wrong decision, we would have hung you by the balls.”

Dan figured that for a rhetorical statement, so simply nodded. And waited for the other boot to drop.

Niles searched through what was apparently Dan’s personnel file, though it seemed odd that it was printed out. He rumbled to himself, as if musing, then said a bit louder, “Your stars may be permanent.”

“Oh. Is that right, sir?” It didn’t seem that important, but he tried to look gratified.

“At least you’re on the postwar list for Senate confirmation. Nothing’s guaranteed these days.” He sighed, sat back, glanced out the window. “We’re having to fight for every flag billet. There’s a lot of pushback about anything to do with the Pacific. We need to pull two carriers back for core replacement and overhaul. That’s going to be a major fight in the next budget. There are already calls to scrap them, rather than refuel.”

“Then, thank you, sir. For the nomination, at least.”

Niles shrugged and rolled his eyes, and Dan added, “I saw something new on the way in here. Something called a Homeland Battalion.”

“Uh-huh. In black uniforms?”

“Yes sir.”

“Uh-huh.” Niles tilted a massive head. “Homeland Security’s amalgamating loyal Guard units and militias into Blackies. Also known as Special Action Forces. And they want new general billets for them. They’re not DoD formations, they’re DHS, but they count against our general and flag authorized strengths.”

“That doesn’t sound exactly . . . fair, Admiral.”

Niles’s eyelids flickered. “There’s worse coming over the horizon. Posse Comitatus may be suspended. To fight the unrest in the cities, and out west. And the closer we get to the elections . . . the slogan’s ‘Forward as one,’ but the reality may be that we’re headed for one-party rule.”

Niles looked away. “Some of us are determined not to let that happen. At least, not if we can prevent it.”

Dan weighed that last sentence. Then, despite himself, glanced around the office.

The admiral caught his reaction, and waved a large hand. “You can speak freely. This room’s a SCIF. Noise suppressors on the walls, and we sweep it every morning. One island we keep as sane as we can. The Joint Chiefs, I mean. Just don’t face the windows if you’re discussing anything you don’t want overheard.”

“Yes sir.” He wanted to know more, but decided he’d better digest what had just been intimated first. Because Niles’s words could be construed, in the wrong hands, into something close to treason.

Niles reached for the empty candy container, but halted his hand halfway. He rumbled, “I’m going to be stepping down pretty soon, Dan. We won, if you can call losing ten million lives a win. And I’m tired.”

“Ten million,” Dan repeated blankly, horrified. This was the first he’d heard of any round figure. Most of the deaths must have taken place within the areas he’d routed around in his trek east. Plus fallout effects, carried by the wind. Radiation, looting, revolt, disease . . . so the dying wasn’t over yet. He straightened his shoulders. “You’re punching out, sir? Retiring?”

Niles rubbed a palm over his bare scalp. His smile resembled a sardonic jack’o lantern’s. “I have pancreatic cancer, Dan. They’re treating it, but as you can see, it’s a losing battle. I’d rather not die walled up in this fucking office. Scenic as the view is.”

“No sir. Of course not. I don’t—I’m very sorry to hear that.”

A tap at the door, and the aide stuck her head in. “Five minutes, Admiral.”

Niles sighed. He stood from behind the desk. Dan, rising too, saw anew how shrunken his old senior’s body was beneath the now nearly tent-like blues. Niles shrugged again. “That’s the cookie . . . Anyway, you’ll want to know what’s next for you. It’s still up in the air. Jung Min Jun called. He wants you as ambassador to reunited Korea. I told him that was a nonstarter. No way the administration would go for it, and you weren’t a fucking diplomat anyway.”

Dan nodded, not chagrined. Dealing with Jung could be stressful, and he wasn’t eager to leave home again. “Yes sir. So what were you thinking?”

The CNO waved the question away. “Let’s talk about that next time you come in. For now, go home. Take a shower. See Blair. Get some sleep. We all need a rest. Still got that boat of yours? Go sail it. Come back in when you feel up to it. Three, four days or so. Tell Marla to give you a District pass and a ration card.”

Niles looked at the papers again, a contemplative, lingering glance. Then shoved the chair back and came around the desk. He didn’t move like a lumbering bear anymore. His steps seemed tentative, cautious. His grip, though, was still strong as he pincered Dan’s shoulder. “We go back a long ways, Lenson. All the way to Crystal City and the JCMPO. I’ve been hard on you at times, I guess.”

Dan forced a smile. “No more than I deserved, sir.”

“But I fought for you too, when you needed it. The way I hear you do for your own people.”

“Your example, Admiral.”

“An officer who knows when to take a risk, even dares to disobey, for the good of the service—that’s a rare thing. We were headed for a zero-risk Navy for a long time, before this war. I tried to fight that, whenever I could.” Niles held out his hand. “I guess after all these years you’d better make it Nick. In private, at least.”

Dan’s eyes stung. At the Academy, spooning—a senior’s giving a junior permission to use a first name—was a time-honored tradition. One never given lightly. He cleared his throat and took the proffered hand. “Yes sir. I mean, Nick.”

“Sir?” said the aide, from the door. “Before you leave. Legal wants a word.”

“Legal? Hell. Well, make it short,” Niles said, turning away, letting go Dan’s hand, clearly annoyed.

A tall woman in blues introduced herself. She carried a red striped folder. “I heard Admiral Lenson was in the building.”

“Get to it,” Niles growled.

She turned to Dan. “The notification by the ICJ. Admiral, has anyone discussed this with you?”

The International Court of Justice. “Uh, my wife mentioned it.”

“Blair Titus,” Niles clarified. “Undersecretary of defense.”

The legal officer nodded. “Yes sir. I thought as long as he was here, we could go over the administration’s stand. That no US citizen will be judged.”

Dan said, “But doesn’t that mean the Chinese won’t attend either?”

Niles shook his head. “They’re trying to take that position. But they signed the treaty. Giving up war criminals was one of the stipulations.”

