The submarine drifted awash in the cold waves, her conning tower, periscope, and antenna masts camouflaged among burning diesel fuel and floating wreckage. Jonah and his crew huddled in the command compartment. Alexis and Vitaly shivered as they toweled and stripped down from their wet, stained coveralls and equipment. Ocean swells lurched the Scorpion intermittently with sickening motion, tossing the crew back and forth within the cramped, windowless compartment. Still, their eyes were glued to the satellite television feed on the bulkhead-mounted monitors.
A map of the East China Sea flashed onto the screen along with intermittent images of the burning amphibious ship vanishing beneath the waves. The Scorpion surfaced amidst the videotaped chaos, her purposeful, angular bow callously pushing through clusters of shredded rafts and oil-slicked bodies. Jonah didn’t speak a word of Japanese, but the implication was clear—their trial by media had already rendered a verdict.
Someone had worked very, very hard to plant the story. The submarine Scorpion and her mercenary crew had been on a secret rendezvous within a North Korean military installation, returning to the open sea to attack a Japanese fleet in cold blood. He had to admit it was a pretty great story. His mind raced. How long had they been a patsy? All he knew was that their unknown enemy had tipped their hand with the news story. Such detailed information about an unfolding disaster never travelled this fast, not even in the information age. Someone had set it all up well in advance.
“Well this is goddamn fantastic,” said Alexis, first to break the silence. The television screen was displaying images of the Scorpion’s crew now, beginning with security footage of Jonah and Hassan. Both men were bound with hands tied behind them like criminals. Jonah on his knees as blood dripped from his mouth. The doctor’s barely conscious body pushed upright against the corner of the penthouse elevator.
Jonah couldn’t help but wince at his own image. So the rumors were true: a salvage team had reached the sunken remains of Anconia Island, even managed to rescue a few key hard drives from the deep.
Next was a composite of Dalmar Abdi’s face. The computer-rendered image of the grinning Somali almost resembling fan art. Dalmar grunted and tapped his foot, preemptively skipping his usual dread-pirate, famous-terrorist routine.
Alexis was shown in more security footage, only her grainy image was paired with her decidedly dated senior picture. The result was all Patty Hearst—a young, All-American girl turned to the dark side. The images only lasted seconds before cutting to an announcer droning on in rapid-fire Japanese.
“They say Alexis brainwashed,” piped in Sun-Hi. “Maybe hostage?”
Alexis snorted. “Of course they say that. Because there’s no way I made up my own goddamn mind.”
“We know you make own terrible decisions,” interjected Vitaly, giving her a reassuringly condescending pat on the head. Alexis gently slapped his hand away and shot him a half-annoyed smirk.
“You speak Japanese?” said Jonah to Sun-Hi, running a small towel through the last seawater in his dry hair. He’d need to get a shower soon—the dried salt and oil on his skin had already begun to itch.
“A little,” said Sun-Hi. “In school. For when Democratic Republic People’s Army conquer Tokyo!”
Marissa’s photo suddenly flashed onto the screen, a classic, full-on mug shot complete with height lines and tilted arrest placard.
“Whoops! Looks like they weren’t quite done,” chuckled Jonah.
“Oh hell,” mumbled Marissa. “My dad’s going to straight-up murder me when he sees this on TV.”
Jonah cocked his head as he squinted at the mug shot. “I don’t think I remember this one,” he said. “And I thought I’d seen ’em all.”
“It’s . . . recent-ish,” said Marissa. “From not long after you disappeared. You could say I backslid a little.”
“Yeah? Before or after you met Mr. Accountant?”
“He’s not an—oh, forget it.” Marissa squeezed the bridge her nose, the first sign of an early-onset tension headache. “I went out on the town with Stevie and his crew once they hit landside after the Hurricane Irene oilfield cleanup.”
“Voodoo Stevie or Zipperface Stevie?”
“This cannot be a real story,” said Alexis. Hassan nodded his baffled agreement.
“Zipperface. We ended up at Dollie’s and he tried to follow one of the dancers into the bathroom—her idea, by the way. Turns out her so-called boyfriend was one of the bouncers. Things got a little out of hand from there and I had to throw down for my boys. We would have made it out home free if we hadn’t run behind the bar to grab more drinks first. Gave the cops time to set up a perimeter.”
“Incoming fleet on radar,” said Vitaly, tapping on the flickering green display. “We will hear them on hydrophone soon.”
