Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon

by Cameron, Marc

  “Hello to you, too,” Murphy said. “You must have something.”

  “Maybe,” Yao said. “So go over Beg’s statement again. The part about the Wuming disappearing.”

  “He said they would disappear into the forest, that they could slip over many borders to escape—if they exist at all. Why, what do you have?”

  “Not sure,” Yao said. “Maybe nothing. There were some ticket stubs in the pocket of a coat that may have come from a member of the Wuming. They’re only partial stubs, but they’re for a boat tour. It’s something about a monster fish.”

  “Lake Kanas?” Murphy said.

  “It’s not on the ticket, but I assume the boat tour could be on a lake.”

  “The tickets are Chinese, right?” Murphy asked.

  “Correct.”

  “Then Kanas Lake makes sense,” Murphy said. “They have their own version of the Loch Ness Monster.” She paused.

  “You still there?” Yao asked.

  “Yup. Just checking a map. This looks promising, Adam. Lake Kanas is north of Urumqi, tucked into a little thumb of land that is surrounded by Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia … It’s extremely rural, with many borders over which to escape—and lots of forest—just like Urkesh Beg said.”

  “That’s thin,” Yao said. “But it’s a hell of a lot more than I had an hour ago. I appreciate this.”

  “No prob,” Murphy said. “When are you coming to Albania so I can show you around? We need somebody with a brain to be our station chief. Rask chewed my ass for interviewing Beg without his blessing. I told him I wasn’t allowed to tell him who asked me, which really pissed him off.”

  “Sorry about that,” Yao said. “I’ll make a couple of calls and get you top cover. In the meantime, don’t mention the Lake Kanas connection to anyone. Okay?”

  “You got it, Chief.”

  “Don’t,” Adam said and chuckled. “I’m not chief material.”

  “Don’t be a stranger,” Murphy said. “It’s hard to find good friends.”

  “In this outfit?”

  Murphy sighed. “Anywhere, Adam.”

  CIA Station Chief Fredrick Rask hunched over his keyboard, fuming, fingers blazing as he typed a cable. No, this could not be allowed to stand. Leigh Murphy was forgetting her place in the food chain.

  A mentor had once told him to get up and go to the restroom before sending a cable or e-mail when you were angry. Good advice, to be sure, if you wanted to be civil, but Rask wanted a piece of somebody’s ass. He was either the station chief or he wasn’t. No one had the right to run an op on his turf without at least letting him know. And he’d be damned if he was going to let some secret-squirrel shithead from Langley sneak into his bailiwick and task one of his case officers without asking his permission. Not to mention the task in question was to chat up the former U.S. detainee about his continued association with Uyghur separatists. The guy had already been interrogated for four and a half years. This kind of shit had the propensity to blow up in your face. The media, Congress, his bosses in D.C.—they’d be all over him if they found out one of his people was harassing a guy they’d let go.

  Someone at HQ needed to know about this—if only so Rask could cover his own ass from the blowback. He fired off the cable, making his boss aware of the situation, and then leaned back and sent a copy to his buddy on the Central Asia desk. If someone was poking around looking for Uyghur separatists, he’d want to know.

  28

  An hour into the seven-hour flight on the C-21A, the U.S. military’s version of the Bombardier Learjet 35, Dr. Patti Moon decided this kind of luxury was something she could become used to. They made a short stop to refuel at an FBO in Calgary, Alberta, and then continued direct from there to Washington Reagan. She had the plane to herself—just her and a couple of hotshot pilots who liked to practice near-vertical takeoffs and then explain how the Lear was really a fighter jet in a suit and tie. And anyway, somebody up the chain wanted her in D.C. ASAP, the pilots said, so they were told by their bosses not to spare the horses.

  The closer they got to D.C., the more fretful she became. The whole suit-and-tie thing didn’t help. Moon’s mother, an extremely devout and weekly attendee of the Tikigaq Bible Baptist Church in Point Hope, had drummed into her from an early age that the devil would not be dressed in rags when he came to tempt her. He would, in fact, be dressed in fine furs … or even a suit and tie.

