Arctic Gold

24

GK-1 Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1205 hours, GMT-12

DEAN SPUN, DRAGGING BACK the slide on the Makarov to chamber a round. At the far end of the corridor, perhaps eight or ten yards away, a man in civilian clothing was aiming a sidearm at them. “Stoy!” the man shouted again. “Stop!”

As Dean moved, the man fired, the shot a thunderclap in the steel confines of the base passageway. The bullet struck the overhead, ricocheted with a screech, then ricocheted again off a bulkhead somewhere at Dean’s back.

“Jesus!” Dean ducked reflexively, even though the round had already screamed past. Taking aim, he triggered a round as well, and heard the bullet bouncing off one of the walls before rebounding from the bulkhead behind the other man. Something clattered on the deck ahead of Dean… the spent round, spinning as it burned off the last of its energy.

This was, he realized, a deadly shooting gallery. Handguns simply weren’t accurate beyond a range of a few yards unless the shooter was well trained. Here, though, the massively thick steel bulkheads served to channel shots all the way down the passageway… with the effect of making this a little like a shoot-out inside a sewer pipe.

Sooner or later, even the worst shot would hit something. Dean needed to end this now.

He fired three more shots in rapid succession, not trying for accuracy so much as for a storm of bouncing, ricocheting rounds that would force the Russian gunman back behind the shelter of the far bend in the passageway.

The ugly little Makarov was uncomfortable in Dean’s hand, the grip considerably thicker than what he was used to. A disengaged part of him recalled that the design enabled the shooter to handle the weapon easily while wearing heavy gloves-a necessity in the cold, long winters of Russia.

The other man dropped to the deck, writhing. A pipe running along the overhead suddenly spurted a stream of water. A second man appeared and snapped off another shot that came shrieking down the metal corridor, then pulled back out of sight. Behind him, Dean heard a sudden gasp, a cry of, “Ah!”

“Who’s hit?” Dean called.

“It’s Golytsin!” Kathy said.

“I’m okay!” Golytsin said. “Into the submarine! Into the submarine!”

Two men appeared around the bend in the passageway, grabbed their comrade, and dragged him back out of sight as water continued to spray into the far end of the corridor. At least, Dean thought, it wasn’t coming in with a force of half a ton per square inch; it must be a broken internal water supply.

“You can’t get away, American!” a voice yelled.

Braslov.

For answer, Dean fired twice more, deliberately aiming at the bulkhead far down the corridor in an effort to bank the shots around the corner. He heard a shriek with the second shot.

Behind him, the others had scrambled down an open hatch in the deck. Dean fired one more shot blind, then jumped into the opening, pulling down one circular hatch and dogging it, then the second.

Golytsin was already at the controls, flipping power switches and bringing the little submersible to life. “We need to leave now,” he told the Russian. “Before they figure out how to stop us.”

“Coming online now,” Golytsin replied. Dean could hear the rising hum from astern. “Cutting the connectors now…”

There was a jolt and a sudden dropping sensation as the deck tilted sharply forward. The whine aft shrilled louder, and then the deck started to level off as Golytsin wrestled the submarine level.

Dean dropped the Makarov onto one of the narrow seats provided for passengers on the craft and squeezed forward between Kathy and Benford, peering over Golytsin’s shoulder.

“Are you okay?” Dean asked the Russian.

“For now.”

“Where’d you get hit?”

“His side,” Kathy told Dean.

“It just grazed me.” Golytsin shook his head. “I didn’t think the idiots would open fire inside the facility!”

“The walls seem pretty thick,” Dean said.

“Yes, but the water pipes, hydraulic lines, and wiring conduits are all quite vulnerable,” Golytsin replied. “We could have crippled the base!”

“I wish we had,” Dean said. He was looking at a TV monitor mounted high up on the forward bulkhead, above and between the two thick quartz portholes. The screen showed the view aft, the brightly lit stern of the upended Russian ship now receding slowly astern. “Can they come after us?”

“They might,” Golytsin acknowledged. “We’ll just have to see…”

The portholes forward showed only impenetrable blackness. The deck was tilting again, however, this time with the bow nosing higher. They were beginning their ascent: eight hundred meters, half a mile…

Dean glanced around the compartment and saw three sets of bright blue survival dry suits on the deck aft where the others had dropped them.

“Let me take the helm, Golytsin,” he said. “You three should get into your dry suits… and, Kathy? Check his wound. I don’t want him bleeding to death. Is there a first aid kit in here?”

“Port-side bulkhead,” Golytsin said.

Dean was still wearing the neoprene dry suit he’d donned for the assault on the Lebedev. Once they reached the surface, it would be best if they could stay snug and dry inside the Mir, but he didn’t know how long the little vessel’s life support would last, or how well it might ride on the surface. If they did have to abandon ship, the others stood a much better chance of surviving if they were properly garbed.

