stop.
Disabling the tanker in any way was out of the question. It might be tugged back to port, instead of going on to North Korea, and investigators might realize the damage was intentional, prompting questions about who had done it and why. Stealth was the only option, and it had a side benefit as well. If the North Koreans blamed the Venezuelans for the contamination, it would make them less likely to trust their suppliers for future diesel shipments.
It was Max as usual who had used his engineering expertise to devise a way to get a tanker to stop without hijacking or damaging it.
The Discoveryâs robotic arms cradled an apparatus the size and shape of a coffin, flat on the long sides, with watertight Plexiglas sealing the ends and an uninflated tube on top. A filament connected the object, which they called the beatbox, to a control system inside the mini-sub. When attached to the hull, the beatbox, which was equipped with a high-impact rotating hammer, would knock with each rotation of the propeller shaft.
No captain likes to be stranded in the middle of the ocean with a dead engine, so the mechanical systems are tuned and maintained rigorously to run at peak operating efficiency. If the engineer heard a pounding in the engine room that couldnât be located, he would recommend that they stop the ship until the problem could be diagnosed. Of course, in this case there wouldnât be a problem at all, and the onboard instrumentation would tell them that. Max estimated they would have thirty minutes before the engineer deemed the engines safe and cranked them back up.
âHold on, boys,â Linda said. âWeâre heading under.â
She flicked the joysticks expertly and dived the sub, maneuvering the Discovery so that it was below the path the
Sorocaima
would take. The rush of water being pushed by the immense tankerâs bow grew until it sounded as if the sub were a barrel floating toward Niagara Falls.
Using the onboard LIDAR, or light detection and ranging system, which relied on a series of reflected lasers that would re-create a three-dimensional image of anything they saw, Linda could see the tankerâs hull soar over them like a zeppelin drifting through the clouds.
Linda clicked on her on-screen control and the tube on top of the beatbox inflated until it made the apparatus neutrally buoyant. She retracted the robotic arms and then backed the Discovery away, unspooling the filament control wire as she did. She stopped when she was a hundred yards away.
The positioning was perfect. The beatbox hovered twenty feet below the centerline of the tanker.
The tankerâs gigantic single screw thrashed as it got closer. Linda would have to time this right. Too early and sheâd get the beatbox too far forward of the engine room to be mistaken for a problem with the turbine. Too late and sheâd get the beatbox chewed up by the screw or miss the tanker entirely. If that happened, there was no way the sub would be able to catch up and try again.
When the last hundred feet of the tanker passed overhead, she clicked another button, activating the powerful magnet on the beatbox. It flipped as the magnetized side was pulled by the steel hull of the
Sorocaima
. A loud bang signaled that the beatbox had made contact and was holding fast to the tanker only four feet from where Linda had been aiming.
The filament continued to feed out. She clicked another button and the hammer inside the beatbox started to pound away. She nudged the joysticks forward to the subâs maximum speed so that they would be as close as possible when the tanker came to a stop.
âKeep your fingers crossed,â she said.
There was an agonizing wait as she looked for any signs that the tanker was slowing. A thousand yards of the filament had already played out. They had three thousand to go. After that, sheâd have to cut it loose.
Another thousand yards came and went before she finally saw the
Disabling the tanker in any way was out of the question. It might be tugged back to port, instead of going on to North Korea, and investigators might realize the damage was intentional, prompting questions about who had done it and why. Stealth was the only option, and it had a side benefit as well. If the North Koreans blamed the Venezuelans for the contamination, it would make them less likely to trust their suppliers for future diesel shipments.
It was Max as usual who had used his engineering expertise to devise a way to get a tanker to stop without hijacking or damaging it.
The Discoveryâs robotic arms cradled an apparatus the size and shape of a coffin, flat on the long sides, with watertight Plexiglas sealing the ends and an uninflated tube on top. A filament connected the object, which they called the beatbox, to a control system inside the mini-sub. When attached to the hull, the beatbox, which was equipped with a high-impact rotating hammer, would knock with each rotation of the propeller shaft.
No captain likes to be stranded in the middle of the ocean with a dead engine, so the mechanical systems are tuned and maintained rigorously to run at peak operating efficiency. If the engineer heard a pounding in the engine room that couldnât be located, he would recommend that they stop the ship until the problem could be diagnosed. Of course, in this case there wouldnât be a problem at all, and the onboard instrumentation would tell them that. Max estimated they would have thirty minutes before the engineer deemed the engines safe and cranked them back up.
âHold on, boys,â Linda said. âWeâre heading under.â
She flicked the joysticks expertly and dived the sub, maneuvering the Discovery so that it was below the path the
Sorocaima
would take. The rush of water being pushed by the immense tankerâs bow grew until it sounded as if the sub were a barrel floating toward Niagara Falls.
Using the onboard LIDAR, or light detection and ranging system, which relied on a series of reflected lasers that would re-create a three-dimensional image of anything they saw, Linda could see the tankerâs hull soar over them like a zeppelin drifting through the clouds.
Linda clicked on her on-screen control and the tube on top of the beatbox inflated until it made the apparatus neutrally buoyant. She retracted the robotic arms and then backed the Discovery away, unspooling the filament control wire as she did. She stopped when she was a hundred yards away.
The positioning was perfect. The beatbox hovered twenty feet below the centerline of the tanker.
The tankerâs gigantic single screw thrashed as it got closer. Linda would have to time this right. Too early and sheâd get the beatbox too far forward of the engine room to be mistaken for a problem with the turbine. Too late and sheâd get the beatbox chewed up by the screw or miss the tanker entirely. If that happened, there was no way the sub would be able to catch up and try again.
When the last hundred feet of the tanker passed overhead, she clicked another button, activating the powerful magnet on the beatbox. It flipped as the magnetized side was pulled by the steel hull of the
Sorocaima
. A loud bang signaled that the beatbox had made contact and was holding fast to the tanker only four feet from where Linda had been aiming.
The filament continued to feed out. She clicked another button and the hammer inside the beatbox started to pound away. She nudged the joysticks forward to the subâs maximum speed so that they would be as close as possible when the tanker came to a stop.
âKeep your fingers crossed,â she said.
There was an agonizing wait as she looked for any signs that the tanker was slowing. A thousand yards of the filament had already played out. They had three thousand to go. After that, sheâd have to cut it loose.
Another thousand yards came and went before she finally saw the
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