  She’d worked herself into a lather by the time the little jet lined up left of the Potomac River and settled into a grease-smooth landing at Washington Reagan.

  To make matters worse, the tall man in Navy khakis who met her in the lobby of Signature Flight Support at the south end of the airport introduced himself as Commander Robbie Forestall, a national security adviser to the President of the United States.

  Navy habits abided long, and she very nearly introduced herself as Petty Officer First Class Moon. She caught herself, shook the commander’s hand, and then stepped back and let him lead the way. A meeting with the national security adviser … That was going to be weird. Still, Moon supposed she’d asked for it by asking Barker to push the recording up the chain.

  The Marine helicopter had picked her up at breakfast, and the entire trip had been relatively short, but the time difference between Alaska and the East Coast meant it was already well into the evening by the time Commander Forestall showed Moon to a black Lincoln Town Car. He gave her a bottle of water and offered to help her with her bag, but she refused and held it on her lap instead.

  Traffic on George Washington Memorial was a steady flow of red lights and headlights—a shock to Moon’s system after the high lonesome solitude of the far north where she spent much of her life. The ice floe was dispassionate and could crack loud as a gunshot, but there was silence there, too, and, when the sky was clear, the bowl of stars and aurora brought peace to Moon’s ever-wary soul.

  D.C. had the opposite effect. On steroids. Being plunked down here in the middle of a rat race made her chest tight to the point she thought she might be having a heart attack. By the time Forestall took the 14th Street Bridge across the Potomac into D.C. proper, Moon resolved that she would attend her little meetings, answer some bureaucrat’s questions, and then haul her ass out of here as fast as she could.

  Then Independence Avenue and the National Mall appeared in the windshield and she began to wonder where they were going. Her theory had gone up through Navy channels, so she’d figured they’d put her up somewhere in Crystal City. There were some damned fine hotels there that gave the government rate and were always crawling with service members from all branches that had business at the Pentagon. Must all be full, she thought.

  “What hotel am I at?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” the commander said, easy and honest, like they were old friends. “I’m thinking they have you at the Willard. It’s just a block away, but I’ll drive you over. It’s no problem at all.”

  Moon had read somewhere about the Willard, but couldn’t place it.

  “A block away from what?”

  “The White House,” Forestall said. “That’s where your meeting’s at.”

  Moon leaned forward, craning her neck over the front seat. “Wait, wait, wait. Commander, are you telling me that the national security adviser wants to meet with me at the White House about the noises I recorded under the ice?”

  Forestall gave her a wry smile. “Not exactly.”

  “Whew,” Moon said. “Because that would have given me a stroke.”

  The commander laughed out loud. “I am so sorry,” he said. “Your meeting isn’t with the national security adviser. I thought you already knew …”

  Jack Ryan had just walked into the Oval from the colonnade, still wearing his black Orioles baseball jacket against the evening chill, when Commander Forestall entered from the secretaries’ suite. Arnie van Damm, Mary Pat Foley, SecDef Bob Burgess, and Admiral Talbot, chief of naval operations, were already present.

  Dr.
Moon was not.

  Ryan raised his hands, palms up, shooting a glance at Forestall. “Did she escape?”

  “I apologize, Mr. President,” the commander said. “I have her signed in and set up with a visitor’s badge, but she insisted on calling her father before coming in. She’s standing outside the entrance by the press briefing room to make the call. Millie from Secret Service Uniform Division has an eye on her, but giving her space.”

  Ryan sat down beside his desk.

  He’d already been to the Residence and grabbed a quick dinner with Cathy—crab salad with quinoa that was tasty enough but left him craving crab cakes from Chick & Ruth’s in Annapolis. He’d changed out of his suit, thinking that since Dr. Moon was coming straight off a plane, she’d be more relaxed if he were dressed in jeans and an open-collared shirt.

  “I’m really sorry, sir,” Forestall said. “She was very insistent.”

  “It’s not your fault, Robbie.” Ryan waved off the apology, resting his elbows on the desk, looking glum as a schoolboy benched during a ballgame. “At our level, you get used to people waiting on you instead of the other way around.”

