Arctic Gold

He doubted that Braslov was stupid enough to fire a weapon inside the Mir’s sealed passenger compartment; a cracked port or a broken hydraulics line would end the voyage quite quickly. By taking the lead and making decisions for himself, however small those might be, Dean was snatching a tiny bit of psychological advantage from the situation and perhaps keeping their captors just a little off balance.

Braslov seemed about to bark an order, but Golytsin said something in Russian and laughed. Braslov shrugged. “Just touch nothing,” he growled.

With his hands at his back, Dean stared out through the curved transparency on the starboard bow of the craft. There was very little to see. The water was lucidly, inexpressibly clear, like deep blue crystal, but there was simply nothing to see in all of that emptiness. As the Mir continued to descend, the blue grew rapidly deeper, darker, and more opaque, until the endless and absolute night of the deep abyss closed in.

Golytsin hit a pair of switches overhead, and a faint glow answered from outside. A few isolated particles danced in the Mir’s lights like tiny white stars.

“How deep are we?” Dean asked.

Golytsin glanced at an LED readout on a TV monitor. “Four hundred meters,” he said.

“And how deep can we go?”

“Quiet,” Braslov ordered. “No more questions.”

Electric motor shrilling, the Mir continued its steepening descent.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1902 hours EDT

“Yes, sir,” Rubens said. “Yes, sir, I understand. Thank you, Mr. President.”

He hung up the red phone.

At least the White House operator had put him straight through to the President this time. Bing was no longer keeping him isolated, at least for the time being.

A map of the Arctic had been thrown up on one of the secondary wall monitors. A bright red triangle showed the position of a flight of six MiG-35s, now better than halfway between the mainland and the Lebedev.

At Mach 2, they were ten minutes from the Lebedev and the Ohio. The President had not been pleased with this latest turn of events. The encounter in the Arctic, what was supposed to have been a quick in-and-out by the SEALs to rescue the Americans held on the Lebedev, was fast turning into a deadly confrontation.

Over the past half hour, the Art Room had continued monitoring the situation on board the Lebedev. At last report, SEALs had taken over both the bridge and the engine room and a large number of seamen had been sequestered in a forward hold, under guard. Twelve American prisoners had been freed from an empty storeroom aft, and another, the seriously injured Commander Larson, had been found in the ship’s sick bay.

Two were still missing-Harry Benford, the traitor, and the NSA employee Kathy McMillan.

With the Lebedev under the control of the SEAL assault team, the focus of the operation had shifted to getting the former hostages off of the Russian ship and across the ice to the Ohio. A long gangway had already been set up, allowing people to reach the ice off the Lebedev’s deck. A similar gangway, with safety lines and stanchions, had been rigged to let them clamber off the ice and onto the Ohio’s forward deck.

Everything was going perfectly according to plan, with three serious problems.

Russian MiGs were on the way, perhaps ten minutes out. The SEALs had to get the released prisoners off the ship and across the ice before those aircraft arrived, because when they did, the Ohio would be an easy and obvious target.

That was one. The second was worse. Fifteen minutes before, the Ohio’s sonar operator had reported a new underwater contact… almost certainly a miniature submarine of some sort. Minutes later, however, a second contact had been reported, this one larger, much larger… most likely a Russian attack submarine. Because of the difficulties of determining range and bearing in the weirdly echoing undersea terrain of the Arctic ice cap, it was impossible to tell just where the new contact was, or how close. But the chances were good that someone on the Lebedev had called for help, possibly over an undersea hydrophone system, and the attack sub was moving in on the Ohio.

And Charlie Dean had been captured. From the look of things, he and the other NSA employee, McMillan, had been taken aboard a miniature Russian sub and were now heading into the ocean deeps, presumably to rendezvous with GK-1.

“The captain of the Ohio reports the last of the hostages are on board,” a communications tech said. “The SEALs are evacuating the ship.”

“Very well.”

But once the SEALs were aboard, the Ohio’s skipper would have a deadly choice. If he stayed on the surface, he would be vulnerable to attack by the incoming MiGs. If he submerged, he might drop squarely into the track of torpedoes fired by the Russian sub. Damned if you do… damned if you don’t.

This was not shaping up to be one of America’s better days…

Mir 1 Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1108 hours, GMT-12

There were lights in the darkness.

Dean leaned forward in an awed silence as the Mir continued its descent. According to the monitor readout, they were now at eight hundred meters, half a mile beneath the ice-locked surface of the Arctic Ocean. And GK-1 was just now coming into view.

The thing was enormous-at least a hundred yards long, perhaps more. Bow and stern had the look of a conventional surface-going ship, but they were joined by a relatively slender center section holding the two together like the bar on a set of barbells. At first, Dean nearly didn’t recognize what he was seeing as a ship; it was moored in the darkness bow down, which is not the usual attitude for a vessel designed to move along the ocean’s surface.

Five massive cables stretched out and down from the bow, vanishing into the darkness below. Several more slender cables reached straight up from the stern, tethering the structure to the Lebedev half a mile overhead. Something like a slender needle extended from the structure’s bow straight down into the abyss-the drill itself, Dean assumed. On the stern-the highest point on the ship in this position-was a round well or receptacle. Dean could make out one of the drill pipe sections hanging suspended just above the structure’s stern. Something like the remote-controlled arm of the Space Shuttle reached out of the stern, bent back at an elbow joint, and grasped the pipe section as though preparing to insert it into the receptacle.

But nothing was moving. Work, it seemed, had halted.

The technical challenges in designing the thing, Dean thought, must have been staggering… but the payoff was a stable drill rig that could operate half a mile beneath storms and rough seas, beneath moving ice, and well off the radar of any environmental groups that might oppose drilling on the ocean floor.

“Not much happening,” he commented to Golytsin. “What is it, Russian workers’ holiday?”

“No. We’ve run into a… snag, I believe you Americans call it.”

“Don’t tell them any more,” Braslov ordered. “They don’t need to know.”

“It hardly matters,” Golytsin said with a shrug. “If Kotenko doesn’t order them killed, they’ll still never be allowed to leave Russia.”

“Methane,” Dean said, venturing a guess. “Methane clathrates on the bottom. Isn’t it?”

“You’re too smart for your own good, old man,” Braslov said.

Dean had received a last-moment briefing update from Rubens before the Ohio had moved to her new position off the Lebedev’s port side. It turned out that a report Lia had seen on Kotenko’s computer had concerned immense deposits of methane clathrate discovered on the seabed beneath GK-1. Evidently there’d already been one accident, fortunately rather minor. Work had been suspended until the problem could be resolved.

The update had included a brief discussion of clathrates, also known as methane hydrate or methane ice. Apparently outcrops of the stuff were often associated with stretches of seabed rich in petroleum and also marked fields of natural gas bubbling up to the surface through fissures or geological fault lines in the ocean floor.