Arctic Gold

Rubens wondered what Collins had been doing going through NSA personnel records… and how she’d managed that. He gave her a cool, appraising look. “He’s one of my best field agents, Ms. Collins, and frankly, I’ll take a tough old Marine with combat experience over a young pup any day. And if you’ve been going through my filing cabinet lately, you’ll know he’s just completed his quals with a four-oh. He’s good. And he gets results.”

The President chuckled. “Think your old Marine can keep up with a SEAL platoon, Bill?”

“He’ll do whatever is necessary to get the job done, sir.”

“The SEALs have experience in deploying all sorts of high-tech gadgets,” Thornton put in. “Why do we need your man up there?”

“The SEALs are good,” Rubens agreed, “but they haven’t been trained in some of our more recent high-tech bits of hardware.”

“Mr. President!” Collins said. “I must protest! Once again, this is a job for the Central Intelligence Agency! We have the trained personnel and the equipment for covert operations of this nature! The NSA should stick with what it knows… signals intelligence!”

“How about that, Charlie?” the President asked. He was smiling. Damn the man, he was enjoying this!

“I’m not trying to steal the Agency’s thunder, sir. But I do submit that one man, with a portable satellite relay station and some rather small communications pickups, ought to be able to slip in and give us the insight we need into just what the Russians are doing up there.” He shrugged. “If the CIA wants to send their own team, that’s fine with me. But I do want a piece of this, sir.”

“How about it, Roger?” the President asked Smallbourn. “Does the CIA have a team they can insert right away?”

“Actually, sir, I submit that we’ll get better results with satellite imagery. We don’t need someone on the ground. Or the ice-”

“With respect, Mr. President, that’s not true. At high latitudes, the only satellites we have that can give us close surveillance of the area are those in polar or near-polar orbits. Currently, we have five such satellites… and there are two others that might be boosted into new, higher-latitude orbits. We’re not talking about geostationary here. To remain above the same spot on the Earth’s surface, a satellite has to be at geosynchronous orbit… and that’s above the equator and over twenty-two thousand miles up. A satellite in a polar orbit is typically only a couple of hundred miles up or so, but it’s orbiting the Earth once every ninety minutes or so. That means it’s only over a given part of the landscape for a few minutes before it drops over the horizon.

“So with seven spysats in a polar orbit, our satellite surveillance of the Russian base will consist of, at best, maybe thirty minutes out of every ninety. That’s eight hours out of twenty-four. And that assumes they all have enough fuel on board for course corrections, since to pass over the Russian base, they’ll need to be canted a bit off of a true polar orbit, and be precessed so that they keep passing over the same point on each successive orbit. They won’t be able to maintain even that much coverage for more than a day or two.

“Besides, the best spy satellite in the world can’t see inside those ships. The Lebedev is sixty-six hundred tons and longer than a football field. How will the SEALs know where the hostages are being held? And they might not be on the Lebedev at all. There are three ships up there. Thirty-two SEALs. What are you going to do, send ten SEALs to each ship?”

“It sounds like you’ve thought this out pretty carefully, Bill,” the President said.

“We try to… anticipate, sir.”

“Well, goddamn. It works for me. Tell your man to pack his long johns.”

“Thank you, sir.”

As they continued to discuss the situation, however, Rubens could sense the anger and the resentment among the others-in Collins especially, though that may have been because he knew her best. He still found it hard to believe. The two of them, Rubens and Collins, had been lovers once, if briefly, an episode that he now believed to be the biggest mistake of his life. Collins, he knew, had all the moral sensibilities of a tomcat pissing on the furniture to prove ownership, and she wouldn’t be happy until Desk Three was part of her Directorate of Operations.

There was hostility toward the DIA, too; there’d been head-to-head antagonism between the DIA and the CIA over a lot of intelligence issues lately-most memorably the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, back in ’03. As for Bing… she was tough to read. Most likely, she was simply trying to secure her own personal empire within the White House basement and would ally with anyone who could give her the power she craved.

The President’s injunction to “play nice” would only drive the interdepartmental hostilities beneath the surface, and that only for a time.

The important thing, so far as Rubens was concerned, was that the political infighting and turf wars not be allowed to affect his people, his field agents.

They deserved a hell of a lot better than that.

Menwith Hill Echelon Facility Yorkshire, England 1340 hours GMT

The Somerset Room was a large mahogany-paneled conference room a level above the Menwith Control Centre, with a long, oval table surrounded by comfortable chairs and the wall opposite the entrance covered by a huge flat-screen monitor. At the moment, that screen, flanked by the flags of both the United States and Great Britain, showed the NSA logo, but shortly it would provide the English end of a conference call, scheduled for 0900 hours EST, 1400 GMT. A row of LED panels above the big screen showed digital readouts for the local times at six different cities in the world. It was twenty minutes to nine, Dean saw, in Washington… and 4:40 in the afternoon in St. Petersburg.

Yakutsk would be… what? GMT plus nine hours? Something like that. The Arctic base north of Wrangle Island would be GMT plus twelve.

Lia took a seat on Dean’s left, Carolyn Howorth on his right. Evans sat across the table from them, with Akulinin next to him. The five of them had talked about the situation into the late evening the night before, discussing the Russian Mafiya, the Russian petroleum industry, and the current international crisis in the Arctic.

It all appeared to be related. Dean was willing to bet his paycheck on that.

Dean was quite taken with Carolyn-CJ, as she insisted on styling herself with her friends. She was quick and she was sharp, one of the infamous Menwith Girls, though she was unusual in actually being English rather than one of the small local army of transplanted Americans. He’d been surprised to learn that she was an American citizen, though her parents had brought her over from Yorkshire thirty- eight years before, from a tiny village less than twenty miles from this conference room. The NSA only rarely hired naturalized citizens… but they’d made an eager exception in CJ’s case. Her expertise in Japanese, spoken, she said, with a slight Kobe accent, had led them to make an exception so that she could work in the public relations bureau at Misawa. Only later had her knowledge of Russian brought her back to the Yorkshire moors and a place on the Russian desk.

And there might have been advantages, Dean thought, in having someone like her on the payroll here in England. The United States wouldn’t officially acknowledge her dual nationality, but so far as the Brits were concerned, she was a British subject until Her Majesty personally revoked her citizenship.

“I have some news,” Evans said as they took their seats, Styrofoam cups of coffee in front of Lia and Dean, cups of tea for Evans and CJ. “Fischer woke up last night at Barts, and MI5 has been talking to her. And we picked up Julie Henshaw at Heathrow. MI5 brought her in as well, and has been having a little chat with the lady.”

“Don’t tell us,” Lia said. “Neither of them knew a thing.”

“Nothing worth the asking,” Evans admitted. “Fischer knew Braslov as Johann Ernst. She thought he was German and a Greenworld activist, one of the group’s founders. She said he had money, a lot of it, enough to take care of her considerable debts, and those of her two friends.”

“At least that explains how the Russians recruited them,” Dean said. “It doesn’t explain how she got recruited for a suicide mission.”

“She insists that Braslov told her no one in the GLA building would be armed, for security reasons. Mr. Karr’s defense of Dr. Spencer, she said, was most surprising.”