Tim

Ok, so I said I was going to do this, so let’s dive into one of these Steve Nelson things.

For those not following the Nibly the Bear spork, Steve is a rather distinctly crazy guy somewhere in his fifties from Utah who apparently works as a maintenance guy (this is actually important, as you’ll see later) and is defined by being uniformly unskilled in just about every aspect of the writing craft. The Problem Eliminators! is Steve’s attempt at an action story. It’s not at all clear who he’s trying to write for since it swings all over the place in terms of tone, but whoever they are it’s doubtful they’re going to want to read it.

The cover is pretty typical Nelson artwork:

A bunch of paintballers are apparently hiding behind a deflated tractor tyre while Smug McWellingtons stands in front trying to hail a cab, with a badly drawn gun vaguely associated with his hand and his head stuck on his body at an odd angle. Behind lurks what appears to be one of those stupid ultra-serrated combat knives but is actually a really badly drawn submarine (!), while in the background lurks a yacht which you’ll later see the photo reference for. For now: it does not look like it.

They Strike Without Warning! Hard, Fast and Deadly! With Capital Letters and incredibly easy crude jokes which I will attempt to rise above.

We’ll start out with the introductory description on Smashwords, which I imagine is on the back of the print version, assuming anyone ever bothered to make any physical copies of this.

Enjoy Action and Adventure Today with, The Problem Eliminators! © 2012 By Steve Nelson
It is a known Fact that the best customers of the worlds Drug Barons, have been for many years and are today, U.S. Government Officials.

Here Steve lays out the basic, ridiculous idea; apparently all those people on the streets actually buying drugs aren’t where drug lords really make their money, that’s, um, a small group of very rich people. I don’t think Steve understands that one person can only consume so much of a given controlled substance without, you know, dying and shit.

The copyright notice is also pretty funny since a lot of the images in this book were acquired by the entirely legit means of Google image search and don’t belong to Steve at all.

Just Imagine…
A group of fictional highly trained and motivated, retired military men, that hunt down the Drug Lords, and their Government allies.

Throughout this story, Steve doesn’t seem to really understand how to use the word “fictional” properly; here he’s nested it in “imagine” which means he’s asking us to imagine a group of vigilantes who are themselves imaginary. This gets far worse when you get to the glossary, which is written in-character and yet still has the protagonist calling things he encountered in the story fictional, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Fact: the Drug War is a Phony War, designed to bring about the destruction of the U.S. Constitution, and in turn, the Freedom of all peoples of the world!

Fact: Whenever Steve labels something as a fact it isn’t.

Just Imagine…
This group of fictional military men, with nothing to lose; Act on their Oath to ‘Protect and Defend the Constitution’ against all enemies Foreign and Domestic!

The oath that enlisted men take in the US also includes swearing to obey the orders of the President. Remember this.

They call themselves, The Problem Eliminators!
With Action at every turn on the high seas and on land!

Contents may vary from those claimed.

The Problem Eliminators! Strike Without Warning!
Like the name of their Fantastic Redesigned Submarine,
The Barracuda; They Strike Hard, Fast and Deadly!

Ok, so the Barracuda is that ridiculous sawblade thing up top there, and we’ll be meeting it in more detail in chapter 2. For now, suffice to say that Steve copied Jules Verne’s Nautilus with absolutely no idea of the background that made Verne design it the way he did.

The Problem Eliminators! By Steve Nelson
Is a Fictional Action/Adventure story featuring a fantastic submarine, The Barracuda!

And featuring absolutely no proofreading of any kind, as you may currently be detecting. This is one-pass writing at its very finest; “Wait, didn’t I just say that? Eh, whatever.”

Like Amer-I-Can James Bond’s, these guys take no prisoners where the Drug Lords are concerned!

Steve uses that “Amer-I-Can” thing in everything he writes, I think it’s supposed to be inspiring but it’s more annoying than anything else. Also these guys are nothing like James Bond. James Bond has a much better attitude towards women, for a start.

Join up Today with- Captain Mitchell, Dave ‘The Dude’ Wilson, ‘Doc’ Robinson, Sergeant Remus and the whole crew of the fantastic submarine, The Barracuda for a Fictional Action/Adventure story you won’t soon forget!

I can actually fully accept that the story is fictional even within the context of the book, though I’m not going to forget it anytime soon.

The Problem Eliminators!
Is Action! And Adventure! With Over 33,000 Action Packed Words! And Almost No Foul language! Plus Exciting Pictures! You Can Enjoy this Exciting Adventure Today!

Steve trying to hype you up is like the textual equivalent of a migraine.

Anyway, word count says 33,110, which includes the index, copyright notice, stupid glossary at the end, and the bit where he copy-pastes about four paragraphs of text twice accidentally. And even if you allow him all that, he’s bragging about writing a book which is 69 pages long in PDF format. The count is also padded substantially by Steve’s rather, um, unique approach to writing action scenes, as you’ll see.

The dedication credits “Shirley Ann Nelson,” presumably his wife, with “special technical assistance.” Given the level of technical knowledge demonstrated, I don’t think she’s any more qualified in any field related to this book than Steve himself is.

We then get the following linguistically puzzling disclaimer:

This story is a work of fiction. It is suitable for young adults and up. The characters are
productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

Ceci n’est pas une story?

Elements that are factual are listed as such in the Glossary section following the story.

He also lists elements that are part of the story, random things that simply appear in the story, and his own rather bizarre views on reality. We’ll be quoting the relevant portions of the glossary section as they come up in the main story, since most of it is a complete waste of time.

Next time, we’ll be getting into the first chapter and enjoying a thrilling tale of how not to perform a military operation and a thrilling display of how not to do in media res.

Comment [16]

Also known as

Chapter 1 A Drug Lord’s Yacht

Which is a screenplay scene title, not a chapter name. Oh well, let’s get started with our memorable first line!

I had just finished measuring the depth of water in relationship to this yachts’ keel.

In general the first line of a novel should be the one you spend the most time working on, since it’s supposed to hook the reader. I can remember plenty of opening lines, from “April is the cruelest month” to “I was just a child when the stars fell from the skies.” I do not imagine “I had just finished measuring the depth of water in relationship to this yachts’ keel” is going to find its way onto that list. Every time I try to recall it when I haven’t just been looking directly at it I get something along the lines of “I had just finished measuring the water something something yacht’s keel.”

I noted my measurements on my waterproof note pad and I climbed aboard. I stowed my underwater gear in a handy alcove that I spotted near my entry point there on the starboard deck and I covered it up with a loose section of tarp.

So let’s have a quick count now, how many things are or will be wrong with Operation Gary Stu?

