Fu picked up his watch, a Tissot, also on the nightstand by his hat. “I will check the flights,” he said. “But it will take all day to get there via commercial airline.”
Talia’s beautiful thigh tensed—possibly because he spoke about leaving …
“Stand by,” Fu said, muting the phone and holding it away from his ear to check the distance between Moscow and Tirana, Albania, on the Internet. He turned the phone away so Talia could not observe his search.
The movement brought a whiff of Talia’s shampoo and he had to rub a hand across his face to stay focused.
“If I take a company plane I can be there in under four hours,” he said.
Her leg tensed again. Relaxed. A delicate foot tick-tocked back and forth at the end of the mattress, red toenails bright and stark against the white sheet. Her brain was working through some problem. Was it how to get Fu to stay with her, or was she instead envisioning a large map, as he would have done had he heard her having this same conversation? Was she trying to work out what important destinations a corporate jet might reach in less than four hours?
The admiral easily agreed to Fu’s use of the company plane, a Cessna Citation CJ3 registered to an Internet gaming company in Beijing. The company did not mind the use of their name on the international paperwork, and members of Admiral Zheng’s intelligence service enjoyed some degree of anonymity when they traveled. Four of Fu’s men were already in the air from Beijing. They would meet him in Tirana.
Fu ended the call and set the phone back on the nightstand beside his hat. He waited for Talia to speak.
She rolled toward him, draping her leg across his thighs again, nuzzling his neck with her button nose, kneading gently at his shoulder with her chin. “Do you really have to leave me, dorogoy?” My darling.
“I am afraid so,” Fu said, attuned to the reaction of the muscles in her belly as she lay flush against his hip.
She groaned, pouting, pulling herself closer to him, as if getting any closer were even possible. “Ya nye magu byes teebya zheet.” Fu didn’t understand her, but he’d observed many times since he’d taken her to his bed that though her Mandarin was near perfect, she stuck to her native Russian in matters of the heart. She stuck out her bottom lip and translated. “I cannot live without you.”
She did not ask where he was going, which made him doubt his earlier assessment. Instead, she asked when he was coming back.
“I am not certain,” Fu said, being honest. He did not know if he would ever return to Moscow.
She nuzzled him harder, breathing against his neck. “You have at least one more hour, no?”
He shook his head. “I must leave now.”
She pulled away, far enough to lift herself up on one elbow and stare down at his face, head tilted, auburn hair draped to one side, exposing the small diamond stud in her beautiful ear. She kept her leg where it was, hooking him gently with her heel.
“What could be so important that you have to rush away?”
“Work,” he said, leaving it at that. Now her questions would come. The angled interrogation of a spy hiding under the guise of a wistful lover.
Instead, she collapsed beside him, dejected and glum, and pressed him no further. “Very well,” she said. “I am not accustomed to this. It is usually I who leaves.”
Fu kissed her on the shoulder and got out of bed.
Talia pulled the white sheet to her chin and rolled on her side to watch him get dressed. She slipped back and forth between Chinese and Russian as she talked about all the things they might do together when he came back to Moscow.
She was still in bed, naked but for the sheet, when he shrugged on his long wool coat and pulled his gray hat snug. The odds were sixty-forty against her working for the Russian SVR—and that saved her life.
For the moment.
35
Commander Wan’s exposure suit gripped him like a fist as water flooded the trunk and pressure equalized with the sea outside. He climbed the short ladder and unlocked the hatch. He took a deep breath before he gave it a kick. It opened easily, and he pulled himself through, clinging to a small exterior handle long enough to shut the door behind him, throwing him into complete and utter darkness.
And then he let go.
The sonar technician aboard Long March #880 had been off watch during the accident and sustained burns to the side of his face as part of the fire-suppression crew. At his station now, he turned his bandaged head toward the captain.
“Con, Sonar. Heavy screws. Close. Zero-five-zero.”
Captain Tian pursed his lips. Perhaps the distress buoy had gotten through the ice. “Another submarine?”
“Negative, Captain. A surface ship. Icebreaker.”
In training, Commander Wan had been taught to yell “ho, ho, ho,” like Santa Claus all the way to the surface to keep venting air so his lungs would not burst as the pressure increased as he shot to the surface. In truth, he simply screamed. The huge hood shot him upward at two meters per second, as if pulled by a hoist, arms outstretched over his head like Superman. Even moving so quickly, it took almost a minute and a half for him to reach the surface. Ears squealing, his lungs on fire, his face felt as though he’d been beaten with a hammer as pockets in his sinuses struggled to deal with the rapid ascent. And the cold. It was very cold, even in the suit. He imagined for a moment that he was falling, not rising, plummeting from a fifty-story building. If he hit overhead ice, the results would be close.
He’d been terrified through the entire journey, from the moment he’d dogged the hatch on the lockout trunk, but a minute in he began to fight true panic. The kind of panic that makes a submariner hold his breath or rip away some important piece of gear. The kind of panic that would kill him. He kept breathing out. Why was it still so dark? He had to be near the surface. Had they gotten the time wrong? Was it night? Did polar bears hunt at night? He should be nearing the surface by now. Ah … He’d been closing his eyes. Light. Gray at first. Then blue. Something pale passed in front of his eyes, scraping the hood, spinning him as he bounced away.