  Forestall chuckled. “Our level, Mr. President?”

  “You know what I mean,” Ryan said. “In charge of things.”

  Van Damm crossed to the door. “I’ll go get her.”

  “Give her a second,” Ryan said. “Everyone processes these meetings differently. What we have here before us, as my dad used to say, is the opportunity not to be assholes. He held leaders to a high standard, my old man. You were either a good leader or a bad one. Good leaders could make mistakes, but the higher up the chain they were, the better my dad expected them to treat their subordinates.” Ryan’s eyes glistened. “Remember that anecdote about the Army private who was late for formation and he ran around the corner and knocked General Eisenhower to the ground. There they were, the bottom rung of the enlisted ladder, and the five-star supreme commander of Allied Forces. Remember what General Eisenhower said to the kid?”

  No one answered.

  “‘You better be glad I’m not a lieutenant,’” Ryan said. “I don’t even know if it’s true, but it’s a damned good story.”

  Dr. Moon arrived two minutes later, giving a decidedly jaundiced eye to everyone in the room. Ryan took her hand and smiled. “I’m not going to beat around the bush,” he said, “except to say that we’re reading you in to some extremely sensitive subjects that shouldn’t be discussed with anyone outside this room unless you clear it with Commander Forestall.”

  “Understood, Mr. President,” Moon said, her face a granite wall, impossible to read.

  “All right, then.” Ryan took a seat in his customary chair by the fireplace and offered Moon the chair beside him while everyone else took the couches. “A lot of big, giant brains seem to be divided about whether your recordings depict something made by man or fish noises. Certain events have transpired that give weight to the ‘man-made’ argument, but you’re the closest person we have to the source. I’d like you to make your case.”

  It took less than two minutes for Moon to recount what she’d heard and where she’d heard it, after which she glanced at Commander Forestall’s tablet. “Are the audio files I sent you on that?”

  The room listened to a series of whistles and grunts and buzzing sounds, illustrated by a dancing bar graph on the computer screen that rose and fell with the pitch and volume of the sounds.

  “That’s a recording of an Atlantic cod, Gadus morhua,” she said, before opening a second file on the heels of the first. It was hollow, eerie, and haunting. “This one is uguruq bearded seals, recorded from my father’s boat.” She tapped the tablet and a green graph appeared, superimposed over the red lines that depicted the seal song. “Now we add the ice.” The whistles, screams, and chattering groans sounded incredibly human.

  She tapped the screen again. “We’ll mute the ice and the biologics, but leave up the visual graphs while we add the recording in question.”

  The room sat enthralled by the distinct splash as the hydrophone slipped beneath the surface and the burble as it descended into the deep. A wailing whistle, somewhere in the distance, overlaid significantly with a red graph—the bearded seal. The screech of the ship’s hull against floating ice closely matched the green. Ryan had listened to the file before, but heard it differently now.

  The new yellow graph suddenly jumped as new sounds came over the tablet’s tiny speakers. The room sat in rapt silence as the sounds blanked out and then reappeared a few moments later when the hydrophone cable was retrieved.

  Ryan took it all in, impressed with the young woman’s forthright demeanor—folksy, from a life lived close to the land, yet bolstered by science.

  Moon folded the cover over the tablet screen and gave a somber nod. “This is not fish flatulence, Mr. President, as some of my fellow scientists have suggested. And I do not believe it is ice. I’ve spent my life listening to ice talk and sing. I know what it sounds like.”

  Ryan gave a contemplative nod. “I agree.”

  Moon’s eyebrows inched up, just a hair, but enough that Ryan noticed. That might be the most emotional outburst he was going to get from this stoic woman.

