Nuclear Option

Reedsy Prompt June 18, 2021:

Begin your story with somebody watching the sunrise or sunset.

Daybreak had never been his friend. But, of course, that didn’t mean much since he had no friends. The glow of the false dawn in the east partially obscured by the outer bands of an oncoming hurricane arrived at a particularly inopportune time. He had spent every night for the last five years searching the waters of the South Carolina coast for a large metal fish, and he had found it. Even more improbable than finding the “artifact” was that it currently hung at the end of his “fishing” line. He had only a precious few hours to raise his catch the remaining few hundred feet so he could deposit it on the after deck of his converted trawler.

For five years, he had escaped detection. He had patrolled every night without incident. There had been some close calls, to be sure, but radar is a strange animal. Radar works by transmitting an electronic pulse and listening for an echo. The quality of the echo determines the radar’s range. However, the transmitted pulse travels much further than the echo can be detected. So by listening for the original radar transmission, a ship can be located much further away than merely listening for the echo. By the same token, if he was using radar in the traditional manner, he could be detected as efficiently and accurately as any other trawler on the high seas. It was a simple matter to alter the search pattern to avoid other seaborne traffic.

Detection would have been less of an issue if he had merely been trawling the ocean for fish out of season, but that was not what he was doing. Instead, he towed a sophisticated remote control submerged sled at depths of up to over a hundred fathoms. The sled had taken him five years to build and test. It was equipped with ground-penetrating side-looking sonar, an array of cameras, radiation detectors, and powerful lighting equipment. It was capable of maneuvering independently of the support ship on the surface. It regulated its depth with an inflatable canvas flotation collar. As marvelous as all this advanced technology was, the most crucial feature was the “gator noose” attached to the sled’s front. The noose had been tested on real alligators and had proven reliable. He could sneak up on an adult male alligator resting on the bottom of a pond, slip the loop around its neck and lift it out of the water. He practiced this maneuver over a hundred times before he was satisfied that he could raise the bomb.

The “gator noose” was designed to lift the heavy metal fish from the seafloor where it had rested for over half a century after being dropped in the collision between a US Air Force bomber and a fighter not far from Hilton Head, South Carolina. The Air Force had denied losing the nuclear-tipped bomb, but for a boy who spent his summers at the family’s vacation home just south of Hilton Head, the rumors rang true. Now, for the first time, someone had proof. He had the bomb in the “gator noose” brightly lit with the lights on the sled and plainly visible in the cameras mounted for that purpose. 

Daybreak this Saturday morning meant that weekend sailors would be arriving soon since he was adjacent to one of the primary sailing routes between Charleston and Savannah. Some of them would be fleeing north ahead of the advancing hurricane. The last thing he needed was some nosy nelly with a cell phone camera exposing him to the world. Unfortunately, the hurricane currently exciting surfers all up and down the American east coast as it drove toward landfall in a few days meant that there would be no second chance. He had a pitiful few hours to harvest the results of ten years of work. It all came down to the several hundred feet of water beneath the keel that separated him from his quarry.

The compressor on the converted trawler pumped air into the canvas flotation collar. The compressor had two speeds. It was on, or it was off. There was no way to regulate it. Not including a tank to hold the compressed air now appeared to be a mistake for the first time since starting the project. He could only wait as the flotation collar brought the sled with its precious cargo to the surface.

Once the sled reached the surface, the bomb could be hoisted onto the afterdeck. The sled would be left slightly submerged in the water for the run back to the dock. The sled would be abandoned at the dock and the remaining nuclear waste collected over the last ten years to make the “dirty bomb” loaded onto the converted trawler. Then, taking advantage of the hurricane driving boat traffic ahead of it, the trawler would crawl its way northward to Norfolk, where it would be parked near the naval shipyard. When the hurricane hit Norfolk, a gloriously unforeseen circumstance, the bomb would be detonated. The combined impact of the bomb and the subsequent delays in rescue caused by the storm would destroy a substantial portion of the American fleet.

Revenge would be sweet.

