Arctic Gold

18

USGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 0915 hours, GMT-12

DEAN SAT AT THE WARDROOM table, staring into the screen on his handheld PDA. Rubens’ lined face stared back out at him. “I know, Mr. Dean,” Rubens was saying. “But the President was most insistent. We treat this as a terrorist hostage situation.”

Captain Grenville had let Dean use the wardroom for his communications session with Fort Meade. The Ohio had shifted position some seventy miles to the north of Ice Station Bear, taking her closer to the Russian ships parked in the ice. An hour ago she’d surfaced in a polynya, rising just enough to extend the sub’s communications mast and establish a link with one of the National Security Agency’s dedicated comsats. The image on Dean’s handheld tended to fuzz and break up at times-atmospherics were still playing hell with RF signals, and the satellite was quite close to the horizon-but at least there was nothing on the horizon to block the signal completely.

“But suppose the hostages aren’t there any longer?” Dean said. “Suppose they’ve been moved to the mainland?”

“Fourteen, fifteen people, plus their guards, would need a fairly large transport,” Rubens told him. “Something the size of a Hip at least.”

“Hip” was the NATO designation for the Russian Mi-8 helicopter, an old design going back to the early 1960s, but still common both throughout the Russian Federation and with numerous Russian military export customers.

“And there’s one of those operating off the Lebedev,” Dean said, nodding.

“Right. But satellite reconnaissance has picked up no air traffic at all between the Russian base and the mainland. It’s nine hundred miles at least to the nearest land base; that’s a flight time of six and a half hours for a chopper… and an Mi-8 would require at least two refuelings en route. It doesn’t have air-to-air fueling capabilities, so it would have to land on ships with helipads. We have some holes in our satellite coverage up there, but none big enough that we wouldn’t have seen an operation of that size. If the Russians had moved our people to the mainland, we’d have spotted it.”

Dean didn’t have the same faith in high-tech magic that Rubens did, but he was willing to accept that Desk Three was satisfied that the Americans were still at the Russian ice base. But he could see a lot of problems blocking any attempt to get them out.

“Is there any way of imaging those ships to get an idea of where our people might be held?”

We’ve been collecting a lot of satellite recon data,” Rubens told him, “especially from the IRSAT series. We’ve been building up a coherent picture over the past couple of days. Here…”

The image on Dean’s handheld screen changed from Rubens’ face to a photograph of the Lebedev, taken from overhead and to one side. The picture then changed, becoming fuzzy, green, and somewhat translucent, as the ice and water around the vessel turned black and certain parts of the ship, her engine rooms in particular, glowed in mingled tones of white, yellow, and pale green. A number of light green dots were scattered in irregular clumps through the ship.

“Infrared imagery,” Rubens said. “Heat. IRSAT is sensitive enough to pick up the heat radiated by a living human body, even behind walls. The detector’s not sensitive enough to pick up warm bodies on the lower decks, but the walls of the superstructure are pretty thin. We’re picking up sixty human signatures here.”

“That’s less than half of the Lebedev’s complement.”

“Correct. But we can see where people are congregating in the superstructure. The bridge. Berthing quarters. Mess room. And here…” A red disk winked on, highlighting a tight clump of green dots near the aft end of the superstructure. “And here. The supply lockers.”

“Interesting.”

“We count sixteen human-sized heat sources in this one area. Our ship experts believe these would have been stores lockers, which are empty now, after months at sea. Good places to quarter a large number of supernumeraries.”

“Hostages, you mean,” Dean said. “And their guards. Okay. I’ll buy it.”

“You’ll need to use that special equipment to try to confirm their location,” Rubens told him as the image was replaced once more by his face. “I’ve already spoken with Lieutenant Taylor. You will accompany the SEALs on board the ship. Just try to stay out of their way. Let them do their business.”

