“Why are you telling me this?” Kao asked.
“I do not approve of this mission. I should be staying here to defend the island, not slinking across the ocean.”
“You mean stay here and advance your career in front of the admiralty,” Kao said.
“Be careful, Sergeant. You may not be in the Navy, but I can still bring disciplinary action upon you.”
“I was out of line, sir.”
Lin ignored the insincerity.
“If by chance you’re still alive in two months and manage to bring the Colorado where I can get to it, make no mistake that I will see this mission succeed.”
“It is fortunate that your personal aspirations correspond with your duties… at least at the moment.”
Lin laughed through his nose.
“Not all men follow orders blindly. As long as I am taking part in this mission and you come through on your end, I will get my warheads.”
“Then may I assume you have said all you wish?”
“Only one more thing, Sergeant — just to be clear. I do not care what the Minister says. I will not tolerate having the Americans or the Frenchman control our destiny.”
Those final words continued to echo in Kao’s mind.
He realized that if he left the westerners alive, Lin would act. Once the warheads were transferred to his ship, the brazen commander of the Tai Chiang could send the Colorado a parting torpedo just to kill them, and the explosion could destroy the secrecy of the entire mission.
He wrestled with his decision, but in light of Commander Lin’s demeanor, Kao could envision no scenario that preserved the lives of his American shipmates. If the Colorado reached the Tai Chiang, Kao would order his team to kill the Americans once the stealth vessel was in sight.
As for the Frenchman, his fate seemed murky. The Minister had ordered Renard returned to his side, but Kao doubted that Commander Lin would let Renard live. Nevertheless, he would wait to decide the Frenchman’s fate. But the Americans were dead men.
Accepting his decision, he maneuvered the bristles across his teeth and spat. He shifted his weight and felt a surgically reattached tendon grate across his patella. Pain shot through the commando’s body, but the image in the mirror remained stone.
CHAPTER 25
After ten days of transit, Brody slowed the Miami to navigate around icebergs. A sailor in the control room announced that the high frequency sonar measured twenty feet between the Miami’s sail and the wall of ice above.
Brody glanced at a depth gauge with numbers that had been shrinking during the days he drove north into shallower waters. The seafloor and iceberg squeezed the Miami, but Brody felt comfortable going deeper.
“Make your depth three hundred feet,” he said.
The sonar display showed clear water above as the iceberg drifted over and behind the Miami.
As a junior officer on an older submarine, Brody had patrolled the under-ice world. As he approached it again, he felt a chill. He remembered that the polar world forgave no mistakes — neither those of navigation nor those of battle.
He wondered if he could pull the trigger on his friend and protégé.
Ordered to trail Jake, then ordered to kill him, he had no official guidance on what to do if he found him. He had to set his own rules.
Jake had once been a friend, he thought, but that no longer mattered. He had committed mutiny, placed national security at risk, and had even launched a live weapon at the Miami.
If he found him, Brody decided, he would send Jake to an arctic grave.
“We’re clearing the marginal ice zone, Captain,” Senior Chief Schmidt said. “Background noise is falling off, and it’s quiet ahead. We’re going under the ice cap.”
“Good call, Senior,” Brody said. “Agrees with the navigation officer’s fix.”
“The glacier’s pretty far south this year,” Schmidt said. “All that ice breaking off is hard on the ears, you know. Now it gets quieter. Instead of my ears hurting from all the noise, I have to start listening for a pin to drop from a hundred miles away.”
“A pin to drop or a Trident submarine to slip by,” Brody said. “I don’t know if the Colorado’s here yet or if it’s even coming, but start listening for her. Even up here, she can come and go in the blink of an eye.”
Mike Gant’s voice shot out over a loudspeaker and awoke Jake. He had been dreaming about his revenge coming to fruition at Commander Thomas Henry’s conviction at a Court Martial.
“Smoke in the feed bay,” Gant said. “I dumped all AC buses.”
Half asleep, Jake marched through the shadows cast by emergency lighting. Buzzers behind darkened control panels rang in his ears during his walk to the Colorado’s engine room. As he reached the ship’s lowest propulsion plant caverns, he smelled burning rubber and saw floating wisps of gray.
Two commandos held battery-operated battle lanterns over David Bass’s rotund body as he studied the motor controller circuitry to the port patrol feed pump. Jake gazed around the electrician at charred wires.
“Looks like over-current,” Bass said.
“Low grounds?” Jake asked.
“Probably. Nobody’s keeping things clean, so carbon dust is building up. It’s only a matter of time before dust connects everything to grounded metal. Shit’s going to keep shorting out.”
“Let’s fix this problem first and worry about the rest of the ship later. Isolate the motor controller from the electrical bus and then come back to maneuvering. We have a reactor to start. It scrammed on interlock when Gant dumped all the electrical buses, so everything’s still hot. It should go fast.”
After reassuring Gant of his decision to extinguish the Colorado’s electricity in response to the errant bus voltages caused by the dying pump, Jake led an uneventful reactor warm restart.
With his reactor back online, Jake steamed the Colorado northeast at nine knots. He traversed the G-I-UK Gap. With no one looking for the Trident in the gap, he passed without a trace. Jake kept the Colorado on its northerly trek deep enough to pass under most icebergs and fortunate enough to not bump into the rest.
It was nineteen days after faking the Trident’s death before Jake slowed the Colorado so that it crawled at five knots into the quiet, surreal world of the polar ice cap.
Inside his Trident Missile submarine under the ice, Jake huddled with Renard over a chart in the control room.
“The chart is accurate, Jake?”
“As good as it gets up here. This is not the quickest route, but it’s the one adjusted best for the magnetic and gravitational deviations on the gyroscopes.”
“Indeed,” Renard said. “The question of location becomes tricky. In these latitudes, magnetic north is no longer just a few degrees from true north. It lies on its unique, constantly changing direction, rendering our compasses useless. And with ice overhead, GPS fixes are elusive. We’re completely reliant on inertial navigators.”
“Even those are less accurate up here,” Jake said. “But if we go slow and follow this charted path, we can use the fathometer to at least verify we’re close to the right place based upon water depth.”