Arctic Gold

The ship’s general alarm shrilled from the intercom speaker overhead, bringing Golytsin to his feet. Someone pounded on the door. “Sir! The ship is under attack!”

Only moments before, the report had come down from the Lebedev’s bridge: an American submarine was surfacing just a hundred meters off the port side. Golytsin had been preparing to go outside to see the spectacle for himself when the alarm had gone off.

The ship under attack? From the submarine?

“I’m coming.” He reached into a bottom desk drawer and extracted his sidearm, a PM-Pistole Makarov-still in its holster and slung from a web belt. His parka was on a coat hook by the door.

Down the main port-side passageway, through a watertight door, and out onto the deck, where a blast of cold and keening wind cut into his face like myriad thrusting needles. A dozen or more of the Lebedev’s crew were already along the port railing, staring out into the glare of the ice. There was the American submarine there, her sail black against the ice. An American flag had been unfurled above the conning tower, so there could be no mistaking the vessel’s nationality. He could even see two tiny human figures in the weather cockpit in front of the flag and more figures on the submarine’s forward deck, putting down a gangplank to the ice.

Well, well, he thought with grim surprise and something approaching admiration. Perhaps the Americans have grown some balls after all. But, while surprising, the surfacing of that submarine didn’t constitute an attack, as such…

“Sir!” Lieutenant Alexei Stilchoff gripped his upper arm. “Sir, you should get below! Now! ”

“Alexei! What the devil’s going on?” Golytsin demanded. Stilchoff was the commanding officer of the contingent of naval infantry stationed on board the Lebedev. He was an old hand, a veteran of the Chechnyan War, and not easily flustered or scared.

Stilchoff pointed aft. “American commandos! They’re already on board!”

Golytsin looked back along the port-side railing toward the Lebedev’s fantail. Even as Stilchoff turned and pointed, a pair of gray-clad figures appeared around the corner of the superstructure aft, menacing figures with compact submachine guns held rigidly against their shoulders as they moved forward with the deadly grace of predatory cats. Nearby, one of Stilchoff’s men fumbled with the AKM assault rifle slung over his shoulder, dragging back the charging lever and raising the weapon to take aim. At the same moment, Stilchoff grabbed the butt of his holstered PM, trying to drag the pistol free of its holster.

Before either man could complete the move, however, triplets of bullets slammed into them both, knocking them back a step, sending them crumpling to the deck in untidy sprawls. Golytsin hadn’t even heard the shots as they were fired.

Golytsin was still standing in the open door leading onto the deck outside. At the instant Stilchoff and the other man were hit, Golytsin jumped backward, pulling the heavy door shut, hearing and feeling the clang of bullets striking it outside. With his right hand, he pulled out his own PM, and stood leaning against the bulkhead for a moment, breathing hard. God, that had been close!

He chambered a round in his pistol but didn’t even consider trying to engage those two invaders. They would be American commandos from that submarine… most likely U.S. Navy SEALs, who were widely regarded even in countries other than the United States as the best, most deadly small-unit fighters in the world. To attempt to face those two men outside in combat was nothing less than suicide.

He pulled a radio from the pocket of his cold-weather gear and pressed the handset button. “Captain Mironov!”

“Mironov here.”

“We have American commandos coming onto the fantail. I recommend you put men with machine guns on the wings of the bridge, and in the main passageways.”

“Commandos? How many?-”

But Golytsin switched off the radio. Let the command staff figure this one out.

The prisoners. They were here to free the men and women from the American research station-a hostage rescue.

He needed to get down there, get down there fast.

Fantail CFS Akademik Petr Lebedev Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1028 hours, GMT-12

With his grenade launcher in hand, Dean moved aft onto the Lebedev’s fantail. Long lengths of metal pipes or tubes were stacked along the fantail, evidently drilling sections waiting to be lowered to the GK-1 somewhere below. The A-frame gantry loomed overhead, one pipe section still secured to the arm by a heavy wire rope.

A football field’s length away off the port side, the Ohio had emerged from the ice, her black island standing above a tumble of ice blocks shouldered aside as she’d surfaced. A number of Russian sailors had gathered along the port side of the Lebedev to stare at the risen apparition. Now, though, SEALs moved down the deck, weapons held against their shoulders as they moved. Two Russians, both of them naval infantry judging from their uniforms, lay dead on the deck. The rest, unarmed, were fleeing, scattering forward along the deck or ducking back into doorways.

One of the key tactical considerations for this op, Dean knew, was just how many armed troops were on board what was ostensibly a civilian research vessel. According to her published specs, the Lebedev was supposed to carry 128 men. Most of those would be ordinary sailors, even merchant seamen, with little or no knowledge of weapons. A few would be Russian naval infantry; some might even be Spetsnaz-Russian Special forces-depending on how important this expedition was to the Russian government and military. But the chances were good that only a few-fifteen? Twenty?-would have military weapons or training.

Standing orders would be to engage enemy forces capable of resisting but to minimize other casualties. Still, there were only fifteen Navy SEALs on board the Lebedev now and one former-Marine- turned-spook. They had to seize the initiative and hold it; if they let the enemy recover their breath and their wits, the SEALs could find themselves up against some very serious opposition indeed.

Dean might not be a SEAL, but he should be able to help with that. Kneeling on the afterdeck in the shadow of the huge A-frame crane, Dean pulled the UAV control board out of its watertight plastic case. The device was the size of a large paperback that unfolded flat at the press of two buttons, with a built-in swing-up screen, a small keypad, and a two-inch-high joystick that popped up when he unfolded the panel. He switched the device on and made sure he had a clear signal from the Sky-HUNTIR, then set the unit on the deck and picked up the MGL- 140.

Taylor appeared on the fantail next to Dean, a gray apparition, still dripping, an H &K in his hands. “Well? How about that special spook stuff, Marine? You said you’d have something to show us.”

Dean was already training the six-shot grenade launcher on the dazzlingly blue zenith of the sky. “Taking care of that now, sir,” he said, and he squeezed the trigger.

The MGL-140 grenade launcher gave a sharp cough as it sent a 40mm round streaking into the sky. Dean set the weapon down and quickly picked up the controller, his thumb on the joystick. Seven hundred feet overhead, the grenade Dean had fired came apart as it reached the top of its trajectory, the expended propellant cartridge falling away to expose a small, battery-driven pusher-prop and an unfolding ram-air parafoil the size of an unfolded newspaper.

One of the rounds originally developed for the MGL-140 was called HUNTIR, a somewhat tortured acronym standing for High-altitude Unit Navigated Tactical Imaging Round. Fired by a Marine on the ground, the HUNTIR flew into the sky, deployed a small parachute, and drifted back to earth like a flare… but instead of burning magnesium, it carried an onboard CMOS camera aimed at the ground, transmitting whatever it saw in real time. It gave ground forces a badly needed tactical advantage in places like Iraq, where you never knew what was waiting for you behind that wall up ahead, on the next city block, or on the other side of the next hill.

The problem with HUNTIR, though, was that it only transmitted for about eight seconds, and if you didn’t place the round perfectly above the right piece of real estate, you might miss seeing what you needed to see. The National Security Agency, looking for new and innovative ways to gather useful data on the battlefield and during