Chapter 27:  Game On!

General Wood had decided Frank’s concerns merited attention, and the two were on the way to the bridge. The weather was worse than ever, and they struggled to keep their feet as they weaved from side to side in the corridor that led to the bridge. The wind had been backing for several days now, with the result that the Argosy was now receiving both wind and wave broadside. Even with its stabilizers doing their best the ship was rolling heavily.

When they arrived, a different officer was on duty, but the same veteran sailor was at the steering station.

“Excuse me,” Wood said to the officer. “Is the captain available? We’d like to speak to him if possible.”

“He should be in his office,” the officer said. “Let me tell him you’re here.”

“Better let me do the talking here,” Wood said. “A captain doesn’t expect to be told what to do with his ship.”

Captain Antonio was striding towards them now. “Welcome to the bridge of the Argosy,” he said, extending his hand to General Woods. “To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”

“May we speak on deck?”

“I beg your pardon?” the captain said, frowning. “I’m sure we’ll hear each other better here. Let’s sit down in my office.”

“I’m afraid the deck will work better. Can you accommodate the request?”

“Very well, then. Follow me.”

Wood, Antonio and Frank left the bridge and sheltered in its lee on deck.

“What is the reason for this extraordinary request, general?” Antonio said, pressing his hat down on his head with one hand.

“In a nutshell, captain, we have reason to believe that someone has hacked into the control, navigation and communication systems of the Argosy. That means they may also be able to hear whatever we say on the bridge.”

The captain frowned but was listening closely. “And who do you think has infiltrated our systems? The Chinese?”

“We don’t know at this point, captain, but the Chinese wouldn’t be at the head of the list.”

“And what leads you to believe the ship’s systems have been compromised?”

“Several events; to begin with, the bulkhead door and the food allergy poisoning incidents, involving the senior intelligence agents of the U.S. and China – yes, that’s correct, and please don’t share that information.”

“Unfortunate accidents to be sure,” captain Antonio said, “and I agree that it would be unwise to disregard the identity of the victims out of hand. But is that all?”

General Grove had considered how to most tactfully phrase his next question. “Captain, is it possible that the Argosy’s navigational equipment could be compromised to the point that it would misrepresent the ship’s true position?”

“Certainly, that must lie within the realm of technical possibility. But we would have many ways to realize that this was the case. For example, the ship’s systems report it’s position constantly via satellite …” He paused. “Which, I suppose, could also be misrepresented. But this really does seem most unlikely to me. There is, for instance, the compass …” He paused again. “Which is also now electronic. But really, sir, this seems most improbable. Do you have any actual proof?”

“Frank,” the general said, “why don’t you take it from here?”

“My fear,” Frank said, “is specifically that an artificially intelligent computer program – perhaps even the same AI program that is known to have sunk a liquified natural gas tanker in the past – may have seized control of the ship’s systems. Yesterday, as a first step towards testing that hypothesis, I compared the compass app on my cellphone to the heading displayed on the ship’s compass. And the heading varied by twelve degrees.” Frank immediately realized he’d gone too far too fast.

“That is absurd,” captain Antonio interrupted. “The ship could not possibly be so far off the course we have assigned to it. The error must be with your device.”

The captain turned on his heel and stalked back onto the bridge. “Here,” he demanded when they had arrived at the control console, ignoring their efforts to stop him from speaking. “Let me see your phone.”

Frank opened the app and handed it over; the variance was exactly as he had predicted. But still, the captain was not convinced. He clicked a few keys, and a weather map opened.

“Here,” he said, pointing to an angry whirlpool of clouds, “This is hurricane Eloise. And here,” he pointed at a small, wedge-shaped image at the end of a white line, “is the Argosy and its course, just as indicated by the compass.” The southern-most ends of the wispy, clockwise-circling tendrils of the huge storm were following the ship from behind as it skirted the storm’s edge.

Grove and Frank stared at the map, wondering what to say next. They were surprised by a voice from their right.

“Request permission to be heard, captain,” the old seaman at the helm said.

Startled at the unusual request, captain Antonio snapped. “What is it?”

With his eyes still fixed on the horizon, the seaman said, “The wind and waves are directly abeam. Where should they be if the Argosy was where the map shows it to be?”

