Arctic Gold

25

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1210 hours, GMT-12

ANOTHER SAVAGE JOLT ROCKED the Mir as Braslov’s submersible slammed into them from astern. Dean pulled the joystick hard over to the right, at the same time shoving the power control all the way forward. The electric motor whined as the Mir twisted hard to the right; the deck slanted sharply, and Benford fell, toppling clumsily into the seated Golytsin and the kneeling McMillan. On the TV monitor overhead, the other minisub swam out of the camera view, but they could hear the bumps and clatters as its keel dragged across the Mir’s upper hull.

Dean chanced a quick glance over his shoulder. Kathy was wrestling with Benford, struggling for control of the pistol. Dean snapped the stick over to the left and hauled back, praying there was enough oomph in the electric motors to pull off this sudden a maneuver. Minisubs were not jet aircraft, and the sluggishness of the Mir’s response reminded Dean of the bumper cars at an amusement park he’d gone to as a kid.

The Mir came left and started to climb, directly into Braslov’s submarine…

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

“Ten seconds to impact!” Mayhew called over the intercom.

The COB put an intercom mike to his lips. “All hands! All hands brace for impact!”

Thunder boomed through the Ohio, the force slamming Grenville hard against the Mk. 18 periscope mount. A second explosion followed hard on the heels of the first, the twin detonations ringing like hammer blows. This is it! he thought as the deck heeled far over toward starboard, threatening to invert the boat.

Only as the Ohio began swinging back toward a normal orientation did Grenville realize that the explosion had not been that of a Russian torpedo detonating against the Ohio’s hull.

“Torpedoes passing close astern!” Mayhew warned. “They’re homing on the countermeasures!”

Grenville heard them now, the high-pitched whine of torpedoes passing very close to the Ohio, sounding close enough to touch…

The Pittsburgh’s ADCAPs had struck their target first. The Russian torpedoes, still racing toward the Ohio, had taken the bait and homed on the cloud of bubbles, punching through and into the clear, cold, empty water beyond.

Grenville and the officers and men crowded into the Ohio’s control room collectively held their breath as the whine dwindled into the distance.

“Con, Sonar!” Mayhew called. “I have major flooding and breakup noises close to port!”

“Helm, reverse turn,” Grenville ordered. “Come left one-eight-zero degrees!”

“Reversing turn, helm left one-eight-zero degrees! Aye, sir!”

He tried to picture what must be happening on board the Russian sub right now, just a few hundred yards to port. The ’Burgh’s ADCAPs must have winged squarely into the Russian boat’s stern, tearing out the main ballast and aft trim tanks, the engine room, the generators… maybe even the nuclear power plant. Forward, men would be struggling in absolute darkness as freezing-cold seawater blasted into compartment after compartment.

It was every submariner’s nightmare, no matter what the uniform they wore or flag they sailed under.

Grenville’s concern now was to steer away from the collapsing wreckage lest the Ohio become tangled in the debris… and also to put some distance between the Ohio and those Russian torpedoes.

The torps would have been wire-guided. If the enemy weapons control officer had already cut them loose before the ’Burgh’s ADCAPs hit, they would be operating under a search program, one that would swing them about in a large circle until they reacquired their target, or found a new one. If the wires had still been attached, though, when the Russian sub exploded, all steering commands had suddenly ceased. Depending on what the final set of programmed instructions was telling them, the torpedoes might go into automatic search mode, or they might simply continue running, descending into the depths.

Until Grenville knew which was the case, he intended to put as much maneuvering room between his command and those Russian torpedoes as he could manage.

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1211 hours, GMT-12

Braslov’s minisub was twice to three times the size of the Mir, an ugly, cigar-shaped monster perhaps eighty or ninety feet long. It had the blunt, rough-hewn character of a construction vehicle, and Dean imagined that it was used for heavy lifting around the GK-1, hauling and attaching sections or drill tube. It mounted two shrouded propellers aft, plus smaller directional thrusters for tight maneuvering.

Its sheer size, however, gave Dean and the Mir an advantage. As the larger submersible passed overhead, Dean brought the Mir’s bow up and around to the left. Reaching down with one hand, he slipped his arm into the open framework of the controller for one of the Mir’s mechanical arms. As his hand closed on the squeeze-grip handle inside, there was a whine of servomotors and the arm on the Mir’s port side jerked spasmodically, then extended itself, grippers wide open.