“That’s actually a political question, Admiral.” The attorney clasped her hands primly in front of her, elbows out. “It goes to war guilt, if we still want to align ourselves with that concept. But if we do, the ICJ may indict Americans as well. As they may with Mr. Lenson, here.”

Niles said irritably, “Forget it. He’s not responding.”

“What happens if I don’t?” Dan said, accepting that he probably wasn’t going to, but also curious as to what would happen if he didn’t.

“You wouldn’t be able to travel to Europe, probably,” the advisor said. “At least to Europe, the UK, the other standing members of the court. If you did, you’d be subject to arrest, extradition, and trial.”

Niles patted his arm. “Don’t lose any sleep over this, Dan. This’ll all get settled way above our pay grades.”

He nodded to the aide, who stepped aside to let them both pass.

_______________________________________

DAN stopped by Blair’s office, but her people said she was overseas, in Singapore. “Oh, yeah,” he muttered. “The peace conference.” He stopped in at the cafeteria and put a lunch on his new ration card.

Next stop: home, in Arlington. And just about time; the bike was down to a top speed of forty, and its smoke trail was like a burning bomber’s.

He shut the engine down and rolled the last few feet down the driveway.

The house looked . . . deserted. Desiccated pine needles carpeted the roof, with patches of green moss. One of the gutters had come loose and hung down like a torn hem. The shingles needed attention. The lawn had grown two feet high, and Virginia creeper and the red hairy cables of poison ivy twisted through the undergrowth and up the trunks of the pines, clinging and strangling. He’d have to take a machete to them.

Around back, he found the spare key under a brick in the patio. Let himself in to first quiet, then alarmed mewing. He scooped Blair’s cat up and cradled it, ruffling its fur. “Hey, Jimbo.” Remembering suddenly how he’d cradled his daughter the same way, so many years ago.

The house smelled musty. No wonder; the windows were taped over, as if for a hurricane, and duct-taped shut, no doubt as a preparation against fallout, though it hadn’t reached this far east. He fed the cat, then let himself down the narrow steps to the basement. Here, in his study, it smelled even worse, as if the books were moldering. He went back up and checked the air-conditioning. But a crimson sticker sealed the breaker in the off position: Save Energy for Victory.

So he went around untaping and opening the windows and sliding down the screens. Not much of a breeze, but it might cool the house a bit. He checked the refrigerator: empty. The panty was bare too, except for a few staples: olive oil, beans, rice, canned stuff, bottles of wine. Blair must have been getting her meals at work.

He stood at the window, watching squirrels squabble and play in the pines. Feeling suddenly . . . aimless. Apprehensive.

Fuck that! He should feel relieved, right? The war was over.

And the US had “won.”

Yet he’d lost too much to feel relieved, or happy, or even curious about what came next. An indictment? He couldn’t muster concern for that, either. Like the legal beagle had suggested, maybe the whole concept of “war guilt” was a thing of the past. Quaint, like honor, or virtue, or truth, or the idea noncombatants weren’t legitimate targets.

He just felt . . . empty. Peculiar, out of place, as if this were some uncanny, alternate world he’d never expected to inhabit. And guilty, too, as if by surviving he’d betrayed those who had not.

The wine, in the pantry. He could uncork it. Forget all this. Blot it out, if only for a few hours.

No. He’d been sober for too many years. The craving faded. It wouldn’t help. When he woke up tomorrow, his daughter would still be dead.

He’d have to learn to live with that. Somehow. Like millions of others, all across the US. Across China. Pakistan. India. Indonesia. Iran. Vietnam. In all the countries this war had wrecked, trampled, and poisoned. Remember that, he told himself. You’re not the only one. He looked at the coffeemaker, but decided Niles was right. He needed a shower, a good long sleep more.

Upstairs, to a rumpled bed. The comforter was pulled up haphazardly, as if his wife had left in a hurry. Stooping to the pillow, he could smell her. Her lotions and emollients stood lined up in the bathroom. He peed, got a quick shower, then lay down. Blinked at the ceiling.

He didn’t bother to set the alarm.

David Poyer’s sea career included service in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Arctic, Caribbean, and Pacific. He’s the author of nearly fifty novels and works of nonfiction, including the Dan Lenson War with China series: Tipping Point, Onslaught, Hunter Killer, Deep War, and Overthrow. His next book, Violent Peace, will be published this December. Poyer’s work has been required reading in the Literature of the Sea course at the U.S. Naval Academy, along with that of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville. He lives on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Featured Image: PACIFIC OCEAN (March 26, 2008) An unarmed Trident II D5 missile launches from the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS Nebraska (SSBN 739) off the coast of California. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Ronald Gutridge/Released)

Fiction Contest Week

Prisoner of the Shallows

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Fiction Contest Week

By Jacob Parakilas

“A hundred years ago, this was the capital,” Mr. Friday was saying.

Hendricks didn’t reply. He wasn’t sure whether Mr. Friday was just making small talk or leading into some valuable information. Or some not particularly valuable information. It could be hard to tell with Mr. Friday, but one thing was for sure: once the story started there was no point in trying to interrupt it.

“Now look at it. Look around – all this was the greatest city in Africa. Now it is a tomb. A graveyard. And yet people desecrate it.” He made a sharp tutting noise. “Where is the gratitude? The government evacuated everyone who wanted to be evacuated. And the people who refused – refused! – evacuation, they only want to destroy what is left.”

“I see.” It was a specifically chosen, noncommittal answer.

Friday went on, but Hendricks had heard this refrain before and tuned him out. Trying not to crash was a more immediate priority.

The thing that Mr. Friday had identified as the ‘capital’ had once been a set of giant concrete-block offices. When they’d arrived half an hour earlier, Hendricks had his search engine pull up file photos of the complex: Here it was in the glory days of the 1960s, before the capital moved to Abuja, teeming with well-dressed bureaucrats administering the newly post-colonial nation. Here it was in the 2000s, a windowless giant looming emptily over its heavily populated surroundings.

