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

Where there were ships of commerce, there were also ships of war.

Dr. Moon noted the hydrophone’s depth at the time she’d first heard the noise. Two hundred and fifteen feet, but descending rapidly as the buoy and her underwater mic dropped toward the seafloors on the Kevlar cable. She adjusted the gain the old-fashioned way—by turning a knob, attempting to pick up the burst again.

“A passing whale?” Thorson said, his cigarette bobbing between his lips. “Sound can travel 4.3 times faster in water. Whatever you heard could be miles from here.”

“Maybe,” Moon conceded, ignoring the elementary physics lesson. She was professional enough not to rule out anything without a process. But even as she said the word, she knew that this was no whale.

The noise had not faded, but winked out, as if a switch had been thrown—leaving the rest of the ocean chorus to continue in its absence.

The sea was dark and cold, but it was not a quiet place. When she was only five, Patti’s father had let her come with him seal-hunting beyond the jutting spit of land that gave Point Hope its Inupiaq name of Tikigaq—forefinger. Her father had showed her how to put the handle of the wooden paddle to her ear and listen to the undersea songs of uguruq —the bearded seal—as they vibrated up from the blade he’d left submerged in the water. The wooden paddle made for a rudimentary listening device, but she was able to hear the occasional song of a bowhead whale, bearded seals, and the ever-moving pack ice that shrieked and squealed like a badly fitting lid on a Styrofoam cooler. Later, during her time in the Navy, she’d learned that fish grunted, croaked, farted, and ground their teeth.

“Pack ice?” Thorson offered. Sullen, but wanting to guess correctly before she did.

She shook her head. “I’d still be hearing it if it was ice. No … it’s gone dark, whatever it is.”

Moon listened to the relatively dull burble of water as the science buoy continued to plummet toward the seafloor, taking the hydrophone with it. She stretched, glancing out at the sea. Calm today for this part of the world, the Arctic churned and swirled, looking like blue Gatorade and crushed ice—the good stuff, the kind you get from a drive-in.

Sikuliaq used her twin Wartsila ICEPOD azimuth thrusters, each capable of rotating 360 degrees, to stay in place relative to the seafloor. The big ice—the dangerous stuff that could gut even a tough polar ship like Sikuliaq— was still a half-mile away, glinting like silver on the northeast horizon.

Moon turned down the speaker and adjusted the headset over her ears, studying sound graphs on the screen of a second laptop, which was also attached to her hydrophone. Her primary laptop received readings from the expendable research buoy that Snopes Thorson had lowered into the water minutes before. The three-foot can was designed to remain under the ice all winter, far below the massive, fast-moving keels that raked the frigid water as deep as thirty meters. Surface buoys were a no-go in such harshly kinetic environments. They would simply be ground to bits. UAVs—underwater autonomous vehicles—drones—were useful. But they were also expensive. Frigid water sapped battery life and made them prone to loss. The Arctic, and the mysteries that lay beneath her surface, still baffled—and ate—technology.

That’s where the under-ice buoys came in. Three feet tall and eight inches in diameter, the metal cans were relatively cheap, though expendable seemed not quite the right word for something with a three-thousand-dollar price tag. Attached to a fourteen-hundred-pound anchor, the device would remain on the ocean floor for most of the year, recording measurements on currents, temperature, and salinity at depth. At a predetermined time, shortly before the surface ice was expected to melt, a mechanism would release the buoy from its anchoring tether, allowing it to float to the surface, collecting more data about flow and thickness and melt rates. When the ice melted and the buoy peeked above the surface, it would send a message to its handlers via short-burst data transmission over the Iridium satellite system.

Ice data was all well and good, Dr. Moon thought. It was, after all, what paid the bills for now, but her real interest was in underwater sounds. To that end, she had begged permission to attach the hydrophone to the deploying cable as the buoy went down. She kicked herself for not rigging a camera at the same time. Even a GoPro might have given her video of whatever had made the sound.

She checked both computer screens, and then looked at Thorson. He surely thought the thick collar of his wool turtleneck made him look like a Nordic fisherman. Patti thought he looked like a little boy wearing his daddy’s sweater.

“My money is on bubbles,” he said, folding his arms across his chest. He nodded toward his computer. “It’s not on the charts, but the sonar’s showing a tall ridge jutting up from the seafloor about fifty meters northwest of our position. It’s likely you’re hearing current burbling around the rocks.”

It was Moon’s turn to shake her head. “I don’t think it’s burbling bubbles …” She fiddled with the touchpad on her computer. “What depth are you showing now?”

He checked his computer, then leaned sideways, squinting at her screen.

“Same as you. Three-six-five feet.”

She gave Thorson her best imploring look, going so far as to bat her eyes a little. “Think we could bring it up a hundred feet, see if I could get that sound again?”

The numbers on her screen kept climbing as the buoy went deeper.

“Sorry, kiddo,” Thorson grunted. “Entanglement danger if we reverse the winch right now.”

Damn him, but he was right.

Moon thought of begging him more, but Sikuliaq ’s first officer, a thirtysomething woman named Symonds, trotted down the steps from the wheelhouse and strode over to them, her head bowed against the wind. She also wore a wool turtleneck under waterproof orange Grundens bibs, but she wore hers better than Thorson, like she’d been born in them. A shock of curly blond hair jutted from beneath a black wool watch cap. One of the handful of people on the boat who didn’t hold a graduate degree in science or engineering, Kelli Symonds possessed more common sense than most of them put together.

“Low pressure toward Wrangel Island is sucking a knife ridge of heavy pack ice south and west, right on top of us,” she said. “The first course looks to be about the size of a cruise ship, and there’s city blocks of the stuff after that. The skipper wants us up and outta here in five minutes.”

Faces glued to their screens, both scientists gave Symonds a thumbs-up.

Sikuliaq was a Polar Class 5 vessel, fully capable of operating year-round in two and a half feet of new ice, with a few chunks of the previous year’s stuff mixed in. Even now, a slushy soup of seawater and baby ice rattled and thunk ed against the powder-blue hull.

“… and … we have touchdown,” Thorson said. “Can is stable. Detaching now. Cable’s coming up.”

Patti Moon hunched over her computer again, ready this time, focusing intently on her headset as the winch wound in the Kevlar cable, raising the hydrophone faster now that there was only the counterweight and not a half-ton of gear dangling on the end of it.

The azimuth thrusters under Sikuliaq ’s hull had already begun pushing her south, away from the jagged teeth of oncoming ice.

And there it was—at least part of it.

The noise started again at two hundred and fifty feet, continuing for almost four seconds before going quiet.

Dr. Moon marked the position in her journal and looked aft, past the red cranes and over the transom at the wake Sikuliaq left in the churning blue-green water. She shivered, and not from the bitter wind. This could not be what she’d initially thought. That was impossible.