Shadow of the Dragon

by Marc Cameron

  “That’s a recording of an Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua,” she said, before opening a second file on the heels of the first. It was hollow, eerie, and haunting. “This one is uguruq bearded seals, recorded from my father’s boat.” She tapped the tablet and a green graph appeared, superimposed over the red lines that depicted the seal song. “Now we add the ice.” The whistles, screams, and chattering groans sounded incredibly human.

  She tapped the screen again. “We’ll mute the ice and the biologics, but leave up the visual graphs while we add the recording in question.”

  The room sat enthralled by the distinct splash as the hydrophone slipped beneath the surface and the burble as it descended into the deep. A wailing whistle, somewhere in the distance, overlaid significantly with a red graph—the bearded seal. The screech of the ship’s hull against floating ice closely matched the green. Ryan had listened to the file before, but heard it differently now.

  The new yellow graph suddenly jumped as new sounds came over the tablet’s tiny speakers. The room sat in rapt silence as the sounds blanked out and then reappeared a few moments later when the hydrophone cable was retrieved.

  Ryan took it all in, impressed with the young woman’s forthright demeanor—folksy, from a life lived close to the land, yet bolstered by science.

  Moon folded the cover over the tablet screen and gave a somber nod. “This is not fish flatulence, Mr. President, as some of my fellow scientists have suggested. And I do not believe it is ice. I’ve spent my life listening to ice talk and sing. I know what it sounds like.”

  Ryan gave a contemplative nod. “I agree.”

  Moon’s eyebrows inched up, just a hair, but enough that Ryan noticed. That might be the most emotional outburst he was going to get from this stoic woman.

  “It is interesting,” Ryan continued, “that the voices you recorded appeared and then disappeared as the hydrophone went deeper. I’m assuming that you’re working with some sophisticated equipment. I’ve listened to your recording and it sounds almost like the flip of a switch, as if someone turns off the voices and turns them back on again. Why would they not fade away as the hydrophone grew more distant?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Moon said. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas. For years—decades, really—phantom shoals have appeared on some charts, but not others. One Navy sonar picks up a submerged reef that looks as though it should rip the keel off the ship, while another steams by with nothing between them and the bottom but three hundred fathoms of cold water. Some say these are caused by rising biologics—schools of fish, plankton clouds, even giant squid. Others believe there is a magnetic anomaly and the charts are simply wrong. The point is, Mr. President, the Arctic is a mysterious place. That’s why I’m there, doing what I do. There’s a good chance we’re more familiar with the surface of the moon than we are with what’s down under the ice. Subs are gathering more and more data every day, but it’s a big place, with lots of secrets. What we do know is that the area around the Chukchi Borderland is toothy. There are all sorts of ridges and ledges jutting up from the seabed. A couple of them reach within a few fathoms of the surface. I suspect that whatever . . . whoever . . . made the sounds I recorded was located on the opposite side of one of those ridges. Sound waves travel long distances through water, but they are easily attenuated by solid rock, at least as far as my hydrophones are concerned.”

  Ryan nodded slowly, picturing the scene.

  “So,” he said. “For the sake of illustration, whatever is making voices is on one side of a ridge, say, a hundred meters below the peak, and you lowered your hydrophone on the opposite side. The sounds would be picked up as the hydrophone descended, and then blocked by the underwater mountain when the equipment went below the top, in the rock shadow, so to speak.”

  “Exactly, sir,” Moon said.

  Forestall put up his hand. “If I may, sir.”

  “Go ahead, Robbie.”

  “Given this scenario,” Forestall said, “knowing that the sounds came from the direction of the ridge in relation to the hydrophone, we may be able to triangulate on the signal strength as the instrument descended and the known depth. In theory, that could get us a general location from which the sounds emitted.”