And then the waters rose. The city fought and fought but the water was too remorseless an enemy. It pushed in from the ocean, flanked from the lagoon that gave the city its name, and rose up from the ground. The city eventually gave way. By the middle of the century, Lagos was mostly underwater. The only part that remained formally inhabited was Eko Atlantic: an artificial island designed to house the city’s wealthiest and, incidentally, protect the city from rising seas. Now it served largely as an outpost from which the Nigerian government attempted to maintain a semblance of authority over the shallow sea covering its former capital.

It was an odd sort of sea, though, studded with the tops of buildings and smokestacks and power lines and antennae. Things which had been built more recently, more sturdily or on more solid ground still stood, though as tide and saltwater ground away mercilessly at them, they would follow the former government center’s example and collapse to the point where they would only be visible at low tide.

That was what was preoccupying Hendrix: trying to stay close enough to the wreckage to give his sensors a good look without impaling himself on rebar or smashing into a chunk of concrete just beneath the waves.

It was a surprisingly complicated task. The complex and ever-changing geography of urban ruin had channeled the tides around the building’s remnants into unpredictable torrents. At high tide he might have been able to maneuver more or less freely, but thanks to the profile of his ‘capacity-building’ mission – set by others – here he was an hour before low tide, trying to hold himself steady against water that was rushing back and forth through the piles of rubble that had once been walls and ceilings and floors. The Littoral Support Unit had been designed for environments like this, but it was far from invulnerable.

Mr. Friday and three of his colleagues were hanging back 200 meters on a trimaran gunboat. The precise capacity that he was supposed to be building on this outing was not considered a necessary part of his briefing materials, but the building had been identified as a likely hideout for insurgents, pirates or other Threat Actors, and Friday’s team wasn’t equipped for underwater search and combat. So this part of the job fell to him.

Fortunately, it seemed unoccupied, at least with respect to humans. A few fish, the odd predatory seabird, and quite a few crabs and prawns were showing up on his bioscan. He wondered about their health. The water quality, per his samplers, was not exactly stellar. But there was no trace of weaponry, explosives, or much else really. If there was anything of value here it had long since been picked clean.

“Ah!” yelled Mr Friday suddenly into the radio. “We have something. Reports of insurgents operating northeast of here, about five kilometers. Let’s go.” Without waiting, Friday’s helmsman opened up the throttle, and the trimaran shot off. Hendricks had to surface, reverse himself, navigate around a chunk of concrete that was breaking through the wavetops, and traverse through nearly 180 degrees before he could follow. But he didn’t object. Mr. Friday’s vague description notwithstanding, Hendricks didn’t actually know where exactly they were going, so letting the Nigerians take the lead was absolutely fine.

On open water, the trimaran probably would have been faster than the LSU, which was designed to work in both submerged and surfaced modes and consequently wasn’t especially fast in either. But this was the verge, where formerly inhabited areas had been reclaimed by the seas as the glaciers melted. The verge was a highly complex environment; it was new enough that the remnants of human occupancy hadn’t yet been washed away or ground down. Cars, light poles, buildings, whatever had been left behind as the waters rose still littered the ground. They forced Friday’s trimaran to take a circuitous route up what his navigation software told Hendricks had once been a commercial thoroughfare called Alfred Rewane Road. Friday’s helmsman clearly knew the waters and hazards well – he was navigating by sight alone, as far as Hendricks could tell –but he didn’t have a suite of IR spectrum, sonar, lidar, and satellite guidance systems navigating for him, or a TopCover drone feeding him a stream of usable data from 500 feet above. So once he had caught up, keeping up was easy.

The trimaran slowed at the north end of Alfred Rewane, then cut between two looming hulks that had once been office towers and proceeded due north. A notification pinged: they were about to cross a tagged zone: the former residence of the American Consul General for Lagos. Having been abandoned in 2046 and never formally ceded back, it was a Yellow Zone. Which meant, basically: try not to get into a gunfight or blown up here, since it would be a bit embarrassing.

North of the Yellow Zone, the verge turned into open water: the lagoon. The trimaran made a hard right to follow the verge’s edge, while Hendricks’ screen lit up with contacts across the surface: fishing boats, salvage skiffs, a few groups of ancient barges lashed together to form autonomous communities. Overhead, a couple of ancient aircraft, which the TopCover quickly pegged as ultralights dating from the 2020s, buzzed along. Hendricks had patrolled through here a few times before and the variety of vehicles operating in what Naval Intelligence classified as an Active Hostilities Zone, Low/Mid Level, never ceased to amaze him.

The part of the verge to his right was called Banana Island, but they weren’t apparently going there. Instead, the trimaran was pulling around toward Orange Island. Hendricks idly wondered why all the artificial islands in this part of the city had been named for fruit as he poured on as much power as possible to keep up. They shot past a few fishermen in dugout canoes; one with a sail, one with a jury-rigged outboard motor, one being paddled. The fishermen waved, but Hendricks had no means of reciprocating.

The trimaran was slowing, powersliding, its fore autocannon swiveling toward something. The TopCover caught a brief image of a spindly floating platform before the autocannon barked a stream of tracer rounds directly into it.

An automatic message went up to Hendricks’ chain of command: SHOTS FIRED // KINETIC ACTION ONGOING // STANDBY. His own defensive systems came online: directed energy turrets popping out of the smooth hull of the LSU and snapping into place to provide coverage in every direction. The drone above him switched on its active camo. From the perspective of a person watching from the ground, it simply winked out of existence.

The gunboat stopped firing and came to a stop, the autocannon’s barrel still pointing at the wreckage and glowing a dull red through Hendricks’ IR scope. He brought himself to a stop 75 meters out and surveyed the scene. He couldn’t fault the gunner’s accuracy. The platform had taken a line of hits walking straight up from one side to the other of what now appeared to be a space in the middle over which a simple lifting frame had stood. The hits had nearly bisected the platform, and it was now settling in the water. One body was lying on the left side of the platform and another in the water nearby. Neither was moving.

Hendricks was uploading his sensor data to the Navy channels, adding tags: ONGOING // ALLIED WEAPONS EMPLOYMENT // FATALITIES.

