Seas of Crisis

Carter had eased in as close to the beach as she could. It was time for the commando team to switch to a smaller taxi. They were in a location meant to be the seemingly least likely point of covert entry that mission planners could possibly conceive of. Self-preservation alone should discourage Russian forces from searching this place. Satellite surveillance had appeared to confirm the fact. But that didn’t mean that Kurzin and his followers were safe — not by any stretch of the imagination.

Nyurba would lead the first ten-man group in their short underwater crossing to the minisub. From swim fins and scuba rebreathers, to dry suits and dive masks and weapons and everything else, what they wore or used or carried was Russian-made. Russia’s borders were porous, and a brisk underground bazaar of military equipment was constantly active. Nyurba knew that sometimes corrupt supply noncoms, or disaffected and demoralized soldier-draftees, often heroin addicts, would sell anything for hard cash, even to their enemies — especially on the steadily smoldering Chechen front, or along Russia’s newly tense border with China.

The group, tethered in dive-buddy pairs, did final checks inside the jam-packed airlock chamber in Carter’s Multi-Mission Platform. Constituted temporarily as a point element for the squadron, they were by background a mix of Navy SEAL or Seabee, Marine Recon, Army Ranger or Green Beret or Delta Force, and Air Force Special Operations Squadron shadow warriors. From here they would put into practice armed forces jointness to the full, as they had in training for most of a year. They were part of a hand-picked elite from within the elites, and they knew it. Nyurba was proud to be leading them.

They each, in their own way, showed the mix of eagerness and fear that he himself was feeling, the indescribable high that always preceded mission insertion. They placed their rebreather mouthpieces between their teeth, verified that their oxygen supplies were good, and made “okay” hand signs to Nyurba.

“Don radiation suits and watertight hoods,” he ordered tersely. “Fins over the suit booties.”

The radiation suits were thick and heavy. The hoods had Plexiglas window plates. Everyone helped their buddy use Velcro strips to bind the suits as snugly as they could to their bodies and gear, working from the legs upward. This was to squeeze out air pockets that might otherwise make them too buoyant — they’d pop to the surface like beach balls, helpless. If they forgot to exhale rapidly, an uncontrolled ascent could burst their lungs.

Once the hoods were fastened on, the scuba rebreathers became the men’s self-contained respirators.

They put on uninflated buoyancy-compensation vests — adjustable life jackets — over the suits. They strapped titanium dive knives to their left arms; these were survival tools, not weapons. Special weight belts went on last, so they could come off first if anyone did get into trouble.

Nyurba signaled to the command center that the chamber was ready to be equalized. Air hissed in, increasingly, to match the pressure of the sea outside. Everyone swallowed to clear their eardrums. The pressure, for scuba divers, was mild, less than double the norm at sea level. It squeezed their suits and pressed hood windows against the dive masks covering their faces.

A SEAL chief opened the bottom hatch. In pairs, with Nyurba and his dive buddy going last, they sat on the edge of the hatch, holding in their laps their seawater-proof backpacks and equipment bags, which were tethered to their waists. These had floatation bladders, to make them neutrally buoyant. They slipped into the pitch-black water, and disappeared.

Carter’s chemo-sensors had already thoroughly tested this area for toxins.

You would not want to swim in this water without a radiation suit.

Nyurba and his buddy — a Marine Recon gunnery sergeant — slid into the water. They fell a very short distance and landed feet-first on hard sand. On foot, in slow motion because of water drag, they moved out from under Carter’s hull and her shadow as fast as they could; they had to crouch because the clearance was so small. Pockets of less salty water, thanks to the freshwater rivers, provided less lift to any object compared to regular seawater; if such a pocket drifted under Carter they’d be squashed like insects — the ship, even with ballast tanks blown empty, weighed more than ten thousand tons. From the surface swells alone the hull heaved up and down enough to make the diver lockout evolution be one hair-raising experience.

Nyurba heard moaning and popping sounds from the floe attached to Carter’s other side, but such effects from any big floe were typical. He opened a tiny cover on the ship’s hull and rotated a handle, to signal to the command center that the chamber was ready for its next load of men, in case the chamber’s video cameras failed.