Dean groaned inwardly, however. No military commander liked being micromanaged, and none liked it when spooks, no matter how high up they were on the org chart, told them they had to drag along unwanted baggage. He kept his feelings to himself, however, and simply nodded at the handheld’s optical pickup. “Of course.”

“We’ve had a breakthrough, of sorts, thanks to Lia and the new man, Akulinin.”

“Their op went okay then?”

“Well enough.” Something about Rubens’ expression on the tiny screen told Sean it hadn’t been as simple as that. “They’re both okay. They made it through to the Georgian border, then to Turkey. They’re still in Ankara, waiting for a flight back to the U.S.”

“I’m glad to hear it. What did they find?”

“The three ships up there in the ice are part of an operation called Deep Well, or GK- 1,” Rubens told him. “It’s a new and experimental drilling process for oil.”

“Pretty much what we thought, then.”

“Yeah. The unexpected part is the drilling platform.”

“They’re using the ship, right? The Lebedev?”

“No. Or, rather, not directly. The drilling platform is underwater.”

“So. Literally ‘Deep Well.’ How the hell did they pull that off?”

“Lia found a report on Kotenko’s computer that let us piece things together.”

The screen cut to a series of schematic views, plans and elevations of something that looked more or less like a conventional ship with a slender midships section between much larger bow and stern sections. Dean was strongly reminded of the FLIP, or Floating Instrument Platform, an odd-looking vessel used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography since the 1960s. Like FLIP, the Russian undersea oil platform appeared to be designed with ballast tanks that let it rotate ninety degrees into a vertical position, bow high. It could then be anchored by cables to piers sunken at the planned drill site, and then, unlike with FLIP, ballast and trim tanks could submerge the structure to any desired depth, all the way down to three thousand feet. The drilling rig ran down the length of the vessel, from bow to stern; feeder tubes could be raised to the surface on flotation buoys to take on air if necessary, though he saw provisions in the blueprints for desalinization plants to make fresh water, and hydrolysis units to break oxygen out of seawater. Other tubes could be raised in order to pump oil or natural gas up to a waiting tanker.

“GK-1 is a prototype,” Rubens continued, “a test bed for new technology and proof-of-concept. The bugs Lia planted in Sochi have led us to a Houston company called Wildcat Technologies.” More schematics appeared of a design identical to the Russian structure. “They call the thing Deepsea. It’s an oil rig anchored to the sea floor at a depth of anything from a few hundred feet to half a mile down. Teleoperated robots and something like the Canadian arm used on the Space Shuttle let them take drill segments passed down from a ship on the surface, piece them together one after another, and add them to the drill train.”

Dean studied the schematics for a moment. “So… it doesn’t need anything at the surface at all? The whole thing’s entirely underwater?”

“Obviously, once the structure’s in place, it needs to be serviced by ships on the surface. During the drilling operation, a vessel like the Lebedev lowers the drill sections down to the rig, but once the well is producing, the design allows supply ships to come and go without needing to shut down the operation between visits. A relatively small crew lives on board the submerged rig. Docking ports here… and here allow miniature submarines to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the surface. The whole thing can be self-sufficient for a couple of months at a time, maybe longer.”

“Like one of our nuclear missile subs,” Dean said. “They can stay submerged for months. I don’t see any engines, though.”

“The structure is designed to be towed into place. No engines, except for station-keeping thrusters. Oil or natural gas brought up from the sea floor is pumped into large collapsible bladders secured to the hull until they can be transferred to a tanker. The bladders increase the structure’s buoyancy as they fill, of course, but that’s counteracted by progressively flooding onboard ballast tanks.”

“So the whole drill rig can’t be affected by waves or storms, and they can carry out long-term drilling operations underneath the ice.” Dean nodded. “Slick.”

“Exactly. Icebreakers give access from the surface when they need to send down supplies, or to fill a tanker. When a well gives out, they just attach guide cables from above, release the anchor cables below, and float the structure up to a hole cut in the surface ice, where it’s righted. Then they tow the whole thing to a new location.”

