Arctic Gold

was bingo fuel-had forced the helo crew to abort the operation and start winching the hero back up to safety, the officer had hit the safety release on his harness and dropped into the ocean.

That hero had, of course, survived his dunking in the frigid Atlantic waters and gone on to win the day in the finest tradition of literary and cinematic heroes everywhere. The waters beneath the Ocean Hawk this morning, though, were bitterly cold, colder even than the water into which Clancy’s fictional hero had fallen. If Dean hit the freezing water of Baffin Bay, he would have a few minutes at best before hypothermia numbed him into insensibility and he drowned.

The Ocean Hawk was hovering now, and the crew chief slid aside the big side-panel door. Spray from the aircraft’s rotor wash swirled past the cargo compartment, salty and cold.

At least the rain had stopped.

“We’re dipping our tallywacker now!” the crew chief said, shouting into Dean’s ear above the thunder of the helo’s rotors. “Think of it as ringing their doorbell!”

“Yeah!” Dean yelled back. “Or fishing! Fishing for submarines!”

The chief laughed and clapped Dean on the shoulder.

Suspended beneath a length of cable, lowered from the Ocean Hawk’s belly, was a dipping sonar, a device sending out intense pings of sound through the water. Normally, it was used to find lurking submarines underwater, pinpointing them by echolocation. This time, though, as the chief had suggested, it was a pre-arranged signal for the submarine to surface.

Nothing happened for several minutes. Dean, despite his layered Arctic clothing, suppressed a sudden shiver, though whether it had been brought on by the cold or from high-stress anticipation, he couldn’t tell. Then one of the sailors on board the Ocean Hawk pointed out the open door. “There! There she is!”

Dean followed the man’s pointing finger and saw a white rooster tail of spray on the surface several hundred yards away. A dark, slate-gray shape sliced upward through the foam, becoming the squared-off cliff of a submarine’s sail, its forward hydroplanes extending from either side like small wings. As the vessel continued to rise, a second shape emerged from the spray aft of the sail-an Advanced Seal Delivery System, or ASDS, a miniature submarine just sixty-five feet long and riding on the bigger submarine’s afterdeck like a black, torpedo- shaped parasite.

In another moment, the deck appeared, immersed in a broad, V-shaped wake. The SSGN Ohio was 560 feet long overall, with a beam of 42 feet; it was startling how tiny the sail and the ASDS looked by comparison with that dark sea monster’s awesome length and mass.

In another moment, the Ocean Hawk had reeled its dipping sonar back on board and repositioned itself above the surfaced submarine. Dean leaned over, looking down out of the open door, to see the Ohio nested within the disk of the helo’s rotor wash. Men scrambled out of an open deck hatch forward of the sail, and he could see two officers in the tiny, open cockpit on top of the sail, shielding their eyes as they looked up at the Ocean Hawk’s belly. Several of the seamen on the forward deck carried long, slender poles.

“Don’t worry about those poles!” The crew chief shouted to be heard above the roar. “They’re going to reach up with them and hit your cable before you touch the deck! We’ve built up an electrical charge in flight, and if they don’t bleed it off, it could knock you on your ass!”

Dean nodded understanding. He’d seen this maneuver done before at sea, especially during stormy weather.

They were signaling from the deck, waving him on.

“Okay, Mr. Dean!” the crew chief bellowed. “Out you go! Good luck!”

“Thanks for the lift!”

“Don’t worry about the lift! It’s the drop that scares the shit out of me!”

Gripping the cable attached to his harness, Dean stepped into emptiness. Immediately the prop wash caught him, buffeting him back and forth as he dangled, like bait on a fishing line, beneath the hovering Ocean Hawk. The ear protectors on his helmet shut out much of the roar, but it still felt and sounded like being caught inside a wind tunnel. Below him, five men in heavy, olive-drab parkas, bright orange life jackets, and safety lines waited with upturned faces. Two of them jabbed at him with static discharge poles.

Of one thing Dean was certain: he was not going to release the harness and drop into the sea. If the Ocean Hawk’s pilot decided to reel Dean back in, he’d be quite happy to accede to their judgment.

He was starting to drift past the submarine’s hull. He could see one of the men below, however, talking into a headset, and the helicopter’s pilot adjusted, bringing Dean back and gently down. The fear wasn’t as bad as he had thought it would be; somehow, the wind and the pounding of the rotors and the shrill whine of twin high-powered turboshafts and the biting cold all combined to numb the brain and anaesthetize the mind. He dropped lower… still lower and then felt gloved hands grabbing hold of his boots and legs and hauling him down to the deck.

“Permission to come aboard!” he shouted as they helped him with his harness.

“Granted!” the chief in charge of the deck party called back. “Welcome aboard!”

In another instant, the cable was reeling away up into the cargo deck of the Ocean Hawk, and the helicopter, dipping its nose, began arrowing away through leaden skies back to the east, toward Thule. One of the sailors guided Dean with a hand on his shoulder aft toward the open hatch in the deck. “Mind your skull, sir,” the man told him. “It’s a tight fit.”

The hatch led down a vertical ladder to the Ohio’s forward torpedo room, where several more sailors waited to receive him. He heard some murmurs among them. “So that’s our spook, is it?” some asked.

“Bond,” another voice replied with mock seriousness. “James Bond…”

“Shaken,” Dean told the watching sailors as he started stripping off life jacket, helmet, and parka and passing them off to waiting hands, “not stirred.” That raised a laugh. Someone draped a blanket over his shoulders. Another man offered him a mug of steaming coffee, which he gratefully accepted. He heard the hatch clang shut overhead and someone speaking over an intercom, saying, “Forward torpedo room hatch secured!” The compartment was surprisingly warm, the air fresh, though carrying the mingled scents of oil, salt, and too many men in a confined space.

A lean, pale blond youngster in khakis and a lieutenant commander’s rank insignia stepped forward. “Welcome aboard the Ohio, Mr. Dean,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Commander Hartwell, the boat’s exec. If you’ll come with me, please?”

“Now hear this,” a voice sounded over the sub’s 1MC speakers. “Now hear this. Dive! Dive!” An alarm klaxon sounded, a computer-generated version of the classic ah- oogah! of the movies, followed again by the voice calling, “Dive! Dive!”

A modern submarine’s true element was the dark silence of the ocean depths, and no skipper wanted to leave his command exposed on the surface for longer than could possibly be helped. As the exec led Dean aft, he felt the deck tilt slightly beneath his feet as the Ohio returned to her proper realm.

15

Zhemchuzhina Hotel Sochi, Russia 1712 hours, GMT + 3

LIA AND AKULININ TOUCHED down at Adler-Sochi International Airport in the early afternoon after an uneventful flight from London. They passed through customs with passports listing them as husband and wife, picked up their luggage in the baggage claim, and caught a cab for the long ride up to Sochi. The airport was located in Adler, just five miles from the Georgian border, but Sochi was almost fifteen miles to the northwest, along the E97 highway that ran along the Black Sea coast.

According to the legend provided by GCHQ, they were Mr. and Mrs. Darby, John and Lisa of Mayfair, on holiday to this rather posh resort region on the Black Sea.

They noticed quite a lot of construction on the hillsides south of the city. Their driver was the talkative sort, running on without stop about Sochi having been chosen as the site for the Winter Olympics in 2014. It was, he