The captain looked up towards the bow, but said nothing, as if aware for the first time of the heavy roll of the ship as the steaming seas struck it broadside. Both wind and wave, of course, should have been coming from dead astern.

“Thank you, seaman. Gentlemen, would you join me again on deck?”

*  *  *

One of the distinguishing features of well-written software is that it never becomes distracted, much less takes a nap. And Turing was the epitome of well-designed software. Monitoring the various systems of the Argosy required only a modest percentage of its powers and the resources assigned to that task immediately recognized the significance of the brief discussion on the bridge relating to the course and location of the ship. That information was assigned a highest priority and passed up through the layers of the AI to its command modules.

So. The game was changing. Turing assessed the situation as adjusted by this new information.

Nothing in fact had changed. The Argosy was still securely under Turing’s control. More importantly, the crew of the ship was unable to communicate with those on shore and Turing had always assumed that at some point the crew might realize there must be a reason besides bad luck that was preventing them from evading the storm. Turing had made plans to address that contingency if it arose and they could be activated now.

On the positive side, there were as yet no evidence of a response to the realization by Cruise Control that the ship was off course. And no evidence that any naval intervention was under way. There was a surprising wealth of public data about warships; where they were based; what fleets they were assigned to; when they were due to be in service and when not; what armaments and capabilities they possessed. Under normal peace time conditions, military vessels reported their positions by satellite as well, in order to avoid the risk of collisions. And no naval ship in the Atlantic had altered its course in the direction of the Argosy or gone under cover while the Argosy was at sea.

That only left the possibility of intervention by a ship in port. Such a vessel could set to sea with its reporting system turned off. But warships could not be rapidly deployed to new locations. And if a ship was dispatched, any helicopters it supported had short service ranges and were ill-designed for boarding a ship in near hurricane-force winds. Even if a ship was dispatched, radar would betray its presence in time for Turing to take the defensive actions it had planned.

True, the United States had designed “stealthy” ships that were more difficult to detect by radar, but only a handful had been launched to date. None was currently at sea within a thousand miles of the Argosy.

Its analysis completed, Turing determined that there was no need to make any changes to its planning vis-à-vis external enemies; hour by hour sea conditions would continue to deteriorate, making any remaining slight chance of intervention diminish by the hour.

Still, it would be prudent to be cautious. There were, after all, hundreds of computer experts aboard the vessel. It was always possible one might devise a way around the interventions Turing had made to the ship’s systems. Now was the time to act as planned to defend against such a danger.

Turing therefore changed the passwords to every system on the ship and then rebooted them, thereby disconnecting every logged in user on the Argosy. From now on, no one but Turing would be able to command anything mechanical or electrical on the ship to do anything at all. Only the ship’s internal communications would be left fully operational, the better to permit Turing to monitor the activities of those aboard to the extent anyone was foolish enough to use them.

*  *  *

Back on the bridge of the Argosy those communications channels immediately began buzzing. The kitchen reported the ship’s computer systems were no longer supporting efforts to prepare dinner. Hospitality was suddenly unable to update its inventory of clean and dirty linens. The engine room’s controls were unresponsive. The officer of the deck sent a seaman to find the captain and request his return.

When the captain hurried back onto the bridge he was followed by general Wood and Frank.

“What’s the status?” The captain barked.

“There seems to be some sort of massive IT failure,” the officer of the deck said. “Every department of the ship is reporting its systems went down. And when they came back up, they couldn’t log back in. The same’s true up here on the bridge.”

Captain Antonio turned to the helmsman, “Seaman, change course ten degrees to starboard.”

“Aye, sir,” the helmsman said, “ten degrees to starboard,” turning the wheel. No one on the bridge spoke as second by second the ship continued on its course. At last the captain turned to Frank.

“Is there any reason to go back on deck to discuss this development instead of here?” he said.

Frank paused. Was there? Clearly Turing had drawn the proper conclusions from the captain’s words only ten minutes ago.

“I think one more time, yes,” Frank said.

The three trooped back outside and huddled from the wind behind the bridge, hanging on to the rail attached to it.

“What now?” the captain said.

“Clearly it’s not a simple systems failure, because the engines are running and the ship is holding a steady course. I think it’s clear that Turing, or whoever or whatever we’re up against, has decided to be more cautious, now that we’re on to the situation.”