Alexis nodded towards the satellite television feed. “The news story is just repeating at this point. We should dive now and get the hell out of here.”
“Agreed,” said Marissa. “I know some local ports in Indonesia where we can lay low, maybe even do some business.”
Jonah scratched his short beard and glanced at the navigational console as the crew waited for him to speak. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he began.
“Let me guess,” said Hassan, shaking his head in frustration. “Fleeing is exactly what the Japanese would expect, and we’re going to do something much more hazardous instead.”
“I’m all for running when the time comes—but the doc is goddamn right,” said Jonah. Marissa and Alexis both groaned, rolling their eyes in hunger and frustration. “Running is what they’d expect. They’ve no doubt already encircled the area with submarines, helicopters, and satellites. They’re closing in on us as we speak, and, they’ll find us if we run for it. But the last thing they’d anticipate is for us to stay right where we are.”
“Because it’s fucking insane,” said Alexis. “Every floating asset the Japanese have is going to converge on this location within hours.”
“But captain has point,” said Vitaly. “Much noise when ships arrive, easy to hide. Much safer than—what you say? Run gauntlet?”
“We couldn’t save the carrier—not with her systems turning on us—but we may be able to show it wasn’t us,” said Jonah. “Running will only make us look guilty. I want to stay, dive the carrier, and try to salvage the central hard drives. They won’t last long in these waters, and there’s no way the Japanese can mobilize a dive team in time.”
“If running away looks guilty, staying at the scene of the crime looks straight up suicidal,” mumbled Alexis. “I can’t even imagine what they’re going to do if they find us down here.”
“It’s settled,” boomed Dalmar, folding his arms. “We cannot win when we cannot fight. And we cannot fight when we do not know our enemy.”
“What’s the depth of the ocean bottom?” said Jonah.
“Maybe five hundred fifty feet?”
“Can we risk a ping?”
“Why not?” said Vitaly. “In for penny, in for pound.” He punched the button, a single acoustic ping erupting from the Scorpion’s bow to echo over the underwater landscape below. The computer churned through the returning data, slowly drawing a green three-dimensional digital wireframe of the upright carrier on the ocean floor deep beneath them.
“There,” said Jonah, resting his fingertip on the top of the sunken carrier’s flight deck. “I want you to land the submarine right there.”
Jonah secured the last zipper of his thick neoprene diving suit. He twisted the hot water supply valve back and forth with his fingers, satisfied that it turned easily. Unlike a wetsuit, which used a diver’s own body heat to warm a thin layer of water, the hot-water suit would continually inject a steady supply of electrically-heated water through a web of tubing—a necessity when breathing a heat-robbing mixture of oxygen and helium at depth. The system wasn’t perfect as there were always cold spots in the suit, but, that was diving.
“Are you certain swimming into the carrier is the best option?” said Hassan, leaning against the hatchway as he tapped a foot in nervous anxiety. “I’ll have you know I nearly died at just half this depth.”
“Well, you didn’t know what you were doing,” said Jonah dismissively as he pulled on one oversize Wellington boot after another over the neoprene suit feet. “I do. Plus, this isn’t scuba diving—it’s saturation diving. Sat divers don’t swim, they walk. Once under pressure, my soft tissues and bloodstream will take on dissolved oxygen and helium to the point of saturation. I’ll breathe an exotic gas mixture, mostly helium.”
“Because helium is inert?”
“Yep. It doesn’t make you high like nitrogen, or kill you like higher concentrations of oxygen—but it does make you cold as a motherfucker, believe me. I’ll be physically attached to the Scorpion by umbilical for my heat and air needs. The helmet has a built-in camera and microphone setup, too, so we’ll be in touch every step of the way. No sweat.”
“I am familiar with the principles of hyperbaric medicine,” sniffed Hassan. “As well as the myriad of associated medical risks.”
“Sure,” said Jonah as he hefted the bulky fifteen-minute emergency air tank over his shoulders and secured it with a snap. Marissa stuck her head through the hatchway, watching him as he assembled the gear. “High pressure nervous syndrome, aseptic bone necrosis, decompression sickness . . . and that’s just the obvious stuff. I’ve known guys who got crushed, froze to death, explosively decompressed. Hell, I once heard about a guy who got his intestines sucked right out his O-ring when his tender flushed the toilet at the wrong time.”
