Chapter 24
Arctic
“Depth?” Captain Yong inquired.
“Pinger locator is at five hundred meters,” said a technician at the operator’s console. He was working a joystick, his eyes fixed on the green-shaded control screen. While the operator “flew” the towed pinger locator to keep it at the desired depth, a man next to him listened on a headset.
Yong looked on sullenly. An hour earlier, more details on their tasking had come through. In his opinion, headquarters was asking them to do the impossible.
Their immediate objective was to locate the emergency beacons from Hemisphere Flight 777.
When an airliner crashed on land, its black boxes emitted satellite and VHF radio pings that could easily be pinpointed.
A deep ocean search, however, was far more problematic.
Because satellite and radio signals were attenuated by water, an alternative system was activated.
An underwater locator device, or ULD, was triggered upon immersion, sending an ultrasonic pulse, once every second, on 37. 5 kHz.
This was where Snow Dragon 2’s facade paid dividends.
She was officially owned and operated by the Chinese Academy of Science, a paper-thin veil to suggest that she was a maritime research vessel.
She was equipped accordingly, with a large complement of towed underwater scanning devices and UUVs, or unmanned underwater vehicles.
Indeed, few other ships in China’s military and civilian armada carried the specialized equipment needed for finding underwater emergency signals—a pinger locator that could be towed low and deep behind the ship on a cable.
And by assigning Snow Dragon 2 the task, China could plausibly deny direct military involvement.
Yong’s proficiency in searching for ULDs was limited to a single training exercise, and he had but one recollection from the experience: He knew it was a laborious process.
Even ULD pings attenuated in deep water, meaning that Snow Dragon 2 would have to sail within a mile of the device to have any hope of hearing it.
Making matters worse, bathymetry maps confirmed that the depth of the seabed varied greatly in this area.
The contours resembled those of a minor terrestrial mountain range, with ridges rising to within 650 feet of the surface and trenches plunging half a mile.
Finding the crash site could take a day, or it might take a year—it all depended on the accuracy of the starting point they had been given by headquarters.
If they did get lucky and find the beacon, the second step of their tasking order was relatively straightforward.
They would use a towed side-scan sonar array to map the debris zone.
Only then could they begin the third, and seemingly impossible, endgame.
Using their best underwater drone, they were to locate and retrieve what appeared to be—based on pictures sent by headquarters—a standard black briefcase.
The more Yong thought about it, the deeper his mood descended.
The odds against success seemed insurmountable.
He had grilled two of his junior officers, both of whom had more experience in such operations, and they had agreed there was little hope of quick success.
It was akin to finding a specific stone in the Great Wall.
An air crash would have sent debris exploding in every direction.
As the pieces sank in thousands of feet of water, they would spin through currents and tumble down subterranean hills, leaving a wreckage field strewn over miles of ocean floor.
As if that weren’t damning enough, the deep waters of the Arctic were as black as outer space, and a visual search using the drone’s cameras and lights would progress at a snail’s pace.
Yong realized he was already plotting his excuses for failure, and as he did a ray of hope emerged.
If he could fulfill his two simpler objectives—finding the ELT and mapping the crash site—his competence might not be questioned.
How a simple briefcase could be worthy of such trouble, he couldn’t fathom, but the fact that it was might also be in his favor.
In the time it would take them to find and survey the crash zone, other vessels might be sent to share the burden of retrieving the case.
And, from Yong’s point of view, share the blame if they could not.
“Distance to turn point?” he asked.
The helmsman responded, “Nine miles, Captain.”
Yong had delegated the details of the search to his executive officer. They had begun at the center of the search box and were stair-stepping outward using twenty-mile legs. The first two passes had come up empty.
“These parallels seem too tightly spaced,” Yong complained to his exec.
The junior officer pointed to a map of the submarine terrain. “The depth here varies greatly. If these ULDs sank into a trench, they might be difficult to hear. Thankfully, we have good charts for this area. Perhaps if we—”
“Captain!” the sonar operator said excitedly. “I have a signal on 37.5 MHz!”
“Transfer it to speaker!”
Moments later, everyone on the bridge heard a warbling tone on the overhead speaker. It was faint but steady—the unmistakable pulse of a ULD.
“Can you get a bearing?”
After a lengthy pause, the operator said, “Ten degrees right of our present course.”
Yong looked at the map. They were nearly centered in the search box. It had to be their missing airliner.
“Steer new course zero five zero,” he ordered.
No sooner had the order been carried out than the technician said, “The signal is getting stronger. And I have a second tone on the same frequency.” This was further confirmation. One ping would be the cockpit voice recorder, the other the flight-data recorder.
The exec said, “We are lucky to have found them so quickly.”
Yong felt immense relief. “How long will it take to map the area with the towed array?”
“We must still triangulate a precise position. And it is important to remember that the wreckage could be spread over a wide—”
“How long?” the captain snapped.
“In eight hours, we should have the first side-scan images of the area around the beacon.”
“Eight hours,” Yong repeated, his frustration clear.
When no one offered a more promising assessment, he said, “Very well. Prepare to send a message to headquarters. We will advise them of our success.”
As Yong mentally composed a message reflecting maximum credit on himself for locating the wreckage, it occurred to him that an additional request might be in order: a plea for any additional information on where the sunken briefcase might have been on the jet.
The aviation authorities in Macau would presumably know the seat assignment of whoever was carrying it, so if the fuselage remained at least partially intact, their search could be considerably narrowed.
Otherwise, they would be groping blindly in very dark waters.
In truth, Yong, along with the other officers on the bridge, never realized how tantalizingly close they were to success.
Their great mistake was in assuming that all of the wreckage lay where the flight recorders had ended up.
It never occurred to anyone that parts of the aircraft might be stranded on the ice, or that deepwater currents had carried the primary wreckage field, as it sank into the abyss, far from its original impact point.
Adding to that separation was the movement of the ice pack on a storm-driven sea.
It didn’t help that the ship’s radar showed nothing but electronic clutter, overlapping fields of ice on the horizon all around. And white-out conditions had made posting lookouts pointless.
The agonizing reality: In that moment, the forward section of Hemisphere Flight 777, containing the briefcase China so desperately wanted, was a mere fourteen miles off Snow Dragon 2’s port beam.
And it was slowly drifting away.