Arctic Gold

15

Zhemchuzhina Hotel Sochi, Russia 1712 hours, GMT + 3

LIA AND AKULININ TOUCHED down at Adler-Sochi International Airport in the early afternoon after an uneventful flight from London. They passed through customs with passports listing them as husband and wife, picked up their luggage in the baggage claim, and caught a cab for the long ride up to Sochi. The airport was located in Adler, just five miles from the Georgian border, but Sochi was almost fifteen miles to the northwest, along the E97 highway that ran along the Black Sea coast.

According to the legend provided by GCHQ, they were Mr. and Mrs. Darby, John and Lisa of Mayfair, on holiday to this rather posh resort region on the Black Sea.

They noticed quite a lot of construction on the hillsides south of the city. Their driver was the talkative sort, running on without stop about Sochi having been chosen as the site for the Winter Olympics in 2014. It was, he proclaimed in heavily accented Russian interspersed with even worse English, just the economic boost the city needed, and everyone was soon going to be rich. Lia studied the new construction with a more cynical eye and wondered how deep the Organizatsiya had burrowed into the local landscape.

They checked in at the front desk, argued a bit with the desk clerk over whether their reservation had been for smoking rather than nonsmoking, then went up to their room. As soon as the door was shut, Lia pulled what looked like a compact from her handbag and began walking around the room, studying the tiny LED readout as she passed the device along the walls, over the lamps and TV, across the head of the big king-sized bed, across the big mirror in its ornate frame over the dresser. “Lovely room, John,” she said in a bright voice. “I think the travel agency picked a good one this time.”

“Nice view of the ocean,” Akulinin said from the window. He, too, was carefully scanning the glass doors onto the balcony with something like a small PDA. They continued to exchange uninformative chitchat until they were reasonably sure that there were no hidden listening devices in the room. Their argument at the front desk had been designed to get the desk clerk to make a last-minute change, just in case foreign tourists were automatically dropped into a room wired for sound or video. If they’d found anything, they were prepared-by means of a dead cockroach sealed in a small plastic bottle-to demand yet another room change.

But their room appeared to be electronically, as well as physically, clean.

Of course, the bad old days of the Soviet regime were long gone and tourists were no longer the targets of paranoid suspicion and KGB surveillance. The new and capitalist Russia desperately needed foreign currency and was doing her best to promote a lively tourist trade. The chances were good that no one was spying on the two spies. At least, not here.

Still, many of the old ploys used by the KGB were still employed in the new Russia-especially where business people were concerned. The honey trap was an old favorite. The traveler might come back to his room one evening to find a lovely and willing young woman waiting for him in bed, complete with a story about how she’d bribed a maid to let her in just so she could meet him, or how the people with whom he was working had hired her for his pleasure, or how she’d accidentally ended up in the wrong room. Sound recordings and video footage would then be used to blackmail the traveler. If Russia was no longer as interested as she once was in political or military espionage, industrial espionage was still big business. It was amazing what a business traveler might reveal about a new technical process in order to keep a wife or a boss from seeing a certain compromising and decidedly X-rated video.

And the Organizatsiya was always on the lookout for useful information to sell to the highest bidder or for the payment of a few thousand euros or dollars from a horny and gullible mark. One reason Akulinin and Lia were here posing as a married couple was to make the two of them a less obvious target than the traditional lonely businessman.

“So is everything in there to your satisfaction?” Jeff Rockman’s voice said in Lia’s ear.

“I got weak positives off the wall outlets and the phone jack,” she said. “As usual.” Her detector picked up copper wiring as well as electronic circuits. “But I think we’re clear.”

“I’ve got nothing,” Akulinin said, stepping back inside from the balcony. “It really is a great view, though.”

“We’ll need you to put down your eyes so we can cover your room,” Rockman told them. “And you have a visitor coming up. I just gave him your room number.”

A knock sounded at the door.

Akulinin peered through the spy hole, then opened the door. James Llewellyn walked in.