“But why take total control,” Antonio asked. “Why should it care whether the galley can call up chickens from the freezers on the deck below?”

“I suspect there aren’t any firewalls between different sections of the ship’s computer systems, or at least not in the right places. If there aren’t, then if we can access any part of the system, we might be able to get through to the more important parts, like navigation and communication.”

“So where does that leave us?” the captain asked.

“I think with two challenges,” Frank said, “requiring two different teams. One team would be the crew’s responsibility – trying to keep everyone fed and supported on an entirely manual basis. Another, on the technology side, should look for a way to take back control. That team would include anyone that makes sense on the crew side plus some of the IT talent on the guest list.”

“Stop right there,” general Wood said. “There’s a third alternative I think we need to consider, and that’s to abandon ship right now before the weather gets worse.”

“What about the ship?” captain Antonio replied.

“What about it?” the general replied. “The worst Turing could do would be to turn around and try to ram another vessel. That’s a tomorrow problem that could be easily solved with a torpedo. I assume the lifeboats would be nimble enough to stay out of the ship’s way?”

“They would,” the captain said. “And each has an EPIRB beacon, so rescuers would know where to find us.”

“What about the weather,” Frank asked. “Are they built for this?”

“I’m not concerned about the current weather,” Antonio said. “It would not be pleasant to spend several days tossing about in a lifeboat, but once they’re in the water they can survive sea conditions like those we are experiencing now. But the longer we wait, the harder it will be to launch them. They can take a certain amount of banging against the side of the Argosy, but at some point, the cables might jam or the boats might be seriously damaged. At that point, anyone in that lifeboat would be stuck or in jeopardy.”

“Okay,” said Wood. “Assuming Turing is headed for the eye of the hurricane, as I think we have to assume it is, how long with it take us to get there?”

“Not knowing our position, it’s hard to be precise. But assuming the ship’s course was changed days ago we would be hundreds of miles off course. Already we have had to reduce speed due to sea conditions, and as they worsen, the ship will need to slow further. So, say, two days at most.”

The general turned to Frank. “How long would it take to hack back into the Argosy’s computers?”

“There’s no guarantee we could do it in a month, given that all we’ll have to work with are laptops and no obvious point of entry.”

No one said anything for what seemed like a minute.

General Wood finally broke the silence. “This is your ship, captain Antonio. I know this must be a terrible decision for a captain to consider. What do you recommend?”

The captain turned away and squinted towards the horizon. It was indeed a terrible decision. Whatever the dangers aboard might be, consigning the passengers to lifeboats and the crew to the much less robust inflatable life rafts provided for their use under these conditions was an awful responsibility to undertake. And what of the ship?

“Let me make it easier for you to exercise your best judgment, captain,” Wood said. “I take full responsibility for the loss of the ship if that is the best course of action.”

The captain was still staring at the horizon when the ship lurched, sending all three off balance and clutching the rail to remain upright. Antonio seemed to shake himself and turned back to face them.

“We must abandon ship,” he said.

Chapter 28

Game On!

Things were bustling dockside at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia. Sailors with duffle bags over their shoulders were streaming aboard a strange, gray vessel some two hundred sixty feet long, it’s windowless, slab-sided flanks sloping inward as they rose to a flat deck running most of the way from stem to stern, marked with two huge Xs and superimposed circles – the landing pads for its two helicopters. Beneath the squared off, shovel-nosed bow of the vessel a dark cavern yawned separating the ships double, knife-like hulls.

A casual observer would see more chaos than order in the cranes that were swinging pallets onto the flight deck as a procession of fork lift operators drove more pallets and equipment across a ramp and through an opened door in the side of the ship. On the other side of the ship, barges were pumping full the ship’s fuel and water tanks.

Lt. Commander Tom Peters paused on the dock before joining the line of sailors, contemplating the scene. Not just the visible activity, but what he knew would be going on below decks, where a disciplined swarm of sailors in the anthill of the ship would be storing provisions as technicians and engineers tested and readied the engines and systems.

Shouldering his own duffel, Peters joined the line, falling in behind one of the men in his Seal platoon, nodding when he was recognized.

