The Vigilant Spy

by Jeffrey Layton

  Yermakov grinned. “We made it, Captain! A true miracle.”

  “Indeed.”

  * * * *

  After registering V-6’s kill, Viperina 3 rose from the depths. Its sonar detected the escape capsule when it separated from the sinking hulk of the target. V-3’s AI brain construed the ascending remnant as a pending threat and returned to attack mode.

  Chapter 52

  “What have you got?” asked Commander Bowman. He had been summoned to Colorado’s radio room, located adjacent to the control room. XO Mauk accompanied him.

  The twenty-six-year-old radio room tech looked up from his seated position at the comms console. Colorado’s disguised floating surface radio antenna maintained a secure link to Pearl Harbor. “Sir, COMSUBPAC just reported picking up an emergency DISSUB beacon. GPS coordinates are consistent with the Russian boat’s operating area.”

  “Advise COMSUBPAC that the beacon might be from a Russian submarine escape pod.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain.”

  Bowman and Mauk returned to the horizontal large screen display in the control room.

  “Maybe the crew survived,” Mauk said.

  “The beacon is a good sign.”

  “Who do you think is going to rescue them? I don’t know of any nearby Russian assets.”

  “Probably the Philippines. I expect COMSUBPAC will be talking with Manila soon, issuing an international disabled sub alert.”

  “Skipper, what if the PLAN shows up instead? I don’t think that will go over well with the survivors.”

  “That would be ironic alright.”

  * * * *

  Captain Zhou Jun, Dr. Meng Park and a dozen staff were inside the S5 subterranean operations center at Shendao, Hainan Island. They all focused on the flat-panel wide-screen display secured to a nearby wall. Live video images transmitted from a Y-8FQ PLA-Navy maritime patrol aircraft filled the monitor.

  “There it is,” shouted the S5 duty officer, pointing to the upper left corner of the screen. The escape pod surged through the water-air interface in the morning sun, rising beyond the midpoint of the vertical steel cylinder before re-submerging. The pod repeated the oscillation several times before reaching buoyant equilibrium. The crown of the twenty foot high capsule was about four feet above the sea surface.

  “The Vipers took out the sub!” announced Captain Zhou, officially confirming the kill.

  Jubilation erupted from the assembled. Handshakes and high fives broke out.

  Zhou saluted Meng Park as the S5 watch officer approached. “Congratulations, Captain. Serpent worked perfectly.”

  “The thanks belong to Dr. Meng. This whole project is her brainchild.”

  Zhou’s deputy turned toward Meng and bowed. “Brilliant concept, Dr. Meng.”

  Meng Park smiled. “Thank you.” She turned back to view the screen; it displayed a close-up view of the bobbing escape pod.

  Dazzled by what had transpired, euphoria flooded Meng’s senses. It really worked!

  Meng and Zhou had observed Serpent’s attack remotely. The network of seafloor hydrophones scattered throughout the South China Sea allowed real time monitoring of the hunt. Zhou had supplemented the bottom listening stations with sonobuoys dropped from the Y-8FQ that orbited above the underwater battlefield. Terabytes of acoustic energy data poured into S5 every minute via satellite, allowing the S5 supercomputers to generate three-dimensional positions of all six attacking Viperinas and the Russian sub. Unlike the Novosibirsk or the Colorado, S5 had the decrypt key that allowed eavesdropping of the Vipers’ machine to machine acoustic comms.

  Meng focused on the rescue capsule, wondering when the survivors would open the top hatch. She was about to ask Zhou a question when she noticed the disturbance in the water near the pod. Something was just below the surface, orbiting the pod in steadily decreasing radii.

  “Oh my god!” Meng screamed.

  * * * *

  “What’s that noise?” called out one of the submariners inside the escape capsule.

  Captain Petrovich heard the scraping racket, too. “Quiet everyone,” he ordered. He touched the steel wall of the chamber. He could feel the vibration in the tips of his fingers. What’s that? he wondered.

