Cyborg, page 18
The capacity of the oxygen cylinder inside Steve's left thigh, just above the knee of the bionics limb, was supplemented by a unit strapped to his body that could provide another thirty minutes of oxygen. The installation was repeated on his right.
He was given a camera, but in case he lost it, a miniature camera was inserted in the false eye. To activate the camera, Steve pressed against the side of his head, where a trip switch was embedded beneath the plastiskin that had been built around his once-shattered eye socket. This released the shutter mechanism. To take a picture he merely blinked his eye. The muscles still worked. His eye-camera had a capacity of twenty exposures.
If the way back from the underwater approach to the submarine pen were blocked, he could try to swim north or even south along the coast and they'd find him through a homing transmitter. But they also equipped him with weapons in case he had to fight his way overland through jungle and swamp—when the transmitter might not pick him up and he'd be entirely on his own.
His left hand, the bionics hand, was modified so that the outer side was provided with a bottom layer of silastic, over which went a strip of steel, extending from the wrist down to the end of the fifth finger. Plastiskin camouflaged steel. The outer covering of the hand when clenched into a fist received the same treatment. Properly braced he could punch his way through heavy wood or light metal. The middle finger gave him a weapon with reach beyond his body. Fanier's technicians disconnected and removed the finger and replaced it with a digit built to Schiller's specifications. When he extended the finger straight out and snapped a presslock, the curving cylinder that formed the finger became rigid. Once he rigidified the finger it became the barrel of a needle dart gun. It activated with a small CO2 cartridge and a revolving chamber that contained a swift-acting poison. The darts were designed to penetrate skin, dissolve with impact, and spread the poison into the system to take its effect within six seconds.
Getting information back was the primary purpose of the operation, even if they couldn't get Steve and the photos back. A miniature wire recorder powered with two mercury-cell batteries was inserted into Steve's right leg. He could tape up to ten minutes through a small microphone extractable from the limb. He would have to be back on the surface for this action. When he completed taping his message he could twist a control on the microphone to rewind the wire. Then, using the radio transmitter built into his right leg, he could burst-transmit the recorded message. It was a system that had been in use for years aboard scientific satellites—compressing long periods of data into a single-burst message sent out in only minutes. In the case of Steve's recording equipment, ten minutes could be burst-transmitted in fifteen seconds.
There would be no great trouble picking up the transmission. The network of military communications satellites meant that there would always be two or three of those birds in position. If there were a problem in transmission power, the Air Force would have a U-2 or an RB-57B overhead at seventy thousand feet. One way or another they hoped to pick up whatever Steve sent.
They had required nearly a week for the modifications, for other equipment to be installed within his bionics system, for the equipment to be checked out and tested.
Now Dr. Wells stood before Jackson McKay's desk, ignoring for the moment the gestured invitation to be seated. To McKay's left, Oscar Goldman stood by his own leather chair. "Where are they now?" Wells asked.
McKay pressed a button on the left side of his desk and the room darkened. A wall screen leaped into glowing life with a clear map representation of the northeast coast of South America. "This is a replica of the chart being used at this moment in our situation room," McKay said. "The latest reported positions of Soviet vessels, surface and underseas, are shown there, and," he pointed with a desk ruler, "there. Of course there's a time lag in such reports. We gather these by satellite reconnaissance and aircraft reconnaissance. Now, over here," he pressed another button and a glowing line snaked its way across the map, "is the intended course of our force. But they are doing everything possible to avoid being tracked and they are very good at their business.
"Somewhere in this area, the submarine with Austin will ease to the surface. There will, of course, be considerable distraction through the entire area. That distraction will lead the Russians to assume, as we would, that some infiltration attempt will be made or is under way. A two-man torpedo sub will work its way into the defense zone, where it will be tracked by the Russians, and the two men aboard the sub will be killed—I'm sorry; the two men who will be 'lost' at sea died accidentally in the twenty-four-hour period before the task force left port. A plane crash, in fact. We expect the Russians will be convinced when they find the bodies of two Americans and will not spend time looking for Steve."
"The truth is you're a cold bastard, McKay. But I suppose you have to be in your line of work." Wells sighed and leaned his head back against the chair. "I really don't mean to be this antagonistic, it's just that Steve…"
"We understand," McKay told him.
"Do you? Really understand? In every respect, no matter what has happened to him, what's been done to him, Steve remains a man. An extraordinary man, superior, marvelously flexible, but still very much and in many ways, a vulnerable human being. If his skull is crushed, despite the additional protection he now has, he will die like any other person. If his heart is pierced, the puncture will be just as fatal as for any other human being. If he bleeds excessively, he will die. He can freeze, burn, drown, suffocate. He feels pain, even though he can withstand more pain, and still function, than before. He's been in so many ways transformed into even more of an extraordinary individual than he was before, he's indeed superior, but by no means superhuman."