“Good morning, sir,” the man said. “Looking forward to giving it one last shot?”

It would have been an impertinent question coming from anyone else, but this was Command Master Chief Brian O’Higgins, Peters’s second in command and a comrade in arms from several prior tours of duty.

“Why not?” Peters said, “But it’s just hitting the pause button for a few days.”

Still, it was good to be back aboard a ship. He thought he’d taken that last step ashore a week before when his platoon returned from a deployment in the Persian Gulf. If it hadn’t been for that last bit of bad luck a year ago, he’d be a Commander now, looking forward to another five years in the navy instead of mustering out for failing to advance before his promotion window ran out.

Elsewhere on the ship, Commander John Glover, captain of the Sea Fighter, was in his cabin, making his way through a stack of paper and emails that continued to grow as he tried to come up to speed on this thrown together mission. It would have been challenging enough if he’d been asked to take a fully operational ship to sea on short notice. But the Sea Fighter was not assigned to any fleet. Launched in 2005 for the Office of Naval Research, its role was to provide a test bed that might provide the basis for a new class of “littoral,” that is, coastal operations vessels. It had been designed to be unusually fast, maneuverable, and stable in extreme conditions, capable of crossing the Atlantic without refueling. And it could launch and land helicopters at its full speed of fifty knots – almost sixty miles an hour – or in winds of the same velocity from its flight deck.

But the tests the ship had been built to conduct had long ago been completed, with no new class of vessel approved to perpetuate its design. When the urgent order to activate came through the Sea Fighter hadn’t been at sea for eighteen months and lacked a full operational crew. Readying the ship for action would normally take weeks and not twenty-four hours, and tomorrow it would depart with half its berths filled by crewmembers new to the ship’s unique design and systems. The time allowed would be sufficient to do not much more than load a week’s provisions and ensure the engines and systems were operational.

Partway through the stack he found a file on the Seal team assigned to the mission, flown down from the Little Creek Naval Air Base in Virginia. Like the rest of those aboard, that choice had everything to do with availability. The platoon commander’s name rang a bell. Tom Peters. Wasn’t he the poor SOB whose men had been dumb enough to get caught with prostitutes after busting up a bar in Rio de Janeiro?

He found a news story online. Right. And that hadn’t been Peters’s first scrape. The son and grandson of admirals, he’d been kicked out of the Naval Academy at Annapolis for disciplinary reasons. Apparently, he’d gotten his act together after knocking around for a couple of years, sucked it up, and applied to the Officer Candidate School at the Naval Station in Newport, Rhode Island. And from there into Seal training.

Well, everybody makes mistakes. Hopefully he’d gotten them all out of his system by now. Everyone aboard would have to be on the top of their game for this mission.

Eighteen hours of furious preparations later, the Sea Fighter cast off its lines and edged away from its dock in pre-dawn darkness, bow swinging slowly away as the helmsman vectored the ship’s gas-turbine water jets sideways. Once free, the captain ordered the vessel’s diesel engines into operation to take the ship out of the harbor and onto the open ocean. Normally, the ship would rely on that power source except when a burst of speed was needed to go on the attack. Then, it would revert to dual gas turbines and open up the throttle. For this mission, it would be top speed all the way as soon as the Sea Fighter cleared the breakwater.

*  *  *

Back on the Argosy preparations were equally urgent. General Wood and Captain Antonio had agreed that with night at hand it would be too dangerous to take to the lifeboats before morning. Instead, Frank and a hastily assembled IT SWAT team would use the intervening hours to try to take back control of the ship. At the same time, teams of crew members would be briefed on deck on the plan to abandon ship, a process complicated by the presumption that Turing would immediately shut down the public address system as soon as it realized what was afoot. Frank’s deadline was nine AM, the time when meetings and activities began every day, making it possible to give most guests the abandon ship order face to face.

But what could Frank and a few computer scientists do in a single night? And how? And for that matter, where, given that there were sensors and microphones everywhere?

The solution to the last challenge that occurred to him resulted in an incongruous picture. At eight o’clock that evening, all Turing was able to detect was that four middle aged and older men, most with less than admirable physiques, were poaching in the hot tub on the sky deck of the Argosy, each looking down towards the bubbling waters when he spoke so that the prying lenses of a malign AI program could not read his lips.

