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  Cooper got the kid a foot off the ground, crouched deeper, leaned forward, and pulled the boy’s skinny body up over his ass. He positioned Alphonse’s waist so that he could bend the kid’s body around the contour of his hips, and with Alphonse bent around him like a noodle-float in a suburban swimming pool, he was able to clasp his hands underneath the noodle, in front of his body-just above his own nuts, as it turned out. Bobbing once to check the seal of his hand clasp, he shook his head, reasonably satisfied that this was the best he was going to do, and stood up straight.

  “Not too bad, Kareem,” he said. The kid felt light as a feather, though he’d have to see how long that would last.

  He set out and felt the grade wearing on his hamstrings before he’d taken a dozen steps. The blisters on his feet squeezed against the boots and his arms ached. He looked up at the hill, which it did not appear to him he had even reached.

  “Christ.”

  It was going to be a long walk up that fucking mountain.

  16

  In 1974, at the tail end of the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese strategists, fearing a possible last-ditch invasion by the U.S. Navy, ordered a series of mines planted outside a harbor near Haiphong. By the time local intel overrode the paranoia of the strategists and the order came to sweep the mines, local vessels had been safely navigating the harbor for almost two years. All of the local captains knew exactly where the mines were.

  Unfortunately, the new rotation of military personnel supervising the minesweeping operation did not. Operating from a combination of the original specifications and hearsay from local fishermen, the man in charge of the mission did his best, but found that once the harbor and its adjoining channel were ostensibly cleared, the count of recovered or detonated mines came up two devices short. After a cursory second sweep, the commander wrote off the discrepancy, stating in his report that the two missing mines must have previously detonated without incident.

  In actuality the missing mines had broken from their moorings almost two years before the sweep.

  A typhoon in the fall of 1976 had caused the cables anchoring the two mines to scrape against a marine escarpment for sixteen straight hours; both cables were sheared, one near its mine, the other almost where it had been affixed to the ocean floor. The mine with the shorter length of cable floated to the surface and drifted off in the night, washing ashore thirty miles up the coast along with some driftwood and other debris. It was never discovered except as a sort of jungle gym used unwittingly by local kids.

  Trailing its longer, and therefore heavier cable, the second mine remained well below the surface and drifted at a much slower cruising speed into the open waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.

  Over the course of the next year, out of reach of even the deepest keel by some hundred feet, the mine made its way through the South China Sea, along the Malay Peninsula, and past the Riau Islands near Singapore. Toward the end of 1977, a storm washed the mine up against an oceanic shelf in the Strait of Malacca, where it lurked for fourteen months, too deep to disturb any passing vessels, and too heavy to be moved more than an inch or two at a time by the lackluster current. Another storm, this time a violent one, carried the mine into the Andaman Sea, where it caught a slow but consistent current, riding the floe through the Bay of Bengal in a looping semicircle down past Sri Lanka into the Indian Ocean.

  The mine migrated south through the next winter, passing Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope before working its way up the western coastline of Africa in the spring, again traveling deep enough to avoid surface traffic. In June of 1980, the mine started across the Atlantic near the equator, and by September of 1981, had reached the coast of Brazil.

  Prevailing currents brought the mine slowly up the east coast of South America until, in 1983, it lodged in a stubborn bed of seaweed that appeared to have seized the mine permanently in its morass of brown tentacles. Then a hurricane tore the kelp from its bed, bestowing upon the mine another shot at freedom. With a northbound momentum generated by 1984’s particularly harsh storm season, the mine rose past Trinidad and Tobago, up the Antilles chain, and was approaching the eastern seaboard of the United States, due north of Puerto Rico near the Tropic of Cancer, by the end of that year-so that, in the early months of Ronald Reagan’s fourth year in office, the mine was floating harmlessly in the warm, clear waters of what was widely referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, about forty fathoms beneath the ocean’s surface.