1. He’s alone, he doesn’t even have a backup guy to call on if he gets in trouble or to stop people screwing around with his gear if they find it.
2. He’s not in regular radio contact with anyone, meaning if he’s killed or captured it’s going to be a long time before anyone realises. It also means the writer has skipped the initial scene of him reporting in which would have provided the reader with some idea what the hell is going on.
3. As will be stated later, his entire armament is a .22 calibre manually-operated pistol. This is great unless anything of any kind goes wrong, at which point he’d be trying to win an ass-kicking contest with his pelvis on backwards. Luckily he doesn’t have to worry about that because he’s a Gary Stu and the author would never allow him to actually mess something up, but military planning tends to consist of assuming everything that can possibly go wrong will, most likely all at once. So you’d think he’d be carrying a carbine rifle or combat shotgun as insurance even if all he actually uses on the op is his handgun.
4. He has so little idea of the layout of the vessel that he doesn’t even know how deep it would normally sit in the water, which should be piss-easy to work out from any sort of shipbuilder’s plans, or could be measured with any half-decent imaging sonar device rather than having to go right up and do it by hand. He didn’t even know where he was going to stow his equipment until he actually got on board, which would have been great for him if there wasn’t anywhere.
5. This mission itself is never really all that well defined; typically you wouldn’t send guys in without at least some idea what they’re supposed to be looking for, with a preference for knowing absolutely everything they possibly can, but his briefing appears to be “get on board and erm err drug lord drugs explosives and that.”
6. He’s in a position to shoot the guy he’s after or blow up the boat several times and doesn’t for absolutely no reason other than the writer wants to do something “cool” instead. Steve has the common mediocre writer issue of forcing the story to contort around scenes he thought it would be cool to write regardless of whether or not it makes any sense for them to happen.
7. For a guy who’s trying to be stealthy he leaves a ton of evidence he’s been there.
8. He’s a complete moron.

Also, we’re not going to find out this guy’s name until the second chapter, so for now he is called Useless.

Next I made my way stealthily inside this fancy millionaire’s yacht.

“I’d had enough of infiltrating run-down poor people’s yachts to last me a lifetime.”

I was silent. I had been trained as a navy seal and stealthy type of work was our business. But I’ll let you know more about that later.

You’d think a SEAL would know that SEAL is an acronym (SEa Air and Land), or at very least that it’s a proper noun. You’d also think Steve would be a little nervous about making the protagonist a SEAL since they’ve historically been very closely associated with the CIA’s SOG special operations unit, but that would involve Steve doing some actual research on something.

And here we come to the problem with in media res done wrong. There’s no point starting the story out in the middle of something if that something doesn’t tell us anything at all about the character we’re watching. All we find out here is that he’s an ex-SEAL and he’s careful, except that he isn’t actually very careful. The flat descriptive tone gives us no idea how he thinks; you’d think he’d either be thinking in ultra-professional operator-speak to show how focused he is or noir-style over-description of how the beautiful yacht contrasts to the dark heart of the etc to give some insight into why he’s doing this. Instead we just suspend chapter one until chapter two so we can have a really dreary “action” start.

In addition, there’s no framework set up here to explain who the reader (who the character just addressed directly) actually is. Typically in this kind of story the reader is given the role of a “silent interrogator;” they aren’t given lines, just the role of the journalist / board of inquiry / court / interrogator / torturer / whoever who the protagonist is interacting with. This kind of framing device is good because it gives a reason for the character to be recounting things they already know in detail, and can also make the reader feel more involved if the character indirectly responds to them (“What? Oh, I see what you mean, I’ll elaborate…”)

Neither is it clear when Useless is recounting all of this. Since the tenses don’t change he presumably recounts all of this at the same time, but because this is written one-pass a lot of the things he says now aren’t informed by things that happen later.

We will find out later who Useless is supposed to be talking to. It will not help in the slightest.

You might also notice you can’t visualise any of this. This is because Steve very rarely describes anything (and when he does it’s usually useless and trivial). We don’t know what our protagonist looks like, what he’s wearing, what gear he has (because we skipped the traditional gear check scene), where the yacht is in relation to anything else, what the yacht looks like or even what colour it is (it’s not the one on the cover), or even what time of day it is.

I made my way about the interior corridors of this floating mansion and checked out compartments as I went.

It’s weird how he keeps emphasising it’s this yacht, as if he’s trying to stop us noticing a much more interesting story happening on the other yacht moored alongside. Maybe that’s why he isn’t describing anything.

It wasn’t long before I found the main cabin and I could hear sounds of laughter coming from beyond the doorway.

LAUGHTER

Carefully I loaded my mini cam with a fresh cartridge and held it in my palm. I pointed the flexible lens into the half open doorway to the cabin. I moved the camera about slowly so as to get a complete record of all its occupants for my Captain.

Steve’s a little out of the loop regarding technology, as in a good thirty years. Even police SWAT units have cameras to look under doors or around corners, and those have built-in monitors so you can see what the camera sees in real time. Nevermind the ridiculous anachronism of using one of those newfangled high-tech Super 8 film cartridge video cameras in a story written in 2012.

Also, this floating palace doesn’t have any kind of security system. Drug lords live in villas built like fortresses, surround themselves with guys with military-grade firepower and build ersatz tanks and yet we’re expected to believe this guy hasn’t even bothered installing cameras.

I made sure to survey the entire cabin from side to side and top to bottom. Then I pulled back and ducked around into an empty cabin nearby.

I love how he describes in nauseating detail how he checks the one cabin and then just ducks straight into the other without bothering to explain how he knows it’s empty.

I activated the instant replay of the cam and observed the contents so as to know for sure if I needed to go on further in my investigation, or if this was another false lead.

Wait, so how the hell many completely innocent people have they done this to so far?

Sure enough, the image of one of the most despicable drug lords appeared on my mini screen. My captain was right again, there he was, the hated drug lord Jose Garza El Jalapeno, alias the (Little Pepper).

The drug lord is also a quest item. Congratulations, reader, you got the (Little Pepper).

Also present and stoned out of their minds were 3 women.

If you ever need a textbook example of what “objectification” is, Steve’s here to help you. Of all the women in this story, one has a name and one actually speaks. For bonus WTF points, the one that speaks is not the one with the name.

And we are indeed dealing with an author who can’t be bothered to write out the entire word “three.”

They had just snorted a few more lines of cocaine, there on the table between them. Jose was also stoned and he enjoyed the sight of his women getting their minds blown away in a haze of a drug influenced high.

Because obviously he has nothing better to do than get wasted on a yacht, it’s not like he has a business to run. In real life, drug lords often don’t even touch their own product. Being even more crazy and paranoid usually doesn’t help and if they’re constantly stoned out of their gourds they’re going to either be killed by their non-stoner underlings or their non-stoner rivals.

Also, “getting their minds blown away in a haze of a drug influenced high?” If you can’t decide which of three descriptions to use, the correct answer is not “all of them.”

Anyway, Useless chips in with a bit of entirely necessary perverted enthusiasm as El Stereotypo starts undressing one of the women.

They were just getting going! This would go on for a while!

Thanks, Steve.

Useless explores more rooms and calls the place THIS FLOATING MANSION again because telling us it’s a mansion lots of times is kind of like bothering to describe it in any way. During his quest to not advance the story, he whips out another gadget that might have been impressive a few decades ago.

I have a heat sensing device that I can wave by doors and easily check for the presence of human habitation.

It senses…habitation? So I guess it beeps and says “you’re on a yacht, you idiot.”

So, he’s got a handheld heat sensor. He pointlessly tells us he’s used it on “other missions” as well, as if we really care all that much, and it’s pretty clear we’re supposed to think it’s neat and high-tech. Let me show you what high-tech looks like.