Ice.
His hands struck the base of the ice sheet first, his arms folding in on themselves as the speed of his body carried him up. The air in the bubble hood protected his skull from the worst of the impact—rattling him, but not breaking his neck as he’d feared. He followed the light, rebreathing what little air he had left in the hood as he crawled along the bottom of the ice, pulling himself toward what he hoped was the edge.
At some point, he’d have nothing but carbon dioxide.
Blue-white chunks of ice as big as cars bobbed and rolled in a slurry of smaller slush, basketballs, soccer balls, baseballs, all jagged and sharp, tearing at his suit. A sudden shock hit the small of his back as freezing water began to seep in. Floundering, he kicked toward what looked like the edge. One of the crew had made him a set of spikes out of two pieces of a mop handle and sharpened bolts. Fighting the swaying current, terrified of being sucked under, he popped the protective corks off the sharpened ends and used them to pull himself upward. Kicking was difficult within the cumbersome suit, but he powered himself up—only to be rolled off the other side as what he thought was a shelf turned out to be a small, tippy berg. Water began to seep into his suit again. If it filled, he would, at the very least, freeze to death. If he lost the flotation, he would return to the sub, very slowly and very dead.
He found the edge, a two-foot-thick shelf. It was much too high for him to get a correct angle with the ice spikes without taking the suit off. That was not going to happen.
He swam along the edge, searching, pushing away every time a swell threatened to drag him under. His nose bled profusely, spattering the clear face of the hood with every breath. Overwhelmed with cold and fatigue, he found himself wondering what would come first, complete exhaustion or the inability to see what he was doing. A bergy bit the size of his father’s car nudged him from behind, at first startling him, then giving him an idea.
The
first one had held him for a time, before tipping him off. If he could clamber up on this one, he might be able to use it as a stepping stone …
“We did not talk about this,” Wan muttered inside his bubble hood as he worked. “Drowning. Yes. Kidneys torn out by bears. Yes. But there was no mention of the insurmountable wall …”
Using all his reserves, he finally dragged and kicked himself out of the water to collapse on the ice shelf. He rolled onto his side and unzipped the hood with trembling fingers. The sudden slap of cold air took what was left of his breath away. A white moonscape of ice dazzled by the sun stretched forever around him in all directions.
The thought of it made him laugh out loud. He’d struggled so hard, only to drag himself to a different place to die.
Commander Wan’s suit had begun to freeze to the ice by the time he remembered he had something else to do.
The satellite phone. Yes. That was it. Call in the report … and then, whatever happened happened …
He fumbled with the bag containing the phone, teeth chattering, shivering badly, his hands like unworkable claws. The simple squeeze buckles seemed impossible, and he had to put his hands under his armpits for several minutes just to warm them. He finally opened the bag—only to dump a steady stream of seawater onto the ice. He could not see any rip, but it had flooded nonetheless. The phone was useless. A plastic brick.
The bag with the shotgun was still around his neck. He could use that if he needed to. If freezing to death wasn’t as painless as they said. Or if a bear came for him. He looked at the plastic buckles, then at his blue unworkable fingers and shook his head. The neoprene bag might as well have been a bank vault. However he died, the shotgun would not be a part of it.
Wan rolled onto his back. An unbearable sadness washed over him as he stared up at the incredible blue. The men on the stricken 880, his men, five hundred feet below, would all perish without another look at the sky.
Two hours after Wan Xiuying collapsed, a strange rumble carried across the ice. He felt it before he heard it. The shivering had passed now and he was warm. In fact, the suit worked much too well, and he thought of taking it off to cool himself. He’d watched movies in his mind as he drifted in and out. Crimson Tide, Run Silent, Run Deep—the book was better. He’d found a copy in Mandarin, but he learned more from the one in English. U-571 … What was the Russian movie? China needed something … Wolf Warrior should make a good submarine movie …
The rumbling grew louder, shaking the ice under his head. A surge of adrenaline coursed through Wan’s body. A bear! Head lolling. He pushed himself onto his side with great effort.
“Come here!” he shouted. “Come and get me, you—”
But when he lifted his head, it was no bear he saw, but a large red ship in the distance, eating its way through the ice—and an orange bird hovering directly above him.
36
Captain Jay Rapoza, commanding officer of the USCGC icebreaker Healy, met the medical officer outside sick bay. Rapoza was a big man, burly, fit, barrel-chested, with a slight squint in his left eye that made him look as though he should be clenching a pipe in his teeth. He was a sailor’s sailor, fibbing just a little to his wife when he told her how heartbroken he was every time he went to sea.
“How’s he doing?” Rapoza asked.
Fortunately for the guy they’d scooped off the ice, the Healy was the only cutter in the Coast Guard to have a licensed physician’s assistant and an HS—health services technician (called a corpsman in the Navy). Lieutenant Shirley Anderson peeled off a set of blue nitrile gloves and shook her head.
