Deep Shadow

by Nick Sullivan

  Boone looked toward Emily and saw she was looking up at the surface too. The motor sound continued; it was unusual, not a high-speed pass from a boat in transit. Perhaps a fisherman was idling, lining up on a promising spot. After a moment, Emily’s eyes found his and she simply shrugged, signaled OK, then readied her camera for another go at her spotted drum friend. She’s got her drum, now how about my dolphin? The second he had this thought, he heard a pair of high-pitched tones. Sonar? Hopeful, Boone turned out to sea to check the blue. This time he saw something. It was large and moving at a fair clip, but it was definitely not a dolphin.

  At first, his brain simply couldn’t register what he was looking at. Painted in splotches of different shades of blue, the object was about seventy feet out, heading east, dropping slightly in depth as it traveled. At the moment, it was slightly shallower than Boone. A submarine?! Impossible! As if to dispel any doubts, a second pair of piercing pings reached his ears, one slightly higher in pitch than the other. He felt them in his body and winced. It’s big! Water distorted the actual size of objects underwater, but Boone made a mental comparison to wrecks he’d dived and estimated its length at nearly a hundred feet. A tiny trickle of bubbles emanated from the base of its small conning tower and Boone could make out a pair of propellers turning slowly just aft of a dorsal rudder and a pair of planes on its stern. The thrumming of its engines resonated in his chest. He quickly looked back toward Emily and spotted a stream of bubbles where she was still head-down in the coral. He unclipped his carabiner and began banging it against his tank. She popped up and looked around. Boone saw her eyes go wide and he quickly mimed taking a picture, before returning his attention to the submersible.

  A large stream of bubbles suddenly surged from the side of the object as it passed him and began dropping in depth toward the sandy bottom, barely visible below the reef. Boone noted its two propellers were enclosed within open, circular housings. He checked his depth and pressure gauges: seventy feet and a thousand psi of air. He realized he was breathing hard, pumped as he was with adrenaline. Making a rough calculation, he took off after the sub, heading into the blue. Almost immediately, he stopped. Must be going six or seven knots, despite the westward current. No way am I gonna get anywhere near it. Emily came alongside him, her camera held tightly in front of her, taking photos. Occasionally, she checked the LCD screen at the back of the camera, made an adjustment, and took some more shots. In moments, the submarine merged with the blue and its propellers vanished from sight, heading east.

  Emily put her mask right up to his, her eyes glowing with excitement. Boone nodded vigorously, but then held up his pressure gauge so she could see it. She nodded, pumping two fingers north, toward shore. As they began the return swim, Emily reached over and squeezed his arm. Through the sound-distorting water he heard her giving a primal scream of exhilaration through her regulator.

  Boone pointed at her camera and signaled OK? Emily nodded vigorously.

  Well, it wasn’t a dolphin… but it’ll do.

  Thirteen hours earlier.

  2:30 a.m., Wednesday, August 23

  One mile north of Viento Suave, Venezuela

  Igor Popov slapped his palm against the side of his neck for what felt like the hundredth time tonight. Here, alongside a jungle-encrusted river mouth, the bugs were particularly thick. Damn mosquitos. Well, the women of Venezuela have been enjoying me, why not the insects? His hand came away coated in sweat. Even after two in the morning, the night was hot, the air humid. Almost makes me miss Kamchatka, he thought, though he quickly admitted to himself that that was a lie. The Siberian winters were brutal, and Venezuela was beautiful. As if the country itself sought to reward him, an ocean breeze kicked up off the nearby shore, cooling his face.

  Popov was used to the ocean, having lived in a closed military town near Petropavlovsk for nearly twenty-five years, working at the Rybachiy Nuclear Submarine Base. For the first part of his tenure there, he’d helped design and construct shiny new nuclear and diesel submarines for the USSR; for the second part, he struggled to maintain the steadily deteriorating remnants of what was now the Russian Pacific Fleet.

