Cameron, Marc - Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon

PLAN

Yuan

-class attack submarine

Expedition #771 (Blue Dragon)

Sun Luoyang:Captain

Bai Jiahao:Commander, XO (Executive Officer)

PLAN Nuclear SSBN

880 (Long March)

Tian Ju:Captain

Wan Xiuying:Commander, XO (Executive Officer)

USS

Indiana

(SSN

789

)

Virginia

-class fast-attack submarine

Cole Condiff:Captain

Lowdermilk:Lieutenant, officer of the deck

Markette:Petty officer, sonar technician

Ramirez:New crew member

Roosevelt “Rosey” Jackson:Captain, USS Makin Island ; nephew of former POTUS Robert Jackson

Jay Rapoza:Captain, USCG icebreaker Healy

ELISE

Monica Hendricks:CIA operations officer in charge of ELISE

Peter Li:Retired USN admiral

David Wallace:FBI counterintelligence agent assigned to ELISE

Odette Miller:CIA counterintelligence officer

Tim Meyer:CIA case officer

Albania

Leigh Murphy:CIA case officer, Tirana

Fredrick Rask:CIA chief of station, Tirana

Vlora Cafaro:CIA case officer, Tirana

Joey Shoop:CIA officer, Tirana

Urkesh Beg:Uyghur refugee living in asylum in Albania

Terms

ELISE:Operation to find Chinese mole within U.S. intelligence

PLAN:People’s Liberation Army Navy

Bingtuan:“The Corps,” short for Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps

1

Dr. Patti Moon sat bolt upright in her plastic deck chair, startled at the sudden noise coming across her headset.

The biting wind blowing off the Chukchi Sea didn’t realize it was spring and pinked her round cheeks and smallish nose. Apart from her hands, which she needed to work the Toughbook portable computer, her face was the only part of her not bundled in layers of wool or fleece. Dr. Moon leaned toward the folding table, situated on the afterdeck of the research vessel Sikuliaq , straining to hear the noise again. Sikuliaq was Inupiaq for young ice —appropriate for a science vessel capable of traveling through more than two feet of the stuff.

They were in open water now, taking advantage of a large lead, more than a mile wide, to set some research buoys before the wind blew the ice pack back in.

Moon touched a finger to her headset as if that would help her make more sense of the sudden burst of sound. A former sonar technician on a Navy destroyer, she’d listened to a lot of noises from the deep, but nothing like this.

She sat up again, shook away a chill, telling herself it was just the wind.

The scientist slouching beside her turned to look at her with sleepy eyes that dripped barely veiled contempt. She didn’t take offense. He looked at everyone and everything on the boat that way. Steven “Snopes” Thorson had spent his entire adult life in the world of academia. He knew he was smart—and he liked to make sure everyone around him knew it, too, fact-checking everything anyone said—especially his colleague and fellow Ph.D., Patti Moon.

Her academic bona fides were stellar—but she’d also had the experience of a life growing up in the Arctic, which apparently burned Dr. Thorson worse than the bitter wind.

Moon spent her first seventeen years in the tiny coastal village of Point Hope, Alaska, just four hundred miles south of where the Sikuliaq now motored to stay hove-to against the wind. She’d been in Anchorage for a high school basketball tournament when the USS Momsen , an Arleigh Burke– class destroyer, stopped for a port call. A female sailor had come ashore with the skipper—and that changed her life. No one pressured her to enlist—they didn’t have to. She’d grown up on the ocean, fishing and seal-hunting with her father. The sea was in her blood, and though she wasn’t sure how she felt about the U.S. government, the beautiful gray warship off the coast of her home state was all the inducement she needed to sign on the dotted line as soon as she graduated. She served six years as a sonar technician.

Her test scores were through the roof, and though she had a reputation for believing most every conspiracy theory she heard or read online, her sea-daddies (and -moms) pushed her to go to school when her enlistment ended. The GI Bill put her through undergrad at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, after which she’d gone on to attain a first-class graduate degree, and her doctorate in physics from Oxford.

She was just as smart as Dr. Thorson. And frankly didn’t give two shits if he judged her for being human and touching her headset in hopes that it would make her hear better. Something was down there. A sound that didn’t belong.

And then it was gone, yielding to the other squeals and grunts and songs of the ocean as quickly as it had arisen.

A strand of black hair escaped her wool beanie and blew across Moon’s wind-chapped cheek. The wind had shifted, coming from the northeast now—beyond the pack ice. She ignored the cold, focusing instead on the sound she’d heard for only an instant as the hydrophone descended beneath the Sikuliaq .

Ballpoint pens were iffy in the cold, so Dr. Moon used a pencil to record the depth and time in her notebook. She shot a quick glance at Snopes Thorson.

“You didn’t hear that?”

Wind fanned the ash on the end of Thorson’s cigarette, turning it bright orange—like a tiny forge. Bundled in layers of merino wool, fleece, and orange arctic bibs, it was difficult to tell much about him, except that he wasn’t very tall, and was, perhaps, very well fed. He wielded his sideways glares like weapons when he was annoyed, or, more often, when he was about to annoy someone else by fact-checking every little detail of a conversation. Thorson relished the notion of calling everyone out on the slightest error. Patti Moon made it a point to speak as little as possible around the man—not an easy thing to do when their jobs overlapped and their office was a 261-foot boat in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.

Like Moon, Dr. Thorson was a science officer, managing the dispersal of five expendable buoys that would be sunk in the deep water six hundred miles north of the Bering Strait and eight hundred miles south of the North Pole. If there were any mysteries left on earth, they were in the sea, Moon thought. And some of the greatest mysteries of all lay here, in the Chukchi Borderland, where the relatively warmer and saltier Atlantic met the colder, fresher, and more nutrient-rich waters of the Pacific. Oh, the Navy had bathymetric charts of the seafloor, but she knew from experience that they were not entirely accurate. Hidden reefs and shoals appeared and disappeared. Some believed them to be thick clouds of sea life that rose from the depths fooling a ship’s sonar techs into thinking they were in much shallower waters.

No matter where one stood on climate change, there was no denying that the Arctic Ocean was opening to more and more sea traffic during summer months, cutting the delivery time of fossil fuels from ports in Russia and the North Slope of Alaska to the rest of the world by as much as two-thirds. Polar nations like Russia, Canada, Denmark, and the United States were as busy as they had ever been collecting data on the Arctic. Even China had edged into the game, arguing that they were a near-polar nation and going so far as to plant a CCP flag beneath the ice on the seafloor. Other countries had laughed this off as a stunt, but everyone worked to enhance their own capabilities on and under the ice.