A neoprene dry suit was designed to prevent hypothermia; Dean’s suit had proven that much already. He’d been miserably hot over the past hour, especially with the athletic exertions of the past few minutes, and was sweating heavily inside the thing.

“Keep hold of this,” Golytsin told him, moving aside so he could take the joystick. He pointed at a digital readout. “That is our angle of ascent. Keep it between twenty and forty degrees.”

“Right, Admiral.”

Golytsin looked pale and drained and was clutching his right side. Dean could see blood slowly spreading beneath Golytsin’s hand.

Dean hoped they could find the Ohio up there. Even with a survival suit, Golytsin wouldn’t last long on the ice-or in this cold chamber-not when he was already going into shock.

The Mir continued its climb through darkness.

SSGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1208 hours, GMT-12

Captain Grenville had been wondering what had become of the Pittsburgh.

The Los Angeles-class attack submarine had accompanied the Ohio all the way up to the Arctic. They’d passed messages back and forth, of course-by radio when they both were at periscope depth and could raise a mast, and by hydrophone while at depth-but once they’d entered the AO, the Area of Operations, all hydrophone communications had ceased. Anything one of the American subs could hear underwater could be heard by Russian subs, and at an extraordinary distance.

Standard operation orders, therefore, required a communications blackout. According to the ops plan, the Pittsburgh was to have begun orbiting the AO ten miles out each time the Ohio surfaced, providing perimeter security against the Russian attack subs that were known to be in the vicinity.

Grenville stared at the patterns on Mayhew’s waterfall, realizing that what they represented was a slight decrease in noise-even the background noise of grinding ice and distant ships-just astern of the Russian Victor.

In short, Grenville was seeing what amounted to a sound-absorbing hole in the water, and the only thing that might do that was the anechoic, sound-absorbing paint on the outer hull of…

“The Pittsburgh,” Mayhew said softly. “It’s gotta be.”

“Agreed,” Grenville said. He put out a hand to steady himself against an overhead beam as the Ohio’s deck tilted with her turn. The Ohio had been passing the Victor, from bow to stern and off her starboard side, but not on a perfectly parallel course. Grenville had been intent on executing a maneuver known as the Williamson turn, cutting behind the Russian Victor and coming around on an exact reciprocal of his initial course-which would put him squarely in the Russian’s wake.

But it appeared now that the Pittsburgh was already there. Grenville had broken off to port in order to avoid a head-on collision with the other American sub in the area.

He watched the patterns of sound shift on the waterfall and hoped he’d given the order to turn in time.

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1209 hours, GMT-12

Dean held the Mir in its climb. For the past couple of minutes, he’d been listening to the swish and zip of clothing being changed behind him and trying not to picture Kathy stepping out of those baggy pants and wiggling into her survival suit. She was, he thought, quite attractive.

He found himself thinking about Lia instead. Safe in Ankara, Rubens had said yesterday. Was she back in Washington yet? Or still overseas?…

“This doesn’t look too bad,” Kathy’s voice said a moment later.

He risked a glance back over his shoulder. Golytsin was slumped in one of the seats, the leggings of his survival suit on, but the rest bunched up behind his waist and back. Kathy, in another blue dry suit, knelt in front of him, looking at an angry red slash just below his rib cage. She had the sub’s first-aid kit open and was applying a wad of sterile gauze.

“I told you,” Golytsin said. “Just a scratch.”

“Yeah, a scratch bleeding like a stuck pig,” Kathy said. “But this should stop the-”

“It hardly matters,” Benford said. “He’s going to die anyway. You all are.”

Dean looked past Kathy and the Russian. Benford was standing all the way at the aft end of the compartment, stooped slightly under the low overhead, and he had a Makarov pistol in his hand.

SSGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1209 hours, GMT-12

“We’re cavitating, Captain!” Mayhew said.

“Captain, Con!” a voice called over the intercom at the same instant. “We’re cavitating!”

The damage was done. “Helm! Maintain turn! Come to new heading two-six-zero! Ahead half!”

“Helm maintain turn to new heading two-six-zero, aye! Ahead half. Aye!”

Even at a creeping pace of four knots, the sudden turn had been enough to make noise in the water. The trouble was that the Ohio, over 560 feet long and with a submerged displacement of 18,750 tons, did not stop on a dime or turn inside her own length, and Grenville had to goose the old girl to give her rudder some bite to the water.

The cat was well and truly out of the bag now, dripping wet and making a hell of a racket… but that was better than scoring an own goal by ramming the Pittsburgh.

The question now was what the Russian was going to do about it.

SSN Dekabrist Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1209 hours, GMT-12

“Got him, Captain!”

Captain First Rank Valery Kirichenko looked up as the sonar officer called over the intercom.

“Talk to me, Lieutenant.”

