Painkiller

A different fate awaited the fourth sub.

On the third Friday of July 1984, Lieutenant Commander Elmore Bradenman, Le

The captain was asleep in his quarters, which gave Le

One quality of submarines that their designers and operators could not help was the occasional random destruction of ocean wildlife. An Ohio-class nuclear attack submarine was, after all, nearly two football fields long, and therefore much bigger than any sea bass, tuna, or jellyfish it might have happened to plow into as it navigated the deep blue sea. Many a fish had been bruised or knocked unconscious by the blunt nose, or chewed to bits by the screws of such subs, and while the sonar engineers on board were trained to detect even the smallest metallic anomaly in the surrounding waters, they were required, by necessity, to ignore any indication of an approaching halibut, or patch of seaweed. The latter being precisely what the sonar engineer determined the floating mass of vegetation ahead of the Chameleon to be as Le

Long dormant but still quite live, the explosive charge within the drifting North Vietnamese mine responded to the punch it received from the bow of the Chameleon as the submarine powered through the Atlantic at a speed of just under thirty knots. There was a brief delay after the initial impact, so that the more alert perso

The old mine, even with ten years of fury stored within, had, at first, little impact on the outward appearance of the Chameleon: it simply inflicted a puncture wound on the sub’s port flank. At the Chameleon’s cruising depth, however, there existed approximately nine times the pressure of that found at sea level. This was not a problem for a submarine with its hull fully intact, but as the puncture opened up in the Chameleon, the seams of the hull partially caved in around the puncture and water tore into a series of compartments, any one of which could have been sealed off from the rest of the boat if damaged alone. This Titanic-like flooding of multiple compartments caused a simultaneous listing of the sub and a failure of the primary electrical system; dead in the water, the Chameleon began a slow descent which LCDR Bradenman found himself powerless to stop. Soon the sub, growing heavier from the flooding, declined past seventy, then a hundred fathoms. It was Le

He attempted every procedure the navy had taught him and some they hadn’t, but at a depth of nearly three hundred fathoms, the last remaining significant sealed portions of the boat folded inward like a crushing aluminum can, and the last of the survivors either drowned, or died under the crush of collapsing metal.

Just before he died, Le

My God, he thought. This is what they talk about. This is how it happens.

We’ve gone down in the Bermuda Triangle.

The navy’s clandestine salvage effort came up empty. Begi

One of Le

The vessel to which Le

When the strange report came in from the spy fleet that week-the fleet being a thousand-vessel unit the new head of the PLN intelligence wing, vice admiral and fledgling polo enthusiast Deng Jiang, had ordered built at the start of his tenure-a senior analyst, sifting through the data, thought that he might have stumbled across something. An Atlantic-based spy boat had reported an underwater concussion followed by an S.O.S. signal tapped against a metal hull, and if the report from the trawler were true, the possibility was self-evident:

Somebody had lost a submarine.

Deng quietly monitored the progress of the obvious U.S. Navy salvage effort. Knowing how the Americans operated, he found this to be a textbook case-the navy’s failed four-year “civilian” salvage operation answered Deng’s initial curiosity as to who had lost the submarine. Continuing reports told him that the search continued for four years, but in due course the Americans ran out of patience and scrapped the salvage mission.

In the meantime, Deng had been given the whole army.

Not a religious man, and therefore resistant to superstition, Deng had never once considered that a supernatural phenomenon might have caused the disappearance of the USS Chameleon. A submarine could sink and be salvaged, or sink and be left to decay on the ocean floor, but one could not simply vanish. Deng was also an extraordinarily patient man, who did not believe at all in luck. He believed, instead, that a man controlled his own destiny, and that luck was earned. Thus, when the U.S. Navy quit their recovery efforts, Deng decided to mount a salvage operation of his own.

The Chameleon had sunk in the southernmost portion of the North Atlantic, along a ridge beside the Puerto Rico Trench. Aside from a depth of some four and one-half miles, the Puerto Rico Trench boasted two other compelling characteristics: active suboceanic volcanoes and frequent earthquakes, the latter because the trench lay above a series of fault lines.

The portion of the trench into which the Chameleon had sunk was possessed of a peculiar geography. At the edge of the trench, there stood a suboceanic mountain range. From base to peak, some of the mountains measured higher than six thousand feet. Nosing through the depths, the Chameleon had struck an outcropping of rock near the peak of one of the taller mountains. The underwater ledge did nothing to slow the Chameleon’s downward momentum, but did break off from the mountain and begin its own plunge down the slope. Along the way, the huge lump of volcanic rock tore off numerous similar outcroppings, which in turn generated a massive cloud of silt.