“Good afternoon,” Llewellyn said with an affable grin. “How’s the old married couple, then?”

“Jet-lagged,” Lia replied. “And in no mood for games.”

“Understood.” He glanced around the room. “We’re secure?”

“Yes.”

“Capital.”

“As secure as we can be, anyway.”

“Yes, well, that’s what keeps the game interesting, don’t you think? You can never be sure.”

“What’s interesting,” Akulinin said with a grimace, “is waiting to hear if you guys ever recovered that tool kit. You said you had a team on it that night, but then we got hustled back to England so quickly we never heard what happened.”

“Ah,” Llewellyn said. “As it happens… no.” He set his laptop computer on a desk in one corner of the room and opened it. “But, actually, that’s a bit of good news. Hang on a tick. I think you’ll be interested in what I have here.” He began booting up the computer.

“They weren’t able to recover the damned thing and that’s good news?” Akulinin said. He looked bleak.

“He’s been afraid they’re going to take it out of his paycheck,” Lia put in.

“Yes, well, the thing is, we were able to track it for a time,” Llewellyn said. “Used a satellite to query the satcom’s imbedded GPS. We were able to plot its movements over the course of two days, from St. Petersburg to Moscow to someplace near Donetsk. The last time we got a signal from the unit, we think it was airborne and moving south.”

“Donetsk is more or less halfway between Moscow and Sochi,” Lia said. “You think it was on its way here?”

“A distinct possibility,” Llewellyn told them. “We’re now certain the gang that jumped you in St. Petersburg was with the Tambovs. Grigor Kotenko is a high-ranking Tambov chief, and he was closely involved in the beryllium sale in St. Pete. Those were probably his enforcers on the waterfront. He specializes in high-tech items, remember, and the black box alone from the AN/PSC-12 would be worth millions to the right buyer.”

“Tell me about it,” Akulinin said. “Rubens is going to have me shot when I get back to the States.”

“Only after he skins you alive,” Lia told him.

Llewellyn grinned. “Maybe they’ll just take it out of your pay. In any case, we couldn’t find the kit on the waterfront where you said you must have left it. The sensors you two left in the area showed the whole place was crawling with people for hours after you left, so it’s a fair bet they found it and looked inside. If they reported it to Kotenko, he would have wanted to see just what it was that had so unexpectedly fallen into his hands.”

Lia looked at Llewellyn. “So does that mean Kotenko is in Sochi now? I thought the dacha was closed except for a housekeeping staff.”

“We thought it was,” Llewellyn said. “But several days ago, we saw signs that the place was open for business. Here.” He typed a set of commands into the laptop, and a full-color photograph came up on the 17-inch screen, a shot apparently taken from a boat offshore. The camera angle looked up from the water, framing a large two-story villa on a hilltop. Snowcapped mountains-the Caucasus-rose behind, almost lost in a blue haze. The house, its walls and roof brightly colored in tropical aquas, reds, and yellows, looked deserted. He hit a key and a second photo opened up, this one taken from either a satellite or a high-flying aircraft, looking down on the same building. The grounds, the large deck, the balconies, all were deserted.

“Those first two are from a week ago,” Llewellyn said, pointing to the date and time stamps on the photos. “You can’t tell for sure from two photos, but our agents watching the place reported no activity at all, save for a gardener, a pool caretaker, and two security types. Then, three days ago, we got this.”

He brought up a third photo, again taken from overhead. This one showed two cars in the driveway at the front of the dacha, an open table umbrella on the poolside deck, and a number of human figures around the pool. Five security men were visible around the property’s perimeter, two of them with dogs on leads.

“My God,” Lia said, looking close. She hit a key several times, zooming in closer on the scene. “Is that an orgy?”

“Kotenko appears to have been, ah, entertaining some guests this past weekend,” Llewellyn said. “We’re checking our sources in Moscow, and going through some backlogged cell phone intercepts to be sure, but we think he’s brought in some VIPs from Gazprom. Probably for some high-level… I think you Yanks call it ‘wheeling and dealing’?”

