//------------------------------//
// Chapter 5 
// Story: Corsair 
// by totallynotabrony 
//------------------------------//

	A few days later, we went to meet Agent Jones.  Hanley gave us the address of a restaurant nearby.  Once again, I took Andy along to translate Korean.
It was supposed to be a lunch meeting.  Hanley had said noon, but Jones was late, so we ordered.  I left to use the restroom before the food arrived.
As I approached the table on my way back, I saw a woman walking up to Andy.  She had medium brown hair, cut to shoulder length, and was of average height and build.  She wore a modest business suit and there was a briefcase in her hand.
“Mr. Canvas?” she said.
Andy looked up in surprise, having not seen her approach.
“Uh…” he fumbled.
Her face flashed with anger.  “What, didn’t expect a woman?”
“No, that’s not—”
“Can it.  I’m still an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, and that means you take orders from me.”
“Hello,” I said as I reached the table.  “I’m Sail Canvas.”
She looked between the two of us in confusion.  “That’s what I was trying to tell her,” said Andy.  “Then she went off on some feminist rant before I could explain that I’m not a pony.”
“Feminist rant!  Is it really too much for me to ask you to treat me with respect?”
I sat down.  “So act like you deserve it.  There wouldn’t be a problem if you hadn’t started one.”  I kept my voice quiet and reasonable.  “Have a seat.  The entire restaurant is staring at you.  I would have thought the CIA taught all its agents to have some emotional control.”
Face red again, Agent Jones sat down.  “You’re making a glorious first impression, Mr. Canvas.”
“So are you,” said Andy.
“Shut up.”
“You sound like my mom,” Andy shot back.
“Mr. Canvas, exercise some control over your employee.”  Jones was nearly speaking through gritted teeth.
“Why?” I said.  “I think it’s kind of funny.”
“Let me remind you that I am your case officer!”
“It’s a fancy title,” I said, “but what authority does it give you?  You don’t own me, and you can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.  I put up with Carl Hanley because he put up with me.  You and I don’t have to like each other, but if we’re going to work together there needs to be some mutual respect.”
She sat there steaming for several seconds before responding.  “Make room on your boat, Mr. Canvas.  I’ll be coming along to keep an eye on you.”
“Traveling with us was what got your predecessor shot,” I pointed out.
“We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” she said, getting up and storming out of the restaurant.
Across the table, Andy grinned.  “Nika’s going to love this.”
“Yeah,” I laughed.  Just then, our lunch arrived.
Outside the restaurant later, I called the hospital and managed to get put through to Hanley’s room.  He answered the phone.
“I met Agent Jones.”
“I heard.  She called me a little while ago.  She’s a real take-charge kind of woman, isn’t she?”
“Was she planned to be your successor, or did you pick her out special for me?”
Hanley laughed and hung up before I could ask if he’d intentionally forgotten to tell her to expect a pony.  Perhaps I wasn’t the only one he was punishing.
We refueled and resupplied that night.  Jones hadn’t given us a time for pulling out in the morning, so I couldn’t really say that she was late when she showed up a little after ten o’clock, but by that point the rest of us had been ready to go for a few hours.  At least she traveled light, bringing only one suitcase.  I showed her to her stateroom.  
“Head for the Yellow Sea,” she said.  “I’ll tell you about the job when we get there.”  She shut the door.
Jones spent most of the time alone in her room.  She didn’t usually eat with us, didn’t drink coffee or alcohol, and didn’t speak unless she had something to say.  It was almost like she wasn’t there at all, and I appreciated that.
We traveled south and went around the Korean peninsula to arrive in the Yellow Sea.  Jones told us to head for the Chinese coast.
“One of our intelligence vessels sank about fifteen miles away from land,” Jones said, in a rare meeting with all three members of Corsair’s permanent crew.  We stood around in the bridge.
“How?” I asked.
“We don’t know.  The crew was able to get off and flag down a passing ship.  To conceal the location of the sinking, they told the Chinese that they sank somewhere else and drifted to the place where they were found.”
“That was probably a smart thing to do,” I said, “but going back to my question, how do you not know why the boat sank?  It filled up with water, obviously, but how did the water get in?”
“I don’t have anyone from the crew here to ask,” said Jones, a little anger rising in her voice.  “In any case, how it sank is not nearly as important as figuring out whether the Chinese have found out about it.”
“What’s the big deal?  You said they were fifteen miles out.  That’s outside the twelve-mile territorial boundary, so it sank in international waters.”
