“Sir, the Americans may not yet know our position, since we had to remain behind the others to finish repairs, but they will certainly hear, and in all likelihood see, us when we pass to the north through the Bering Strait.”
“Indeed,” Sun said.
A natural choke point, the Bering Strait was little more than eighty kilometers wide at its narrowest point. With an average depth of fifty meters, some areas were far shallower, leaving submarines visible to surveillance satellites or prowling P-3 Orion sub hunters. The Americans generally thought of the PLAN as a coastal submarine force, rarely venturing farther than the straits of Taiwan. They would be all too happy to discover a Chinese Dragon heading not just to coastal Russian waters, but for the Arctic Ocean.
The United States had placed sensitive hydrophones and other sensors on the floor of the Bering as well as other choke points around the world to monitor Soviet traffic. If one was to believe American propaganda — which Captain Sun did not — the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, had been greatly curtailed after the Cold War, with only three devices still in place. Surely powers like the United States were growing their surveillance presence all around the world, not curtailing it. And that didn’t count the presence of Canadian or other listening devices.
The Americans would see them, but it could not be helped. PLAN Fleet Command knew what they were doing. They had issued the orders and Sun would comply with them.
“We will be apprised of our mission once we are well north of the strait,” Sun said. “Until then, set a course for these grid coordinates.”
The XO typed the latitude and longitude, laying in a series of plot-dots on the screen that would allow them to run as deep as possible, while navigating around obstacles like underwater mountains or the Diomede Islands that guarded the center of the Bering Strait. Finished, he tapped a spot on the chart off the coast of Alaska, a thousand kilometers north of the strait.
Captain Sun knew exactly what his right-hand man was thinking.
“Exactly,” Sun said. “The Chukchi Borderland. We’re going under the ice.”
The two men in the second-story window across the street from Huludao Smile Swimwear Ltd’s tiny office made no attempt to hide. Both wore long coats, as if they planned to step outside at any moment and brave the cold. Pei Ying could feel their eyes before she saw them. Rather than look up and meet their gaze, she went about her midday routine. She had not grown a successful business to squander all her money on propane to heat an empty office, and it had grown cold while she was away all morning visiting one of her factories. She lit the gas heater on the wall beside her cluttered desk, then dropped the blackened match into an ashtray with a nest of dozens of other burned stubs — the remnants of a long and bitter winter. The faint odor of gas made her think of her late husband and those early days of the company. She chuckled at that, despite the men lurking across the street. Anyone who looked at her office would surely believe her business was struggling. The tiny heater wouldn’t actually warm the cramped space until mid-April, but the blue flames and glowing ceramic tiles took the worst of the edge off. And anyway, Pei did not mind the cold. She enjoyed wearing a down jacket and sipping hot tea all day — an irony indeed for the owner of a company that manufactured skimpy swimsuits.
The main offices were located at the primary plant, nearer to the wharf, but Pei kept a personal office here, for the moments when she wanted to be away from the clatter of machinery and buzzing employees. It had been her husband’s office — and now it was hers. Just like the company.
Tucked into the ground floor, the office was in the same squat three-story building as her home. Everyone in the building called her Pei Ayi — Auntie Pei. Her apartment was upstairs — a short commute. She could have easily afforded a private villa — what people in the West called a single-family home. She had plenty of money if she’d wanted a high fence and her own yard, like the ones across the alley, but she preferred to roll her money back into the company. She was always at work, anyway. A larger house was only more for her to clean. Her son’s wife had different notions, of course, and leaned on the boy to buy her a lavish apartment. The stupid girl gambled, too.
Perhaps the men across the street were here about Pei’s daughter-in-law. That would not be so bad.
