The Threat

by David Poyer

  Carmichael said, “Is the crew aboard?”

  Dan, at the same moment: “How deep is it?”

  Kim shouted a question to the divers. One shouted up, his answer half cut off by a wave that jostled him into the ladder. The doctor turned back to them. “The crew is dead. The sub is lying on the bottom of sand thirty-five meters down. The salvage divers have blown one compartment clear.”

  “About a hundred and ten feet,” Dan said. “That’s in air range.”

  Kim glanced at him. “You are a diver?”

  “I sport dive. SCUBA.”

  “You have done this in wrecks?”

  “Wrecks? Sure. Now and then.”

  “Then, of course, you will want to see for yourself. If you are willing.”

  The Korean held his gaze, and Dan realized it wasn’t an invitation; he was being dared. “Sure,” he said. “Suit me up. I’ll take a look.”

  Carmichael and Shappell traded glances. “Hey, now,” said the commander. “I don’t really think you need to go down there yourself—”

  But the Korean was smiling, and Dan also very much wanted to have the first U.S. look at a Sang-o class sub, if that was what it was. He glanced over the side again, then off to where the destroyer hovered. Storing the information, in case he should need it.

  “All right then,” said the Korean. He called to one of the tenders, who came over, running a critical eye up Dan’s height. “He will help you suit up.”

  * * *

  The water was very cold. The wet suit was heavy black rubber, the biggest they had aboard, but still too tight, which wasn’t good; he’d take some serious heat loss by the end of the dive.

  Twenty feet down, he clung to the thick yellowing braided nylon of the descent line, sucking gas with a hissing click. His mouth was already parched and the moistureless gas didn’t help. What the fuck had he gotten into? He gazed up at the black wedge of the salvage ship’s stern, the motionless, cruel-looking screws. Golden rays flickered around it. They slid through the blue down into an inky twilight that yawned beneath his slowly kicking fins. The fish he’d watched from above undulated slowly between him and the light.

  Dropping his gaze, he finned himself horizontal and slowly pivoted round the line, searching the sea to the accelerated thud of his heart. He was encased in lightfilled sapphire, surrounded by a circular wall of blue-gray haze. About thirty yards visibility. No sharks yet. Some yards away red and black hoses and safety lines dropped away into the black, losing their color as they receded from the sun. The helmet divers were working down there. His free hand roved over the regulator, checked his mask, tested the buckle of his weight belt. The gear wasn’t that different from what he was used to. Solid quality, but not exactly the latest technology.

  A plunge of bubbles, and his partner fell through the silvery rocking roof. A pudgy fellow who’d made comic faces when they told him Dan would be going down with him. He hovered, adjusting his buoyancy, then jack-knifed and headed down, jabbing a questioning finger to his head.

  Dan pointed to his own ears and nodded. He thumbed the exhaust button of his buoyancy compensator and felt himself go from weightless to heavy.

  He kept his right hand out, letting the line drag through it as they dropped into steadily darkening blue. Flecks of organic matter drove past them like a slow snowstorm. Pain jabbed inside his head. He grabbed his nose through the mask and cleared his ears. Again.

  He grinned around the regulator, remembering Shappell’s warning that he shouldn’t go. They were here to observe, not participate. And the naked envy on the intel officer’s face, his begging for a written report afterward.

  But he’d never enjoyed standing around and watching. And the Koreans who suited him up had slapped his back, grinning and nodding. These people operated on face. And strapping on a tank with them had earned him some.

  He checked the depth, then his Seiko. Sixty feet already. The light from above was dimming away. He looked down, but didn’t see only blackness. His partner was swimming down the line headfirst, fins kicking turbulence toward him. A backturned mask flashed the last of the sunlight. Dan was content to drop slowly, staying vertical. He’d check out the hull, maybe swim along it, then come up. Punch his ticket and surface.

  Was he really being foolish? Stepping beyond what a full commander ought to be doing? To hell with it. He could push paper anytime. Carmichael wanted a report, didn’t he?

