Arctic Gold

She tried not to think of the corollary… that even when they missed the three-person team, what would the rest of the expedition be able to do about it?

Their captors had hustled them across the ice to one of the helicopters and flown them across the ice to a large ship with the name Akademik Petr Lebedev picked out in Cyrillic letters on the bow. A civilian ship, then, probably one of the fleet of exploration and science vessels the Russians used for Arctic surveys and research. Two other ships were visible nearby, an icebreaker and what was probably a transport of some kind. She only had a glimpse of the activity on the ice around the three ships, but the Russians appeared to have constructed a small base and there were stockpiles of supplies and carefully shrouded equipment everywhere.

The Toy Shop indeed. What the hell were they building?

Once on board the ship, they’d herded the three Americans belowdecks, taking their things and putting them in three separate cabins. McMillan had tried pounding on the door and shouting, but after a while her voice was raw and her hands sore, so she’d been waiting quietly ever since.

She heard a rattle at the door and came to her feet. Half a dozen ill-formed plans flitted through her thoughts- of knocking down whoever was coming inside and racing for the deck-but common sense won out. Where the hell could she go, barefoot, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties?

The door swung open, and a tall, blond, rugged-looking man stepped inside. Behind him, she could see a guard, a man in a Russian naval uniform, holding an AKM assault rifle.

“Good morning,” the man said in almost faultless English. “How are we doing?”

“We are demanding to be allowed to talk to an American consul,” she said. “We are protesting being captured and dragged here by your goons! We were engaged in a scientific-”

“We were spying, darling,” the man said evenly. “The captain of our submarine got excellent video footage of you scuttling your equipment on the ice. What was it… an unmanned undersea rover? A robot submarine?”

“I am part of a NOAA survey expedition,” she told him. “We are mapping and measuring the thinning of the ice cap, and monitoring ice drift.”

“Indeed. And you seem to have drifted into Russian territory.”

Russian territory. McMillan bit back a harsh laugh. “I hate to break it to you, Ivan. These are still international waters.”

The Russian claim was utter nonsense, of course… sheer political posturing and muscle flexing. The NOAA ice station had been deliberately, almost ostentatiously, constructed on the ice over international waters. Over the past month, however, the ice cap’s normal clockwise drift-as much as twenty-five or thirty miles in a single day, depending on winds and currents-had carried the station across the antemeridian, the 180-degree longitude line, and, according to the latest Russian claims, at any rate, into Russian territorial waters.

No one was taking the Russians very seriously, of course. In the summer of 2007, they’d pulled a kind of high- tech publicity stunt, sending a couple of their Mir three-man minisubs to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole, some twelve thousand feet beneath the ice. They’d planted a large titanium Russian flag at the bottom and operated a kind of ultra-exclusive tourist service, ferrying several people able to pay the eighty-thousand-dollar fare to what they were calling the real North Pole.

The flag planting was solely symbolic, of course… but the Russians were trying to make something more of it. According to the way they read the map, their territorial waters, by international treaty, extended two hundred miles from their continental shelf. They were trying to make a case for the undersea Lomonosov Ridge, which extended out from the Siberian landmass almost all the way to Greenland, as a part of their continental shelf, a declaration that allowed them to claim fully half of the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole and as far over the top of the world as the 180th meridian, as their sovereign territorial waters.

The whole matter was due to be adjudicated by the United Nations within the next couple of years, but in the meantime, the Russians had been doing a lot of saber rattling.

And the West had been rattling back. Canada and Denmark, especially, weren’t about to let the Russian claim go unchallenged, and the United States was weighing in as well. As barren and cold as the ice cap was, various geological surveys conducted by both the United States and several other nations suggested that fully 25 percent of the world’s as-yet-undiscovered oil and gas reserves might lie beneath the floor of the Arctic Ocean, a staggering bonanza of fossil fuels that might power the industrial nations for another century or more. If the Arctic Ocean remained for the most part international waters, anyone with the technological know-how could tap those petroleum reserves. Russia wanted to grab the bear’s share of that treasure for herself, a move that could revitalize their creaking post-Soviet economy and make Mother Russia once again a major force in the modern world.

The NOAA station had been set up at least in part to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to the Arctic Ocean being international waters. And McMillan and Yeats had come along with their own agenda, of course.

“What is your name?” the man asked, his voice disarmingly pleasant.

“Katharine McMillan,” she told him. There was no harm in admitting that much, and the truth would be safer than a lie.

“Katharine. And my name is Feodor Golytsin. I work with a private corporation called Siberskii Masla.”

McMillan had heard of it. The name meant “Siberian Oil,” and it was less a private corporation than it was an arm of the Russian government.

“And who,” Golytsin continued, “are you working for?”

“NOAA,” she replied. That was a lie but a completely plausible one. A check of NOAA’s personnel files would show her listed as an employee. “That’s the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.”

“I know what NOAA is,” the Russian said. “I suspect, however, that you are, in fact, CIA or possibly DIA. NOAA doesn’t usually have access to such high-tech equipment as what we saw you dumping into the ocean. Or such a need for secrecy. You will tell me the truth.”

“I’ve told you the truth. Go screw yourself. You have no right to-”

“Right does not enter into the picture, Katharine. Not here.” He looked thoughtful. “If you choose not to cooperate, we have several possible courses of action.”

Suddenly Golytsin reached out and grabbed her, yanking her close and spinning her around so he was holding her from behind. She shrieked and tried to hit him, but he was strong enough to clamp his arms down over hers and hold her immobile. She tried kicking his kneecap, but he lifted her off the deck and grabbed her left breast, hard.

“Let go of me, you bastard!”

For answer, he squeezed her, painfully, through her shirt. She shrieked, “Stop! Let me go! ”

“There’s the crew of this ship, for instance,” he continued, ignoring her squirming and her shouts. “One hundred twenty-eight men on board the Lebedev. Another one hundred fifty on the Taymyr. Perhaps fifty on the Granat. And for most of them, it has been a very long time since they’ve seen their wives and girlfriends. You are an attractive woman, Katharine. For them, you might have considerable… entertainment value.”

“Go to hell, you sick bastard!”

He released her suddenly, shoving her hard across the cabin. She tumbled into the bunk and lay there on her back, panting.

Golytsin took a step forward and bent forward, looming over her. “But I imagine even you would lose your appeal after a time. How long would it take, do you think? A month? Two? If we then decided you were worthless, that we needed to dispose of you, I might order you dropped into the ocean alongside this ship. Just how long do you think you would live? The water temperature here is actually a bit below freezing-minus two, maybe minus three degrees Celsius. The salt content, you know. You might survive, oh, two or three minutes.

“Or… better still, if we dropped you on the ice out there, somewhere. Even if we chose to return your cold weather gear, how long before you froze to death, do you think? There are lots of very hungry polar bears out along the edge of the ice pack, hunting for seal. Do you think you would still be alive when the bears found you?

“In any case, Katharine, your body would never be found. Never.”

“I’m telling you the truth!” she yelled. “I’m with NOAA! I’m-”