Shadow of the Dragon полностью

Two hours after Wan Xiuying collapsed, a strange rumble carried across the ice. He felt it before he heard it. The shivering had passed now and he was warm. In fact, the suit worked much too well, and he thought of taking it off to cool himself. He’d watched movies in his mind as he drifted in and out. Crimson Tide, Run Silent, Run Deep—the book was better. He’d found a copy in Mandarin, but he learned more from the one in English. U-571… What was the Russian movie? China needed something… Wolf Warrior should make a good submarine movie…

The rumbling grew louder, shaking the ice under his head. A surge of adrenaline coursed through Wan’s body. A bear! Head lolling. He pushed himself onto his side with great effort.

“Come here!” he shouted. “Come and get me, you—”

But when he lifted his head, it was no bear he saw, but a large red ship in the distance, eating its way through the ice — and an orange bird hovering directly above him.

Captain Jay Rapoza, commanding officer of the USCGC icebreaker Healy, met the medical officer outside sick bay. Rapoza was a big man, burly, fit, barrel-chested, with a slight squint in his left eye that made him look as though he should be clenching a pipe in his teeth. He was a sailor’s sailor, fibbing just a little to his wife when he told her how heartbroken he was every time he went to sea.

“How’s he doing?” Rapoza asked.

Fortunately for the guy they’d scooped off the ice, the Healy was the only cutter in the Coast Guard to have a licensed physician’s assistant and an HS — health services technician (called a corpsman in the Navy). Lieutenant Shirley Anderson peeled off a set of blue nitrile gloves and shook her head.

“Pupils are still dilated and his heartbeat is irregular. Core temperature is eighty-seven — about a degree from gonersville in most people. We’re warming him up slowly. Have to be careful the cold blood from his extremities doesn’t rush back to his core and give him a heart attack.”

“Hope that guy plays the lottery,” Rapoza said, “because he is one lucky young man.”

“Roger that, sir,” Lieutenant Anderson said. “If I may ask, sir. No sign of a boat or snow machine?”

“None,” Rapoza said. “The 65 made two more passes after they dropped him off. Just a big hole in the ice. The SEIE suit suggests he escaped a submarine.”

Anderson shivered.

“I don’t like thinking about subs underneath us, sir. Creeps me out. But it does make sense. This guy is extremely talkative — mostly about submarine movies.”

“Odd,” Rapoza said. “Sonar shows the seabed at over a thousand meters. There are some underwater mountains, maybe…” He glanced at the door, then at the lieutenant. “What exactly is he saying?”

“He was talking about Lipizzaner stallions when I left.”

Rapoza saw a junior officer from engineering at the end of the passageway and called him by name. “Find Chief Cho and have him come see me.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the ensign said. “Right away. I just passed him.”

Rex Cho came through the hatch a half minute later, cover in hand.

“Captain,” he said, presenting himself.

The whole ship knew they were heading toward an unknown radio signal, possibly a Chinese submarine. And, of course, they knew about the lone Asian man in the exposure suit they’d picked up off the ice, but they’d not all been told the details.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” Cho said. “I haven’t spoken Chinese since grade school, since my nainai passed away.”

“Understood,” Rapoza said. “But I’d like you in the interview with me, just in case you pick something up. He’s kind of out of his head. He might see you as a friendly face and be a little more forthcoming.”

“Aye, sir,” Cho said.

It took all of ten seconds for the man to tell Chief Petty Officer Cho that he was “Commander Wan Xiuying, executive officer of 880.” He drifted off twice, rambling about enigma machines and Nazi U-boats when he awoke. Some of it was in English, and Rapoza recognized them as lines from Hollywood movies. He first answered Chief Petty Officer Cho in Chinese, but when Cho repeated the question in English, Commander Wan threw his head against the pillow and rolled his eyes as if to say, Oh, you want to play that game? Okay… and then answering in English. Most of it seemed like nonsense, but many recent events over the past few days fell squarely in the unbelievable column.

Coded signals, strange noises from the bottom of the Chukchi, and now a Chinese submariner coughed up on the ice like some Jonah — Captain Rapoza grabbed a piece of paper from Lieutenant Anderson’s desk and took notes.

Though the Chinese submariner seemed fluent in English, his physical and mental state slurred his rambling words, rendering them difficult to understand. There had been a fire on a submarine… a professor Liu was dead or near death. Rapoza got that much.