  Eighty feet, and sinking faster as the pressure squeezed the buoyancy out of vest and suit. His stay time would only be fifteen minutes at a hundred and ten feet. Longer than that would require decompression stops. He’d have to pay attention. That deep you could get fuzzy, disoriented—the famous rapture of the deep. He reminded himself he was short on sleep, and the cold wouldn’t help. He’d better stay on the conservative side of the dive tables.

  When he looked down again, the sub lay below him. It was obscured by the dim and the blowing silt, but the surprise stopped his breath for a moment before the hiss and click resumed. The descent line was gray now, all yellow sucked away in the dim light. It was tied off on what looked like a rudder pivot. The afterbody was smoothly curved. The craft lay stern, or perhaps bow—he couldn’t quite tell yet—down in soft-looking brown muddy sand.

  He dropped a few more feet in the bubbling silence and realized he was looking at the stern. The whole picture dim and fragmentary as it was snapped into place. The craft was much smaller than he’d expected. It was dead black, dotted here and there with pale specks of barnacles. The tail planes and rudder were rigged with struts. He wondered why. Then realized they were antifouling guards, to keep fishing nets or mine cables out of the prop.

  A ridge ran the length of the hull, with port-and-starboard swellings that had to be side-saddle ballast tanks. He couldn’t see the bow, but a small sail, or conning tower, loomed dimly through the murk. It was denser down here, blowing past at the rate, he remembered from the briefing, of the knot and a half’s worth of slow massive current that was hanging him out along the descent line like a slowly flapping flag. He noted carefully that the sub lay crosscurrent. He didn’t want to let go of this line and not know which way led back.

  His dive buddy had already released it. He was finning forward just above the hull, toward a silvery gush of bubbles. They rushed wavering up into the vague brightness like a silver escalator. Dan saw he was following the air hoses. He bled air into his compensator until he hovered. It was colder down here, as if they’d passed through some chill barrier that blocked any emanation of the sun. His hands, even in gloves, and feet were going numb. He fumbled for his watch and ratcheted the elapsed-time bezel to fifteen. Then let go the line.

  His buddy eased over the hull and disappeared into the darkness below. Dan followed, clearing his ears again as he descended. Brown rippled sand rose up through the milling murk. The bow was clear of the bottom. The hoses led under it. He started at a flicker in the obscurity, then realized what looked like black flames was the flutter of fins, under the hull. He hung back, wary of overhanging black steel. Then forced himself forward.

  The other diver hung on what looked like a hatch-rim. Dan caught dark eyes studying him. A finger pointed up.

  He nodded, and the Korean turtled his head and chinned himself up into what must be a lockout chamber. Fins kicked, then disappeared. Dreading the mass looming above him, Dan herded himself farther under it. When he looked up, he saw only a vibrating green-golden gleam, trickling and twisting like melted light.

  He checked his watch. Three minutes. He got a grip on his breathing and finned slowly upward, arms raised, fingering along smooth cold metal for some handhold.

  His head burst through into an echoing ullage crammed with darkness, splashing, a deafening hiss of releasing gas, hollow shouts. A flashlight strobed across a circular emptiness above that mirrored that below.

  “You come up,” a voice gonged. A pudgy figure filled his sky. A gloved hand grabbed his wet suit. “Set tank in that rack. Give me
your hand.”

  * * *

  They were in what seemed to be the control compartment—or more accurately, a combined control, berthing, and torpedo area. The upper hemisphere of the lockout module took up most of the space. It left a short, extremely cramped tube maybe twelve feet across, so crammed with equipment they had to worm their way through an aisle that touched Dan’s shoulders on either side. Dive lights beamed glares that left most of it in shadow. A discarded glove huddled like a small dead animal. The cold air was thick, dense, humid. It stank of the heavy oil that coated every surface and a bleachy sting he realized must be chlorine from the flooded batteries. The incoming air hissed so loudly from its hose fitting, clamped to one of the hull ribs with a red C clamp, that communication had to be in shouts.