“It was a special purpose electronic signals gathering submarine.  If the Chinese find it, they’re going to want to know why it was there.”
The way she had talked about it early on, I had assumed it was a ship disguised as a fishing boat or something, not a submarine.  I was surprised.
“I assume you have the coordinates where it sank?” I asked.
She nodded.  “We need to get there and determine if anything has been taken from the site.  We also need to determine the submarine’s orientation on the bottom for future salvage operations. ”
“How deep is the water?”
“What do you mean?”
I threw my hooves up.  “You didn’t stop and think how we’re going to take a look at this thing?”
Jones turned her head away and shuffled her paperwork.  She told me which coordinates to steer for before going back to her room.
Andy found the place in a Chinese oceanographic chart he found online, informing me that the depth of the water was only about one hundred ten feet.  That was good; it was shallow enough to dive in.
The next problem: it was located only fifteen miles from China.  Sure, it was international waters, but they would be suspicious of anyone hanging around that close to their shores.  There was only a small city nearby, so I hoped there wouldn’t be much of a harbor patrol or security force.
We arrived at the target coordinates about midday.  The sun was out, and the water was very clear.  China has the reputation of being a mass polluter, but this spot was still clean.
Neither Nika nor I was comfortable with her making such a deep dive with relatively little experience.  Breaking the first rule of safe diving—never go alone—I strapped on my gear and jumped over the side.
I wore my rebreather.  It’s used similar to a scuba system to breathe underwater, but rather than using compressed air, it scrubbed the carbon dioxide from expelled breath and recycled it into breathable air.  It emitted no bubbles and gave you more time underwater than a scuba tank.  The rest of my equipment consisted of an underwater camera, a lightweight titanium pry bar, a dive computer, a light, and a knife.
The camera was the whole point of the dive.  Jones wanted her pictures, and frankly, I did too.  It was always interesting to take a look at a secret spy ship.  The pry bar was useful in getting into, or out of, the wreck.  The dive computer could tell me the depth, time, air remaining, and a host of other functions.  The light was for inside the submarine, assuming I managed to get inside.  The knife was useful for a lot of things, most of them you hoped you never had to do.
At one hundred ten feet, I still had a ways to go.  I doubted that Andy had made a mistake.  The problem was most likely with the Chinese oceanographic survey.  I rolled over to take a look back at the surface to try and judge how much farther I had to go.
Deciding I could make it, I started back down.  Deep skindives are possible, but difficult and dangerous.  The first problem is time.  You have to come up from depth very slowly to avoid getting the bends, a condition where nitrogen bubbles form in your blood.  The second problem is conditions.  It gets very dark and very cold only a few hundred feet down.
I made it to the wreck at just less than one hundred sixty feet.  It was already difficult to see, so I turned on my light to pick my way over the hull of the submarine.  I wondered how the sinking had happened.  If the crew had been rescued, they had either been on the surface or had escaped using specialized escape equipment.  I’d have to see the hatches to decide for sure.
I made my way around the sub, figuring it to be about forty feet long.  There was no way something like that could have gotten there on its own.  That meant the CIA had a tender ship for it, sending the submarine from the ship to get up close to the coast to gather intel.
It sat at nearly upright on the seabed, with only a slight angle.  From my inspection of the hull, there was nothing that looked amiss.  Of course, there could be a big hole in the bottom and I would never see it because of the soft mud the sub sat in.
I made my way up to the topside.  The sub had no proper sail, just a slightly raised area where the main hatch was.  I noted that it was open, and moved on, making a slow trip over the top.  I was searching for another hatch, and I found it towards the bow.  It was closed.
I went back to the main hatch.  It looked a little small, so I took the rebreather unit off my back and pushed it ahead of me down through the hatch while keeping the mouthpiece in.  The inside of the sub was surprisingly roomy.  Only a few air bubbles were trapped along the ceiling, indicating that no one wearing scuba gear had been there before me. 
I photographed as much of the interior as I could.  There were three compartments in the submarine.  One appeared to be for the propulsion, one for control and data gathering, and one for crew accommodations.  I didn’t find any empty gaps or tool marks where equipment might have been removed.  I didn’t see anything that might indicate a problem leading to sinking, either.
The design of the sub left something to be desired.  It appeared a little antiquated, and while I was no submarine mechanic, there were some things that I would improve if given the chance.  I’d have to find a set of blueprints and figure out if there was a flaw in the design that could have sank it.
The closed hatch I found near the bow opened into the crew compartment.  It was an airlock, for escaping the submarine from underwater.  Since it hadn’t been used, I had to assume the crew had gotten off when the submarine was surfaced.
