Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

  At a range of just under fifty meters, he could hardly miss.

  He’d not fired the weapon, however… and didn’t plan to do so if he could possibly help it. Mallet, Berger, and Fischer, simpleton dupes, the lot of them, had done exactly as he’d coached them over long, patient hours during the past week, finding Spencer, rushing in as close as possible, and only then pulling out their weapons and opening fire. Braslov was ready with the sniper’s rifle if necessary, if none of the three succeeded in hitting anything, but at point-blank range, they were almost certain to hit someone.

  That they appeared to have missed Spencer mattered not at all. They’d killed one, perhaps two of Spencer’s bodyguards.

  It would be enough.

  There was one final task Braslov had set for himself, however. None of the three, after his coaching, had expected the bodyguards to be armed, and, as a result, all three of the Greenworld attackers were now down. Two were almost certainly dead, but the third, the woman, was still moving, a puddle of blood spreading on the concrete beneath her and soaking through her T-shirt. He shifted his aim until the crosshair reticules in his scope centered on her head. A squeeze of the trigger and the only person on the GLA observation deck who knew exactly what had happened would be dead.

  It was a difficult shot, however. The surviving bodyguards and several GLA security personnel were clustered around her, and she was partially blocked from his view by the back-slanting safety railing at the edge of the deck.

  No, he decided. Too risky. Shooting the woman would alert the security forces that a fourth shooter was in the game. They might even spot him and call in support before he could get clear of the building.

  Fischer was done for, shot in the stomach and chest several times. Even if she survived, she didn’t know enough to be a threat to Braslov, or to the Organizatsiya.

  Moments later, paramedics arrived, and they began strapping Fischer onto a gurney. The window of opportunity was past.

  Thoughtful, Braslov disassembled the rifle and stowed the pieces back in the camera bag. Only then did he pull out a satellite phone and punch in a number, opening an encrypted line.

  “Rodina,” he said. Motherland. Mother Russia.

  “We’re watching BBC Two. Excellent work.”

  “One of our agents still lives. I cannot get a clear shot, however.”

  “She knows nothing. We don’t want to reveal your presence. That might tell the opposition too much.”

  “That was my thought.” He hesitated. “Perhaps it is time to activate Cold War. The two… incidents should take place close together, for maximum effect.”

  “We agree. A ticket and new identity papers are waiting for you at the embassy. You fly out tonight.”

  “Good. Until tonight, then.”

  Utter pandemonium reigned throughout the GLA building and in the surrounding parks and waterfront. It was simplicity itself to walk down the stairwell and let himself out onto Potter’s Field. Terror-stricken people continued to flee the area, spilling out of the GLA building and into the surrounding park. Police were arriving now, many in heavy combat gear, but no one took notice of the lone cameraman with a BBC ID badge clipped to his shirt.

  He looked up at the enormous green banner for a moment, hanging ten stories above his head, smiled, then mingled with the fast-thinning crowd and disappeared.

  8

  Met Remote One Arctic Ice Cap 82° 30' N, 177° 53' E 1910 hours, GMT-12

  KATHY MCMILLAN PULLED the edges of her hood closer to her face. The temperature was only just below freezing, but the wind was shrill and biting. The windchill, she thought, must be down around zero, Fahrenheit.

  Forty years ago, an American astronaut had described the surface of the moon as a “magnificent desolation.” This, she thought, must have been what he’d felt. The landscape in every direction was utterly flat and almost featureless, save for occasional small upthrusts and pressure ridges, none more than a few feet high, and randomly scattered patches of ice melt. The sky was a searing, featureless blue, the sun a heatless white disk suspended above the southern horizon. In every direction there stretched a barren white icescape, pocked with shallow craters filled with icy water, broken here and there by darker leads.

  Scarcely five hundred miles away, in that direction, lay the North Pole itself.

  Met Remote One was an unmanned meteorological drift station established on the Arctic ice cap three weeks before. There wasn’t a lot there-a slender tower with an anemometer, a surface instrument package for measuring temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, ice thickness, and other data, and a GPS and a dish antenna for measuring ice drift and transmitting the information to Ice Station Bravo, some eighty miles away. The whole setup required minimal maintenance; the three American scientists were essentially employing the met station’s presence as a useful excuse… an alibi.

  Somewhere off toward the north, about seven miles away and just barely over the horizon, was Objective Toy Shop, an amusing reference to their proximity to the North Pole and Santa Claus. While the NOAA expedition at Ice Station Bravo was out here on the ice to monitor changes in climate and ice thickness, Yeats and McMillan were here specifically-and secretly-to have an up-close look at the Toy Shop.

  “Hey, Mac! Quit playing tourist and give me a hand, here,” Dennis Yeats said. He and Randy Haines were beside one of the sleds, wrestling with the Unmanned Underwater Vehicle.

  “Sorry.” She tore her attention away from the barren panorama and crunched through soft ice to join the others. She carried an M-16 slung over her shoulder. All three of them were armed-a necessary precaution against the possibility of polar bears. Unslinging the weapon, she stowed it on the supply sled behind Haines’ snowmobile, then joined the others.

  “Did you get through to Bear One?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Haines told her. “And to Asheville. A freakin’ miracle.”

  Communications had been frustratingly intermittent lately. Maybe things were finally starting to break their way.

  The three of them had driven out across the ice in three snowmobiles, each towing a sled with supplies and the special equipment. Yeats’ sled carried the Orca, eight feet long and weighing over a quarter of a ton, while hers carried the cable reel and support gear. The two men had just finished stripping the protective plastic sheet off the cradled Orca and were readying the sleek black and red device for launch.