He missed. He’d been trying to jam the Mir’s arm into one of the propeller shrouds on the other sub, but there was no kinesthetic feedback to the thing, and he couldn’t feel what he was doing, or judge distance and reach. The Mir’s arm flailed wildly, banging uselessly off one of the construction sub’s tall rudders.

He tried coming right again, tried getting above the other craft.

Behind him, Golytsin and McMillan continued struggling wordlessly with Benford.

The shock wave struck, slamming into the Mir from above and from the left. Dean heard the roar, like far-off thunder, but the jolt ringing through the Mir’s hull was sharper and more insistent. The Mir tipped hard to port as loose gear and equipment crashed from storage racks and a water pipe somewhere on the port side broke with a shriek of high-pressure water.

The Mir very nearly flipped over, but somehow Dean brought the stubborn little craft back onto an even keel. He heard a loud thump behind him. When he glanced back, he saw Benford flat on the deck, evidently unconscious, with Kathy standing over him, the Makarov in her hand. Golytsin, bare-chested, was getting up off the deck, his hand pressed against the oozing wound in his side.

“Nice maneuver,” Kathy told Dean. “Give us some warning next time!”

“Wasn’t me,” Dean told her. “Shut off that water pipe! Golytsin! You know how to work the arms on this thing?”

“Da…”

“Then help me! Get up here and take that sucker apart!”

Braslov’s construction craft was just ahead, apparently dead in the water. Dean could see a large, white numeral 4 painted on the upper starboard side.

“What was that explosion?” Kathy wanted to know.

“Damned if I know,” Dean said. “It wasn’t us; that’s all I know. Golytsin! Can you disable that bastard’s props?”

“If you get me close enough to the stern, yes.”

He was studying the other craft narrowly in the glare from the Mir’s outside work lights. It didn’t appear to be damaged, but it wasn’t going anywhere at the moment. It appeared to have a very slight negative buoyancy, but it was still upright, still intact under the terrible, crushing pressure outside.

He cut the forward power back by half and pulled the Mir into a tight turn until the other minisub’s stern was directly ahead and below. Dean didn’t want to spend too much time here; other Russian construction subs might have launched from the GK-1 and be in the vicinity.

But if he, Golytsin, and Kuthy could cripple Number Four, that would be one sub, at least, that would not pursue them to the surface.

Nomer Chiteereh Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1211 hours, GMT-12

Braslov groaned and opened his eyes. That had been an underwater explosion, and one close by. A smear of blood glistened on the control panel in front of him-his blood. That explosion had slammed him forward, momentarily stunning him. He raised a hand to lightly touch his forehead; it came away wet with blood.

No matter. He’d suffered a lot worse. The important thing was… what was the condition of his submarine? Quickly he looked around, checking monitors, checking readouts. The hull was still intact, power still good, trim still good…

And the Mir with the Americans on board was swinging around onto his tail.

Braslov grinned. That would get them nowhere.

He reached again for the controls.

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1211 hours, GMT-12

With Golytsin working the controls, both of the Mir’s mechanical arms extended, reaching toward the other craft’s starboard side screw. Before Dean could grab hold, however, the propeller suddenly spun to life, the shroud pivoting as Braslov put the craft into a sharp turn.

Damn!

“Okay. We’ll just have to try to race him to the surface,” Dean said. He brought the Mir’s nose up and rammed the power handle full-forward. “I don’t suppose there are torpedoes on this thing?”

“No,” Golytsin said. “No torpedoes.”

Sluggish, the Mir began climbing.

Behind it, the construction submarine turned a clumsy circle, then began to give chase.

Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1214 hours, GMT-12

Three miles away, the two torpedoes fired from the Russian submarine Dekabrist continued their flight through the lightless deep, continuing to descend as they raced through the water at fifty knots. Though the American submarine captain was not yet certain of the fact, there’d been no backup programming directing the weapons into a search sweep. They would continue to drive into the depths until they either ran out of fuel and sank… or hit the bottom.

Groaning like a dying man, the wreckage of the Dekabrist settled toward the bottom as well. They could hear the sounds in the sonar rooms on board both the Pittsburgh and the Ohio as steel bent and twisted. Now and then, a compartment sealed off from the rest of the vessel would give way under the steadily increasing pressure, a sharp, chilling pop as seawater inexorably forced its way inside.