Marty Schiller joined them. "We've received the coded signal through the comsat net," he said quietly. "The Russians picked up the two bodies on the decoy sub. That means Steve is on his way."
CHAPTER 18
THE EXPLOSIONS came to them as distant, muffled booms, rolling coughs of sound from miles away. Steve Austin stood on the small platform of the submarine deck, listening to the sighing thunder, trying to hear details above the sound of water off metal. A light breeze came from the west. He ignored the rumbling sounds, the explosions brought on by the decoy maneuvering to draw attention away from them. Ricardo Carpentier tugged at his arm. "They're almost ready," he told Steve. "Okay," Steve replied, and turned to watch the mixed Navy and OSO crew at work.
The nuclear submarine was a modification unlisted in any public document. A teardrop in shape, with twin nuclear turbines, it could do fifty knots a thousand feet beneath the surface. It carried eight torpedo tubes forward and four aft. It was designed as a killer sub, but it had been modified for special operations such as the mission now under way. The sub rolled uncomfortably on the surface, a strange wallowing motion that reminded everyone she wasn't designed for stability anywhere except down deep. Steve ignored the motion and concentrated on the men working just forward of his position. A large hatchway had opened, and dim red lights showed the men moving two dull forms through the water in the open compartment. Steve glanced along the deck and noticed gray shadows, men with automatic weapons at the ready. He knew there were more at the stern. Above and behind him a sweep radar kept watch on the sea lost in darkness. Nothing within miles. It wouldn't stay that way for too long.
They were fourteen miles off the Surinam coast. Far enough to avoid immediate attention, yet the distance would not overly complicate what he had to do. He turned his attention back to the compartment. Several swimmers were moving the larger forms away from the submarine, and Steve saw that the securing lines were still in place before activation. A voice called from the water, "They're ready."
Steve turned to Ricardo. Another man held a shaded red lamp in position for Ricardo to make a last-moment visual check of his equipment. Ricardo went expertly over the scuba gear, the cameras, infrared equipment. He had performed this same inspection a hundred times before, was still edgy about the final examination. He nodded his head slowly and slapped his hand lightly against Steve's arm. "It is time," he said. Steve reached out and squeezed Ricardo's shoulder. They had become friends. Ricardo and another man helped Steve slip into the water. The fold-snap flippers were already in place, and Steve eased his way to the first of the two dark shapes rolling in the sea, still tethered to the sub.
These would be his way in and, they hoped, his ride back to the submarine.
They were Able and Baker, two most unusual porpoises. Dark-bodied, with wavy streaks of white along their flanks, their snouts glistening, eyes gleaming in the bare, red light from the submarine, they were strangely lifeless at this moment, rolling without any attempt to stabilize themselves. And they would remain so until Steve brought them both to life. Able and Baker were ingenious creations of the Naval Office of Scientific Research. At any distance over a dozen feet it would take another porpoise to distinguish them from the real thing. Once they were activated they moved through the sea with precisely the same motions as the living animals.
The naval scientists had labored for years to produce these mechanical electronic simulations. Flexmetal construction guaranteed a full articulation. They moved through the sea with their flukes duplicating the motions of the animals. Their flippers were fully articulated, and the long bodies themselves showed an outer skin that rippled in response to internal movement. Animals kept in huge artificial bays had been studied, and every movement registered was fed into a computer until the computer produced a mathematical readout of the engineering construction necessary to prepare the artificial equivalent of the animal. That meant artificial duplication of biological material, and it also meant developing a computer that would fit within the artificial porpoise and that would perform two tasks: assuring normal movement of the creature on the surface or within the sea, and, providing for input of new command material. The onboard computer had been developed originally for the Gemini spacecraft program, and modified to fit the needs of the porpoise effort. Directional control, or so-called position control, emerged from an old missile program that had been upgraded drastically through the years. It had begun with the original SM-64A Navaho ramjet missile of the Air Force when it was urgent to come up with an inertial-guidance mechanism. The Navaho had to cruise at two thousand miles an hour for five thousand miles, and then plunge with accuracy into its presented target. Along came the ballistic missile to shove the Navaho into a museum, but not its inertial-guidance system. That went into the ballistic-missile submarines of the Navy and into other long-range vessels and aircraft. As components were reduced in size, what had been the size of a large valise now went into a container the size of a softball. It was microminiaturization at its best, and with such manner of packaging, the porpoises became a reality. There was one final key—power. It came from the compact nuclear generators—dense, almost massive containers that ran for only two weeks before burning out, in order to deliver high power during that period. So the porpoises were born with their constant-energy source, their marvelous articulation and shape and movement. The outer skin did more than duplicate the visual appearance of the animal. It bounced along the exact wave length the reflections by radar from the real animal. The two porpoises in the water with Steve had functional blowholes and were programmed to emit the same high-pitched, sonarlike cries as do the real animals.