“Looks like that’s not all they’re doing,” Akulinin said, studying the screen. “Damn. That does complicate things a bit.”

“Indeed. We were counting on you two having the place more or less to yourselves. But if Kotenko is in residence, he’ll have a small entourage with him. Bodyguards. Office assistants. Maids and butlers. Secretaries. And, from the look of it, girls from one of his brothels in town.”

“Yeah. Looks like it’s a hell of a party,” Akulinin said.

Llewellyn typed another entry, and a number of architectural drawings came up-blueprints on the dacha. “We got these from the company in Moscow that built the place,” he told them. “The same company made a number of alterations to the house after Kotenko bought it. Notice here… on the first floor, and here, in the basement directly below.”

“Looks like it’s wired for Internet,” Lia observed, studying the wiring schematics. “And what’s all this in the basement? Looks like they added structural reinforcement.”

“Right the first time. They reinforced the floor, there, with load-bearing beams.”

“A safe?”

“That’s a good bet, Lia. Something damned heavy, anyway. We think this area on the first floor is Kotenko’s office… and that eight years ago he installed a heavy floor safe, right here.”

Lia nodded. “So… if we can’t sneak in without being seen, we might make it look like a burglary.”

“That was our thought,” Llewellyn said. “I brought some specialist tools for you from St. Petersburg.”

“Wait a second,” Akulinin said. “You guys are jumping way ahead of me here. A burglary? I thought this was just a quick in-and-out to plant bugs.”

“Ideally,” Lia told him, “we could sneak past a couple of security guards, gain entrance to the building, plant our surveillance devices, and slip out again and no one would ever know we’d even been there.”

“Right,” Llewellyn said. “But with that many people on the property, it’s more likely that you’ll be spotted.”

“Exactly. If we pretend to be burglars, though, they might not think to look for bugs afterward. At least, not the kind of bugs we’ll be leaving.”

“And if you’re burglars,” Llewellyn added, “the safe, obviously, becomes your target.”

Lia watched realization unfold behind Akulinin’s eyes. “Ah. Got it,” he said. “If Kotenko has the satcom unit, there’s a good chance that he’ll have it in that safe. We might be able to get it back after all.” Akulinin pumped his arm happily. “Yeah! The new kid gets a chance to redeem himself! I can live with that.”

“I’d still rather go in without a crowd on the premises,” Lia told Llewellyn. “Any chance we could just kick back and wait for a few days, maybe hope Kotenko goes back to St. Petersburg?”

“No, Lia,” Llewellyn said. “Mr. Rubens was most insistent. Something big is happening either in Siberia or up in the Arctic. He wants to be able to read Kotenko’s mail as quickly as possible.”

“We should have done this as soon as we heard Kotenko was behind the beryllium shipment,” she said. She was thinking that she and Akulinin might have had a better command of the situation in St. Petersburg if there’d been some hard intelligence from Kotenko’s dacha before they’d inserted.

“Yes, well, that was on the to-do list, don’t you know. But it wasn’t quite so urgent then.”

“That’s the government for you,” Akulinin pointed out. “Hurry up and wait… and then you find they needed it done yesterday.”

“So when do we go in?” Lia asked.

“Some of our local assets are still getting into place,” Llewellyn said, “and we need to coordinate with your Puzzle Palace. Besides, if you’re jet-lagged, a good night’s sleep would be just the thing, eh?”

“Sounds heavenly,” Lia said.

“Tomorrow night then?” Akulinin asked.

“Tomorrow night,” Llewellyn agreed. His fingers clattered over the laptop’s keyboard again, bringing up more photographs and diagrams. “Now, let me show you what we’ve worked out…”

Beaufort Sea 75° 18' N, 129° 21' W 1732 hours, GMT-7

A shadow, whale-lean and 560 feet long, moved through the eternal night of the abyss, six hundred feet beneath a ceiling of solid ice, invisible and silent.

