Arctic Gold

21

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1841 hours EDT

“NIKOS-1 IS COMING OVER the Lebedev’s horizon now,” Marie Telach reported. “We’ve got the target ship onscreen.”

This time, the satellite would pass almost directly over the Lebedev, giving the observers in the Art Room the closest possible look at what was going on in the ship. Jeff Rockman entered keyboard commands that swung the spysat’s cameras up to focus on the approaching vessel, zooming in for a closer look.

Rubens studied the images with care. Fourteen minutes had passed since the last satellite had orbited over the Area of Operations. Anything could have happened in that time.

“Do we have comm pickup yet?”

“Coming through now, sir,” Telach reported.

“Three-one, One-one!” an urgent voice called, just intelligible through hissing static. “Get your people onto the bridge. The rest of you, start herding the tangos forward!”

“One-one, Four-three! We have resistance from the bow. Looks like two, maybe three November Indias behind the wreckage of that capstan!”

“Four-three! Take them down!”

“Copy that.”

November Indias-“NI,” for “naval infantry,” the Russian equivalent of Marines. And “tango” was SEAL shorthand for terrorists, in this case a generic term for the enemy. From the sound of things, the SEALs in general had the upper hand, though there obviously were still pockets of resistance. As the satellite drew closer and closer to a point directly over the Lebedev, the details of the action unfolding on her deck became clearer.

The scene was a computer-enhanced blend of optical and IR imaging. Rubens could see individual SEALs and Russians on the huge ship’s deck now. Heat sources inside the superstructure were vague, dark gray blurs, but the people in the open were easily distinguished, right down to details of uniforms and weapons.

“Can we raise Dean?” Rubens asked.

“We have a channel,” Rockman told him. “We can try.”

Establishing a direct channel to Dean had posed a serious technical challenge for the Art Room, one that had never been fully resolved. Dean’s usual communications gear and bone implant receiver were useless without a clear satellite connection accessible through an antenna coiled up in his belt, so the only way to reach him was through the SEAL tactical comm net.

And using that net for private chitchat ran the risk of jamming up the SEALs’ tactical communications in the middle of a firefight-something the SEAL CO would not appreciate.

But it was important that the Art Room let Dean know some key information about the Russian operation, information uncovered by Lia and Ilya in Sochi and added to day by day as the National Security Agency’s master eavesdroppers continued to look over Kotenko’s shoulder as he typed out e-mails and messages on his home computer.

And they would have only a brief window of opportunity as the NIKOS satellite passed overhead-two minutes at most.

“Sparrow, this is Bird Watcher,” Marie Telach was saying from her workstation. “Sparrow, Bird Watcher.”

Sparrow was Dean’s code name for this op. Bird Watcher, obviously enough, was the Art Room.

Static hissed in response.

“Sparrow, Bird Watcher.”

“Bird Watcher, clear this channel!” a new voice said, sharp and demanding.

Rubens picked up a microphone and held it to his mouth. “This is Bird Watcher,” he said. “We need to get a message to-”

“Bird Watcher, this is Sierra Echo One-one,” the voice said. “Your pet spook disobeyed orders and has gone MIA. Now clear the fucking channel!”

Rubens replaced the microphone. Sierra Echo One-one would be the call sign for the SEAL element commander, Lieutenant Taylor. Dean was missing?

“There!” Rockman said, pointing at the big screen. “That must be him!”

The satellite was now looking directly down on the Lebedev’s forward deck from the zenith. The watchers in the Art Room could see three figures now standing on some sort of platform extending from the ship’s side off the starboard bow. It looked like a mooring platform for a small boat against the larger ship’s waterline, and there appeared to be an oval hull tied up alongside, bobbing in the water. One figure was standing close beside the Lebedev’s hull, and even at the resolution of an image captured from space, the object in his hand was obviously a small pistol. The other two figures appeared to be unarmed, one a woman, one a man. The man had just opened a circular hatch on top of the oval hull and was now climbing down inside.

Rockman continued jockeying the satellite’s camera array, keeping the scene on the monitor locked on the mooring platform.

Rubens picked up the microphone again. “One-one, this is Bird Watcher. Dean is being taken on board a small submarine off the ship’s starboard bow!”

“Bird Watcher, this is Overwatch,” another voice said. “Clear the channel. You are jeopardizing the operation!”

Rubens scowled. Overwatch was the handle for the Special Operations Command HQ team overseeing the SEAL op in the Arctic. The airwaves over the ice suddenly felt uncomfortably crowded.