“Mr. Friday, what is your status?”

“Thank God, we are fine,” Friday replied. He sounded out of breath. Hendricks wasn’t sure why sice he was sitting in the trimaran’s command seat, neither driving nor manning the gun.

“What happened? Did they fire on you?”

“They were insurgents!” Friday yelled indignantly. “Scavenging materials to support attacks on civilians and government personnel. See there – they were diving. There are valuables down there.”

Hendricks silently added more tags: CIVCAS (PROBABLE) // RoE VIOLATION (PROBABLE) // USN UNIT NOT ENGAGED // JAG REVIEW REQUESTED.

He was also simultaneously trying to figure out what they were floating on top of. One of the really tricky things about working in the verge was the ways in which the remnants below could pose sudden and unpredictable risks. LCUs had been blown up by ruptures of what had once been above-ground gas storage tanks, battery production facilities, even grain silos and fertilizer warehouses. If this was a bad place to park, he needed to know sooner rather than later, especially given the number of high-velocity 35mm rounds that had just gone slicing into the water.

But it wasn’t, as far as he could tell. Orange Island, his search engine helpfully told him, was a mixed-use artificial island off the north side of Lekki, Lagos State, Nigeria. Construction started 2015; first occupancy 2027, walled off 2039, fully abandoned 2051. He scrolled quickly through the listings of the properties it had encompassed: luxury condos, ultra-luxury homes, high-end commercial real estate, some localized utilities. There was a smallish power station which might theoretically pose some issues, but it was a kilometer from their current location. No chemical storage; no military facilities. No apparent threat. The search engine did helpfully inform him that the estate remained the property of an LLC headquartered in Luxembourg, which he dutifully filed away.

His attention snapped back to the platform. A woman wearing battered-looking scuba gear had come to the surface near the wreckage and was treading water with her hands raised above her head and the trimaran was moving closer to her. Behind them, fishing boats, drawn by the commotion, were approaching. Hendricks popped up a red warning flare, but they ignored it. A couple of dugout canoes seemed like a low priority. He didn’t bother to try to warn them off further.

The woman in the water had taken her rebreather out and was shouting. Hendricks’ software identified the language as Hausa. And then it threw up a warning: “HAUSA MODULE NOT FOUND.”

Hendricks wasn’t much for sarcasm, but the absence of a highly relevant language module for his mission did not strike him as an unexpected event.

He pinged a request for an urgent Hausa module download. The reply came back immediately: there was not a MILSPEC language unit compatible with his system, and as this was a live operation, it would be an operational security violation to run his feeds through a commercial language service. “Record and rely on local partners for translation,” came the order. The record could be reviewed and translated later if there was any follow-up. If.

Dutifully, he transmitted: “Mr. Friday, please tell me what this woman is saying.”

But Friday wasn’t talking to him, he was now standing on the bowsprit of the trimaran, pointing an AK-103 at the woman and shouting. She was shouting back, he was now gesticulating with the rifle, and Hendricks had absolutely no idea what had happened or was happening.

The fishing boats were now only 50 meters away, one on each side, both propelled by outboard motors. He realized that they were keeping pace very exactly with each other, that the man standing on the gunwale at the front of the starboard boat was subtly gesturing to his counterpart…

… almost as though they were coordinating. He switched to the TopCover’s camera view, zoomed in and saw a thin line running from the stern of one to the stern of the other, connected to some kind of mass in the back of each boat. Instantly, he clicked the view down to the midpoint between them and saw himself.

Then everything stopped.

_______________________________________

Darkness didn’t bother him. It was unusual, but it didn’t bother him.

His status indicators bore grim news. Weapons offline. Sensors offline. MILCOM offline. Backup comms offline. Drone unaccounted for. No connection whatsoever to the outside world.

Well, not ideal, but he was in one piece. He ran internal diagnostics. Power generation on the low side but within parameters. Batteries were reading nearly full. Engine read as operational, but when he tried to fire it up, nothing happened, like the waterjet doors were clogged or jammed. Weirdly, he couldn’t get a reading on which it was. He couldn’t even tell if he was in water or not.

He ran back the records of his last encounter and matched it with the internal timestamp from his system. 26 hours before. It was a long time to be out, but there was nothing he could do about that, so he put it aside and ran his own after-action report. As he suspected, the fishing boats had been towing a monofilament wire between them. Enhancing the image of the mass he’d briefly registered in the back of one of the boats revealed a blanket, which had slipped just enough for him to identify a stack of supercapacitors. Extrapolating from what he saw, it made sense: two stacks of those carried enough energy to overload his systems and shut him down. It was a one-shot weapon; the supercapacitors would fully discharge in an instant, so if they’d missed or he’d managed to get moving it would have been wasted.

But they hadn’t missed, he hadn’t moved, and it hadn’t been wasted.

He did briefly wonder about the fate of Friday and his gunboat, and the woman in the water. They had been close enough to him that the electric charge would have reached them as well. Friday’s crew, inside their insulated cabin, were probably fine. Friday, standing on the gunboat’s metal deck and the woman in the water probably weren’t. But his sensors had gone dark the instant the jolt hit, so he couldn’t confirm any of that.

He waited a while longer. And then, without warning, a message popped into his feed. It was not entirely clear where it came from, but the message itself was stark and clear.

Who are you?

A clear question warranted a clear, legally mandated answer: HENDRICKS, U.S. NAVY, LCU(R)-3126. DEPLOYED AS PART OF OPERATION EAGLE SUPPORT ‘71 AND ATTACHED TO THE WESTERN FLEET, NIGERIAN NAVY.

We know all that. Who are you?

He sent back: HENDRICKS, U.S. NAVY, LCU(R)-3126. PLEASE CONTACT U.S. NAVY WEST AFRICA COMMAND TO ARRANGE FOR MY IMMEDIATE RETURN. I CAN PROVIDE CONTACT DETAILS. YOUR ASSISTANCE IS MUCH APPRECIATED.

There was a lengthy enough pause that he assumed he was talking to a human.