  With a suppressed tone, Yermakov said, “Captain, maybe someone from a passing boat is securing a line to the pod.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  The metallic rasp stopped, rendering the interior of the capsule silent. To a man, the bliss of impending rescue was the universal—and last—thought of the Novosibirsk’s survivors.

  * * * *

  “WOW!” shouted the Colorado’s sonar supervisor.

  “What?” demanded Commander Bowman. He stood next to the horizontal large screen display. Executive officer Mauk was at his side.

  “Captain, I just picked up another explosion.” Petty Officer Anderson pulled down his headphones.

  “Where?” Bowman asked as he and Mauk joined the sonar supervisor

  “Same general area as the Yasen,” Anderson said.

  “Ordnance detonating in the bottom wreckage?”

  “No sir. It was a surface blast.”

  “The rescue capsule?”

  Anderson looked up, facing the captain. “Maybe. I’m going to replay the event.” He worked his keyboard and the sharp crack of an explosion broadcast from an overhead loudspeaker.

  “My god, Tom,” muttered Mauk. “They wouldn’t self-destruct, would they?”

  Commander Bowman did not respond, lost in his thoughts. What the hell’s going on?

  Chapter 53

  “Park, are you okay?”

  Meng Park knelt at the toilet bowl and retched again.

  Captain Zhou Jun stood on the other side of the lavatory door. “Let me know if I can help.”

  After five minutes, Meng joined Zhou in the corridor. They were alone. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  Zhou slipped an arm around Park’s waist and pulled her close. “I regret you had to witness that.”

  Seared in Dr. Meng’s memory, the horror endured. Viperina 3 had swirled around the escape pod just below the water surface. Like a gargantuan boa constrictor, V-3 gripped the cylinder’s steel hull with its metallic claws. The PLAN patrol aircraft had swooped in for a closer view of the pod when the weapon detonated. The shockwave from the blast rocked the four engine plane with the vengeance of a Cat 5 hurricane. The live video feed from the Y-8FQ had flashed to a sheet of static on the wide screen monitor in the S5 ops center.

  It took the airborne camera operator about a minute to reboot the system before new images materialized on the S5 video display. The rescue pod had vanished. In its wake, several corpses and a collection of body parts littered the frothy waters.

  “It should never have come to the surface,” Park said.

  “I understand. We’ll figure it out and fix it.”

  “All of those men—torn to pieces.”

  Zhou again hugged Meng. “Just give it time,” he whispered. “The bad memories will fade.”

  Park buried her brow in Jun’s shoulder. He comforted her as best he could. But he too suffered.

  During Zhou’s twenty plus years as an officer in the People’s Liberation Army-Navy, he had never experienced combat. The visceral images he witnessed today would remain with him for the rest of his life.

  * * * *

  While Meng and Zhou embraced, Yuri Kirov stepped gingerly on their native ground about one hundred feet above the couple. He followed Master Chief Halgren. It was late morning.

  Jeff Chang and Murphy were one hundred and thirty yards upslope, serving as lookouts. They kept an eye on the nearby Fleet Logistics building but a new arrival captured most of their attention. The Shandong loomed beyond the three story structure. The wounded aircraft carrier had docked several h
ours earlier. The Shendao pier buzzed with activity as work crews boarded the ship and sailors milled on the pier deck.

  Yuri and Wild Bill approached one of the shafts that ventilated S5. The holes were concealed within the dense undergrowth of the tropical canopy. Four 0.75-meter (30-inch) diameter vertical steel tubes extended downward from ground level to the ceiling of the underground complex. Two downhill shafts served as air intakes. The uphill tubes discharged excess heat and stale air.

  Halgren stopped beside the vent. Yuri joined the SEAL. The rush of warm air flowing from the pipe brushed Yuri’s cheek.

  “This is the one we want to use,” Halgren whispered. He and Murphy had located the shafts earlier in the morning during a recon patrol.

  Yuri examined the open end of the exhaust port. The pipe jutted two feet above the ground. A galvanized steel mesh matching the diameter of the pipe lay on the dirt. During the SEALs earlier look-see, they had disconnected the anti-critter mesh. They also checked the vent and the surrounding grounds and vegetation for electronic sensors, motion and ground pressure detectors in particular. Finding nothing, both operators hoped they had not missed something.

