Asian Front

about the perimeter of the old Soviet buffer zone that stretched, half-moon-shaped, from the Bering Sea south to southwest toward the Kuril Islands north of Japan, lying in wait for the vital convoys en route to Freeman’s Second Army. But going by the radio message, the Southern Star was within the well-patrolled two-hundred-mile zone off the Canadian-U.S. mainland.

“Ah—” Washington State coast guard pronounced, “they probably saw one of our Hunter-Killers going out on patrol— started shitting themselves.”

“Or a school of fish,” the second officer added. The sudden shifts in water color caused by the quicksilver-like veering of near-surface feeders could suddenly alter the pattern of water, giving it a shivery “patch” look, a patch often mistaken by fishermen, especially in wartime, for the change occasioned by rapid temperature shifts at the water-air interface caused by a sub’s venting excess fresh water, a side effect of its abundant nuclear power. A suspicious-looking patch could also be produced by the upwelling of hydrothermal vents, or hot springs, on the sea floor, whose spouting columns racing up through the cold layers produced a “bubbling” effect on the ocean’s surface akin to a huge globule of oil popping and expanding on the surface in less dense water.

The MV Southern Star, her listing on the coast guard’s manifest showing that she was a fish processor of 15,000 tons, was asked politely, calmly, whether she could have been mistaken.

“No way,” the immediate reply came, this time unencumbered by any kind of static.

“Nothing garbled about that,” the coast guard duty officer said. “Must have seen something, I guess. Notify Whidbey Island. They can send out a chaser.”

Within twenty minutes a P3 Orion, replete with sonobuoys and other ASW equipment, including eight Mk 54 depth bombs, eight 980-pound bombs, six Mk 50 torpedoes, and six two-thousand-pound mines on underwing hard points, was being dispatched on full alert speed at 470 mph. After the saboteur attack on a Trident sub by an antitank missile earlier in the war as she had egressed Hood Canal, the duty officer wasn’t about to take chances, even though he believed the lookouts on Southern Star had seen no enemy sub but perhaps a whale breaching.

With its MAD — magnetic anomaly detector boom, an extension of the plane’s tail — on active, the Orion made for the last reported position of the Southern Star, and within twenty minutes of crossing the surf-fringed ribbon of Vancouver Island’s Long Beach saw the factory ship, the dots on the Southern Star’s forward deck waving frantically up at the aircraft, more crew members spilling out by the second, as if by sheer force of numbers they could somehow convince the aircraft to shepherd them into port.

“What are they worried about?” the Orion’s radar operator asked. “No one’s gonna go after a fish boat.”

“Yeah,” the copilot wryly said. “But figure it’s you down there, buddy boy. And you thought you’d seen a hostile. You’d want protection, too.” From the Southern Star’s position, the copilot gave the captain a search pattern for possible Hunter-Killers in the area that, taking the Southern Star as its center, extended in a circle two hundred miles in diameter.

The only anomaly the MAD picked up was metalliferous deposits around sea mounts where superheated water from the unstable sea floor southwest of Vancouver Island had streamed up, causing minerals to be leached out as the hot plume hit the colder water of the northeast Pacific. But these anomalies were already marked clearly on the oceanographic charts.

“Unless,” the radar operator proffered, “a hostile has nestled in all cozylike against a sea mount, using the magnetic mineral deposits as a cover?”

“Siberian or Chinese sub wouldn’t know the sea bottom that well around here. You’d need to have it laid out like the back of your hand, buddy boy.”

“Maybe they do.”

“Don’t think so — our navy didn’t put up with any of the ‘oceanographic research’ bullshit the Soviet trawlers tried to pull. Goddamn things had so many aerials sproutin’ from them they looked like anemones. Kicked their ass out of here years ago. Anyway, tricky business hanging around sea mounts — all those canyons running off the base, turbidity, currents galore. Sub could end up gettin’ buried in a friggin’ great mudslide.”

