Arctic Gold

toward the depression’s center.

“Okay!” Yeats called, hurrying back from the depression’s edge. “Let’s blow it!”

“And three,” Haines said, holding a small transmitter in his gloved hands, “and two… and one… and fire!”

A column of water and chunks of ice geysered into the cold air with a solid thud that they felt through the soles of their heavily insulated boots. The water and spray subsided, leaving a large dark spot at the bottom of the depression.

“Breakthrough!” Haines called.

“Right,” Yeats said. “Launch the baby.”

“Watch your feet!” she called. “Don’t get caught in the cable!” McMillan touched a control on her board, and the cradle supporting the Orca at the depression’s edge began rising on powerful hydraulics, tipping the UUV’s tail high, the nose down. In seconds, gravity took over and the Orca eased forward on its rails, slammed hard onto the ice belly down like a huge and ungainly penguin, and swiftly slid into the water. It reached the dark patch, nosed over, and vanished, trailing the slender wire behind it.

The large spool of fiber-optic cable mounted on McMillan’s sled played out rapidly with a faint hissing sound. An age ago, in what seemed now like another life, Kathy McMillan had worked for Raytheon on the ADCAP torpedo for the U.S. Navy. Five years ago, she’d come to work for the National Security Agency, bringing her experience-and her security classification-with her. For the past year, though, she’d been seconded from the NSA to the CIA and had been working with the Company’s Directorate of Science and Technology to fine-tune the Orca for CIA operations worldwide.

The Orca was actually quite similar to the wire-guided torpedoes used on board U.S. submarines-considerably smaller, lighter, and slower, of course, and lacking a high explosive warhead, but powered by batteries, driven by pumpjet propulsors, and remotely piloted over its two-way data feed. McMillan had about ten miles’ worth of cable on her spool, though it didn’t look bulky enough for that.

Her handset looked like a video gamer’s control box, with a pair of inch-long joysticks, one for left-right-up- down, the other for controlling speed. Touch-pad controls handled the sophisticated array of underwater sensors and cameras into its nose. Headlamps set into the Orca on either side of the nose cast an eerie, cold-white light ahead, illuminating swirling clouds of gleaming white motes in the vehicle’s path. McMillan was getting a clear picture on her small display-a deep blue-green and featureless haze, with an oddly wrinkled and rugged ceiling of white overhead.

“How’s she look?” Yeats asked, coming up beside her.

“We’re beneath the ice,” she told him. “On course, fifteen knots. We’ll be there in about half an hour.”

“Good. I don’t want us to hang around here longer than we have to.”

“Relax. They don’t even know we’re here.”

“They would’ve heard the explosion,” Yeats told her. “Sound travels underwater, you know.”

“Yes, Dennis,” she said in her most acid, yes-dear tone. She hated it when men patronized her. “I know something about sonar, okay?”

“Oh, yeah. All that work for the Navy.”

“And I also know that it’s almost impossible to track underwater sounds under the ice. They heard the explosion, all right, but they won’t have a clue as to where it came from, or how far away it is. So far as they know, it was something echoing in from the oil derricks off the North Slope.”

Minutes passed. The fiber-optic cable continued unreeling from its drum, vanishing into the hole in the ice. On her monitor, the bottom side of the ice raced past overhead with a flicker of fast-shifting shadows. Twice she adjusted the Orca’s depth to avoid looming pressure ridges-inverted mountain ranges plunging down into the black. This part of the ice cap, though, was fairly uniform and relatively thin. Maybe, she thought, the environmentalists had something after all; the ice cap was thinning rapidly from year to year. A couple of years ago, for the first time since such things could be checked, ice-free water had actually opened around the North Pole itself.

Then she thought of the Greenworlders back at the main camp on the ice and dismissed the thought. That bunch of screwups couldn’t be right about the time of day, much less something as dynamic and ever-changing as the Arctic.

She felt a shudder pass through the ice beneath her boots.

“What the hell was that?” Haines asked.

Yeats eyed the hole uncertainly. “Dunno. Maybe we should move back from the edge a bit, though. We might’ve used too big a charge.”

Another shudder was transmitted through the ice, a solid shock. “Nah, it’s not that,” Haines said. “That’s not like ice breaking. More like a thump from underneath.”

“A whale, maybe?” Yeats suggested.

Haines gave Yeats a sour look. “No.”

“We should probably move the sleds back a bit anyway,” McMillan told them. “Just to be safe.”

“Right,” Yeats said. “I’ll-”

And then the ice was shuddering and bucking so hard that Haines fell down, and Yeats and McMillan both grabbed hold of the edge of the sled to stay standing. There was a roar, like avalanche thunder, and the ice between the party and the met station began to heave and buckle skyward.

McMillan’s first thought was that a pressure ridge was forming… but the buckling and upthrust continued. Blocks of ice toppled backward and slid down the growing mound, and then something like a smooth, black cliff appeared above the center of the mound, rising slowly.

“Submarine!” McMillan screamed. “It’s a fucking submarine!”

The conning tower, or sail, as submariners called it, continued to loom slowly above the ice, which was rising and cracking now to either side of the structure as the submerged vessel’s hull ponderously broke through to the surface. As more of the structure came into view, she noted that the sail was rounded and sloped both fore and aft, giving it the streamlined look of a teardrop. That was emphatically not an American design. It was almost certainly a Russian boat, probably a Victor II or III, nuclear powered, with about eighty men on board.

“It’s Russian!” she called to the others. “Quick! We’ve got to ditch the gear!”

She rammed both joysticks on her controller full forward, sending the UUV into a vertical dive. Then she released the ice brakes on the equipment sled and locked the cable reel. Immediately the tough plastic wire snapped taut and the sled began to slide, slow but steady, toward the hole in the ice.

It hurt, destroying a $4-million piece of hardware like this, but the team was under orders to be careful not to let it fall into unfriendly hands.

She just wished they’d had a chance to get close enough to actually see what the Russians were doing at Objective Toy Shop.

“Shit!” Yeats said. “C’mon, Randy!” The two of them released the brakes on the second sled, unhooked the snowmobile, and began sliding the empty cradle toward the ice-melt depression.

The submarine had come to rest, surrounded by huge, cracked blocks of ice. A figure, made tiny by comparison with the huge vessel, appeared at the top of the sail. A second figure appeared next to the first a moment later… and a hatch behind the sail broke open to disgorge a line of men, all in heavy parkas, all carrying assault rifles.

“Stoy!” a voice boomed from the sail over a loud-hailer. “Nyeh sheveleetess!”

“How’s your Russian?” Haines asked.

“He’s telling us to halt, to not move,” McMillan told them.

The sled with the reel of cable was well out into the ice-melt depression now. It hit the black opening and vanished with a splash. The sled with the Orca cradle was in the depression but not moving.

There was nothing that could be done about that.

“Brahstee arujyeh!”

“He wants us to drop our guns.”

“I suggest we do what they tell us,” Yeats said, stepping away from the snowmobile, unslinging his assault rifle, and dropping it on the ice. Carefully he raised his hands.

Heavily armed sailors were clambering down off the submarine’s deck now, using a long extending gangplank to cross the broken ice. In another few moments, the three Americans were being herded back toward the surfaced