Steve eased his way to the first machine, code-named Able, slipped into a body harness that packaged him neatly within the porpoise, and placed his hands within reach of manual override controls. He was now within a complete miniature submarine that possessed the distinct advantage of being almost indistinguishable from a living creature. When moving along the surface, Steve would be able to see some distance ahead during darkness, thanks to an infrared scope powered by the single-point nuclear generator. If he went beneath the surface he would draw from the oxygen supplies of the porpoise, rather than draining his own limited supply that was packaged onto the harness he wore. If he believed himself free of surveillance, he could activate floodlights under the water or even use a limited-range sonar that would provide him with an underseas path through otherwise-invisible obstacles. Two-way radio equipment had been fitted into the construction framework. He had automatic transmitters to be activated in an emergency. In the belly of the machine was an array of small, silent-running, torpedo-like projectiles, carrying not explosives but a variety of devices to be used for diverting attention away from him if he should be under pursuit.
He studied the small control panel, the instruments glowing, feeding from the nuclear generator on standby. He flicked the control to bring the power flow to full on, depressed the inertial-guidance and display system. A circular glowscope brightened, and Steve studied a gridmap with glowing reference points. The coast line showed clearly, with indentations of rivers. A slowly pulsating light indicated his own position, and a second light, this one blue instead of orange, showed him the relative position of Baker, the fully robot porpoise. The computer, tied in with the inertial-guidance system, would always show him precisely where he would be in relation to the coast line and the particular bay he sought. Later, if he were still with Able—he smiled to himself, realizing he had already come to think of the machine as a living creature—he would be able to pick up a bearing and position reference of the submarine and go full speed to be picked up.
He turned to a second control panel, much simpler than the array for Able. This was his remote control for Baker, which had no provision for a passenger, internally or otherwise. Instead, the accompanying porpoise was an arsenal of electronic and ordnance equipment. Steve could guide Baker by working the small control stick inside Able, but he preferred to be free of such distraction, especially when he would be closer to the base. While Baker was on automatic, it would remain within a general distance of Able. Not a fixed distance at all, but a computer-directed variation resembling the actions of two porpoises at sea, moving closer and then a greater distance away, slipping beneath the surface and then sliding along the top with the dorsal fin exposed. Unless Steve hit the "command" switch to take over direct control, Baker would maintain its fluctuating formation position with Able.
One final performance was built into the two machines. Each was designed to "die," when necessary, with a performance that would match a real animal in its death throes. If the porpoises were attacked and struck by gunfire to such an extent that no one expected them to survive, they—at least Baker—must "die" with fully appropriate movement and sounds. And as a last resort, should there be the danger of the Russians or anyone else, for that matter, being able to capture one of the marvelous creatures, after a specified time interval the porpoise would destroy itself. The nuclear generator was programmed to overextend itself and to release its energy in a violent spray of heat, consuming the generator and the entire porpoise as well. Should damage be excessive, the generator would "blow" in three minutes. Not much time, Steve thought, but just enough.
He completed his checkout of both porpoises. Time to move out. For a while his movement would be straightforward. Get as close to the base as possible before encountering the defenses. He flicked switches to place the controls on auto, punched a position two miles from the harbor to the sub base as the destination, and felt the fluke behind him vibrate as it moved the porpoise forward.
He had a sudden moment when this whole thing seemed crazy, impossible. Here he was, inside this creature, moving through the sea, the same man who'd ridden a skittering angular metal bug through vacuum to the surface of a world that had never even known the first drop of water.
A direct course would have helped. With a speed of six knots along the surface he could have recovered the distance to the submarine base in just a little more than two hours. But following a straight line would have been a dead giveaway that the porpoises were phonies, and so the computer was programmed to follow an erratic course, much as porpoises might have done. The Surinam coast had taken heavy rains for several days and there was a heavy water flow from rivers and streams into the ocean. This added to the current against which Able and Baker fought, a side current that required constant correction from the computer. It presented no operational difficulties, but it messed up the time allocated just to reaching the coast, and reduced drastically the hours of darkness on which they had planned.
There was nothing to do but ride it out. The wind quickened and Steve found himself taking jarring bounces from wave action. It would be an awful time to become seasick. He activated the porpoise's oxygen system and that helped somewhat to offset the wave action, as well as the peculiar pitching motion of the porpoise through the movement of the fluke. He concentrated on the infrared scope, hoping it would reveal any vessel at sea. Nothing. He remained within his strange world, a modern Jonah in the belly of a small mechanical whale, watching the glowing pips of Able and Baker crawling across the surface of the gridmap.
He didn't need the map or the glowing points of light to tell him when he was within reach of the opposition. They announced their presence, still distant, through deep, pulsating waves of pressure that pounded through the sea and trembled through the structure of Able—random explosions about which he'd been briefed. Patrol boats moved lazily in crisscross patterns, trailing explosive charges that boomed and thudded through the ocean. The sounds reaching him were like those of a distant squall line, an intermittent barrage that set off its charges without pattern, that could catch you unawares by its very randomness.
