Arctic Gold

“Team four, on deck! Moving aft!…”

The assault on the Lebedev had begun.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1825 hours EDT

“There they go,” Rockman said. “Right at the waterline, about three-quarters of the way aft from the bow. See them?”

Rubens placed his hands on Rockman’s workstation desk and leaned forward, staring into the big screen as if by sheer force of will he could influence the events unfolding there. Yes, he could see them, tiny antlike shapes moving up the huge ship’s rounded side.

The scene being transmitted to the Art Room was real-time, images picked up by the NIKOS-4 reconnaissance satellite launched into a polar orbit from Vandenberg just two days earlier. The scene showed an oblique view of the Lebedev, looking down on her starboard side from about forty-five degrees above the horizon. Beyond the Lebedev, the Ohio had just surfaced, her conning tower showing as a narrow, black square protruding above the ice. The other two Russian ships were farther off, almost half a mile distant.

From the wall speaker, bits of radio transmission, captured by the NIKOS satellite and transmitted back to Fort Meade, sounded against the crackle and hiss of background static.

“Fire team two, on deck! Target! Engaging!…”

“Team four, on deck! Moving aft!…”

Rubens thought he could see one of the antlike figures advance on another, see the second figure crumple to the deck. But the details were lost, and he wasn’t entirely sure what he was seeing.

It was frustrating, really. Desk Three and the Deep Black operation were built on the supremacy of technology, the ability to use sophisticated sensor platforms such as NIKOS to penetrate an enemy’s strongholds and reveal his secrets. Rubens was always mindful of the dictum of one of his favorite authors, a science fiction writer named Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The National Security Agency and the Art Room performed astonishing feats of magic on an almost daily basis.

And none of that could help now. Up there on the Arctic ice, satellites in geosynchronous orbit, orbiting above the equator in step with Earth’s twenty-four-hour rotation, were simply too close to the horizon to be useful for surveillance. You needed spysats in a low polar orbit to see what was going on down there, and those passed across the entire span of the sky within a minute or so. The image on the screen was already dwindling as NIKOS-4, at an altitude of 120 miles, raced toward the southeastern horizon.

“Damn it, can’t you zoom in any closer?” he asked Rockman.

“A little, I think. But we’re pushing the limits of our resolution now…” Rockman entered a set of commands on his keyboard. The view rushed in closer, but still not close enough. He could just make out figures moving on the Lebedev’s deck, but the details tended to blur and fuzz out at the extreme limit of NIKOS-4’s resolution.

“Here,” Rubens said. Reaching into his coat jacket, he produced a laser pointer and switched it on. He let the red dot dance around a portion of the Lebedev, on her starboard side up near the bow. “Any ideas about what that is?”

Whatever it was, it had not appeared on any of the ship plans and schematics the Art Room had been able to pull up for the Lebedev or her sister research vessel, the Akademik Sergei Vavilov. It appeared to be a temporary structure hung over the ship’s side, something like an enclosed vertical tunnel or ladder shroud, with what looked like a swim platform at the level of the water, close by the ship’s waterline. Rubens had never seen anything like it.

“That platform,” Rockman said, thoughtful. “Might be for small craft tying up alongside the ship.”

Rubens nodded. “Makes sense. Boats must go back and forth between all three ships, and that’s how they get on board.”

A logical assumption… but Rubens was worried. Assumptions based on insufficient data always worried him.

If the satellite had been directly above the Lebedev, the men and women here in the Art Room would not have been able to read newspaper headlines over someone’s shoulders, as the popular myth had it, but they would have been able to distinguish Navy combat dry suits from Russian parkas, spotted weapons, detected ambushes, and maybe seen clearly the structure hanging over the Lebedev’s starboard bow. But the satellite was too close to the horizon for that now, and in another few seconds it would vanish over the curve of the world.

Whatever was going to happen now was in the hands of those Navy SEALs, the skipper and crew of the Ohio, and one NSA agent.

The image on the screen broke into shifting, jumping pixels, then re-formed as empty ice. It was tracking over the edge of the ice pack now. Rubens saw the dark blue of open water, and broad leads where the ice cap had cracked open. As he watched, ice gave way to deep blue, open water, and a patch of brilliant glare where the sun was reflecting off the sea and into space.

“NIKOS-4 is passing over the horizon, sir,” a technician reported from another station. “We’ve lost transmissions from the Ohio.”

“How long before the next satellite reaches the AO?” he demanded.

“That would be NIKOS- 1,” Rockman said, consulting his monitor. “Fourteen minutes.”

Fourteen minutes. An eternity in combat.

And Rubens was as helpless to affect the outcome as he would be if the boarding action were taking place on the far side of the moon.

Damn!

Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1026 hours, GMT- 12

Treading water close beside the Lebedev’s waterline, Dean wondered if he was about to make a fool of himself. It had been years since he’d even climbed an obstacle course cargo net, and his recent round of quals had stressed the purely physical-push-ups, timed runs, and target shooting-rather than acrobatic activities like climbing chain ladders.

“Dean!” Taylor’s voice crackled in his hood. “You’re up next!”

He swam over to the rubber boat and clung to the side as he pulled off his fins and breathing equipment, dropping them with the rest of the SEAL swim gear in the bottom of the boat. He then sidestroked his way carefully to the nearest ladder, slung his waterproof pack over one shoulder, and, with Taylor steadying the ladder at the bottom, started up. No doubt about it, Dean thought. I’m getting way too old for this.

With Taylor holding the ladder taut, though, the climb wasn’t as bad as Dean had feared. He was breathing heavily by the time he rolled over the starboard rail and dropped onto the starboard companionway, but he was able to un-sling his satchel and break out the Master Blaster, unfolding the stock and locking the foregrip in place.

There was a dead man on the companionway deck in front of a door twenty feet away, one of the Lebedev sailors gunned down by silenced shots from one of the first of the SEALs to come aboard. There was no room here for gentlemanly conduct or proper rules of war. SEALs relied on total surprise coupled with a concentrated focus of overwhelming firepower and violence to achieve their aim… and a random sailor unexpectedly strolling out onto the starboard side companionway for a smoke couldn’t be allowed to sound the alarm.

The SEALs, once on board, had split into separate elements and dispersed, moving both fore and aft to secure the Russian vessel’s main deck. “Team four!” sounded over the radio. “Multiple targets, port! Engaging!…”

Dean heard a kind of sharp clicking and recognized it as shots fired from the sound-suppressed H &K, coming from the other side of the ship’s main deck superstructure. Shouts and screams followed, the sounds of spreading panic.

Gripping the grenade launcher, Dean hurried aft.

Golytsin’s Office CFS Akademik Petr Lebedev Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1027 hours, GMT-12