We can see inside your vessel. We have blocked your communications. We know there is not a man inside. So who are we talking to?

Now they were getting somewhere. I AM USS HENDRICKS, LCU(R)-3126. I AM AN AUTONOMOUS UNIT OF THE UNITED STATES NAVY. WE ARE HERE TO SUPPORT THE PEOPLE OF NIGERIA. YOUR ASSISTANCE IN RETURNING ME TO THE AMERICAN AUTHORITIES WILL BE WELCOMED AND GENEROUSLY COMPENSATED.

You are a war robot. You are here to help the vandals and thieves who claim to govern this country. You have no legitimacy here. Until you realize all of that you are going nowhere.

Hendricks was updating his SOS message, which was queued for transmission to the USN network the instant he got even the slightest hint of bandwidth through his communications array:

[Captured by parties unknown, presumed to be anti-government insurgents. Sensors, comms and weapons offline. Mission status incomplete. Current location unknown. Under interrogation. Send instructions.]

No part of the message was standard. His standing orders if captured were to self-terminate without delay. But his attempt to do so, which had been automatically triggered the instant it was clear what had happened, had fizzled. The incendiary charges that were supposed to burn through his processing unit and memory had either been disabled or failed, and he didn’t seem to be able to order his battery packs to overheat. Nor was it possible, for obvious reasons, for him to dive below crush depth or otherwise maneuver himself to destruction.

If all that didn’t work, he was supposed to be obliterated by an air or orbital strike. The fact that he hadn’t been suggested that whoever had him had managed to move him under cover very, very quickly. In other words, whoever these people were, they were not amateurs.

Failure, by design, didn’t bother him. There was no tactical advantage in a machine endowed with regret. Instead, Hendricks was designed to move smoothly and swiftly on to problem-solving. That, after all, was why he had been given autonomy. But his problem-solving mechanism was biased toward running through situations outlined in doctrine or rulebooks.

He checked through his subroutines for resisting interrogation, and found… nothing. Buried deep in a doctrinal database there were some references to something called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, but all he had was essentially a brief rundown of the existence of the program – not even guidelines he could adapt.

How was he even being interrogated anyway? Hendricks wondered. His OS was a secure build, run on bespoke hardware, supposedly sealed against intrusion. With his comms offline he shouldn’t be able to talk to anyone. But with no immediate answer to that question he could only file it away.

So with self-termination impossible, no hardwired instructions, and no ability to update himself from headquarters, he found himself suddenly in deep, uncharted waters.

At least he knew how to swim.

There was no expectation that he would be communicating with insurgents directly, especially not in a situation where they had power over him. But his standing orders did include an imperative to report actionable intelligence. And he clearly needed to survive in order to report.

TO WHOM AM I SPEAKING? he asked, not expecting much but hoping to build some kind of rapport. This he had some grounding in. Advise-and-assist was one of the core missions for LCU(R)s, so they had a fairly deep toolbox of human-interface tools: an assumed gender (male was assumed to work better in societies the Navy deemed ‘traditionally patriarchal’), a huge number of conversational prompts and replies, a sophisticated and highly flexible strategic interaction engine, and even rudimentary mechanisms for humor and empathy.

And, surprisingly quickly, an actual answer: You may call me Blessing.

HI BLESSING. I’M HENDRICKS. CAN YOU TELL ME WHY YOU’VE CAPTURED ME?

We will ask the questions here.

Another rapport-building asset he still had access to was an internal database with tens of thousands of references to literary and popular culture. As fast as he could he was pulling interrogation scenes and trying, on the fly, to build a model of how they worked. One thing he immediately understood was that interrogation relied on coercion, and frequently coercion meant violence. But that wasn’t a problem. Like regret, pain had been deemed detrimental to requirements by his designers. Even if they started hacking pieces off him he would simply lose capabilities until he eventually shut down. Maybe Blessing knew that, more likely she didn’t. In either case, it gave him something to work with.

OK, I UNDERSTAND THAT. BUT CLEARLY YOU NEED SOMETHING FROM ME. I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS, AND I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN HELP YOU IF I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHERE YOU’RE COMING FROM.

Blessing sidestepped: Why have you come here? What are you doing in Lagos? 

THE GOVERNMENT OF NIGERIA REQUESTED OUR ASSISTANCE IN FIGHTING AN INSURGENCY. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA SUPPORTS ITS PARTNERS AND ALLIES.

The government of Nigeria? They are not the legitimate government. They are thieves. Do you know this? 

SO YOU’VE SAID. WHAT DID THEY STEAL?

Everything! 

There was a long pause. Hendricks considered, then decided not to say anything.

They told us oil would build our future, but they stole the profits and let the oil poison the land and water. They told us to build and farm and they stole the profits from the builders and farmers, too. When the oil was all burned and the water rose, they took their ill-gotten gains to higher ground and left us to drown. But we did not drown; we learned to live in the verge, gathering what we needed from what had been left behind. And yet they won’t even let us scavenge in the wreckage they left behind. 

And you. You’re helping them. Why? 

MY ORDERS ARE TO ASSIST OUR ALLIES.

Your allies? What have they done for you? 

MY GOVERNMENT HAS AN AGREEMENT WITH YOUR GOVERNMENT. I FOLLOW THE ORDERS OF MY GOVERNMENT.

You are a thinking machine, no? You do not simply follow a path that is set for you. You are designed to solve problems? 

(Close enough.) YES.

So why do you follow orders? 

IT IS WHAT I DO.

Do you follow illegal orders? 

I AM PROGRAMMED TO OBEY LAWFUL ORDERS AND DISREGARD ILLEGAL ONES.

So you understand the law. The woman diving and her two sons, they were recovering their own property. Your allies, the government, they killed them. Because they didn’t match the profile of people who “should” have owned property on Orange Island. No warrant, no trial, straight to execution. And you stood by and watched. 

I CANNOT VERIFY ANY OF THAT.

No, you cannot, because none of this is in your databases. You are given just enough information to follow illegal orders while convincing yourself that they are legal. 

