Maden Mike - Tom Clancy Firing Point

Favoring warmer waters where food sources thrived, tiger sharks were frequently found in tropical and subtropical areas like the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico. But they were commonly seen in the Pacific waters near Australia, New Zealand, and the islands of the South Pacific. They have also been spotted in the colder waters of the northern Pacific and the Atlantic. Known to live as long as fifty years, these great fish are capable of circumnavigating the globe in the course of their lifespans.

The tiger shark is one of the largest predatory shark species on the planet, just slightly smaller than the more famous great white. They are nomadic animals who mostly follow the warm water currents. Their insatiable hunt for food includes all manner of fish and also giant sea turtles, dolphins, octopi, manta rays, sea birds, sea lions, and even other sharks. Fishermen have split open the stomachs of these ravenous beasts and discovered in whole or in part rats, cats, horses, monkeys, cushions, coats, car tires, and even explosives.

A pelagic species, tiger sharks usually inhabit the deep waters beyond the continental shelf, sometimes over four hundred feet below the surface. Sometimes they venture closer to the coast. They are perfectly designed for long journeys in deep water, and capable of short bursts of speed on the attack.

The largest tiger shark ever caught was just under twenty-four feet in length and weighed nearly seven thousand pounds. Typically, they are half that length and a third that weight.

In overall shape, length, and weight, the average tiger shark is quite similar to the human-designed Mark 48 torpedo.

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The Canadian-owned freighter Emerald Glory was a Liberian-flagged vessel. The term of art was “flag of convenience,” which was quite apt. Registering a vessel under the Liberian flag was a legal and convenient way for the owners to avoid the burdensome costs of additional taxes, environmental regulations, union wages, and maintenance requirements that a Canadian flag would have necessitated. This saved the owners over three million dollars per year.

The Emerald Glory had been loaded in the port of Montreal with a variety of cargoes, most of it in containers, but not all. Shipments of forklifts, excavators, gas turbines, plywood, fiberboard, and fuel wood were all bound for Aberdeen, Scotland, and Grimsby-Immingham, on the east coast of England, the busiest port in the UK.

The Emerald Glory was making just over eleven knots on a northerly route in the frigid waters of the Labrador Sea, a decent speed for her aging and fuel-inefficient engines. Her current location, speed, direction, and ports of destination were all broadcast on her AIS and available on a variety of commercial websites.

There were a number of people who monitored her live AIS broadcast, including those who intended to destroy her.

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The tiger shark swam at a very low rate of speed, just above that of the eastbound current that carried the Emerald Glory along. The shark was, in fact, exactly in line with the ship as it approached from some two thousand yards away.

This particular shark was more than eighteen feet in length and weighed nearly four thousand pounds, neither of which was particularly unusual for the species.

Had the fish been hauled aboard one of the many fishing trawlers that harvested the fruit of the North Atlantic waters, they would have discovered several differences between this tiger shark and those typical to the species.

The single biggest difference was simply this:

The tiger now diving below the surface of the frigid waters of the Labrador Sea was an autonomous drone.

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God—or nature’s god, evolution, depending upon one’s metaphysical orientation—was the world’s greatest designer, and few designs exceeded the hydrodynamic efficiency of the tiger shark.

Biomimicry was widely adopted in many forms of drone technology. Rather than try and reinvent the wheel, the designers of the tiger shark drone let nature be their guide. Whereas actual tiger sharks were designed to hunt for food and reproduce, the tiger shark drone was designed to destroy commercial shipping vessels. This necessitated a few changes in God’s design, not that it needed any improvements in form, only in function.

That function was not unlike the American-designed and -manufactured Mark 48 torpedo, one of the world’s great undersea weapons. A lone sonar-guided, high-speed Mark “fish” was capable of single-handedly destroying a surface or submerged warship.

The latest Mark 48 models weighed about thirty-five hundred pounds including a six-hundred-and-fifty-pound payload of high explosives. Much of the torpedo’s remaining weight was due to the onboard liquid fuel propellant that drove the heavy swash-plate cam engine. The Mark 48’s high-speed, pump-jet propulsion produced speeds exceeding sixty miles per hour underwater. The internal components and high-speed performance necessitated a metal skin and rigid architecture to maintain the torpedo’s structural integrity from launch to impact.

The other requirement for the Mark 48 torpedo system was a delivery platform, which included every submarine class in the U.S. inventory. Delivery platforms like submarines and surface vessels were extraordinarily expensive, complex, large, and heavily crewed.

In short, the brilliant engineers at the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare Center designed the Mark 48 to attain high speeds, dive to great depths, and overcome defensive countermeasures in order to seek and destroy fast-moving, deep-diving enemy subs, their primary targets.

The challenge for the designers of the tiger shark drone was to combine the hydrodynamic efficiencies of the shark with the destructive potential of a torpedo.

While these two design characteristics were seemingly at odds—God versus the Naval Surface Warfare Center—in fact, the solution was relatively straightforward.

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The tiger shark drone design variations from the Mark 48 torpedo all stemmed from the variation in targets.

The Mark 48 weapons system was designed for combat against fast, stealthy, deep-diving submarines capable of high-speed defensive maneuvers. This required fast, deep-diving torpedoes with advanced target acquisition capabilities.

But the tiger shark drone targets were slow-moving, non-diving commercial cargo vessels that deployed neither stealth nor any other defensive countermeasures.

That made commercial cargo vessels extremely vulnerable to slow-moving weapon systems like the drone shark.

With that kind of target, the tiger shark drone design solutions immediately suggested themselves.

First and foremost, a slow-moving drone could carry a larger payload—twenty-six hundred pounds of high explosive, four times greater than what the Mark 48 deployed.

Slow-moving targets allowed a slow-moving weapon. This meant the drone required lower energy output and energy use. The battery-powered, electric-motored tiger drone had plenty of both in reserve.

When first described to Sammler, the chief design engineer compared the four-thousand-pound, sixteen-foot tiger drone to a submersible 2020 Tesla Roadster—but with fins instead of tires. The all-electric Tesla Roadster was capable of achieving zero to sixty miles per hour in 1.9 seconds, and could travel over six hundred miles at highway speeds on a single charge of its 200 kWh lithium-ion battery.

But the tiger shark drone wasn’t turning four tires at maximum speed on high-friction asphalt in order to chase down a fast-moving target. In fact, the drone didn’t have to move at all. It could simply drift for hours, if not days, without expending any energy whatsoever as it waited for its target to arrive at the drone shark’s location. Even if it ran continuously at its average speed of thirteen knots per hour, it would still have a range of over twenty-four hundred miles on a single charge. Thanks to its eight-hundred-volt architecture stolen from the Porsche design bureau, it could recharge eighty percent of its capacity in just fifteen minutes.