Chapter 337: USS Harry S. Truman

Monday, April 16, 2007 (Continued)

At 4pm I detached myself from the boat and headed closer to the shore to find a computer to use. I hadn't done enough research about the military bases in the area, so it was time for me to do some more googling before people got home from work.

I found a seaside house with a couple of computers that I could use, so I browsed away. I used Google Earth on one of them, and noticed that Hampton Roads was only fifteen miles away from where I was now. If I remembered correctly, and I usually do, there's a big naval base in the misleadingly named Hampton Roads.

A quick google confirmed that there was a BIG naval base there. Naval Station Norfolk is apparently the largest naval base in the world, so it certainly qualified as "big". Reading about that led me to the information that several nuclear-powered aircraft carriers were homeported there. I knew the Navy considered their nuclear carriers to be incredibly important, so fucking with one of those would be a VERY effective shot across the US Government's bows.

From Wikipedia:

• USS Enterprise (CVN-65). Stationed at Norfolk and, "Currently surge-ready ahead of a deployment later in the year."

• USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70). "Her 2005 World Cruise concluded with a homeport change to Norfolk, Virginia for a Refueling and Complex Overhaul, which includes refueling her nuclear reactors. She will return to sea duty in 2009."

• USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71). "On 7 March 2007 the Roosevelt began a nine month Planned Incremental Availability in Norfolk, which will see the addition of RAM missiles among other upgrades."

• USS George Washington (CVN-73). "She entered Norfolk Naval Shipyard for a Planned Incremental Availability in September [2006] to prepare for her upcoming homeport transfer to Yokosuka [in 2008]."

• USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75). "Left Norfolk Naval Shipyard in December of 2006 and is currently in a training cycle to prepare for surge capability beginning in April of 2007."

("CVN" is a classification code for ship hulls. "C" codes for "Carrier"; "V" for "voler", which is French for "to fly"; "N" for "Nuclear powered". The number suffix is incremented chronologically as each ship is built.)

It appeared that I'd have my choice of targets. There was also a shit load of other ships homeported at Norfolk: cruisers, destroyers, frigates, submarines and God knows how many others.

Then I discovered another delightful little fact. Slightly farther into the inlet was Newport News where our latest Aircraft Carrier was being constructed: the USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77). (What's with "Roads" and "News"? Didn't "Port" or "Harbor" occur to the namers?) Construction of CVN-77 started in 2001, delivery is due next year and commissioning in 2009. It had a construction budget of less than $6 billion, which seemed surprisingly cheap to me, but maybe I've been spoiled by MAF's big numbers. Regardless of its cost, I decided we didn't need a mega-sized ego-testament to the Bush dynasty, so it'd have to go.

I didn't think I'd have any trouble sneaking into the navy's yards. Obviously the water was deep enough for aircraft carriers, so I'd be able to stay deep enough to be out of sight of anyone on the surface. If they did see me, the Air Force uniform I was still wearing should confuse them (haha). I'd be quiet, careful, and try not to collide with any submarines. I'm joking about that, as of the dozen SSN's homeported at Norfolk, most would be out on missions, and if one of the few still here did move, it would have to do so on the surface in these shallow and busy waters.

If I was discovered, I thought it'd most likely be from emplaced sensors or maybe Navy frogmen during an exercise. The carriers might even have a permanent guard of frogmen swimming around them, but I could search the water VERY quickly and easily with a sight blob, and I only needed to get within 450 feet of my target to do anything, so I didn't expect much of a problem. And if there was a problem, fifteen seconds later I can be at 10,000 feet doing 600 mph.

I spent a couple of minutes reading up on A4W reactors, the nuclear reactors used in all the carriers except for the old Enterprise. There wasn't much information available (of course), but it gave me an overview to think about for the next couple of hours. If I decided I wanted to sabotage one of them, I presumed I could get all the highly detailed information I'd need by reading the maintenance manuals inside the carrier itself.

I checked ABC's website to see if there was anything interesting. My resurrection offer was prominently featured, but didn't contain anything interesting other than a comment that the media were being refused access to Andrews AFB.

I exited the browsers, moved out to deeper water, and motored north around the cape then west toward the naval base.

I took it slow, starting at 15 mph and slowing to 10 as I neared the inlet. I raised a sight blob high in the air, and it could see three carriers tied up at dock about three miles from me. I smiled to myself.

