The Steel Shark

Chapter 25

Joe woke to the sound of a sonar ping. It sounded so much like the device in his yellow submarine that it took him a second to realize where he was — in his bed, with Edison nearby, and his laptop on his nightstand. Exactly where he’d been for hours.

The laptop pinged again, and he rolled over to pick it up. Edison stirred in his doggie bed.

“Shh,” Joe whispered. “Back to sleep, buddy.”

Edison snorted and lay still. Andres had taken him out for most of the day, and the dog was tired out.

Joe checked out his laptop. He was monitoring acoustic buoys around the world’s oceans. They tracked sounds in a range lower than normal human hearing. At that frequency, sound could travel for miles. Whales used it to communicate, and governments used it to monitor nuclear explosions anywhere in the world.

It had taken a bit of doing, but he’d been given access. Nobody thought he could actually figure the sounds out. Once he had access, he’d been assigned an acoustic intelligence officer named Fred Mulcahy. When Joe had invited him over from the submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, Mulcahy had given him a crash course in interpreting underwater sounds. So far, there had been a lot of false alarms. Many things made noise in the oceans — whales, dolphins, boat engines, volcanoes, earthquakes.

For the past few days, he’d been tuning the data to filter out natural and expected sounds so he got alarms only when something manmade and unusual occurred. Pattern recognition was his specialty, and he could see the system improving. Fred Mulcahy had gotten excited about it, and Joe had given Fred the source code in return for his help interpreting sounds. He probably could have built another company off this work, but he wasn’t interested. It was just a tool to help him find the submarine that had nearly killed him.

This was a new sound.

He studied the data that had triggered the alarm. A second loud sound registered, followed by a series of quieter noises with no pattern he could see. The loud sounds looked like explosions — something blew up — and the quieter ones might be something else breaking apart.

The event had happened in the North Atlantic about six hundred (orange, black, black) nautical miles from New York City. While some parts of the ocean had been seeded with naval mines to damage or destroy ships, that part of the ocean certainly wasn’t. The sound couldn’t have been a ship that ran into a mine. It could have been a ship that had had a primary then a secondary explosion — a boiler went, and then some kind of explosive cargo went after.

Or it could have been a ship that just got torpedoed. Twice.

He’d had Fred on alert since he’d discovered the pilot of the princess’s downed plane lurking in the background of a photo on Facebook. The man probably hadn’t noticed he was being photographed by a party at another table, but Joe’s software had tracked him down and matched his facial features beyond a reasonable doubt. He hadn’t been able to track the man further, but it was enough to know that, no matter what the official investigation said, the pilot had survived the crash. If he had, the women very likely had as well.

He sent the data off to Fred. Fred didn’t seem to sleep any more than he did. He was astonishingly adept at focusing for long periods of time and didn’t seem to experience fatigue. Joe pegged him as pretty far along the autism spectrum and was grateful he didn’t have to make small talk. Fred was about the sounds and nothing else.

He worked on the data for the explosions. They had to mean something.

His phone rang.

“Fred here. I got your data.”

No pleasantries from Fred. “What’s your take?”

“Torpedoes,” he said. “Beyond a doubt. The first didn’t do much damage, but you can hear the ship breaking apart after the second one. My guess is the first shot missed, or it went off too early.”

“Can you tell what kind of torpedo?”

“It’s consistent with the Swedish Gotland you’ve been hypothesizing, but it could be another kind, too. No known Swedish subs in that area. Doesn’t mean anything. Gotlands are quiet, hard to detect.”

“Have you reported it up the chain?”

“I have, but I’ll never hear back. Above my paygrade. You know that.”

Fred was very regimented in what he would and wouldn’t do. Joe suspected Fred’s higher-ups rarely listened. If he was really viewed as a valuable intelligence asset, they never would have sent him to work with Joe. “Thanks, Fred.”

“One new thing. A Mayday message came in from a tanker called the Narwhal since I called you. The radio operator said there was an explosion, and they were abandoning ship. He asked for rescuers to come to help him and his crewmates.”

“Are we sending someone?”

“Above my paygrade, but we don’t usually do long-range rescues like that for non-US-flagged commercial vessels. If we have someone close, though, we’ll send them.”

“What’s the flag?”