  “It is interesting,” Ryan continued, “that the voices you recorded appeared and then disappeared as the hydrophone went deeper. I’m assuming that you’re working with some sophisticated equipment. I’ve listened to your recording and it sounds almost like the flip of a switch, as if someone turns off the voices and turns them back on again. Why would they not fade away as the hydrophone grew more distant?”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Moon said. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas. For years—decades, really—phantom shoals have appeared on some charts, but not others. One Navy sonar picks up a submerged reef that looks as though it should rip the keel off the ship, while another steams by with nothing between them and the bottom but three hundred fathoms of cold water. Some say these are caused by rising biologics—schools of fish, plankton clouds, even giant squid. Others believe there is a magnetic anomaly and the charts are simply wrong. The point is, Mr. President, the Arctic is a mysterious place. That’s why I’m there, doing what I do. There’s a good chance we’re more familiar with the surface of the moon than we are with what’s down under the ice. Subs are gathering more and more data every day, but it’s a big place, with lots of secrets. What we do know is that the area around the Chukchi Borderland is toothy. There are all sorts of ridges and ledges jutting up from the seabed. A couple of them reach within a few fathoms of the surface. I suspect that whatever … whoever … made the sounds I recorded was located on the opposite side of one of those ridges. Sound waves travel long distances through water, but they are easily attenuated by solid rock, at least as far as my hydrophones are concerned.”

  Ryan nodded slowly, picturing the scene.

  “So,” he said. “For the sake of illustration, whatever is making voices is on one side of a ridge, say, a hundred meters below the peak, and you lowered your hydrophone on the opposite side. The sounds would be picked up as the hydrophone descended, and then blocked by the underwater mountain when the equipment went below the top, in the rock shadow, so to speak.”

  “Exactly, sir,” Moon said.

  Forestall put up his hand. “If I may, sir.”

  “Go ahead, Robbie.”

  “Given this scenario,” Forestall said, “knowing that the sounds came from the direction of the ridge in relation to the hydrophone, we may be able to triangulate on the signal strength as the instrument descended and the known depth. In theory, that could get us a general location from which the sounds emitted.”

  “He’s right,” Dr. Moon said, turning Forestall’s tablet around so Ryan had a good view. The others leaned in. The screen depicted a cross-sectional view of the seabed with the research vessel Sikuliaq on the surface. A series of knifelike ridges rose from the bottom, one almost directly beneath the s
hip. She tapped the screen and a small box representing the hydrophone appeared beneath the surface. “I began picking up the sounds here,” she said, “as soon as the instrument made it below all the surface clutter—ice, ship noise, et cetera. Then lost it here.”

  Foley leaned closer, adjusting her reading glasses. “The hydrophone is still above the ridgetop,” she said. “Not in the shadow yet.”

  “Ah,” Dr. Moon said. “But it would be in the shadow if the sounds emanated from this point.” She tapped the screen again, bringing up the red triangle, five hundred feet down, resting on a ledge on the opposite side of the ridge as the hydrophone. “Any sounds coming from here would travel upward, spreading out just enough to allow me to pick them up for a few meters. But if the sounds are coming from here, close to the wall, the shadow starts much higher, before the instrument passes the ridgetop.”

  Ryan looked around the room. “Anyone else have questions for Dr. Moon?”

  No one did. The matters they had to discuss would take place out of her presence.

  “Very well.” Ryan got to his feet. “Thank you for dropping everything for this trip.”

  Moon worked her way around the room, shaking hands.

  “I wonder,” Ryan said. “Would you mind staying around D.C. for a couple of days?”

  “Of course,” she said. “But I’ve already told you everything I know. My field of study is relatively narrow. I’m not sure what help I could offer.”

  “You’re smart,” Ryan said, “and you stick up for what you know when peers and superiors try to wave you off. It’s only a request, mind you. If you have something pressing, I understand, but I would appreciate it if you could stay. Commander Forestall will get you set up at the Willard and see that you get a few bucks in per diem.” Ryan walked with her to the door, struck with a sudden idea. “The First Lady is accompanying me to Fairbanks day after tomorrow, where I’m hosting some meetings with the polar nations. You could fly up on Air Force One as my guest, and then I’ll get someone from Wainwright or Eielson to get you back to your ship. If this is what I think it is, things are likely to develop fast, and I’d like to have you around.”