By H I Sutton
The horizon fell away as the tiny boat rose on the wave. For a few moments the sun caught the bow, causing it to glisten as the water streamed off. Overhead an oppressive ceiling of steely blue clouds hung ominously. Droplets rolled down the water repellent film on the Perspex windshield, momentarily distorting the view.
Sara focused intently. Her eyes flicked across the screen, scanning the endless gray sea. The sun occasionally highlighted the white crests of foam stretching out in front. Hours in, it was a challenge to remain focused.
She flinched as a fresh spray hit the camera lens.
“Got something” she blurted out.
The room sprung to life. To her right Noah swiveled in his old office chair. He reached towards her, grabbing the desk to pull himself closer, arriving at her side accompanied by the squeal of metal casters.
Someone from another team glanced across the room, and then turned back to his laptop, deep in his own mission.
Their supervisor, Mike, emerged from nowhere to peer over her left shoulder, hunching over her chair. The smell of coffee in his breath made her nostrils recoil. Her gaze did not falter, she was engrossed in the camera footage on the screen.
The dark line of the sea was rising rapidly again as the tiny boat pivoted on the crest of the wave. Now it was rolling forward into a gaping trough, which seemed ready to devour them. Deep gray tones of the impending wall of water hid the horizon and with it anything more than a few hindered yards in front.
“What was it?” Noah asked excitedly. “The carrier?”
Sara breathed in.
“Several ships. Just dots on the horizon.”
Noah sunk in his chair, deflated.
Behind him the office, really the outbuilding of an old factory which was now an improvised sea drone command center, gave off bunker vibes. It was dimly lit, contrasting with the bright daylight outside, long forgotten by its occupants. Charger cables littered the floor. The adaptors required to convert the Taiwanese plug sockets to USB threw red and green highlights on the wall.
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Sara spoke with a perfect English accent which she used to her advantage. Intelligent, savvy and sociable, she was in her element. Her pale skin shone a pale blue hue from the monitor, her oversized glasses reflecting the screen exactly. In Sara’s mind, and those of her colleagues, she was the best at this.
Mike on the other hand was the only one among them with any family ties to Taiwan. His parents were from Taitung on the east coast but had moved to Canada before he was born. He had some loyalty to the island, but his real motivation for joining the International Brigade had been adventure. Now his position as the team supervisor thrust upon him a sense of responsibility which overrode any second thoughts he might have. He was in this war for the long haul.
Noah was the quiet strength of the team. Softly spoken, slightly nerdy, and out of place in a military uniform. He wore it awkwardly, as if it were just civilian clothes. Not that any of the team really looked the part of a soldier.
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“I think we have something, here they are!” Sara almost jumped in her seat, before peering into her screen as if to see further. “Bearing 10, one moment.”
Noah and Mike were back with her, staring deeply into the monitor as the sea rose and fell before them. The process was painfully slow, a few seconds felt like minutes.
“There it is!” Noah exclaimed, eager to be the first to call it even though Sara had already seen it.
“That’s not the carrier though, looks like an escort?”
“Stabilizing the drone.” Noah turned back to his screen. Unlike Sara’s, which was dominated by the video feed, his contained all the engineering information and controls for the drone.
He flipped the switch to spin up the gyroscope which kept the boat almost exactly level as the water moved around it. At the same time the camera zoomed in on the horizon where the ships were. The picture quality was improved but they were using precious battery power.
It was Mike’s turn to offer wisdom. “That one is the carrier, that whitish blob, that’s the superstructure. It’s roughly where we were expecting it.”
The Chinese aircraft carrier, the Type-003 Fujian, was sailing slowly. Aboard its deck, crews in bright shirts run around, oblivious to the noise and wind around them, busily preparing for the next flight operations. It was China’s newest and most powerful carrier, about the same size as the U.S. Navy’s.
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“What are these smaller objects? Looks like fishing boats or something.” Sara looked across to Noah.
“They aren’t broadcasting their position. And the carrier doesn’t seem bothered by them, must be Chinese,” he responded, clicking through various apps.
“Maritime militia.” Mike’s voice floated in the background.
Mike thought through his orders, quickly assessing the situation in his mind. It was the number one priority to hit this ship and they might be the only friendly asset with a chance to do it. Their tiny robot vessel didn’t pack enough explosives to sink it, but it might be able to cause a mobility kill, or at least slow it down.
“Fire up the motor, we have enough fuel for one attack run, just. I’ll alert headquarters and keep them appraised.”
“And the fishing boats?”
“We’ll have to sail through them, we don’t have the power to go the long way around.”
“Roger,” Sara confirmed.
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Taking Risks
An hour later they were almost at the first fishing vessel. They’d sailed slowly in the hope of not standing out against the choppy surface of the water. It was getting dark, which they reasoned would count in their favor. There was no choice but to sail through the fishing vessels if they had any hope of reaching the carrier.
The entrance to the room opened with a squeak and a clang as the heavy metal door hit the hard wall.
The team turned around to see who had arrived. It was Leo, a member of another team who sometimes shared their space.
“Hi all,” he said, pausing for acceptance.
