Arctic Gold

“About eighty miles northwest of Station Bravo-they call it ‘Ice Station Bear,’ by the way-there is a surface Russian expedition. Three ships, the polar icebreaker Taymyr; the Akademik Petr Lebedev, a civilian geological research vessel; and a support ship, the Granat. Five months ago they took up their current position, and have been station keeping ever since. Satellite reconnaissance shows they’re building something, building something pretty big, in fact, but we haven’t been able to determine what it is.”

“So the Agency sent a couple of spooks out for a look-see, is that it?”

She nodded. “The remote met station was set up in a particular spot on the ice. A deliberate spot.”

“What… close enough that they could approach those ships?”

“The ice up there is constantly moving,” Barbara said. “Over a hundred, hundred-fifty miles a week. The Russian ships cut through the ice to reach a specific set of coordinates, and they’ve been maintaining station on top of those coordinates ever since.”

“So… the ships are staying put, and the ice is moving around them?”

“Exactly. The Taymyr keeps breaking up the ice around the Lebedev and the Granat. Over the past few weeks, the remote met station has drifted with the ice almost five hundred miles. It’s less than ten miles from the Russian position now. Yeats and McMillan hoped to launch a UUV three days ago to give them an up-close look at what was going on, underwater.”

A UUV-an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle. Desk Three had similar devices in its arsenal, which allowed an underwater inspection of enemy ports, harbors, or ship bottoms from a safe distance… as much, say, as twenty or thirty miles. The CIA’s device was probably similar to a small wire-guided torpedo with a ten-mile range and cameras and other sensors instead of a warhead. The whole assembly, UUV plus miles of control wire and a remote piloting unit, would have been small enough to carry on, say, a sled towed by snowmobile. At the met station, they would have dropped the UUV in through a hole in the ice and wire-guided it to the objective, allowing for an underwater reconnaissance impossible for satellites, for men on top of the ice, or for something as large and as intrusive as a submarine.

“You said ‘hoped to,’” Rubens pointed out. “They didn’t make it?”

“They reached the met station. They established a satellite relay and reported that they were about to launch the UUV. Then the relay went bad. We haven’t heard from them since.”

“Sunspots.”

“Communications at high latitudes have been god-awful lately.”

“Tell me about it,” Rubens said. “That’s why things went so wrong in St. Petersburg.”

“The Russians have been jamming, too. Anyway, there’s no sign of our people at the remote station, and they’re long overdue back at Ice Station Bear. It’s possible that the Russians spotted them and picked them up. And now you get an intercept that claims our people are murdering each other up there on the ice… and the Russians are moving in because this is happening on their territory.”

“It smells like a setup.”

“Maybe. The Russians might have all of our people in custody now, including a congressman’s daughter. But we don’t know.”

“No ideas what the Russians are doing up there? Drilling for oil, maybe?”

“The water is too deep in that area for conventional drilling-rig technology,” Barbara told him. “Over twenty-five hundred feet. But they’re up to something on a big scale.”

“Can the Danes or the Canadians help?”

“Maybe. But the President wants answers, and he wants them soon… sooner than other countries are going to be able to get anything up into that region. That’s why he’s thinking about you and Desk Three.”

“That’s most gratifying… but I imagine Debra Collins is going to have her own ideas about that.”

“The President’s exact words were, ‘I want to talk to Rubens. If his people can’t get me what I want, nobody can.’”

“I see.”

“Besides, one of the missing people is yours.”

He nodded. “Kathy McMillan. Although she’s working for the Agency right now.”

“Is she Desk Three?”

“No. She works for the NSA’s tech department.” The vast majority of the NSA’s employees were technologists, computer programmers, and mathematicians. In fact, the NSA had more mathematicians working for it at Fort Meade than any other single employer in the country. Deep Black ran only a handful of agents like Dean or DeFrancesca.

Or Karr.

As a result, Desk Three was stretched to the breaking point right now.

“But you’re right,” Rubens continued after a moment. “She belongs to us, we’re going to take care of her.”

“I imagine the Company feels the same way,” Barbara said carefully, using insider-speak for the CIA. “But they’re stretched pretty thin right now.”

“And we’re not?” Still, there was an opportunity here. If Deep Black could get the missing Americans back-all of them, of course, not just the NSA technologist-it would weigh heavily in Desk Three’s favor.

He despised thinking of the situation as a kind of game played with numbers and accounting ledgers, but an agency’s worth, or the worth of its individual people, came down to just how effective they were at getting the job done.

Not that such thinking went far these days in cutting the deadwood out of the pile in this town. He looked at his watch.

“So, when does the President want to see me?”

“You have a three o’clock appointment tomorrow afternoon,” she told him. “And both Bing and Collins will be there.”

“Oh, joy.” But he’d expected that. Both women would be jealously guarding their own respective turfs.

And he would be guarding his.

Ice Station Bear Arctic Ice Cap 82° 24' N, 179° 45' E 1340 hours, GMT-12

“Damn it, Bill!” Lieutenant Segal was frantic. “Can’t you raise anyone?”

Bill Walters shook his head, one earphone pressed up against his ear. “Nada,” he said. “Nothing but static… and Russian jamming. They’re on every frequency now.”

Outside, the wind gusted with the freshening gale. Behind its keening they could hear the bang- bang-bang of the storage shed door, slamming in the wind. Most of the base personnel-NOAA and Greenworld-were crowded together at one end of the Quonset hut as Walters tried to establish contact with the outside world. At the other end of the room, near the curtains leading to the women’s bunk space, Susan Fritcherson and Dr. Chris Tomlinson sat with the unconscious Commander Larson. Tomlinson had bandaged the injured man’s head and made sure his breathing passage was clear… but there wasn’t much more he could do. Larson needed to be in a hospital, and soon. Soon.

“Are-are they coming, do you think?” Harry Benford asked.

“Who?” Fritcherson demanded.

“The Russians, of course.”

Tom McCauley turned and glared at Benford. “Why? What’s it to you?”

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? I mean, we need to get the commander to a hospital, and if we can’t raise our own people-”

“Just shut the hell up and stay out of the way,” Fred Masters told him. “You’ve done enough damage.”

“Look, I didn’t mean to hurt him that bad! But it’s like I said… he shot Ken, and then I thought he was gonna shoot me, too, and I-”

Lieutenant Segal whirled and advanced on Benford, fury in his face and clenched fists. “You slimy little bastard!” Segal shouted. “Isn’t it convenient that there was no one else there to back up your story! You know what I think? I think you shot Richardson and then you clobbered the skipper to cover your tracks!”