Survival (Sobrevivência): A Lowell Story, #2

Prologue

The city of Lowell, Massachusetts is most easily identified from the air by a series of awkward twists in the course of the Merrimack River.  These twists came into being at the end of the last glacial period, when the river was diverted from its original course by several large mounds of debris, carried northward and dropped here by the retreating ice sheet.  These mounds of debris now account for much of the city’s topography.  On its present course, the river encounters a 32-foot drop as it meets the boundary of the Avalonian tectonic plate.  This plate was split in half around 400 million years ago, with one part drifting west and underlying much of eastern New England, and the other drifting east to become the foundation of the British Isles.  The 32-foot drop, now called Pawtucket Falls, is the original basis for the city's existence, as the first large-scale manufacturing site in the nation.  The network of canals, built to deliver water power to the textile mills, still exists, and is the next feature of the city which becomes visible as we descend.

Approaching closer, now taking a bird's-eye view, we can clearly see the streets and buildings of the city center.  It is December, and winter has just begun to tighten its grip on the city.  The snow accumulating at the edges of the streets will remain there until late March, by which time it will have turned rock-hard, its pristine whiteness turned to smoky grey.  Looking closer still, we see a young dark-haired woman walk briskly along Middlesex Street, holding her coat tightly against the chill.  It would be easy to overlook her among the many people hurrying along the sidewalks on this weekday morning.  Most of these people are, for now, blissfully unaware that if not for this young woman, the Earth would at this moment be a lifeless ball of rock, as dead as its moon.  With our bird's-eye view, we see her make a number of brief stops: at small churches, community centers, and a number of new shops and businesses that have sprung up in the city in the last few months.  Most of these new businesses are here because of this woman, and she is part or sole owner of some of them.

Her errands finished for the moment, she walks up Chapel Hill, the site of a crowded Irish neighborhood in the 19th century, and of a large Brazilian population in the 21st.  Her destination is a modest three-story wooden building at the top of the hill.

Her name is Beatrisa De Souza, and she is an ‘undocumented’ immigrant from Brazil, having arrived here in Lowell with her mother and sister when she was a child.  As recently as two years ago the limitations and frustrations of her undocumented status were a daily irritant.  Now, they are utterly irrelevant.  She has not obtained a green card or social security number for herself, although she could have easily done so, and has done for many of her friends and neighbors.  The three-story building is her base of operations, where she provides free classes in English, computer programming and other useful subjects for the local Brazilian community.  It is also the de facto headquarters of a rapidly growing multinational corporation, with seemingly unlimited financial resources and extensive and rather mysterious operations throughout Brazil and elsewhere.

Her numerous errands today, as varied as they might seem, are all devoted to a single desperately important goal: the continued survival of the human species on Earth.  But in spite of the urgency of her tasks, Beatrisa habitually walks, though she could easily move herself from place to place in the blink of an eye.  She shivers in the cold wind as she walks, though she could easily surround herself with tropical warmth wherever she goes.  She does things in this way because she does not wish to ever forget what it used to be like to be a human being.

Chapter 1 : Insult to Injury

CPO Dennis Brown slowly woke up, his head throbbing in pain.  As his mind cleared, he became aware of other sensations.  He felt the cold steel plate of the deck pressing against his face, and a sticky wetness that he strongly suspected was his own blood.  Things only got worse when he sat up and looked around.  There was the missile tube which he had been inspecting, its hatch still open.  CPO Brown jumped to his feet, which was a mistake, since he became dizzy from pain and loss of blood, and nearly passed out again.  He realized then that he had two different head wounds, one in the back where Ensign Stone had struck him with a heavy object (most likely the wrench which he saw on the floor nearby), and one on his forehead, evidently from falling face first onto the deck of the submarine.

Tending his wounds, no matter how severe they might be, was not even close to being a high priority at this moment.  After the dizziness passed, he rushed over to the open missile tube, climbed the stepladder and peered in. The inner cover had been removed, and there was the Trident missile, right where it should be, just like the other 23 in the ‘Missile House’, the huge compartment at the center of the submarine where all of the Tridents were stored, ready for launching.  However, this one was missing part of its payload: of the five MIRV warheads, each one carrying a 10 megaton hydrogen bomb, only four were visible.  Panic and bewilderment sprang up at the same time: what sense did this make?  Stealing nuclear warheads from a submarine while in port, maybe.  While it would be extraordinarily difficult to do, at least you could visualize somebody attempting it.  But the USN Appleton had set out from the Point Loma base three weeks ago, and no one except the Captain and a handful of officers even knew where they were or what course they were on.  What good would it do to steal something that size when you couldn’t take it anywhere, and had no way of knowing exactly where you were?

