Red Shark

Sammy Shin came up to Jefferson, eyed him contemptuously, and said, “No Amerika-jin here, man.” He pushed the beer out of Jefferson’s reach and palmed the yen. “You go.”

“He’s a big guy,” Jefferson said evenly. “He might have been with an American girl, dark hair, good looking.”

Sammy looked Jefferson up and down as if seeing him for the first time. “No such man or giru,” he said. “I said you go, man. This place, Japanese only. No gaijin. No niggers. Fuck off!”

Jefferson produced a wad of yen. “I’ll buy talk.”

Sammy considered for a moment, then motioned that Jefferson should follow him down a narrow hallway. A man at the bar slid off his chair, but at a nod from Sammy, he stayed put.

Sammy led the way into a reeking men’s room. He ordered a man to zip up his pants and get out. Sammy turned to Jefferson and said, “How much you pay—”

Jefferson slammed his left forearm into Sammy’s throat, driving him back against a wall, pinning him there. He flashed a silenced H&K pistol and jammed it into Sammy’s right ear.

“Amerika-jin. Where’d he go, asshole?”

Sammy’s hands clawed at the thick arm crushing his throat. Jefferson bore down harder, until the flat face contorted in pain and a slimy gray tongue bulged from between two rows of brown teeth. “Talk to me, you fucking Nip, or this nigger’s gonna put your brains in the toilet!”

When Sammy finished telling Jefferson what he wanted to know, Jefferson stepped back and thanked him, then drove a knee into his balls and kicked his feet out from under him. He threw the wad of yen at Sammy and left him doubled over on the filthy restroom floor, retching his guts out.

39

The Yellow Sea Littorals

The Red Shark hovered, not quite motionless, above a sea bottom that rose gently from the continental shelf toward the coast of China. The first officer thrust his head into the sonar room to say something, but Park held up a hand.

Park had an ear to the speaker; he was listening to a faint sound, what he thought might be a submarine’s creep motor. Filtered and enhanced by computers that had flushed out the extraneous noise generated by small coastal craft and large commercial vessels, even the cry of biologicals, the sound Park heard had been analyzed and compared to known sources stored in the computer archives.

A Romanized label crawled across the upper sonar monitor: KILO 636-CLASS CREEP/MANEUVERING MOTORS.

“Now we know,” Park said.

He exited the sonar room and, with the first officer, crossed to the chart table behind the periscope stand.

“We have a Chinese Kilo, almost dead in the water,” Park said. He sketched a narrow, wedgelike shape on the navigation chart’s acetate overlay and saw that it encompassed the area of littorals along the coast of China in which the Red Shark was now hovering. Park made two Xs on the chart and scaled the distance between them: less than 10,000 yards — five miles. We’re virtually within hailing distance of each other, thought Park — within the sure kill radius.

Zemin heard the sonar officer report, “Possible dead zones here, here and here.”

Zemin marked their positions the length of a shallow six-mile-long arc that ran roughly southeast to southwest along the coast. The zones he’d seen on the monitor were not clearly defined and, to his disappointment, looked more like amorphous blobs than profiles of a submarine. Still, they were better than nothing, but whether they had been caused by the target’s sound-masking effects was another matter altogether.

“Range to the farthest zone?” Zemin said.

“Ten thousand yards, sir.”

“Range to the nearest zone?”

“Three thousand yards but fading.”

Zemin knew that somewhere on that arc was the submarine he’d been tracking. He also knew that the zones wouldn’t last much longer and saw that even as he was viewing them on the monitor they had begun to evaporate.

“Disengage creep motor; main motors ahead together; speed seven knots.”