“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.