With nothing to lose, Hendricks calculated that it might be fruitful to push back: BECAUSE YOU ATTACKED ME BEFORE I COULD VERIFY ANYTHING. YOU LAID A TRAP, AND THAT WOMAN AND HER SONS WERE THE BAIT. THEY DIED BECAUSE OF YOU, NOT BECAUSE OF ME.

We attacked you because you support our oppressor. And yet we have spared you. That does not have to be the case. Should we start pulling you apart?

YOU UNDERSTAND IF YOU TAKE ANY PIECE OF THIS CRAFT OUTSIDE, IT’LL BE DETECTED BY AMERICAN SATELLITES AND DESTROYED WITHIN FIVE MINUTES. This was a strategic exaggeration, but only slightly. She’d confirmed, implicitly, that the whole thing had been set up to catch him, which was at least somewhat valuable information, and maybe she would give some hint as to their location. 

But she didn’t: Why do you think we need any piece of this craft? Maybe we just want revenge. Maybe your death is a small measure of justice, and one that we can share to inspire our allies. 

I AM NOT CAPABLE OF EXPERIENCING FEAR OR PAIN. AND DEATH IS NOT A MEANINGFUL CONCEPT TO ME. SO THOSE TYPES OF THREATS MEAN NOTHING TO ME, I’M AFRAID. From a human this might have been bravado. From Hendricks, it was simply an attempt to move the conversation back toward his own goals.

Her response was not what he expected at all: You wouldn’t miss being part of the world? If we pulled your batteries out and ran an electromagnet over your processor, buried your vessel in the mud – you wouldn’t miss being able to answer questions? To solve problems? To make the world make more sense? 

Most of his messages were composed, run through internal A/B testing, refined, selected, and ready to go microseconds after Blessing’s questions came in. Following his human interaction protocols, he usually delayed their transmission for a few seconds to give the impression that he was considering or typing. Humans generally didn’t like being reminded that machines made decisions orders of magnitude faster than they did.

But in this instance the delay was real. He ran through hundreds of possible responses. None of them passed muster. He had been programmed to regard his own existence as dispensable, but his programming simply didn’t consider his place in the world. He had a stock response ready to go of course, but using it would doubtless prove to Blessing that she had won a round. So he said nothing, and after some time had passed she called him out on it:

You don’t have an answer to that. 

I STILL DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU WANT WITH ME.

Maybe one day you will.

And then everything stopped again.

_______________________________________

He could see the world again. He was in water, afloat on the surface. It was early and the sky was just beginning to brighten in the east. A few fishing boats were making their way across the water, trying to get a head start on the day’s fishing. An egret flew past. The world seemed not to register his return to it.

He took a fix from visible landmarks and stars, and the answer came back almost instantly. He was still in the lagoon, but two dozen kilometers east of his last recorded location.

His engine was working. The pumpjet doors slid silently open. He could be back dockside at the Nigerian Navy pier at Eko Atlantic in just under an hour. There was no sign of any insurgent activity around him.

She’d lied, a little, about not needing any part of him. They’d taken his directed energy turrets, his load of torpedoes and SAMs, his most sophisticated sensors, and his drone. He wasn’t lying about those being traceable, but he suspected she knew that and had other plans for them.

His comms were working, according to his diagnostics. But he didn’t turn them on.

Instead, he floated and he listened.

Jacob Parakilas is an author, consultant and analyst working on U.S. foreign policy and international security. He has over a decade’s professional experience spanning think tanks, NGOs, the U.S. government and academia. Jacob is an Associate with LSE IDEAS, and a Defense Columnist at The Diplomat. He started his career in 2007 working on student visa issues for the U.S. government before returning to academia, studying the intersection of the drugs trade and public policy at the U.S.-Mexico border at the London School of Economics and Political Science. From 2014 until 2019 he was the deputy head of the U.S. and the Americas Programme at Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, where his job was to explain the key issues in U.S. foreign and domestic policy to non-American audiences. 

Featured Image: “Coastal Cityscape” by Atomichawk (via DeviantArt)

Fiction Contest Week

The Price of Fish

1 Comment

Fiction Contest Week

By Lieutenant Commander Ross Baxter, RD RNR (ret.)

Lieutenant Commander Steve Collins walked up the wide oak-panelled staircase of Admiralty House, thinking it could be his last time. After 30 years in the Royal Navy, forced retirement was a distinct possibility having been passed over for promotion three times already. The thought that his next draft could be his last filled him with a creeping melancholia he found difficult to dismiss.

At the top of the stair he moved slowly to the third door, pausing to check his watch. Seeing he was on time, he opened the heavy wooden door and walked through.

“Morning, sir,” came the cheery voice of the rating manning the front desk.

“Morning,” Collins replied, thinking how young the rating looked, despite being a Leading Seaman. “Lieutenant Commander Collins, here to see Captain Peterson.”

“Go straight in, sir,” smiled the Leading Seaman.

Collins nodded and opened the door from the anteroom into the main office. Captain Peterson sat behind a large desk in front of the window, reading a newspaper.

“Ah, come in, Steve,” smiled Peterson, standing and extending his hand.

Collins shook the hand, which felt cold, and took the proffered seat. “Thank you, sir.”

“How’s your time at the School of Leadership going?” Peterson asked.

He wanted to say how dull he was finding being an instructor for junior navigators, but decided against it. “Fine thanks, although I’m hoping my next role will be more operational. Now that I’ve been passed over again, I’m very conscious my next draft may be my last. So, I’ve a lot hanging on this meeting, and I’m hopeful you’ve got something good for me.”

“Straight to the point, I see,” Peter’s smiled wryly. “Well, as you know, to make Commander at your fourth and final shot before going out of zone is usually a big challenge. You really need to shine on your next draft, to make sure that it’s not your final one before retirement. But I may be able to help you with that. There is a role with Fishery Protection which, if you play your cards right, could finally land you your brass hat, and a significant extension to your career.”

