Red Shark

They raced down a narrow stone path that led to the main drag and emerged into light, noise, and crowds. Cold drizzle made Kabukicho’s streets glitter like jewels. At the Pink Pussy Club, Scott turned down another alley to a minuscule private parking lot, where Tracy had left Rick’s silver Lexus wedged in a space between two BMWs, the space for which he’d paid Sammy Shin ten thousand yen.

“You drive.” Scott unlocked the car and got in; it reeked of Rick’s cologne.

Tracy didn’t budge. “You really are a complete bastard,” she said. “I don’t know you, Jake Scott. I didn’t know what you were capable of till now.”

“You also don’t know what I’m up against.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? That what you did was right?”

Police sirens started hee-hawing from several directions at once.

“Trace, time’s running out.”

“Goddamnit, Jake, what are you trying to do, save the world again?”

“No, just one part of it.”

38

The Yellow Sea Littorals

UNIDENTIFIED flashed red at the bottom of the Rubikon monitor long after the contact had vanished.

Deng Zemin couldn’t tear his eyes away. A submarine contact couldn’t just disappear in an instant. Fade, yes, but not vanish as if someone had thrown a switch. But vanish it had.

The sonar technician looked up sheepishly at Zemin, waiting for instructions. Zemin’s mind raced through the possibilities: sound masking, interference, temperature gradients, the list was endless. But the Rubikon system’s failure to identify the contact nagged at him, too.

The Rubikon’s archive had the resources to identify almost all of the warships in service around the world, yet it couldn’t identify a contact that he was convinced had been a North Korean submarine. The DPRK had only five submarines in commission, all of which were known by their sound signatures to every navy in the world. Was it possible, Zemin mused, that the DPRK had secretly deployed a new type of submarine with advanced quieting technology? It had been assumed that such technologies were beyond their reach. Were they? Chinese intelligence had, in the past, often underestimated the capabilities of North Korea’s military. Had they again?

“Segregate the last contact coordinates from the target-tracking module and run an isolation program to dissect what we have,” Zemin ordered. “Perhaps it will provide data we can use to start a new search.”

While the sonar watch set to work reconfiguring the Rubikon system to search its memory, Zemin reviewed what little he had to go on.

The target had been on a southerly heading at slow speed. Sonar had reported the target’s swing toward the coast. Had they heard something? Us? Minutes later, with its range a tick less than 18,000 yards, the target had vanished. A review of the Rubikon’s data might indicate where to commence a new search, somewhere close to the coast.

“Your orders, Captain?…” It was the first officer.

“Maintain our current position while we try to reacquire the target. If he is on a spy mission, we’ll try to trap him in the restricted zone surrounding our submarine base at Dingdao. But it won’t be easy to find him, because he’s running very quiet. Too quiet. It’s a mystery.”

“Aye, Captain.” The first officer hesitated, then said, “Perhaps, sir, he has fallen into what they call a black hole.”

At first Zemin ignored the remark, but then it hit him: Not a black hole in space but perhaps a black hole in the ocean.

The hole-in-the-ocean phenomenon posited that an ultra-quiet submarine could be detected by turning its own quieting technology against it. The theory suggested that an ultra-quiet submarine blocks ambient sound generated by the ocean environment around it, in effect creating a silent hole in the ocean. Find the silent hole, so the thinking went, and you’ll find the submarine. Zemin knew his Kilo wasn’t equipped with sonar designed to find a hole in the ocean, but a careful examination of information they already had might provide a clue to where the illusive target was.

“Sonar! Belay my last order.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“I want a full review of our audio drives, starting five minutes before and ten minutes after we lost contact with the target.”

The first officer and sonar officers appeared baffled by Zemin’s orders.

“You will commence a search for any dead zones in our sonar reception that might indicate a sound block. Find it and we will plot its position. If we allow for its speed of advance, we may find what we are looking for.”