Icebound

1:32

On the fourteenth day of a hundred-day electronic-espionage mission, the Russian nuclear submarine Ilya Pogodin reached its first monitoring station on schedule. The captain, Nikita Gorov, ordered the maneuvering room to hold the boat steady in the moderate southeasterly currents northwest of Jan Mayen Island, forty miles from the coast of Greenland and one hundred feet beneath the stormy surface of the North Atlantic.

The Ilya Pogodin had been named after an official Hero of the Soviet People, in the days before the corrupt bureaucracy had failed and the totalitarian state had crumbled under the weight of its own inefficiency and venality. The boat's name had not been changed: in part because the navy was tradition bound; in part because the new quasi-democracy was fragile, and care still had to be taken not to offend the bitter and potentially murderous old-guard Party members who had been driven from power but who might one day come storming back to reopen the extermination camps and the institutions of “reeducation'; and in part because Russia was now so fearfully poor, so totally bankrupted by Marxism and by legions of pocket-lining politicians, that the country could spare no funds for the repainting of boat names or for the alteration of records to reflect those changes.

Gorov was unable to obtain even adequate maintenance for his vessel. In these trying days after the fall of empire, he was too worried about the integrity of the pressure hull, the nuclear power plant, and the engines to spare any concern for the fact that the Ilya Pogodin was named after a despicable thief and murderer who had been nothing more noble than a dutiful defender of the late, unlamented regime.

Although the Pogodin was an aging fleet submarine that had never carried nuclear missiles, only some nuclear-tipped torpedoes, it was nonetheless a substantial boat, measuring three hundred sixty feet from bow to stern, with a forty-two-foot beam and a draft of thirty-two feet six inches. It displaced over eight thousand tons when fully submerged.

The southeasterly currents had a negligible influence on the boat. It would never drift more than one hundred yards from where Gorov had ordered it held steady.

Peter Timoshenko, the young communications officer, was in the control center at Gorov's side. Around them, the windows and gauges of the electronic equipment pulsed and glowed and blinked in the half-light: red, amber, green, blue. Even the ceiling was lined with scopes, graphs, display screens, and control panels. When the maneuvering room acknowledged Gorov's order to hold the boat steady, and when the engine room and reactor room had been made aware of it, Timoshenko said, “Request permission to run up the aerial, Captain.”

“That's what we're here for.”

Timoshenko stepped into the main companionway and walked thirty feet to the communications shack, a surprisingly small space packed full of radio equipment capable of receiving and sending encrypted messages in ultrahigh frequency (UHF), high frequency (HF), very low frequency (VLF), and extremely low frequency (ELF). He sat at the primary console and studied the display screens and scopes on his own extensive array of transceivers and computers. He smiled and began to hum as he worked.

In the company of most men, Peter Timoshenko felt awkward, but he was always comfortable with the companionship of machines. He had been as tease in the control room, but his place, with its even heavier concentration of electronics, was his true home.

“Are we ready?” another technician asked.

“Yes.” Timoshenko flicked a yellow switch.

Topside, on the outer hull of the Ilya Pogodin, a small helium balloon was ejected from a pressurized tube on the sail. It rose rapidly through the dark sea, expanding as it went, trailing the multicommunications wire behind it. When the balloon broke the surface, the technicians in the Pogodin were able to monitor every message sent to, from, and within the eastern coast of Greenland via virtually every communications medium except note-passing and underground telephone line. Because it was the same dull gray- blue as the winter sea, the balloon — and the short, complicated antenna attached to it — couldn't have been seen from the deck of a ship even ten yards away.

On land and in civilian society, Timoshenko was frequently self-conscious. He was tall, lanky, rawboned, awkward, and often clumsy. In restaurants and nightclubs, on city streets, he suspected that people were watching him and were quietly amused by his lack of grace. In the Pogodin, however, secure in his deep domain, he felt blessedly invisible, as though the sea were not a part of the world above the surface but a parallel dimension to it, and as though he were a spirit slipping through those cold depths, able to hear the inhabitants in the world above without being heart, to see without being seen, safe from their stares, not an object of amusement any longer. A ghost.

After giving Timoshenko a while to deploy the aerial and scan a wide spectrum of frequencies, Captain Gorov stepped into the doorway of the communications shack. He nodded at the assistant technician. To Timoshenko, he said, “Anything?”

The communications officer was smiling and holding a single earphone to his left ear. “Full input.”

“Of interest?”

“Not much as yet. There's a group of American Marines winter-testing some equipment near the coast.”

Although they were living in the long shadow of the Cold War's passage, in a world where old enemies were supposed to have become neutral toward one another or were even said to have become fine friends, the greater part of the former Soviet intelligence apparatus remained intact, both at home and abroad. The Russian Navy continued to conduct extensive information-gathering along the coastlines of every major Western nation, as well as at most points of strategic military importance in the Third World. Change, after all, was the only constant. If enemies could become friends virtually overnight, they could become enemies again with equivalent alacrity.

“Keep me informed,” Gorov said. Then he went to the officer's mess and ate lunch.

1:40

Crouched at the shortwave radio, in contact with Edgeway Station, Harry said, “Have you gotten through to Thule?”

Although Gunvald Larsson's voice was filtered through a sieve of static, it was intelligible. “I've been in continuous contact with them and with Norwegian officials at a meteorological station on Spitsbergen for the past twenty-five minutes.”

“Can either of them reach us?”

“The Norwegians are pretty much locked in by ice. The Americans have several Kaman Huskies at Thule. That's their standard rescue helicopter. The Huskies have auxiliary fuel tanks and long-range capability. But conditions at ground level aren't really good enough to allow them to lift off. Terrific winds. And by the time they got to you — if they could get to you — the weather would have deteriorated so much they probably wouldn't be able to put down on your iceberg.”

“There doesn't just happen to be an icebreaker or a battleship in our neighborhood?”

“The Americans say not.”

“So much for miracles.”

“Do you think you can ride it out?”

Harry said, “We haven't taken an inventory of our remaining supplies, but I'm sure we don't have enough fuel to keep us warm any longer than another twenty-four hours.”

A loud burst of static echoed like submachine-gun fire in the ice cave.

Gunvald hesitated. Then: “According to the latest forecasts, this is bigger than any major weather pattern we've had all winter. We're in for a week of bitter storms. One atop the other. Not even a brief respite between