  This had been an ambitious journey for the mine, and it showed: with an aquatic forest of barnacles, mussels, algae, and other oceanic vegetation, the mine had grown its own ecosystem that went as high up the food chain as the occasional Atlantic salmon and blackfin tuna. By the time the mine had reached the Bermuda Triangle, in fact, there wasn’t a single square inch of steel visible on either the floating orb of the mine itself or the one hundred feet of steel cable dangling beneath.

  Between 1981 and 1985, the U.S. Navy launched four Ohio-class nuclear attack submarines which it overlooked the obligation to declare under the then-current nuclear disarmament treaties-and which the navy also managed to hide from the KGB. For as long as the navy maintained this ruse-which, for three of the four subs, meant all the way to the end of the cold war-America was able to position ballistic missiles in places that members of the Politburo would have found appalling.

  A different fate awaited the fourth sub.

  On the third Friday of July 1984, Lieutenant Commander Elmore Bradenman, Lenny for short, had the controls of the USS Chameleon, the fourth clandestine Ohio-class attack sub. The Chameleon was running fast and deep, 180 miles southeast of Key West. The crew of the Chameleon had been assigned the brief mission of performing some routine coastline surveillance east of Florida, followed by a Caribbean rendezvous with a second boomer, with which they would be conducting various exercises.

  The captain was asleep in his quarters, which gave Lenny, the executive officer of the boat, the chance to do two things: enjoy the command of an entire submarine, and get in some reading. Tonight he was working on the first book by a writer everyone was telling him about; thanks to a rumor that Reagan liked it, the book had hit the New York Times bestseller list the week before Lenny boarded the Chameleon in Norfolk. The book was called The Hunt for Red October.

  One quality of submarines that their designers and operators could not help was the occasional random destruction of ocean wildlife. An Ohio-class nuclear attack submarine was, after all, nearly two football fields long, and therefore much bigger than any sea bass, tuna, or jellyfish it might have happened to plow into as it navigated the deep blue sea. Many a fish had been bruised or knocked unconscious by the blunt nose, or chewed to bits by the screws of such subs, and while the sonar engineers on board were trained to detect even the smallest metallic anomaly in the surrounding waters, they were required, by necessity, to ignore any indication of an approaching halibut, or patch of seaweed. The latter being precisely what the sonar engineer determined the floating mass of vegetation ahead of the Chameleon to be as Lenny Bradenman settled in to begin Clancy’s debut novel.

  Long dormant but still quite live, the explosive charge within the drifting North Vietnamese mine responded to the punch it received from the bow of the Chameleon as the submarine powered through the Atlantic at a speed of just under thirty knots. There was a brief delay after the initial impact, so that the more alert personnel aboard the vessel-Lenny among them-had a moment to wonder what had struck the boat before a dull concussion rocked the sub’s port flank.

  The old mine, even with ten years of fury stored within, had, at first, little impact on the outward appearance of the Chameleon: it simply inflicted a puncture wound on the sub’s port flank. At the Chameleon’s cruising depth, however, there existed approximately nine times the pressure of that found at sea level. This was not a problem for a submarine with its hull fully intact, but as the puncture opened up in the Chameleon, the seams of the hull partially caved in around the puncture and water tore into a se
ries of compartments, any one of which could have been sealed off from the rest of the boat if damaged alone. This Titanic-like flooding of multiple compartments caused a simultaneous listing of the sub and a failure of the primary electrical system; dead in the water, the Chameleon began a slow descent which LCDR Bradenman found himself powerless to stop. Soon the sub, growing heavier from the flooding, declined past seventy, then a hundred fathoms. It was Lenny’s ship to the end-the captain never made it out of his cabin.

  He attempted every procedure the navy had taught him and some they hadn’t, but at a depth of nearly three hundred fathoms, the last remaining significant sealed portions of the boat folded inward like a crushing aluminum can, and the last of the survivors either drowned, or died under the crush of collapsing metal.

  Just before he died, Lenny Bradenman, a lifelong skeptic, took note of the Chameleon’s current coordinates. When they registered, absurdly, in his mind, Bradenman reached the obvious conclusion.