It left the question of why.  If the submarine was surfaced enough for the crew to escape, then the main hatch had to be out of the water.  If it was able to come to the surface like that, then it hadn’t had very much water leaking in.  Maybe it was a slow leak.
I decided that it was a question for someone else, and headed for the surface.  The dive computer calculated my ascent, advising me when to stop and wait, and for how long.  Coming up from one hundred sixty feet took almost as long as I had spent looking at the sub.
When I climbed aboard the boat, Andy was there to meet me.
“We have a problem,” he said.  “While we were here, we had to make way for a survey ship.  I plugged in our passive sonar, and found out that they were using a mapping system to chart the seafloor.”  The mapping sonar used active pulses to make a picture of the bottom.
“They needed it.  That submarine was actually about fifty feet deeper than the map said.”  Something else occurred to me.  “You don’t think they might have been looking for the sub, do you?”
“I don’t know, but even if they weren’t, they’ll probably find it when they process the data.”
I told Andy that I would go deal with Jones, and gave him the camera.  I sketched out a quick drawing to show how the sub sat on the bottom and noted no obvious damage.  He took that too, and went to send a scan of it and all the pictures to the CIA.
I knocked on Jones’s door.  When she opened it, I asked if she knew about the survey ship.  She said that Andy had told her his fears about it.  She’d been in contact with the Agency, and the salvage ship to take the submarine away would arrive in a week.
“It’s possible that the Chinese will look at their map and discover it before then,” I said.
“Then you need to destroy that survey ship,” she said icily.
“Wait a minute, I’m not blowing up an unarmed ship full of civilians just for some cheapshit spy sub.”
“The Central Intelligence Agency does not do things cheapshit!”
“Lady, I know what I saw.  My shipyard could have built something better than that for Whale Watchers.”
I could see that Jones was thinking of slamming the door in my face, but restrained herself to say, “I don’t care what you do, but make sure the Chinese don’t learn about that submarine.”
I nodded and said, “I’ll think of something.”
I met Andy out on the deck as night was falling.  As we leaned on the rail, I explained to him what I was thinking.  The survey ship had continued on after passing over the sub, making me think that instead of someone watching the readout from the mapping sonar, it was being recorded.  To tie in water depth and bottom contour with GPS coordinates to make a map, you needed a computer.  That gave us a place to start looking once we got aboard.
“Unfortunately,” I said to Andy, “we don’t really know what we’re dealing with.  We’re going to just have to send in the Marines and improvise from there.”
“Who are the Marines?”
“You and me.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“I’d really like to do this with the minimum of casualties, both ours and theirs.  I think we should pull the hard drives from the computers and then maybe sink the boat to cover it up.”
“What if they downloaded the data already?” he asked.
“Not much we can do about that.”
We made a few more plans.  It would be nice to have more people along, but I suspected that Jones would either be useless or refuse to go, and Nika had to watch the boat.
Andy and I went down to the well deck and inflated a collapsible life raft.  Life rafts are orange for high visibility, but that was exactly what we didn’t need.   We improvised a black paint job with spray paint.
Checking for active radar and security patrols, Nika maneuvered us to within a mile and a half of the coast.  Picking us up afterwards would be more difficult, but we still had the job to do before we could think about that.
It was a small city we were sneaking into.  I hadn’t bothered to learn the name, but there was enough light pollution to guide us in without the need for night vision enhancement.  Andy and I both wore all black and hoped nobody was expecting a sea invasion.
The port was relatively small, and we found the survey ship easily.  Stashing the inflatable under the rickety wooden pier, we crept aboard.
There was a light on inside the superstructure.  I slid over to a porthole and had a look inside, keeping my eyes squinted to protect my night vision.
Two men were looking at one of the computers.  It was fairly modern hardware.  One of the men disconnected a portable hard drive from the computer’s USB port.  They talked for a little bit and the man with the hard drive left the ship.  The other man turned off the computer and lights, leaving the compartment.  I relayed all this to Andy.  We quickly made the decision to follow the man with the hard drive.  
We hadn’t noticed the guard patrolling the pier until it was almost too late.  There were a few other boats tied up to it, none looking too important, so he was probably only the Chinese equivalent of rent-a-cop, but he would probably ask questions if he saw a white guy and a pony dressed all in black.
We dropped down to the life raft and paddled it as slowly and quietly as possible under the pier.  Ahead of us, I could hear footsteps of the hard drive man, and a muted greeting to the guard.  We followed the footsteps to the shore.