  As more and more of the hulks rusted away, Popov began thinking of retirement. He felt little better than a glorified mechanic, scraping barnacles, testing circuits they didn’t even make anymore, and rolling the dice every time he started up a reactor on any nuclear sub that had been sitting idle for too long. He missed the days when he would design a sleek, silent beauty from the ground up. Well, to be fair, he had done so with a team of other engineers and was rarely the lead designer but still, it was creating something.

  After Putin came to power and the country spiraled into a corrupt kleptocracy, Popov decided it was time to reward himself for his service. He slipped into North Korea, offering to design an improved version of a midget submarine they currently had. He’d heard rumors about their indigenous creation and had a number of ideas how to turn their bathtub toy into a lethal killer. Given how poor the country was, he was genuinely surprised when his newly established Swiss bank account received a substantial influx of funds. The North Koreans were pleased and asked for another design, but having spent nearly a year with them, Popov had decided they were completely insane. He said he’d be happy to design a new boat for them, he just needed to journey to Iran to arrange for the transfer of some needed materials. Once in Iran, he kissed the North Koreans goodbye and approached the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, offering his services to them instead. In short order, they housed him in a lavish apartment in the port city of Bandar Abbas, placing him on a current project: a new mini sub for use in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. This submarine, to be named Besat, was the third class in a line of submarines the Iranians had already built. Popov thought it was an excellent design and he soon learned why: the project was headed by another former Soviet submarine engineer, Hamid Samarkandi.

  Popov looked toward the shore and spotted his counterpart. He whistled and called out. “Kak tam?” You alright?

  Samarkandi looked back, smiling and giving an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Khorosho!” Very good. He was directing cartel men as they prepared to pull the mini sub toward the beach.

  Samarkandi was from the former Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, and he too had become disgruntled with the state of the navy. Once the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, he returned home to Uzbekistan for a time before making a decision similar to Popov’s; except he went immediately to Iran and helped with the design of two earlier submarine types.

  The two engineers worked together flawlessly, and with the influx of Popov’s own design skills, they quickly improved the Besat, altering the conventional diesel engine design to an air-independent propulsion system that was much quieter and would allow the mini submarine to stay down for long periods without needing to return to the surface or deploy its snorkel. The Iranians paid them both handsomely and, newly enriched, Popov let his friend in on another lucrative possibility. After hearing about several crude semi-submersibles running drugs for South American cartels, Popov had approached one of the more stable groups with a proposition: for twenty million dollars, he would design and construct a legitimate mini sub, one that could go far faster and deeper than anything they had. Soon, the two engineers were flying to Caracas. A year and a half later, their new submarine was complete.

  At the moment, the newborn mini sub was nearing the mouth of the river under the watchful eye of Hamid Samarkandi. Popov joined his friend, taking care not to sink into the muck of the river bank. “I hope you are ready to celebrate! We have earned it!”

  “Let us make sure it reaches the ocean, first,” Samarkandi said, still smiling.

  Though “mini” by submarine standards, their design was still a large craft. Nearly a hundred feet long, the sub displaced over a hundred tons (and quite a bit more once they added crew, fuel, and cocaine). They had built it in a makeshift shipyard deep in the mangrove
s of this small jungle river. The site was well chosen, the jungle thick and concealing, and this part of the Venezuelan state of Falcón was largely unpopulated. The nearest village, Viento Suave, was over a mile away to the south, and its hundred or so inhabitants were not likely to approach a cartel operation.

  The river emptied into the Caribbean about fifty miles south of the Dutch island of Curaçao and the submarine had been able to navigate part of the way to the mouth of the river before it became too shallow. At this point, heavy construction vehicles were essentially portaging the boat to the shore where two shallow draft tugs would take over. A large dredger had already opened up the river mouth, giving them a little more depth to play with.

