Along the way, submerged through the Chukchi Sea, Challenger began to pass more and more chunky icebergs, and flatter floes, bobbing and tumbling noisily on the ocean surface above. Then she crossed beneath the edge of the 2012 summertime Arctic ice cap. The boundary zone was extremely noisy, with wind and wind-driven wave action making broken ice chunks grind against one another and the outer margin of the solid cap. What marine mammals were heard now, on sonar, changed from whales — who rarely went under the ice cap since they needed to surface often to breathe — to amphibious creatures: seals and walruses, who ate the many Arctic fish. The seal and walrus adults and pups would enter and leave the water through open areas called polynyas or leads, which existed even in winter, but became more common and larger in summer. Teeming flocks of sea birds also lived off fish they caught in these polynyas.
Jeffrey reminded himself that polar bears walked around on the ice and snow up there. They hunted the seals and walruses. Inuit walked around, or paddled kayaks, or drove dog sleds or rode on snowmobiles, too. They also hunted walruses and seals, and sometimes had confrontations with the polar bears — which were edible, but just barely.
Challenger turned east, entering the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, and began to steam across the Canada Abyssal Plain, in water nine to twelve thousand feet deep. Three and a half days after transiting the Bering Strait, well up under the ice cap, Challenger neared her rendezvous with USS Jimmy Carter.
Commander Dashiyn Nyurba was impressed by the food on Challenger. Whether breakfast, lunch, dinner, or midrats, the ingredients were the highest quality, the cooking the most skilled and imaginative, that he’d ever experienced in his fifteen years as a naval officer. And he’d traveled far and wide, ashore and on many surface ships, before being tapped for the Air Force Special Operations Squadron joint-service outfit that he was second in command of now.
The dinner dishes had been cleared a while ago. Nyurba’s people were in the wardroom with Commodore Fuller, playing their last poker game before they transferred to Carter. While the card- playing helped to kill time — the Seabees had a lot to spare as they rode along on Challenger—the rounds weren’t friendly. Everyone, including the commodore, spoke only in Russian. Since gambling was forbidden by Navy regs, the stakes were toothpicks and ego, especially the latter, which made the play extremely competitive. Nyurba thought that the commodore was getting noticeably better at both his poker face and his language fluency. His accent was atrocious, but that part didn’t matter. Unlike the special ops team, Fuller wasn’t supposed to disguise his nationality. No, his duty would be to emphasize it.
Through hooded eyes Nyurba looked the commodore over one last time. Soon enough, he knew, Fuller would find out for himself what his orders were in total. Nyurba had known his squadron’s purpose for most of a year, though he’d beseeched the Lord that this mission never be put into effect. He expected that when they all went over to Carter in Challenger’s minisub for a major briefing and planning session, and the commodore opened his inner orders pouch when he got there, he’d be appalled.
As well he should be. What Fuller was being asked to do was truly appalling, but Nyurba had been told that it was the least of all the evils left for America to choose between. And at one point, Captain Jeffrey Fuller, United States Navy, would have to personally pull off the biggest, most important bluff ever conceived in military history.
The mere idea of it sent shivers up Nyurba’s spine, and Nyurba was a very hard man.
A messenger knocked and entered the wardroom. “Commodore, the Captain’s respects, and he requests your presence in Control.”
“Da, spasiba,” Fuller responded. Yes, thank you. He glanced at Nyurba. “Pazhalsta.” Excuse me.
“Nichevo,” Nyurba said. No problem.
“Sir?” The skinny, pimply complexioned young messenger was confused.
“Sorry,” Fuller said, reverting to English. “I’ll be right there.”
The messenger left.
The round of betting wasn’t finished. Fuller placed his cards facedown, and stood. Nyurba saw him covetously eye the big pile of toothpicks in the middle of the table — the pot.
“A shame. I had a full house. Jacks high.”
“Let me see that.” Nyurba reached across the table. He turned over the cards. “Liar. You got crap.”
“But I had you thinking.” Fuller smirked, then left the wardroom.
Nyurba viewed Fuller with a mix of admiration and pity.
He knew that together they’d soon pull the tail of the dragon of Armageddon as hard as anyone could. The odds were discouraging that many or any of the squadron’s men would return from the land phase of the mission alive.
It will be a major miracle if Commodore Fuller succeeds at all the things his strike group must achieve like clockwork from here forward. If he fails, his name will be cursed for centuries by whatever is left of the human race.
From what Nyurba had seen and heard the past few days, he believed that Jeffrey Fuller was the right man to attempt what seemed forbiddingly impossible. Commander, U.S. Strategic Command, and the President of the United States above him, had chosen well.
Jeffrey, Bell, and the sonar officer, Finch, stood side by side in the aisle behind sonar supervisor Senior Chief O’Hanlon’s seat. Contact would be made with Jimmy Carter, and identities verified, using a secure undersea digital acoustic link. This system sent verbal or text messages in code, in a frequency band around one thousand kilohertz — fifty times above the range of human hearing. Each transmission’s frequency jumped thousands of times per second, and the beam could be tightly focused toward the intended recipient, making it almost impossible for an enemy sonar to notice, even at close range.
“You think we’ll hear Carter hailing us before we detect her broadband or tonals?” Bell asked Finch and O’Hanlon.
Lieutenant (j.g.) Allan Finch was in his mid-twenties, short and thin, with a serious personality. A naval officer generalist assigned to sonar only for now, he was sensible enough to know that on matters of real-world operations, Senior Chief O’Hanlon — with ten years’ more experience and a permanent rating as sonar tech — could run rings around him.
“Let’s hope so, Skipper,” O’Hanlon replied. “Arctic acoustic conditions are way too tricky this time of year. The nominal range of our comms is about the same as the maximum range of our ADCAPS.” Around thirty miles. “Getting Carter on the phone would ease my mind about a friendly fire embarrassment.”
Two hours later, close to the rendezvous point, Bell went to silent battle stations as a precaution. Jeffrey sat at his borrowed console in the rear of the control room. Making the meeting with Carter even trickier was that a gale had blown in from the west, with winds that Sonar estimated as topping thirty knots. They got this figure by analyzing wave action in the larger polynyas under which Challenger passed every five or six miles. Bell ordered the sonar speakers turned on.
Background noise rose substantially with the storm. Sleet and freezing rain pelted the polynyas, causing hissing and drumming sounds. The wind made the summer ice cap, which averaged less than ten feet thick, bend and flex due to forces that ranged from sea swells carrying their up-and-down energy far under the edge of the ice, to the wind itself pressing against ice ridges that stuck up from the cap. The prevailing surface current, from the opposite direction, east, gained purchase against many downward bummocks, straining the ice even more.
The cap moaned and creaked continually. Sometimes, nearby or in the distance, it would emit a sudden loud crack, echoing off bummocks everywhere like rolling thunder, as multiple stresses fractured the cap and two adjacent sections either relentlessly squeezed together, piling up and fracturing more, or separated, making a lead of brand-new open water. Challenger’s sensors indicated that, with this gale, colder air was moving in, polynyas were freezing to slush, and the water temperature at shallow
