Seas of Crisis

islands had helicopter landing pads, and helos. These could shuttle southwest, to the much larger parts of the New Siberian Island landmasses, or could fly due south to the mainland, three hundred nautical miles away.

The helos didn’t just rotate troops and bring in supplies. They patrolled aggressively, dropping dipping sonars and LIDAR projectors through the polynyas. And the troops, on skis or using snowmobiles, patrolled the surface of the cap, moving back and forth between Genrietty and Zannetty, watching for commandos who might think there were easy pickings here. Jeffrey assumed the naval infantry followed routes mapped out by the helos across the uneven, ever-changing, treacherous ice.

Which is why I picked this area for infiltration and eavesdropping. It’s the last place they’d expect a pair of American nuclear subs to actually be.

And since the islands were plugged into the regional communications net, the trunk cable Jeffrey wanted to find was likely to run very near them.

Except the Russian mind is infamously difficult to read. Maybe, to them, this is precisely where spy subs would come, into the teeth of their defenses and right under their sentries’ feet.

Once Harley’s probe went active, the Seahorse might instead set off a buried acoustic-intercept intruder alarm, or even detonate a mine. The Seahorse was expendable, but the unmistakable blast would bring alerted forces from everywhere, and the strike group would be surrounded with nowhere to run or hide. If the mine was an RMT-1, similar to the American CAPTOR but more lethal, it would release a torpedo that rose from the mud and homed on the nicest target within the considerable range of its seekers — which meant Challenger or Carter.

The senior control room teams on both ships knew there was no way around this. The strike group simply had to locate the cable. Jeffrey was taking his biggest gamble yet. He granted Harley permission to go active with his probe.

Fatalistically, Jeffrey waited for Carter’s Seahorse to produce results. Whether the next thing to happen would be Harley’s signal of success, or the eruption of a mine going off, or the whine of a torpedo inbound, only time would tell. The acid burning in Jeffrey’s stomach acted up again. From the jittery movements of people sitting or standing around him, he knew he wasn’t alone in this torturous stress.

The solid resistance to perpetual pack-ice drift, caused by the two small immovable islands, was an added factor making the cap here unusually dynamic, constantly splitting and piling up and grinding. Those noisy 3-D quadraphonic effects on the sonar speakers, giving spatial cues for the violent natural goings-on so close above, made Jeffrey feel oppressively hemmed in.

“Carter signals,” Sessions finally announced, “ ‘Have located buried cable. Ice above it is thick, solid, and jagged. No polynyas are near. Permission to commence cable tapping?’ ”

“Signal Carter, ‘Permission granted, commence cable tap operations. At will, inform flagship ideal position assume for massive parallel data processing.’ ”

Harley’s ship took the lead. Carter and Challenger converged on the Seahorse III that was hovering over the buried military fiber-optic cable.

Chapter 16

For the next phase, Nyurba’s duties and status as second-in-command of Kurzin’s squadron meant that his proper place was in USS Jimmy Carter’s battle management center, within her Multi- Mission Platform. To Nyurba, the space’s layout and the feel of its people at work resembled Challenger’s control room, except most of the staff were nonsubmariners — passengers aboard Carter who formed a support-and-liaison section that wouldn’t go into Siberia with the Air Force Special Ops Squadron. But instead of having a ship control station, the command center had stations for controlling off-board probes. Other consoles were being used to operate diver airlocks and the hangar space’s ocean interface — through which unmanned vehicles departed or returned covertly. Near the forward end of the space, the bulkheads angled inward; Carter’s wasp waist began to taper there, at the front of the battle management center.

The data and imagery on the console screens and bulkhead displays consisted of everything relevant to the commandos completing their mission. A tactical plot aided team situational awareness: Challenger was two hundred yards away, ahead and to starboard. The commodore had two of the three Seahorses, and both LMRS probes, deployed five miles off in different directions, as early-warning trip wires.

Colonel Kurzin stood impatiently, in overall charge, while an Air Force major handled minute-to-minute decisions and orders as leader of the mission-support section. Activity here was so classified that not even Captain Harley could enter without Kurzin’s permission while espionage divers worked on the bottom, as they were right now. Several intercom systems and dedicated sound-powered phones, as well as fiber-optic data buses, let the control room and the special ops center stay in constant touch. From these it was clear that Harley and his people had their hands full, making Carter hover as if glued in place.

Nyurba watched for progress, or problems, while a display screen showed six Navy SEALs, in closed-circuit mixed gas rebreather gear, carefully digging into the bottom muck to unearth the buried fiber-optic cable. The rebreathers had much longer endurance than open-circuit scuba, with the added benefit of not releasing bubbles that rose to the surface to increase the risk of being detected. The mixed gas was necessary at a depth of two hundred feet, where compressed air’s oxygen could cause convulsions, nitrogen would induce the pleasant but often fatal rapture of the deep, and it also increased risk of barotrauma — the bends — even if the divers were returned to normal atmospheric pressure gradually.

The widescreen display was windowed to show the divers from several perspectives at once. The pictures were sharp, because now that the immediate area had been thoroughly scoured for threats, Commodore Fuller ordered active laser line-scan cameras to be used. One feed came from the Seahorse III that had found the cable, and hovered nearby. Other feeds came from photonic sensors mounted along Carter’s keel, and from a hand-held camera used by one of the divers. His camera had a fiber-optic tether of its own, and a SEAL chief at one console in the special ops center, wearing headphones and a lip mike, was in continual voice contact with him through that tether.

The divers all wore harnesses connected to lifelines fastened to fittings on Carter’s keel. This was a standard safety precaution.

One diver spent almost all his time looking up. This was for safety, too. He was watching Carter’s hull for depth change or drift. The ship’s rounded underside was only fifteen feet directly above the divers’ heads. A sharp drop and she could squash them. A quick rise and the lifelines would yank the SEALs up shallow too fast, to hideous deaths.

Carter was being held in position laterally by her auxiliary maneuvering units, her bow facing into the current — which near the bottom set to the east at one-quarter knot. This was enough to cause noticeable drag against someone standing upright. The divers had to be cautious to keep their footing and not kick up silt; their buoyancy-compensation vests were deflated to make them heavy — they stepped softly and slowly in their extra-large-sized combat swimmer fins. As they dug, using titanium shovels meant for the purpose, they deposited the muck downcurrent, so they could see what they were doing. Nyurba understood all these things because he was a qualified Seabee diver himself, although he’d mostly used compressed air or pure oxygen and rarely gone below thirty feet. His focus, as a construction engineer, had been on assessing underwater repairs — for bridge abutments and water mains — or planning submerged obstacle-removal demolitions.

The SEALs hadn’t yet exposed the cable. Their trench looked about three feet deep. From what the Seahorse’s sonar had shown, they wouldn’t need to go down much farther.

Nyurba glanced at another bulkhead display, a large-scale map. He knew from prior briefings how to interpret it at a glance. Icons, and color-coded ribbony bands that reminded him of party streamers, explained why the trunk fiber-optic cable was here, why Commodore Fuller had decided to tap it here, and why Kurzin and Nyurba would lead their men ashore on the mainland Siberian coast nearest to here.

The central part of the Russian Federation consisted of a wilderness with virtually no east-west