Shadow of the Dragon полностью

“Like you told me,” Lisanne said. “Sometimes you bounce a rock off the bad guy’s head, sometimes you bounce the bad guy’s head off the rock. I’m the weapon, I just choose how to use the tool.”

Clark gave her a wink. “Young lady,” he said, “I believe you will do.” He took out his phone and punched in his son-in-law’s number.

“You guys about done for the day?” he said when the man at the other end picked up.

People’s Liberation Army Navy Yuan-class attack submarine Yuanzheng #771 cruised twenty meters below the choppy brown surface of the Bering Sea, towing a tethered communication buoy. The Yuanzheng (Expedition) designation applied to all conventional diesel-electric submarines that were armed with ballistic or cruise missiles.

Expedition 771 carried ballistic missiles, but she was far from conventional.

The PLAN Submarine Force referred to each vessel by class and hull number, but 771’s crew, the collective soul that made her alive, called her Qinglong—Blue Dragon — after the dull color of her rubberized anechoic hull. Captain Sun Luoyang thought it fitting. The blue-green Dragon of the East symbolized the Yuan Dynasty’s great sea power, and the name gave the men immense pride in their vessel.

Sun was an effective leader who had his father’s strong hands and his mother’s rock-solid devotion to duty. Not quite five and a half feet tall, he’d also inherited his father’s narrow shoulders and diminutive stature. His size had been a nuisance in school, and much more so later in military training, when every success seemed to hinge on one’s ability to excel at sports. But a keen intellect and sheer determination carried him to the submarine force, where his small frame would serve him well. With an array of torpedoes and ship-killing missiles at his disposal, it didn’t matter one iota if he was good at football or boxing or table tennis.

He’d never married, but took seriously the responsibility of mentor if not father to the young people in his crew.

Now that he’d come shallow, three of them were suffering acute symptoms of seasickness.

Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Captain Sun and the crew of 771 had finally slipped free from a two-week exercise with the Russian Navy in the semiprotected waters near Anadyr, the administrative capital of Chukotka, Russia. There had been problems with two of his pumps, and he’d had to stay behind for the better part of a week after the others had returned south. Sun had remained on his submarine through the entire training evolution and repairs, never setting foot in the city. He surmised that like all frontier towns he’d visited, this one was filthy and full of itself for its perceived rugged independence.

Captain Sun had found the exercise interesting enough — docking, refit and repair at sea, submarine warfare theory. All well and good, necessary to sustain a formidable force. But PLAN superiors steadfastly refused to allow any vessels to take part in the “war” part of the war game. Though well accustomed to littoral defense and denial, in Sun’s opinion, the PLAN’s abilities in the open sea needed more severe testing. Beijing wanted them to drill, but they were not about to be embarrassed in front of the Kremlin. Moscow did not push the subject. To them, the exercise had been little more than a sales pitch. The Kremlin wanted to brag about their technology in order to sell more of it to Beijing. The less they had to work for it, the better. Moscow was vocal to the point of bombastic on news and social media about their success at modernizing the Russian Navy, but Captain Sun was astonished to see how clankingly aged most of the ships and submarines were. Chinese and Russian weapons alike often finessed American technology into tractorlike hardware, giving them the appearance of a well-designed sledgehammer.

They were, of course, far from defenseless. Sun had never personally seen it, but the Russian Typhoon-class submarine was said to be large enough to have its own sauna and pool. Sun laughed at the thought. With the flick of his hand, he could turn his entire boat into a sauna and have the crew swimming in their own sweat.

The exercise had not been a complete waste of time. Simply being at sea was good training for his youthful crew.

Finally away, the last to leave, 771 was heading southwest by south off the Russian coastline, still in relatively shallow waters. She had yet to pass the point of Navarin, where the depth dropped to many thousands of meters — deeper and calmer. Here, they were in the growling gut of the Bering Sea — famous to Americans because of the bourgeois television program about crab fishing. The Bering was the birthplace of many a violent gale, and at this depth, Captain Sun Luoyang felt the roll of a confused sea shudder through his boat.