CPO Brown immediately pulled the alarm, and called the control deck on the intercom to tell them what had happened, at least to the extent that he knew.  In the back of his mind, he was half hoping that this had all been some sort of drill, some particularly brutal psychological exercise.  He knew that they occasionally tested all seamen who had anything to do with the missiles, to make certain that they would do their duty if the order was received to fire the missiles.  But if this were such an exercise, it was pretty extreme, since Brown might have died from his injuries, or suffered permanent brain damage.  And what would they be testing for in any case?  Was it part of an enlisted seaman’s duties to be constantly on the alert for officers going psycho?  And the aftermath was a no-brainer: any idiot would know what to do.

In the thirty seconds or so that it took for a security team to arrive at the House, CPO Brown had time to contemplate a series of progressively more outlandish possibilities.  Obviously Ensign Stone had gone bonkers, taken the warhead out of the missile, and dragged it somewhere, and although it wasn’t immediately visible, it would take no more than ten minutes to locate it wherever it was on the submarine.  But Brown could not help considering the consequences if, impossibly, the warhead could not be found.  He would be in deep shit, of course, along with everyone else who had signed off on these inspections.  Which was, of course, a small matter compared with the consequences of a nuclear weapon gone missing.

Although the ship’s time was 3:00 AM, Brown was not surprised to see the Captain rush in with the security detail.  Captain Eduardo Ramos had a reputation on board, which was variously described as meticulous, nitpicking, worry wart, anal-retentive, and so on.  Clearly, he was a light sleeper as well.  He was not offended by any of these labels: on the contrary, he reveled in them.  Ferocious attention to detail was what had gotten him this far in the United States Navy, and in the opinion of many, would take him farther still.  He had many mottos to express his attitudes toward his work, and one of them was ‘no unexamined assumptions’.  This stemmed from his student years at UCLA, earning his Bachelor's degree in Mathematics while in the Navy ROTC program.  ‘No unexamined assumptions’ might not look so good on a bumper sticker, but he found it a powerful tool for dealing with complex situations.

And there were few situations as inherently complex as the command of a ‘boomer’, a submarine carrying a cargo of global nuclear apocalypse, which spent most of its time in deep water, its location undetectable by those whom its purpose was to terrify.  If the order to fire the missiles was ever received, it meant that the unthinkable had occurred, and nuclear war was under way.  But it was the duty, and daily routine, of everyone on board to be constantly prepared for the unthinkable, and it was the Captain’s duty to anticipate anything, anything at all, that might impede the prompt firing of the missiles if the order was received.  It put him in the position of carefully weighing a variety of bizarre possibilities numerous times during the course of a typical day.

Two hours after the call from CPO Brown, Ramos’ command had become considerably more complex than usual.  He had, of course, immediately ordered an exhaustive search of the submarine.  The warhead was nowhere to be found.  There was also no sign of Ensign Stone.  There was nothing lacking in the search protocols.  This was no idle look-around: inspection of  the boat was a carefully thought out and frequently practiced procedure.  There were simply no places to hide on board, and no way that the search teams could possibly overlook a warhead out of place.

The Captain applied Occam's Razor: if there are multiple explanations for an event, the most credence should be given to the one requiring the least radical assumptions.  Whether or not CPO Brown was telling the truth, the facts in evidence demonstrated that there was someone on board who could not be trusted.  Therefore, after the first sweep turned up nothing, the Captain ordered redundant searches, rotating the search teams to different parts of the sub, each team making a complete video record of every search.  The Captain watched the live video feeds from all the teams while they were searching.

Again, nothing: no warheads, no Ensign Stone.  Captain Ramos personally made a meticulous search of the engine room and the House.  They seemed the most likely places to hide a warhead, since a Geiger counter might not be able to pick it out from the background radiation in these areas.  Aside from an odd sensation of blurred vision while in the House, his personal inspections told him nothing new.

The situation looked bad for CPO Brown.  Occam's Razor said that the warhead had been missing before they left port, and that Brown had falsified his inspection records.  Most likely, Brown had been duped or otherwise victimized by whoever had taken the warhead: if he was actually a part of the conspiracy, why would he have now put himself in this position?  It was all highly disturbing.  A submarine, especially a Boomer that spends months under the sea, is a small, isolated society in which everyone gets to know everyone else very well.  Captain Ramos had the highest regard for Brown, and his record was exemplary, or else he would never have been assigned to missile duty.  If something had gone wrong in Brown's life (a family member being held hostage by terrorists, for example), he had hidden it remarkably well from his shipmates.