“I’d never consider doing that to you,” laughed Marissa as she made an obscene flushing gesture with her hand.
“Quite the ghastly image, that,” said the doctor.
“No shit. The Scorpion is capable of supporting a saturation diver on a limited basis, but this won’t exactly be a textbook operation. We’re essentially using a converted escape trunk, not a proper diving bell, and there’s no hyper-baric lifeboat if things go tits up.”
“I’ll make sure we have plenty of fresh water and a change of clothes upon your return,” said Hassan. “I’m not certain what else I can do to be useful.”
“Thanks,” said Jonah as Marissa passed him a tool belt. He secured it around his waist beside a clanking rack of carabineers and nylon webbing. “And don’t forget the reading material. I’ll be decompressing at roughly six vertical feet per hour, so I’m looking at upwards of four days in the lockout chamber.”
“Four days?” sputtered Hassan.
“Maybe throw a couple of Cosmos onto the stack? I’ve read all the Better Homes and Gardens at least three, four times through. It’s worse than a dentist’s office down here.”
“He’s always liked the quizzes,” added Marissa.
Jonah caught himself taking great satisfaction at Hassan’s baffled frustration. “Just be careful. Can you at least agree to that?” the doctor finally said.
“I promise to not get killed or whatever,” said Jonah, rolling his eyes. “But only if you go worry somewhere else. Marissa and I have some pre-dive checklists to get through.”
“Very well. Goodbye, then.”
“Later, Doc,” said Marissa. She pulled a thirty-pound Kirby Morgan diving helmet off the shelf as the doctor ducked his head underneath the low hatch and left the armory without another word.
“Is he always so uptight about everything?” asked Marissa, tilting her head toward the now-empty hatchway.
“He grows on you. I wasn’t exactly the doc’s biggest fan when we met, but he’s a good man. Better than me, at least the way I figure things.”
“Never thought I’d go back to being your dive tender,” said Marissa with a faint smile. She considered the helmet in her hands, not quite ready to pass it to Jonah.
“You were good at it. I think we spent the better half of our relationship on opposite sides of a bariatric tank glass.”
“It was the job. It was the life we had—until it wasn’t.”
Jonah sighed. “I don’t want to be an asshole here, but you can’t possibly think we’d still be together if I hadn’t disappeared on you. Don’t get me wrong—when things were good, they were the best. But we also put each other through a metric ton of shit. You and I were a delayed fuse. We were always going to blow up in the end.”
Marissa turned away for a moment before shooting him an angry look. “Maybe, maybe not. You never gave us chance to find out like a normal couple. Not to belabor a point, but you were dead as far as I knew.”
“Yeah,” said Jonah, a faraway sadness in his eyes. “Maybe we’re both sorry about that.”
“Come back this time,” she said as she placed the helmet over his head, ending any further exchange. She kissed her fingertips and pressed them against the thick glass. “Don’t hoover the air—and don’t fuck around when you’re in that carrier. She’s already a widow maker.”
The temperature of the lockout chamber dipped sharply as freezing helium displaced the sea-level mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Jonah kept one eye on the gauges, watching carefully as the interior atmospheric pressure slowly increased to the sound of dry hissing air. Beginning at an ambient sea level pressure of fourteen pounds per square inch, the blowdown wouldn’t be complete until it reached over 200—the takeoff weight of a 747 pressing in on him from every direction. He slowly breathed in and out, swallowing to equalize the pressure in his ears. Pain built up deep inside his sinuses before releasing with a wet pop. The process would take only minutes. After all, pressurization was easy—it was depressurization that would kill you.
Jonah cleared his throat, hearing the high-pitched Daffy Duck sound of his own voice in his ears. It didn’t bother him, though. Helium made even the deepest-voiced divers sound like a founding munchkin of the Lollipop Guild. He sealed the suit and began the hot water flow, bracing himself against the sudden influx of weight as it filled. The sound of air rushing through the umbilical and into his helmet soothed him with its familiarity. Most of the previous generation of divers were “deaf on the left” from too many hours with the old-style air feeds, before manufacturers started protecting hearing with new designs.
Jonah turned to the tiny window and flipped a thumbs-up. With atmospheric pressure now equalized to 550 feet in depth, Marissa began to flood the lockout chamber. Hidden vents spilled forth brackish, frothy water into the closet-sized compartment, the cold liquid flooding into his rubber boots. The chamber was soon filled to the ceiling, gently releasing the weight of the tank, tool belt, helmet, and suit from Jonah’s waist and shoulders. He adjusted the hot water flow, the prickling warmth slowly spreading across his skin.