  The jungle insects competed with the sound of construction machinery and Popov looked up at the moon—it wasn’t full, but there would be plenty of light for a shakedown cruise. The moon cast a shimmering path along the water and he could see the coat of blue and green camouflage on the submarine, designed to make it difficult to spot from the air while running shallow. The sub’s twin propeller housings were just visible above the surface of the river and its small conning tower, sporting a snorkel and a periscope, stood proudly like the dorsal fin of a shark.

  “Isn’t she a beauty, mi amigo!” A brash voice, speaking in accented English, cut through the night air. The cartel leader strode up, the glow of his cigar heralding his arrival through the gloom. Neither Popov nor his partner spoke Spanish, but their English was good and many of the senior cartel leaders spoke English as well, ranging from passable to excellent. Fernando Muñoz was among the latter. “You should be very proud, Igor. She is a triumph!”

  “I am delighted that you are pleased,” the Russian said.

  “I shall be even more pleased if she functions as you say she will,” Muñoz said, looking at Popov over the orange tip of his cigar.

  “Everything is in order, Señor. You are paying us well and I am certain we have earned it. More importantly, you have provided excellent materials, as I requested. I ran the air-independent propulsion system for several hours this afternoon. It performed as expected. The fuel cells are holding their charge with only a tenth of a percent loss per hour. You should have more than enough range to reach Puerto Rico.”

  “And will she go as deep as you promised?”

  “The design depth of two hundred feet should be no problem. I designed it for a test depth of three hundred but the Kevlar coated carbon fiber hull is somewhat experimental—that being said I can promise you two hundred fifty feet.”

  “Excelente! That should be more than enough for the second-tier naval units we are likely to encounter.”

  “It should be, yes.” Popov was most concerned about maritime patrol aircraft like the P-3 Orion and the newer P-8 Poseidon. The United States had actually retasked several of the older Orions to look for narco subs, and they still employed a Magnetic Anomaly Detector, or “MAD”, to detect the disruption in the earth’s magnetic field caused by a passing submarine. Popov’s hull had been designed with a non-metallic outer layer. This wouldn’t completely foil MAD—the submarine still had plenty of metal underneath—but it would greatly reduce the range at which an aircraft could detect them.

  Muñoz clapped him on the shoulder and grinned. “Are you ready for your first command, Igor?”

  Popov had gone on many runs aboard Russian submarines, testing various systems and ensuring that everything was operating smoothly. While he had never commanded one himself, he knew every system inside and out and was supremely confident that, with Samarkandi’s help, they would have no difficulties. “I am eager to sail, Señor Muñoz.”

  “Good. I’m counting on you. And if all goes well, you can count on me to transfer the second half of your twenty million. Perhaps, after this, you might design a bigger one, capable of reaching Europe. I can promise you, the cartel knows how to treat its friends.”

  Fernando Muñoz was more than the leader of the cartel—he was also a colonel in the Venezuelan Army. The Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) was a criminal organization run by high-ranking members of the Venezuelan military. As the country descended into lawlessness under President Nicolas Maduro’s reign, a group of officers had banded together and created the organization, incorporating elements of distribution from existing criminal organizations into a military structure. With government resources at their disposal such as weaponry, manpower, and intelligence gathering, the Cartel de los Soles quickly consolidated much of the drug trade in the country. The corruption hadn’t spread to all levels and many members of the military were not aware of the group—or if they were, they chose to look the other way—but enough cartel members were situated in the Bolivarian Navy and Coast Guard to make certain the narco submarine’s maiden voyage would meet with success.

  Muñoz began walking toward the mouth of the river and Popov followed. “I have spoken to the commander of the frigate. He will be on station to the northeast of Isla Aves de Sotavento. I have men at the small lighthouse there. Once you are certain of the submarine’s performance, you will proceed to that island to check in with me, and from there to the rendezvous. One advantage of our President Maduro’s tenure: the coast guard vessels of other countries will not be surprised if one of our frigates acts aggressively; she will keep other vessels well away from the submarine when you need to surface.”