  “He’s right,” Dr. Moon said, turning Forestall’s tablet around so Ryan had a good view. The others leaned in. The screen depicted a cross-sectional view of the seabed with the research vessel Sikuliaq on the surface. A series of knifelike ridges rose from the bottom, one almost directly beneath the ship. She tapped the screen and a small box representing the hydrophone appeared beneath the surface. “I began picking up the sounds here,” she said, “as soon as the instrument made it below all the surface clutter—ice, ship noise, et cetera. Then lost it here.”

  Foley leaned closer, adjusting her reading glasses. “The hydrophone is still above the ridgetop,” she said. “Not in the shadow yet.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Moon said. “But it would be in the shadow if the sounds emanated from this point.” She tapped the screen again, bringing up the red triangle, five hundred feet down, resting on a ledge on the opposite side of the ridge as the hydrophone. “Any sounds coming from here would travel upward, spreading out just enough to allow me to pick them up for a few meters. But if the sounds are coming from here, close to the wall, the shadow starts much higher, before the instrument passes the ridgetop.”

  Ryan looked around the room. “Anyone else have questions for Dr. Moon?”

  No one did. The matters they had to discuss would take place out of her presence.

  “Very well.” Ryan got to his feet. “Thank you for dropping everything for this trip.”

  Moon worked her way around the room, shaking hands.

  “I wonder,” Ryan said. “Would you mind staying around D.C. for a couple of days?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But I’ve already told you everything I know. My field of study is relatively narrow. I’m not sure what help I could offer.”

  “You’re smart,” Ryan said, “and you stick up for what you know when peers and superiors try to wave you off. It’s only a request, mind you. If you have something pressing, I understand, but I would appreciate it if you could stay. Commander Forestall will get you set up at the Willard and see that you get a few bucks in per diem.” Ryan walked with her to the door, struck with a sudden idea. “The First Lady is accompanying me to Fairbanks day after tomorrow, where I’m hosting some meetings with the polar nations. You could fly up on Air Force One as my guest, and then I’ll get someone from Wainwright or Eielson to get you back to your ship. If this is what I think it is, things are likely to develop fast, and I’d like to have you around.”

  Moon’s brow inched up again. “And what do you think it is, Mr. President?”

  Ryan opened the door for her. “The same thing you do. A Chinese submarine that has gotten itself into trouble.”

  29

  It seemed a simple assignment. Pick three names, one of which would be randomly selected for a suicide mission.

  Wan Xiuying sat alone in his quarters, curtain drawn, listening to the terrified sobs of the young crew, smelling the stench of melted metal and the cloyingly sweet odor of cooked flesh. Hunched over his small, fold-out writing desk, the thirty-one-year-old executive officer of the PLAN nuclear ballistic submarine Long March #880 clutched at his forelock with one hand while he tapped his pencil on the blank sheet of paper.

  The captain’s only criteria were that the candidates be brave, calm under pressure, and physically fit enough for the mission.

  Wan pushed the pencil so hard with his thumb that it snapped in half. How could he pick the next men to die? Most of them were mere boys. Fifteen were already dead, burned to death or killed by smoke inhalation when PLAN nuclear ballistic missile submarine Long March #880 suffered an engine room fire. A dozen more were sick or injured. All
of them were terrified. One seaman’s apprentice who had witnessed the fire had gone out of his mind, screaming “Sixty-one, sixty one,” over and over as he ran back and forth in the narrow passageways. In 2003, all seventy crewmen aboard the Great Wall #61, an older, Ming-class sub, had suffocated at their stations when the diesel generator failed to turn off and used up all the oxygen on board. Any submariner in the fleet who denied having dreams about the disaster was lying.

  This should not have happened to Wan Xiuying. He was an up-and-coming star of PLA-Navy’s relatively nascent blue-water submarine force. He’d wanted to be a submariner since he was a small boy, reading every book and watching every movie about submarines that he could get his hands on. Most of the movies were in English, which had afforded him a perfect opportunity to study American idioms. Though they were meant to make the Americans look heroic, they almost always showed the captain and the first officer at odds over command of the vessel. Commander Wan hoped that was the truth. It would make beating the Americans easier in a pitched sea battle if the two men who were supposed to be in charge of the ship were constantly at each other’s throats like they were in Crimson Tide—or in the book Run Silent, Run Deep . . . In U-571 the captain did not trust the XO to make difficult decisions—decisions like Commander Wan now found himself facing. The list of conflicts was almost endless.