The wheel to the exterior hatch turned easily, the door swinging open to the permanent night of the abyss. No subsea light could reach these depths. Jonah stepped out of the lockout chamber and onto the Scorpion’s exterior hull. Vitaly had precisely landed the submarine on the submerged helicopter carrier, planting her long, slender length across the now-empty flight deck. The submarine’s running lights illuminated a small patch of the underlying surface and the very base of the control tower, impossible blackness surrounding them, stretching in every direction. Suspended particulates hung in the waters like snow, swirling and dancing in the glare of his helmet’s built-in light.
Jonah took a breath and leapt from the side of the Scorpion, slowly falling as the thick umbilical uncoiled behind him. His Wellington boots hit the deck, silently absorbing the impact of his near-weightless form.
“Can you see what I’m seeing?” asked Jonah, almost unable to recognize the squeak of his own helium-altered voice.
It took a moment for the communications descrambler to deepen and translate the transmission. Marissa answered. “We see what you see. Your onboard camera is working. All gas levels are good. I’m seeing green across the board.”
Jonah didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. They’d be able to watch from the Scorpion’s command compartment as he approached the carrier’s flight control tower. He tried to remind himself how easy he had it, how much better things were than the old days. Less than a hundred years previous, divers went into the cold black encased in brass, rubber, and canvas, their burning lights barely able to penetrate the dark and only able to communicate with the surface by a crude systems of strings and bells. Half of them worked while narced or bent out of their minds, soaking wool their only protection against the cold. Others were so badly crippled that they begged for the deep, their fleeting moments underwater the only possible relief to the painful air bubbles permanently lodged in their joints and spine.
And yet their underwater labors built empires—men who lived like lions, drank like fish, and too often, died like drowned rats. If Jonah’s umbilical was cut he could tap his emergency tank and make a quick escape back to the Scorpion. But the old guard didn’t have such protection. A severed surface line meant instant death by ‘the squeeze’, their entire bodies crushed into unrecognizable human gristle within instants, leaving others the grim duty of scraping pulverized remains out of their helmets and air hoses.
The interior of the carrier’s flight control tower was a mess. The flooded main corridor was thick with floating paper, leaking oil, and debris. Air bubbles slowly trickled up from deep within the wreck, spilling across the ceiling like mirrored quicksilver. There were fewer bodies than he’d expected, most had made it to the boats or gone overboard. Those who remained were congregated in destroyed compartments, their sunken, pale corpses riddled with bullets, their joints frozen in rigor mortis, every ounce of buoyant air squeezed from their ruined lungs. The first of the scavengers had already found them, crabs and silver-fish inexorably attracted to the scent of waterborne death. Translucent crustaceans crawled across the bodies, hiding from Jonah’s light as their claws sought soft tissues.
Jonah shuddered. He’d recovered hundreds of bodies in the warm waters of Thailand after the Indian Ocean tsunami. Most in worse shape than these, and children among them. But it never got any easier. No, the bad memories just became more crowded, one piling onto the other until they threatened to overwhelm the part of his mind where he kept things he couldn’t un-see.
The now-familiar interior stairs of the bridge tower were a simple climb. He carefully unrolled the last long lengths of umbilical cord as he ascended straight up the railings, leaping upwards from flight to flight. The umbilical tugged at his suit just a few steps short of the command deck. He’d reached the end of the line. Jonah considered the tether for a moment before disconnecting it, cutting off his warm water, camera feed, and submarine-supplied air with a single twist.
There was no sense in telling Marissa first—she’d just waste precious time trying to talk him out of the reckless maneuver. The tank on his back would give him fifteen minutes; maybe less if he pushed himself too hard. The worst part of the disconnection was losing the warm water supply; heat had already begun to drain from his suit as though he’d eased himself into a frozen lake.
Jonah ascended the last steps to the bridge as he began to shiver. The influx of floodwaters had thrown the uniformed bodies of the dead carrier captain and his murdered bridge staff against one wall where they now lay in a twisted pile. He aimed a flashlight at the ceiling, the harsh illumination playing across mirror-like air pockets and oil until it fell upon a thick bundle of Ethernet cord. Tracing the bundle across the ceiling and into a bulkhead, Jonah located a service hatch, pulling it open to reveal a long bank of computer servers and hard drives. If he was lucky, it’d have everything he was looking for—navigational charts, radar imagery, maybe even uncorrupted security camera footage showing the carrier’s self-destruction. Jonah unclipped a folded mesh grab bag from his webbing and shook it open. He began to pull the large removable hard drives from the server bank and stack them in the bag, one after another.