“Sir! We have sounds of propeller cavitation to starboard, bearing two-five-zero, range approximately five hundred meters. Target aspect changing, and appears to be turning away from us, to port. I’m getting increased power plant noise as well. I believe he is accelerating.”

“Excellent! Stay with him!”

Kirichenko’s orders required that he find and neutralize any enemy submarines operating within a twenty-kilometer perimeter around the GK-1 if hostilities commenced. The Lebedev had passed him the word hours before that American commandos were boarding the ship and that an American Ohio-class submarine had surfaced alongside.

The Americans had made it so easy… but then the game had turned dark as the Dekabrist slipped closer to the enemy. The American vessel had suddenly submerged, making the challenge of finding her that much more difficult. He knew approximately where the enemy vessel was, but not precisely. He’d hoped the sounds of scraping ice and opening bow doors would have enticed the Americans into doing something rash-and noisy-but there’d been nothing.

Until now.

“Helm!” Kirichenko ordered. “Come right eight-five degrees, to new heading two-five-zero! Increase speed to twelve knots!”

“Yes, Captain!”

Five hundred meters. They’d been so close! But the American sub was turning away, which made her an easy target.

“Stand by to fire torpedoes one and two,” Kirichenko said. “On my mark!…”

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1209 hours, GMT-12

“Everyone stay calm,” Benford continued. “But you will do as I say. Or you’ll all die sooner, rather than later.”

“Harry!” Kathy cried, pulling back a little from Golytsin. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m not going to jail for murdering Richardson!” he said. “The damned Russians double-crossed me… tried to put the blame on me. Well, they’re not going to get away with it!”

“We’re not trying to blame you,” Dean said. He was kicking himself. That was his pistol, the one he’d carelessly dropped on a seat after coming on board the Mir. He was trying to remember… how many cartridges should be left?

He didn’t know the Makarov well, but he knew the Walther PP series and he’d read once that the Russian Makarov was based on the tried-and-true PP design. Walthers had eight-round magazines, so the chances were good that the Makarov had an eight-round mag as well.

But how many rounds had he fired in the short, savage firefight on board the GK-1 just now? There’d been his first shot… then three quick ones…

He couldn’t be sure-things had happened so fast-but he was pretty sure the pistol only had one shot left. Maybe two…

“Yes, you are!” Benford cried. There were tears on his face now, and his hands were shaking. Not good…

“Harry, it’ll all be okay!” Kathy told him. She started to rise, but he swung sharply, pointing the pistol at her.

“Don’t move, you little bitch! Damn it, no one believes me! It… it wasn’t supposed to be this way! I did everything they wanted me to do, and then they always wanted more! And now they want to double-cross me! Well, I’m giving the orders now!”

“Listen here, Benford,” Dean said.

“No, you listen!” The pistol swung back to point at him. “You… you just get me to the surface, understand? And get me out of this fucking box!”

The stress, Dean thought, must have been building on the man for days. From the sound of it, he was having a bout with claustrophobia as well, first locked up in that stores closet on the Russian platform, and now crammed into the Mir. That and his fear at being caught for the murder…

The trouble was that if he fired that pistol in here, it could very easily kill them all. The hull of the Mir was as thick and rigid as the hull of the GK-1, designed to withstand the incredible pressures of the abyss… which meant that a bullet fired in here would bounce wildly around the crowded compartment until it hit someone-or cracked one of the quartz viewing ports forward, or smashed some piece of equipment vital to their continued survival.

“The pressure on the hull outside, Benford,” Dean said, keeping his voice low and level, “is roughly one half ton pressing down over every square inch. Do you know what will happen if you put a hole in one of our viewing ports with that thing?”

“Don’t make me find out!”

“Give it up, Benford! Put the gun down!”

“No!”

“If you think it’s cramped in here now, wait until twenty tons or so of seawater blast in through a porthole and smash you into a grease spot!”

“Shut up!”

Dean met Kathy’s eyes. He flicked his own gaze forward, to the place where she’d laid her pistol when she’d changed clothes. It was lying on a shelf on the starboard side, a few feet forward of Golytsin’s chair and well out of her reach… out of Golytsin’s reach, too, assuming he could move fast enough to grab it.

Dean glanced aft again to meet Kathy’s eyes, then ahead to the pistol again. She gave a barely perceptible nod.

If Dean could throw the Mir into a violent maneuver, knocking Benford off his feet, Kathy might be able to grab the other pistol and regain control.

Of course, Benford’s weapon might go off when he fell. The odds were not real good at the moment…

And then something collided with the Mir, knocking it sideways with the violence of a sledgehammer blow and sending Benford slamming against a bulkhead.

“What the hell?”

Kathy looked up at the TV monitor over Dean’s head and pointed. “Look!”