If you want to be all tacticool futuristic you need to be carrying enough hardware to divide by zero, most of it on your gun. Neat and high-tech is having an eyepiece combining sensor data from all that junk on your weapon, the submarine’s sensors, your little mini-UAV that’s circling overhead and sets of blueprints and floorplans. It’s firing around corners and seeing through walls, not having a sensor that you could have gutted from a children’s toy.

This isn’t some top-secret ultra-classified program, if you Google for “future soldier” a page listing the NATO future soldier programs is the second result. And as you’ll see later, Steve definitely has Google.

So after examining quite a number of cabins with no results except lockers of food stuffs and other consumables along with cleaning products and linens

I’m sure glad Steve decided to state the specific kinds of pointless shit that Useless found while he was killing word count. And given that this is an account from a later point in time, Useless isn’t just noticing all of this, he remembers all this when he looks back at what he did.

For that matter, why does the yacht’s storage seem to consist entirely of randomly distributed lockers? Wouldn’t there be actual storerooms and some logical order to where things were placed in relation to the places they were needed, so that the people who actually worked on this yacht could find them if they needed them?

Maybe eventually he’ll find an actual story so he can start doing things that further it. Keep checking those lockers, Useless!

Finally, Useless decides to stop screwing around and discovers a locked cabin. Eager to catalog more random junk, he picks the lock, which for some reason he decides to note takes “about five seconds.” Needless to say, focusing all his attention on a lock with nobody to act as lookout is not a good idea at all.

Inside I found a stash! Yes, ‘The Stash’ of this drug lord’s main business product.

It’s amazing the things you can learn from Steve. For example,

Drug lords keep all of their drugs on board their personal yachts rather than, you know, smuggling them to places so that people can actually buy them. And they keep their money in bundles on board the same yachts rather than using it for things.

I guess Steve imagines that people who have a lot of money just kind of stack it up somewhere until they have enough to swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck.

Wrapped in plastic sealed bags were hundreds of pounds of cocaine and some of the green stuff as well. I ran my razor sharp blade about the packets of dope puncturing most all of them thoroughly.

I assume given the next sentence “the green stuff” is money rather than weed, but “dope” is usually used to refer to heroin or cannabis, not cocaine (which would be coke). So something’s wrong here. Also, since they’re going to blow the entire ship up I really don’t see what the point of puncturing the bags is. It’s like the SAS sneaking on board the Tirpitz to let down the seaplane’s tyres twenty minutes before the Lancasters flew in and dropped Tallboys on it.

I can’t really even tell why he’s doing this when he recognised the guy as a drug lord already; if the place was deserted he might be looking for evidence of who owned it, but I don’t see why he’d think the drug lord would have enough product to kill everyone on board several dozen times over and a ton of money he can’t possibly need on a ship he owns, all stuck in a locked cabin. Why’s the Stash™ in a cabin rather than a safe, anyway?

Hastily I stowed several packets of cash with large denominations into special storage pouches on my wetsuit. “Well that’ll be enough to compensate us for this trip I guess,” I whispered to myself.

Useless’ wetsuit has special pouches for stealing money. Well, I can see why he’s only carrying a handgun, obviously this was much more important than pouches for silly things like ammo. Also, I don’t know why he keeps cracking wise (well, not wise, obviously) to himself about what he’s doing, but it doesn’t exactly paint him as the most mentally stable person in the world.

And yes, we’re supposed to believe the entire massive operation we’ll be shown later is financed with stolen drug money. Ethical!

One other thing to watch is how Steve uses the word “packet” throughout this story, it’s always one of the worst words he could have chosen for whatever he’s talking about. Here “bundle” would be more appropriate.

I photographed the lot with my mini cam and made a quick exit and headed for other sections of this big ship.

I think Useless and his Captain have rather missed the point of being a vigilante. Any evidence you gather is also evidence that you were breaking the law in getting it, so it’s not like you can present it to anyone. Just being in radio contact would allow him to report what he was finding, so unless his chain of command are paranoid and don’t believe anything he can’t show them a photo of, there’s no reason for him to be doing any of this.

I could just about buy it if Useless was less Stu-ish and didn’t magically know exactly who the drug lord was (so he was taking photos so others could study them), but since he recognises the guy there’s nothing for anyone else to do with the photos, let alone the ones proving that money and drugs exist.

I came upon what was the communications center of the yacht, and I set up an overload to burn out the communications console in the next few minutes.

A private yacht’s radio has an integral blow-itself-up function with a predictable timer.

It wasn’t long that I came across the radio man returning to his post with a cup in one hand and a sandwich in the other.

That evil maniac!

I had to dispatch him without a sound, so I waited till he passed and gave him a quick karate blow to the back of the neck and head.

Either that’s two blows or Useless has very big hands. Also you’d think he’d have some weapon for doing this (cosh, piano wire, whatever) rather than hoping he can knock people out silently with his bare hands every time. Stacking the deck in your favour never hurts when you’re playing for your life.

He was out instantly, and I drug him into a storage locker, where he was out of sight. I also gave him a knock out injection to keep him out for as long as I needed.

Steve has this weird habit of having Useless dispatch people in not-very-violent ways even though he’s going to kill all of them later anyway. Also:

There’s a good reason why police and military units don’t use tranquilisers the way they’re used in fiction; they don’t work that way. Knocking someone out is a fine balancing act between them being wide awake and dead, which is why there’s such a thing as an anaesthetist rather than any old doctor doing it. It requires fairly comprehensive knowledge of the patient’s body mass, medical history and so on, not just sticking them with an all-purpose syringe. There’s also no injected tranquiliser in the world that can put someone down fast enough for it to actually be worthwhile, even if you get the dose spot-on.

It might be a pretty common way to make the hero look more heroic because he isn’t killing his enemies, but Steve tends to just do it because he’s lazy and wants to ignore the consequences of knocking someone out instead of killing them (or later, to get out of writing dialog and ignore consequences). So he doesn’t get a free pass for it.

Continuing aft I came to the engine room. I set some small charges about the instrumentation panels there, and timed them to go off just shortly after my return to my ship.

Um…The instrumentation panels aren’t actually a vital part of the engine, they just tell you what it’s doing. Now if you’re going for the control panels or, hell, the actual engine itself…But it’s not like Useless would have any idea how much explosive to bring along since, as mentioned, he doesn’t know anything about the yacht at all.

Then I headed up a shaft that I knew would take me to the helipad, where this fancy yacht had a chopper secured.

Oh, except he knows immediately that a random shaft leads to the helipad. I guess he memorised exactly one thing from the briefing.

I really can’t visualise what shape this yacht must be to have a vertical shaft from the engine room to the helipad. The narrative puts me in mind of a modern first-person shooter level, where the world is a pretty, arbitrarily shaped corridor which might as well be drilled through a solid block of steel.

Upon arrival at the helipad, I found a goon on duty. Was he the pilot or just another drug goon in the employ of the Little Pepper?

Whichever he was, it was really unimportant, as he needed to go! I snuck right up and gave him a right cross that dazed him, and I gave him a heave, and over the side he went! He bubbled a bit and then was gone.

Steve’s action sequences are so one-sided it’s like watching someone playing a game with all the cheats on. Useless gets the drop on the guy, disables him in one punch, throws him into the sea, and then it turns out the guy can’t even swim. You can’t sell a character as heroic when he’s never in any actual danger of losing.

“Can’t swim, shouldn’t be on a boat,” I mumbled quietly.