It would be a mistake to keep pushing, Rubens decided. The opportunity to communicate with the SEALs would come again, if he didn’t force the issue now. Right now, the SEALs had their plate full trying to take down a ship full of Russian marines, and Desk Three would not be helping things by screwing up their communications channels.

“Sir!” Telach called from her station. “We’ve got something new developing!”

“What is it?”

A monitor above her workstation showed the view from another satellite, this one looking down on a barren coastline, ocean surf on a gravel beach, and a long, obviously military airstrip. Two jet aircraft were lifting off from the runway, afterburners flaring. Two more military jets were in the process of taxiing to begin their takeoff roll.

“It’s Mys Shmidta,” Telach said. “Four MiG-35s are taking off from the base there. Two MiG-31s apparently took off ten minutes ago. They’re all headed north… toward the Lebedev.”

“We’re getting heavy radio traffic from Wrangle Island,” a communications technician reported. “Sounds like they’ve put a Midas in the air, too.”

It had only been a matter of time, of course, before the Russians responded to the assault on the Lebedev with military force. Rubens had hoped, however, that they would be a little less efficient, a little slower on the uptake. He did some fast calculations.

The MiG-31 Foxhound was strictly an interceptor, with no weapons that would be of use against targets on the ground. It was also limited in range to less than seven hundred miles-which was why the Russians were scrambling a Midas, the NATO code name for an Ilyushin Il-78 tanker.

The Foxhounds would simply be escorts for the real muscle, the MiG-35 Fulcrum-Fs. The Fulcrum-F was one of their best strike fighters, with movable forward canards giving exceptional maneuverability, and a maximum speed of Mach 2.2… say 1500 miles per hour. They wouldn’t push that hard for very long, not without causing some seriously dangerous stress to engine and airframe. Mys Shmidta was about nine hundred miles south of the Lebedev; the Fulcrum-F’s combat radius was well over twice that.

So make it nine hundred miles at Mach 2…

The SEALs had perhaps forty minutes before some very nasty company arrived.

Mir 1 Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1042 hours, GMT-12

It was a tight fit down the submarine’s hatch. Dean eased himself through and stepped back from the ladder as McMillan’s legs dropped into view, following him down. A moment later, the Russian joined them, moving to the far side of the narrow compartment so that he could keep them both covered with his Makarov.

“This is one of your civilian Mir submarines,” Dean said, looking around. The overhead was low and cluttered with pipes and bundles of plastic-coated cables. At the forward end, a pair of bubble windows looked out and down into the ocean depths. “Adapted for deep-sea oil work?”

“Very good.”

“They were using these things to take tourists down to the sea floor at the North Pole a year or two ago,” McMillan said. “The Russians have had a lot of experience with the technology.”

Their captor had pulled a small radio from his parka and was speaking into it urgently in Russian.

“Who is this guy?” Dean asked her. He had the feeling he’d seen the man before-in a file photo, perhaps.

“Feodor Golytsin,” she replied. “He’s some kind of bigwig with Gazprom.”

That was it. Dean remembered his briefing with Carolyn, the pretty English woman at Menwith Hill.

“Right,” he said. “He used to be a sub driver during the Soviet days, and then got promoted to admiral and given a shore billet. He got into trouble with Moscow and ended up in a gulag for three years.”

Golytsin put the radio away. “You seem to know a lot about me, Mr. Dean.”

“A little bird told me.” Dean shrugged. “Actually, we have quite a sizable file on you. If anything happens to us, there will not be any place on this planet where you can hide.”

It was a bluff but a reasonable one. People throughout the world, Dean knew, tended to have an inflated fear of the CIA and other American intelligence agencies and what they could actually do. He was hoping to play on that fear.

“I’m not too worried about that, Mr. Dean. Sufficient money can buy some very good hiding places. Look at Osama bin Laden.”

Pointing with the pistol, Golytsin herded them back and away from the minisub’s control panel. Reaching over, he began flipping switches in a particular pattern. Dean felt the ventilator system kick on, blowing cold air into the compartment, and felt a faint shudder through the deck as the power system came to life.

Dean watched the switches being thrown, trying to memorize their positions and order as they clicked on. He had a pretty good idea by now of where Golytsin intended to take them. If he and McMillan were to have a chance in hell of getting out, he would need to learn to pilot one of these things, on the fly and with only a single demonstration.

