Dead Ice

TWO

One room looked like every other conference room in every other jurisdiction, in every other part of hell. It didn’t matter which city it was in, which state, or even which country. This one was on the Coronado military base in California, but could just as easily have been in a hotel in Anchorage now that the blinds had been closed.

The people in the room waited for the briefing to start.

They didn’t know why there were here, but looking around the room, seeing who had been assembled, it was obvious that it was important. At least Zara Leopov assumed everyone else was in the dark. She certainly had no idea why she had been summoned. Her position in naval intelligence didn’t put her in the same room as the top brass that often. She resisted the temptation to count the pips on the uniforms around the table, afraid she’d lose count. It was readily apparent that most of the men knew each other. She was the only outsider here. They barely even spared her a second glance, assuming she was here to make the coffee. This was a testosterone-fueled world, after all.

Another uniform entered. She started to get to her feet, but the commander sitting beside her placed a hand on her shoulder and gently pushed her into her back seat. It wasn’t an overtly friendly gesture. He leaned in close and whispered, “I don’t know who you are, girl, or what you are doing here, but you are here, and you are meant to be here. That means you’re every bit as important as the rest of the blowhards at this particular dance. As long as you’re in this room, you don’t stand for a superior officer. You’d be permanently on your feet.”

She gave him a nervous look and saw he was smiling. “Thank you, sir.”

He nodded.

Someone dimmed the lights.

A face appeared on the screen at the front of the room. She recognized the man. It had been months since they last met. A year or more, she realized. His name was Jackson Carlisle. It was the kind of name mentioned in hushed tones throughout Naval Intelligence. She hadn’t known him well, but he was one of theirs. A month ago they’d got word of his death.

From near darkness a voice began.

“As most of you already know, a US citizen, Jackson Carlisle, was shot and killed in the Russian port of Murmansk. The story the Russians have given us is that he was in the red light district and managed to get himself shot because he refused to pay a prostitute.”

Leopov shook her head but said nothing, recognizing it as a better work of fiction than anything Tolstoy managed in his lifetime. She knew that Jackson wasn’t that kind of guy. The picture changed. The photo of the handsome man in the prime of his life was replaced by the grey image of a face no longer touched by it.

“The body was returned to us along with his personal effects. Needless to say we were a little surprised that although no autopsy had been carried out, the bullet that killed him had been removed. While we have no evidence we suspect that it was fired from either a Kalashnikov or a Makarov. What we do know is that Carlisle was assassinated by the KGB while he was in the act of completing a mission of the utmost importance to our National Security. We lost a good man, people.”

A murmur went around the room but none of them reached Leopov’s ears.

She was the cuckoo in their nest.

It was the way she’d been treated since she’d joined the service. Part of it was because she was a woman, but just as much of it came down to her name. It didn’t make any difference that she had been barely been able to walk when she had come to the States, or that her father had died getting his wife and daughter out of Russia. It was all about her name.

The picture on the screen changed. She felt a wave of relief. It had been hard enough to see his picture again, reminding her of how full of life he had been, but harder still to see him in death. The new image was a satellite picture of an island.

“It has taken our code breakers a while to decrypt the information he paid for with his life, and while I cannot provide all of the details at this moment, I can confirm that he provided us with the coordinates for this island in the Arctic Ocean.”

Leopov recognized the coordinates, and when someone in the near darkness asked where, she had no hesitation in saying, “Russian territory.” The words came tumbling from her lips before she had even realized that she was speaking out loud. She was only too aware of eyes turning in her direction to the sound of breaths being taken. “Sorry,” she said to break the moment of silence that filled the room. “I…”

“Forgive me,” the speaker said, preventing the embarrassment from lasting any longer than it needed to. “This is Lieutenant Leopov. She has been lent to us by Naval Intelligence.”

Leopov could almost feel the dagger of ice the sound of her name thrust into the room. She felt the heat rise in her cheeks, but forced a thin-lipped smile as she nodded to those looking in her direction.

“Lieutenant Leopov has been studying satellite data about the island, which as she quite rightly says, lies within Russian territory.”

The image on the large screen changed to show a closer view, and then again, zooming in frame by frame. Leopov was familiar with these images, she had spent most the last few weeks watching the slightest changes in the pictures that came through every time the satellite passed overhead.

“I’m sorry to put you on the spot, but perhaps you could tell us what you believe this picture is showing?”

She nodded. She took a sip of water to compose herself, trying to decide what she felt she could tell the men that were gathered around the table.