His brain felt sluggish, limbs slow and unresponsive, his shivering now uncontrollable. He could ignore the numbness in his extremities, but his core temperature had dropped at least a couple degrees. No doubt early stage hypothermia. But nothing he couldn’t withstand for the duration of his emergency reserves. Jonah checked the tank—down by half. He should have turned around by now. He made a half-formed mental note not to flood the suit with scalding water once the umbilical was reattached. The risk of burning himself was unlikely due to updated manufacturing and safety specifications, but warming up too quickly could send a jet of freezing blood into his heart, shocking it into stopping.
There it was—the last clunky hard drive. Jonah stood and swiveled towards the door, retracing his steps down the stairs until his light fell over the floating end of the severed dive umbilical. He paused as he reconnected it, closing his eyes as warm water washed over him once more.
“—nah Blackwell!” came the intercom transmission through the helmet’s tinny speaker. “Jonah—answer me goddamn it!”
“I’m still here,” confirmed Jonah, barely hearing his own impossibly high-pitched voice over the hissing air valve.
There was a pause on the other end. “What the fuck was that?” she finally demanded. “You were completely off-line for almost ten minutes!”
“Umbilical must have gotten a kink,” said Jonah as he continued to descend the tower stairs, the hard drives in his mesh bag awkwardly knocking against the metal hand railings with each step.
“Bullshit. You think I’m a complete idiot?”
Jonah was just about to make up another excuse before Marissa cut in again.
“Don’t even bother making something up to get me off your back,” she said. “You may not give a shit about your own life, but there are other people down here that do. Tell me this: did you even stop to think about anybody else before you disconnected? The fact that I spend the last ten fucking minutes thinking you were dead, trying to imagine what I’d have to say to your crew?”
“Doesn’t matter—I got what I came for. Coming back now.” Jonah let silence fall between them. If she wanted more information, she could get it from his point-of-view camera feed.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Jonah stopped for a moment to coil his umbilical before continuing to retrace his steps down the corridor. He stopped dead at a double-wide hatchway, recognizing it as one of the ship’s galleys. The thick metal doors hung slightly ajar, just wide enough for Jonah to catch a fleeting glimpse of several emaciated bodies within. He clapped a gloved hand over his camera lens, stopping the video transmission.
“What happened?” demanded Marissa from the other end of the intercom. “I’m still getting camera telemetry, but the view is obstructed.”
“Is Sun-Hi with you?”
“She’s watching the monitors with the rest of us—but I have you on my headset, it’s just you and me talking.”
“Give her something to do in another compartment. Tell me when she’s gone.”
The transmission went silent, muted from the other end. A few moments passed before Marissa’s voice crackled back over the helmet speaker. “She’s gone. What’s going on?”
Jonah silently pushed the oversize hatch doors open, his helmet light illuminating the drowned bodies of nearly a hundred North Korean refugees within the cafeteria. Some still wore their thin cotton rags and sandals, the ghostly fabric of their ill-fitting clothes dancing in the eddy created by his movement. Others still in heavy Japanese work coveralls. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying not to envision their last, terrified moments, the fruitless sacrifices they’d made as they fled across the frigid North Korean icepack.
Marissa paused for the longest time before speaking. “What should I do about Sun-Hi?” she asked.
“I’ll tell her when I’m back,” was all Jonah could mumble. But despite saying it out loud, he didn’t know if he could.
Hassan watched Jonah’s return to the Scorpion over Marissa’s shoulder. There wasn’t enough room by the lockout chamber console; he was forced to hang onto the conning tower ladder like a lineman as they together watched the external camera feed on a too-small screen. Jonah clambered up onto the submarine’s submerged deck, waddling in his ungainly neoprene suit and heavy helmet, dragging two unfurled mesh grab bags behind him, umbilical coiled over one shoulder.
“I think I see the hard drives,” said Marissa. “What’s he got in the second bag?”
