Arctic Gold

Her eyes widened slightly, and she nodded. Dean didn’t know if the room was bugged or not, but the oldest trick in the book was to put prisoners in a room where they could talk freely with one another-and listen in from somewhere nearby.

“So… is that all true?” she asked Dean quietly. “He was a Russian agent?”

“Looks that way,” Dean told her, his voice a low murmur. Even if there were no hidden mikes, he didn’t want Benford listening, either. “He had a small, one-channel receiver. We think the Russians gave him a signal and he murdered Richardson to give them their excuse to come in.”

“Why’d the Russians blame him, then?”

Dean shrugged. “Probably because it’s just not that plausible that the commander of a NOAA scientific expedition would kill the leader of the Greenworld contingent at his base. Doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know,” McMillan said. “There was no love lost between those guys. Scientists and nutcase environmentalists. It was bad news, believe me.”

“You’re not serious!”

She smiled. “No, I honestly don’t think Commander Larson would have killed anyone… not even someone as annoying as Richardson.”

“If it’s any consolation, the rest of the expedition people were being evacuated off the Lebedev about the time I ran into you and Golytsin.”

“That’s good.” She folded her arms and shivered. The storeroom was cold. Dean went to a storage shelf, pulled down a military-style wool blanket, and draped it over her shoulders. “Thank you. Aren’t you cold?”

He shook his head. “This dry suit’s almost too warm.” He was eyeing the door, the bulkheads, the overhead. “We need to think of a way to get out of here.”

“I don’t suppose you brought along any James Bond gadgets? A thimble-sized laser to cut through the door, maybe? An origami flamethrower?”

Dean made a face. “Gadgets have their place, I suppose,” he said. “But the only thing that’s essential is right here.” He tapped his forehead.

In fact, Dean was wishing he’d brought along something-the components of a binary explosive, for instance, with which he could have shattered the lock. Lacking that, however, the possibilities included finding something here in the storeroom that would help them break out-unlikely-and waiting for the bad guys to show up and overpower them.

“Let’s check those crates and see what we have to work with,” he said.

SSGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1120 hours, GMT-12

“You knew those guys weren’t going to shoot at us, Skipper!” Lieutenant Dolby said. “How?”

Grenville gave a modest shrug. “They zipped past south to north, pulled a major U-turn, and came straight back for us, north to south. But on that bearing, the Lebedev was between us and them. At their altitude, they weren’t about to drop anything nasty, not without hitting their own people. Hell, they were lucky if they didn’t clip the Lebedev’s mast.”

The Ohio drifted once again in her preferred world, the abyssal deep, her screw turning over just enough to give her way.

Grenville picked up a microphone and keyed it. “Sonar, this is the captain.”

“Sonar, aye,” came the immediate response.

“Talk to me, Chief. What’s out there?”

“It’s pretty much a hash, sir,” Sonar Chief Kevin Mayhew replied. “Ice grinding. Lots of incidentals from the Russian ships.” There was a puzzled hesitation. “I… I think they’re cheering over there.”

“You can hear that, Mayhew?”

“That’s what it sounds like, sir.”

“What about submarines?”

“We had two on the waterfall for a while there, sir. Sierra One-one-five was the midget. The library tagged Sierra One-one-six as a probable Victor III. Right now, they’re both shut down. Not a thing on the boards.”

“Any sign of the Pittsburgh?”

“Sir, they could be right alongside and all we’d hear would be the hole in the water.”

“Well, do your best listening, understand? I want to know the moment you hear a shrimp fart.”

“Shrimp fart. Aye, aye, sir.”

The Ohio had been in terrible danger while exposed on the surface. She might pack 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles in her vertical launch tubes, capable of striking targets fifteen hundred miles away, but she had absolutely no way to defend herself against an air strike save by seeking the quiet safety of the depths.

Now, however, she was in far greater danger. It was one of the axioms of submarine warfare: the best way to kill a submarine is with another sub, and somewhere out in all of that ice-noise hash, there was a Russian Victor III waiting… and listening.

Victor IIIs were decent attack submarines-about the same size as the American Los Angeles boats but a little lighter, a little slower. Some of them had an odd eight-blade screw consisting of two co-rotating four-bladed props, which gave them a unique signature on passive sonar. Grenville had dogged a Victor or two back when he’d skippered the Miami and, earlier, when he’d been the XO on the Cincinnati.

Now a Victor was dogging him.

When they surfaced, the surrounding ice had formed a protective bastion. The only way to hit the Ohio with a torpedo would be to have it detonate under her keel, and the chances were good that with all of that surrounding sonar-reflecting ice, the enemy wouldn’t even be able to locate the Ohio well enough to target her.

Down here in the deep, though, it was different. The Victor was listening for them, trying to sort their sound signature out from the same background hash that Chief Mayhew had complained about. And the Ohio was listening for the Victor.

The Ohio had three major advantages, however, and Grenville intended to take full advantage of them both. American subs were the quietest in the world; it would take some very good sonar people on the other side to pick her out of the background noise. American submarine technology was the best as well, especially as demonstrated by the Ohio’s sonar suite and computers.

And finally, and more important by far, American submariners were the best trained in the world and their sonar operators were capable of seemingly magical feats of sensitivity and accuracy.

If that shrimp did cut a hot one, Mayhew and his team of sonar techs would hear it.

GK-1 Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1122 hours, GMT-12

“Not much here,” McMillan said. She slumped back, the set of her shoulders showing her despair.

“Well, you didn’t think they were going to lock us in the storeroom with all the guns in it, did you?” Dean said. “But there’s stuff here we might be able to use.” He held up a one-liter tin of stewed tomatoes, hefting it. “This could make a nasty club.”

“Kind of awkward.”

“Yeah,” Dean admitted, dropping the can back into an open crate. “And it doesn’t quite have the same reach as a nine-millimeter Parabellum.”

They’d been going through a sampling of the crates stored in the narrow compartment. Peeking into three of them, so far, they’d found only foodstuffs-canned goods and boxes, all of it, and not a single bottle that might be judiciously broken into a makeshift knife. They’d examined the wooden slats of the crates themselves, but the wood was soft pine, each slat only a couple of feet long, and they were fastened together with staples rather than nails. You could do some damage with the things, surely-but not against a couple of alert men holding pistols.

He’d considered bunching a wool blanket up in a big wad and using it as a shield as he rushed the guard. Would a crumpled blanket absorb the kinetic energy of a 9mm round with a muzzle velocity of about twelve hundred feet per second? Or would the bullet slice right through and kill him before he’d taken two steps? Dean wasn’t sure, and