  Wan revered and respected Captain Tian. He felt certain the feeling was mutual. Were it not so, Captain Tian would have, no doubt, personally stuffed his XO in a torpedo tube and gotten him off the boat.

  Tian was a senior captain, would have certainly been promoted to admiral after this tour. He had quite literally grown up with the Chinese Navy and understood the pressing need not only to build excellent submarines, but to build excellent submariners. He worked very hard to pass on his knowledge to those next in line. From the time Wan had come aboard, it was clear to him that Captain Tian demanded strict discipline, a hard-as-ironwood boss who was focused not only on the command of his submarine, but on making certain his new XO was equal to the task when he got his own boat.

  But none of that would happen now.

  The experimental Mirage silent propulsion system was a twisted heap of charred metal. Fifteen men had died horrible deaths, including the ship’s medic. Twelve more were too severely burned to work. Worst of all, the chief engineer and three of the five engineering mates were dead. The remaining two, still in their teens, were from poor counties that still used oxen in the field. They’d only recently graduated from submariner school in Qingdao, but their training specific to the engine operation and maintenance was to have taken place aboard the boat. Even then, with a new, experimental propulsion unit, they could do little more than stare at the mess while holding a wrench, clucking to themselves like a husband who did not want to admit to his wife he had no idea how to fix a stalled car.

  When it had become apparent that the fire involved the submarine’s propulsion unit, Captain Tian had considered an emergency blow—that is, sending compressed air into the ballast tanks and blasting them to the surface. Both the United States and Russia provided periodic analysis of ice and possible open water. The United States called theirs a FLAP analysis—Fractures, Leads, and Polynyas (the Russian word for open water surrounded by ice). But the ice here was moving, a flowing solid, with jagged keels that hung down like ax blades, capable of chopping the 880 in half during an uncontrolled ascent.

  Fortunately, the nuclear reactor was in the compartment forward of the Mirage drive. The reactor itself and all but two of the pumps were still operational.

  If the charts and calculations were correct, the 880 lay belly-down on a rocky ledge, one hundred and seventy meters below the surface, with an undersea mountain rising to starboard. Collision with the rock face on the way down had ripped a four-meter gash in the outermost hull of the double-hulled vessel. The inner hull was still intact, keeping the crew alive—for the moment—but with the ballast tank damaged, an emergency blow was now problematic.

  To port, off the edge of the ledge, the seabed lay some eleven hundred meters below—well beyond crush depth, even for a powerful double-hulled submarine like 880. If the baby-faced engineering mates were able to somehow get the boat moving in any direction other than up, she might simply shuffle off the ledge and plummet straight to the bottom.

  Of course, that would solve Commander Wan’s problem.

  At first it seemed like they had one ace in the hole. Professor Liu Wangshu should have been able to fix the drive. It was his design. That’s why he was on the boat, to make sure it worked. And work it did. When the pumps—one of the loudest parts of a nuclear submarine—were rigged for ultra-quiet, the gearless Mirage drive proved to render the 880 all but invisible. The fire appeared to have started in one of the pumps, some sort of lubricant ignited by a spark, one of the youngsters surmised. Wan wondered if they would ever know. Over and over, history had shown that it was often a string of simple, relatively minor mistakes and seemingly insignificant design flaws that led to catastrophe.

