“Da, da,” said Vitaly quickly. “Vitaly stay with submarine, like always.”
“You don’t mind? You’re always complaining about being left behind.”
“Vitaly stay with Scorpion no problem! You go now. Goodbye.”
“Are you sure?” teased Jonah, poking Vitaly in the ribs just inches from where he’d shot him on their first encounter. “Because I could always use a canary on my landing party.”
Vitaly rolled his eyes and punched the intercom. He ordered the remaining crew to the command compartment, effectively ending further discussion.
“Are you certain we don’t wish to wait?” asked Hassan. “If in doubt, we must practice caution.”
Jonah cut him off. “We’ll only keep the initiative if we keep the initiative. The longer we stay here, the more likely something shitty will happen. I’m not worried about the CO2; we’ll break out the firefighting gear and use the self-contained breathing masks and air tanks. It’ll be enough for thirty minutes or so. We’ll leave the sub, take a poke around, and be back inside half that time.”
“There’s something else,” added Hassan, hearing footsteps from down the main submarine corridor. “I hate to bring this up given other pressing matters — ahem — but we must discuss our stowaway.”
Before Jonah could respond, Dalmar and Marissa made their way into the command compartment followed by Alexis. The engineer pulled in wet-haired Sun-Hi by the hand, the young North Korean’s tiny frame now dressed in comically large work coveralls.
“Hello!” announced Sun-Hi. She broke away from Alexis and grabbed Jonah around his middle in a big hug, the top of her head not even reaching the bottom of his chest.
“Another stowaway?” demanded Jonah, holding his hands up in confusion. “Why does this keep happening to us? Forget it. We’ll discuss internal security procedures later. She looks familiar. Didn’t she do us a solid with the radio transmission leaving North Korean waters?”
“I am Sun-Hi, silly!” said the young woman, still hugging him, her small face buried in his stomach.
“She played Koppun in Flower Girl,” added Hassan dryly.
Sun-Hi didn’t break her grip on Jonah until she noticed the map on Vitaly’s screen. And then she bolted over, seizing the monitor with both hands and shaking it as though she could force it to refresh from a frozen error on the screen. Unaware of the Scorpion’s new mission, she clearly expected to have been discovered, once far away from North Korea.
“We go now, please?” she said, pointing at the screen. “Why we here? No good, no good! We must leave! If army find us, they shoot us!”
“She does have a point,” Marissa said.
“Yes, Captain,” mimicked Vitaly. “Can we go now, please?”
Jonah considered her for a minute until Hassan spoke. “What do you want me to do about her?”
“We could confine her to quarters,” suggested Marissa.
“Look at her — she can’t hurt anybody!” said Alexis.
“I have killed the most men with my smallest knife,” interjected Dalmar.
“That cannot be true,” protested Marissa, glaring at the pirate. “You are so making that up.”
Sun-Hi just stared between the members of the crew as they considered her fate.
“I won’t turn down local knowledge while we have it,” Jonah finally said. “Besides — out of all of us, she seems the most motivated to not return to North Korea. Sun-Hi, how did you hide from the Japanese?”
“I hide in laundry!”
“See?” demanded Marissa. “See? I told you the laundry wasn’t a shitty hiding spot!”
“For her maybe — she’s all of half your size,” retorted Jonah. “I could hide her in a pair of Dalmar’s tube socks.”
There was a general murmuring of agreement among the crew as Marissa glowered at Jonah with renewed fury.
“Hassan, Alexis, Dalmar, Sun-Hi, you’re with me,” ordered Jonah. “Full SCBA respirators and tanks from the firefighting gear. Keep an eye on each other’s gauges and mask seals as well as your own. We go by rule of thirds— we’ve got thirty-minute tanks, I want us turned around and headed back for the Scorpion within ten.”
“Arms?” asked Dalmar.
“Nothing visible — and no rifles. Anything you can carry on your person is fine by me.”
“Like this?” asked Dalmar as he lifted his shirt to reveal several high-caliber pistols holstered against his ridiculously chiseled abdominal muscles.
“Yeah, that works,” said Jonah as he pulled, press-checked, and replaced his nickel-and-pearl .45 at the back of his jeans.
“What do you want me to do?” asked Marissa.
Dalmar reached over the frizzy-haired shipping heiress and pulled an oversized black assault rifle from a hidden wall compartment. He shoved it into her hands, waiting until she gripped the weapon before releasing it to her.
“Do not allow us to be boarded,” the pirate warned.
“Um… OK.” Marissa gulped and looked at the gun in her hands.
Dalmar leaned over her, eyes wide and teeth shining white as he whispered into her ear. “And if you cannot hold them back,” he rasped. “Do not be captured alive.”
“Knock it off, Dalmar—” Jonah chided as he pulled a clear plastic full-face mask and bottle from the command compartment’s cache of emergency firefighting supplies.
The rest of the landing party began to don their own masks as well, and Alexis showed a reluctant Sun-Hi how to adjust and tighten the straps around the back of her head.
“You going to be OK?” asked Jonah, his voice muffled through his fogging mask.
Marissa looked down at the rifle, then at Dalmar, and back to Jonah again. “No!” she exclaimed. “No, I’m not going to be OK!”
“Don’t worry about anything,” insisted Jonah as he ascended the conning tower ladder to the lockout chamber above. “We’re just taking a peek around — back inside twenty minutes tops.”
CHAPTER 9
The lockout chamber unlatched with a heavy clunk, seals hissing as the thick watertight door swung open and the toxic atmosphere of the underground North Korean submarine base swirled invisible around them. Jonah stepped from the conning tower interior and onto the deck of the Scorpion. Behind him, Hassan, Alexis, Dalmar and Sun-Hi emerged from the tight compartment. He took a deep breath through his respirator facemask and was rewarded with a lungful of dry, odorless air. Good — his SCBA unit was in working order; the gauge on the tank read fully in the green. It’d give him thirty minutes of air if he was careful, maybe forty if he kept his breathing slow and pulse even.
Jonah scanned the chamber from end to end before staring up at the concrete ceiling above him through the curved clear plastic of his facemask. He paused, taking in the crumbling, hand-painted DPRK flag that loomed overhead. It looked like it hadn’t been tended to in years. Strange for a country where symbols were generally regarded as more important than people.
“I see we are still without any greeting party.” Hassan gazed over the empty, pillared gangway and darkness beyond. Freed from tide and swell, the Scorpion floated, bow rake gently scraping against the concrete moorage. The design and dimensions of the long, horseshoe-shaped submarine waterway resembled a steep-walled irrigation channel, albeit one sequestered deep beneath the surface. One way in. One way out. And no way to turn the submarine around. Jonah tried to imagine how much rock and earth was between them and the surface. Two hundred, maybe three hundred feet? The facility was certainly deep enough to protect the submarine base from the capitalist missiles and rockets the hermit kingdom had spent generations preparing for — but how deep exactly, he had no idea.