But heavy ice had moved in above. The hydrophones picked up the burble of the buoy’s departure, and the unmistakable thud as it impacted the ice. Moving ice tugged at the cable, finally separating it completely and carrying the buoy away without it ever having seen the sky to make its call. A remote underwater autonomous vehicle met the same fate in the unforgiving ice. The Americans had ALSEAMAR SLOT 281s, buoys the size of baseball bats that carried a recorded message to the surface and then scuttled themselves. The 880 was too secret to be equipped with such devices.
The captain decided to try one last option before detonating the self-destruct disks. It was low-tech, and the odds of success were practically nil, but the odds of everyone dying if he did not try were one hundred percent.
He would send a man to the surface.
A torpedo would blast a hole through the ice, hopefully pulverizing a good portion of it. This would almost certainly bring nosy Americans, but he always had the explosive disks as a fallback if that occurred. A volunteer would use the escape trunk to leave the submarine immediately following the fish, rising to the surface in a neoprene escape suit — with a satellite phone in a waterproof bag.
Commander Wan had thought the idea insane, but one did not confide such feelings to a submarine captain. It was either this, the captain had explained, or they all died immediately when the captain initiated the self-destruct mechanism, taking the priceless Mirage drive with them. In time, Wan saw that this was the only way forward — the last way.
And so Wan Xiuying found himself hunched over his desk, clutching his forelock, trying to decide which of his men he would volunteer to climb into the escape trunk, wait for it to fill with water equalizing pressure with the sea, all the while waiting for the horrific banging of the hammer that signaled it was time to open the outer hatch and swim into the cold, dark water… one hundred and seventy meters — five hundred and sixty feet — below the surface.
He used the edge of the desk to carefully tear the paper into three equal pieces — and then wrote his own name on each one.
30
“Your request must be denied out of hand!” Captain Tian snapped, pulling the second, and then the third folded paper out of the cup in Commander Wan’s hand. “I need you here, by my side. These are incredibly important decisions that must be made. If, by some chance, any of us survive this, it should be you. You are the future of our Red Star, Blue Water Navy.”
Wan kept his voice low and even, knowing full well that he would never win an argument with the captain. The man simply did not argue. He would discuss, he would listen to reason, but if for one moment he believed that someone was arguing with him, he would, as the Americans said, pull rank, or, more often than not, simply walk away.
“I understand,” he said. “But if I may, you have said many times that you depend on my counsel. I humbly give you that counsel now. You know how important the Mirage drive is. I am in full agreement with you that if there is any way to save it and Professor Liu, then we should attempt it. Honestly, the chief engineer would have been the best candidate. He was extremely fit, and knew more about the drive than anyone besides the professor. But, sadly, he did not survive the fire. Considering our options dispassionately, I am the next logical choice. I am older than almost any of the submariners, so I am less likely to panic, and in much better physical condition than any of the more mature division chiefs. I swam competitively in secondary school and am a trained scuba diver, accustomed to the water.”
Tian took a long breath, puckering, as if smelling his top lip — it was what he did when he thought and was often copied by the men, though never in his presence.
“This is a suicide mission,” he said. “A one-way trip. No return. One way or another, you will die when you leave this boat. No question about it. In all likelihood, your lungs will rupture during ascent, or you will drown, hopelessly trapped beneath the ice. If you reach the surface alive, there is a better-than-average chance that you will be ground to flotsam by jagged pieces of floating ice. If, by some miracle, you are able to drag your broken body onto the ice and make the call, rescuers may save the ship, but the chances of anyone arriving in time to save you are almost nonexistent.”
“So,” Wan smiled, “there is hope?”
“You will eventually freeze to death.”
“If we do nothing, we all die. It would be my great honor to give my life for the crew and for China.” He shrugged, hoping it looked humble rather than haughty. “And I have heard that dying from cold is not at all unpleasant,” Commander Wan said. “They say one falls asleep.”
“A pleasant way to die indeed, unless your slumber is interrupted by a passing polar bear.” The captain pursed his lips again. “Soviet cosmonauts were issued shotguns to take into space for the eventuality that their capsule landed in Siberia when it returned to earth.” He shivered, trying to shake a memory. “I once saw the body of a man who had been partially eaten by a bear, in Siberia. The beast had broken the poor man’s neck and then eaten his kidneys. I believe he was alive during—”
“With all due respect,” Wan said, smiling, “I would just as soon die as imagine such horrible things.”
The captain took him by both shoulders, tears of pride welling in his eyes, calling him by his given name. “Xiuying, it has been my great honor to serve as your captain…”
“Thank you, sir!”
Tian stepped away. “But if we are to do this, then we should do it without delay. I am sorry that there is no more time for you to prepare.”
“I assure you, Captain,” Commander Wan said, “I would rather not linger. I was prepared from the moment I wrote my name on the papers.”
The PLAN Submariner Academy in Qingdao ran every student through egress exercises. Wan still remembered his experience putting on the full-face mask and “horse-collar” flotation aid before crawling into the modified torpedo tube and waiting for it to flood. When the hammer clanged three times on the hatch, he opened the flooded tube and kick-floated his way through a few feet of slightly cool water to the surface, into the arms of waiting instructors who wore scuba equipment to save him if he got into trouble.
This was not going to be like that.
The ungainly orange suit was a Chinese copy of the Submarine Escape Immersion Equipment, or SEIE, suit, designed and manufactured by RFD Beaufort Limited and utilized by, among others, the U.S. Navy. The operation was relatively straightforward. He would enter the lockout trunk wearing his suit, and attach the tube from his suit to an air connection that, when the time came, would fill the enclosed hood and provide him with flotation and breathing air on the way to the surface. The function of the trunk was exactly the same as that of the training tube in Qingdao, with the exception that this one was much larger, to accommodate several Special Forces divers, should the need arise. There were no Special Forces divers on this trip, or one of them would have had this honor.
Because of the unpredictability of the ice after it was broken — if it broke at all — it was decided that Commander Wan would enter the lockout trunk and flooding would begin as the Yu-6 torpedo was fired. Coordinates were plotted and the 880’s fire control guided the fish via its trailing wire umbilical, sending it as close to straight above their heads as possible.
Sweating profusely in the waterproof suit, Wan opened the escape trunk’s inner hatch. He saluted the crew, who had crowded into the forward torpedo room, and then hung the rubber pack containing the satellite phone around his neck, clipping it to a belt around his waist to keep it from becoming an entanglement hazard.