Arctic Gold

mid-leap when the dragonfly slammed into its back. The animal yelped and turned, snapping at something no longer there. The dragonfly swooped once more…

And then the van was there, the back door open, with Vasily leaning out and waving them on. More men were crashing down through the woods on the other side of the vehicle, and somewhere up the road a burst of automatic weapons fire cracked against the night.

“Don’t forget your tool kit!” Lia called as she dove for the back of the van, lunging in headfirst.

Akulinin didn’t answer as he landed heavily beside her, but she saw that he did, indeed, still have the heavy metal box with him.

“Go! Go! Go!” Vasily was screaming as more gunfire cracked and thundered close by. Lia heard the clang of bullets piercing metal, but Llewellyn, in the driver’s seat, had floored the accelerator and the heavy vehicle peeled rubber as it sped up. Through the open back doors of the van, Lia got a glimpse of running figures on the road well behind them, until Vasily managed to slam both doors shut.

There were bullet holes in the windows of the back door and more in the side of the van, just above their heads. That had been entirely too close…

“Hang on!” Llewellyn called back to them. “Next stop, the Georgian border!”

Lia lay on the floor of the van, trying to slow the galloping pace of her heart.

Behind them, the dragonfly swooped far and high out over the Black Sea before suddenly inverting and plunging at high speed into the water. On the security camera pole at the dacha entrance, the piece of hardware left behind by the probe burned as its magnesium casing ignited, a tiny, hot star at the top of the pole that left nothing behind but a severed length of cable and a charred spot on the wood.

This time, no incriminating hardware would be left behind.

18

USGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 0915 hours, GMT-12

DEAN SAT AT THE WARDROOM table, staring into the screen on his handheld PDA. Rubens’ lined face stared back out at him. “I know, Mr. Dean,” Rubens was saying. “But the President was most insistent. We treat this as a terrorist hostage situation.”

Captain Grenville had let Dean use the wardroom for his communications session with Fort Meade. The Ohio had shifted position some seventy miles to the north of Ice Station Bear, taking her closer to the Russian ships parked in the ice. An hour ago she’d surfaced in a polynya, rising just enough to extend the sub’s communications mast and establish a link with one of the National Security Agency’s dedicated comsats. The image on Dean’s handheld tended to fuzz and break up at times-atmospherics were still playing hell with RF signals, and the satellite was quite close to the horizon-but at least there was nothing on the horizon to block the signal completely.

“But suppose the hostages aren’t there any longer?” Dean said. “Suppose they’ve been moved to the mainland?”

“Fourteen, fifteen people, plus their guards, would need a fairly large transport,” Rubens told him. “Something the size of a Hip at least.”

“Hip” was the NATO designation for the Russian Mi-8 helicopter, an old design going back to the early 1960s, but still common both throughout the Russian Federation and with numerous Russian military export customers.

“And there’s one of those operating off the Lebedev,” Dean said, nodding.

“Right. But satellite reconnaissance has picked up no air traffic at all between the Russian base and the mainland. It’s nine hundred miles at least to the nearest land base; that’s a flight time of six and a half hours for a chopper… and an Mi-8 would require at least two refuelings en route. It doesn’t have air-to-air fueling capabilities, so it would have to land on ships with helipads. We have some holes in our satellite coverage up there, but none big enough that we wouldn’t have seen an operation of that size. If the Russians had moved our people to the mainland, we’d have spotted it.”

Dean didn’t have the same faith in high-tech magic that Rubens did, but he was willing to accept that Desk Three was satisfied that the Americans were still at the Russian ice base. But he could see a lot of problems blocking any attempt to get them out.

“Is there any way of imaging those ships to get an idea of where our people might be held?”

We’ve been collecting a lot of satellite recon data,” Rubens told him, “especially from the IRSAT series. We’ve been building up a coherent picture over the past couple of days. Here…”

The image on Dean’s handheld screen changed from Rubens’ face to a photograph of the Lebedev, taken from overhead and to one side. The picture then changed, becoming fuzzy, green, and somewhat translucent, as the ice and water around the vessel turned black and certain parts of the ship, her engine rooms in particular, glowed in mingled tones of white, yellow, and pale green. A number of light green dots were scattered in irregular clumps through the ship.

“Infrared imagery,” Rubens said. “Heat. IRSAT is sensitive enough to pick up the heat radiated by a living human body, even behind walls. The detector’s not sensitive enough to pick up warm bodies on the lower decks, but the walls of the superstructure are pretty thin. We’re picking up sixty human signatures here.”

“That’s less than half of the Lebedev’s complement.”

“Correct. But we can see where people are congregating in the superstructure. The bridge. Berthing quarters. Mess room. And here…” A red disk winked on, highlighting a tight clump of green dots near the aft end of the superstructure. “And here. The supply lockers.”

“Interesting.”

“We count sixteen human-sized heat sources in this one area. Our ship experts believe these would have been stores lockers, which are empty now, after months at sea. Good places to quarter a large number of supernumeraries.”

“Hostages, you mean,” Dean said. “And their guards. Okay. I’ll buy it.”

“You’ll need to use that special equipment to try to confirm their location,” Rubens told him as the image was replaced once more by his face. “I’ve already spoken with Lieutenant Taylor. You will accompany the SEALs on board the ship. Just try to stay out of their way. Let them do their business.”

Dean groaned inwardly, however. No military commander liked being micromanaged, and none liked it when spooks, no matter how high up they were on the org chart, told them they had to drag along unwanted baggage. He kept his feelings to himself, however, and simply nodded at the handheld’s optical pickup. “Of course.”

“We’ve had a breakthrough, of sorts, thanks to Lia and the new man, Akulinin.”

“Their op went okay then?”

“Well enough.” Something about Rubens’ expression on the tiny screen told Sean it hadn’t been as simple as that. “They’re both okay. They made it through to the Georgian border, then to Turkey. They’re still in Ankara, waiting for a flight back to the U.S.”

“I’m glad to hear it. What did they find?”

“The three ships up there in the ice are part of an operation called Deep Well, or GK- 1,” Rubens told him. “It’s a new and experimental drilling process for oil.”

“Pretty much what we thought, then.”

“Yeah. The unexpected part is the drilling platform.”

“They’re using the ship, right? The Lebedev?”

“No. Or, rather, not directly. The drilling platform is underwater.”

“So. Literally ‘Deep Well.’ How the hell did they pull that off?”

“Lia found a report on Kotenko’s computer that let us piece things together.”

The screen cut to a series of schematic views, plans and elevations of something that looked more or less like a conventional ship with a slender midships section between much larger bow and stern sections. Dean was