This avalanche meant that as the Chameleon struck the ocean floor on the shallow northern side of the trench, it was immediately pile-driven into the muddy bottom by some two hundred million tons of volcanic rock, silt, and debris. When the cloud of silt settled, the Chameleon and its crew of 154 sailors had been buried, the layers of mud, sand, and rock covering the length of the sub with somewhere between twenty-seven and forty feet of debris. There was no discernible shape on the ocean floor above it, at least none that resembled an American nuclear submarine, and no detectable metal with any proximity to the surface of the silt.
Four years and eight months later, the nineteen hundred and fifty-seventh earthquake to rattle this section of the Puerto Rico Trench since the Chameleon’s demise registered a 6.8 on the Richter scale and sluiced a new, smaller trench north of the mountain range. Over the next three weeks, a two-mile-long stretch of the mountain range slipped into this trench. There were avalanches for months, spurred by aftershocks of the quake, all of which represented nothing more than ordinary geologic activity for the region surrounding the Puerto Rico Trench, with one exception: a portion of the Chameleon’s bow had been freshly exposed to the sea.
For the U.S. Navy, who had recently abandoned its salvage mission, the geologic activity that freed the Chameleon meant nothing. It passed like the sound of a tree in a forest where no ears were present to listen. For others-namely, the supreme commander of the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China-the Puerto Rico Trench’s most recent sequence of earthquakes meant something entirely different.
To General Deng, it meant that the mystery as to the whereabouts of the missing submarine had been solved.
17
Laramie stood in the doorway to Malcolm Rader’s office.
“There’s a caramel macchiato with your name on it in the commissary,” she said. “You’ve got to take a walk to get it, though.”
Laramie knew Rader was a sucker for the sissy drinks at the Starbucks kiosk. A career analyst somewhere near the peak of his tenure, Rader had two kids in college and one ready to hit the road, and it was evident he hadn’t made it to the gym since the first kid arrived. Disorganized, absentminded, and overweight, he compensated for these issues with a frenzied, spastic work ethic-Laramie thinking you never quite understood what Rader was saying or doing, but she couldn’t remember his taking a vacation since she’d been working here, and he seemed to be aware of everything. She wasn’t even sure whether he took meetings out of the office-another floor, or room, maybe, but she’d never seen him anywhere outside the building.
“What are we meeting about,” Rader said, “or talking. And walking.”
“Korea,” Laramie said. “North Korea, to be precise.”
There were three mounds of papers on Rader’s desk. He shifted his weight in his chair and nearly vanished behind a particularly massive stack.
“What about it,” he said. “Them. Whatever.”
“It’s about North Korea and China, and how they’re related.” She let her statement hang out there.
“This is more on your Taiwan theory,” Rader said.
“The same.”
He frowned, eyes slipping to his monitor-the twin temptations of Laramie’s intel and the caramel macchiato competing with his inclination to answer e-mails and remain productive.
Finally he stood. “You’re buying, correct?”
“Absolutely.”
“Fine.”
Rader had hired her. He wasn’t exactly a mentor, but occasionally she asked his advice, and when she did, he always accommodated her. The man was a decent boss.
But he wasn’t listening.
She’d thought about what she’d found through a second sleepless night, and once she developed a theory-involving speculation, but reasonable, fact-based speculation, with sound conclusions-she’d thought carefully about what to do, and say. She decided to start with him.
“Look,” she said, leaning over her coffee, “it’s too much of a mismatch. The timing. The politics. All of it. What does the State Council of the People’s Republic of China care anymore about North Korea? These nations are not allies-not politically, not militarily. Think about it, Malcolm: there’s no reason the majority rule of the State Council would intend to be identified internationally with Korea. North Korea’s foreign policy essentially consists of an annual rotating nuclear-proliferation extortion scheme, while China’s embracing capitalism-the council is expanding China’s business relationship with the West. Opening its borders. Getting gung ho about free trade. Meanwhile North Korea puts its policy-making energy into threatening the U.S. whenever its people run low on rice.”
Rader sipped his sissy drink. “Your point?”
“Bear with me. The other side of this? It’s almost not possible that these two exercises are not connected. I considered the possibility of coincidence when I made the discovery, but you know as well as I do-better than I do-that the facts I presented to you on the way down here point, odds on, to collusion: I practice to invade my neighbor in June during a cloudy day in a place and time that known paths of spy satellites would not cover-and you practice to invade yours in April-on a cloudy day, et cetera.”
“Laramie, I will grant you that there is a chance-”
“Malcolm, you’re the one who taught me how to find these things in the first place!” She stopped-you had to keep a lid on the volume, sitting in a corner of a commissary known to have been snooped on as a matter of routine. “Listen. I have a theory. You and I both understand the political climate in China, and specifically the political leanings of the members of the council. We could present each member’s full dossier to prove the point, but by now the ideology of each of these men is virtually common knowledge. You know as well as I do that it’s unlikely-impossible, in fact-that the council has approved any invasion plans. General Deng Jiang is doubtless aware of the exercise, probably overseeing it, and that means he’s planning for an invasion, whether with the approval of the council, or not. If he needs to win them over, he can do it through extortion and other old-school techniques-he’s used these tricks before. He’s an extremist who doesn’t fit in, but he’s in deep with the intelligence chair and has the goods on everybody from his days overseeing military intel. Okay?”
“With you so far. It’s my territory.”
“I’ve learned from the best. But with a second nation’s military involved in a virtually identical operation, conducted on the same timetable-Malcolm, the facts suggest, and I have prepared a report, for your eyes only, hypothesizing what I’m about to tell you. My opinion is that we’ve stumbled across what I’ll call a ‘rogue faction’-an unofficial alliance between certain extremists on the State Council and the government of North Korea. A new al-Qaeda, if we feel like using a sensationalist label.”
“That is sensationalist, since your hypothesized group has, well, yet to do anything.”
“Let’s follow my theory all the way through. The rogue faction, presuming it exists, enjoys ties-or, greater than that, influence over more than one nation. There are joint preparations under way for potential simultaneous invasions of American allies, or, to be more accurate, nations whose independence is critical to our foreign policy and therefore our national security. What do you think will happen if I look elsewhere? We should establish a task force, Malcolm-it will take time if there are other participating nations, or other connected extremists within nonextremist regimes, but if further documentation exists-I realize that I am again being sensationalistic, but these could be the first signs of, well, you could call it a new form of world war, Malcolm.”