“More power!” shouted Jonah, punching the intercom to Alexis in the engine room. “Anything you got — I need it over the next ten seconds!”
Alexis must have found some last remaining joule or watt hiding somewhere in the battery bank, because the Scorpion surged forward, engines screaming. Hassan nearly lost his grip on the console, splaying his feet to keep from tumbling out of his seat and down along the steep deck.
“Thirty meters!” Vitaly sputtered, as the Scorpion breeched the surface like a great, blue whale. And then she fell back to earth, her belly slamming against her sister submarine below with the sound and fury of Thor’s hammer and anvil. Everyone was thrown to the deck as metal screamed against metal, lights flickered, and hydraulic fluid rained down from above. Several electrical panels short-circuited, bursting into flames.
“Emergency flood procedures! Damage report! Vitaly, where’d we hit them?” shouted Jonah, almost shaking the helmsmen out of his seat.
“Above conning tower, Captain!” said Vitaly. “We sheer off their snorkel, periscope, radar, everything! They blind and deaf now. No hull leak detected — all major systems or backups functioning.”
“Then get us the fuck out of here. Emergency descent.” Vitaly obeyed, the engines once more roaring to full power as the Scorpion plunged into the sea.
“How did you know we could out-climb them?” exclaimed Hassan. “Vitaly said we were evenly matched!”
“They’re fielding a full crew,” answered Jonah. “And a full complement of torpedoes and other ordnance to boot. We may not have much, but we had the weight advantage and every chance of beating them to the surface with Alexis on the engines and Vitaly at the helm.”
“Deaf and blind,” repeated Hassan, breathless as he shook his head.
“But they still have a set of lungs,” added Jonah. “They’ll be howling for every NK anti-sub asset within five hundred miles. Vitaly, plot an evasive course; drop us beneath a thermal layer. Return to silent running. Let ’em think they got us, too.”
“Aye,” Vitaly said, fingers shaking as he input the new instructions.
“Captain, I must say this is an excellent opportunity to play dead,” said Hassan. “We can find a place to hide on the ocean floor, drop to minimal power. I don’t know how long we can hold out with no food and thinning air, but maybe it would be enough time for both the North Koreans and Japanese to stop looking for us. This isn’t our battle, Jonah.”
Jonah nodded. “We’ve got to play this out, Doc. We can’t risk a gamble, not until we know what’s at stake. Orders stand. Set course for the Japanese fleet. Let’s see what they make of this mess.”
CHAPTER 10
Freya Weyland leaned against the rusting stern railing, her hands curled around the hard steel, scarred knuckles white and fingertips as cold as the metal they rested upon. She leaned over and nestled her chin into her folded arms, eyes closed as the winter winds of the East China Sea swept across her face. The freezing air felt good, her skin prickling with goose pimples underneath a thin, fashionable sweatshirt, the chill numbing her fingers, stealing the breath from her lungs. A crescent moon hung low in the winter sky, casting dim illumination over the 170-foot research vessel as it quietly pushed through gentle swells.
The young man next to her spoke passionately, winding through a ponderous, well-rehearsed epiphany that probably impressed the coeds of his university’s science department. His conclusions were clearly meant to be edgy, at least for a mainline academic; the rebellious hypothesis punctuated by the neglected cigar in his hand as it slowly burnt to ash in the darkness. Something about the benefits of selective near-extinction — how collapsed fishing stocks would lead to real legislative change faster than any conservation activism. Better the fish died now; perhaps enough would survive to repopulate the region while the Japanese fleets languished in scrapyards for lack of catch.
He was handsome, at least compared to the balance of the R/V George D. Stillson’s male population. Tall, skinny— well, too skinny if she was honest with herself—trendy haircut with the long, slick top and shaved sides, half-lidded eyes, and a sly smile. And he could talk, really talk. He didn’t just stand around waiting for her to say something so he could pretend to agree. Maybe even a guy her mom might have called a breath of fresh air, the type who introduced himself as ‘Benny’ and not ‘Dr. Whoever the Third, PhD of Ivy-This or Ivy-That’.
She liked listening to him talk. She liked how he filled the silence with such ease, how she could simply lean on the railing staring ahead, and he wouldn’t get bored and walk away. She almost felt at peace when he spoke. Maybe this was what it was like to be a woman who didn’t know the right ratio of diesel to urea fertilizer, or the correct detonator needed to blow it sky high, or the sound made by breaking vertebra if one twisted a neck just so.
Freya raised up and turned towards the young man, smiling as she caught his eye. He stopped speaking for a moment, thrown from his pedantic verbal wanderings, and tilted an ear to better listen to her over the ship’s laboring diesel engines.
But she didn’t speak. She instead took the small cigar from his fingers, puffed it twice, and handed it back. She pursed her lips to blow a thick, clinging cloud of smoke and warm vapor into the night sky. Benny smiled, shifting in his thick, red ski jacket as he watched her with sparkling eyes.
“You’re hot blooded, aren’t you?” he said, trying to needle her into a response. “The type of girl who never gets cold, like maybe you grew up in Fargo, or an igloo?”
Freya allowed herself an amused laugh as she glanced down at her thin, inadequate sweatshirt. But still she said nothing.
In fact, the less she said the better — she’d made her way aboard the Stillson with a stolen passport, barely checked. But the exhaustive cover story she’d tediously memorized hardly mattered; nobody wanted to talk about academic papers or obscure oceanographic flora. Sure, small teams of Japanese and American graduate students wrestled over deck space and ship time as they netted fish, dissected specimens, gathered core samples, and deployed scientific instrumentation over the course of the working day. But the nights were the real attraction, bacchanalian parties in the recreation room winding down well into the early morning hours as the students stole away to explore one other in the darkened semi-privacy of their shared shipboard cabins.
The air of political tension made the expedition all the more exciting. Spy games weren’t unheard of, and the waters off Amami Oshima had earned a reputation as the kidnapping grounds of North Korean intelligence agencies. A disguised spy vessel was spotted and chased by four Japanese Coast Guard ships just a few years previous, sparking off a six-hour gunfight that ended when the North Koreans scuttled their own trawler.
The fifteen unlucky spies left clinging to the wreckage were deemed a security risk and abandoned to the unforgiving sea. Japan returned two years later to raise the trawler from the deep, finding her equipped with guns, rockets, a high-powered engine, and a hidden speedboat launch. Some of the Japanese grad students had visited the salvaged spy ship at the Coast Guard Museum of Yokohama, flashing the ubiquitous V-sign with their fingers as their photos were taken in front of the bullet-riddled hull.
Freya decided that if Benny ever stopped talking and tried to kiss her, she might just let him. It’s what her cover identity Cindi Phelps would do, wasn’t it? Cindi Phelps with an ‘i’ at the end of her first name. Cindi Phelps the marine biologist in training who once wanted to become a dolphin trainer. Cindi the grad student who was determined to make her way to sea like a real scientist — at least until Yasua Himura decided her passport was worth more than her life. The real Cindi had been chosen deliberately, her digital fingerprint exactingly traced through social media, cell phone records, and online correspondence, until she was firmly established as the candidate best suited for replacement. As an added bonus, the real Cindi somewhat resembled Freya, albeit six inches shorter, and with a distinctive toothy smile that Freya could not reproduce no matter how hard she tried.