  Compressed air, he reminded himself. So they were still pressurized. He looked at his Seiko again. Still building up bottom time, taking on nitrogen, though he was out of the water. Seven minutes gone; eight remained.

  The Koreans glanced at him as they worked. Four occupied the space, three hose divers and the stocky guy who’d come down with him on tanks. The chubby diver belted out aggressive-sounding Korean, gesturing at Dan. They reached through piping to shake hands, grinning and nodding. “Welcome,” one said, “Thank you,” said another. He waved and smiled, feeling he was intruding.

  He stepped on something soft, and instinctively lifted his bootied foot. An oil-smeared, startled, wide-cheekboned face appeared. Its features were strangely delicate. It looked up at the curved ribs of the inner hull. The left side of its skull was missing. Brain was visible, but no blood. Dan stared. Then made out a shoe nearby. It was oil-stained dark, but bore a familiar boomerang-shaped logo.

  “Nikes.”

  “Muarago? What did you say?”

  “I didn’t know they had Nikes in North Korea.”

  He followed a flaccid leg to another corpse wedged facedown behind a motor-generator. The barrel of an AK-type rifle poked out. He couldn’t tell what had killed this second man. He had on a red windbreaker with a red-and-white patch. The Marlboro logo.

  “Three dead,” the pudgy diver said at his elbow.

  “I only see two.”

  “Another there.” He pointed into the shadows forward.

  “Who are they?”

  “North Korea, like commando. Like SEAL.”

  “Who shot them?”

  “They shoot each other. Do not give up.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yichoyero! You come, see this,” called one of the others. “See what we find.”

  He gave the bodies a last glance, and followed the beams of their lights.

  A few feet aft the diver slapped what Dan recognized as a fairly unsophisticated-looking periscope stand, then pulled him to a little fold-down wooden table. Either a captain’s station or a navigator’s chart table. Dan blinked at it: cheap plywood, complete with knot holes. Everything in the space looked crude, hastily finished and covered, where it was shielded at all, with flimsy metal banged together with machine screws. He bent closer as a paper caught his eye. Someone had unfolded it carefully, so as not to tear the sodden, oilstained fibers.

  It was a chart. Shivering as the cold crept deeper, he stripped off a glove and traced a coastline by the beam of a flash. Curving away, small islands … a larger island offshore. The Hangul characters conveyed nothing, but he gradually made it the Straits of Korea, if the long island was Tsushima.

  He dug in with the spot of light till the lens touched the cheap shoddy paper. Was that a pencil-trace? A dead reckoning line, an advanced course? He let the chart sag where it lay. Fished in what looked like a wire wine-rack and came out with another. This was in English. Approaches to Pusan, it read. Next came a small book that hefted astonishingly massive. When he opened the lead covers, each soaking page was filled with tiny handwritten characters.

  An exclamation from the far end of the compartment brought him back to where he was. He squinted at his watch. Twelve minutes gone, out of fifteen. He had to get out. It’d take a few minutes to get back to the bow, no, the stern—anyway back to the ascent line.

  A louder gabble from the divers. He glanced their way, then back toward the black toothless maw of the chamber. A hatch at the top, another at the bottom. The inner hatch opened upward, the lower, downward. Obviously to lock out divers while still submerged.

  Since it left no room for torpedo stowage, this must be the infiltration version of the sub. But what were they doing here? Trying to tap submerged cables? The U.S. Navy had pioneered it, but that didn’t mean nobody else could try.

  And they were almost to the DMZ. Why charts for Pusan, the southernmost port on the Eastern Sea? And why was the crew wearing clothes that must have been purchased in South Korea?

  Maybe the logbook held an answer. He unzipped the top of his suit and tucked it inside, against his chest, figuring he’d turn it over to Dr. Kim when they surfaced.

  The unmistakable clack of a pistol slide slamming forward snapped his attention up. He wriggled toward the others. As he reached them, his pudgy friend held up a hand. His mouth hung open. They were as far aft in the compartment as they could get. His ear was pressed to the steel bulkhead beside a heavy watertight door.

  “What is it?” Dan murmured.