The bottom here was eighteen hundred meters down… just over a mile.

It would take the Dekabrist a long time to get there.

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1218 hours, GMT-12

Dean checked the aft monitor. Sure enough, Braslov was on their tail, and coming fast. Dean could see the work lights on the construction sub like four dazzling stars in the night, the bow of the sub a vaguely seen insect’s face between them.

“He can move faster than us,” Golytsin told Dean. “Especially in ascent. More power, and larger ballast tanks.”

“Great. Fucking great…”

“But the Mir is more maneuverable,” Golytsin continued. “And more rugged.”

“How much more rugged?” Dean wanted to know.

“Mir can outdive him by perhaps twenty percent.”

“Meaning it can take more pressure on the hull?”

“Yes. Wait… you’re not-”

“No,” Dean said. “I’m not going to try to lure him beneath his crush depth. That would be crazy.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to try to ram him. Kathy! You’ve got Benford secured?”

“Yeah,” Kathy replied. “There was some rope in this locker back here.”

“Okay. Strap yourself down.”

“No seat belts, Charlie.”

“Then hold on, damn it. Golytsin! Where are the ballast controls on this thing?”

Golytsin pointed.

“Flood the ballast and trim tanks,” Dean said. “And kill the forward lights! Let’s see if we can discourage the bastard!”

He pulled over on the stick, bringing the nose of the Mir up even higher, then over and around. Like a jet aircraft in a stall, the little submersible hung suspended for a moment, then nosed over, beginning to descend.

Ahead, the four work lights on the construction sub grew brighter, and seemed to stretch farther apart.

“God in Heaven,” Golytsin said, eyes widening. “What are you doing?”

“Playing dolphin to his shark, Admiral.”

“You’ll kill us!”

“Where’s your faith in good old, solid Russian engineering, Admiral?”

At twelve knots, the Mir slammed into the construction sub, bow to bow. There was a savage bang that rang through the hull, followed by the scrape and tear of metal.

And all of the lights went out.

Nomer Chiteereh Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1218 hours, GMT-12

Braslov had been puzzled when the Mir’s work lights winked off, then decided the American was hoping to lose his dogged pursuer. Idiot! Nomer Chiteereh had sonar and would be able to hunt him down easily even in the pitch blackness of the depths.

Braslov was reaching for the sonar switch when he caught a shiver of movement in his forward view port. The Mir was just ahead, coming into the illumination cone of his own work lights.

His full attention was yanked back onto the other craft. It was close… impossibly close, and swelling to fill the forward port as though racing down to meet him.

The shock threw Braslov out of his seat, slamming him to the deck as the construction submarine heeled far over to port. The sound was an explosion of raw noise, the shock indescribable. Several internal pipes gave way, and streams of ice-cold water blasted into the construction ship’s compartment.

Braslov struggled to get up, to get back to the control panel, but the deck was now a bulkhead and threatening to become a ceiling, and it was all he could do to cling to the deck grating as the submarine heeled over.

Then salt water hit wiring, and the interior lights flicked off, came on, then flickered off once more, leaving Braslov in the deepest, most profound darkness he had ever known…

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1219 hours, GMT-12

“Golytsin!” Dean shouted. “Blow all ballast!”

“Give me a moment! I can’t see!”

“We don’t have a moment!”

An alarm was shrilling, and a recorded voice was saying something in Russian. The outside lights were off, but he could still hear the whine of the motors, and the instrument lights and LED readouts were still on.

A moment later, the Mir’s emergency lights switched themselves on. “You see, Admiral?” Dean said brightly. He reached out and thumped the console with his fist. “You Russians know how to build these things solid!”

“Don’t hit that too hard,” Golytsin warned. “Not until we know the full extent of the damage!”

Dean was pretty sure the man was cracking a joke.

Golytsin hauled down on a large handle, and there was a sudden jar as several hundred kilograms of iron suddenly dropped clear of the Mir’s keel. He pulled another handle, and they heard the shrill hiss of pressurized air forcing its way into the ballast and trim tanks. As the water was forced out, the Mir rose faster.

“Emergency surface,” Golytsin explained.

“Yeah, but there’s ice up there,” Dean said. “What happens when we hit it?”

Golytsin smiled. “Where is your faith in good, solid Russian engineering, my friend?”