“So what’s the payoff?” Dean asked. “It sounds expensive.”

“It is. The big oil companies have been using semi-submersible rigs since the 1960s, using ballast tanks to partially sink the rig, but this idea required a lot of new technology. The project was initiated ten years ago, with the idea of developing an oil platform immune to storms.”

That made sense, Dean thought. There’d been several nightmarish accidents when storms had toppled conventional oil rigs on the surface. He remembered reading about one, the Ocean Ranger, a drilling platform that had sunk in a storm in the North Atlantic in 1982, killing all eighty-four people on board.

“There’s also a considerable public relations bonus if it works,” Rubens went on. “Environmentalist groups have been targeting visible drilling operations off of Los Angeles, and in the Texas gulf. If the drill platforms are out of sight, they’re out of mind. That was the idea, anyway.

“But the real advantage, of course, would be for drilling underneath the Arctic ice cap. A couple of the global oil giants have been working on the technology for some time, now. They’ve known for years that the North Slope fields extend pretty way out into the Arctic basin. They just weren’t sure how far, or how extensive they might be. The Russians have been doing exploratory drilling up there for at least fifteen years now. According to the data Lia found on Kotenko’s computer, it’s a bonanza.”

“You said this is an American design?” Dean asked. “Did the Russians buy it, or did they steal it?”

“We’re… investigating that. We’ve come across an interesting tidbit. One of the Greenpeace people at Ice Station Bear used to be a mid-level manager at Wildcat Technologies.” A new image came up onscreen, a dark-haired, bearded man with a worried look on his face. “Harry Benford. According to some of the intelligence we developed in Solchi, he evidently was working for the Russians. He might have provided them with the Deepsea engineering specs.”

“Something’s not right here,” Dean said. “When I was at the ice station, we found that little one-channel radio receiver in the bunk belonging to either Steven Moore or Randy Haines. Seems like it’s pushing things a bit to assume that there were two Russian spies at the base.”

“I agree. It would have been easy enough for Benford to plant the radio in another bunk, especially in all of the confusion when the Russians arrived at the base. Of course, it’s also possible that Wildcat was cutting a backroom deal with Moscow.”

“Oh?”

“We’ve been doing some checking. Wildcat is in deep financial trouble right now. The company put a lot of money into R and D for this thing, but the oil companies that might have purchased Deepsea are holding off on investing in the new technology.”

“God. Why? This looks like a really decent idea.”

“Because it is so damned expensive. Because a lot of the technology is still unproven. And the way things are going with the Arctic environment, it may be they just need to wait a few years for all of the ice up there to melt. Then they could build cheaper, traditional ocean-rig platforms.”

But the Russians, Dean thought, might not want to wait for that to happen.

“Anyway,” Rubens went on, “there are laws that would block the transfer of some of this technology to another country. The Justice Department will be investigating to see if any of those laws were broken by Wildcat… or if this is simply a case of simple industrial espionage.”

“I see.” Dean considered the situation for a moment. “So we’re going to take them down.”

He didn’t like this. It was inevitable, perhaps, that as oil reserves dwindled around the world, as war continued to wrack the Middle East, as the demand for oil increased, those countries dependent on petroleum for economic and political stability would begin to squabble among themselves over what was left. It was a depressingly Malthusian scenario.

“Just so you know, Dean,” Rubens said, “this is not about oil.”

Damn. Sometimes Dean swore that Rubens could read minds. “No, sir. I didn’t say it was.” Not out loud, at any rate.

“Espionage aside,” Rubens continued, “it’s the President’s assumption that the Russians have a perfect right to drill for oil up here. That’s not the issue. They do not have the right to hold American citizens hostage, to take over American science stations, or to claim half of the Arctic Ocean as their own personal backyard.”

“I understand, sir.”

“And they especially don’t have the right to kill or capture my people.”