“So what are we waiting for, Admiral?” Dean said. He wondered if using the man’s former rank would help forge a psychological bind he could use. A long shot, to be sure, but right now Dean was willing to try anything.

The deck shifted beneath their feet as the submarine suddenly rocked from side to side. Golytsin looked up and smiled. “For that.” Footsteps rang through the compartment from overhead. Someone was clambering around on top of the Mir. With a clang, the topside hatch opened, and a pair of BDU-clad legs appeared coming down the ladder. The newcomer pulled the hatch shut above him, then joined the three of them in the now extremely cramped control room.

Dean recognized this man’s face immediately. Sergei Braslov. Former Soviet Army, GRU, MVD, and, more recently, and as Johann Ernst, co-founder of the militant environmental group Greenworld. He, too, held a 9mm Makarov pistol in his hand.

Braslov said something to Golytsin in Russian, and the other man replied with a shrug and two words, “Da, gaspodin!” He turned and took his place at the controls of the little submarine.

Dean was trying to get a feel for the social dynamics here. He’d been thinking of Golytsin as the guy in charge of the Russian Operation Cold War, but if he’d just called Braslov gaspodin, meaning “sir”…

And there was that photograph of Braslov on a beach with Grigor Kotenko, who was very high indeed in the hierarchy of the Tambov group, the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Mafiya.

Things were falling into place now. Braslov was the plumber, the fixer who made Kotenko’s orders materialize. Golytsin was a high-ranking executive in Gazprom, a company targeted for takeover by the Russian mob. He’d served a short term in the Siberian gulag, just long enough to make some key contacts with prominent members of the Organizatsiya; when Golytsin reached out to push a power control forward, his sleeve fell back far enough to reveal some blue tattooing at his wrist… and tattoos, especially blue ones, were marks of Mafiya membership. When Golytsin had been freed, Kotenko or other high-ranking mob bosses might have made sure he got a position with Gazprom.

Creating a Mafiya beachhead within the largest natural gas company and the third-largest producer of petroleum in the world.

That left a few questions unanswered as yet. Why was the Mafiya so interested in GK-1? Had they, in fact, organized the project from scratch, or had they simply taken over an existing program? It might not matter. Either way, a sudden infusion of profits from the GK-1 drilling project might be the lever needed to move key power centers within Gazprom, facilitating a takeover of the entire company.

A takeover that would make the Russian Mafiya the owners and the beneficiaries of the largest energy company in the world.

As Golytsin pushed the throttle control forward, the whine of electric motors hummed from the aft end of the compartment. A joystick control pushed forward nosed the Mir minisub into a downward cant; steering the submarine, Dean thought, was a pretty simple seat-of-the-pants exercise, with one joystick controlling up-down and left-right maneuvers and the throttle providing forward thrust.

“Move away from the control panel,” Braslov warned.

“I’m not touching anything,” Dean replied. Carefully he placed his hands behind his back. “See? I just want to take in the view.”

He doubted that Braslov was stupid enough to fire a weapon inside the Mir’s sealed passenger compartment; a cracked port or a broken hydraulics line would end the voyage quite quickly. By taking the lead and making decisions for himself, however small those might be, Dean was snatching a tiny bit of psychological advantage from the situation and perhaps keeping their captors just a little off balance.

Braslov seemed about to bark an order, but Golytsin said something in Russian and laughed. Braslov shrugged. “Just touch nothing,” he growled.

With his hands at his back, Dean stared out through the curved transparency on the starboard bow of the craft. There was very little to see. The water was lucidly, inexpressibly clear, like deep blue crystal, but there was simply nothing to see in all of that emptiness. As the Mir continued to descend, the blue grew rapidly deeper, darker, and more opaque, until the endless and absolute night of the deep abyss closed in.

Golytsin hit a pair of switches overhead, and a faint glow answered from outside. A few isolated particles danced in the Mir’s lights like tiny white stars.

“How deep are we?” Dean asked.

Golytsin glanced at an LED readout on a TV monitor. “Four hundred meters,” he said.

“And how deep can we go?”

“Quiet,” Braslov ordered. “No more questions.”

Electric motor shrilling, the Mir continued its steepening descent.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1902 hours EDT

“Yes, sir,” Rubens said. “Yes, sir, I understand. Thank you, Mr. President.”

He hung up the red phone.

At least the White House operator had put him straight through to the President this time. Bing was no longer keeping him isolated, at least for the time being.

A map of the Arctic had been thrown up on one of the secondary wall monitors. A bright red triangle showed the position of a flight of six MiG-35s, now better than halfway between the mainland and the Lebedev.