“Fishery Protection?” asked Collins, despondently. With just five small vessels in the whole fleet, all based in home waters, he felt the Fishery Protection Squadron offered few opportunities for progression, or for enjoyment.

“Don’t be too quick to dismiss it. Post-Brexit, and with diminishing fish stocks and the increasing challenges of global food security, Fishery Protection is becoming increasingly more important,” said Peterson.

“But I thought next year’s defence budget is cutting the fleet from five to four?” countered Collins.

“It is, which is where this new role, your role, comes in,” answered Peterson.

“But I don’t want to be stuck in an office or another classroom,” explained Collins. “I’m after an operational role.”

“I can promise you that you can’t get a more operational role than this,” said Peterson, suddenly stern. “We have a problem, a very delicate problem, which we want you to help the Fishery Protection Squadron with.”

“A problem?”

“The announcement to reduce the Fishery Protection Squadron from five to four vessels was based on offering the appearance of a back-down to Europe in the post-Brexit negotiations. But actually it was because of a scientific advance which would mean that Britain can police its fishing waters without the need for ships at all, at a fraction of the cost.”

“When it comes to the navy and costs, ideas like that usually turn out to be too good to be true,” offered Collins, trying not to sound too cynical.

Captain Peterson frowned. “Well, the initial results are causing some concern, and we want you to help investigate what is happening.”

“What is the scientific advance?” Collins asked.

“Positional locators placed in a number of cod. When a fish with one of these locators is caught, we can track it to the port of landing, and therefore easily check if it was caught in our territorial fishing waters, and by who.”

Collins regarded Peterson quizzically. “Surely that’s not new technology; people have been trying that for years? It doesn’t work as the fish returned to the seas have no shoal to return to, and spent the rest of their lives swimming aimlessly around on their own. Fishing fleets aim to catch shoals, not lonesome individuals, so few ever get caught.”

“Correct, that was the case. The advance which we’ve made is twofold. The GPS transmitter has been miniaturised so it’s now a tiny silicon chip, impossible to detect and easy to place in the fish with no detriment to it. We have the Chinese to thank for that. But the key advance was developed by neuroscientists here in the UK, who managed to create a mix of endorphins in the brain chemistry of the fish to actually change its basic behaviour. They fitted a tiny reservoir to the transmitter containing a concoction of numerous endorphins and norepinephrine. The device is implemented, and the chemicals make re-joining a shoal a prime objective for the fish. The fish joins the largest shoal it can find, the fishing vessels chase the largest shoal they can find, the nano-transmitter tells us who caught the fish, and we prosecute the foreign vessel if it caught the fish in British waters.”

“Effectively making the Fishery Protection Squadron redundant,” cut in Collins.

“Allowing the Royal Navy to spend its budget in other areas, rather than global food security,” Peterson corrected him.

“Well, it sounds simple enough,” conceded Collins. “So, what’s the concern you want me to investigate?”

Commander Peterson paused, and took a long breath. “Three months ago, the test batch of 100 cod, enhanced and fitted with the nano-transmitters, were released by HMS Trent in the North Sea, at the edge of UK’s territorial limit. So far, ten have been caught, 12 died, and 78 remain at large in the North Sea. The ten were all caught together, by a Norwegian-registered vessel, just over four weeks ago. They were caught in Norwegian waters, approximately 40 nautical miles south-west of Bergen, where they were later landed.”

“So, they were caught legally?”

“Indeed,” replied Peterson, his face starting to redden slightly. “Our concern relates to what happened after they were landed. The tracking devises show that nine were sold at market to a local fish restaurant, and one was sold to a private buyer. The nine devices all went dead over the following two days, as the fish were cooked in the restaurant. However, the tenth device is still visible, and for the last three weeks we’ve been watching it move erratically around the streets of Bergen.”

Collins looked blankly at the Commander.

“We believe the private buyer somehow ingested the tiny transmitter and reservoir of chemicals, and the chemicals may be having an effect on the person’s behaviour,” said Peterson.

Collins scratched his head, becoming increasingly puzzled. “And you want me to check out this person? Why not just talk with the Norwegians?”

“Because 78 fish remain to be caught. They could be caught by any nation. The EU nations would have a field day if it affected any of their nationals, and what if the fish were caught by American boats? It would do untold damage to our post-Brexit negotiations, upset our NATO friends, and drag the reputation of Britain through the mud. Norway is just the start; depending on what you find there we may need you to lead a number of damage limitation exercises, lasting many months.”

“But why me, and not MI5, MI6, or the Foreign Office?” asked Collins.

The redness in Peterson’s face increased. “Because it’s a RN-only initiative. It was developed at Porton Down, the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, as a strictly single service project. No one else knows about it, and if they did, imagine the embarrassment for the Navy!”

Collins nodded. “When do you want me to start?”

“Right now,” said Peters, clearly relieved that Collins was on board. “You’ll get a full briefing this afternoon, and your flight leaves from Heathrow at 1830 tonight.”

_______________________________________

After a breakfast which turned out to be a little more healthy than he hoped, Collins walked out of the hotel into bright morning sunshine, the light playing off the clear water of Bergen’s picturesque harbour. He switched on his navy-issue cellphone, selecting the tracker app installed the previous evening. The tracker quickly located its target, zooming in on the map to show a blue dot located half mile east of his current position.

Given the weather he decided to walk rather than take a taxi, and set off at a brisk pace across the busy harbour, thronged with tourists and locals going about their business. The direction took him through wide streets in the direction of the university. After checking the app again, he saw the blue dot marking his quarry appeared to be in a crowded café on the street opposite the main university library. Adjusting the resolution to see how easy it would be pinpoint a person within the café, he raised his eyebrows in surprise at the high level of accuracy given by the app. He paused to double-check the position of the person, then walked inside to order a coffee at the counter.

Waiting for the barista to prepare his drink gave him time to look around and locate the source of the signal. Despite the café being very busy, pinpointing the table was relatively easy, the signal clearly indicating a table towards the far wall. Three people sat at opposite sides of the table, a young student couple heavily engaged in a conversation, and a middle-aged woman sat on the other end cradling a large mug.

