Arctic Gold

come again, if he didn’t force the issue now. Right now, the SEALs had their plate full trying to take down a ship full of Russian marines, and Desk Three would not be helping things by screwing up their communications channels.

“Sir!” Telach called from her station. “We’ve got something new developing!”

“What is it?”

A monitor above her workstation showed the view from another satellite, this one looking down on a barren coastline, ocean surf on a gravel beach, and a long, obviously military airstrip. Two jet aircraft were lifting off from the runway, afterburners flaring. Two more military jets were in the process of taxiing to begin their takeoff roll.

“It’s Mys Shmidta,” Telach said. “Four MiG-35s are taking off from the base there. Two MiG-31s apparently took off ten minutes ago. They’re all headed north… toward the Lebedev.”

“We’re getting heavy radio traffic from Wrangle Island,” a communications technician reported. “Sounds like they’ve put a Midas in the air, too.”

It had only been a matter of time, of course, before the Russians responded to the assault on the Lebedev with military force. Rubens had hoped, however, that they would be a little less efficient, a little slower on the uptake. He did some fast calculations.

The MiG-31 Foxhound was strictly an interceptor, with no weapons that would be of use against targets on the ground. It was also limited in range to less than seven hundred miles-which was why the Russians were scrambling a Midas, the NATO code name for an Ilyushin Il-78 tanker.

The Foxhounds would simply be escorts for the real muscle, the MiG-35 Fulcrum-Fs. The Fulcrum-F was one of their best strike fighters, with movable forward canards giving exceptional maneuverability, and a maximum speed of Mach 2.2… say 1500 miles per hour. They wouldn’t push that hard for very long, not without causing some seriously dangerous stress to engine and airframe. Mys Shmidta was about nine hundred miles south of the Lebedev; the Fulcrum-F’s combat radius was well over twice that.

So make it nine hundred miles at Mach 2…

The SEALs had perhaps forty minutes before some very nasty company arrived.

Mir 1 Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1042 hours, GMT-12

It was a tight fit down the submarine’s hatch. Dean eased himself through and stepped back from the ladder as McMillan’s legs dropped into view, following him down. A moment later, the Russian joined them, moving to the far side of the narrow compartment so that he could keep them both covered with his Makarov.

“This is one of your civilian Mir submarines,” Dean said, looking around. The overhead was low and cluttered with pipes and bundles of plastic-coated cables. At the forward end, a pair of bubble windows looked out and down into the ocean depths. “Adapted for deep-sea oil work?”

“Very good.”

“They were using these things to take tourists down to the sea floor at the North Pole a year or two ago,” McMillan said. “The Russians have had a lot of experience with the technology.”

Their captor had pulled a small radio from his parka and was speaking into it urgently in Russian.

“Who is this guy?” Dean asked her. He had the feeling he’d seen the man before-in a file photo, perhaps.

“Feodor Golytsin,” she replied. “He’s some kind of bigwig with Gazprom.”

That was it. Dean remembered his briefing with Carolyn, the pretty English woman at Menwith Hill.

“Right,” he said. “He used to be a sub driver during the Soviet days, and then got promoted to admiral and given a shore billet. He got into trouble with Moscow and ended up in a gulag for three years.”

Golytsin put the radio away. “You seem to know a lot about me, Mr. Dean.”

“A little bird told me.” Dean shrugged. “Actually, we have quite a sizable file on you. If anything happens to us, there will not be any place on this planet where you can hide.”

It was a bluff but a reasonable one. People throughout the world, Dean knew, tended to have an inflated fear of the CIA and other American intelligence agencies and what they could actually do. He was hoping to play on that fear.

“I’m not too worried about that, Mr. Dean. Sufficient money can buy some very good hiding places. Look at Osama bin Laden.”

Pointing with the pistol, Golytsin herded them back and away from the minisub’s control panel. Reaching over, he began flipping switches in a particular pattern. Dean felt the ventilator system kick on, blowing cold air into the compartment, and felt a faint shudder through the deck as the power system came to life.

Dean watched the switches being thrown, trying to memorize their positions and order as they clicked on. He had a pretty good idea by now of where Golytsin intended to take them. If he and McMillan were to have a chance in hell of getting out, he would need to learn to pilot one of these things, on the fly and with only a single demonstration.

“So what are we waiting for, Admiral?” Dean said. He wondered if using the man’s former rank would help forge a psychological bind he could use. A long shot, to be sure, but right now Dean was willing to try anything.

The deck shifted beneath their feet as the submarine suddenly rocked from side to side. Golytsin looked up and smiled. “For that.” Footsteps rang through the compartment from overhead. Someone was clambering around on top of the Mir. With a clang, the topside hatch opened, and a pair of BDU-clad legs appeared coming down the ladder. The newcomer pulled the hatch shut above him, then joined the three of them in the now extremely cramped control room.

Dean recognized this man’s face immediately. Sergei Braslov. Former Soviet Army, GRU, MVD, and, more recently, and as Johann Ernst, co-founder of the militant environmental group Greenworld. He, too, held a 9mm Makarov pistol in his hand.

Braslov said something to Golytsin in Russian, and the other man replied with a shrug and two words, “Da, gaspodin!” He turned and took his place at the controls of the little submarine.

Dean was trying to get a feel for the social dynamics here. He’d been thinking of Golytsin as the guy in charge of the Russian Operation Cold War, but if he’d just called Braslov gaspodin, meaning “sir”…

And there was that photograph of Braslov on a beach with Grigor Kotenko, who was very high indeed in the hierarchy of the Tambov group, the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Mafiya.

Things were falling into place now. Braslov was the plumber, the fixer who made Kotenko’s orders materialize. Golytsin was a high-ranking executive in Gazprom, a company targeted for takeover by the Russian mob. He’d served a short term in the Siberian gulag, just long enough to make some key contacts with prominent members of the Organizatsiya; when Golytsin reached out to push a power control forward, his sleeve fell back far enough to reveal some blue tattooing at his wrist… and tattoos, especially blue ones, were marks of Mafiya membership. When Golytsin had been freed, Kotenko or other high-ranking mob bosses might have made sure he got a position with Gazprom.

Creating a Mafiya beachhead within the largest natural gas company and the third-largest producer of petroleum in the world.

That left a few questions unanswered as yet. Why was the Mafiya so interested in GK-1? Had they, in fact, organized the project from scratch, or had they simply taken over an existing program? It might not matter. Either way, a sudden infusion of profits from the GK-1 drilling project might be the lever needed to move key power centers within Gazprom, facilitating a takeover of the entire company.

A takeover that would make the Russian Mafiya the owners and the beneficiaries of the largest energy company in the world.

As Golytsin pushed the throttle control forward, the whine of electric motors hummed from the aft end of the compartment. A joystick control pushed forward nosed the Mir minisub into a downward cant; steering the submarine, Dean thought, was a pretty simple seat-of-the-pants exercise, with one joystick controlling up-down and left-right maneuvers and the throttle providing forward thrust.

“Move away from the control panel,” Braslov warned.

“I’m not touching anything,” Dean replied. Carefully he placed his hands behind his back. “See? I just want to take in the view.”