At Mach 2, they were ten minutes from the Lebedev and the Ohio. The President had not been pleased with this latest turn of events. The encounter in the Arctic, what was supposed to have been a quick in-and-out by the SEALs to rescue the Americans held on the Lebedev, was fast turning into a deadly confrontation.

Over the past half hour, the Art Room had continued monitoring the situation on board the Lebedev. At last report, SEALs had taken over both the bridge and the engine room and a large number of seamen had been sequestered in a forward hold, under guard. Twelve American prisoners had been freed from an empty storeroom aft, and another, the seriously injured Commander Larson, had been found in the ship’s sick bay.

Two were still missing-Harry Benford, the traitor, and the NSA employee Kathy McMillan.

With the Lebedev under the control of the SEAL assault team, the focus of the operation had shifted to getting the former hostages off of the Russian ship and across the ice to the Ohio. A long gangway had already been set up, allowing people to reach the ice off the Lebedev’s deck. A similar gangway, with safety lines and stanchions, had been rigged to let them clamber off the ice and onto the Ohio’s forward deck.

Everything was going perfectly according to plan, with three serious problems.

Russian MiGs were on the way, perhaps ten minutes out. The SEALs had to get the released prisoners off the ship and across the ice before those aircraft arrived, because when they did, the Ohio would be an easy and obvious target.

That was one. The second was worse. Fifteen minutes before, the Ohio’s sonar operator had reported a new underwater contact… almost certainly a miniature submarine of some sort. Minutes later, however, a second contact had been reported, this one larger, much larger… most likely a Russian attack submarine. Because of the difficulties of determining range and bearing in the weirdly echoing undersea terrain of the Arctic ice cap, it was impossible to tell just where the new contact was, or how close. But the chances were good that someone on the Lebedev had called for help, possibly over an undersea hydrophone system, and the attack sub was moving in on the Ohio.

And Charlie Dean had been captured. From the look of things, he and the other NSA employee, McMillan, had been taken aboard a miniature Russian sub and were now heading into the ocean deeps, presumably to rendezvous with GK-1.

“The captain of the Ohio reports the last of the hostages are on board,” a communications tech said. “The SEALs are evacuating the ship.”

“Very well.”

But once the SEALs were aboard, the Ohio’s skipper would have a deadly choice. If he stayed on the surface, he would be vulnerable to attack by the incoming MiGs. If he submerged, he might drop squarely into the track of torpedoes fired by the Russian sub. Damned if you do… damned if you don’t.

This was not shaping up to be one of America’s better days…

Mir 1 Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1108 hours, GMT-12

There were lights in the darkness.

Dean leaned forward in an awed silence as the Mir continued its descent. According to the monitor readout, they were now at eight hundred meters, half a mile beneath the ice-locked surface of the Arctic Ocean. And GK-1 was just now coming into view.

The thing was enormous-at least a hundred yards long, perhaps more. Bow and stern had the look of a conventional surface-going ship, but they were joined by a relatively slender center section holding the two together like the bar on a set of barbells. At first, Dean nearly didn’t recognize what he was seeing as a ship; it was moored in the darkness bow down, which is not the usual attitude for a vessel designed to move along the ocean’s surface.

Five massive cables stretched out and down from the bow, vanishing into the darkness below. Several more slender cables reached straight up from the stern, tethering the structure to the Lebedev half a mile overhead. Something like a slender needle extended from the structure’s bow straight down into the abyss-the drill itself, Dean assumed. On the stern-the highest point on the ship in this position-was a round well or receptacle. Dean could make out one of the drill pipe sections hanging suspended just above the structure’s stern. Something like the remote-controlled arm of the Space Shuttle reached out of the stern, bent back at an elbow joint, and grasped the pipe section as though preparing to insert it into the receptacle.

But nothing was moving. Work, it seemed, had halted.

The technical challenges in designing the thing, Dean thought, must have been staggering… but the payoff was a stable drill rig that could operate half a mile beneath storms and rough seas, beneath moving ice, and well off the radar of any environmental groups that might oppose drilling on the ocean floor.

“Not much happening,” he commented to Golytsin. “What is it, Russian workers’ holiday?”

“No. We’ve run into a… snag, I believe you Americans call it.”

“Don’t tell them any more,” Braslov ordered. “They don’t need to know.”

“It hardly matters,” Golytsin said with a shrug. “If Kotenko doesn’t order them killed, they’ll still never be allowed to leave Russia.”

