“After reverse engineering her, we figured she could have done thirty-five knots as quiet as an ant’s fart. There’s still a lot of head scratching as to how they managed to get past our watchdogs on the Kola Peninsula.” Krail paused for a moment, apparently remembering those days, then his eyes turned to Zubov.
“Ingenious motherfuckers, those comrades of yours.”
Zubov was used to U.S. military types referring to his heritage as though it were some kind of pestilence.
“Then why tell me?” he asked. “How do you know I won’t go skipping back to “Ivan’?”
Krail lifted an index finger toward Garner.
“Because you’re with him. And what hasn’t already been leaked to the international intelligence community by now isn’t worth knowing.”
“So what was Scorpion doing in the Canadian Arctic?” Zubov asked.
“Probably looking to embarrass us,” Krail admitted.
“And she succeeded. Our detection network missed her completely and we still don’t know if her captain was intentionally trying to leave us a calling card, or whether someone on board screwed up while navigating the canyon.”
“Hell of a tight spot to try and park a boat that big,” Garner said.
“Like I said,” Krail replied, “maybe her captain was just trying to flip us the bird.” Krail’s casual tone suggested to Garner that his friend wasn’t telling the whole story — but perhaps the story was really just as trivial as Krail was suggesting.
“Anyhow,” Krail continued, “now we’ve got this seven-thousand ton piece of Jules Verne in the middle of the Canadian Arctic — too far from home for the Soviets to do anything about it. The fact that we could recover Scorpion was probably the only thing that deterred the Russians from building dozens more. Whatever sunk her did more for the national defense than any two hundred intelligence operations.”
“You salvaged a Soviet warship?” Zubov asked skeptically. “I bet they had something to say about that.”
“They should have,” Krail said. “But they were just as red-faced about the whole thing as we were. Neither side wanted to admit the boat had ever existed. We called it the tomato standoff.”
“What about the Canadians?” Garner asked. “The site is inside their territorial waters and they’re a nuke-free country.”
“Nuke ninnies only protest what they know about,” Krail said with a wave of his hand.
“I suppose someone high up on their defense ladder questioned our operation, but we convinced them it was in their best interests.” He laughed.
“What the hell were the Canadians gonna use to salvage it? Canoes?” Krail then told the men to wait as he checked the reference number on Garner’s chart, dialed an extension on the telephone, and relayed the information to the answering party. A few minutes later, an ensign knocked at the door, holding what appeared to be a rolled-up transparent plotting sheet.
“Technically I’m not supposed to show this to civilians,” Krail said as he took the chart and unrolled it over the chart Garner had provided.
“So you’ll have to look at this with one eye closed. You too, Ivan,” he said to Zubov, with a good-natured wink.
As the two charts were aligned, it was obvious that the transparent chart was a complete rendering of the Coast Guard chart, only with currents, land forms and bottom contours shown in far more precise detail.
“Obviously, the Navy gets to use a much more recent and more detailed version of the bathymetry,” Krail said. “These plots out resolve even our best SASS plots. The data they’re plotted from is still classified. There are things out there we don’t want just anyone picking up in a marine shop or ordering over the Internet, and the Gulf of Boothia is hardly a place where we need to regularly post updated hazards to pleasure boats.”
Garner was impressed at the level of detail rendered on Krail’s chart.
The transparent sheeting not only provided a multi color depiction of far more chart elements, but also a holographic depiction of the seafloor itself.
“Speaking of jules Verne,” he said, “I didn’t know you guys had these.”
“Then someone’s still doing their job,” Krail said.
Garner studied the enhanced chart before them. At the approximate coordinates of Scorpion’s demise, Krail’s chart showed a narrow, elongated chasm on the seafloor. The depth profile showed a nearly constant 280 meters bounded on either side by walls that topped out at 100 meters. Squared type set along the middle of the heavily branched formation declared the name of the canyon: THEBES DEEP.
“Ominous name,” Garner observed. “As in ‘the plague of Thebes’? Famine and death of the youngest until Oedipus returned and solved the riddle of the Sphinx?”
“Man, you read way too much.” Zubov shook his head, impressed.
“Everyone can use a little Sophocles now and then,” Garner replied with a shrug.
“It’s nothing that erudite, I’m afraid,” Krail said. “I think the geologist who found it was named Thebes. Albert Thebes.”
Garner shot Krail a stung look and Zubov let out a bellowing laugh.
“Oh, but your version is good too,” Zubov said, nudging his friend.
“Whatever it’s called, that’s where Ivan took his dive,” Krail said, indicating the position on the chart.
“If she was trying to hide. Scorpion couldn’t have picked a better place,” Garner noted. “Deep and noisy as hell, with the ice grinding above and the branches of the canyon below.”
“A good place to make repairs too,” Krail agreed. “Maybe she was damaged and that led to her taking the low road — low enough that she’d never be recovered. She almost made it.”
“And you still say there’s no chance the wreck could be part of the current problem?” Garner asked again.
“None,” Krail assured him. “That case is closed. Even if it weren’t, you and Carol aren’t equipped to attempt a looksee at that depth. Hell, half the Arctic fleet barely pulled it off. Scorpion had two reactors. One we recovered intact, the other we believe was buried in a submarine earthquake. Transmutation reactors are very clean, so even if her cores were cracked open, it’s highly doubtful we’d see this much contamination this long after the fact.” Krail pointed to the chart again, indicating the narrow channel between Melville Peninsula and Baffin Island.
“Besides, look at the tight bathymetry here. Show me where contaminated bottom water could find its way through all of that into Foxe Basin?”
“No one’s talking about bottom water yet,” Garner corrected him. “What Carol’s found so far is on the surface, probably carried along by the ice.”
“Over hundreds of miles? Through that logjam? From one inoperative sub’s reactor decades after the fact?” Krail insisted. “You might as well blame the mine at Deline. Or the Lenin.”
The Lenin, the world’s first nuclear-powered icebreaker, reportedly had a major reactor accident while on an arctic cruise. Then there was Kosmos 954, a nuclear-powered spy satellite that had crashed in Canada’s Northwest Territories in 1979, scattering radioactive debris over miles of tundra. Other weapons operations had used Canada’s northern territory as a friendly approximate to Siberia for years.
Certainly none of these incidents could be considered a massive radiation source on an individual basis, but Garner found it troubling that there were so many minor culprits in a place as supposedly remote and untouched.
“C’mon, buddy, use a little common sense,” Krail urged him. “Believe me on this one.”
“I believe you,” Garner said. I believe you, but you’re trying a bit too hard to sell me on the point, he thought.