There was so much water traffic that I wasn't the least concerned about my submarine making detectable noise. There were so many noise sources that they'd never pick out the slight swishing that I might make. I doubted I made much, if any noise, because my submarine had a streamlined shape and no engine.

My only real risk was in being picked up on some sort of underwater video surveillance. I had no idea whether the navy used such things, but it was easy to check for: I just kept a max-sized sight blob farther ahead of me than the water had visibility range. The water was so murky that the visibility range was shorter than the diameter of my sight blob, so it'd be impossible for anything to see me before I saw it. If my invisible blob saw a camera housing of any sort, I'd easily be able to stop before it saw me.

I waited for a moderately large incoming boat, checked to make sure it didn't have any worrisome sensors protruding from its hull, then positioned myself twenty feet directly under it. I kept formation as we passed over the tunnel part of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel (a public vehicular road across the mouth of the inlet), and proceeded farther into the harbor.

I accompanied the boat as it motored down the main channel, leaving it at its point of nearest approach to the carriers, about one mile away from them. I cautiously headed toward the nearest one, going only 4 or 5 mph at 30-foot of depth, with a max-sized sight blob looking for anything ahead of me, and with another blob quite high above the water, looking down for anything suspicious, including any trace of myself, which there wasn't. Apart from the three HUGE aircraft carriers, the only thing of note was a net strung around the piers. It was about six hundred feet out from the ends of the piers, suspended from floating buoys and a few more substantial fixed points. (Actually, not "fixed", as they could be towed aside to let the ships in and out.) The location of the net was annoying, as it would've been SO MUCH easier if they'd strung it only three hundred feet out!

My caution proved unnecessary, as there were no incidents all the way to the net. Well before I got within visibility range of it, I paused and sent a sight blob to check it carefully.

The thick, metal cables were spaced too close together for me to pass through the holes. I sent a sight blob into a buoy, and saw that it contained electronics, so it was a great deal more than an ordinary net. Looking carefully, I was sure the buoy contained a sound sensor. It certainly wasn't a sight sensor, as there was too much marine life growing on its cover.

The cables themselves didn't appear to be anything other than ordinary steel cables. They might contain a copper cable in the core that would break a circuit and set off an alarm if cut, but the outside of the steel cables appeared to have no 'intelligence' of any sort. There was plant growth on the cables, fish life was nibbling on it or just swimming around so they sometimes made contact with a cable, etc. I was pretty sure I could touch the cables with NP-fingertips if I wanted to, especially because NP-fingertips have no mass and are therefore perfect insulators.

At the bottom of the net there was slack, which pleased me. I'd thought there'd be slack for when the tide came in, but it was good to see it confirmed. The bottom of the net made a bundle on the seabed, the strands of which banged against each other when waves on the surface caused the net to bob up and down. That movement was obviously acceptable to the Navy, so if I lifted up the bottom of the net and slid under it, no alarms should go off.

I tested that hypothesis by moving about 300 feet away, then using some NP-fingertips (formed on the surface and quietly submerged and moved to where needed) to raise the net off the bottom to make a large enough gap for me to glide through. I held it open for fifteen seconds, then gently put it down.

I waited, searching for any reaction. No underwater explosions occurred, the water wasn't suddenly full of frogmen, the skies weren't full of helicopters. Every destroyer and frigate didn't suddenly come screaming toward the suspect net. It was life as normal.

While looking around for frogmen I discovered a string of sensors placed along the bottom, parallel to the net line, but a dozen feet out into deeper water. I couldn't determine what they were doing as the manufacturer had annoyingly not labeled them properly, and moving a sight blob into one of them couldn't make out anything that gave me a clue. It was too packed with circuitry for me to make sense of it.

There was no external sensor, so they didn't appear to be sound or pressure detectors. They had a plastic casing, which made me suspect that they were some sort of electromagnetic sensor. The casing wasn't transparent, so it wasn't a camera housing, but I knew that already as I would've recognized one of those during my internal inspection.

My two guesses were:

1. They detected metal (such as a scuba diver's tanks) by the moving magnetic field.

2. They detected the electrical activity inside nearby living creatures. That theory was more science-fiction than real, I hoped.