  My God, he thought. This is what they talk about. This is how it happens.

  We’ve gone down in the Bermuda Triangle.

  The navy’s clandestine salvage effort came up empty. Beginning six hours from the time the USS Chameleon’s emergency beacon floated to the surface and ending four years later, a fleet of pseudocivilian survey vessels blanketed the region to no avail. In a hundred, a thousand, then one hundred thousand passes over the same expanse of ocean, the team unearthed shipwrecks from as far back as the seventeenth century, but found no signs of a sunken nuclear submarine. At the end of the fourth year of the search, the navy shit-canned the whole deal, the crew’s deaths long since passed off as a training accident aboard another, less secret boat.

  One of Lenny Bradenman’s final acts had been to send a distress signal in Morse code. Lenny intended the message to serve as an alert to the boat his sonar man had spotted some seven miles off, in hopes that the vessel would detect the missive and come to the rescue of any surviving crew. He grabbed the first man he found and ordered him to tap out a message against the wall of the sub; the kid grabbed a wrench and banged out “S.O.S.” fifty or sixty times before succumbing to the elements.

  The vessel to which Lenny had hoped to convey his S.O.S. had been classified thirty minutes back as a fishing vessel, wood, thirty-five to fifty feet long. This assessment had been both correct and incorrect. From the surface, the boat did in fact appear to be a fishing trawler; that part, Lenny’s crew had got right. The interior of the boat, however, was another matter, since the apparent fishing trawler was in fact a spy ship, belonging not to the Soviet Union or Cuba-which, based on the geography, might have been the logical supposition-but instead to the newly broadened military intelligence wing of the People’s Liberation Navy of the People’s Republic of China.

  When the strange report came in from the spy fleet that week-the fleet being a thousand-vessel unit the new head of the PLN intelligence wing, vice admiral and fledgling polo enthusiast Deng Jiang, had ordered built at the start of his tenure-a senior analyst, sifting through the data, thought that he might have stumbled across something. An Atlantic-based spy boat had reported an underwater concussion followed by an S.O.S. signal tapped against a metal hull, and if the report from the trawler were true, the possibility was self-evident:

  Somebody had lost a submarine.

  Deng quietly monitored the progress of the obvious U.S. Navy salvage effort. Knowing how the Americans operated, he found this to be a textbook case-the navy’s failed four-year “civilian” salvage operation answered Deng’s initial curiosity as to who had lost the submarine. Continuing reports told him that the search continued for four years, but in due course the Americans ran out of patience and scrapped the salvage mission.

  In the meantime, Deng had been given the whole army.

  Not a religious man, and therefore resistant to superstition, Deng had never once considered that a supernatural phenomenon might have caused the disappearance of the USS Chameleon. A submarine could sink and be salvaged, or sink and be left to decay on the ocean floor, but one could not simply vanish. Deng was also an extraordinarily patient man, who did not believe at all in luck. He believed, instead, that a man controlled his own destiny, and that luck was earned. Thus, when the U.S. Navy quit their recovery efforts, Deng decided to mount a salvage operation of his own.

  The Chameleon had sunk in the southernmost portion of the North Atlantic, along a ridge beside the Puerto Rico Trench. Aside from a depth of some four and one-half miles, the Puerto Rico Trench boasted two other compelling characteristics: active suboceanic volcanoes and frequent earthquakes, the latter because the trench lay above a series of fault lines.

  The portion of the trench into which the Chameleon had sunk was possessed of a peculiar geography. At the edge of the trench, there stood a suboceanic mountain range. From base to peak, some of the mountains measured higher than six thousand feet. Nosing through the depths, the Chameleon had struck an outcropping of rock near the peak of one of the taller mountains. The underwater ledge did nothing to slow the Chameleon’s downward momentum, but did break off from the mountain and begin its own plunge down the slope. Along the way, the huge lump of volcanic rock tore off numerous similar outcroppings, which in turn generated a massive cloud of silt.

