Seas of Crisis

“We’ll need every minute of it.” He paused as if he wanted to say something else, but didn’t. “Out,” Kurzin ended testily.

Nyurba gave back the sound-powered rig.

“More time pressure?” Harley asked.

“To put it mildly, Captain.”

Before going below, Nyurba looked around one last time, at the austere yet beautiful scenery. Local time was midnight. But the sun, a misshapen golden orb softened by mist and fog in the distance, kissed the horizon in full view, glinting off intervening spots of open water. Kurzin for a moment felt disoriented and slightly depressed, in the same way he’d get from extreme jet lag. Something was wrong, something that made the vista seem like a landscape on an alien planet. Then he put his finger on it: the sun was due north. For days yet, until summer aged more past the solstice, the sun at this latitude would circle round and round the entire horizon and never set.

It seemed unnatural, although he understood astronomically why it happened. He took his leave of Captain Harley, and climbed down the ladder. As he reached the second of the two open watertight hatches in Carter’s sail trunk, he had a disturbing thought. All too soon, if things went as planned, he’d be unleashing new suns that were horribly more unnatural.

For a day, the strange little flotilla moved south. Carter steamed at four knots, moored to the ice floe. The minisub, small enough to stay submerged even in such shallows, followed beside, getting good fuel economy at such a low cruising speed. The Seahorse IIIs probed ahead and to both flanks, checking the bottom and airwaves for threats or new information. The special ops squadron leadership cadre, Kurzin and Nyurba especially, used the Multi-Mission Platform’s command center nonstop, to revise their logistics and land-travel arrangements, since the NSA experts’ signals intercept told them they’d lost a valuable day. The stay-behind support section, and the eighty commandos who’d go on the raid, ate and slept when they could, which was rarely.

The changes didn’t just involve computer and console work. Most of over a hundred hermetically sealed heavy backpacks and equipment bags, already combat-loaded in the U.S., had to be opened, spread out, reloaded with a different mix of contents, and checked and sealed again, one by one. This needed to be performed in the cable-tapping clean-room chamber, under antiseptic conditions, to avoid leaving the slightest forensic trace — particulates, lubricants, lint — that would reveal that the packs and bags had ever been aboard a U.S. Navy submarine. The process was an annoying, exhausting chore.

Twice near the start of the passage south through the East Siberian Sea, men in dry suits had to cross to the floe, hiding under the tented camouflage cloth, and emplace new mooring spikes as previous ones came loose. Other men, in parkas and ski pants, stationed on Carter’s hull, often needed to take up the slack on the lines while the floe slowly shrank from melting, as by the hour both air and sea grew ever slightly warmer. Nyurba and Kurzin took turns overseeing this work. When free, Nyurba would climb down a hatch and go into the command center, to note the broader situation status on the displays.

Coastal sea surveillance radars swept over Carter wearing her disguise. Their signal strengths were gradually rising, coming from directions that — thanks to Commodore Fuller’s trick with his decoy and K-335—presented few surprises and so far posed no risk of counterdetection as anything other than an ice floe. But Nyurba was experienced enough at combat to understand how radars would play cat-and-mouse. Some were mobile, driving quickly elsewhere after they’d given themselves away, to peek again from a bearing and range that might be a lot more dangerous. Not all installations would radiate during a single alert, to be able to electronically bushwhack the enemy later. That steadily approaching hostile shore held many unknown risks.

Nyurba increasingly felt as if Rear Admiral Meredov was watching for him and his team in a personal way.

Patrol boats with antiship cruise missiles more than once crossed Carter’s path. Were these patrols routine, or were they sneaking into position to get Carter surrounded where they knew she couldn’t possibly dive? Three times Carter’s lookouts saw merchant ships go by much closer than the horizon; their navigation radars, once detected, could be tracked, and Harley made very sure that none were collision dangers. But the Russians sometimes used merchant ships for spying or counterespionage. Did these have concealed sonar rooms and passive arrays below their waterlines, recording every whiff of tonals and broadband that Carter gave off?

The closer the floe drifted toward the nuclear-waste dumping ground — with Carter surreptitiously pushing — the less Russian forces of any type came within visual range. The continental shelf continued rising. When the bottom of his ship got too near the bottom of the sea, Harley ordered that several variable ballast tanks be pumped dry, to raise Carter’s hull slightly higher out of the water. Soon, Nyurba knew, even that wouldn’t be enough.

Kurzin told Nyurba to go forward into Carter’s control room, to liaise there with Captain Harley during the next step needed to get the commandos toward shore.

When Nyurba got there Harley greeted him, pointing at the tactical plot. “We’re already in the bay, Commander.” The Ularovskaya Guba. “See? The nav chart and the gravimeter show you the Indigirka delta, and the Alazeja mouth.” Harley tapped keys on his command console, and the gravimeter changed from its bird’s-eye-view display mode into look-forward mode.

Now the arrangement of seafloor and coastal geography appeared to Nyurba as if he were seeing through the windshield of a car. He noted the big navigable channels into the Indigirka River, and, to his left on the screen, the two much smaller channels where the Alazeja River forked five miles before its outlet, creating a thin, low-lying island in midstream. The tactical plot showed the island was unoccupied — Nyurba knew it was totally lifeless.

“Now we can’t avoid some noise,” Harley said. “I’m counting on chaotic thermal updrafts from heat sources on the bottom, and turbulent river outflows, to keep anybody from noticing.”

“Understood, Captain.” Nyurba shuddered to think of what made that heat.

“Sir,” the control room phone talker said, “Colonel Kurzin reports men are in position on superstructure.”

“Very well. Helm, all stop.”

They waited for the ship’s and the floe’s momentum to come off. This didn’t take long — the front of the floe made a lot of water resistance, like a barge.

“Phone Talker, tell Colonel Kurzin to stand by to adjust mooring lines as needed.”

“Colonel Kurzin acknowledges, sir.”

“Chief of the Watch, blow more air into all main ballast tank groups as needed to reduce ship’s draft by three feet.”

“More air, all groups, as needed, reduce draft by three feet, aye, sir,” Carter’s chief of the boat answered. Lanky and dour, he was quite a contrast to Challenger’s COB in both build and personality, Nyurba thought to himself.

He heard the hiss of high-pressure air. He knew that submarines could adjust their depth at the keel this way, to some extent; being surfaced wasn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. But the more their hulls were lifted up, especially at the stern, the more their propulsors would cavitate — a distinctive hissing sound — or even throb, called blade-rate. If the COB wasn’t careful and deft, extra air might leak out through the open bottoms of the ballast tanks, bubbling to the surface alongside the hull, the worst acoustic giveaway of all.

Harley’s previous jauntiness up on the bridge had deserted him. With the added effort of pushing the ice floe, starting from a dead stop could make Carter’s pump jet, bordering on the ocean-to- atmosphere interface, suck vacuum. The propulsion shaft would race, potentially causing permanent damage. The noise transient — a new one for the typical Russian sonar technician — would be impossible to miss. All the effort to convince Meredov that the floe was just a floe — by pushing it to the last place anyone in their right mind would want to approach — could be squandered in five seconds flat.

And no matter how quiet Carter could be, her ruse might not hold up forever. She still faced a long trip surfaced like this, as Nyurba and Harley well knew. After the commando dropoff, Carter and the floe would make their way back to the marginal ice zone — it having looked then like the floe had drifted in a giant U that trended from west to east with the prevailing current and the variable winds. Harley’s men would take in the camouflage cover, detach from the floe, and submerge. Carter would then begin a whole new series of difficult actions to get ready to pick up the surviving squadron members with maximum stealth, several days hence.