Chapter 8
Kurt took the Otter down to a depth of seventy feet to make sure he wouldn’t bump his head on anything, but even at that depth, the view above remained alien and extraordinary.
It was strangely disorienting gliding under the ice.
Light penetrating the ice made it appear to be glowing, mostly white, but in places blue and green hues could be seen.
Bubbles skated along the underside of the ice, moving here and there with the current in an endless attempt to escape to the atmosphere, where they belonged.
Downward spikes of the frozen water jutted at him in places.
Some were long and thin—like stalactites in a cave—but most resembled upside-down mountain ranges in miniature, while the seawater below him swallowed the light so quickly that it resembled the depths of outer space.
Feeling his neck stiffen from looking upward for too long, Kurt switched his attention to the small screens in front of him.
Like a modern car, the Otter had a plethora of screens and cameras all over the place.
They looked upward, downward, sideways, and backward.
The system was designed to allow the Otter and its occupant to see everything around it at all times.
Kurt could bring up the view from any camera, at any time, by toggling a thumb switch.
He could click on a button and see a three-dimensional representation of the Otter and its surrounds, a useful feature when navigating in and around wrecks and dangerous debris.
For now, he kept the forward view on the right-hand screen and the artificially created overall view on the left.
Because it was designed to work in murky lake water and sediment-filled rivers, the Otter also possessed tools that allowed it to swim blind. It had sonar to scan the bottom and sides along with a top-notch internal navigation system.
Kurt wasn’t entirely sure what made the nav system so accurate—high-speed gyros, lasers, and accelerometers had been mentioned in the briefing—but he was impressed with its precision.
Once the onboard computer completed its analysis of the currents surrounding the sub it placed it on a map and gave him an ETA to the satellite-confirmed position of the Chinese ship.
Twenty minutes into the journey it told him he was approaching the destination.
Kurt saw little evidence of that through the window or on the screen.
But a minute later he found the water brightening.
He was nearing the open channel in the ice.
Almost directly ahead he spotted the hull of the Chinese ship, jutting down through the ice.
He took the Otter deeper and passed underneath the ship and made for the bow.
Kurt had seen countless ships from below.
Some up close while chipping barnacles from the hull, most from a deeper depth with sunlight filtering down around them.
He always found it a view worth lingering on.
One never really appreciated the concept of buoyancy until he looked up at a hundred-thousand-ton hunk of iron floating above his head with nothing but sinuous water to keep it there.
Even with all those images locked away in Kurt’s memory, the view of the Chinese ship was unique.
Surrounded by the ice, it looked more like a fossil or an ancient artifact embedded in the rock.
Moving slowly underneath it, Kurt saw no sign of divers, ROVs, or submersibles.
Studying the view from the upward-pointing camera, he saw nothing to indicate the ship had vast doors that could open up and gobble a wreck whole, as the Glomar Explorer had done with a Russian submarine all those years ago.
The hull was solid, red, steel, marked only by a tangled pattern of scrapes and gouges from crushing its way through thousands of miles of ice over the years.
With nothing to see above him, Kurt checked the Otter’s downward-pointing sonar. The submersible was small enough that he could feel the clicks reverberating through the hull with a dull thud, thud, thud, like he was driving a car with a square tire.
The seafloor was six hundred feet below, giving Kurt enough depth between himself and the bottom for the sonar beam to spread out like the cone of light from a streetlamp. The returns covered a mile-wide swath. It was nothing but flat, featureless ooze.
“If they do have it,” he said to himself, “they didn’t park directly over the top of it.” He decided to angle for the open cut in the ice in case they’d pushed it off the far-edge runway and into the abyss.
The Otter passed beneath the breaker’s stern and moved beyond the collar of ice that had formed around the ship. The water slowly brightened until he emerged from the overhang and was bathed in the sunlight coming in from above.
The brightening effect made him feel a bit exposed, but there was little chance anyone was standing on the edge of the broken ice staring down into the abyss. Especially not when they were all busy out on the ice trying to repair the makeshift runway.
He found the area behind the ship was clear, the bottom remained nothing but sediment. He continued along beneath the opening, skirting the edge.
He kept his eyes on the sonar readout, too closely perhaps, as the Otter hit something and twisted to the right. The jarring impact took Kurt by surprise. He looked up as something scraped loudly across the acrylic canopy above him.
Flipping the throttle to a stop, he studied the damage to the clear acrylic panel. It had been scratched and gouged, not unlike the underside of the Chinese ship’s hull, but he was far too deep for it to be ice.
Drifting a bit, he cycled through the camera views looking for what he had hit. A second lesser impact got his attention. It made a slow grinding sound as the Otter slipped past something in the water.
Kurt knew the sound well. It was metal on metal. Steel scratching across the titanium hull. He saw a blurred image on the port camera. Whatever he’d encountered was too close for the lens to resolve. He bumped the thruster, moving the Otter to the right.
After flipping on an exterior light, Kurt craned his neck around to see what he’d found. He had run into a braided steel cable, several inches thick, but nearly invisible in the dark water.
Taking on some more ballast, he allowed the Otter to sink to a greater depth. At a hundred twenty feet he went back to neutral buoyancy.
With the Otter hanging suspended in the water and tiny sedimentary particles around it catching the light that was filtering down, Kurt looked up.
He found the cable again and followed its length back to a point where it intersected a second cable.
Farther on there was a third and a fourth and possibly more.
He took the submersible lower. The farther down he went, the more he could see against the light from above.
At two hundred feet he stopped the descent.
The view above him was clear now. There were dozens of cables suspended in the water.
At their far edges they appeared to be connected to huge yellow bags, which in turn appeared to be anchored to the ice.
The bags were inflated lifting bags, each one the size of a house.
The cables stretched out between them, crisscrossing and interlocked.
It’s a web.
With the whole structure in sight, it became clear what the Chinese had done. They’d built a massive, submerged net out of braided steel cable, then anchored it to the ice and supported it by connecting large numbers of the giant flotation devices.
It was indeed a web, designed to catch a very large fly. But the net, Kurt noted, was empty.
“It’s not here,” he said aloud.
A grin appeared on Kurt’s face, partly from the satisfaction of being proved right in his analysis, but mostly from the knowledge that the Chinese hadn’t succeeded in stealing such an important example of American technology.
Using the Otter’s cameras, he took photos and videos of the vast metal net. He got in close enough to get good shots of the connectors and the lifting bags. He estimated the size.
With that done, he checked the navigation system, the power levels, and the oxygen supply. He had plenty to spare, but decided it was time to head home.
He tapped the thruster controls, pivoted away from the net, and then nudged the throttle ahead. He’d just begun to turn back when a new impact shook the sub, shoving it forward and pushing it end over end.
The Otter had been rammed by something. The whirring sound of a rapidly spinning propeller gave the attacker’s presence away. It radiated through the water as the Otter tumbled.
Getting control of the sub, Kurt looked out through the canopy. He spotted a bulky, industrial-sized ROV silhouetted by the light above. It was traveling away from him, but slowing and turning. As he watched, it came around and charged back at him once again.
“Damn,” Kurt said, gunning the throttle. He’d overstayed his welcome by the thinnest of margins.