I did have some metal with me, from the Air Force uniform and security badge. If the sensors did detect moving metal, they couldn't be ultra-sensitive about it or the nearby waving net would be setting them off. Nonetheless, I decided to ditch the uniform. I'd been hoping to keep it for possible future use, but I didn't care enough to take the risk.

If they detected the electricity of life, then fish life must be a problem. If I passed thirty feet over the sensors, surely they'd pick up less of my electricity than they'd get from a fish one inch away. The mystery sensors were laid in a straight line, while the net arched inshore between the buoys because of the current flow. For my penetration I'd use one of the midway places where the net arched the most. I'd pass high over the mystery sensor until I got near the net, then descend to the bottom before lifting the net and sliding into the protected area.

I kept searching around the area, waiting for any reaction to my experimental lifting of the net. After fifteen minutes there'd still been no reaction, so I removed the Air Force boots, uniform and badge, putting them in a small box that I detached from my submarine. To avoid a sudden burst of air bubbles underwater - because that'd surely sound like a diver - I sent the box up to the surface before canceling the NP-points. The boots and badge sank immediately, the clothes floated like all the other pollution on the water's surface.

I located a place where the net bowed inward nicely, and headed for that. I passed over the line of mystery sensors just as I'd planned, about thirty feet above the nearest one, descending to the bottom again just before reaching the net.

I waited for several minutes, looking for any reaction to my passing the mystery sensors. There was none, so I used NP-fingertips to lift the bottom of the net and slip inside, lowering it slowly behind me. I breathed a sigh of relief at having overcome (undercome?) the tricky part so easily.

^

[[Underwater port security was a LOT better than I gave it credit for.

The good news was that the "mystery sensors" I'd been so worried about were the least of my worries. They were magnetic anomaly detectors, and were virtually useless against anything smaller than a four-man submarine as they need a lot of metal to set them off.

The net and its attached sonar-buoys were reasonably high-tech. Cutting the net would've set off alarms because each cable had a fiber optic core, and my making the wrong sorts of sounds would've caused an alert too.

Highest tech of all was IASS, the Integrated Anti-Swimmer System. It's a Coast Guard, anti-diver, ultrasound weapons system. It has three components, all of which were mounted on the end of every second pier and at the end of the breakwater 1,300 feet to the north:

1. A sonar system. Each unit had a range of about 1,500 feet. They overlapped considerably to provide accurate triangulation in three dimensions.

2. Underwater loudspeakers which could be used to broadcast messages like, "You are ordered to surface immediately or we will use lethal force."

3. An underwater shockwave emitter to stun any divers in the area. It's meant to be non-lethal, but unconscious people relax, including relaxing their mouths. For an underwater diver, dropping his oxygen-supplying mouthpiece means his next breath is nothing but water, so the weapon's non-lethal nature quickly becomes a moot point.

The second and third items were fairly simple, so extra units were installed in the port's first response security boats. The key to the system is the highly sophisticated first item. In a busy harbor, it had to be sophisticated to filter out all the various types of boat and natural marine life noise. It was highly intelligent, able to differentiate a swimming man from a swimming seal, regardless of whether the man was on the surface or beneath it, using a snorkel, scuba or rebreather system. With several sonar units operating (as was the case at Norfolk), and sending their data back to a central control room, the resultant information display was very much like that of an air traffic controller's radar. The operators could watch a diver moving through a 3D plot in real-time. The Navy's own divers had been unable to fool it in several penetration tests.

Fortunately I hadn't been swimming; I'd been lying flat and still inside an airtight box. The highly sensitive sonar units couldn't have picked up the sounds of my kicking, because I hadn't been. Even more powerfully, they couldn't have picked up the sound of anything, not even my breathing or heartbeat, because I had been inside a SOUNDPROOF box. That totally negated the effectiveness of the passive sonar microphones they had listening for suspicious sounds. If they had gotten suspicious and had used active sonar to ping me, they would have got an extremely clear result as the water-air interface acts like a mirror to sound. As they had several sonar units, they would have known my position exactly. I was safe from the acoustic weapon they had, as its sound would have bounced off my box just like the active sonar would have, but upon seeing such a clear active sonar return from my 'sub', their Plans B, C, D, E, etc., would have made things unpleasantly lively for me. It was a good thing they didn't use active sonar unless something made them suspicious first.]]