  Yuri peered into the tube—a black hole. He grabbed his flashlight and illuminated the pipe’s interior. That’s when he spotted the steel grill twenty feet down. One inch diameter steel dowels welded to the pipe and spaced every five inches provided a low-tech access barrier while allowing for the flow of exhaust.

  “Govnó,” Yuri muttered. He turned to Halgren. “You’re right. That’s going to be a bitch to get through.”

  “We’ve got thermite, which will blow through those bars. But that damn stuff will keep going. If it gets into the ventilation fans below, who knows what kind of alarms that will set off.”

  “Maybe we can work out a way to capture the excess.”

  “I don’t know…that shit is wicked, burns through everything.”

  Maybe not everything, Yuri thought. “Let me think on it some more. Anyway, let’s run the camera down and take a look.”

  “Okay.”

  * * * *

  Dr. Meng and Captain Zhou were next to Zhou’s BMW in the Fleet Logistics parking lot.

  “I just need to rest for a while,” Meng said.

  “If you’re too tired for dinner tonight, that’s okay with me.”

  “No. I’m looking forward to that.”

  “Okay, great.” He gave Park the key to his sedan.

  “I’ll come back and pick you up,” she offered.

  “Don’t bother. I’ll get a ride to Sanya from one of my staff. Seven o’clock okay with you?”

  “Fine.” Meng kissed Zhou on the cheek. “See you tonight.” She opened the door and climbed into the automobile.

  * * * *

  “I don’t frigging believe it,” Jeff Chang said as he watched the BMW exit the parking lot.

  “What?” asked Murphy. He squatted nearby, working on an MRE—Meal Ready to Eat.

  The CIA officer and the SEAL staffed the team’s observation post. Yuri and Halgren were still downslope, investigating the S5 vents.

  Chang lowered the Nikon 35 millimeter camera with a telephoto lens. “I just noticed something very interesting in the parking lot.”

  “Oh yeah,” Malibu Murph said now peering through an opening in the vegetation. The asphalt lot was only a quarter full. Maybe twenty vehicles. He observed a uniformed male walking toward the Fleet Logistics building.

  Chang pointed west. “That officer walking back to the building runs S5. Captain Zhou Jun.”

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Zhou was in charge of the South Sea Sound Surveillance System. But it was the female who had accompanied the navy captain that supercharged Chang’s interest.

  Jeff worked the Nikon, retrieving one of the dozen images he had just recorded. “Hello there, little sea turtle!” Jeff muttered as he studied a digital blowup of Meng Park’s lovely face.

  * * * *

  Yuri and Halgren returned to the observation post. The two SEALs and Yuri currently debated how best to penetrate the S5 ventilation shafts.

  Master Chief Halgren said, “We can blast through the steel bars with our shaped charges but the racket will reverberate through the pipe. Probably sound like thunder inside S5.”

  “Maybe we can muffle the blast,” offered CPO Murphy.

  “Doubtful. That shaft is a perfect sound conductor.” Halgren fingered the stubble on his chin. “We don’t have any choice, Murph. We have to use thermite.”

  “I hate working with that stuff.”

  “I read you.” Halgren engaged Yuri. “What’s your take?”

  “Thermite is probably our best approach but controlling the discharge will be the challenge. We might be able to construct a tray that hangs under the bars to catch the debris.”

  “A tray made out of what?” Halgren asked.

  Yuri started to respond when Jeff Chang finally jumped in. “Maybe we don’t need to get inside S5 after all.”

  That captured Halgren’s instant attention. “What do you mean?”

  “Half an hour ago, we spotted the officer in charge of S5 in the parking lot. Captain Zhou Jun. Runs the entire network.”

  “Snatch him?” Halgren asked.

  “We could but the real prize is the woman he was with.” He pulled up the Nikon and displayed a digital photograph. “This is Dr. Meng Park. She’s a research professor at the the University of Science and Technology of China. She’s the brains behind the S5 ASW system.”