Andy tied off the boat while I popped my head up.  There was some kind of road running parallel to the water.  The man we were following crossed it and only went a few buildings down before unlocking the door to a shabby looking one and going inside.  There was some kind of sign above the door in faded Chinese characters.
We checked both ways and quickly crossed the street.  Keeping to the shadows, we made it to the corner of the building that the man had gone into.  We had just barely gotten there when he came back out without the hard drive.
After locking the door, he left in another direction, maybe going home for the night.  We waited for a few more minutes, before going over to the door.
“Got to love the Communists,” said Andy, inspecting the door.  “Shoddy building, top of the line lock.”  We went around to the side of the building and climbed in through a window we smashed.  Luckily, there didn’t appear to be an alarm.  
Inside, the building was dark.  Andy chanced turning on a small flashlight he had brought along.  There was paperwork and maps everywhere.  Modern computer equipment, similar to that on the survey ship, was also present.
Andy quickly checked near the front door to make sure there was no alarm.  I went to work trying to find the portable hard drive.  It was on a stack of charts near a couple of computers.  I checked to make sure that I had the right one, and that there weren’t more like it.  I didn’t find any, so I gave the hard drive to Andy to pocket.
Next, we had to decide what to do.  When someone came in to the building in the morning, they would find the broken window and the missing hard drive.  If we also removed some computer equipment, they might assume it had been a burglary.  If we burned the place down, probably no one would notice anything missing.
Unfortunately, however we handled the building, there might be a copy of the data stored on the boat’s computers.  Something happening to both the building and the boat on the same night would look suspicious.  At least the Chinese wouldn’t have the data, though.
We didn’t have time to come up with a better plan, so Andy and I agreed to cause the maximum destruction to ensure the data wouldn’t be used.  We started in the building.
In a utility closet in the back room, I found a container of something that smelled like acetone.  It was a cleaning agent typically used in nail polish remover, and it was very flammable.
I poured it on a pile of papers on the desks out front, spreading the puddle out to ensure the fire caught on to other things.  Next, I switched a desk lamp on, turned it over, and smashed the light bulb in a pool of acetone on the desk.  In the instant before the white-hot light filament burned out, it started the fire.
Andy and I went back out through the broken window.  He checked to see if the coast was clear, paying special attention to the pier guard, before waving to me.  We sprinted back to the lifeboat.
About halfway along the pier back to the survey ship, we heard the guard’s running feet pass over us, heading for the shore.  I stuck my head out for a look, seeing that the fire we’d set had grown to engulf the building.  Good.
With the guard gone, we paddled faster until we reached the end of the pier.  Once we were back aboard the survey ship, we had to quickly make a new plan.  We set off to check the boat for people.  
In a room near where we had seen the computers, we found a dozen or so bunks, half of them occupied by sleeping men.  There were too many to capture quietly, and they would without a doubt see our faces.  No need for that.
We left them for the moment, checking the rest of the vessel.  All the while, I let my inner engineer have free rein to examine everything for the possibility that we could use it to destroy the ship.  We checked the engine room last.  There, Andy and I stopped to figure out what we were going to do.
“Ideas?” I asked him.
“The only thing I can think of would be to set the fuel on fire.”
That was true.  On a commercial ship like it was, there was very little flammable material just lying around.  “We have to have some way to get it out of the tanks,” I observed.
“There’s the fuel pump on the engine.  Can we run it without starting the engine?  Can we somehow redirect the fuel to where we want it to go?”
I walked over to the engine and had a look.  The fuel pump was a big piece of equipment powered by an electric motor.  It was a design I hadn’t seen before.
Andy walked over.  “This ship has batteries to start the engines with, right?  If we can run the pump with that power supply, it should work.”
“A couple of problems,” I said.  I pointed out how it would require tools to unhook the pump power cable and to remove the pipe leading to the engine’s fuel rail.
“I saw a toolbox over there,” said Andy.  He went and grabbed it.  Working with the wrenches inside, we got everything disconnected.  Then came the problem of what to power the pump with.
With a pair of bolt cutters, we quickly snipped the protective wire cage from an overhead light bulb.  Unscrewing the bulb, we managed to get the connector on the end of the fuel pump cable to jam in the socket.  When I turned the light switch on, the pump sputtered and came to life.
The pump had been designed to produce high pressures, and was out of its element just pumping fuel out onto the deck of the engine room.  Still, it seemed to move a lot of diesel.