“Pupils are still dilated and his heartbeat is irregular. Core temperature is eighty-seven—about a degree from gonersville in most people. We’re warming him up slowly. Have to be careful the cold blood from his extremities doesn’t rush back to his core and give him a heart attack.”
“Hope that guy plays the lottery,” Rapoza said, “because he is one lucky young man.”
“Roger that, sir,” Lieutenant Anderson said. “If I may ask, sir. No sign of a boat or snow machine?”
“None,” Rapoza said. “The 65 made two more passes after they dropped him off. Just a big hole in the ice. The SEIE suit suggests he escaped a submarine.”
Anderson shivered.
“I don’t like thinking about subs underneath us, sir. Creeps me out. But it does make sense. This guy is extremely talkative—mostly about submarine movies.”
“Odd,” Rapoza said. “Sonar shows the seabed at over a thousand meters. There are some underwater mountains, maybe …” He glanced at the door, then at the lieutenant. “What exactly is he saying?”
“He was talking about Lipizzaner stallions when I left.”
Rapoza saw a junior officer from engineering at the end of the passageway and called him by name. “Find Chief Cho and have him come see me.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the ensign said. “Right away. I just passed him.”
Rex Cho came through the hatch a half minute later, cover in hand.
“Captain,” he said, presenting himself.
The whole ship knew they were heading toward an unknown radio signal, possibly a Chinese submarine. And, of course, they knew about the lone Asian man in the exposure suit they’d picked up off the ice, but they’d not all been told the details.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” Cho said. “I haven’t spoken Chinese since grade school, since my nainai passed away.”
“Understood,” Rapoza said. “But I’d like you in the interview with me, just in case you pick something up. He’s kind of out of his head. He might see you as a friendly face and be a little more forthcoming.”
“Aye, sir,” Cho said.
It took all of ten seconds for the man to tell Chief Petty Officer Cho that he was “Commander Wan Xiuying, executive officer of 880.” He drifted off twice, rambling about enigma machines and Nazi U-boats when he awoke. Some of it was in English, and Rapoza recognized them as lines from Hollywood movies. He first answered Chief Petty Officer Cho in Chinese, but when Cho repeated the question in English, Commander Wan threw his head against the pillow and rolled his eyes as if to say, Oh, you want to play that game? Okay … and then answering in English. Most of it seemed like nonsense, but many recent events over the past few days fell squarely in the unbelievable column.
Coded signals, strange noises from the bottom of the Chukchi, and now a Chinese submariner coughed up on the ice like some Jonah—Captain Rapoza grabbed a piece of paper from Lieutenant Anderson’s desk and took notes.
Though the Chinese submariner seemed fluent in English, his physical and mental state slurred his rambling words, rendering them difficult to understand. There had been a fire on a submarine … a professor Liu was dead or near death. Rapoza got that much.
Commander Wan lifted his head, tugging against his IV line, attempting to get out of the bed.
“Must call,” he said. “Crew … destroy …”
Anderson and Cho each took a shoulder and guided him gently back to the pillow.
“Burned,” he said, thrashing his head back and forth. “Save crew! Hai shi shen lou … no good. Destroyed … Fire. Hai shi shen lou … Gone! Hai shi shen lou …”
Chief Cho gave an excited nod. “Wait, wait … I think I know this one … I always thought it was funny … Hai shi shen lou—towers and cities built by clams—it means mirage.”
Commander Wan’s heart rate rose and he began to thrash harder.
“Captain …” Anderson said.
“Right.” Rapoza took his notes and walked toward the door. “I need to make a call. This is a little above my pay grade.”
“Sir,” Lieutenant Anderson whispered before he made it into the passageway. “Are we still heading toward the distress signal?”
Rapoza thought for a moment, and then shook his head.
“I think this guy is our distress signal. We’ll see what Higher says, but unless otherwise directed, we’ll stand by at this location for a bit.”
“Do you think there are people alive down there?” Anderson shivered again. “On a submarine?”
“Down there, yes,” Rapoza said. “Alive … I don’t know. But I think we’re going to find out.”
37
CIA case officers Leigh Murphy and Vlora Cafaro habitually kept an eye open for surveillance. Being aware of one’s surroundings was part and parcel of PERSEC—personal security—for spies, and for anyone else, for that matter.
They’d done no full-blown surveillance-detection run on the way to the bar. They had no need to arrive in the black—that is, without a tail. Everyone at the embassy, and likely everyone on Elbasanit Street, knew they went to the Illyrian Saloon at least three nights a week after dinner. Sure, it was predictable, but there were only so many good bars within walking distance of the embassy. The Illyrian was only four blocks away, on the other side of the Air Albania stadium. They were just two women going to unwind after work, not spies doing spooky spy shit.
And they were young and invincible.
Murphy saw the tall man in the gray fedora when she left the Serendipity restaurant on her way to meet Vlora at the bar, around the corner at the southern edge of the upscale Blloku district. Eating alone was a natural depressant, and there was nothing about the man to make him stand out on a dark street where most everyone wore some kind of hat against the cold spring evening.
Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon Page 25