Then there was the matter of Ensign Stone.  Clearly, a missing warhead, capable of killing half a million civilians, was a much more important matter than one missing officer.  But according to Brown's story, Stone had attacked him during an inspection of that missile tube.  His head wounds were certainly consistent with his story, although that would not be enough to save Brown from a court-martial.  At any rate, the Captain was obligated to weigh the possibility that Stone’s disappearance and the missile’s were connected in some way. 

Ensign Stone had been a mystery from the outset.  This was his first sail on this submarine.  He was a last minute replacement for Lieutenant Barnes, who had been hospitalized with pneumonia while on shore leave.  Stone had arrived with sealed orders, which designated him as a new trainee.  A scrambled call to Admiral Potts at Fleet Operations confirmed that these orders were legitimate. 

A new ensign would normally be considered a burden on the crew for the first six months or so, but Stone was the exception.  A very small and wiry man, he was tireless, remarkably strong, and learned the ship's operations faster than anyone Ramos had ever seen.  However, he did not seem to mix well with the other officers or with the seamen.  Stone came across as cold and humorless, with an intensity that most people found either intimidating or annoying.  And something else bothered the captain:  Stone really was small: aside from his face, he appeared more like a child than an adult.  Someone like that, going through OCS training, would have drawn a great deal of attention, and yet no one on board had ever heard of Stone.

And now Stone was missing, and according to Brown's account, he had something to do with the disappearance of the warhead.  In fact, Stone's disappearance was the only evidence supporting Brown's story.  There was no question that Stone had been aboard the Appleton, and now no trace of him could be found.  Of course, it was a little more believable that a person could evade search teams than that a nuclear warhead could be moved around quickly.  So perhaps Stone was still on board, had attacked Brown, and was hiding, for reasons yet to be determined.  Even so, it was still most likely that the warhead had disappeared from the sub before it left port, since there was no way that it could have been removed from the sub while it was underwater, and it clearly did not appear to be on the sub now.

The Appleton was ordered to return to base immediately.  This gave Captain Ramos a few days to learn as much as he could while they were still physically isolated from the outside world.  Remembering his episode of blurred vision in the Missile House, he first had a full checkup in the ship's infirmary, then spent hours carefully reviewing the video records of the search teams, particularly in the House.  The day before they were to arrive in port, he realized that there was a corner of that deck which did not appear on any of the videos.  The cameramen for all six teams which had inspected that chamber had pointed their cameras everywhere except that one corner.  It was the same corner the Captain had been looking at when his vision blurred that day.

Once he realized this, the Captain rushed aft to the House, and looked in that corner again, bringing a camera along.  He had no blurred vision this time, and had no problem photographing this part of the chamber.  What he did see in that corner was a few scratches on the decking, as though something heavy had been dragged there, then dragged away again.  Unfortunately, the scratches ended within the House, and did not provide any trail to follow elsewhere on the boat.

Upon their arrival in port, events proceeded predictably, by the book, doing absolutely nothing to dispel the mystery.  For the first two days, no one was allowed to leave the sub, and no one was allowed within half a mile of the dock while grim-looking, heavily armed Marines conducted their own search and interrogated each member of the crew.  The Marines had no more success in locating the missing warhead than the crew had done, and hearing about this missing ensign just made them more frustrated, especially when it became clear that this ‘Ensign Stone’, if he existed at all, had never been assigned to the Appleton or any other Navy submarine.

The unavoidable conclusion was that the warhead had been taken before the Appleton had left the base, and that CPO Brown was guilty of incompetence and/or treason.  It would be up to the court-martial board to decide between the two options. 

The Captain knew three things at this point.  First, that it was very likely that CPO Brown was telling the truth about the entire incident.  Second, the fact that his own crew’s videotaped searches consistently missed that one corner of the House was proof of this, in a convoluted way.  And third, that this argument, and the crew’s testimony regarding the presence of ‘Ensign Stone’ on board the sub, would never be taken seriously by the court-martial board.

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In an isolated warehouse outside of San Diego, in a small storage room with lead-lined walls, Stone assessed the progress of his mission so far.  Acquiring the warhead had not been the problem.  The challenge was to do it in such a way that people would draw the wrong conclusions and react in a predictable and harmless fashion.  Humans might be feeble, dull-witted and lazy, but their overwhelming numbers were making them more of a problem with each passing century.  This meant that the type of work  that Stone did required much more elaborate planning than it used to.

As always, Stone’s planning and execution had been equal to the challenge.  Despite the quarantine