“Methane,” Dean said, venturing a guess. “Methane clathrates on the bottom. Isn’t it?”

“You’re too smart for your own good, old man,” Braslov said.

Dean had received a last-moment briefing update from Rubens before the Ohio had moved to her new position off the Lebedev’s port side. It turned out that a report Lia had seen on Kotenko’s computer had concerned immense deposits of methane clathrate discovered on the seabed beneath GK-1. Evidently there’d already been one accident, fortunately rather minor. Work had been suspended until the problem could be resolved.

The update had included a brief discussion of clathrates, also known as methane hydrate or methane ice. Apparently outcrops of the stuff were often associated with stretches of seabed rich in petroleum and also marked fields of natural gas bubbling up to the surface through fissures or geological fault lines in the ocean floor. Methane-natural gas-formed in underground pockets. When it percolated through to the ocean at depths of over about five hundred meters, the cold and extreme pressure of those depths sometimes formed clathrate fields. As Dean understood it, water froze into normal water ice on the sea floor and adhering to it and within it, rather like permafrost, clinging to the bottom instead of floating to the surface. As the water froze, it trapped molecules of methane-CH₄-inside its crystalline structure. A piece of methane hydrate liberated from the seabed to a laboratory counter looked like an ordinary chunk of ice. Set a match to it, however, and the ice burned with a hot, bright red flame as the methane was liberated.

Methane clathrates had been advanced as a possible solution to the energy crisis, since it appeared that there was more methane locked up inside seabed deposits of clathrates than there were reservoirs of natural gas under dry land. But they also posed certain risks of unknown magnitude. A few climatologists had actually suggested that periods of global warming in the past had been caused by massive releases of seabed methane. A mass extinction of life on ancient Earth-like the one that had wiped out the dinosaurs, but almost 200 million years earlier and on a far larger scale-had been blamed by some on an explosive release of undersea methane into the atmosphere.

“It could put a real stopper on your pet project, couldn’t it?” Dean continued after a moment’s silence. “I mean, you drill into the sea floor and find you’re drilling through ice. What happened? The drilling broke some pieces off that floated to the surface and ignited?”

“GK-1 sustained minor damage when a large block of methane ice floated up from the bottom and struck one of the anchoring cables,” Golytsin said. “Mainly, though, Gazprom called a halt to activities while an assessment was made on the possibility of harvesting methane ice in quantity from the ocean floor.”

Some more pieces fell into place for Dean. The organized crime groups trying to infiltrate Gazprom were doing so through the GK-1 drilling project. Probably the revenue from newfound petroleum was going to give Kotenko and Tambov leverage within the organization.

But now another branch of Gazprom had interfered, stopping work at the GK-1 site while decisions were made about the natural gas resources discovered there. A power struggle? Or simply a delay? It would be interesting to know what was happening within Gazprom’s halls of corporate power.

The Mir sub drew closer to the undersea station now, approaching the stern of the submerged and vertical ship. In the glare of the outside lights, Dean saw other Mir submersibles docked with their upper hatches snug against a massive tube, evidently a boarding tunnel or air lock.

“What kind of pressure do you maintain in there?” Dean asked.

“Standard sea level pressure,” was Golytsin’s surprising answer. “Just as inside the Mir. We haven’t had to work with high atmospheric pressures in some years now. We build very good in Russia, you see…”

Impressive, given that the outside seawater pressure on the GK-1 must be incredible. Dean did some fast calculations. The pressure exerted by seawater went up by.445 pounds per square inch for every additional foot of depth, he knew. Eight hundred meters was about twenty-six hundred feet and a bit, times.445…

At a rough estimate, the pressure at this depth was over half a ton per square inch. Most of the outside work at GK-1 must be handled by robots or with miniature submarines like the Mir, equipped with mechanical arms. He noticed that there weren’t any windows or portholes on the vessel, not even at the lower edge of the stern section, where he expected the bridge to be.

Skillfully Golytsin maneuvered the Mir underneath the docking tube, watching the approach through a TV monitor relaying the view from a camera mounted on the Mir’s dorsal hull next to the hatch. For a moment, Dean had memories of space-docking events he’d seen, of Apollo spacecraft docking with Lunar Excursion Modules, or the Space Shuttle connecting with the space station.

There was the faintest of bumps, and a hollow clang. Golytsin threw a series of switches. “We’re home,” he said.

“The last home they’ll ever know,” Braslov said with an unpleasant grin.