That, of course, was the telling point-especially to a former Marine. Presidents and politicians might take their countries into war for the most selfish, shortsighted, vainglorious, or otherwise idiotic of reasons… but the men on the front lines didn’t fight for political causes. Not really. They fought for their buddies, the other grunts in the trenches with them. That had most likely been a basic principle of war even before Narmer united Egypt.

“If Braslov’s up here, I’ll find him,” Dean said.

“Good. Alive. I’ll also want you to keep an eye on the people the SEALs rescue, make sure they all get out okay. Two of them are intelligence operatives, remember-Yeats and McMillan-and McMillan is one of ours.”

“Yes, sir.”

“According to the diplomatic communiqué, two of the hostages are injured, one of them seriously.”

“Jesus. What happened?”

“No details yet, but the Russians reportedly have both of them in the hospital facility on board one of the ships. They also have a body.”

“Of who?”

“According to the Russians, the dead guy is Kenneth Richardson. He was the leader of the Greenpeace film crew at the NOAA ice station. They say the NOAA CO shot him twice, and that another Greenpeace guy smacked the CO in the face with an iron bar.”

“That’s the badly injured man?”

“Commander Larson, yes.”

“And the guy who hit him?”

Rubens’ mouth twitched in an almost smile. “Harry Benford.”

“Well, well, well. The possible spy.”

“Benford is the other man. Apparently, Larson shot him in the arm before Benford was able to hit Larson.”

“And if Benford was working for the Russians, maybe he set the whole thing up.”

“That is the belief of the analysts we have working on the intelligence developed by Miss DeFrancesca and Mr. Akulinin,” Rubens said. “The Russians were looking for an excuse to move in and grab the NOAA station. Quite possibly, they’d already realized that we were spying on their base from one of our met stations nearby. A murder is reported-a murder supposedly committed by the leader of the scientific expedition, no less-and the Russians, claiming that region as their legal jurisdiction anyway, move in. They probably hope to use the incident in support of their official claim to the Arctic basin.”

“It sounds pretty tangled.”

“It is. And untangling it will not be your job, for which you can be duly thankful. But you’re going to have a damned full plate. Whatever goes down, I want you to make sure we have Braslov alive. If they’ve separated our intelligence operators from the rest, I want them found and freed. Whatever it takes.”

“Yes, sir.” No man left behind.

“And remind the SEAL platoon commander that there are two wounded men and a body, probably in the ship’s sick bay. We’ll need at least the wounded men for questioning, if we’re to make sense of this mess.”

A knock sounded on the wardroom door. “Mr. Dean?” a very young voice called from the other side. “The skipper says for you to get ready for the shore party. They’re getting ready to go.”

“I’ll be right there,” Dean called back. He looked at Rubens’ image again. “It’s time for me to go, sir.”

“Right. Good luck, Dean,” Rubens said. And the image winked off.

CFS Akademik Petr Lebedev Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 0920 hours, GMT-12

A sharp rap sounded from the door to Golytsin’s office. “Come.”

One of the naval marines assigned to the Lebedev opened the door and stepped inside. “Sir!” He handed a message flimsy across to Golytsin. “This just came in from the Dekabrist. It has been decoded.”

Golytsin accepted the message. “Very well.”

The marine saluted, turned, and left. Golytsin read the flimsy.

FROM: COMMANDING OFFICER, CFS DEKABRIST TO: F. GOLYTSIN, CFS AKADEMIK PETR LEBEDEV SONAR DETECTED SOUNDS OF UNIDENTIFIED SUBMARINE

SURFACING IN ICE AT 0810 HOURS. LOCATION

UNKNOWN BUT SUSPECT INTRUDER TO BE WITHIN 20

KILOMETERS GK-1. REQUEST SHOOT-FIRST ORDERS IF

INTRUDER SUBMARINE APPROACHES PERIMETER. SIGNED: KIRICHENKO, CAPTAIN FIRST RANK

Brief and to the point. Golytsin frowned, wishing there’d been a bit more information… like a bearing, for God’s sake.