“Please.” The man offered his pointer to her. It was not the first time she had given a briefing, but she was coming into this blind. She’d have appreciated some kind of warning. She rose to her feet and took a deep breath as she moved to the front. She took the pointer from him.

“Wrangel Island lies in the Arctic Ocean, as I said, within Russian territory,” she began. She knew that she was repeating herself, but she wanted to make sure everyone was on the same page. She couldn’t just assume everyone got the implications of what she was about to say. “We have known for some time that the Russians have been using this island as an internment camp.” She pointed to a couple of the buildings, indicating what she believed to be accommodation blocks, then traced the pointer along a black line that surrounded the buildings. “This is a high security perimeter fence, with lookout towers here and here,” she pointed again.

“How many prisoners are held in this camp?” a voice asked.

“Maybe a thousand in these areas here,” She traced the pointer along the image, picking out parts of the camp. She moved the pointer again to a separate section of the photograph. “But in this section there is only one, kept separate from the rest of the prisoners.”

Now she’d got their attention.

“One? Why would they keep one man in solitary confinement?” the same voice asked, then answered his own question. “Someone who needs protection from the other inmates?”

“Perhaps the security is to keep people out rather than someone in?” another suggested.

“We are sure that this is a prisoner who stays in quarters here.” She pointed again to a building the same size as one of the other accommodation blocks. We have seen him alone in what we have termed the Exercise Yard. No one else goes into that space other than those going to and from the towers.”

“He gets that block to himself when the other thousand are squeezed into those dozen huts? Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” she assured the room.

“It seems a little extreme, doesn’t it? Building a separate part of a prison for one man?”

“Rudolph Hess has been the only prisoner in Spandau for nearly twenty years.” This observation came from the man who had been sitting next to her. “Clearly whoever this man is, we can assume he is very important to someone. Yet, at the same time, the Russians don’t want to shout about him? Now, ask yourself this, why do you think that would that be? What makes this man so special? That seems like a very important question to me. Lieutenant Leopov?”

“As of yet we don’t know.”

“Yet is a very powerful word,” the man noted. “It implies you will do soon.”

She nodded. “We know how many people are permanently on the island and have been able to identify some of the people who have visited the island recently. At least one of them was a high ranking officer of the Red Army. We believe the two are linked in some way.” When distilled to its essence she realized how little they had actually learned about the island. It felt like they had been wasting so much time to get so little tangible information.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” the man held his hand out for the return of his pointer, signaling that her part in the briefing had come to an end. Leopov handed it over, wondering if she had really told anyone anything they hadn’t known. She made her way back to her seat, relieved to receive a reassuring nod from the man beside her.

“You did fine,” he whispered. “And now I’m thinking that’s not the only reason you’ve been brought here.”

A frown crumpled her face, but the man said no more.

The picture changed to show another face she had seen more than once in the last month.

“General Alexei Abramovitch. This is the man we believe has visited Wrangel Island a number of times over the last few months. Forgive me if this information has been kept from you Lieutenant, but it was felt that it would be better if we restricted this information to a need to know basis until this point.”

“Well, she was certainly right about it being a high ranking official in the Red Army.” The man next to her sat up straight, nodding at the screen. “They don’t have many fish bigger than this guy.”

“Indeed,” the presenter continued. “Abramovitch is a hard liner, very vocally uncomfortable with the way President Gorbachev is cozying up to the West. If he had just a little more support within the military his star would be on the rise and we’d be looking to the skies.”

The reference to a nuclear assault wasn’t lost on any of them.

The shadow of nuclear winter was a long one, but Leopov couldn’t believe anyone thought it would actually come down to that. Mutually assured destruction? That way lay madness.

“The plot thickens. I’m guessing he wasn’t taking a holiday on this little of island of theirs? Making a spot inspection to make sure that prisoners are being treated well would be a little below his pay grade, too.”

“That’s correct, Commander. We believe that Abramovitch has been visiting the prisoner being held in isolation.” He brought up another picture before there was the chance for anyone else to ask further questions. The man was clearly used to being in control, even amongst this group of officers. Leopov suspected he might be CIA.

“The intelligence that Carlisle managed to get out of Russia related to an Echo II Class submarine that has managed to get itself trapped in the ice around Wrangel Island. This submarine carried something either to or from the island; something referred to as Pandora’s Egg.”

“And do we know what this Pandora’s Egg is?” the commander asked.