The Mir rose rapidly up from the abyss…

Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 44' N, 176° 50' E 1219 hours, GMT-12

Some five miles away now, the first of the Russian 650mm torpedoes slammed into the seabed. Had the ocean floor consisted of soft mud and sediment, like so much of the abyssal plain elsewhere, the contact detonator likely would have failed to go off and the weapon would have buried itself harmlessly in the ooze.

Unfortunately, large stretches of the seabed in this region were covered by and penetrated by immense shelves of ice, methane ice clinging to the ocean floor like permafrost.

The detonator triggered and nearly one ton of high explosives went off.

With no oxygen to support combustion, the methane clathrates on the floor couldn’t ignite, but the blast did break a very great deal of ice loose and send it rocketing toward the surface.

It also liberated a large amount of methane gas-several hundred million tons of it-from the sea floor, the bubbles rising in massive clouds out of the deep.

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 33' N, 177° 45' E 1225 hours, GMT-12

“How long before we reach the surface?” Kathy asked.

“We’re passing two hundred meters now,” Dean told her, glancing at the instrument readout screen. “Maybe… another minute?” He looked to Golytsin for confirmation.

“Something like that,” the Russian replied. His hand was on the ballast control. “But I’m going to begin slowing the ascent now. You’re right, of course. We don’t want to hit the ice ceiling too hard.”

“It would be nice to be able to break through,” Dean said. “But if we happen to hit a thick patch…”

“Exactly. Even with recent climatic warming, the ice is as much as a meter thick in places, and the Mir might not be able to break through. There is also the chance, a small one, that we could come up beneath the keel of the Lebedev or one of the other ships up there. So we will come up close to the surface, and attempt to find a polynya.”

“Do you think Braslov will be able to come after us?” Kathy asked.

“I don’t know,” Dean said. “We hit him damned hard. If we’re lucky, he’s on his way down, now, while we’re going up.” He sighed. “Just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“My boss is going to kill me. I was supposed to bring Braslov back alive.”

Nomer Chiteereh Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1225 hours, GMT-12

The construction submarine was sinking, as water continued to leak in from a ruptured seal, dragging the craft down tail first. In total darkness, drenched in icy water, Braslov struggled upward toward the forward part of the compartment. If he could just reach the controls and trip the main circuit breakers, perhaps the emergency power circuits were still good. He needed to blow ballast and surface… or at least try to regain neutral buoyancy long enough for them to come out and rescue him from GK-1.

His arm felt like it was broken. The cold was a living thing, leeching the heat from his body, leaving him trembling and exhausted.

Almost there…

The methane cloud struck from beneath, totally unexpected, a sudden shock slamming into the construction submarine’s belly and stern. Braslov had the sudden sensation that he was rising, and then the submarine flipped end for end and he hurtled into the forward end of the compartment, screaming as he slammed into the control panel. Water cascaded over and around him, stunning him, immobilizing him.

And above the roar, he could plainly hear the shriek of metal as the tortured vessel began to tear open amidships…

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 33' N, 177° 45' E 1231 hours, GMT-12

“I can see light!” Dean said, peering up through the view port. “I can see the surface!”

“Let me have the controls,” Golytsin said. “I’ll see if I can find open water.”

The Mir was drifting toward the surface slowly now, the weight of the water in its ballast tanks counteracting the lift induced by the release of the heavy keel plates. Under his guidance, one of the electric motors was coaxed to life, and the Mir began to respond…

The cloud of methane, expanding enormously as it rose out of the constricting pressure of the depths, caught the Mir, sending it rocketing upward as the vessel rode the shock wave for a moment. Then, with a savage jolt, the Mir dropped through a methane bubble, hit water beneath, then hit another bubble. For several interminable seconds, the Mir tumbled in the frothing sea, its occupants slammed from deck to overhead and bulkhead to bulkhead like rag dolls.

Water came thundering in…

Nearby, the bubble mass struck GK-1, ripping the anchoring cables free. The drill train, extending into the depths, snapped, then snapped again, again, and yet again as the shock wave worked its way up out of the abyss.

The shock wave ruptured ballast and trim tanks, flooding the forward section first. Unimaginable stresses clawed at the ship, and the relatively slender and unarmored midships section ripped apart as conflicting forces tried to draw the stern higher while dragging the bow down.

Then watertight seals ripped open and the ocean came pouring in.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 2032 hours EDT

“My God!” Jeff Rockman said, staring at the big screen on the wall. “What in hell is that?”