  The diver made walking legs with his fingers. Jerked his head at the bulkhead. At the closed door.

  He sucked an astonished breath. Someone still alive? A flooded forward compartment this big would take them to the bottom. But if they’d sealed off the boat in time, they could still have a bubble in there. It was just barely possible.

  Only … weren’t they supposed to commit suicide?

  One of the divers lifted a pistol. It gleamed darkly with grease. They’d come armed. Apparently not as paranoid a precaution as one might think. But now what?

  He looked at his watch again and felt fear crawl over his skin like ticks. He was into decompression time. But he wasn’t sure he had enough air in his tank to get through it.

  His pudgy friend slammed a wrench on the bulkhead. “Kechokye itneonjadeol. Tohanghameon sal su yitda!”

  The only answer was silence. His guy, who apparently had rank, pointed to the dogging wheel. Two divers seized it, one on either side. They braced themselves and threw it over.

  “Shit,” Dan muttered. He scrambled to where the corpses lay and fumbled the AK out from under a thin arm. Oily water pissed out of the action, draining from the barrel as he pointed it down and jerked the bolt back. A cartridge flipped out and pinged away. He let go and the bolt slammed closed. But he couldn’t remember which way the safety lever worked and it was too dark too see any markings.

  “Yeolligoit seom ni da,” Pudgy shouted. He aimed at the door. The others were straining at the wheel, faces going dark with blood. The dogs crept back from their locking lugs, screeching faintly, as if under terrific strain.

  He realized with horror that the reason might be a pressure differential. “Goddamn it, you’re going to bend us,” he shouted. “Or flood us, if that’s water on the other side.”

  They didn’t even turn their heads.

  The door slammed open with a bang like a bank vault being dynamited. His ears popped violently.

  An object flew in through the opening, trailing smoke. Before his stunned mind had time even to register what it was, Pudgy scooped the grenade up and threw it back in. It exploded almost as it left his hand. The blast was deafening in the steel-walled tunnel. Fragments clanged into equipment cabinets. Explosive fumes filled the air, then thinned, pushed by the steadily inrushing compressed air toward where the air bubbled out through the open lock.

  Leaning into the hatchway, Pudgy emptied the pistol through it, firing rapidly as he could, then dove in after the bullets.

  A rapid, roaring clatter from the far side of the bulkhead. He had a bad feeling his stocky friend was history. The others cursed frantically. One pulled a dive knife from a thigh sheath. The other spun around and jerked the AK o
ut of Dan’s hands.

  A wiry, black-haired, lithe little figure in black shorts flew through the door headfirst, as if bounced off a trampoline on the far side. It hit the deck and rolled, agile as a gymnast, and came up holding a commando-type knife that it instantly backhanded across one of the divers’ face. The South Korean staggered back, shouting and pawing at his eyes. The enemy crewmember whipped the blade back to guard and faced Dan, not four feet distant. His instinctive hesitation at what he saw was almost fatal. Held at arm’s length and lunged with incredible quickness, the blade drove in straight as an arrow and slammed into his chest.

  The North Korean gaped, taken aback, as the point slid off, gouging black rubber with a tearing sound. Deflected by the soft lead cover of the logbook tucked against Dan’s chest under the wet-suit top.

  Dark eyes dropped to the AK’s muzzle just as the other diver pulled the trigger.

  The rifle blasted twice, then stopped, either jammed or out of ammunition. Both bullets struck the North Korean in the chest. The knife went flying. The small face contracted in pain and shock. An arm clutched small nude breasts, welling now with dark blood. She gasped, struggled to speak; then crumpled.

  The diver worked the bolt frantically, watching the open hole of the door. He aimed the rifle at it and pulled the trigger again, but got only a dry click. No light on the other side. But when Dan aimed a flashlight in, something fluid gleamed back.

  The water licked at the lip of the hatch like a black cat testing a treat. Then edged forward, elongated, and began pouring in. They must have cracked a valve, yielded their one unflooded compartment to the sea, when they realized someone was aboard who shouldn’t be, on the far side, in the control compartment.