Pointing out that what you wrote is incredibly stupid does not really mitigate the fact that what you wrote is incredibly stupid.

I climbed into the pilots’ seat, and cut some important control wires under the instrument panel. “Now this chopper won’t lift a feather!” I whispered to myself.

“There’s no way anyone on this yacht would know how to reconnect some wires to some instruments, and the instruments are the same thing as the controls!”

I headed down through the yacht one more time. I was, on my way to my stashed underwater gear, at my entry point on the starboard bow.

Given he specifies it was the bow (as opposed to the stern where sane people would infiltrate a ship) this presumably means Useless climbed the sheer side of the bow to get on board in full view of the bridge. Perhaps the Drug Goons™ let him screw around with their ship out of pity.

I wanted to check again, because I thought that I had heard something off the main corridor.

Which he somehow missed out on narrating despite telling us every other pointless detail of his locker-spelunking adventures. Also bear in mind he presumably did not include this when setting the timers on the charges in the engine room, since he’d have no way to know how long searching this room was going to take.

Arriving at the suspect door, I paused a few moments, and listened carefully. Sure enough, I heard a whimpering cry of some sort.

Then a cougar jumped out and ate him the end.

Hey, I can dream.

I carefully opened the door, to find there on a bed, in the semi darkness a very pretty young girl.

Luckily, Useless is here to disturb us with his misplaced enthusiasm once again.

She was bound and gagged!

Thanks, Steve.

Useless resists the urge to put on his robe and wizard hat, and instead, um…

I couldn’t risk a lot of sound, so I removed another hypodermic from my emergency medical kit. I fitted the needle with my knock out drug cartridge, called K14

You know if you can’t think of a good name for something you don’t have to name at all, the traditional method of dealing with it is to not name it. Not just look at your keyboard for a few minutes and press the first few keys your eyes land on.

Or you could type “anaesthetic” into Google and, you know, research it and stuff.

Steve also didn’t research the method used; soldiers have been using syrettes since World War Two and these days a soldier would be far more likely to have an Autoinjector if he was going to carry anything. There’s no good reason a non-medic soldier’s basic field kit would include syringes. But if Useless is trying to be as quiet as possible he’d be carrying as little gear as possible, so he wouldn’t even have a medkit. Given the nature of his mission, if he gets banged up his best treatment would be a self-administered bullet to the head before they can capture him anyway.

and gave the girl an injection. Instantly she went out like a light. I took a few minutes to check her breathing and heart rate. They were just fine.

Gotta love the chivalrous Useless administering a sedative with no idea of her medical history. Or for that matter him wanting to rescue her but not the other three who were with El Stereotype in his cabin. I guess because they’re WHORES and all, but for all he knows this girl just fell asleep after a little light bondage and is trying to get someone to untie her.

I checked the corridor and hauled her out of there, heading for my date with my equipment.

“I’m sure I’ll get to second base with my oxygen tank this time.”

I was almost there, when I ran across another goon just examining my stashed equipment.

Refer to earlier note about not having anyone left behind to stop people screwing around with his equipment. If he’d been another few minutes studying the linens he’d have come back to find this guy had pitched all his shit over the side and sounded the alarm. This is why you do not do this. Luckily through the miracle of not thinking about what he’s writing, Steve erases any concerns about the guy radioing in or even having a weapon, and the not-described thug just stands there waiting for Useless to beat him up. Which he duly does in the dumbest way possible.

I put down the girl and slammed into the drug goon! I gave him two rapid fire punches to the head, and a jab at the throat! He began to wheeze unable to get air, as I had smashed or severely damaged his larynx.

While Steve forgets to mention it, Useless has a suppressed, very quiet pistol and he’s dealing with a bad guy who’s distracted with his incredibly fascinating diving gear rather than running to tell everyone there’s an intruder. Rushing him is the worst thing he could possibly do since it’s only going to take one shout or a finger tensing on a trigger for everyone on the yacht to come running. So obviously that’s exactly what Useless does.

Crushing someone’s throat with one jab is a little far-fetched; it might be possible, but it’s more likely to work with a sharp chop and that’s what Steve should have gone for. Of course what he should have gone for is Useless standing back and shooting the guy, which would definitely have worked.

Then I gave him too, the heave ho, and over the side he went!

A grown man falling into the sea does not make noise. Also, when you kill someone they vanish from history and people who were expecting them to report in will forget they ever existed.

Then I strapped on my underwater gear, cutaway the gag from the girls’ face, and fastened a small breather unit, capable of 15 minutes of air over her face.

Obviously this is a good thing to use on someone who’s sedated and not in any way likely to result in her death. Regardless, Useless fastens a line and goes over the side (which means he did climb the sheer side of the bow and is currently in full view of anyone looking out of the bridge windows again) and goes over the side holding her “securely,” whatever that means.

She was light weight for me to handle, because I’m used to rather heavy weights in my usual daily workout.

Benching heavy weights doesn’t really prepare you for lifting someone who’s sedated while you’re wearing diving gear. Also, it’s lucky there are no innocent fat people.

Upon reaching the water, she became limp and even lighter.

I’m not sure why Steve thinks that she would suddenly go completely limp when she was sedated the whole time before.

I checked that her breather was in place and then took her under for my next date with my waiting underwater sub scooter!

“So my oxygen tank wasn’t interested, time for some rebound action.”

I found my sub scooter right where it was supposed to be, trailing just aft of the slow moving yacht.

Unless the tow line was magnetically clamped to the underside of the hull (which, you know, would make sense and so obviously isn’t true) I really can’t figure out the logistics of getting off this thing and onto a moving ship, then tying it off without anyone noticing. And it doesn’t help that Useless didn’t do anything of the sort at the start of the chapter.

I set my course and jammed down on the accelerator, heading in quick time for my next most important of dates, my ship.

“I hope my submarine doesn’t find out I’ve been seeing my scooter behind her back.”

My sub scooter was like an underwater Motor Cycle, it was fast!

Operator-speak for a thing like this is SDV (swimmer delivery vehicle). Generally the only reason you’d use something like this is if you had a lot of gear (which Useless doesn’t), you were performing a long-range mission and were using the SDV’s air supply to supplement your own (Useless isn’t) or to move multiple people at the same time, and there’s no way Useless could have known that Nameless Bondage Girl (who is not the one who gets a name, if you were wondering) was going to be there.

We’d reach my ship in a matter of minutes. This was good as the girls’ air only had about 11 minutes left in its supply.

Tension does not work like that.

I didn’t know who she was, but I was glad to have rescued her and yes, she was young and quite lovely to see, with her hair flowing in the water as we sped toward my waiting ship.

A submarine isn’t a ship, it’s a boat. Also, Useless sees the world in third person perv-o-vision.

My Captain would be dealing with Jose shortly, as soon as I made my report. He would also be happy with my efforts this evening. Yes, very happy!

Yeees, master will be happy with Igor, he will not put Igor in the naughty closet again…

Join us next time for a hideous infodump. Bring something else to do.

Comment [31]

So, it’s time for a thrilling exposition dump. Which I first wrote as dumb. Maybe my fingers are trying to tell my brain something. Anyway, Steve dubs this chapter

Chapter 2 Our Outfit and Ship

As I said in the comments for the previous part, I’ve also discovered our goofy book title comes from; it’s a line in Licence to Kill where Sanchez asks Bond why he carries a gun.

