Seas of Crisis

degrees who could also lead in frontline combat.

“The pleasure, the honor, are mine, Captain Fuller.” Nyurba’s voice resonated in the small compartment. His accent was totally American, but his speech had that velvet quality that came from central Asian genetics.

Nyurba possessed a very broad chest. His arms and legs were massive, and toned like a bodybuilder’s. Jeffrey could tell all this on sight: Nyurba, for the first time while on Challenger, wore nothing but swim trunks and a T-shirt adorned with the Seabee logo — an angry bumblebee gripping a machine gun and tools in its six insect arms.

“Sorry to interrupt your exercise.”

“Not exercise, Captain. Now you’ve read your orders, light dress is to get me acclimatized. It’s cold where we’re going.”

Hmm. “That’s what we need to start talking about.”

Nyurba nodded soberly — too soberly for Jeffrey’s comfort. Commander, Strategic Command, he reminded himself.

Sessions yielded his chair to Nyurba, and perched against Jeffrey’s filing cabinet. With the four of them packed in the stateroom, it was cramped. Jeffrey preferred to think of times like this as cozy.

Another knock at the door. “That ought to be refreshments…. Come in!”

A mess management specialist — also highly trained as one of the ship’s paramedics — held a heavily laden tray into the compartment, which Sessions, the closest, accepted. The others passed it from hand to hand until it sat on Jeffrey’s desk. Mouth-watering aromas filled the stateroom.

“The pastries are optional,” Jeffrey said, “but we’re definitely going to need the coffee…. You do drink coffee, Commander? We can get hot water and a tea bag if you prefer.”

“Thank you,” Nyurba said, “but Navy coffee is fine by me. The closer to Mongolia you get in Siberia, the more you see coffee, not tea. Tea is a Russian thing. I mean ethnic Russian. Seven time zones west of the village where I spent my infancy.”

“Ha. Learn something new every day.”

Nyurba smiled warmly, his eyes sparkling in a sprightly way; he had a soft side after all. He also had crooked front teeth, a flaw that made him more human, approachable, not vain.

“My parents moved to Umiat after the Berlin Wall came down.”

“Umiat?”

“On the Colville River, in north Alaska. They run a mom-and-pop general store.”

“The rustic life? Sounds nice…. Well, let’s dig in.” Jeffrey poured coffee for everyone. “Oh, and from now on, you may call me Commodore.” He made it sound routine, matter-of-fact, an afterthought tossed in casually.

The others acknowledged. Bell and Sessions shifted their postures, settling in more comfortably, both physically and psychologically. They already looked older, more mature than when the meeting began. They were growing into their new roles quickly, as they knew they needed to, following Jeffrey’s example. He sipped his coffee, strong and hot and black.

“Commander Nyurba, how much can you tell us now about what your team is supposed to do?”

Dashiyn Nyurba had prepared thoroughly for this initial briefing, and knew he had to proceed with caution. Commodore Fuller was an intelligent man, and fearless, but there were higher considerations that weighed on Nyurba heavily. It was why he’d been given a cyanide capsule to keep nearby at all times.

“It’s not my team, Commodore. I’m second in command.”

“I thought—”

“Yes, I’m the most senior of the SERT members you have aboard.”

“But…?”

“When we rendezvous, I merge with a much larger group.”

“How much larger?” Commodore Fuller asked.

“Seventy-five more.” Nyurba knew they were hot-racking — sharing bunks — since Carter only had space for fifty riders beyond her regular crew. Seventy-five was a mob.

“Seventy-five more Seabees together? What are you guys up to? That’s like, what, eight full SERT teams on one mission?”

“We’re not all Seabees, Commodore. The complement is a joint one. We have people from special ops groups throughout the U.S. armed forces. SEALs, Marine Recon, Army Green Berets and Delta, Air Force Special Operations Squadrons, and some other air force experts. We were chosen because of our individual skills and our physical fitness. But most of all because of our cultural backgrounds and language fluencies.”

“Meaning?”

“The majority of us are combat veterans from the Global War on Terror, who because of our birth and upbringing can pass for native-born Russians or Siberians, or Russian Federation nationalities that serve in their army these days. For instance, I speak Russian and a couple of main Siberian languages, which haven’t entirely died out in the Old Country. My family’s mostly Evenk, intermarried with Yukaghir.” Nyurba saw this drew a blank with Jeffrey. “I spent several tours in Iraq, and have two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart to show for it, doing SERT engineering recon assignments attached to Marine Corps brigades.”

“Okay. I’m suitably impressed.”

“My entire current unit, the eighty of us, have been training together, as one commando entity, since the Berlin-Boer War started, as a contingency against a potential scenario. The President has decided to put that contingency, that scenario, into action.”

“Meaning?”

“I’m not supposed to say yet, sir. We need to get through the Bering Strait, then go to Carter by minisub. As you would know better than me, the Bering Strait is not an easy passage. We can’t afford any sort of problem, where this ship or her crew might fall into not-so-gentle Russian hands, while the latter pretend to be helping us poor distressed mariners. Everything they’d learn would be fed to the Germans. In this context, that could prove more disastrous than…”

Nyurba stopped himself, leaving an awkward silence made worse by the venom he realized had dripped from his last few sentences; his hatred of the Russians and Germans alike was rather personal. It was something he knew could not be fathomed by those whose ancestors hadn’t suffered the eastward expansion of Cossack traders and trappers long ago, the oppression under the czars, Stalin’s purges and forced migrations — and then the mass shipment westward of Siberian troops to repel the Hitlerite invaders, as cannon fodder marching on Berlin to be mown down in droves, to keep that same Stalin in power. Stalin’s successors had been no better, with Moscow despoiling the pristine Siberian environment in the name of industrial progress and Soviet-Russian national defense; the poisoned ecology killed people slowly and painfully. Nyurba knew all about that last part. He was an expert in nuclear decontamination.

Commodore Fuller put an end to the silence. “Last I heard, Carter was under repair in New London after heavy damage and casualties from a failed raid against Axis-occupied Norway.”

Nyurba’s hackles went up again immediately. “That raid did not fail due to even a single mistake made on site. The intelligence that led to the raid, and the operational security required to support it, are what failed.” Operational security meant overall secrecy to maintain surprise.

Jeffrey was taken aback at Nyurba’s vehemence. Clearly he was someone with a quick temper, someone to not make angry, especially not off duty in a bar.

“Commander Charles Harley remains in command of Carter,” Nyurba stated, “for everything that that should tell you. He won the Navy Cross for bringing his ship and the surviving SEALs back in one piece!”

Jeffrey felt a pang of grief. He had a strong hunch that two SEALs he’d grown fond of, who’d been with him on earlier raids staged from Challenger, had died on Carter’s mission to Norway. Because compartmentalization was so strict, none of his efforts to discover the fate of those comrades had yielded one clue.

But that was months ago. And from what he did hear through the grapevine, Captain Harley had reason enough for his own bereavement, from the losses he suffered on that mission, ambushed by waiting German forces through no fault of his own. It said something that, even given the shipyard working round the clock with the highest priority, it took many precious months to make Carter ready for action again.