Arctic Gold

PROLOGUE

Latitude 90° N 1445 hours

IT WAS, FEODOR GOLYTSIN THOUGHT, like touching down on the surface of another planet.

“Ostorojna!” Captain Third Rank Dmitri Kurchakov warned. “Careful! Reduce speed of descent!”

“Da, Kepitan,” the helmsman replied.

“Vasily. Give me a readout on the depth below keel.”

“Deseet’ metrov, Kepitan,” the diving officer replied. Ten meters.

Golytsin stooped to peer through the thick quartz window into the alien world beyond. Another planet, yes… a very dark planet. Blacker than the surface of far Pluto, for there, at least, there was a sun, if one shrunken and wan. Here there was nothing save the luminescence of the abyssal fauna, banished now by the light the submarine brought with her from above.

A dark planet, and a deadly one. At a depth of just over forty-two hundred meters, the pressure bearing down on each and every square centimeter of Nomer Chiteereh’s outer nickel-steel hull was almost two tons.

Muck swirled up off the bottom by the minisub’s side thrusters danced in the harsh white glare of the forward lights, like drifting stars. Briefly, something like a worm, half a meter long and fringed with myriad legs or swimmerets, twisted through the unaccustomed light, casting bizarre and writhing shadows within the cold and watery haze.

Astonishing. Even here, four thousand meters beneath the ice, within this frigid eternal night, there was life.

The submarine was a new, experimental, and highly secret military model with the less-than-glamorous name of Nomer Chiteereh, “Number Four.” Twenty-nine meters long and with a displacement of 150 tons, Nomer Chiteereh could reach depths of six thousand meters and could stay submerged for several days. A pair of external robotic arms operated from the forward observer’s seat gave the tiny vessel considerable dexterity beneath the glare of her external lights. She could be handled by a crew of four, but there was space in the cramped and cold-sweating pressure hull compartment for four additional passengers… or a squad of elite Spetsnaz in the cargo bay aft.

Today, however, there was only Golytsin.

The submersible’s sonar chirped, with ringing echoes. The diving officer read off the depth beneath the keel as they continued to descend, an almost mournful litany. “Vaseem metrov… sem… shest’ metrov…”

“I see the bottom, Kepiten,” the helmsman reported.

Side by side, heads nearly touching, Golytsin and Kurchakov leaned forward and peered down through the second of the forward view ports. “There!” the normally impassive Kurchakov said. He sounded uncharacteristically excited. A dour and taciturn man by nature, he now seemed almost boyish.

White light glared against the blackness, highlighted by drifting bits of organic debris. The bottom appeared disappointingly flat and featureless, an endless gray desert of fine silt and decayed plankton.

Mingled with the chirp of the sonar, the litany continued. “Chiteereh… tree… dvah…”

“Halt descent!” Kurchakov ordered. “Maintain position!”

The submarine’s side thrusters whined more loudly, gentling the beast to an awkward hover. The sharp increase in the thruster wash kicked up additional billowing clouds of fine silt from the bottom beneath the sub’s keel, filling the night with brightly illuminated particles. A blizzard, Golytsin thought. A winter squall such as he’d once known in the St. Petersburg -no, the Leningrad -of his childhood.

“So where is our flag?” Golytsin asked, peering into the murk as it gently subsided. As he leaned forward, the light reflecting back from outside illuminated the web of blue lines etched into his arm and the back of his hand.

Kurchakov didn’t reply at first. He was staring at Golytsin’s tattoos. Then Kurchakov looked away and shrugged. “It could be anywhere, just a few meters away, beyond the edge of the light, and we’d miss it,” he said. “Don’t worry. We will drop another.”

“No need, sir,” the diving officer reported. “I have it on sonar. Bearing one-one-nine… range thirty-seven meters.”

“Helm. Take us there. Slow ahead.”

“Da, Kepitan.”

In August of 2007, a pair of Russian Mir deep submersibles had reached this, the Arctic seabed at the North Pole. They’d taken readings, collected samples of the sea floor, and planted a large, rustproof titanium flag.

Since then, the Mirs had returned several times, taking further readings for the PP Shirshov Institute of Oceanology and extending Mother Russia’s claim in this freezing wasteland. And today the Mirs were back, shepherding the much larger and more sinister Nomer Chiteereh to the cold, black depths of the Amundsen Plain.

An apparition emerged from the shadows beyond the light, broad rectangular, held above the muck by weights deeply imbedded in the sediment. As Nomer Chiteereh drifted forward, the colors emerged as well… the white, blue, and red horizontal bars of the Russian Federation.

“The Pole,” Golytsin breathed. “The real Pole.”

Not the imaginary point on the ever-drifting, ever-changing pack of ice four kilometers overhead, but the actual pole of the planet, on the seabed 4,261 meters beneath the surface.

A point now claimed by Moscow as a portion of the Eurasian landmass and part of the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation.

A point, Golytsin thought, that would very soon return the Rodina, Mother Russia, to greatness.