“In my business you prepare for the unexpected.”
“And what business is that?”
“I help people with problems.”
“Problem solver.”
“More of a problem eliminator.”

This makes a lot more sense as a reply to someone using a similar phrase than it does on its own, obviously.

So, Useless gets down to the by addressing the reader directly with a rhetorical question.

I guess you probably want to know just about now, who we are and or generally all about us and especially our ship?

No, but I’m sure you’re going to tell whoever I’m supposed to be anyway.

Well let me start with my Captain. His name is Captain Norman Mitchell.

His name throughout this will be Captain Tinfoil, for now Admiral Tinfoil as per what follows.

He was an Admiral with the U.S. Navy some time ago. He had a similar incident in his past as we all have had. As an Admiral, he was in charge of nuclear submarines. He was also the Captain of one, some years before, the SSN41.

41 is a really high number for a nuclear attack submarine, assuming she’s supposed to be a fourth Seawolf; they’re SSN-21 to -23. If not it’s a ridiculously low number for a Los Angeles or Virginia class boat since they start at 688 and 774 respectively. Really it would make more sense if the submarine he makes stupid was a partially completed and abandoned SSN-24 anyway, but we’ll get to what actually happens here later.

There was a hard tragedy in his life that brought him and all of us to this life we now pursue.

This rather implies that everyone suffered the exact same tragedy, though this is actually not too far from the truth given how boilerplate their backstories are.

While he was at sea, his son & daughter were brutally murdered in a drive by shooting between rival drug gangs in Houston Texas and his wife left.

Steve doesn’t seem to know how to do any kind of motive except “my (usually female) family members were killed.” This is fairly common sexist fare, but not usually so blatantly obvious; tragic events that happen to women will be spoken of entirely in terms of the effect they have on men. With all of these, including Admiral Tinfoil and Useless (as we’re about to see), their families are not named, described, or spoken of in affectionate terms; there’s as much emotional weight as if they were talking about breaking a nice vase. Something happened, they were sad, then they joined Admiral Tinfoil’s Strikeforce Idiot and all the sad went away forever.

We’re also not told why Admiral Tinfoil’s wife decided to leave while he was away; Useless decides to tell us exactly where the shooting occurred (which is worthless information from a narrative perspective) but nothing that would let us understand what we’re supposed to think about her leaving. Was she distraught and unwilling to face him because he was a reminder of her family and by extension the pain of her loss? Was she only sticking with him for the sake of the children in the first place? We’ll never know. I guess we’re either supposed to think she’s an EVIL BITCH for daring to leave him, or not care about the thoughts of the female object and focus on his terrible man-pain.

Also, how do you have a “drive by shooting between rival drug gangs?” Were they literally standing between the bad guys’ car and the guys they were actually firing at? The only other option is Tinfoil’s son ampersand because I can’t be bothered to type three letters daughter were actually members of a drug gang themselves.

He took a leave of absence for over 1 year, while he sorted this out in his mind. Then he returned to the service. Now promoted to Admiral, he put into operation his well thought out plan.

We now join The Evil Conspiracy™:

“Sir, that crazy captain who somehow got compassionate leave for an entire year is back on duty again.”
“Excellent! Minion, promote him four pay grades for absolutely no reason and put him in charge of something really important!”
“On it, sir.”
“BWAHAHAHA!”

Yes as I said, we all have had a similar tragedy befall us in our lives. For me it was my wife and daughter.

You know, the conspiracy theorist in Steve really ought to question whether, since the only constant in all of this is the captain, the captain isn’t just killing the families of prospective crewmen himself so that they’ll join his nutty crusade. Obviously, nobody is going to bring this up at any point in the proceedings.

So, Useless’ nameless wife-tragedy-object and daughter-tragedy-object were snatched off the street and then found dead in an alley. But we apparently need to know all the unpleasant details, so Steve helpfully adds:

Their bodies had been pumped full of heroin and used by numerous men and then their throats had been cut. They were then dumped where a boy scout later found them.

Thanks, Steve.

And seriously? Someone actually told him that?

Sir, we found your wife and daughter. They’re all murdered and stuff.

Also the sight of their ravaged bodies traumatised a boy scout.

I can’t see why he’s telling this to the undefined reader so casually; you’d think this is something a character would only bring up either to someone he very deeply trusted or, if he’s the type, as an excuse for something he’s done in the narrative that he knows he shouldn’t have. I also can’t see why he’d be going after South American drug lords over something related to heroin, since most of that comes from Asia. In fact, given the actual origins of his woes you’d think he’d be trying to find a group that wanted to rid the world of terrible writing.

Instead of sitting at home, I had been out for days on end, assisting search teams combing the countryside when they were found.

Remember this. He was at home, and helped the police with their search.

I could go on and on about the tragedy that has befallen each one of us in this command. But that would belabor the point.

It would also require that the reader give the slightest semblance of a shit about any of them, which would in turn require that Steve had done something to facilitate the giving of said shit.

The point is we are all here for 1 mission. We are dedicated! We are one in our cause!

Not bothering to write “one” here means it looks more like they all leave after one mission than that they’re united.

And then for no good reason there’s a suddenly a picture of Admiral Tinfoil:

Supposedly this is based on a photograph of Steve’s father, which I guess was taken while he was melting. It’s particularly bad in the PDF itself because the image doesn’t display correctly:

This is what Steve does because he’s too lazy to try to describe people. You can see he has a fairly common issue with amateur artists trying to short-cut by copying photographs without a decent knowledge of anatomy, which is that he tries to copy the individual features with no idea how they’re actually supposed to relate to one another. Here you can see Tinfoil’s mouth and chin are dead horizontal but his eyes are on a slant, making it look like his head’s deflating. The weird super-dark shadow on his nose makes it look like it’s slanting the other way to his eyes for bonus mutant points.

This would be ridiculously simple to deal with simply by drawing guidelines while roughing it out, and looking at, well, anything would help Steve deal with his strange idea that human shoulders are shaped like an inverted letter V.

We are here to rid the world of the awful scourge of drugs, and all those who deal in them. Even whenever possible, the government officials who have for much of the time, been the ‘Best Customers’ of these drug barons that have hold of our planet.

All drugs come from South America, not just cocaine. It is certainly not true, for example, that the vast majority of opiates come from Asia, and you can grow weed and synthesise things like LSD, ecstasy and meth more or less anywhere. Otherwise Strikeforce Idiot would look really stupid trying to stop the entire drug trade by sinking a bunch of yachts off the South American coast, and we know that can’t be true. Also you can end the entire drug trade with a submarine which can only be in one place at a time, since drugs are never smuggled overland, drug shipments happen one at a time, and they are always personally escorted by the local drug lord.

By the way, is anyone keeping a “Tesch Capitalisation Count?”

And who am I? I am Dave ‘The Dude’ Wilson.

Useless has a name! Holy shit, it only took one and a half chapters!

…

…He’s still called Useless. I see no reason to change it.

The glossary section describes him as the captain’s “Number 1” which isn’t terribly specific about what actual rank Useless has on board or why he’s always being sent out on missions if he’s an important member of the crew. It also describes him as a “former Fictional Navy Seal” (author’s caps), which I guess means he wrote this story after he became real and Steve just stuck his name on it.