The Ohio had remained submerged as she threaded her way through the Parry Channel south of the barren Queen Elizabeth Islands, emerging at last in the iced-over deeps of the Beaufort Sea. Dean followed the vessel’s progress with interest in the big plot board at the aft end of the control room, where an enlisted watchstander marked the Ohio’s position each hour, connecting the most recent navigational waypoint with the last.

They were now some 820 miles from NOAA Arctic Meteorological Station Bravo, about twenty-eight hours at their current speed. Officially, an Ohio missile boat had a maximum speed of twenty knots; in fact, her actual speed was closer to twenty-five, and Dean was pretty sure she could manage even better than that in a hell-bent-for-leather emergency dash.

Dean was in the Ohio’s tiny wardroom, seated at the table with Captain Eric Grenville, Lieutenant Commander Hartwell, and a third man in a black acrylic pullover and no rank insignia. The third man had been introduced simply as Lieutenant Taylor. Mugs of coffee, each adorned with the Ohio’s logo, rested on the table before them.

“We should be able to maintain flank speed for most of the way,” Captain Grenville told Dean, “if we don’t run into major ice problems.”

“What would be a major ice problem, sir?” Dean asked.

“Pressure ridges,” Grenville told him. “Places where ice bangs together and creates a kind of mountain range, but sticking down underwater, instead of up in the air. That doesn’t look very likely at the moment, and now that we’re clear of the continental shelf, we can stay deep enough to avoid anything that’s likely to show up.”

Hartwell took a sip from his mug, then added, “We’ve been coming to dead slow every so often to get a good sonar picture. Sonar’s pretty useless above fifteen knots or so. Too much noise. So we dash along at flank, stop, listen, then dash some more. And we’ll need to slow down for the final approach, of course.”

“So they don’t hear us coming?” Dean suggested.

“Exactly,” Grenville said, nodding. “Intelligence says there may be Russian subs operating up there. We’d rather our appearance be a surprise.”

That was news to Dean, but then, the National Security Agency wasn’t usually concerned with Russian naval movements unless they showed up on SIGINT intercepts. Word on the arrival of Russian submarines had probably reached the Ohio via naval intelligence, the DIA, or, just possibly, the CIA.

Dean sipped his coffee. True to the traditions of the submarine service, the stuff was pretty good. “Will Russian subs pose a problem for your operation, Lieutenant?” he asked.

Taylor gave a thin smile. “I don’t think so.”

“I was wondering if I could come along.”

Taylor exchanged a quick glance with Grenville. “Negative. My people know how to work with one another. As a team.”

“So do the Marines, Lieutenant.”

Taylor’s hard expression barely changed. “You’re a Marine?”

“I was. In my misspent youth.”

“Still not a good idea, sir.”

From the hard edge to Taylor’s voice, Dean knew that this was one argument he would not win.

Although no one had told him specifically, he was reasonably certain that Taylor commanded a platoon of Navy SEALs. The Ohio SSGN conversion had specifically allowed the upgraded boats to carry up to sixty SEALs or other special ops forces, but on this mission SEALs were by far the most likely passengers. SEALs-the acronym stood for the three realms in which they operated, SEa, Air, and Land-were the Navy’s premier commando force. Their training was unbelievably rugged, and according to some, they were the toughest warriors on the planet.

Dean held a deep respect for the SEALs but couldn’t resist a good-natured jibe. “When I come ashore at that base,” he told Taylor, “I do not want to see one of your damned signs waiting for me.”

The SEAL Teams had evolved out of the old Navy UDTs, the Underwater Demolition Teams, which had been born in the Pacific in World War II. The Marines had prided themselves at always being the first ashore, but on island after island they would hit the beach only to find hand-lettered signs upright in the sand identifying a UDT recon element that had slipped ashore the night before. It was a tradition that had continued all the way through to Vietnam.