Dean glanced up, then looked again. Another submarine, bigger than the Mir, an ugly bug of a submersible painted dark red and with a pair of insect’s arms spread wide, had just slammed into the Mir’s aft port quarter.

And Dean saw Braslov’s leering face in the cockpit canopy.

SSN Dekabrist Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1210 hours, GMT-12

“Fire number one!” Kirichenko said.

The weapons officer brought his palm down on the firing button at his console. Kirichenko felt the slight bump through the steel deck, heard the hiss of compressed air forward.

“Number one fired electrically, sir!”

“Fire two!”

Again, a bump and a hiss.

“Number two fired electrically, sir! Both torpedoes running true and normal.”

“We have operational control of both torpedoes,” a michman seated at the weapons console announced.

“Estimate impact,” the weapons officer said, looking up at the clock high on the bulkhead, “in thirty seconds!”

SSGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1210 hours, GMT-12

“Torpedoes in the water!” Mayhew yelled over the intercom. “Two torpedoes, 650s, range seven hundred yards, closing astern! Estimate impact in thirty seconds!”

Grenville was just entering the control room again. “Release countermeasures!” he barked. “Helm! Hard right rudder! Ahead full!”

“Release countermeasures,” the weapons officer announced, “aye, aye! Countermeasures released!”

“Helm to hard right rudder, aye, aye! Ahead full, aye, aye!”

There was no panic, no urgency… just men performing their assigned jobs, according to long training and experience, with cool efficiency. Grenville was proud of them.

If the two torpedoes coming in on the Ohio’s tail were 650s, they were the largest in the world-650mm wide and over 9 meters long, with warheads weighing close to one ton apiece. They would be wire-guided and wake-homing, and they were fast. Driven by a powerful closed-cycle thermal propulsion system, they could travel at fifty knots for up to 60 kilometers… or cruise at a more sedate thirty knots for a full 100 kilometers. As they sped from the Russian sub’s bow tubes, they trailed slender wires behind them, allowing the Russians to steer them toward the target. When they were close enough to acquire the target on their own, the Russians would cut them loose and they would home on the sound of the Ohio’s screw.

The Ohio couldn’t outrun them, not at what amounted to point-blank range. By popping countermeasures, however, a pair of canisters releasing clouds of sound-reflecting bubbles astern, the Ohio’s maneuver might be masked for a critical few seconds. The Russian skipper, Mayhew thought, had pushed things too close. The Ohio was barely seven hundred yards away-damned close for a pair of 650mm torps, he thought-and they might well miss on their first pass.

Of course, the Russian weapons officer would steer them around on their wires until they reacquired…

“Captain!” Mayhew called again. “Torpedoes in the water!”

“I know, Mayhew, I know-”

“No, sir! New torpedoes! It’s the ’Burgh! He’s just popped two ADCAPs and is slamming them right up the bastard’s ass!”

SSN Dekabrist Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1210 hours, GMT-12

“Torpedoes running, Captain!” the sonar officer called.

“I know, Lieutenant. Our torpedoes-”

“Enemy torpedoes, sir! Coming in from dead astern!”

“What?” Where in hell had a second American submarine come from?…

SSN Pittsburgh Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1210 hours, GMT-12

“Both torpedoes running hot, true, and normal, Skipper! Time to target, twenty seconds!”

“Very well.” Captain Peter Latham, CO of the USS Pittsburgh, glanced at the clock on the bulkhead. This was going to be damned close.

Ordered to cover the SSGN Ohio, the Pittsburgh had been lying back, staying quiet and staying out of sight. They’d been following the damned Russian for hours, ever since they’d picked him up near the location of the remote weather station. He’d clearly been hunting for the Ohio, but the op orders for the American subs had been to go weapons-free only if the Russians made hostile or provocative moves.

There was a lot of latitude to orders like that, and making the wrong decision could wreck a man’s naval career-assuming it didn’t kill him first. But firing a couple of torpedoes could definitely be construed as “hostile,” no matter how the weekend quarterbacks in Washington chose to interpret things later.

The Pittsburgh’s advantage here lay in the fact that she’d been squarely behind the Russian boat… and therefore in the Russian’s blind spot. Between wake turbulence and the sound of your own screw, it was almost impossible to hear anything from directly astern, even the shriek of incoming high-speed torpedoes.

“Both torpedoes have armed,” the weapons officer said. “Both torpedoes have now acquired the target.”

“Very well,” Latham said. “Cut the wires.”

“Cut the wires, aye, aye.”

“Helm, come left four-zero degrees!”

“Helm come left four-zero degrees, aye!”

“Down planes, one-five degrees!”

“Down planes one-five degrees. Aye, aye, sir.”

It wouldn’t do to be too close to the Russian when those ADCAPs hit. Explosions under the ice could be unpredictable at best.

Latham kept watching the clock, counting down the seconds…