“Not with any certainty, no, but we have suspicions. Or should I say concerns. Hence the perceived risk to National Security”

“No shit.” The commander’s language took Leopov by surprise. “So we come back to the same question we started out with: what makes this prisoner so special?”

“Unfortunately, this is where our intelligence starts to get a little hazy. We are piecing together bits of knowledge, and that means making some assumptions as we try and make sense of it.”

“You mean that you’re connecting the dots and hoping that your picture of a duck is right and that it shouldn’t have been an elephant? From where I’m sitting, it looks as if you’ve jumped the gun, hauling us all in here without any real evidence to support your concerns. Frankly, I’m not even sure there is a threat that we should be concerned about.”

The man didn’t try and hide his anger. He was clearly seething at the commander’s tone, not used to being spoken to like a child. The image behind him changed from the shot of a submarine to a grainy photograph of an old man, his shoulders hunched as he looked forward like a tortoise peering from its shell. “This is the only image of the prisoner on Wrangel Island.”

“I’ve never seen this before,” Leopov whispered to herself, loud enough for her neighbor to hear.

“So are you telling me we actually know who the prisoner is?” the commander asked.

“Not definitively. We think it might be this man. A second image appeared next to it like some conjurer’s trick. It was the face of a much younger man, but even then clearly not in the first flush of youth. “His name is Doctor Hans Luber, stationed in the Majdanek concentration camp from nineteen forty three to forty five.”

“What makes you think that this is the same man?”

“The Soviets liberated the camp just as the war was drawing to an end. Even that early in the game the Russians saw the benefit of learning the secrets that the German scientists had discovered in their experiments, even though they would never have carried them out themselves. Luber’s experiments involved exposing prisoners to radioactive materials. There are rumors of other, equally unsavory practices, but they amount to little more than whispers. We know that he was stationed at Majdanek at the time of the liberation, but he disappeared off the face of the earth from that date onward.”

“So the Russians shipped him back to the middle of nowhere and gave him a never-ending bunch of prisoners to experiment on?”

“So you think this place is some modern day camp?” another officer asked.

“What do you think a Gulag is exactly, sir?” The man was clearly growing tired of the interruptions. “The latest data we have suggests that there is a nuclear reactor on the island. I suggest you ask yourself what reasons the Russians could have for building something so expensive in such an isolated location.”

“More ducks and elephants?”

“That’s as may be, but the information we received from Carlisle has put a rather more important spin on things. Hence this briefing. Our government has made an offer of assistance in rescuing the submarine and its crew, but the Russians have denied the existence of a submarine in the area let alone that there is one caught in the ice.”

“Are you surprised by that? The Russians would rather see their men die than accept the help of anyone else. They won’t dare show any weakness to the world. And the last thing they want is their tech falling into what they see as enemy hands.”

“I’m not surprised at all, Commander. However, would it surprise you to learn our latest intelligence reports that a Spetsnaz team is being sent to the location of the Echo II sub? Their orders are to retrieve Pandora’s Egg. Their mission brief is not to free the submarine; not even to rescue the crew. Their sole objective is to retrieve the Egg.”

“Are you sure?”

“Carlisle was. That’s good enough for us.”

“And you think Pandora’s Egg is some kind of weapon?”

“Crack the shell and unleash all of the evils of the world,” Leopov said. That made them look her way again. “An Echo II submarine is equipped with Vulcan missiles. Wrangel Island puts it close enough to US soil to launch an attack. Now imagine something worse,” she said, voicing the suspicion they were all thinking.

The man still standing at the front turned toward Leopov. Her heart leapt, pounding a little too fast in her chest, before she realized he was actually looking at the man beside her.

“Commander Maxwell. What’s the status of your team?”

“They are already on route to Juneau, Alaska, and should be there in the next couple of hours.”

“Excellent. Then their task is simple. They need to locate the submarine and secure Pandora’s Egg. There’s a plane waiting to take you there. A helicopter will be on standby to take you to the ship. Your men will be on board.”

The commander nodded. “Then what are we waiting for?”

“There’s just one thing. I’d like you to take the Lieutenant with you.”

“And why the hell would you want that? She’s a number cruncher. No offense, my dear.” He turned to Leopov and fixed her with an apologetic smile. “But I don’t want to be responsible for getting you killed. And I really don’t want you to be responsible for getting any of my men killed.”

“She has local knowledge, no one knows the area better, and she speaks Russian with a perfect accent. Utilize all of the assets at your disposal, Commander.”

“Whatever you say,” the man beside her said.

He didn’t take well to receiving orders from civilians.