“Liberia.”

“Liberia?” That wasn’t on his radar.

“Flag of convenience. Five hundred and twenty tankers are flagged as Liberian. Doesn’t mean they’re from Liberia. Tax reasons. Liability reasons.”

“Can you see who owns it?”

“Above my—”

“Paygrade,” he finished for him. That always meant Fred wasn’t going to help.

“Yes.” Fred hung up without saying good-bye.

He found Fred’s lack of social graces a relief and had often considered hiring him when his tour of duty ended, but he suspected Fred would continue reenlisting as long as he could. The routine suited him.

Joe started to research the Narwhal. It didn’t take long to track down, regardless of his paygrade. The ship was owned by a shell company owned by the Dakkar family. Another marine tragedy for the Dakkars. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

He saved the sounds of both explosions and set them up as another alert on his system. If someone fired that kind of torpedo again anywhere in buoy range, he’d know without having to check with Fred. But the sub was getting away. He looked at the clock on his computer: three (red) a.m. He called Mr. Rossi anyway.

“I’m sorry to be calling so early.”

“I assume it’s something time critical.” Mr. Rossi sounded awake and alert. Joe wondered if he ever slept.

“I think I found the submarine that hit us. It torpedoed a tanker called the Narwhal a few minutes ago.” He read off the Narwhal’s last GPS coordinates and gave Mr. Rossi a brief rundown of what he’d discovered. “The crew needs assistance.”

“I’ll pass this along to my contacts.”

“The sub must be nearby. If they wait too long, they’ll never find it.”

“I’m certain they’ll look into it,” Mr. Rossi said. “But I’m also certain we’ll never hear about what they find.”

Joe thanked him and got off the phone. Not much else he could do to track the sub in the ocean. The Gotland was rumored to be one of the quietest diesel electric subs ever built, and the buoys couldn’t hear it.

He’d already tried to find out anything about the women who had died in the plane crash, but as near as he could tell, they really were dead. No social media contacts, no appearance on any surveillance databases he could track. Maybe the pilot had killed them, although Joe couldn’t think why.

He sat in the dark for a long moment, listening to Edison’s quiet breathing and smelling the lilac scent of his bedspread. The policemen and a bodyguard were downstairs. If he didn’t prove he hadn’t tried to kill Prince Timgad and get the royal family to call off the hit man, this would be his life — sitting in his house with guards.

He had to find a way to prove this submarine existed, and that it had been responsible for the prince’s bodyguard’s death. He had to make sure the killers were brought to justice, despite Vivian’s misgivings.

But how?

If the submarine had torpedoed the Narwhal, it was moving farther from detection with each passing second. The ocean was a big place, and the sub could hide anywhere.

But it would need fuel, supplies, parts. It’d be tough to track fuel and food, but submarine parts were another thing entirely. He knew where they’d be found.

The dark web.

He’d spent time lurking there, of course. It was amazingly organized, and the illegal vendors had rankings and reviews, just like on Amazon. The anonymity was welcome, but he’d soon grown horrified by the things offered on their criminal marketplace: drugs of all kinds, counterfeit documents, counterfeit money, uranium, explosives, guns, other weapons, and children.

If he wanted to buy replacement submarine parts, that’s where he would go.

It took him the rest of the day of hacking and tracking, but he managed to find a supplier for the oxygen generators of the same type as those on the Gotland. The supplier lived in a town near the Swedish and Finnish border with just 435 (green, red, brown) inhabitants. They had a port, although they barely shipped anything out of it.

Then he caught a break. The owner of the bait shop at the harbor had a surveillance camera aimed at the port. Even better, he didn’t use a password, and his video was archived for a month. Joe set up a pattern matcher to sort out the movement of anything the size of the oxygen generators or larger. It led to a lot of false positives of boats on trailers and cars, but in the end, it netted him exactly what he needed: footage of two (blue) large and clearly heavy boxes being loaded onto a fishing boat.

Once the boxes left Sweden, he lost track of them. They could be literally anywhere on Earth. Still, he dropped the information into a file and sent it to Mr. Rossi to pass along to his intelligence contacts. Lots of smart people with better tools than he had were working on these issues. Maybe they could find the submarine.

But only if they thought it was important.