  “She’s young,” Yuri offered. “How’d she pull that off?”

  “You’re right. She’s only thirty-four. He passed the camera to Halgren. “She’s what we call a Sea Turtle.”

  “And what’s that?” Wild Bill Halgren asked as he viewed the digital photo of Meng Park.

  “You know the story. Tens of thousands of baby turtles are hatched on a beach. They waddle into the ocean while birds and other critters pick ’em off left and right. Anyway, the turtles spend years at sea before finally returning to their ancestral shores to lay eggs and repeat the entire process.

  Halgren handed the camera to Murphy.

  Jeff continued the story, “Our little turtle here was born in Beijing. Received her undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. Moved to the USA where she earned a PhD—at MIT no less. Specialized in robotics. Had a postdoc at CAL Berkeley working on unmanned underwater vehicles for oceanographic research. She then went to work for a Bay Area R & D robotics company. That’s where we think she finally fulfilled her mission.”

  “A spy?” Yuri asked.

  “More of an obligation to the motherland. We think she managed to get access to another researcher’s work, classified stuff for the U.S. Air Force on drones. Something to do with controlling swarms of drones based on natural systems like flocks of birds and schools of fish.”

  “Let me guess, Yuri said. “She got what she was looking for and took it home with her.”

  “Correct. Returned after years in the States, bearing a precious gift for the homeland.”

  “Let’s snatch her, too!” Malibu Murph offered.

  Chapter 54

  Day 35—Tuesday

  Master Chief Halgren had the mid watch—midnight to four o’clock. It was 1:25 A.M. The others were asleep, bedded down around the perimeter of the observation post.

  After contacting Colorado and reporting the issues related to breaching the S5 air shafts and the unintended observation of Dr. Meng, the team was placed on hold. Lieutenant Commander Andrews needed to run Chang’s proposed change of mission plan up the chain of command. The men welcomed the downtime.

  Standing behind foliage, Halgren peered down the hillside. Like the previous evening, the Fleet Logistics building was sparsely lit. The carrier pier, however, radiated enough light to rival an NFL stadium on game
night. Supplementing the pole mounted deck floodlights was an army of new portable lighting. Vehicles rushed across the 900,000 square foot deck, delivering equipment and supplies. Workmen scurried about the Shandong.

  Three of the feared sea drones also showed up. The cabin-less runabouts were each thirty-three feet long. Equipped with a bow-mounted machine gun turret, torpedo and depth bomb launchers, and a tall mast populated with video cameras, dual radar domes, GPS unit, and multiple secure radio comms, the autonomous surface vessels—ASVs—mimicked similar robotic systems deployed by the U.S. Navy.

  The unmanned boats patrolled the harbor. Nav lights and the deep throated snarl of turbo diesels marked the watercraft as they plied the waters near the Shandong.

  Halgren returned to his collection of gear stashed a couple of meters away from where Murphy slept. He slipped on his helmet with its night vision device. He next grabbed a trenching tool and the precious roll of toilet paper he’d squirreled away in his backpack. He needed to relieve himself—the first time since departing the Colorado.

  Wild Bill lowered the NVD visor and proceeded upslope. He left his M4 behind, relying on the Heckler & Koch Mark 23 pistol strapped to his right thigh.

  Halgren found a suitable location twenty yards from the OP. He excavated a shallow pit. After finishing his business, he pulled up his trousers and reached for the shovel. His right hand had just gripped the handle when a blistering sting erupted in his wrist. “Dammit!” he cried out.

  Halgren searched the ground with his NVD. Whatever bit him had already retreated into the undergrowth. He held up his wrist. A pair of punctures, each with a dribble of blood, marked the attack site. He touched the wounds and cursed again. His wrist was on fire.

  What shit luck this is!

  Halgren collected his gear and started downhill. By the time he reached the encampment, his wrist had noticeably swollen, and blood still flowed from the punctures.

  * * * *

  Yuri woke, aroused by the chatter of the SEALs.