Hassan squinted at the feed. Jonah was closer now, half-walking, half-hopping his way down towards the open lockout chamber. He made it seem so simple, so effortless, almost more comfortable in the cold depths than his own skin. As he approached the camera, Hassan started to make out details of the several dozen compressed plastic packages in the other mesh bag.
“They look like . . . prepackaged meals,” said the doctor. “Perhaps military rations?”
“MRE’s,” confirmed Marissa with a smile. “Normally, I’d rather eat wet cement, but right now they’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Does that mean you’ll give Jonah a pass on disconnecting his umbilical?”
“Hell no. He’s still getting an ass-whuppin’ for that.”
Jonah situated himself inside the chamber, pulling the last of the long tether in after him. He secured the exterior lockout hatch and gave Marissa a thumbs-up through the tiny glass portal. She returned it and began the chamber drainage cycle, water rushing back into sucking vents beneath Jonah’s Wellington boots.
“I’m just replacing water with air; he’s still pressurized to depth,” explained Marissa. “He’ll be stuck in that chamber for a while, even if we surface, it will have to stay sealed. We’ll push it a little, but he’s still looking at about four days’ decompression.”
Hassan blanched a little, trying to imagine the claustrophobia he’d experience if trapped in the closet-sized space for so many endless hours.
Jonah popped the helmet off its ringed collar, shaking out wet hair and cracking his knuckles. His face and neck were covered with long red marks from where the seams of the dive suit had pressed and chafed. He held up the mesh bag of hard drives first, straining against their newfound weight out of water.
“Ready,” Marissa confirmed through the intercom. “Pass them through.”
Jonah nodded, opening a microwave oven-sized pass-through hatch designed to exchange food and tools between the differing pressure environments. He stacked the clunky hard drives in the small box and closed the door from his side, securing it tightly. Marissa depressurized the box to a single atmosphere, and opened the door to retrieve them.
“We got the drives!” Marissa shouted down the conning tower ladder. Dalmar appeared below, taking the hard drives as they were passed from Marissa and Hassan to the pirate like a bucket brigade. Satisfied that they were stacked on a chart table below, Marissa turned her attention back to Jonah’s intercom. “You need anything off the bat?”
“Nothing urgently,” said Jonah as he unzipped the last of the neoprene suit. There was always a strange pause after he spoke as the voice descrambler raced to catch up, the resulting disconnect between his lips and voice resembling a badly dubbed movie. Jonah stepped out of the suit and carefully secured the remaining valves. “A towel and a bedroll would be great once the chamber dries out a little.”
“I can help with that,” said Marissa, activating an interior fan.
Jonah dropped to his knees as he went through the prepackaged military rations. “Cheese tortellini!” he exclaimed. “Fuckin’ A. This stuff is legendary.” Setting it aside, he rifled through the rest, stacking them up on the floor in a haphazard pyramid three-dozen high. “I’ll pass the rest through the hatch. They’re calorie-dense, so rations are one per person per day. Oh, and watch out for the buffalo chicken. Either save it for last, or give it to somebody on your shit list.”
“But you’re the only one on my shit list,” joked Marissa through the intercom.
“What’s wrong with the buffalo chicken?” whispered Hassan. “Also . . . is it made of buffalo or chicken?”
“Chicken, at least theoretically. And it’ll give you the Mount Vesuvius of shits,” said Marissa, removing her finger from the transmit button. “The egg omelet, too. Don’t even bother with Tabasco sauce with that one; it will roast your sphincter from the inside out without even doing you the courtesy of improving the taste.”
Hassan just nodded uncomfortably as Jonah loaded the pass-through hatch with the rescued meals.
“Did you bring the magazines?” asked Marissa.
“Yes, of course,” said Hassan, reaching into a satchel around his shoulder to pull out a large stack of glossy titles, presenting them to her.
“Don’t show them to me—see which ones he wants.”
Hassan selected a gardening magazine and pressed the cover against the portal glass.
“Already read it,” said Jonah, punching the intercom.
“Next.”
The doctor picked a weapons and ammunition title next, presenting it for consideration.
“Christ, no,” exclaimed Jonah, angrily pressing the intercom button once more. “I think I’ve seen about enough of the real thing to last a goddamn lifetime.”
Hassan didn’t answer. Instead, he held up a dog-eared detective novel and several decade-old women’s magazines in quick succession, all left behind by the submarine’s previous occupants.
“Now you’re talking,” said Jonah with a smile. “Yes, yes, and yes.”
