Back at the helm, Stoner took the engines out of neutral, and steered the boat eastward. As he started below, he heard the drone of an aircraft in the distance.
The transmission would have to wait. He continued forward past the paneled area to the compartment at the bow. He threw the camera and media card inside, then stepped back and slammed the hatch shut. He struggled with the three long bolts at either side of the wall until his fingers were raw, finally taking off his sneakers to push at the end of the last bolt. By then, the aircraft was overhead.
He waited until he heard it pass, then pushed his head up to look. He knew of course, that it would be a Chinese patrol plane, though there was always hope he’d be wrong.
He wasn’t. And now a pair of delta-shaped blurs approached from the west—Shenyang F-811Ms, long-distance attack jets.
While he knew enough about the Chinese military to identify the planes’ units and air bases if he cared to, Stoner was much too busy to do so. With an immense leap, he threw himself overboard and into the water, just as the aircraft began firing.
It took approximately ten minutes for Samsara to sink. It would have taken considerably longer had Stoner not began flooding it by removing the bolts. He spent much of the time well below the surface of the water; what he lacked in negative buoyancy, he more than made up for in motivation.
When the aircraft were gone, Stoner bobbed to the surface, floating with as little effort as possible. It was at least an hour before sunset; if he were to survive the night he had to conserve his energy. And of course he knew he would survive. It was his job. It was what he always did.
Samsara’s life raft had been shot to pieces by the attack. Nothing else came off the boat after it went down—a matter of design, not accident. And so it was inevitable that Stoner resorted to the wreckage of the Chinese freighter—or what he strongly suspected was a Chinese freighter—to stay afloat. It was inevitable that the half-man he had poked before would float toward him. Stoner wrapped his arm’s around the torso without emotion. He kicked slowly, just enough to stay afloat and awake: Despite the warm day, the water cramped his muscles with its cold, and maybe made his teeth chatter.
The sun turned the sky pink as it set. Stoner waited in the water with his dead companion. Night crept up with an immense, bright moon. In the distance, he thought he saw the shadow of a shark’s fin. The wreckage of the freighter was drifting closer; paper with Chinese characters drifted near his nose. He moved to grab it, but found his arms frozen in place. He let go of the man’s head and sunk down in the water, trying to shake his limbs back to flexibility. When he reached the surface, the paper was gone and so was the head.
For the next hour he treaded slowly, faceup in the brine, cold and salt sandpapering his lips and nose. Then, suddenly, the water began to churn. He felt it coming for him now, the shark, drawn by his fatigue like a radio beacon in the night. It broke water fifty yards to his right, a massive thing of blackness.
Stoner waited. He had no weapon.
There was a sound behind him, an eerie cry not unlike the death rattle of a man at the end.
“Here!” Stoner yelled. “Here!”
A Seachlight played across the surface of the water. Two SEALs in diving gear paddled a rubber boat toward him.
“Here!” he yelled again.
“Mr. Stoner?” said one of the men.
“You’re not expecting someone else, I hope,” said Stoner as the raft crept up. His muscles were so stiff he had to be helped into the boat. But he managed to climb onto the deck of the waiting submarine and go below without further assistance.
“Stoner, I’m Captain Waldum,” said the skipper. “Glad we found you. Your signal’s getting weak.”
“Yeah,” said Stoner. “Let’s retrieve the bow pod from my boat and get back. About a dozen people are trying to have their underwater in knots about now.”
Chapter 2
An excellent coffin
Dreamland
August 21, 1997, 0700 local
Captain Breanna Stockard shifted her left leg for the five hundredth time since getting into the cockpit, trying to make herself comfortable. Her seat, which canted back at a twenty-degree angle, had ostensibly been form-fitted to her anatomy and designed for a maximum comfort on a long mission. Its inventor joked it would be so comfortable the pilot would be in constant danger of falling asleep; Breanna thought that a remote possibility at best. While the chair adjusted in several dimensions, it was impossible to find a setting that didn’t put a kink in her back—or somewhere else.
Captain Stockard was surrounded by four large panels, one in front, one overhead, and one on each side. Constructed of a plasma “Film,” each panel provided, at her command, a full instrument suite, optical view from all four compass points, or synthesized views composed from radar or infrared sensors. The stick at the side of her seat and the pedals at her feet did not actually move, instead sensing the pressure exerted on them and translating it as commands to the flight computer that took care of the actual details involved in trimming the large craft. The throttle was the closest to a “normal” airplane control in the cockpit—assuming, of course, such a control could select a standard turbofan, a scramjet, and a restartable rocket motor or some combination of all three depending on the flight regime. All of the controls could be discarded if Breanna preferred; the computer stood ready to translate her words into commands as quickly as she could utter them into the small microphone at the end of her headset.