After twenty years of service, a dishonorable discharge was uncalled for. The threat of prison had no teeth. Those women that had accused him of forcing himself on them were all whores. Everyone knew that women only went into the Navy for one of two reasons. Either they wanted all the sex they could get, or they wanted to trap a man into marrying them and taking them away from whatever dead-end town where they lived. Whichever it was, they were whores. As their commanding officer, they were his for the taking.

His relations with women had started as “sloppy seconds” from his father. He was the only child of a powerful industrialist. His mother had died under mysterious circumstances when he was ten. A steady procession of women, some willing, some drunk, some drugged, and some unwilling, paraded through the many family residences. Once the old man finished with the women, they were offered to him or the manservants. There were no female servants.

The police and the politicians were terrified of the old man. Too many had been on the receiving end of his wrath to risk investigating the hundreds of rape allegations thrown in his direction. The old man died in a hunting “accident” while the son was at the Naval Academy. While the coroner listed the incident as an accident, the single bullet that killed him had been fired from over a half-mile away from a sniper rifle. Fewer than a hundred Americans could shoot accurately enough to make the shot given the terrain. Only two were known to be within a hundred miles of the site, and they had solid alibis. None of the other hunting party members carried a weapon of the caliber that killed the old man. The old man’s entire fortune vanished overnight. Whatever inheritance there might have been was gone.

Acceptance into the Naval Academy had been a gift from a well-placed politician in return for several “off-book” favors. The first female cadet he approached kicked him in the balls. After that, he did not attempt his previous proclivities until after graduation.

His first command was a sexual feast. He had access to both military and civilian women in an office environment at a small naval base. The base commander believed that any woman in the military was there either for sex or to secure a husband. He simply did not believe that a woman would be willing to serve the country’s honor or defense as a man would. Women were inferior creatures as God had made them. As a result, he often expounded on his exploits in the all-male seclusion of the base officers’ club. There were no female officers at the base, and the enlisted personnel were fair game. Given that any report of sexual misconduct went up through the chain of command to the commander, it was little surprise that no reports of sexual misconduct were reported to the Pentagon.

All the subsequent commands had been on ships. Each new ship was larger than the last. Except for the first ship, which had an all-male crew, he took advantage of all the women in his command even though most were unwilling. As a result, all the women left the service at their earliest opportunity. Two became pregnant and were denied abortions. One of them committed suicide. He felt neither guilt nor shame in any of this.

He was less than two months from retirement when his chief electrician’s mate and chief engineer barged into this cabin to report a fire in the engine room. One of the ship’s medics was bound to his bed with a gag in her mouth. She was trying desperately to scream. The engineer restrained him while the electrician went for the first officer.

The trial was swift. It had as much to do with sweeping the matter out of sight and keeping it away from the media as it did with any concept of justice. With over a hundred women testifying against him, keeping it quiet was an arduous task.

The women had it coming. He was right to do what he did. They deserved it. They had no right to impose themselves on a man’s world. They had no right to accuse him of doing anything wrong. He had every right to do what he did. Now he would pay them back.

Revenge would be sweet.

Except that is not what happened.

The canvas flotation collar began to leak. It developed a small tear. The rip became larger. The sled began to sink. The collar tore more, and within seconds, as he watched, horrified, the entire assemblage drove itself into the seafloor.

He saw the beginning of the flash as the nuclear warhead detonated. After that, he saw no more. Then, a fountain of water lifted the trawler into the air and flipped it over. The trawler fell bow first straight down, striking the seafloor, disintegrating, and creating a small secondary explosion.

Channeled by the seafloor’s shape, a wave of water twenty feet high and a couple of miles wide raced toward Hilton Head Island. Then, striking just after dawn when the majority of the island’s residents were asleep, it came in off the ocean and toppled everything in its path. It left behind a sand bar, dumped the debris into Calabogie Sound, and gently drained off into the sea from whence it had come.

Author’s note: The Air Force denies that it lost a nuclear weapon off the South Carolina coast, but the rumors persist much like the rumors of pirate gold buried in the same area.