I was a Navy Seal. I participated in numerous actions, while I was on active duty and then my tragedy struck.

According to two bloody paragraphs ago he was at home. So he was a Navy SEAL on active duty in his own house?

I almost lost it! Then one day Admiral Mitchell found me. I was a total wreck! Kindly he talked with me and when I was able, he presented me with his plan.

See, this wouldn’t have been a bad place to start out. Let’s piece together an alternative opening entirely from military story clichés and see how it works out.

Our protagonist (who we’ll make a woman named Michelle just to raise the number of women who do anything substantial in this spork to one and double the number of women with names) wakes up in a cell after getting in a drunken brawl at a bar to find an elderly Navy officer bailing her out. She takes a moment to narrate some details about what a mess she is, without going so far as turning to the reader and saying “by the way, here’s the backstory.” She turns the officer down at first when he mentions a plan of some kind, and goes home, to find a message on her answerphone telling her not to bother to turn up to work since they’re fed up of her coming in late when she turns up at all.

She fishes a photo of her dead squadmates out of the mess, her internal monolog talking about how they’d said it would be one last easy op before they all went home. She can’t forgive herself for surviving because she was their sergeant, and tells herself that if anyone had died it should have been her; we don’t find out all the details of what happened until later. She gets a knock on the door from her landlord, a kindly old man who she resents for no good reason, who says he knows she’s having a rough time but he just can’t deal with a tenant trashing the place and giving him cheques that bounce. After she slams the door she sees the card the old officer slipped into her jacket pocket, and figures hey, it’s not like his idea could possibly be any worse.

Obviously that doesn’t make a good Stu, though, since it would require that we see she’s fucking up her own life because she’s too proud to let anyone help her, and Stus have no negative qualities that actually matter. Nope, clearly far better if absolutely everything bad going on is external and goes away when Admiral Tinfoil sprays them down with his handy can of Past-B-Gone™.

All of us that make up the crew of this vessel, as with the Admiral at the time, were on the edge of self destruction.

“Did you remember to seal the hatches?”
“I was too busy listening to Slipknot and thinking about the sweet release of death.”
“Oh.”
“…”

Our common cause saved us.With our vessel we are on the job of ridding the world of every drug baron we can find!

Let’s talk about character motives. There’s two kinds of motivation for a character; personal and global. A personal motivation is something that primarily affects them, a global motivation something that primarily affects others. Saving someone you love is personal, saving the city is global. It also helps if their personal motive gives them a direct reason to take action, for example their life is at risk if they do nothing.

Now, problems arise when a character has one but not the other; if there’s only global motivation, the question arises as to why any specific person is doing the thing in question. For example, if the reactor is melting down and anyone who goes in to shut it off will receive a lethal dose of radiation, it’s not very satisfying if the only reason we’re given for Anna going in to do it is that the reactor’s melting down, because that’s the same reason everyone who didn’t do it had to do it.

If there’s only personal motivation, then the character’s actions will come across as entirely selfish; here, everyone is acting to get revenge. Taking down the drugs trade is apparently only their concern because it personally slighted them, and not a single member of the crew joined up without some personal tragedy affecting them first. This isn’t as bad as having no personal motives, but it doesn’t exactly colour them as noble.

Needless to say, they’re supposed to be noble. As an aside, this is often a problem in videogame morality systems where “good” is utterly selfless and “evil” is utterly selfish (eg inFamous); the two end up seeming respectively too good to be true and evil-for-its-own-sake.

And what vessel is that you may ask? As an Admiral, Mitchell was in charge of mothballing all old navy vessels, and when SSN41 came up for his attention. The admiral saw to it personally and officially the SSN41 disappeared off navy records as having been disposed of.

A lot of conspiracy theories only work because they oversimplify the world to the extent shown here; Steve seems to think one man would be responsible for every aspect of scrapping a complex and potentially extremely dangerous vessel. In real life there’d be a massive search as soon as the boat failed to report in, or at very least when the breakers reported that they hadn’t received her as scheduled and nobody could figure out where she had got to. And then there’s the fact that most of her important parts would be subject to additional programs such as special safe disposal procedures or recycling, some would be scheduled to be held as spares for the remaining ships in her class, the metals in her hull would presumably have been sold to someone who expected to actually get them… This whole thing is ridiculous the minute you start thinking about the scale of what you’re asking for and how many people would have to be in on it.

Also, it’s the DoD budget planners who decide which ships will be scrapped and when, not some random Admiral. And mothballing a vessel would mean preparing it to join the United States Reserve Fleet, not scrapping it entirely. It’s unlikely a nuclear powered vessel would be put into the reserve fleet without dismantling the reactor first, which presents its own problems. We’ll get to that later.

The Admiral had already recruited me and a number of others, and so we sailed the SSN41 to an uncharted, unnamed island off the Florida coast.

This might have worked in Verne’s day, and even in Gerry Anderson’s day for Thunderbirds by saying the island was privately owned, but these days you can subject any area you like to surveillance with a publicly available program. Even Area 51 is viewable down to a level where you can see individual cars on the tarmac, and Steve wants us to believe that this base was built without a single person seeing the construction underway, within spitting distance of the Florida coastline?

This plot would make some sense if you transposed it to a sci-fi setting rather than expecting it to work on Earth, since it’s much easier to accept that an old warship could vanish in the depths of space and be spirited to a secret base on some moon or asteroid. In fact the whole plot would work a bit better if you did that, though the stupid parts would still be stupid.

The Admiral resigned his commission and joined us later. While we waited for the Admiral, we went to work on the SSN41.

I don’t really get why he constantly calls it the SSN41 rather than just saying “the submarine” or “the sub.” It’s not like they have more than one submarine for Useless to be talking about here.

Admiral Mitchell was also a brain when it came to engineering and nuclear physics.

Why?

He laid out a plan for us and the ship, and we just followed it to the letter. When we left to supposedly sink the SSN41

“Sir, Admiral Tinfoil wants to have a bunch of guys scuttle a fully operational nuclear submarine in the middle of the ocean with no vessels nearby to retrieve the crew, who will therefore presumably go down with her or die of hypothermia in lifejackets.”
“Excellent! Minion, don’t monitor that at all!”
“On it, sir.”
“BWAHAHAHA!”

we took with us tons of materials that we would need to set up a base at the unnamed island and transform the SSN41. We were stacked to the rafters with material. There wasn’t much room to even move around, we were loaded with so much stuff.

Submarines are not noted for their vast cargo capacity, especially since they’d have to be loaded up through fairly tiny hatches. Here’s an image of the submarine in her pen from later in the story:

It seems at no point while drawing this did Steve stop and think “how the hell are they supposed to have constructed a pen several times the size of the entire submarine with materials that were transported inside it?”

Upon our arrival at the island, we unloaded and set about following the Admirals plan. First we armored the ship with an extra housing of armor, well beyond the already nicely maintained pressure hull of the SSN41.

Then we found she didn’t actually float anymore because we’d made her too heavy. We’re bad at this.

Then we completely remodeled the sail giving it a low profile and added streamlined forward diving planes. Overarching all the ship, we added a special, hardened steel saw tooth and diamond coated, retractable ridge. Designed by the Admiral, much like the fictional Nautilus envisioned by Jules Verne.