Nyurba’s dry suit, layered inside his radiation suit, helped keep him warm. Even so, he felt a chill go up his spine. The water here was clear enough to see the edge of the dumping ground. The surface of the bay overhead, an undulating sheet of green discolored with hazy brown, gave uneven but adequate light that shone in rippling streaks — distorted sunbeams. The water was utterly lifeless, not a fish or eel or even a stalk of seaweed in sight.

What caught his eyes were eerie blue glows, where fresh spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors had been discarded carelessly. He also saw dozens of barrels, some of them rusted through and leaking, in haphazard piles. What gave him the willies, most of all, was the huge cylinder lying on the bottom, so big that its top must extend near the surface, so long that both ends were lost in the murk to Nyurba’s right and left. It was a derelict Russian sub, scuttled here, probably after being used for a while as a mobile nuclear power plant. Nyurba thought that this idea in itself was clever of the Kremlin, since Siberia, supercharged with rampant resource extraction, had an insatiable demand for electrical power. Vessels afloat that the Russian Navy couldn’t afford to keep battleworthy were still able to produce many valuable megawatt-hours. The casual discarding of the vessel once her reactor core was aged out, in contrast, he found abhorrent. She lay with her keel toward Nyurba, masking her sail and superstructure; he had no idea what class of sub she might be. But there were cracks in her hull, through which seawater circulated freely — maybe these fractures resulted from her scuttling, or afterward from storms and winter punishment by bergs. He wondered how many other subs had been dumped here, and how much of the waste in this area had been accepted from foreign countries in exchange for hefty fees. He glanced at his portable radiation instruments. The readings were more than sufficient to hurry him along.

He knew that uranium or plutonium inhaled in tiny amounts caused cancer — symptoms took years or decades to show, and the cancer might be curable. But lighter radioactive isotopes, by-products of nuclear fission that built up by the tons in spent reactor cores, gave off vastly higher rems per hour — acute radiation sickness would kill within days. Outside his suit he was being bathed in offal from dead cores. The slightest leak and a hellish cocktail of strontium, cesium, barium, and yttrium would envelop his flesh and penetrate bodily orifices. He’d never live to reach the missile site, let alone launch armed ICBMs.

Doing this is insanity.

Nyurba tried to steady his respiration rate. The rebreathers had an endurance of about ten hours for a physically fit man exerting himself. Oxygen from a small pressurized tank would be added to the air Nyurba exhaled, while chemicals would scrub it of carbon dioxide, releasing more oxygen — and he’d breathe it again. He and his dive buddy trudged along the seafloor to the hovering minisub. They handed their equipment bags to men already inside, then with their help climbed up through the open bottom hatch, into the mini’s hyperbaric chamber. Nyurba reached for and lifted the bottom hatch until it shut, then turned the wheel to make it watertight.

The two-man crew in the forward compartment reduced the chamber’s air pressure to one atmosphere. Nyurba and his dive buddy went into the transport compartment. They took seats, fully garbed like the others, still using their respirators. The crew in front kept the pressure-proof hatch to the control compartment dogged, and Nyurba knew why. Everything in the minisub aft of that hatch was badly contaminated by poisons the dripping-wet point team had unavoidably carried aboard.

And there’ll be seven more shuttle trips like this before the entire squadron’s ashore.

The eight-foot-high minisub brought Nyurba and his people as close to the beach as it could. The water was twelve feet deep, and the surf zone was a mile away.

The men climbed down through the open bottom hatch, crawling into the narrow space between the mini’s hull and the seafloor, much as they’d done under Carter herself twenty minutes ago.

The water here was unspeakably filthy, and almost completely opaque. The men all tethered themselves together, in single file, by feel, using lanyards.

Nyurba led the way, guided by a glow-in-the-dark miniature inertial navigation system strapped to his wrist. He also held a waterproof mine detector, using it to check the mud and stones on the bottom in front of him. He