But at least the waiting was over. The Americans were here.

They’d been expected, after all. The diplomatic message announcing the capture of fourteen American scientists and Greenpeace activists would have arrived on the desk of the American President several days ago. There’d been time for an American submarine to be redeployed north.

The problem, though, was that American submarines were so hellishly quiet. During the Cold War-the original Cold War that had so focused the military might of both the United States and the old Soviet Union-American technology had consistently outstripped the Russian Navy’s attempts to keep pace. The Walker spy ring, operating from 1967 to 1985, had helped tremendously, had in fact been responsible for a whole new generation of ultra-quiet Russian submarines, but that hadn’t significantly helped the Soviets track American subs.

Golytsin had been part of the Soviet naval intelligence team working on the information provided by the Walker ring. He’d also commanded two Russian submarines during the early 1980s, and he knew something about American submarine technology. It was good, very, very good. Time after time, American attack subs had picked up Soviet missile boats as they exited their lairs in the White Sea or along the north coast of the Kola Peninsula and trailed them, often just a few tens of meters astern, sometimes slipping close enough to photograph details of the Soviet craft’s hull through the periscope, and the Russian sonar operators had never heard a thing. A number of the better than two hundred thousand encrypted messages deciphered with Walker’s help had been top-secret reports on the movements of Soviet submarines, and their astonishing accuracy had alerted the Red Fleet’s high command to the problem.

Feodor Golytsin was one of the few men alive who knew just how difficult it was to track an American submarine, especially under the Arctic ice, where bizarre sonar echoes came ringing back from every direction and subs could play hide-and-seek among the polynyas, keels, and subsurface ice ridges.

And it had been Golytsin who’d recommended that the Dekabrist be deployed to the area around GK-1, as a bit of added insurance. The Americans, he’d argued, were certain to arrive, and the chances were good that they would arrive by submarine. Any submariner could tell you that the best way to catch a sub was to use a sub.

Those idiots back at Severomorsk HQ had hesitated. They feared a confrontation with the United States and didn’t see the GK-1 project as one of Russia’s vital national interests. What they didn’t understand was that Russia couldn’t possibly lose in this new round of international brinksmanship. If the Americans managed to sink the Russian boat, as some of the Northern Fleet’s admirals feared, it would simply be wood to the fire of Russia’s case before the court of world opinion: the Arctic Ocean properly belonged to Russia, and the United States was unfairly using its superior submarine technology to bully Moscow into yielding.

If, on the other hand, a submarine battle ended in a Russian victory, Moscow could simply claim that it was legitimately defending its own interests from the bellicose Americans. More to the point, the Americans were notoriously weak when it came to accepting necessary military losses. American military leaders were as afraid of open war in the Arctic as their opposite numbers at Severomorsk, and the American President would be reluctant to commit to yet another unpopular war. The Americans would… what was their delightful expression? Cave. That was it. The Americans would cave.

Either way, Russia would win.

And with the GK-1 project now fully in place, when Russia won, the Organizatsiya would win as well, would win to the point that, soon, the Tambov group would control all petroleum and natural gas production and sales across the Motherland, with an annual income to be measured in the trillions of rubles. Russia, and with her, Tambov, would again become a major player on the world stage.

And Feodor Golytsin would at last have his revenge over certain men, politicians prominent under both the Soviet regime and the new Federation, who’d been responsible for him freezing his ass for three bitter years in the gulag.

Captain First Rank Kirichenko was a good man, Golytsin knew, experienced, and a cunning tactician. If anyone could beat the Americans at their own game beneath the ice, it was Valery Kirichenko. But Golytsin needed to be sure Kirichenko knew what was at stake.

Turning to the computer keyboard on his desk, he began composing his reply to the Dekabrist’s commanding officer.

USGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 0942 hours, GMT-12

Dean met the others at the air lock leading to the Ohio’s aft deck and the waiting ASDS, located in a cramped compartment aft of the control room. A heavy, watertight door stood open as one SEAL passed a bundle of equipment through to a waiting SEAL inside, and he, in turn, passed the bundle up the ladder to someone out of sight overhead.

Taylor gave Dean a dark look as he walked in, and Dean knew that he resented what he thought of as micro-management on Dean’s behalf.

This would require tact and diplomacy. Perhaps a preemptive strike…

“Mr. Taylor,” Charlie Dean said, “I know you don’t like the fact that I’ve been assigned to operate with your platoon. I regret that… but I had nothing to do with the order. I hope you’ll let me prove that I can be an asset on this mission.”

“That’s one you’re going to need to prove to me, Mr. Dean,” Taylor growled. “I don’t like being told who’s coming along on my op. I don’t like having to leave one of my men behind because I have to make room for a damned tourist. And I damned sure don’t like babysitting a fucking suit. You understand me?”

“I hear you.” So had every man in the SEAL unit preparing to board the ASDS, plus Captain Grenville and Lieutenant Commander Hartwell and three enlisted ratings helping the SEALs with their gear. This was going to be tougher than Dean had expected. “You will not need to babysit me.”

Taylor ignored him. “You will be responsible for your own equipment. And you will follow my orders to the exact letter. Copy?”

“Copy,” Charlie Dean said, his irritation evident in his voice.

“All right. Just so we understand one another. You’d better get suited up, suit.”

“I think that’s enough tantrum, Mr. Taylor,” said the captain. “And please try to remember that you’re just a fucking lieutenant.”

That comment was a conversation stopper. “Yes, sir,” Taylor replied in a normal tone of voice.

They had a combat dry suit for Dean, a one-size-fits-almost-all worn over warm clothing. Unlike a standard wet suit, which allows water from the outside to get in between skin and suit and become warm with body heat, the dry suit worked by keeping cold water out. It was colored in a gray and white camo pattern that would be conspicuous on the ice but help the wearer blend in on board a gray-painted ship. The rig included a combat vest, boots, and a hood. Dean decided that if he actually fell into the water, the weight of his fashion statement was going to take him straight to the bottom.

“We won’t be doing a lot of swimming,” Taylor told him. “The dry suit should keep you alive for the swim up from the ASDS to the ship. Just stick close, do what you’re told, and be ready to hotfoot it up the boarding ladder when we tell you.”

“In broad daylight?” Dean asked.

“This here’s the land of the midnight sun, cupcake. It’s always broad daylight, at least for the next few months. But Captain Grenville here is going to create a small diversion for us.”

Grenville nodded. “We’ll be listening for our cue through our sonar system. When we get it, we’ll surface alongside the Lebedev, about a hundred yards off her port side. That should keep them looking at us and not at you, and should also mask any noise you make going aboard.”

“After that,” Taylor added, “it’s all up to us. Your boss said you have some gadgets that will help. Whatcha got?”

Dean was kneeling at the pack he’d brought on board, uncasing a bulky weapon with an oversized muzzle and a rotary cylinder. Reaching into an ammo case, he pulled out a blunt projectile.

“Forty mike-mike grenades?” one of the SEALs said with a dark chuckle. “Ain’t nothing new about those.”

“There is about this one,” Dean said. “It’s a tiny UAV. Has a camera in it that will send live-feed video, both visible light and infrared. It’ll help us keep track of where the bad guys are, and where our people might be.”

“I was told the hostages are on the main deck, in the aft superstructure,” Taylor said.

“And they might get moved as soon as the Russians know we’re on deck.”

Taylor nodded. “Okay, Dean. Maybe you’re a keeper after all. Just stay the fuck out of our way, right?”

“Ooh-rah,” Dean replied, the battle cry of the Marines.

“Shit, man,” Taylor said, grinning. “This is the Navy SEALs. It’s hoo-yah!”

The SEALs began filing into the airlock and up the waiting ladder.