  Although the closed system engine allowed the submarine to operate submerged for long periods, it did so at the cost of speed and endurance. The planned route would involve two or three nights of running on the surface. “The frigate commander is…loyal?” Popov asked.

  “Oh yes, completely. Several of his bridge crew are ours as well.” They reached the edge of the shore alongside the bow of the sub. “I think it is time to name her. Would you do the honors?”

  Just then, a cloud shrouded the moon and the light on the submarine dimmed. “Shadow,” Popov said.

  “Ooh… I like it. But we’ll go with the Spanish, if you don’t mind. Alas, I did not bring a bottle of champagne to christen her.”

  “Considering the expense of her coating, smashing a bottle against the bow might not be the best tradition to uphold.”

  “That is true.” Muñoz took a final puff from his cigar. “I shall use another vice.” Flicking the stub of the cigar through the air, Muñoz intoned, “I christen thee, La Sombra!” The cigar remnant struck the bow in a burst of embers, bouncing into the water with a hiss.

  The cartel workers swiftly moved the submarine through the shallow river mouth to the shore and, with the help of a tugboat, she was soon floating in the channel they had dredged. Samarkandi had joined Popov on the beach and the two engineers watched their pride and joy float in the waves. Compared to most narcotics-hauling submarines, she had graceful lines, her conning tower rising proudly above her hull. Popov grinned broadly.

  “We did it, Hamid. She’s beautiful.”

  “Yes,” Samarkandi said softly. “She is.”

  “So, my friend… what are you going to do with your ten million?” Popov asked.

  Samarkandi was quiet a moment, looking out at the submarine. “I will send much of it to my family. They need it more than I.” Then he smiled at Popov, the light of the moon shining off of his teeth. “Perhaps I will take a vacation.”

  “Just a vacation? Hamid, it’s ten million dollars! You should reward yourself. You’ve earned it. Me, I’m going to buy a little beach house on Margarita Island. With a name like that, how can I go wrong?”

  Samarkandi returned his gaze to the sea. “A lot of crime there, I hear.”

  “Who’s going to mess with a friend of the Cartel of the Suns? Oh, and Fernando said he’d like us to design a transatlantic sub for him, one to reach Europe.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps.”

  Samarkandi was a quiet man, but Popov was surprised he wasn’t more excited about their accomplishment. Unless… “Are you nervo
us about the voyage? I could probably manage on my own if…”

  “No, no, of course not” Samarkandi smiled and clapped a hand on Popov’s shoulder. “Let’s get aboard and make sure everything is in order.” He started toward a skiff on the beach. “Bring Fernando, he’ll want to be there.”

  Fernando Muñoz and one of his guards joined them and they quickly pulled up to the flank of the submarine, tying on to a hefty rope line that was strung along one side. After using the line to pull himself up, the guard assisted the others as they climbed aboard. Popov opened the little hatch at the back of the conning tower and followed Samarkandi and Muñoz down into the submarine, leaving the guard up top.

  “¡Ay! It is stifling in here,” Muñoz said.

  “Not for long.” Popov said, as he and Samarkandi began flipping switches. In short order, machinery hummed to life and cool air wafted through the interior.

  “Bueno! You put in air conditioning?”

  “Of a sort,” Popov said. “In order to run underwater for long periods, we need excellent ventilation and scrubbers to keep the air fresh.” He turned to Samarkandi. “We don’t want to drain the fuel cells—time to fire up the engines.”

  “In a moment,” Samarkandi replied, heading aft. “I want to check the oil pressure.”

  Muñoz moved toward the bow where a large watertight door was battened down. “Soon, we’ll have ten tons of cocaine loaded in there. A quarter of a billion dollars’ worth.”

  Popov chuckled. “I’m starting to think we should have asked for more money.”

  “No, mi amigo,” Muñoz said, smiling and waggling a finger. “Like all good businessmen, you gave the cartel a “taste”. If all goes well, then for the next sub you will be paid far, far more, I assure you.”