50

CHO DID HIS BEST TO HIDE HIS TENSION AS HE AND MR. LEE WATCHED Jenkins and Kang at the ROV controls. Seeing them in Granger’s and Daniels’s places was a daily reminder of the failure of his last tactic—and of how close he was to losing the war all together. But that was not why he was tense.

He cleared his mind and focused on what was happening in front of him. Jenkins was “flying” and Kang controlled the manipulator arm and other devices in the “tool sled.” The manipulator arm held a slender, but very strong, loop of cable. The other end of the cable was attached to the Grasp II’s powerful crane.

The plan was for Jenkins to fly the ROV down to one of the missile tubes that lay on the sea floor in the wreckage of the submarine. Each tube contained a massive R-39 missile. An R-39 weighed ninety tons, which was too heavy for the ship’s crane to lift. Kang would use the ROV’s hydraulic grinder to detach the missile’s MIRV housing (which contained its ten warheads) from the rest of the rocket. Kang would then slip the cable around the warheads and secure it with clamps. Other team members would reel in their prize while the ROV monitored its trip to the surface for any problems.

To Cho’s surprise, Jenkins and Kang had actually made good progress. After several days of tedious work, they had managed to slice through the missile tubing and the missile itself. Now the MIRV housing lay on the ocean bottom, wires and tubing dangling from an uneven cut. It was a little over two meters wide and four meters long, and it looked vaguely like the severed head of a giant robot.

Today would be the day of truth. They would hook the cable to the MIRV housing and bring it back from its watery grave to the sunlit world.

In preparation for this crucial moment, they had done two practice lifts with pieces of scrap metal lying on the bottom. Every inch of the lift cable had been inspected twice. So had the crane.

The ROV cable, however, had not.

Jenkins took a deep breath and rubbed his hands together. “All right, here we go. Ready?”

“Ready,” replied Kang.

The dark water on the video screens gave way to images of the wrecked sub as the ROV closed in on its target. “I’m going to set her down in the debris field one meter in front of the MIRV housing,” Jenkins announced.

Cho felt his hands perspiring and put them in his pockets. Just a tug, that’s all he needed. If only the cable looping up from the ROV would catch for a moment—a slight snag on a rock or some wreckage, even a strong current. The cable would snap and the ROV would become a permanent part of the wreckage on the bottom.

A small cloud of silt flew up as Jenkins landed the ROV on the sea floor. It floated away, giving a clear view of the dark metal cylinder in front of them.

Kang moved the manipulator arm slowly out and pushed the lift cable underneath the MIRV housing. It was slow, painstaking work. Kang hunched over the controls and sweat began to bead on his forehead.

After half an hour of trying to get the cable in exactly the right position, he leaned back and stretched. His tattoos danced as the muscles writhed beneath his skin. “It is stuck. Please to move ROV to left side.”

Jenkins lifted the ROV off the bottom and flew it around the side of the missile section. The ROV was quite close to the side of the missile. With any luck, the cable would be pulled against the corner for an instant and—

The video screens all turned to static. Kang cursed in Korean and Jenkins shouted inarticulately.

Mr. Lee stepped forward. “What happened? Tell me!”

Jenkins’s head swiveled from side to side as he looked at different monitors and tried various controls. “We’ve lost contact with the ROV. It suddenly went dead.”

“What? How did this happen?”

Jenkins gave up and turned around. “I don’t know what to tell you. We’d better bring it back up.”

The four men went up to the deck and watched as the ROV’s crane reeled in meters of dripping cable. Then suddenly the cable ended in a frayed wisp of wire and plastic.

Jenkins and Kang cursed anew. Cho slammed his fist into his hand and exulted silently. Mr. Lee merely looked at the ragged end of the cable in silence. Then he expelled a sharp breath through his mouth and shook his head once. “Bring up the lift cable.”

Jenkins and Kang hurried to carry out the order. The crane came to life and the ship shifted slightly as the lift cable started coming up. Mr. Lee walked over to the railing and leaned over, his eyes intent on the cable coming out of the dark water. Cho joined him and the two men stared in silence as long minutes dragged past.

A shadow appeared in the depths. Cho held his breath. He could feel Mr. Lee’s arm beside him, taut and quivering.

A form slowly materialized in the water, growing more distinct as it came closer to the surface. It was a dark cylinder, about two meters in diameter and four meters long, hanging at an angle where it had snagged on the loop of lift cable.

Mr. Lee laughed and embraced Cho. “At last, at last! We hold victory in the palm of our hand!”