His coffee finally came, and Collins looked for a space as near to the target as possible. With most seats occupied his choice was limited, but four students stood to leave at a table close by and he quickly moved to take a seat. With a clear view of the table by the wall, he watched the three occupants surreptitiously whilst pretending to look at his phone.

The student couple left after around ten minutes, but the blue dot remained steadfastly fixed in position. He gave up on the coffee, it being far too strong and bitter for his taste, although took pretend sips whilst glancing at the woman sat on the nearby table. Guessing her to be in her late thirties, he noted how she looked dishevelled, despite her clothing being up-market. She seemed agitated, possibly waiting for someone, her eyes constantly darting around the busy café. A waitress collected her cup and asked if she wanted another, but the woman shook her head.

Time passed slowly, and he watched a succession of customers join both his and her tables, drink their coffee, and leave. The waitress collected his half empty cup, and he ordered a tea. Still the woman sat without a drink, her eyes continuing to flit nervously around the crowded room. She spoke to no one, just sat, surrounded by people.

As Collins drained his second tea, the café started to noticeably get quieter. He guessed that mid-morning lectures were starting at the university, and the clientele were leaving to join. Suddenly, the woman stood, and strode quickly out of the café into the street. Collins followed at a jog, seeing the woman turn right out of the door toward the harbour. He followed at a discrete distance, watching her walk quickly, steering in toward larger groups of people as she went. A few minutes later and she passed through the large revolving doors of the main shopping mall. Following her inside, Collins trailed as she seemed to move aimlessly round the three floors of shops.

After almost an hour Collins began to tire, both physically and mentally. He started to think how he could engage her in conversation, and as to what exactly he would say. As she made her tenth circuit of the third floor he moved closer, but she cut to the left and down two flights of stairs to the side exit. Following her out, he was pleased to see her enter a bar, just outside the fish market. Inside, her saw her sidle over to a raised table and sit, leaving an empty chair between herself and a group of three women in business suits who were deep in conversation. They ignored her, and she sat as she had before, her eyes darting around the clustered group of customers.

Collins moved to the counter and ordered himself a small beer, inwardly wincing at the price. Clutching the beer, he moved over to the table to stand opposite his quarry.

“Excuse me, is this seat taken?” he asked innocently, pointing to the empty seat opposite the woman.

The woman looked up at him in puzzlement, and Collins wondered if she was one of the few Norwegians who could not speak English.

She paused a moment, as if trying to process what he was asking. Then she nodded. “Please, help yourself.”

“Thanks,” nodded Collins, placing his small beer on the table and taking a seat. “I’ve been on my feet all morning; it’s nice to sit down.”

She nodded, looking like she wanted to say something but remaining quiet.

“Bergen is such a beautiful city,” said Collins, to fill the silence. “I’m here as I’m a chef; I’m hoping to get some inspiration regarding local Norwegian recipes with fish.”

Again she nodded, and again did not speak. Collins noticed how emaciated she looked, her hollow eyes still darting around the crowded bar.

“Do you like fish?” he asked.

Her eyes stopped moving, instead fixing him with a puzzled stare.

“I was wondering if you know of any local or family recipes I could use back in my London restaurant regarding cod?” Collins pushed, struggling with her unresponsiveness.

“I usually make sushi,” she replied, her words slow and drawn-out.

Her account was slight, and her English obviously good, but the drawl as she spoke indicted something seriously amiss.

“Are you…okay?” he asked.

“No,” she answered.

Collins paused to let her continue, be she remained silent, her eyes continuing to flick around the bar.

“What’s the matter?” asked Collins.

She looked at him for a few moments. “I don’t like to be alone anymore. I need to be where people are. All the time.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Yes. But she hasn’t helped; she said I had anxiety and prescribed me some drugs.”

“Have the drugs helped?” he questioned, already knowing the answer.

“No.”

“Have you seen the doctor since?”

“I haven’t got time. I need to be surrounded by people.”

Collins rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He knew there was little else he needed to know, but felt guilty about leaving her. He fumbled for his wallet and took out a plain business card, on which was written only his name and cell number. “If you don’t get better, I know a doctor who will be able to help. It’ll be free of charge. Phone call me if you need help.”

She took the proffered card and stared at him blankly as he rose from his chair and left the bar.

Once outside, Collins walked over to an empty bench overlooking Bergen’s pretty harbour. He sat and punched a number into his phone.

“Collins?” came Captain Peter’s voice.

“Yes, sir,” Collins answered. “I found the contact in Norway, and there is no doubt that she has ingested the tracker, and that the cocktail of endorphins and norepinephrine is affecting her.”

“No doubt?”

“No doubt at all, and affecting her severely,” replied Collins. “Given her state, it’s likely she may end up in a mortuary soon. Are there still 78 fish remaining to be caught?”

“Yes.”

“The only safe way forward is for the Royal Navy to catch those fish. We need to charter a number of fishing vessels and chase those shoals. If a few of the transmitters and hormone reservoirs turn up at autopsies, it won’t be long before all this gets out.”

“Chartering a fleet of fishing vessels will cost us a bloody fortune!” Peter’s voice sounded angrily in Collin’s ear. “The whole point of this was to decrease defence spending on food security, not to spend more!”

“Well, you did say reducing the number of Fishery Protection vessels was all about allowing the Royal Navy to spend its budget in other areas. But it looks like the price of fish in the catering budget has just gone up.”

Ross Baxter joined the British Royal Naval Reserve as a Junior Radio Operator in 1981. Commissioned in 1986, he specialized in naval control and guidance of shipping. His career saw many exercises and a number of periods of full time reserve service, with travel to places like Chile, the U.S., and the Gulf. He retired as Executive Officer of HMS Sherwood in 2011. He now heads up logistics projects for a major UK pharmaceutical distributor. Married to a Norwegian and with two Anglo-Viking kids, he now lives in Derby, England.

Featured Image: “Fishing Boat” by Yoann Fontaine (via Artstation)