There’s so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start.

First up, I was a little dishonest when I said he’d based it on Verne’s Nautilus because he hasn’t. It’s pretty clear that Steve’s never read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea since Verne’s description of the Nautilus is that she was cigar-shaped with a ramming prow, not a sawblade. The classic vision of the Nautilus with a huge overhead raking blade was created by an artist named Harper Goff for Walt Disney’s 1954 live-action movie.

Second, a ram is a stupid weapon to put on a submarine. To understand why Verne did it you have to understand a little about the state of naval technology when he wrote the book back in 1870.

While people might slap the label “steampunk” on it now, the intent of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was to be more or less a 19th century Tom Clancy novel. Nautilus was incredibly futuristic at the time, being almost twice as long as the submarine Verne based her on, a French boat called Plongeur, and over three times heavier. Verne was amazingly prescient about a number of details related to her, in particular correctly determining that the compressed air powered motors used by early submersibles to run underwater would be useless in a true submarine because they lacked endurance. His Nautilus instead used sodium-mercury batteries, long before any electrically powered submarine was ever even on the drawing boards. Granted, it wasn’t a practical design (he wanted to get sodium from salt in seawater, which would have the minor side-effect of filling the boat with chlorine) but if Verne had a practical design for a submarine he’d have sold it to one of the world’s navies, not written a book about it.

Other aspects of Nautilus are defined by contemporary naval thinking. When Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, there was a thought from battles like Monitor versus Merrimack (or CSS Virginia, as she was called as an ironclad) eight years earlier that armour had won out over armament. Breech-loading heavy guns were new and untested, high explosives were still so unstable that you couldn’t fire a high-velocity explosive shell without blowing it up, and nobody had ever fired a self-propelled torpedo in combat. In general there was a vision that future wars would be decided by nearly invincible machines; and clearly, the only way to defeat armour immune to all gunfire would be to throw your entire penis ship at it.

This is why Nautilus has a ram.

Of course we now know that’s not how it worked out at all; more stable explosives, stronger steels and better fire control systems soon meant warships could hit and destroy each other from huge distances, and the pendulum swung towards armament beating armour.

Now, the problem with a ram is that Newton tells us every time you hit a ship with enough force to rip out the keel, you’re also hitting your submarine with enough force to rip the keel out of a ship. A submarine has a lot of empty space between the outer hull and the pressure hull, meaning there’s a lot of scope for the outer hull to buckle and hatches to jam or burst. In addition the pressure hull really, really wants to implode while you’re submerged, and helping it is seldom a good plan. Nevermind that Steve’s raking blade is retractable and so the first port of call will be screwing up whatever machinery is used to retract it or slamming itself back into the fully retracted position because the locking gear can’t handle the stress of colliding with another ship at forty knots.

The other problem is in the case of an unsuccessful attack you’ll end up stuck to whatever you were trying to sink; the worst case scenario for a submarine attacking a larger vessel would be that you would be unable to free yourself and your opponent would sink on top of you.

Verne gets a pass because he was trying to guess the future. In his day nobody really knew what submarines were going to be good for; indeed, it wasn’t until German use in the First World War that the submarine’s main role of commerce raider was established, which resulted in some aggressively silly ideas about what they were going to do. But we know that there’s better ways to attack with a sub than ramming now. But maybe it’s just because the Eliminators don’t have a lot of materials available, right? Well, um…

When the Admiral came, we added under his direction a particle beam weapon

Yeah, they have enough resources to do that. Also, a particle cannon is an amazingly stupid thing to put on a submarine and an even stupider thing to put on the bottom of a submarine. Let’s see what the glossary at the end has to say about it.

Particle Beam Weapon: a Fictional weapon with several settings. Setting #6 is a Neutron radiation wave.

While you could create a weapon that fired neutral particles (using the same principles as a spallation neutron source for example) you could be damn sure it wouldn’t be able to fire anything else. Nevermind that the later description of the weapon (which is used exactly once, strangely enough on setting six with no idea what any of the others do) does not in any way match what a weaponised particle beam would actually do. Also, particle beam weapons are not fictional; lasers are particle beams, and blinding lasers have been used as weapons enough times for international treaties to be made outlawing them.

and a special water jet engine along the bottom of our new hull, extending half the length of the ship. This would increase the SSN41’s speed to well over 40 knots submerged and maybe as high as over 50 on the surface!

It seems he stole the idea of water jets from the “Caterpillar” tunnel drive system in the original book The Hunt for Red October; the system Clancy imagines wouldn’t be practical on any large submarine since it would take up too much internal space, would be slower due to limiting the amount of water that can pass down the tunnels at any given time compared to a screw or propulsor at the rear of the submarine, and the inlets to the tunnels containing the propulsors would be prone to fouling with debris. This is why a system described in a book written in 1984 is not used on any actual submarines.

Mind you, even Clancy’s book pointed out that the Red October ran slowly on her Caterpillar drive and she had two propellers to use when travelling normally. I guess Steve just skimmed the description of Red October’s drive and then threw the book away before Clancy reprogrammed his mind under the orders of THE GOVERNMENT or something.

And modern submarines are slower on the surface, not faster.

The power source for the SSN41 was originally nuclear. But the Admiral had something much more powerful and safe to use in mind.

A submarine is literally built around its reactor, and it is not designed to be in any way easy to remove; indeed, Russian nuclear submarines have to be dismantled just to refuel them. Also, military personnel are trained to operate ships, not design them from scratch. Steve seems to subscribe to the Star Trek: Voyager system of rank where the ranking officer is also the ranking whatever else she damn well feels like being.

Water! The Admiral devised from some old plans, a hydrogen generator. These plans, Navy Intelligence had stolen from the Army. The US Government originally stole the plans from an inventor in the 1998, which they promptly had killed. The Admiral honored the inventor, a Mr. Meyers, by installing his system onboard our ship and improving it tremendously! The ‘Meyers Hydro Generator’ now powered our ship. Thus the SSN41 now had virtually unlimited power safely!

and the glossary note:

Mr. Meyers: Stan Meyer’s built a car that ran entirely on water, and then was Murdered in 1998 by Government agents. All of his equipment and the car that he created was stolen and never recovered. *This is a true Fact you can look up!

Ah, here we go with the crazy again. You can certainly look it up, and I did.

Convicted fraudster Stanley Allen Meyer (not Meyers) was a typical “black box” kind of guy; just invest in his poorly-defined technology which violates fundamental physical laws and you’d soon be filthy rich. After a fairly successful run of fraud he was hauled to court in 1996 after a couple of investors he duped out of $25,000 each filed a lawsuit, during which he refused to demonstrate his car to one expert witness and three others said his “fuel cell” was just a conventional electrolysis cell and couldn’t generate enough hydrogen to create more power than was used to run it. He discovered afterwards that he could make a safer living by simply giving lectures about how the government was keeping his technology down, since lying to people for money is legal if you don’t lie about why they should give it to you. He ultimately died of a brain aneurysm two years later after eating at a restaurant, so obviously he was poisoned by the same government which, um… well, didn’t take him to court (it was a civil suit) or really do anything at all to stop him.