Taylor actually smiled. Dean hadn’t been sure that the hard-faced man could smile. “Maybe you shouldn’t have told us you were a jarhead,” he said. “When you were just another spook, we didn’t know what to make of you.”

The Teams, Dean remembered, had long maintained a tradition of close work with the CIA, but also preferred to develop their own local intelligence networks where possible. The Teams were close-knit and band-of-brothers tight and tended not to play well with others.

“His ID says he’s CIA,” Grenville said. “Maybe we should just leave it at that.”

Dean said nothing. NSA operatives rarely admitted that they were from the No-Such-Agency when they were in the field, even to friends and allies.

“What exactly is your mission here, Mr. Dean?” Hartwell wanted to know.

Dean reached into the pocket of the dungaree shirt he’d been given to wear when he’d come aboard, and extracted a photograph laminated in clear plastic. He handed it to Grenville.

“Nasty scar,” Grenville said as he looked at the man in the photo. He passed it to Taylor.

“Sergei Braslov,” Dean told them. “Also goes by the name ‘Johann Ernst.’ Used to be GRU. Now he may be working with Russian State Security, but he’s also working for the Russian mob. He may be at the Russian base up here, and he may be involved in whatever happened to our people at the NOAA ice station. What we do know, beyond a doubt, is that he was behind the murder of another government operative, someone who was also a friend of mine.”

Taylor nodded, and his eye met Dean’s for just a moment. He knows, Dean thought. Comrades-at-arms, and all of that. Or maybe he just knows what it’s like to lose a buddy.

“If you find Braslov,” Dean continued, addressing Taylor, “we want him alive for interrogation. The Russian mafia is putting together something pretty big. We think they’re trying to corner the whole Russian oil production network. Braslov may be able to give us some insight on that.”

“Okay. So the mafia takes over Russian oil production,” Hartwell said. “So what? No skin off our noses, right? What’s the big deal?”

“It is a big deal,” Dean told him. “Remember how gas prices soared in ’08? They will again, especially if the Russians start playing games with the market. Gas prices at five dollars a gallon. Higher in Europe. High oil prices mean the cost of everything goes up. High prices mean more unrest, turnovers in governments, even revolutions.

“The Russian mob has been running their economy into the ground for twenty years. If they do the same thing to the Russian oil industry, it will have global repercussions. Bad ones. Half of Europe depends on Moscow for oil and natural gas. If Russian production goes under, it will be devastating.

“And Washington is afraid they’re going to try to grab half of the Arctic Ocean, probably so that they can begin high-volume oil and gas exploitation up here. We know Canada and Denmark will fight their Lomonsov Ridge claim. A war over oil rights is going to shake the world market, too, maybe bring on a general economic collapse.”

Taylor slid the photograph back across the table to Dean. “And finding this one guy is going to stop all of that?”

“Maybe not. But he just might have the key to figuring out what the Russians are really up to.”

Grenville looked thoughtful, then stood and walked around behind the table to a wall safe. He punched several numbers in on the digital keypad, pulled open the door, and extracted a thick manila folder marked “Secret.”

“Your home office transmitted your clearance to see this stuff,” he told Dean, selecting several laser-printer color copies and pulling them out of the folder. He grinned. “Turns out your security clearance is better than mine. Have you seen these yet? Courtesy of the NRO.”

The first print showed three large ships in the ice, a shot obviously taken from an oblique angle from high overhead. Black water was clearly visible around each vessel, and Dean could see disturbances in the water caused by station-keeping thrusters.

The next two zeroed in on one of the ships, massive and red-hulled. One showed the entire length of the ship from her starboard side, from far enough back that the entire vessel was visible, sitting in a large hole of black water surrounded by ice. She had a massive, blocklike forward superstructure and a large, open deck aft. Her name, in Cyrillic letters, was easily legible on her raised prow-Akademik Petr Lebedev.

“A civilian scientific research ship, sixty-six hundred tons,” Grenville said. “Launched in 1989, the second in her class. Designed for physical oceanography and ocean floor sampling. See that mast just forward of the stack, like an oil derrick? Used for drilling core samples.”

