Shadow of the Dragon полностью

If the charts and calculations were correct, the 880 lay belly-down on a rocky ledge, one hundred and seventy meters below the surface, with an undersea mountain rising to starboard. Collision with the rock face on the way down had ripped a four-meter gash in the outermost hull of the double-hulled vessel. The inner hull was still intact, keeping the crew alive — for the moment — but with the ballast tank damaged, an emergency blow was now problematic.

To port, off the edge of the ledge, the seabed lay some eleven hundred meters below — well beyond crush depth, even for a powerful double-hulled submarine like 880. If the baby-faced engineering mates were able to somehow get the boat moving in any direction other than up, she might simply shuffle off the ledge and plummet straight to the bottom.

Of course, that would solve Commander Wan’s problem.

At first it seemed like they had one ace in the hole. Professor Liu Wangshu should have been able to fix the drive. It was his design. That’s why he was on the boat, to make sure it worked. And work it did. When the pumps — one of the loudest parts of a nuclear submarine — were rigged for ultra-quiet, the gearless Mirage drive proved to render the 880 all but invisible. The fire appeared to have started in one of the pumps, some sort of lubricant ignited by a spark, one of the youngsters surmised. Wan wondered if they would ever know. Over and over, history had shown that it was often a string of simple, relatively minor mistakes and seemingly insignificant design flaws that led to catastrophe.

Liu Wangshu could have seen the problem at once, had he not been sick. Sick was not nearly a strong enough word to describe what was wrong with him. Only a handful of the crew knew Professor Liu’s background. He dressed in regular engineering officer’s coveralls, and he spoke with the authority of a professor, which was not uncommon among officers in any branch. He had the shoulder boards, so the crew obeyed him, even though he was new and unknown to them. Oddly, the fire itself had not hurt him. His lungs appeared undamaged by the toxic smoke. No, this was something else. The XO guessed it was a stroke, judging from the man’s sagging face and the gibberish he spoke. Probably brought on by the sudden stress of seeing his life’s work destroyed by fire.

They’d given him aspirin and confined him to bed with two junior submariners watching him. Either he would get better or he would not. If he did not get better, then everyone on the sub would eventually die. Some sooner, when they went insane and began to kill one another. One of the sonar techs had already gotten into a fight with the cook. Some later, when their food ran out.

As long as the reactor continued to function — decades, if no pumps broke — they had power for heaters, the amine CO₂ scrubbers for clean air to breathe, the water maker, and the pumps to take waste off the submarine. Commander Wan anticipated they had almost three months of food — now that there were fewer mouths left alive to eat it. Marooned in their bubble island, they would simply starve to death.

There was an alternative — that only Commander Wan and the captain knew about.

Rigged against bulkheads in the 880’s nose and tail were two explosive disks, each over two meters in diameter. The experimental Mirage drive was the only one of its kind. Ordinarily, Professor Liu, the only person who could re-create the mechanism, would never have been allowed on the submarine. But he’d somehow pulled strings. He wanted to see his creation work in the real world.

Command wanted the drive and the professor protected if at all possible, but their orders were clear. In the event of an emergency, Long March #880 was not to end up in American — or even Russian — hands. The Mirage drive was Chinese technology, not stolen through tradecraft or purchased from a disgruntled U.S. Navy scientist. It had been developed by China and tested by China, and would eventually be utilized by China. It was a point of national pride — and Beijing wanted it to stay that way.

The self-destruct disks were alarmingly simple to operate. Unlike the nuclear missiles on board, which required the simultaneous use of keys carried by both the captain and the XO to activate the command-and-control system, the self-destruct system could be initiated by the captain alone, or, in his absence, the executive officer.

The captain had met with Wan in private, discussing their options. Tian was no coward. He would detonate the disks if ordered to do so. But he was a patriot and did not want to deprive China of technology that put them ahead in a race that they’d lagged in for so long.

He felt certain command would want to salvage what was left of the drive, and, if possible, nurse Professor Liu back to health. If he destroyed the vessel, the United States would not get it — but, without the professor, China might not be able to re-create it, either.

For years.