Shadow of the Dragon

35

Commander Wan’s exposure suit gripped him like a fist as water flooded the trunk and pressure equalized with the sea outside. He climbed the short ladder and unlocked the hatch. He took a deep breath before he gave it a kick. It opened easily, and he pulled himself through, clinging to a small exterior handle long enough to shut the door behind him, throwing him into complete and utter darkness.

And then he let go.

The sonar technician aboard Long March #880 had been off watch during the accident and sustained burns to the side of his face as part of the fire-suppression crew. At his station now, he turned his bandaged head toward the captain.

“Con, Sonar. Heavy screws. Close. Zero-five-zero.”

Captain Tian pursed his lips. Perhaps the distress buoy had gotten through the ice. “Another submarine?”

“Negative, Captain. A surface ship. Icebreaker.”

In training, Commander Wan had been taught to yell “ho, ho, ho,” like Santa Claus all the way to the surface to keep venting air so his lungs would not burst as the pressure increased as he shot to the surface. In truth, he simply screamed. The huge hood shot him upward at two meters per second, as if pulled by a hoist, arms outstretched over his head like Superman. Even moving so quickly, it took almost a minute and a half for him to reach the surface. Ears squealing, his lungs on fire, his face felt as though he’d been beaten with a hammer as pockets in his sinuses struggled to deal with the rapid ascent. And the cold. It was very cold, even in the suit. He imagined for a moment that he was falling, not rising, plummeting from a fifty-story building. If he hit overhead ice, the results would be close.

He’d been terrified through the entire journey, from the moment he’d dogged the hatch on the lockout trunk, but a minute in he began to fight true panic. The kind of panic that makes a submariner hold his breath or rip away some important piece of gear. The kind of panic that would kill him. He kept breathing out. Why was it still so dark? He had to be near the surface. Had they gotten the time wrong? Was it night? Did polar bears hunt at night? He should be nearing the surface by now. Ah… He’d been closing his eyes. Light. Gray at first. Then blue. Something pale passed in front of his eyes, scraping the hood, spinning him as he bounced away.

Ice.

His hands struck the base of the ice sheet first, his arms folding in on themselves as the speed of his body carried him up. The air in the bubble hood protected his skull from the worst of the impact — rattling him, but not breaking his neck as he’d feared. He followed the light, rebreathing what little air he had left in the hood as he crawled along the bottom of the ice, pulling himself toward what he hoped was the edge.

At some point, he’d have nothing but carbon dioxide.

Blue-white chunks of ice as big as cars bobbed and rolled in a slurry of smaller slush, basketballs, soccer balls, baseballs, all jagged and sharp, tearing at his suit. A sudden shock hit the small of his back as freezing water began to seep in. Floundering, he kicked toward what looked like the edge. One of the crew had made him a set of spikes out of two pieces of a mop handle and sharpened bolts. Fighting the swaying current, terrified of being sucked under, he popped the protective corks off the sharpened ends and used them to pull himself upward. Kicking was difficult within the cumbersome suit, but he powered himself up — only to be rolled off the other side as what he thought was a shelf turned out to be a small, tippy berg. Water began to seep into his suit again. If it filled, he would, at the very least, freeze to death. If he lost the flotation, he would return to the sub, very slowly and very dead.

He found the edge, a two-foot-thick shelf. It was much too high for him to get a correct angle with the ice spikes without taking the suit off. That was not going to happen.

He swam along the edge, searching, pushing away every time a swell threatened to drag him under. His nose bled profusely, spattering the clear face of the hood with every breath. Overwhelmed with cold and fatigue, he found himself wondering what would come first, complete exhaustion or the inability to see what he was doing. A bergy bit the size of his father’s car nudged him from behind, at first startling him, then giving him an idea.

The first one had held him for a time, before tipping him off. If he could clamber up on this one, he might be able to use it as a stepping stone…

“We did not talk about this,” Wan muttered inside his bubble hood as he worked. “Drowning. Yes. Kidneys torn out by bears. Yes. But there was no mention of the insurmountable wall…”

Using all his reserves, he finally dragged and kicked himself out of the water to collapse on the ice shelf. He rolled onto his side and unzipped the hood with trembling fingers. The sudden slap of cold air took what was left of his breath away. A white moonscape of ice dazzled by the sun stretched forever around him in all directions.

The thought of it made him laugh out loud. He’d struggled so hard, only to drag himself to a different place to die.

Commander Wan’s suit had begun to freeze to the ice by the time he remembered he had something else to do.

The satellite phone. Yes. That was it. Call in the report… and then, whatever happened happened…

He fumbled with the bag containing the phone, teeth chattering, shivering badly, his hands like unworkable claws. The simple squeeze buckles seemed impossible, and he had to put his hands under his armpits for several minutes just to warm them. He finally opened the bag — only to dump a steady stream of seawater onto the ice. He could not see any rip, but it had flooded nonetheless. The phone was useless. A plastic brick.

The bag with the shotgun was still around his neck. He could use that if he needed to. If freezing to death wasn’t as painless as they said. Or if a bear came for him. He looked at the plastic buckles, then at his blue unworkable fingers and shook his head. The neoprene bag might as well have been a bank vault. However he died, the shotgun would not be a part of it.

Wan rolled onto his back. An unbearable sadness washed over him as he stared up at the incredible blue. The men on the stricken 880, his men, five hundred feet below, would all perish without another look at the sky.

Two hours after Wan Xiuying collapsed, a strange rumble carried across the ice. He felt it before he heard it. The shivering had passed now and he was warm. In fact, the suit worked much too well, and he thought of taking it off to cool himself. He’d watched movies in his mind as he drifted in and out. Crimson Tide, Run Silent, Run Deep—the book was better. He’d found a copy in Mandarin, but he learned more from the one in English. U-571… What was the Russian movie? China needed something… Wolf Warrior should make a good submarine movie…

The rumbling grew louder, shaking the ice under his head. A surge of adrenaline coursed through Wan’s body. A bear! Head lolling. He pushed himself onto his side with great effort.

“Come here!” he shouted. “Come and get me, you—”

But when he lifted his head, it was no bear he saw, but a large red ship in the distance, eating its way through the ice — and an orange bird hovering directly above him.