“Very carefully,” he replied.
“Not funny,” she said.
“It’s an icebreaker,” Kurt said. “Not a ship of war. It probably has a weather radar and short-range collision-avoidance set designed for navigating traffic near congested harbors. It’s not going to be bristling with antiaircraft missiles and fifty-caliber machine guns.”
She gave a shrug, imagining how Kurt must have driven his mother crazy as a child. Before she could offer more reasons to be cautious Joe spoke up.
“I’m all in for the adventure,” he said, “but aren’t we ignoring the obvious?”
He pointed to the screen. The bright red hull of the Chinese ship stood out against the endless expanse of white ice. The gray swath of a runway was easy to make out, but there was nothing else around. “I don’t see a plane.”
“Joe makes a good point,” Gamay said, grinning.
“What’s at the end of that runway?” Kurt asked.
All eyes focused on the screen. Off one end of the “runway” lay a hundred miles of jumbled ice. Not far from the other end lay the gap of dark water formed where the icebreaker had plowed its way south and made the ninety-degree turn.
“You think it went into the water?” Gamay asked.
“Not sure,” Kurt said. “But I can’t imagine a better way to hide a salvage effort from prying eyes.”
Even Gamay had to agree there was logic to Kurt’s line of reasoning. She kept it to herself. “So, you’re just going to fly up there and knock on the side of the hull with a hammer and ask the Chinese if they’ve seen our missing plane?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Kurt joked. “We should bring a housewarming gift as a pretext for looking around. Just like you do when someone new moves into your neighborhood.”
Joe and Paul laughed at this.The boys, she thought. “I’m sure a houseplant would do wonders for international relations. But then what?”
“We’ll see,” Kurt said. He was already up and sliding the chair back into place.
“And what are we supposed to do while you’re gone?”
“Keep watching those screens,” he said, heading for the door. “Just in case I’ve got it wrong.”
Chapter 6
The Chinese ship rose up from the ice like a red castle in a field of white. TheXue Honghad boxy lines and a towering rectangular superstructure that looked like someone had plucked a ten-story building from the middle of a crowded city and placed it onto the ship. The monolithic block contained the crew quarters and the ship’s main operating spaces. The bridge at the top was covered in a forest of antennas, satellite dishes, and radar housings. Its broad windows were canted downward. As the ship was designed to cruise through endless floes of ice, these windows were heated, polarized, and tinted a reflective bronze like a set of giant ski goggles designed to keep the crew from going snow blind.
A long deck ran out behind the main structure, extending toward the stern. An octagonal crown at the far end was painted green, with a gigantic yellow circle around the edge. Planted squarely in the middle of this circle was a midsize helicopter, its windows, engine intakes, and rotor blades covered with removable plastic shields to keep the snow and ice from accumulating on them. At the stern, a pair of red cranes had been swung outboard, where they acted as elevators, transporting vehicles, men, and equipment down to the ice and back up again as needed.
Inside the warm bridge, a trio of uniformed officers waited pensively. At various times they gazed through binoculars at the men on the ice or the empty sky. But there was nothing to see, not on radar or with the human eye. Nothing but endless frozen water and a cobalt-blue sky.
Two of the men wore the naval uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army Navy, PLAN. The third wore winter camouflage fatigues in a white and gray pattern.
“I don’t like this,” the first man said, lowering his binoculars. He was a stocky man in his late fifties with a broad, square face and steel-gray hair. He wore the uniform of a senior captain. The icebreaker was his ship. But the mission was being run by another. “We shouldn’t be waiting like this.”
Beside the captain stood a willowy man with long arms and legs. Rear Admiral Yang Li was elegant and composed. His rank was impressive for his age, as he was only forty-five, almost ten years younger than the captain, but his ambition was to reach even more important positions. “Our orders from the high command are to remain on station,” he said calmly. “We shall do so until otherwise directed.”
By stating it this way, he took none of the blame for those orders. He gave no hint what he thought of them.
“What is the high command waiting for?” the captain grumbled. “It’s been twenty-eight hours. The American aircraft couldn’t have remained aloft for more than three. It’s not coming.”
Admiral Li didn’t appreciate the captain’s tone, though he actually agreed with the sentiment. They had come here to meet the American C-17, creating a runway on the ice. The men had worked without stopping for the better part of two days, taking chainsaws and flamethrowers to the uneven parts of the ice, cutting it away or melting it flat. They’d laid fifty tons of steel mats down and thenused snowmaking equipment and melted ice water to cover it and seal it in place. Their work had produced five thousand feet of smooth, reenforced ice, lined with low-intensity lights to help the American pilot see it and make a safe landing.
As a precaution, Li had ordered a gigantic berm built up at the far end, in case the American overshot the runway or proved unable to stop. The sixty-foot pile of snow and ice loomed in the distance. But all of it was for naught. Aside from a few of the ship’s crew climbing the hill and sliding down it on their backs, none of the handiwork had been put to use.
After a certain period of time, it had become obvious to everyone that the aircraft was not coming. A few hours later it became a mathematical impossibility. The plane simply could no longer be airborne. But the men above Li, those in the highest levels of command, which he hoped to join one day, felt otherwise. They insisted, nonsensically, that the plane would still arrive. When Li pressed them, they offered information from a source who advised that the plane had landed elsewhere to refuel and was waiting for nightfall to make the trip out to the ice.
The admiral considered the likelihood of that happening to be slim. They might as well have been hoping for sea nymphs to bring it to them. But as he hoped to join the high command one day, he’d chosen not to argue. He decided to share what he’d been told.