“I dunno, they might try it, ‘specially if they’re ChiCom diesels.” The senior ASW officer took the point. Everyone was thinking about Siberian subs, a cold war habit. But the Chinese had subs, too, and, being diesel electric, they were often more dangerous than nuclear subs. The nuclear boats, though faster, always had to have the water pumps going to cool the reactor and so gave off sound. The diesel electrics, just as capable at firing torpedoes or ICBMs, could go on battery and remain completely silent.

“Hey — I’m easy to get along with,” the senior ASW officer said. “Drop a deuce and see what we get.”

“You got it.” With that, two chute-born sonobuoys were popped out of the left side of the aircraft. The sensitive mikes that would unravel twenty feet below the air-sea interface would send back any abnormal sound from the noisy world of the deep. Freeman’s convoys couldn’t afford to lose one ship. Even so, the best ASW equipment in the world told the ASW crew aboard the P-3 Orion that the Southern Star must have seen a ghost, as when everchanging cloud patterns threw light and dark shapes on the sea. There was a tendency at sea to see what you feared most, like a child at night imagining that a coat hanging in a dark hallway was an intruder.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Aussie Lewis dragged the long ten-by-six-foot raft of wooden slats and canvas down to the river’s edge at a point where he estimated the current would take him diagonally across to the other side, where the bend in the river was jammed with floes of ice, coagulated where the current had narrowed. With darkness approaching, he fed the two long poles that he was going to use as a slipway into the water and firmly anchored the raft by means of ten tough hide straps, which in turn were held fast by wooden stakes that he’d driven into the sandy soil with the butt of his AK-74.

With slipway and raft held steady, he went up the bank to bring down the Kawasaki. He saw movement near it, dropped, and heard a noise, the same low moan he thought he’d heard before. It was a Mongolian herdsman lying next to the bike. He must have made his way down to the river as Aussie had done a last-minute check around the ghers. Aussie switched the AK-74 off safety and, going low, crawled about to the right of the Kawasaki so as to come up behind the man. If the man had punctured his gas tank, Aussie swore he’d take his head off at the neck. When Aussie was only a few feet from him he could see the old man had done nothing of the sort. Aussie could see the man’s del blood-soaked to the chest. He had been one of those who had been shot by the Spets who were punishing them for not knowing anything of the SAS/D. When he saw Aussie in the tattered del he gestured with what little energy he had left for the SAS/D trooper to come closer.

Lewis moved his finger off the safety of the AK-74 and could tell from the old man’s chest wound that he was not long for this world. It was a miracle he had managed to crawl so far from the rubble of the ghers. Aussie Lewis knelt beside him and gave him several sips of water from the motorcycle’s canteen. The man made as if to talk but could only gesture, the same kind of moan coming from his throat, but it was as clear as a desert day in that dark, dust-riven twilight what he wanted — begging Lewis to finish him off, to see that his agony might not go on.

Aussie couldn’t use the AK-74 for fear of the shots being heard, but the old man was reading his thoughts and drew his hand across his own throat. Aussie Lewis nodded, and with an agnostic’s hedging of the bet, made the sign of the cross on the old man, whose hands now stretched out from his side. Perhaps the old man would understand, perhaps not. Aussie took out his K-bar knife and quickly drew it across the old man’s throat. The blood spurted then gurgled like a crimson brook, and it was done. Aussie then dug a hole in the sand and covered the old man, leaving a hastily rigged cross from two of the gher slats, then he lifted the Kawasaki. It felt twice as heavy as before as he wheeled the bike aboard the raft and again had to lower it before cutting the leather straps that had held the raft in place.

Immediately he began pushing on the stern oar — a long slat — hard to port to catch the current. A piece of jagged ice about four feet square bumped into the raft, sent a shudder through it, then another hit it amidships. “Bloody hell!” was Lewis’s response, but in the swift current he was now already a third of the way across the river