Shadow of the Dragon полностью

Where there were ships of commerce, there were also ships of war.

Dr. Moon noted the hydrophone’s depth at the time she’d first heard the noise. Two hundred and fifteen feet, but descending rapidly as the buoy and her underwater mic dropped toward the seafloors on the Kevlar cable. She adjusted the gain the old-fashioned way — by turning a knob, attempting to pick up the burst again.

“A passing whale?” Thorson said, his cigarette bobbing between his lips. “Sound can travel 4.3 times faster in water. Whatever you heard could be miles from here.”

“Maybe,” Moon conceded, ignoring the elementary physics lesson. She was professional enough not to rule out anything without a process. But even as she said the word, she knew that this was no whale.

The noise had not faded, but winked out, as if a switch had been thrown — leaving the rest of the ocean chorus to continue in its absence.

The sea was dark and cold, but it was not a quiet place. When she was only five, Patti’s father had let her come with him seal-hunting beyond the jutting spit of land that gave Point Hope its Inupiaq name of Tikigaq — forefinger. Her father had showed her how to put the handle of the wooden paddle to her ear and listen to the undersea songs of uguruq—the bearded seal — as they vibrated up from the blade he’d left submerged in the water. The wooden paddle made for a rudimentary listening device, but she was able to hear the occasional song of a bowhead whale, bearded seals, and the ever-moving pack ice that shrieked and squealed like a badly fitting lid on a Styrofoam cooler. Later, during her time in the Navy, she’d learned that fish grunted, croaked, farted, and ground their teeth.

“Pack ice?” Thorson offered. Sullen, but wanting to guess correctly before she did.

She shook her head. “I’d still be hearing it if it was ice. No… it’s gone dark, whatever it is.”

Moon listened to the relatively dull burble of water as the science buoy continued to plummet toward the seafloor, taking the hydrophone with it. She stretched, glancing out at the sea. Calm today for this part of the world, the Arctic churned and swirled, looking like blue Gatorade and crushed ice — the good stuff, the kind you get from a drive-in.

Sikuliaq used her twin Wartsila ICEPOD azimuth thrusters, each capable of rotating 360 degrees, to stay in place relative to the seafloor. The big ice — the dangerous stuff that could gut even a tough polar ship like Sikuliaq—was still a half-mile away, glinting like silver on the northeast horizon.

Moon turned down the speaker and adjusted the headset over her ears, studying sound graphs on the screen of a second laptop, which was also attached to her hydrophone. Her primary laptop received readings from the expendable research buoy that Snopes Thorson had lowered into the water minutes before. The three-foot can was designed to remain under the ice all winter, far below the massive, fast-moving keels that raked the frigid water as deep as thirty meters. Surface buoys were a no-go in such harshly kinetic environments. They would simply be ground to bits. UAVs — underwater autonomous vehicles — drones — were useful. But they were also expensive. Frigid water sapped battery life and made them prone to loss. The Arctic, and the mysteries that lay beneath her surface, still baffled — and ate — technology.

That’s where the under-ice buoys came in. Three feet tall and eight inches in diameter, the metal cans were relatively cheap, though expendable seemed not quite the right word for something with a three-thousand-dollar price tag. Attached to a fourteen-hundred-pound anchor, the device would remain on the ocean floor for most of the year, recording measurements on currents, temperature, and salinity at depth. At a predetermined time, shortly before the surface ice was expected to melt, a mechanism would release the buoy from its anchoring tether, allowing it to float to the surface, collecting more data about flow and thickness and melt rates. When the ice melted and the buoy peeked above the surface, it would send a message to its handlers via short-burst data transmission over the Iridium satellite system.

Ice data was all well and good, Dr. Moon thought. It was, after all, what paid the bills for now, but her real interest was in underwater sounds. To that end, she had begged permission to attach the hydrophone to the deploying cable as the buoy went down. She kicked herself for not rigging a camera at the same time. Even a GoPro might have given her video of whatever had made the sound.

She checked both computer screens, and then looked at Thorson. He surely thought the thick collar of his wool turtleneck made him look like a Nordic fisherman. Patti thought he looked like a little boy wearing his daddy’s sweater.