Arctic Gold

EPILOGUE

Bethesda Naval Hospital Bethesda, Maryland 1520 hours EDT

“HOW’RE YOU FEELING, CHARLIE?”

Dean sat up a bit straighter in the hospital bed. He’d not been expecting Bill Rubens himself to come down to see him.

But, then again, he thought, Rubens is that kind of guy. He was tough, he could be a son of a bitch, but he cared about his people.

“Doing better, sir,” Dean replied. “They say maybe another week…”

“Well, don’t rush things. We want you back at Desk Three all in one piece. Understand?”

Dean nodded at the grisly joke. He’d come close to losing his feet, his ears, and his nose to frostbite. The four of them, Golytsin, Benford, McMillan, and Dean, had drifted in that open raft for forty hours before they’d been rescued.

The rescuers had not, as Dean had hoped, been the Ohio or the Pittsburgh, and after being pulled from the water he’d been relieved to hear that the two American submarines had survived the devastating explosion under the ice cap. Both had been slammed into the underside of the ice and sustained serious damage. Both had limped south through the Bering Strait, ending up at last at the Bangor submarine base across the sound from Seattle. The freed American prisoners had been taken off the Ohio while the SSGN was still north of Alaska, flown by helicopter a few at a time first to Point Barrow, then back to the Lower 48 for a full debriefing.

The four castaways in the rubber life raft had been plucked from the freezing waters by the Algonquin, an Iroquois-class destroyer, operating in the Arctic in conjunction with a Danish frigate, the Peter Tordenskjold. The two had been deployed north to show their respective flags and to contest the Russian ice-grab claims, reasserting their rights to free passage through international waters. NSA monitoring stations and satellites had picked up the distress locator signal in the raft; Rubens himself had talked to the Canadian ambassador in Washington, requesting that the little international flotilla be diverted to search for survivors.

All four had been suffering the beginnings of severe frostbite by the time they’d been rescued. “How are the others doing?” Dean asked.

“They think they’ll be able to save Golytsin’s left foot,” Rubens said. “Right now our… associates with the Agency have him at an undisclosed but secure medical facility, and are talking to him about Mafiya activities in Russia and in the United States. Turns out turning him was quite an impressive intelligence coup. As good as bringing in Braslov would have been.”

“Listen, about Braslov-”

Rubens held up a hand. “It’s not a problem. There was no way you could have brought him out as well as the others. You brought us Golytsin. Well done.

“Benford is at a different secure location, discussing things with the FBI. Again, it turns out the Russian Mafiya has penetrated deep into a number of American organizations and corporate structures. We’re learning a lot. He’s promised to testify in exchange for leniency.”

“Leniency? The man murdered Ken Richardson in cold blood, and assaulted an NOAA officer with a crowbar!”

“Life might be considered leniency in some circles, especially when the alternative is the death penalty. So would transfer to a regular Federal penitentiary, instead of the ADMAX facility in Pueblo.”

“And Kathy?”

“She’s doing just fine,” Kathy said from the door. She was wearing a blue hospital robe and fuzzy slippers. “Now awaiting her official transfer to something called Desk Three. And how’s my James Bond?”

“On the mend, I’m told.”

“‘James Bond’?” Rubens asked, one eyebrow rising.

“Don’t ask.”

“I won’t. I just wanted to drop by and see how you two were doing. Oh, and you might be interested in this…”

He dropped a newspaper on Dean’s bed. It was folded to page 5 and had a one-column article circled. Dean picked it up and scanned it rapidly.

Dr. Earnest Spencer, a U.S. government climatologist, had given a speech at a Press Club luncheon in Washington the day before, claiming that the large-scale release of methane gas beneath the Arctic ice cap the previous week-apparently a completely natural phenomenon-had released the equivalent of two years’ worth of human-produced greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. He pointed out how lucky everyone concerned was that that enormous volume of gas hadn’t ignited in the atmosphere.

While global warming was an incontrovertible fact, he said, human responsibility for that warming was still very much an open question.

“I don’t know, sir,” Dean said. “It didn’t feel very warm when we were bobbing around in that raft.”

“I imagine not. Of course, Al Gore is back on TV saying the gas release is a global disaster. About a quarter of the ice cap appears to have been broken up by the outgassing, and the pieces are melting much faster than expected. There’s now open water all the way to the Pole, they say.”

“And our involvement in what happened is-”

“Classified,” Rubens said pointedly. “Highly classified. The submarine battle with the Russians never happened. The loss of their experimental drilling facility and two of their research ships is a tragic accident… an accident which also destroyed one of our NOAA research weather stations, by the way.”

“Someone already had me sign a paper,” Kathy said.

Rubens nodded. “We don’t want people to know we were in a pissing match with the Russians; they don’t want people to know they might have triggered the outgassing with their drilling.”

“And the Mafiya?” Dean asked.

“Stopped cold,” Rubens said, “at least for the moment. Golytsin’s interrogation suggests that the Tambov group was using both honey-trap tactics and the promise of billions of dollars of new income to pull key members of the Russian Federation Duma into line. Some of those politicians are having second thoughts about the whole thing now. Kotenko had promised that all of the world environmentalist concerns would be crippled when Greenworld was revealed as a terrorist organization, but the reports of the gas explosion in the Arctic have kind of driven Greenworld to the back page all over the world. And we now have Kotenko’s computer under constant electronic surveillance. We think we may be able to put pressure on some of those Duma members and strengthen the campaign against the Mafiya. At least that’s our hope.”

“Sounds like it’s not over, though.”

“No. In some ways, the Organizatsiya is a more deadly enemy than al-Qaeda. They don’t go around blowing up skyscrapers… but they don’t mind selling nukes to al-Qaeda or anyone else who wants one. Anything for a buck, or even just a ruble.” He looked around. “Well, I’ve got to get back to the Puzzle Palace. You two enjoy your vacation. There’s going to be a lot for you to do when you get back.”

He left, leaving Kathy at Dean’s bedside.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said.

She grinned. “Same for you… Double-oh Seven.”

He made a face. “Listen, I should tell you before the teasing goes any further… I am in a relationship right now.” Lia, the last he’d heard, was now back at Menwith Hill with the new kid, Ilya Akulinin. But they both would be back in Maryland soon.

“So?” She shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I can’t tease you. Or even see you once in a while, right?”

“No,” he replied. “No, it doesn’t.”

“Mr. Rubens said he wanted to bring me into Desk Three, that you could show me the ropes and everything. He seems to think we’ll be dealing with the Russians again soon.”

“Of that,” Charlie Dean said, “I have no doubt whatsoever.”

He had a feeling that, for Desk Three and the National Security Agency, at least, the new Cold War was not yet over.