He closed the door and started to set himself up at an empty workstation. Unfolding his laptop, he wrestled with a tangle of cables and adaptors and eventually fired it up.
“It’s like the Bat Cave in here,” he volunteered.
There was still nothing of note on Sara’s screen, just gray ocean.
After a pause, “We’ll take that as a complement,” Sara responded, not looking up from the camera view.
“Have you guys heard about the strike on the shipyard at Shanghai?” Leo continued.
Without an active mission to focus on, he was hooked on a constant stream of news and social media.
“For real?” Noah spun his face toward Leo.
“Yeah, even Chinese social media is on fire with this. Looks like a cruise missile strike, maybe the promised Storm Shadows have arrived.”
“Big if true. If Taiwan can hit that, what else can they hit?”
“But why that?” Sara chipped in. She generally had the most strategic mind of their team, looking for the big picture.
The nuance of her question was lost on Leo. “A warning?” he offered lamely.
“Seems a bit late for warnings,” Sara responded. “Thousands of ballistic missile strikes over every inch of Taiwan, cruise missiles, even the attempted landings last week. It’s great that we can hit a strategic target in China, but I’m not getting why they went for something with no immediate impact on the tons of ordnance incoming every day.”
“Listen to this,” Leo interrupted, “this was written on Weibo two minutes ago by the CCP spokesperson.”
“Go on,” Mike interjected enthusiastically.
“No!” Sara screamed. She turned to Leo, looking away from her screen for the first time in 20 minutes. This was bad, they had let an idiot into their Bat Cave.
“How do you know this, Leo?”
“Weibo, it’s Chinese social media,” Leo didn’t know what her problem was but his instinct told him to defend himself.
“No. Not where. How? This is a no phones space. There’s no signal here and your laptop sure as hell shouldn’t be on Weibo”
“No I’m not accessing it via the laptop, of course not.”
Sara cut him off, “your phone?”
“Yes, Wi-Fi.”
“We don’t have Wi-Fi, we are not that stupid.”
“Yes you do, the Taipei Resistance Network.”
The others in the team now also turned to look at Leo. For a moment their mission was at the back of their minds.
“You f…” Mike bit his lip. He now realized what Sara had a few moments ago. He normally tried to sit inter-team squabbles out, to inevitably reinforce his senior position by playing peacemaker. But this was much worse, a possible security breach.
“Ok,” he continued, taking a deep breath.
Leo’s face went pale. His defense became weak and whimpering.
Sara checked her screen. No change. Then turned back to Leo.
“You realize that you are putting us all at risk?! Chinese fifth columnists use Wi-Fi to search for international volunteers, they map our locations and feed it to the Chinese missile forces. The Chinese can process tons of phone data in an instant. Now their AI has your location, most likely.”
She glared at him. Leo started to pack his gear away again.
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The Approach
The sea drone inched past the stern of the first fishing boat. Each minute passed like an hour.
“It’s too close,” Sara whispered to Mike, her voice trembling.
They all felt the pressure. It wasn’t just the mission, or the greater cause, there was a personal attachment to the sea drone. Sara was invested in this little craft, bobbing up and down in the Western Pacific.
Its discovery and inevitable destruction would feel like dying. Despite the hundreds of miles in distance, her mind, her heart, was as if it were in that vessel. Virtual reality was becoming their reality.
It must not die. It must survive! At least on the level of the real-life video game which was playing out in real time on Sara’s laptop.
“Alfred’s doing fine,” she said matter of factly.
Mike looked at her blankly. They hadn’t named the sea drone. There was no policy, the topic had never come up in briefings.
To the Navy, to the International Brigade staff, and to the planners without insignia who Mike only pretended to know where they were from, these drones were just tools, nameless objects. But to the team it had become more. All of them were becoming attached to two tons of fiberglass and marine alloy.
“Alfred’s doing fine,” he repeated returning to the screen.
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Sara expected to see a face pop up over the transom of the fishing boat, glowing in the infrared of the night camera, to look at them. How had no one spotted them yet?
She turned to Mike, the stress visible on both their faces.
He nodded.
She turned back to her screen, leaning forward as if to see further.
“It’s uncrewed!” Noah volunteered from the sidelines.
They both turned to him. Sara dared not admit to herself that she’d forgotten he was there.
“There was no sign of any heat signature. There isn’t any movement. It’s because there isn’t anyone aboard.”
“Could be abandoned?” Mike asked.
“Noah is making sense,” Sara concluded.
Mike reached over and took control of her mouse. Scrolling the wheel frantically, the camera pitched up towards the fishing vessel’s mast.
The usual tangle of ropes, cables, and metal brackets.
“There!” Mike trumpeted, pointing to a gray blob on the screen.
All three leaned in, their heads touching. Beneath his finger was a camera ball just like on the sea drone.
“It’s not looking this way, it’s looking away. Dead ahead.”
“Conserving energy, sleep mode,” Sara finished for him. It was exactly what their drone did most of the day, wait for the call of action.
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The three hatched a plan. If the maritime militia vessels were indeed uncrewed, and if their camera were fixed in sleep mode, they could slip through by passing each vessel close astern.