The next photo was a close-up, focusing on the Lebedev’s afterdeck. Individual crewmen could be seen, bundled up against the cold as they worked around a stack of long, slender tubes, each around thirty feet long, Dean guessed. One of the tubes hung off an A-frame over the stern, apparently caught as it was being lowered into the ice-free water next to the ship. A second tube was being lifted clear of the deck by one of five starboard-side cranes. Dean could even make out the face of one man who appeared to be in charge; he had his arms up, his gloved hands twisted in an obvious “come on, keep coming” gesture as he directed the operation.

More photos showed other details of a large-scale Arctic expedition-close-ups of the other two ships, an ice breaker and a cargo vessel-as well as a helicopter, small prefab structures on the ice, and piles of supplies and heavy equipment. Time and date stamps on each of the printouts indicated they’d been taken three days before in two passes about ninety minutes apart.

The NRO, or National Reconnaissance Office, was one of America’s sixteen separate intelligence agencies and was responsible for IMINT, or imagery intelligence-photographs shot by spy satellites, in other words. Headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, it was officially part of the Defense Department, but was staffed by employees from both the NSA and the CIA, as well as by military personnel and civilian contractors.

“No,” Dean said. “I hadn’t seen these.” That much was true, though Rubens had told him about the Russian base on the ice during his long-distance briefing at Menwith Hill.

“What’s the matter?” Hartwell said with a chuckle. “Don’t you guys talk to one another?”

“You’d be surprised what we don’t even tell ourselves,” Dean replied. He studied the photo of the activity on the Lebedev’s afterdeck more closely. “What are they doing? Pulling core samples?”

“According to the message transmitted with these photos,” Grenville told him, “the pipes appear to be the business end of an oil-drilling rig. However, there’s no sign of a derrick or platform, and the water at that point is over two thousand meters deep. So the whole thing is pretty much a mystery.”

“You can see that they’re stringing those sections of pipe together and feeding it over the transom,” he said. “The pipe sections are too thin to be a seabed pipeline.”

“I was wondering if it was a pipeline myself,” Grenville said. “But the ship isn’t moving, so she’s not paying it out astern. Besides, the water is pretty deep at that spot-almost half a mile. A regular pipeline would have to be a lot thicker, with lots of insulation to keep the oil warm enough to flow.” He shook his head. “It would also need some hellaciously big pumps, and we’re not seeing anything like that.”

“It might also be a natural gas well,” Dean said, “but that would still require a derrick.” He remembered what Lia had told him a few nights ago about the movement of the ice. “There’s something here that’s just not making sense.”

“Well, we should be at the NOAA station by twenty-two hundred hours tomorrow,” Grenville said. “We’ll surface there… and maybe then we can start getting some answers.”

Dean nodded. “You’re not expecting any problem with breaking through the ice?”

Grenville smiled and shook his head. “Believe me, the ice is the least of our worries. The stuff’s so thin we won’t even need to look for a lead.”

“I heard it was two or three yards thick.”

“Normally, yeah. But the ice cap has been unusually thin for, oh, eight or ten years now. The people preaching global warming aren’t just blowing smoke. In August of 2007, over half of the usual summer ice cap was just… gone. The Beaufort Sea, the Chukchi Sea, and the East Siberian Seam all the way to well beyond the North Pole, the whole damned region was completely ice free. First time that’s ever happened since we started paying attention to the Arctic.”

“But that’s where they built the NOAA station.”

“Right. The sea froze over again the next winter, of course. Right now, though, it’s only maybe two feet at the thickest, and with lots of melt holes. The climate guys think even more of the ice cap will vanish this summer. One reason they put Bravo where they did was to monitor the summer breakup of the ice.”

Dean thought about the Greenpeace kids and their movie. That would have been some good documentary footage on global warming… shot as the ice cracked open beneath them.

“Sounds like the ice cap is melting faster than even the doomsayers are claiming.”