The view, a real-time image of the Arctic ice around the Russian base, showed an awesome transformation, worked in an instant. The ice crazed like shattered glass, then appeared to blur. At the same moment, geysers erupted around all three of the Russian ships, still holding position in the ice, and from the open-water footprint left behind by the Ohio as well.

“What is it?” Rubens asked, leaning forward. “A volcanic eruption?”

The geysers were growing in size. The Lebedev was swallowed whole. The cargo ship was ponderously rolling over onto her port side. In places, solid ice was breaking open now as enormous blocks of ice shattered and broke free.

“I don’t know,” Marie Telach said. “But it’s big.” The view receded several clicks as the magnification on the spysat’s optics was cut back. The polar ice cap seemed to recede suddenly as the curve of the Earth itself was revealed. Below, a vast stretch of the ice cap was smoking.

“Whatever it is, it’s affecting an area of over three hundred square miles,” Rockman said, his voice awed. “Too big to be a nuke…”

Rubens nodded his understanding and sighed. “I’m guessing… it’s Dean.”

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 33' N, 177° 45' E 1235 hours, GMT-12

Dean recovered consciousness first. The Mir was riding on the surface; he could tell by the way the deck swayed and rocked as the stubborn little craft bobbed with the surface chop.

“Come on!” he shouted. He pulled Kathy’s head out of the water, slapped her face until her eyes fluttered open. “Get up! Get up!”

Nearby, Golytsin struggled to his feet. Benford, still bound hand and foot, struggled in the aft part of the compartment, panicking as water rose steadily around him. “Help me! Help me! Don’t let me drown!”

“Golytsin!” Dean yelled. “Get Benford. Cut those ropes! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Dean cracked the dorsal hatch, blinking as sunlight streamed into his face. He looked around, feeling curiously out of place. There was no ice visible at all… only mile upon mile of intensely blue and open ocean.

“Let me,” Golytsin said. “There is an emergency raft…”

Dean stepped back out of the way as Golytsin climbed the ladder, leaning out of the hatch to free the raft. The Mir was flooding slowly, settling gently by the bow as water continued to pour into ruptured flotation tanks.

“Quickly!” Golytsin called from outside. “Into the raft!”

Dean helped Kathy climb the ladder, then Benford, his hands and feet free now. Dean took a last look around, then climbed the ladder after them. Golytsin and Kathy helped him slide off the back of the Mir and into the raft.

“What happened to the ice?” Kathy asked, looking around. “My God! What happened to the ice?”

The ice wasn’t completely gone; there were still numerous floes. But where before there’d been an uninterrupted plain of solid, windswept ice and blowing snow, now there was a horizon-to-horizon expanse of open water littered by blocks of ice.

“I don’t know,” Dean replied. “Admiral? You guys didn’t have a nuke or two on board that underwater base, did you?”

“No. No nukes. I think…”

“What?”

“I don’t know how it happened, but I think there must have been a release of gas from the bottom. A very large release.”

“Methane?”

Golytsin nodded. “We know the sea floor here was covered in methane clathrates. That was why we were forced to stop drilling, while Gazprom decided what to do.” He shivered. “Something must have triggered an enormous explosion…”

Nearby, with a loud gurgle, the Mir was slipping at last beneath the surface of the water.

It would have a long fall to the bottom.

“Are we… are we going to die?” Benford asked at last.

“I don’t know,” Dean said. “How about it, Admiral? Does this thing have an emergency beacon?”

“It should have triggered automatically, as soon as I triggered the inflation release.”

“Then all we need to do is wait for someone to pick up the signal and send help,” Dean said. “Anyone want to take bets on whether we get picked up by the Americans first, or the Russians?”

“Russians,” Golytsin said. “Definitely the Russians. We are well inside Russian territorial waters, after all!”

“Says you,” Dean said. He looked up into the impossibly clear blue sky. “My bet is on some high-tech gadgets listening for our signal.” And the people running those gadgets.

It was cold, and the wind was beginning to pick up. The four of them huddled together in the raft for warmth.

Dean found himself face-to-face with Kathy. “Pretty good, James Bond,” she said. Her lips were blue and she was shivering, but she managed a smile.

“Nah,” Dean said. “If I were James Bond, it would be just you and me together in this thing, alone.”

And they drifted with wind and current, beneath an endless day…