I asked, “Has Beijing asked to help?”
His smile was half visible through the interference, and sour. “Oh, we’re both pretending that nothing is going on, so in a worst-case scenario, it stays private.”
That’s why State isn’t the lead. Is someone from the White House with the director, then? Homeland Security?
Andrew Sachs spoke up shrilly. “Worst case? Combat?”
The director sounded exhausted, leaned left, and seemed to consult someone, then was back. “Our Navy and theirs are facing off more regularly in the South China Sea. And you, Secretary Sachs, know better than anyone that a Chinese sub collided with one of our destroyers during Pacific maneuvers last month. We had no idea they were there until then. But they said we did it on purpose. They lost twenty-eight crew. So… under these circumstances, things can go wrong. Big storm blowing. Tempers hot. Our sky eyes blind. Then guns go off. The apologies come later, and diplomats make nice, and the scapegoats who were positioned all along to take a fall go down, but they have the Montana.”
Sachs seemed shocked. “That’s absurd! Take some responsibility! If you tell your people to stand back, they’ll stand back.”
The director said coldly, “It’s our people, our sub. We’re not the ones who will stand back.”
“Even if you start a war?”
“Don’t be dramatic.” The director sighed. Sachs was trying his patience. But the director was a political animal and clearly knew he was talking to the Secretary of State himself through Sachs. “Like I said, excessive zeal by officers, human error, soldiers shooting blind in a storm, et cetera et cetera. It stops short of war.”
Sachs stared. “You’re setting this up for a fight.”
“I don’t consider forethought a setup.”
I asked, eyeing the Chinese icebreaker, “Those projections you’re showing us, sir, are they actual ship locations or computer guesses?”
“Last known position, coupled with current, wind, floe direction.” The director brightened. “Conditions are pushing our sub in your direction. But reaching her first may depend on ice. So! Marietta! Where are we on that?”
Ice, I thought morosely. It looks hard; it has the geometry of rock. You can walk on it and climb it, but it is always moving. Sometimes you see the movement. Sometimes you don’t. Imagine a city block constantly drifting. You walk outside and the supermarket is a hundred yards north of where it was yesterday. Then it drifts back fifty yards. Then the block splits in two, and the traffic light goes one way, and you, across the street, move the other. The landscape has viscosity. Solid is a lie, one more mirage.
Now, Marietta typed on her keypad and the picture on screen split: director on the left, sat shot on the right, a jagged white peacock shape; a grid superimposed over it, like a wire fence. The grid, she said, divided three thousand square miles into pixels. I saw a few patches of black spilling across lines. I saw a blotchy gray area containing darker speckles. It was like looking through a microscope at virus growing in a specimen of mold.
America’s foremost ice expert fingered an unlit cigar, worrying it like prayer beads. She still wore the baggy clothes she’d been in when we met. “This is our last projection, nineteen hours old. We’ve had problems with reception because the sats keep dropping into standby mode due to solar flares. They shut down during periods of intense activity to avoid damage. So! Aqua, our most advanced eye, uses microwave scanning. Each pixel represents a six-by-six-kilometer area; good overall, but when we get close, problems start. You see, if Aqua picks up sixty-five percent ice cover in one box, the computer turns the whole pixel white. Less than sixty-five percent, black. So if we’re heading for an area with only sixty percent cover, but it’s big, ship-killing stuff, the computer thinks it’s ice free. In the end, we need human eyes or the drone to know exactly what lies ahead.”
I said, “Then how do we pick the best route?”
Her mouth was a tight line of frustration. “Using luck. And Clinton.”
The director asked, “What are those gray masses?”
“Gaps in information due to the solar disturbances.”
Eddie sniffed. “This is the best we can do?”
“If we had more money, we could do better,” she said bitterly. “Also, Aqua sends photos every five hours. So even when everything is working perfectly, it’s possible that we’re making decisions based on hours-old information, since the ice keeps moving all the time.”
Captain DeBlieu raised a finger, like an engineer worrying a technical question. “Can you change the speed of transmissions, get them at, say, thirty-minute intervals instead of five hours?”
“No, that ability would have cost more. NASA was ordered to streamline costs during Iraq and the fiscal crisis. They ate up all kinds of capabilities. Don’t get me started.”
The director’s lips were a hard line, and I knew that he was cursing inwardly. I’d had this discussion with him plenty of times over beers. We’ve been warning Congress for years that we need better equipment, Joe, and they never give it. Washington’s gridlocked. Sooner or later something like this had to happen.
“Thank you, Dr. Cristobel,” said the director.
She smiled unhappily. “For what?”
Thinning light seeped in through the cabin’s portholes. DeBlieu’s walls were hung with photos — mug shots of the Arctic that would have been lovely in an art gallery, but were daunting just now. One old shot showed a snow-swept ice sheet, jagged icebergs, in sepia, nature’s pillars, trapping a twin-masted steamer between them, circa 1931, like massive pincers.
The framed shot beside it showed an ice storm, thousands of pellets driven sideways to create a translucent curtain half obscuring a trio of roped-together scientists tap-tapping their way like blind men, with walking probes, over a floe. Astounding beauty, but it reduced humans to insignificance. The scientists in the photo had about as much presence as a lone flake of snow.
The director said, “Dr. Vleska, your turn.”
She sat directly across from me, projecting an image of a Virginia-class nuclear sub on screen. The long black tube resembled an immense eel, and featured a jutting egg-shaped mast about a fifth of the way aft.
I thought that Karen’s lips looked nice.
She said, “The Chinese know what’s on our sub in theory, because it’s public, but not how it works. So you might as well know, too.”
Her voice was soft and she’d changed into a red and black checkered flannel shirt over a black wool turtleneck that showed an inch of soft throat. She seemed petite and fresh from sleep. Her hair was worn long, its silvery mass draped over small shoulders, probably brushing her seat cushion. Her hands were small, but rough, strong, an outdoorswoman’s. I saw a pale band of whiter skin on the fourth finger of the left hand. A wedding or engagement ring had been removed recently and left a mark.
Click. The torpedo was shaped like a large, finned, green baseball bat, tapered from narrow tail to front. “The new prototype Mark 80,” she said, “capable, while closing on a target, of calculating hull mass and detonating at optimum standoff distance, guaranteeing the best chance of destruction. Best torpedo on Earth.”
Click. Two subs passed each other, underwater. “Our acoustic countermeasures are way ahead of Beijing’s.”
Her eyes met mine. I had not noticed the gray flecks in the blue before. “The Montana is whisper quiet from electromagnetic signature reduction. The enemy may detect her presence, but has no way to determine which exact unit she is, no way to track specific boats.”