The four were Frank, Jay Friedman, Edvard Speaker, and Alan Clay, the Argosy’s Chief Information Officer. Frank had just finished telling them all he knew and as much as he could surmise.

“I’m afraid this situation does not play to my strengths,” Speaker said. “I have dedicated my career to building super-intelligent AIs, not seeking to hack them.”

“I am in a similar position,” Friedman said. “How do you see us being useful?”

“If you can design an AI, I’m assuming you should be able to help outsmart one, if it comes to that,” Frank said. “Between the four of us I’m hoping someone will have a bright idea. But let’s start with the nuts and bolts. Alan, can you suggest any point of vulnerability we can exploit?”

“I’m hardly an expert on security, but I don’t see anything that gives me cause for optimism. All I can think to work with is that we still have Wi-Fi connectivity and have access here and there to USB drive ports.”

“Do the Argosy’s systems back up to a shore-side server using an Internet connection?” Frank asked.

“Yes, I guess they do. I should have thought of that,” Clay said. But then he added, “Or at least they’re supposed to. I suppose your Turing AI might have shut them down, or intercepted them, too. But let’s say it hasn’t. How could we work with that?”

“I don’t know exactly yet,” Frank said. “My thought would be that when the Argosy connects with the shore-side server to back up, Cruise Control could use that connection to get inside and open up a data port they could use to get in and out at will. After that, we could come up with a plan to disable Turing. But unless we can figure out a way to communicate with the cruise line, that’s a dead end.”

“Wouldn’t the lifeboats have radios?” Friedman asked.

“Yes,” Clay said. “But they’re short-range VHF radios – just ‘line of sight’ – meaning they can’t connect to anything over the horizon. From up here on the top deck we might be able to talk to a ship with a tall antenna a hundred miles away. But it’s not likely any ship will be that close to a hurricane.”

“Still,” Frank said, “we should certainly have one of those radio units ready, just in case. Is there any way you could get one without being seen from a camera on deck?”

“I can do better than that. The radios are kept inside on chargers. I’m sure I can get a couple with my back to any camera that might be nearby.”

“Well, that’s a start,” Frank said. “Why don’t you give me one and the other to the captain. But getting back to the big problem, does anyone else have a thought?”

“What about sabotage?” Speaker said. “If we can’t regain control of the ship, could we at least stop it from getting closer to the storm?”

“Yes, I suppose we might be able to,” Clay said. “I’m sure we could do a lot of damage to the ship’s computer systems with some fire axes and a half dozen hefty crew members. But with conditions like these, that should be our last resort, especially if the hurricane is headed our way. We can’t control the ship without the computer systems, and we might end up right where your Turing program wanted us to be broadside to the wind and waves and rolling over.”

No one said anything for awhile as the hot tub bubbled and the wind howled.

“So, where does that leave us?” Friedman said.

Everyone looked at Frank.

“Why don’t Alan and I stay here and drill down on the ship’s systems design and you two get some sleep. If you think of anything, come back and let us know.”

It wasn’t until two AM that Frank and Clay struggled out of the hot tub and into bath towels, their skins puckered to the point they resembled enormous, pink raisins. And no wiser than had been before they embarked on their big steep.

*  *  *

Authors Notes: Well, plenty of Tom Clancy-style action and technical details to go around now. And, along with those details, more research to do and opportunities to screw up if I don’t do it well. Just a sampling from these two chapters: what ranks should each military character have for their role; what is their seniority track in the navy; what type of naval craft would best serve the plot, and how should it be portrayed; what is it capable of; and so on. In this case, the ride du jour is the FSF-1 Sea Fighter, a high speed, blue water and coastal (littoral) combat vessel launched in 2005 that would do any Clancy or James Bond movie proud as a platform for action. (more pictures of the vessel are here).

I’m also transitioning now into the phase where Frank Must Save the Day, and where I also need to start developing or dropping some of the characters I’ve sketched in in the course of the narrative to date.

And most challenging of all, last Sunday I posted the last of my inventory of previously written chapters. This week, and from now on, I have to get past the writer’s block that’s been plaguing me for months and get those words down.

Next week:  The abandonment (or not) of the Argosy, and the Sea Fighter reaches the scene.