We searched for a sprinkler system.  It was there, but instead of being automatic, it had to be turned on by a valve located near the entranceway.  We used a wrench to take the handle off the valve, making it impossible to use.
Andy found a bucket and caught a few gallons of fuel.  We took it back up to the computer room and doused everything, paying extra attention to the computer we’d seen in operation earlier.  We searched for maps and other pieces of paper, piling them up ready to burn.
On the bridge earlier, we’d found some flares and we now returned to get them.  A few of them were stick-type, sometimes called road flares.  
We found the fire extinguishers and tossed them overboard.  We also threw out a hose attached to a spigot on deck.  Back down in the engine room, the fuel had covered the deck and was beginning to creep up the walls.  Andy grabbed another bucketful, and I readied a flare.
I nodded to him, and he left.  I stepped out of the compartment and set the flare alight, tossing it back through the door.  The light was nearly blinding and the heat instantly set the pool of diesel on fire.  Had it been gasoline, the vapor might have exploded.  Lucky for me, diesel didn’t flash like that. 
As the fuel pump continued to run, I ran for the computer room.  I paused to toss another flare into the diesel-soaked paperwork we had collected before running outside.
Andy had poured out his bucket on the old wooden pier.  He lit it up with a flare as several people burst out of the superstructure of the ship, flames right behind them.
I grabbed Andy and pulled him off the pier with me.  We may have overdone it with the fuel, and the boat was going fast.  Besides, if we hung around much longer, someone might see us.
I grabbed my knife in my teeth and cut the knot holding the lifeboat rather than taking the time to untie it.  We began paddled as hard as we could, noise be damned.
In the next few minutes, there were plenty of sirens, people shouting and other noises.  None of it seemed to be directed at us, so we kept paddling.
Quite a while later, as morning began to break on the horizon; we still hadn’t been picked up.  I told Andy to ease up a little.  I could see the blisters on his hands that he had gotten from his paddle.
Glancing back, I couldn’t tell if both fires were out or if we had traveled far enough that they were over the horizon and out of sight.  I could still see the columns of smoke, though.
I thought a little about how far we must be from shore.  It had been several hours of paddling, and the tide had been with us.  I figured somewhere between four and six miles.  That might have been too far.  It probably wasn’t where we were expected to be, because it was much farther out than where we had been dropped off.
I stopped thinking about the distance, though, when I realized what kind of situation we were in.  The two of us wearing combat gear in a black-painted life raft off the coast right after two fires had been set the night before looked suspicious as heck.
I didn’t know if the hard drive would still be readable after dunking it in salt water.  I didn’t think that it mattered much, because the CIA didn’t really need to see what was on it, they just needed the Chinese not to see it.
With no better plan, Andy and I just let the boat drift while we lay on our backs in the bottom of it.  As the sun continued to rise, I could tell that it was going to be a hot day.  My throat was dry, reminding me that we didn’t have any water.  I could really use some animal crackers, too.
“Answer me a question,” said Andy.
“Sure.”
“Can things get worse?”
“Probably.  There could be a Chinese gunboat pulling up to us right now.”
Andy sat up.  “Oh crap...”
“What?”  I followed his gaze to a place near where the smoke that still rose into the air.  There was a ship moving in our direction.
For several tense minutes, we waited while it drew closer.  I thought that it seemed to be pulling slightly to the south of us.  It slowly dawned on me that it was too big to be a patrol boat.  It was also painted white.
As the boat drew nearer, it adjusted course to steer directly for us.  As it got closer and closer, my hopes grew until I was sure that it was our ride.  Several minutes later, Nika maneuvered into position to let us into the well deck.
She came down to meet us.  “I looked for you all night.”  She looked like it, although I wouldn’t say it to her face.
I shrugged nonchalantly.  “Small boat, big ocean.”  The three of us walked back to the bridge.
“You guys get some sleep,” said Andy.  “If I get some coffee in me, I’ll be good to watch the bridge for a while.”
“For that, I’m promoting you to First Officer,” I said.  
Nika and I left.  Out of sight of Andy, she put her arms around me for a quick hug.  “I was worried.”
“Me too.  I think we need to get a motorboat.”
“We searched for two hours after we saw the fires start.  After that, Agent Jones wanted to leave you.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“We fought about it.”
“I’m guessing you won.  What happened to her?”
“I hit her in the head with the butt of my rifle.”
I nodded and smiled.  “Well, if it makes her nervous to be so close to shore, we might as well go out to the submarine site and guard it until the salvage ship arrives.”
I pushed the intercom button and told Andy which way to steer.