Ghost Fleet by Singer P. W. & Cole August

Author:Singer, P. W. & Cole, August [Singer, P. W. & Cole, August]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, thriller, War, Historical
ISBN: 9781910859087
Goodreads: 38590943
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2015-06-30T07:00:00+00:00

Moyock, North Carolina

“Please don’t tap the glass, sir,” said Hernandez. “It makes the animals crazy.”

Cavendish pressed his face right up to a porthole. The shipping container, which was connected to two more in a U-shaped form, had been made watertight and then filled with water. Each container was about the size of a large apartment, or one of the bedrooms in Cavendish’s South Kensington, London, block-long flat.

“I don’t see anything. Are they in there?” said Cavendish. He tapped on the Plexiglas porthole again.

“Yes, sir,” Hernandez said. “Why don’t you try the viz glasses they gave us?”

Cavendish put on the matte-black, special-made viz glasses that had been hanging around his neck; his fingers rubbed the firm’s old bear-paw logo on the side.

“What a simple proposition this all was. How did the original owner so truly screw the business up?” said Cavendish. “I have my theories but —”

He instinctively ducked as soon as the glasses clicked on. A long knife lunged for him, and he virtually counterpunched using some kind of ancient-looking brass trench knife. He settled into the fight, watching through the viz, becoming a part of the sparring from the perspective of a mask-cam worn by one of the commandos.

The lighting inside the container varied; every few seconds, the lights brightened and then faded to almost pitch-black again. The men seemed to be wearing gray-and-black tiger-striped bodysuits that were accessorized with a variety of edged weapons. Swiss micro-rebreather units, the kind used by cave divers, were affixed to their upper backs. When the lights flashed on inside the tank at one point, Cavendish realized that those were not tiger-striped camouflage patterns on the gray bodysuits. They were slash marks.

He felt a tap on his shoulder.

“Sir, this is Aaron Best; he was at DevGru with me210. Best is the one who provides the adult supervision for selection and training,” said Hernandez. “I’ll let him fill you in on where we are.”

“Welcome, Sir Aeric, it is an honor to have you here. What you’re watching is the refinement of our tactics, techniques, and procedures. This is a simulation of a partial power-plant failure. That is why the lighting goes in and out. We also simulate total power failure, which plays out the way you would expect: a knife fight in a closet in the dark. This is a ten-minute evolution. It involves a nine-minute air supply, and the man with the fewest slash marks on his suit wins. He gets to get out first. The loser has to wait until the ten-minute mark before he can exit the tank.”

“Quite an incentive,” said Cavendish.

“In a man-on-man scenario, it’s tough but appropriate. Where it gets tricky for the guys is when you put three of them in there,” said Best. “The last guy out has it pretty rough.”

“What about those outfits they’re wearing?” asked Cavendish.

“Standard long-range recon swim kit. Blast-proof. Thermal regulation, which we enhanced for the mission. We think it will be effective,” he said.

Cavendish’s attention wandered and he stared at a set of seven connected shipping-container halves.

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