Marissa ran the pass-through hatch cycle again, exchanging the MRE’s for the magazines and novel. But despite his smile and jokes, Jonah still looked like he’d aged ten years in the space of a few hours.
Jonah punched the intercom on his end one last time as he slumped against the wall, ignoring the packaged meal he’d left for himself. Hassan could only imagine how Sun-Hi weighed on his mind. “I’m just going to sit here for a while,” he said. “Maybe try to sleep. Let me know if anything happens.”
“Keep her busy for now. I’ll tell her soon.”
Hassan descended the ladder to the command compartment slowly. He’d never seen Jonah quite so weary, the kind of bone-tired rooted more in soul than body. Best to leave him alone. After all, Jonah was never the sort to seek solace in others.
Vitaly was alone in the command compartment, the salvaged hard drives already partially disassembled into a snaking mess of cables and wet circuit boards. “How’s it coming?” asked Hassan.
“Broken data, my favorite,” said Vitaly without looking up from his computer console, his sarcastic tone a clear indication of his irritable disposition.
“Any success thus far?” pressed Hassan.
“No. But still easier than NK data. For them I had to run emulator to mimic very old system. New OS would not even read tapes.” He unplugged the first of the Japanese hard drives and booted up a second, their computer systems lapping up the massive repositories of data. The methodology made sense to Hassan—copy first, analyze later.
Distant noises from far above echoed throughout the Scorpion’s pressure hull, a strange mixture of churning swishes and pings as it passed. “What’s happening?” asked Hassan, a note of concern entering his voice.
“Many ship arrive,” said Vitaly, gesturing upwards with a small screwdriver without turning his head to look. “Coordinate rescue, I think. They will not find us here.”
Hassan considered the information for a moment. He wanted to press Vitaly for more, ask him why he wasn’t concerned, but finally decided against it. “Do you know what Jonah wants you to find in all that data?” he asked.
“No,” said Vitaly with a long sigh. “I am on—how do you say? Hunt of fish?”
“A fishing expedition?”
“Da, da, expedition of . . . ” Vitaly trailed off, glaring at a flashing cluster of red on the hard drive data map. “Chyort voz’mi, security footage ruined!” The Russian pounded a fist on the keyboard hard enough to make Hassan wince.
“Can it be recovered?”
“This not television. I am not Abby Sciuto of NCIS. No, I cannot magic recover data. Too many question— maybe you go away now?”
“Yes, of course,” stammered Hassan, backing up. “Can I get you anything, do anything else to assist?”
“Maybe get me MRE?” ordered Vitaly. “Any but enchilada of beef. I would rather eat shoe.”
Hassan sorted through the stacks of prepackaged meals in the galley. He was surprised with how well they’d held up in their immersion. Most were evenly crushed, but with their packaging, bilingual labels, ingredients, and preparation instructions were otherwise still intact. Setting aside the ones he’d been warned about, Hassan quietly unwrapped Vitaly’s meal—a macaroni and chili dish— and prepared it according to the written instructions. The small compartment was soon filled with powerful aromas, tempting Hassan to eat it himself and prepare another for the Vitaly instead. But he patiently scooped the mix out of the heated bag and onto a plate, walking it back to the command compartment. He resolved to silently leave it with the Russian and sneak away, bothering the helmsmen no further.
Vitaly was leaning over his computer console, intently tracing two long, intersecting lines southward from the North Korean coastline to their present location. Hassan gave him the plate, and Vitaly dug into the meal without even looking up from the screen.
“I find a . . . how you say? Da, I find common factor,” said Vitaly, mouth full of food.
“What is it?”
“Same object in radar data of both NK base and Japan carrier. Both cases small and discounted as threat by computer. Both detect less than ten minute before attack begin. Object size of bird only, maybe two bird, move very slow. But it fly too straight for bird. I trace both routes.” Vitaly tapped his screen, showing the two intersecting lines on the digital map. “The line cross here, at small island in north Philippines.”
“They have a common origin,” breathed Hassan as he leapt up to his feet. “Both attacks were launched from the same location.”
“But nobody believe us,” said Vitaly, a look of concern crossing his face. “The Japanese would sink us before we can show them. Even make phone call too dangerous.”
“You’re right,” said Hassan. “They won’t believe us. Not unless we come up with some kind of hard evidence. I’ll alert Jonah. Prepare to lay a course for the island—full silent running. Let’s find out who set us up.”