“The Canadians are actively expanding their fleet,” Hartwell put in. “Eight new patrol vessels just so they can safeguard maritime traffic going through the Northwest Passage. And they’re building a big new naval base to support them.”

The Northwest Passage, of course, had been a fabled ice-free sea-lane from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the object of hundreds of exploratory attempts as far back as the 1500s and continuing through the Arctic explorations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That passage had been a myth… but as the Arctic ice cap dwindled year by year, the myth had come closer and closer to becoming a year-round reality. The same was true for the Siberian passage from Europe to the Far East by way of the Siberian sea-lanes.

An ice-free Arctic might one day prove to be a boon to global trade… if not for the local ecosystems.

Dean thought for a moment about the man Tommy Karr had been protecting. What was his name? Spencer. Yeah.

That the Arctic ice was vanishing was undeniable. Was human activity to blame, however, or was it part of an ongoing and completely natural cycle, as Spencer claimed? The answer might never be known with certainty… and so far as Dean was concerned, the answer might not even matter. The Arctic was on its way to becoming an ice-free ocean, one way or another, and either way, humans would have to learn to live with the result.

The Russians, apparently, were trying to get a jump on the rest of the world’s population, however, by staking out their ownership boundaries early. If they could enforce their claim to half of the newly exposed ocean at the top of the world, they would have clear access to an incredible bounty of oil and natural gas-enough to challenge the long-standing near monopoly of the sheiks and strongmen of the Middle East.

Enough to replace them as a global source of petroleum as the Middle East reserves inevitably dwindled…

“So what are you going up there for, Captain?” Dean asked Grenville.

“Our orders are, first, to ensure the safety of distressed American citizens in the area and, second, to assert our rights to passage through international waters.”

“Any sign of those distressed Americans?”

“No. But there’s been helicopter activity near those Russian ships… and nothing between the ships and the nearest Russian ports. Intelligence thinks they’re being held on the Lebedev.”

“Which is where you and your men come in, I suspect,” Dean told Taylor.

“That’s why we’re here,” the SEAL said.

But Dean found the man’s grave confidence somehow disturbing.

As a former Marine, Dean was no stranger to combat; while war was never a good option, sometimes it was the best of a raft of genuinely bad possibilities. As a Marine scout/sniper he’d accepted the intensely personal issue of killing a particular individual rather than randomly, justifying what amounted to murder with the knowledge that he was saving the lives of brother Marines.

But a global war over the oil and gas hidden beneath the melting ice would serve no one… except, possibly…

The jokers in this game were the leaders of the Russian mafia, and that was what made things so dangerous. They didn’t care whether there was a war or not. In fact, a good old-fashioned war, even a limited naval engagement, might well present them with unparalleled opportunities to make more money. They might broker deals with foreign companies, invest in military-based industries, control the financial institutions bankrolling military construction, hoard reserves of vital strategic materials like… oil.

The insight stunned him momentarily. Everyone so far had been assuming that the Organizatsiya was simply carrying out business as usual, a kind of neocapitalism gone wild. But what if the Russian mafia or even just a few of its key leaders were actively attempting to start a war, operating on the theory that war is always good for business?

Dean wondered if the idea had occurred to Rubens already, and wanted to discuss the idea with him. Unfortunately, Dean’s communications implant couldn’t find a satellite on board a Navy sub six hundred feet beneath the polar ice. He would have to wait until they surfaced, then hope he could get a clear channel.

He thought the idea important enough, however, that he decided to ask if he could borrow a computer in order to write a full report, to be broadcast back to Fort Meade as soon as the Ohio surfaced.

So far, the rest of the world-including America’s intelligence community-had been two steps behind the unseen enemy. As with al-Qaeda, there’d been a tendency here to think of that enemy as a government, with a government’s concerns, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities. When that enemy instead was, like al-Qaeda, a criminal network, the problem became infinitely more difficult.

And infinitely more deadly as well.