Slowly, methodically, they weaved their way through the ghost fleet. They could only hope, pray, that none of the cameras would spot them.
As they cleared the last vessel they exchanged glances.
“Ok, last check on fuel, batteries, communications?” Mike asked.
“All good, it’s three nautical miles or as good as, which in these sea conditions is six minutes. No sign of signal interference,” Noah replied.
“Good to go!”
Sara smiled as Noah kicked the motor into full drive. Their tiny boat lurched forward purposely as the jet ski engine revved up again and started to power towards the carrier. The bow lifted and it started to plane, skating on the water.
Noah leant in over Sara’s shoulder, his arm still reaching across to his own desk, trying to adjust the power as they hit each wave.
The camera was shaking. Each time they launched themselves off a wave crest they crashed into the next wave which slapped the bottom of the hull, momentarily interrupting the camera feed. It was Noah’s job to get them there in one piece.
White splashes started to appear around them, someone on the Chinese carrier had seen them coming. The fire was sporadic and uncoordinated, but it would only get more and better as the carrier’s weapons systems spun up.
Sara quickly spun the camera around and then up and down to see if there were any escorts nearby. Not that it would change their plan now. There was nothing. A single bright orange helicopter was behind the carrier, a sign of air operations being underway. The carrier was now close enough that they could easily see the aircraft on the deck. But with the camera shaking more than the image-stabilization could keep up with, it was hard to make out details.
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The Race Against Time
Suddenly there was disturbing sound in the background. The whaling of air raid sirens was never welcome.
Mike listened to decode the tones. This wasn’t a regular siren, there were sections of clear tones with pauses, like a church bell counting the hours. He took a moment to process it.
“It’s a two-minute warning! That is close!” His voice was shaky.
“We need 1 minute and” Mike paused “28 seconds.”
“We need to get out of here,” Mike said firmly.
“We are in a shelter, this is where the locals come in a typhoon. It is the safest place around,” Noah protested, still focused on his task controlling the boat’s engine.
“It’s too close, this isn’t a general alarm. And it is super short, it must be a DF-17 hypersonic missile or something,” his voice was almost shouting.
“Leo! That idiot!”
“Give us a minute, let us do this! It might be the only chance anyone gets!” Sara said calmly
“Are you willing to die?” Mike challenged.
“Let us do this.”
“Ok, but I’m hauling us outta here the moment we hit.”
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The incoming fire was getting fiercer. The ship’s close-in weapon systems, 30-millimeter gatling guns, snaked rounds towards them. Sara and Noah adjusted, trying to zig-zag without losing too much speed.
“Aiming for the stern,” Sara’s voice was still calm, controlled.
“20 seconds,” Mike updated.
The incoming fire was less now, they were so close that it was mostly going over their heads.
The carrier was almost over top of them, the huge flight deck overhanging the hull replaced the clouds as the ceiling. This close the wash from the ship was making it harder to make forward progress. Sara and Noah instinctively adjusted to the situation, trying to keep on target.
5 seconds.
Alfred made one last turn towards the target, Noah pushed the throttle fully forward so that the gray hull filled the camera view.
The camera went blank. Communication lost.
“We did it!” Sara yelled.
Before she could do anything more, a force lifted her out of her chair.
Mike was pulling on her chair and, looping her arm yanked her backwards towards the door. The chair fell on the floor as she scrambled to turn and run with him. Noah was at their side.
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The explosion of the drone cut a large hole in the stern of the carrier. Much more, it shook the machinery space, mangling some of the rudder controls and causing a leak in one of the propeller shaft seals. The carrier was far from out of the fight, but its mobility was reduced and its position now known to the defenders.
Back on the outskirts of Taipei the volunteers were running from the Bat Cave. A massive explosion knocked them to the floor. The roof of the building disappeared in an instant collapsing inwards and crushing all below it.
The three lay there, disorientated, unable to move.
“It was a bunker buster, the Bat Cave was the target. They knew we were there!” Mike offered eventually. His speech was interrupted with coughs and gasps for breath.
“Thank god they are so accurate,” Sara noted.
They tried to laugh. It hurt physically but mentally fear was giving way to relief.
“We shouldn’t be here,” she added. “Our next Bat Cave should be in another country, somewhere out of range of the missiles. We could literally be anywhere on earth with StarLink coverage.”
“Yeah, somewhere China isn’t going to bomb for political reasons.”
“Somewhere they cannot reach,” Sara concluded.
They were still lying on the ground, eyes closed, chests heaving. Yet a plan was starting to come together for their next mission. “We could literally be doing this from anywhere, there’s no need for us to be sitting here within missile range.”
“How’s Alfred?”
“Alfred’s dead.”
H I Sutton writes about the secretive and under-reported submarines, seeking out unusual and interesting vessels and technologies involved in fighting beneath the waves. Submarines, capabilities, naval special forces underwater vehicles, and the changing world of underwater warfare and seabed warfare. To do this he combines the latest Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) with the traditional art and science of defense analysis. He occasionally writes non-fiction books on these topics and draws analysis-based illustrations to bring the subject to life. His personal website about these topics is Covert Shores (www.hisutton.com)
Featured Image: Art created with Midjourney AI.