  Liu Wangshu could have seen the problem at once, had he not been sick. Sick was not nearly a strong enough word to describe what was wrong with him. Only a handful of the crew knew Professor Liu’s background. He dressed in regular engineering officer’s coveralls, and he spoke with the authority of a professor, which was not uncommon among officers in any branch. He had the shoulder boards, so the crew obeyed him, even though he was new and unknown to them. Oddly, the fire itself had not hurt him. His lungs appeared undamaged by the toxic smoke. No, this was something else. The XO guessed it was a stroke, judging from the man’s sagging face and the gibberish he spoke. Probably brought on by the sudden stress of seeing his life’s work destroyed by fire.

  They’d given him aspirin and confined him to bed with two junior submariners watching him. Either he would get better or he would not. If he did not get better, then everyone on the sub would eventually die. Some sooner, when they went insane and began to kill one another. One of the sonar techs had already gotten into a fight with the cook. Some later, when their food ran out.

  As long as the reactor continued to function—decades, if no pumps broke—they had power for heaters, the amine CO2 scrubbers for clean air to breathe, the water maker, and the pumps to take waste off the submarine. Commander Wan anticipated they had almost three months of food—now that there were fewer mouths left alive to eat it. Marooned in their bubble island, they would simply starve to death.

  There was an alternative—that only Commander Wan and the captain knew about.

  Rigged against bulkheads in the 880’s nose and tail were two explosive disks, each over two meters in diameter. The experimental Mirage drive was the only one of its kind. Ordinarily, Professor Liu, the only person who could re-create the mechanism, would never have been allowed on the submarine. But he’d somehow pulled strings. He wanted to see his creation work in the real world.

  Command wanted the drive and the professor protected if at all possible, but their orders were clear. In the event of an emergency, Long March #880 was not to end up in American—or even Russian—hands. The Mirage drive was Chinese technology, not stolen through tradecraft or purchased from a disgruntled U.S. Navy scientist. It had been developed by China and tested by China, and would eventually be utilized by China. It was a point of national pride—and Beijing wanted it to stay that way.

  The self-destruct disks were alarmingly simple to operate. Unlike the nuclear missiles on board, which required the simultaneous use of keys carried by both the captain and the XO to activate the command-and-control system, the self-destruct system could be initiated by the captain alone, or, in his absence, the executive officer.

  The captain had met with Wan in private, discussing their options. Tian was no coward. He would detonate the disks if ordered to do so. But he was a patriot and did not want to deprive China of technology that put them ahead in a race that they’d lagged in for so
long.

  He felt certain command would want to salvage what was left of the drive, and, if possible, nurse Professor Liu back to health. If he destroyed the vessel, the United States would not get it—but, without the professor, China might not be able to re-create it, either.

  For years.

  Hydrophones had remained operational. The sonar tech listened to the screws of the surface vessel almost directly overhead. Oblivious to what was occurring five hundred feet below, it departed the area shortly after the accident.

  Tian waited four hours, and then, when it became apparent the drive was inoperable, he released the rescue buoy affixed to the exterior of the ship. It was programmed to release after six hours anyway if the timers were not continually reset by each oncoming watch. That way, if all on board were killed in an explosion—or, as in the case of the 61, died at their stations, China could come and retrieve her submarine.

  The distress buoy was attached to the submarine by a long cable that reeled out when it deployed.

  Had the buoy made it to the surface, the fleet would have received coded satellite transmissions and then sent someone to rescue the 880 or destroy them. Either way, the captain would have his answer.

  But heavy ice had moved in above. The hydrophones picked up the burble of the buoy’s departure, and the unmistakable thud as it impacted the ice. Moving ice tugged at the cable, finally separating it completely and carrying the buoy away without it ever having seen the sky to make its call. A remote underwater autonomous vehicle met the same fate in the unforgiving ice. The Americans had ALSEAMAR SLOT 281s, buoys the size of baseball bats that carried a recorded message to the surface and then scuttled themselves. The 880 was too secret to be equipped with such devices.

  The captain decided to try one last option before detonating the self-destruct disks. It was low-tech, and the odds of success were practically nil, but the odds of everyone dying if he did not try were one hundred percent.