Bear in mind Meyer’s patents are still public, so if the oil industry or government is covering them up they’re not doing a very good job of it. If he had reason to fear for his life over some super-secret plans he had for an engine that actually worked, he could presumably have entered them into the public record at his trial, especially since that would have saved him paying back fifty grand and all.

So, Admiral Tinfoil installed an engine that can’t possibly work and honoured the designer by forgetting his name and surpassing his design in every way. Steve Nelson, everybody.

Each crewman of the ship came bringing his own expertise in whatever he had specialized in while with the navy, or whatever service or walk of life that he came from. Admiral Mitchell gathered the best available, wherever he went and did his recruiting.

He’s gathering the best available even though he’s only selecting from a pool of people with recent bereavements related to the drug trade, and only those who have no dependants left whatsoever because of said bereavement. Again, you have to question if the Admiral isn’t just arranging all of these convenient personal tragedies to assemble Strikeforce Idiot rather than waiting for nature to take its course.

The Admiral himself maintained a special contact at the navy department that provided timely intelligence to us about probable targets. But we have never made a move without checking things out for ourselves first! Government people, as could anyone, could always become compromised.

This is a really weird part since the rest of the book says basically the entire government is corrupt and evil, yet Steve reminds us that even government agents can be compromised. Also, didn’t we establish in the first chapter that most of the leads this guy gives them don’t work out, and wouldn’t that be reason to stop trusting him after a while?

The SSN41 was stuffed with the latest in detection, sensory and communication equipment.

And they just pulled this from the depths of Admiral Tinfoil’s cavernous ass, I suppose. Including the latest sensors that can’t tell you where the keel of a ship is.

Admiral, now Captain Mitchell thought of everything! Plus along with our particle beam weapon, we had a few old fashioned torpedoes too.

There is no such thing as a high-tech torpedo.

And don’t forget, the best friend of any army in the field. We had a supply of recently misplaced shoulder launched surface to air missiles.

1. They’re not an army in the field.
2. These missiles are so useful Steve is never going to mention them again.
3. There is a slight issue some of you might have detected with using a shoulder-launched SAM in a bloody submarine.

It’s pretty cool tech-porn if you can think of a way for the submarine itself to launch SAMs below periscope depth, but having a bunch of Stingers on board that you can’t actually fire without surfacing is kind of… Well, stupid. It might make sense to have one or two on the off-chance you’re caught on the surface, but it’s not something you’d really give much thought to above “oh yeah, that thing we have in case we completely screw up.”

So, the Admiral got them all together for their first mission, which we’re told was several years earlier, and gets started with the inspiring speech.

“Now don’t call me Admiral anymore, as I have resigned my commission. Just call me Captain as that’s all I want to be from now on.” With murmuring discussion we all agreed.

Great job, Admiral Captain Tinfoil!

“I have resigned my commission, so I am busting myself down by four imaginary pay grades. Truly I am a man of the people.”

“The next Item gentleman is we need a name for our new vessel,” said the Captain. “I’ll entertain any and all suggestions.”

You’ll note we’re glossing over such minor issues as how seniority is being decided and enforced, what their actual mission is and how they intend to perform it, or, hell, what they’re going to eat. Nope, naming the USS Whatever (which you’ll notice didn’t have a name beforehand) is top priority. I think the main reason for this is Steve hates thinking of names and thinks actually naming something is a big deal, which is why in his hideous not-utopia future story the only names people have consist of their gender and a serial number.

The discussion went round and round and lots of names were suggested; Shark, Tiger Shark, Swordfish, Sea Wolf, Stingray, Sea Shark, Harpoon, Vengeance, Apollo, Hydra, even Nautilus. This kind of a decision was a bit of a tough nut.

The funny thing about this list is that “Apollo” is the only one that isn’t better than the one they actually choose. But it’s good that they didn’t drag Stingray into this shitfest along with the poor Nautilus and Red October, at least. Troy Tempest is too good for the likes of them.

After some lengthy discussion, the Captain finally said, “All your suggestions are really great, but I believe I have the perfect name for our boat. It is a name that will strike fear into the hearts of all those who deal in the death of the drug trade, when they eventually learn of us. It is a name of probably the deadliest fish ever known, and I think it fits us for our purpose to a tee. I propose that we name our ship, The Barracuda.”

I’m genuinely unsure how he’s quantifying “deadliest.” Barracuda are predators, but they’re not particularly interesting in terms of viciousness as far as I’m aware and they only attack humans because they’re stupid and confuse jewelery for prey. This boat does have “stupid” down to a T, mind you. Regardless, I see Admiral Captainington uses the typical military method of soliciting advice before doing whatever he was going to do anyway.

We all thought a moment and I spouted off almost simultaneously with several others, “Yes Sir, that sounds Great!”

“Spouted off” does not mean what Steve thinks it means.

Then, for no good reason, we get an image of Useless himself. This is supposedly copied from a photograph of Steve’s grandfather who was a “real life war hero” (he doesn’t say which one, and Steve’s old enough he might have Second and Korean to choose from with First at the outside).

I don’t imagine Steve’s grandfather was black and Useless isn’t black on the cover (assuming that’s him in the foreground), so I guess we have a serious shading failure here. Another good example of the issue with art I talked about earlier is that Steve doesn’t understand that Useless’ two front teeth should be lined up with the middle of his nose, so his mouth ends up pointed directly at the viewer even though the rest of his face is looking left. The same for his hooked nose, missing chin and hunchback. The lazy eye I’m not really sure about the reason for, though it certainly does mean fits well as his emoticon.

And I’m really not sure why you’d make a story where badly copied granddad is a direct report to his own son, either.

So our black invisible to radar ship was christened, The Barracuda.

Once again the author manages to start trailing behind the reader. Also yes, he does italicise the word “the” even though it shouldn’t really be considered part of the boat’s name.

I don’t know why he’s concerned with radar on a deep-diving submarine; submarines are designed to beat sonar. If you’re on the surface long enough to be caught by enemy radar you’re already doing something horribly wrong anyway. Modern submarines are black because they’re clad in thick tiles made of rubber to insulate sound coming from inside them, not because they’re made of RAM.

The name really stuck and gave the crew, who worked so hard in building her, a special bond with the boat.

Yeah, I imagine all their hard work meant nothing until it was named after an extremely stupid fish.

With our water jet engine off, intake vents closed, and the overhead blade retracted, The Barracuda could glide underwater like a bird in the upper atmosphere for a long, long while.

This is possibly the most strained metaphor I’ve ever seen that wasn’t played for a laugh. It’s reminiscent of Adams’ description of the Vogon fleet hovering like bricks don’t.

This was due to its extremely streamlined shape and when speed was needed!

When speed is needed you forget to write the rest of a sentence.

To my knowledge, way back then and even now, the drug lords still don’t know about us. All they know is that several yachts with drug kingpins aboard, have met with mysterious ends. They haven’t put 2 and 2 together yet, and we aim to keep it that way for as long as possible. We strike without warning! Like the Barracuda; hard, fast and deadly!

“This name will strike fear into their hearts when they find out, which we don’t want them to ever do!”
“Can I date the submarine now we’ve named it?”

It will also strike fear into the hearts of anyone who expects continuity since we’ll later find they’ve done a ton of stuff that Useless forgets to mention here.

Next up: Dialog! Adventure! Not adventure!

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