“Was it something I said…?” began Hassan.
“No, it’s not you.” Alexis cut him off, turning from him to run her hand vertically against the nearest bathroom wall. “The water pipe behind this bulkhead is warm. It should not be this warm.”
“Is it broken?” asked Hassan, more than a little bewildered at the timing.
“No, it’s not broken,” said Alexis with an anxious whisper. She glanced towards the closed shower curtain and pressed a single finger to her lips, mouthing a single word—Intruder. Hassan nodded, drawing his pistol and leveling it at the shower. Maybe they’d missed one of the knife-wielding North Korean spies in the chaos of the escape and subsequent boarding. The doctor steeled himself, determined not to miss should it come to violence. Careful to stay out of his line of fire, Alexis tensed her body and prepared to pull back the thick vinyl curtain. Jonah wouldn’t be happy about breaking the noise discipline with a gunshot, but putting a potential saboteur down would be preferable to allowing them to run amuck.
The engineer counted to three on her fingers before violently ripping the entire curtain off the hooks. Plastic rivets and water droplets flew across bathroom as Hassan closed one eye and aimed down the barrel of his cocked pistol, finger already beginning to depress the trigger.
But then Hassan froze, the barrel dropping as his eyes fell upon a cringing, shivering, and very wet Sun-Hi within the tiny compartment, the tiny woman wearing only a towel as she gingerly waved an apologetic hello from the puddle in the center of the shower. Her soaking, soapy clothes surrounded her; she’d been in the process of washing them as well as herself. Alexis and Hassan just looked at each other in complete disbelief.
“Um… hello?” was all Alexis could muster. It sounded almost more like a question than a greeting.
“What are you doing in here?” whispered Hassan as he slowly lowered and re-holstered the pistol. His hands shook and he could scarcely close his mouth as the latent adrenaline coursed through his veins.
“Your water so hot!” announced Sun-Hi, pointing to the shower nozzle. “And many bubbles.”
“It’s not that hot,” growled Alexis as she grabbed her from the shower and hauled her bodily into the bathroom, yanking the now half-empty shampoo bottle from her hands. “And another thing — those are my bubbles.”
“Bubbles not for everybody?”
Alexis dropped Sun-Hi’s wrist in frustration and turned to the doctor. “Hassan, help me out here. What are we supposed to do with her?”
“Well,” said Hassan, scratching his head. He didn’t know the first thing about dealing with stowaways. “First things first, I suppose… perhaps you ought to find her some clothes?”
“Me?” protested Alexis in a whisper as she poked a finger into Hassan’s chest. “You take care of her. You’re the doctor!”
“But you’re… you’re—” said Hassan, struggling for words.
“I’m what? If you say anything other than ‘chief engineer,’ I swear to God I’ll—”
“Hair so pretty,” said Sun-Hi as she reached up to touch a long strand of Alexis’ brunette locks.
“Yes — quite pretty indeed!” said Hassan as he took the momentary lapse in Alexis’ attention to apologetically back out of the bathroom door. “I’ll — I’ll let Jonah know what happened. About Sun-Hi, I mean. I’ll be right back, of course!”
“Do not even leave me in here with her!” hissed Alexis as she threw her hands up in the air. Hassan just mouthed “I’m so, so sorry” as he slunk out of the compartment, his mind already racing with ways to make the cowardly retreat up to Alexis later.
Jonah barely looked up as Hassan ducked shoeless into the command compartment. The doctor gently tapped on Jonah’s shoulder and leaned over to whisper to him. “We have a stowaway,” he said.
“Is this stowaway about to sink our ship?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then we have bigger problems right now,” said Jonah. “Relieve Marissa at the hydrophone station.”
“Finally,” complained Marissa as she stood up. Hassan took the headphones from her, placed them on his ears, and listened intently as Marissa marched to the far side of the command compartment and leaned against a bulkhead, arms crossed.
Focusing, Hassan realized he could barely hear a slight ticking sound in the distance, but couldn’t tell if it was coming from within the Scorpion or not.
“I hear a sound — do we know the source?” he asked.
“We are being pinged,” whispered Vitaly. “Low frequency active sonar. Maybe 100 kilohertz only.”
“Could be an autonomous coastal array,” said Jonah.
“Most coastal array listen,” said Vitaly. “This is ping. I think maybe patrol sub hunting us.”
“It’s probably just a low-power active sonar buoy.” Jonah ran his hand over his beard. “I’ll bet it feeds to a small room with a very bored North Korean sailor sleeping in his chair. They’ll never even detect us as we slip through.”
Vitaly mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like worst captain ever as he worked to triangulate the source of the signal and collect as much passive sonar data as possible. The Scorpion’s computer system churned through the gigabytes of incoming data, using the refracted sonar signal to slowly assemble a digital facsimile of the underwater terrain around and below the submarine.
“There,” said Jonah, tapping his finger on the base of Vitaly’s display screen. “That trench — do you think you can use it to get us past the sonar array?”
Hassan leaned in to get a closer look. There it was, a long snaking trench just ten meters in width opening in the seafloor beneath them, its image painted on the screen in the shifting green tones of a 3D computer model. The doctor couldn’t help but appreciate Vitaly’s skill as a pilot, using the very information gathered from the penetrating signal to escape its detection.
Vitaly scowled and cocked his head in consideration before answering. “Very tight for Scorpion I think. Maybe unknown currents. Could pose problem.”
“Can we fit?”
“Da,” Vitaly finally said. “But only because number one pilot Vitaly.”
“Good. Begin descent and plot new course to coordinates through the trench.”
“Aye.”
“Is this going to work?” asked Hassan in a whisper as the bow of the Scorpion dipped subtly downwards. “Are you certain they won’t be able to hear us from within the trench?”
“DPRK tech tops out in the early Cold War,” Jonah shrugged. “So yeah. It’ll probably work. If not, we’ll slink back out before they can mobilize any significant naval assets to the area. This strategy wouldn’t exactly work at the big US naval base at Yokosuka, but we should be good for a lonely stretch of North Korean coastline.”
Vitaly gritted his teeth, and as he steered through the narrow underwater canyon, fingers danced across the console controls as though conducting a sixty-piece symphony orchestra. The Scorpion shuddered through a series of little shifts and tilts, Vitaly navigating with surgical precision. It reminded Hassan of tracing the line of an existing incision with a scalpel, but he knew full well the slightest error would steer the submarine into a rock outcropping, slicing through their steel hull. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the shifting 3D model on Vitaly’s console, their fragile ship impossibly close to the jagged walls of the sunken trench.
The low-frequency ping grew louder and louder above them. But it was muffled now, discordant as it bounced off rocks and sand and ten-thousand-year-old shell beds. And then, the Scorpion slipped past, the piercing signal fading in the distance behind them. Hassan breathed for the first time in what felt like hours. He listened intently from his station as the minutes ticked by until the ping disappeared entirely.