^

I was about 750 feet northwest of the closest corner of the closest carrier, so I had to move at least 300 feet closer. Probably more, as the carrier was 1,100 feet long and I didn't know where in it the nuclear reactors were (carriers have two). Probably in the middle or somewhat sternward of that, I thought.

I slowly moved closer, searching ahead of me very carefully for any more security measures, and not finding any. About 400 feet from the carrier, I stopped, holding myself against the bottom so I could spend some time searching the area even more carefully. I started with whatever portion of the hull and pier I had the range for.

I very quickly found several things I didn't like the look of (I didn't know what it was, but they were the components of the Integrated Anti-Swimmer System, as well as underwater surveillance cameras around the ship). The cameras and speakers were easily recognized, but the other units were more confusing. Plus I was confused by the speakers, as I couldn't imagine a use for them. The biggest piece of unrecognizable equipment looked like half a depth charge, which seemed an unusual thing to mount on the end of a pier right next to an aircraft carrier.

I looked inside it, and there was lots of electronics. There was also a transducer (it had "transducer" written on it), which I knew was a type of underwater microphone. I made a mental note to keep my singing to a minimum.

There was no sign of any reaction occurring on the surface (I had one sight blob up there), so I stayed where I was and kept searching the pier, the carrier's hull (outside and inside), and the intervening seabed.

The carrier was the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75), the most modern of all the carriers that could've been here, according to Wikipedia. It was supposed to have just finished being made fully ready to go to sea again. Its presumed readiness would hopefully be a problem shortly.

To describe the geography of the situation, the piers were like the horizontal bars of the letter "E", except that there were over a dozen of them and they poked out to the west rather than east, i.e., rotate the "E" 180 degrees clockwise. The USS Harry S. Truman was tied up inside (south) of the northernmost pier, with another carrier tied up north of the next pier south, so there was a narrow gap between them (300 feet, which is narrow compared to the size of the carriers).

If the reactors were in the middle of the 1,100-foot long ship, then my needing to be within 400 feet of them was a problem. I didn't want to swim directly under one of the carriers. I knew modern warships had automatic guns that could shoot down incoming missiles traveling faster than Mach one, so I'd hate to have to take off right next to several such ships if I was detected, and swimming right under one of them surely maximized the chance of that.

Fortunately the solution was fairly easy (I hoped). I'd come at the ship from the north, from above the top of the "E". The pier was 150 feet wide, and the carrier about 200 feet wide (actually less at the water line, but I had to allow for how far it was being held away from the pier). It was likely that the reactors were less than 150 feet from the pier, so I could come in about 100 feet north of the "E", traveling east along it and searching the carrier's hull until I found the reactors.

By being 100 feet north of the pier, the underwater cameras wouldn't see me as visibility was a dozen feet at best. I hoped that any other detection systems or defenses wouldn't be focused on anyone that far away. I'd have to get somewhat closer to the transducer than I was now, but it hadn't detected me yet, judging by the lack of reaction. I was 300 feet away from it now, and I could loop north and east before moving south to approach the carrier again, thereby avoiding getting within 250 feet of it. By moving even more slowly and keeping my fingers quietly crossed, I thought I was safe from being detected.

I searched the seabed in the direction I was now intending to go. Recalling that mines can be suspended on cables to either float on the surface or be held at any fixed depth, so sensors could be too, I carefully searched the surface, the volume of water I'd be passing through, and the seabed I'd be passing over.

Other than boats going about their business on the surface, there was no sign of anything worrying. No more mystery sensors, no frogmen, no anything except lots of dirty water, so I slowly arced north and around the transducer. I only had about 750 feet to go to get into a good position to start my search of the ship itself, so even at a mere 1 mph, it only took me ten minutes to get to the point 100 feet above the "E" and about 200 feet along it. There'd been no reaction, I'd searched very carefully while I moved and had seen nothing, and the transducer didn't seem interested in me.

The carrier was parked bow forward, ready to steam out easily. It was nearly as long as the pier, so my being 200 feet along the pier meant I was about 100 feet back from the front of the carrier. The flight deck protrudes forward, so I was north of a very narrow part of the forward bow. I'd already searched this part of the ship and there were no nuclear reactors in it.

I moved fifty feet east, checking the surface, water and seabed around me carefully. Then I stopped on the bottom and used the two sight blobs to cover the three locations I wanted to keep an eye on:

1. Above the surface. Very important because that's where any reaction would first be noticeable.

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