  This avalanche meant that as the Chameleon struck the ocean floor on the shallow northern side of the trench, it was immediately pile-driven into the muddy bottom by some two hundred million tons of volcanic rock, silt, and debris. When the cloud of silt settled, the Chameleon and its crew of 154 sailors had been buried, the layers of mud, sand, and rock covering the length of the sub with somewhere between twenty-seven and forty feet of debris. There was no discernible shape on the ocean floor above it, at least none that resembled an American nuclear submarine, and no detectable metal with any proximity to the surface of the silt.

  Four years and eight months later, the nineteen hundred and fifty-seventh earthquake to rattle this section of the Puerto Rico Trench since the Chameleon’s demise registered a 6.8 on the Richter scale and sluiced a new, smaller trench north of the mountain range. Over the next three weeks, a two-mile-long stretch of the mountain range slipped into this trench. There were avalanches for months, spurred by aftershocks of the quake, all of which represented nothing more than ordinary geologic activity for the region surrounding the Puerto Rico Trench, with one exception: a portion of the Chameleon’s bow had been freshly exposed to the sea.

  For the U.S. Navy, who had recently abandoned its salvage mission, the geologic activity that freed the Chameleon meant nothing. It passed like the sound of a tree in a forest where no ears were present to listen. For others-namely, the supreme commander of the People’s Liberation Army of the People’s Republic of China-the Puerto Rico Trench’s most recent sequence of earthquakes meant something entirely different.

  To General Deng, it meant that the mystery as to the whereabouts of the missing submarine had been solved.

  17

  Laramie stood in the doorway to Malcolm Rader’s office.

  “There’s a caramel macchiato with your name on it in the commissary,” she said. “You’ve got to take a walk to get it, though.”

  Laramie knew Rader was a sucker for the sissy drinks at the Starbucks kiosk. A career analyst somewhere near the peak of his tenure, Rader had two kids in college and one ready to hit the road, and it was evident he hadn’t made it to the gym since the first kid arrived. Disorganized, absentminded, and overweight, he compensated for these issues with a frenzied, spastic work ethic-Laramie thinking you never quite understood what Rader was saying or doing, but she couldn’t remember his taking a vacation since she’d been working here, and he seemed to be aware of everything. She wasn’t even sure whether he took meetings out of the office-another floor, or room, maybe, but she’d never seen him anywhere outside the building.

  “What are we meeting about,” Rader said, “or talking. And walking.”

  “Korea,” Laramie said. “North Korea,
to be precise.”

  There were three mounds of papers on Rader’s desk. He shifted his weight in his chair and nearly vanished behind a particularly massive stack.

  “What about it,” he said. “Them. Whatever.”

  “It’s about North Korea and China, and how they’re related.” She let her statement hang out there.

  “This is more on your Taiwan theory,” Rader said.

  “The same.”

  He frowned, eyes slipping to his monitor-the twin temptations of Laramie’s intel and the caramel macchiato competing with his inclination to answer e-mails and remain productive.

  Finally he stood. “You’re buying, correct?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Fine.”

  Rader had hired her. He wasn’t exactly a mentor, but occasionally she asked his advice, and when she did, he always accommodated her. The man was a decent boss.

  But he wasn’t listening.

  She’d thought about what she’d found through a second sleepless night, and once she developed a theory-involving speculation, but reasonable, fact-based speculation, with sound conclusions-she’d thought carefully about what to do, and say. She decided to start with him.

  “Look,” she said, leaning over her coffee, “it’s too much of a mismatch. The timing. The politics. All of it. What does the State Council of the People’s Republic of China care anymore about North Korea? These nations are not allies-not politically, not militarily. Think about it, Malcolm: there’s no reason the majority rule of the State Council would intend to be identified internationally with Korea. North Korea’s foreign policy essentially consists of an annual rotating nuclear-proliferation extortion scheme, while China’s embracing capitalism-the council is expanding China’s business relationship with the West. Opening its borders. Getting gung ho about free trade. Meanwhile North Korea puts its policy-making energy into threatening the U.S. whenever its people run low on rice.”