  McMillan was the Orca’s technician. Approaching her sled, she first double-checked to see that the ice brakes were solidly set. Then she took several minutes to hook up the guidance wire, stringing the thin length of fiber-optic cable from its spool on her sled across to the receiver on the Orca’s dorsal surface and attaching the other end to a small handheld control unit. The connections made, she switched on the power for a final pre-launch check.

  The readouts on her control panel all showed green and ready.

  “We’re set to go,” she told them. “I’ve got feedback and control. Ready to cut the hole?”

  “We’re on it,” Haines told her.

  One hundred yards from the met station, they’d found a patch of ice melt, a circular depression in the surface filled with milky green water, where the ice was thin enough to have nearly broken through to the ocean beneath. The ice here was about three meters thick; at the center of that depression, it might be as thin as a few centimeters.

  Yeats now trudged toward the edge of the depression, carrying a small, tightly wrapped satchel. Reaching back, he flung the device far out over the water. It hit with a splash, sinking gently about three-quarters of the way toward the depression’s center.

  “Okay!” Yeats called, hurrying back from the depression’s edge. “Let’s blow it!”

  “And three,” Haines said, holding a small transmitter in his gloved hands, “and two… and one… and fire!”

  A column of water and chunks of ice geysered into the cold air with a solid thud that they felt through the soles of their heavily insulated boot
s. The water and spray subsided, leaving a large dark spot at the bottom of the depression.

  “Breakthrough!” Haines called.

  “Right,” Yeats said. “Launch the baby.”

  “Watch your feet!” she called. “Don’t get caught in the cable!” McMillan touched a control on her board, and the cradle supporting the Orca at the depression’s edge began rising on powerful hydraulics, tipping the UUV’s tail high, the nose down. In seconds, gravity took over and the Orca eased forward on its rails, slammed hard onto the ice belly down like a huge and ungainly penguin, and swiftly slid into the water. It reached the dark patch, nosed over, and vanished, trailing the slender wire behind it.

  The large spool of fiber-optic cable mounted on McMillan’s sled played out rapidly with a faint hissing sound. An age ago, in what seemed now like another life, Kathy McMillan had worked for Raytheon on the ADCAP torpedo for the U.S. Navy. Five years ago, she’d come to work for the National Security Agency, bringing her experience-and her security classification-with her. For the past year, though, she’d been seconded from the NSA to the CIA and had been working with the Company’s Directorate of Science and Technology to fine-tune the Orca for CIA operations worldwide.

  The Orca was actually quite similar to the wire-guided torpedoes used on board U.S. submarines-considerably smaller, lighter, and slower, of course, and lacking a high explosive warhead, but powered by batteries, driven by pumpjet propulsors, and remotely piloted over its two-way data feed. McMillan had about ten miles’ worth of cable on her spool, though it didn’t look bulky enough for that.

  Her handset looked like a video gamer’s control box, with a pair of inch-long joysticks, one for left-right-up-down, the other for controlling speed. Touch-pad controls handled the sophisticated array of underwater sensors and cameras into its nose. Headlamps set into the Orca on either side of the nose cast an eerie, cold-white light ahead, illuminating swirling clouds of gleaming white motes in the vehicle’s path. McMillan was getting a clear picture on her small display-a deep blue-green and featureless haze, with an oddly wrinkled and rugged ceiling of white overhead.

  “How’s she look?” Yeats asked, coming up beside her.

  “We’re beneath the ice,” she told him. “On course, fifteen knots. We’ll be there in about half an hour.”

  “Good. I don’t want us to hang around here longer than we have to.”

  “Relax. They don’t even know we’re here.”

  “They would’ve heard the explosion,” Yeats told her. “Sound travels underwater, you know.”

  “Yes, Dennis,” she said in her most acid, yes-dear tone. She hated it when men patronized her. “I know something about sonar, okay?”

  “Oh, yeah. All that work for the Navy.”

  “And I also know that it’s almost impossible to track underwater sounds under the ice. They heard the explosion, all right, but they won’t have a clue as to where it came from, or how far away it is. So far as they know, it was something echoing in from the oil derricks off the North Slope.”

  Minutes passed. The fiber-optic cable continued unreeling from its drum, vanishing into the hole in the ice. On her monitor, the bottom side of the ice raced past overhead with a flicker of fast-shifting shadows. Twice she adjusted the Orca’s depth to avoid looming pressure ridges-inverted mountain ranges plunging down into the black. This part of the ice cap, though, was fairly uniform and relatively thin. Maybe, she thought, the environmentalists had something after all; the ice cap was thinning rapidly from year to year. A couple of years ago, for the first time since such things could be checked, ice-free water had actually opened around the North Pole itself.

  Then she thought of the Greenworlders back at the main camp on the ice and dismissed the thought. That bunch of screwups couldn’t be right about the time of day, much less something as dynamic and ever-changing as the Arctic.

  She felt a shudder pass through the ice beneath her boots.

  “What the hell was that?” Haines asked.

  Yeats eyed the hole uncertainly. “Dunno. Maybe we should move back from the edge a bit, though. We might’ve used too big a charge.”

  Another shudder was transmitted through the ice, a solid shock. “Nah, it’s not that,” Haines said. “That’s not like ice breaking. More like a thump from underneath.”

  “A whale, maybe?” Yeats suggested.

  Haines gave Yeats a sour look. “No.”

  “We should probably move the sleds back a bit anyway,” McMillan told them. “Just to be safe.”

  “Right,” Yeats said. “I’ll-”

  And then the ice was shuddering and bucking so hard that Haines fell down, and Yeats and McMillan both grabbed hold of the edge of the sled to stay standing. There was a roar, like avalanche thunder, and the ice between the party and the met station began to heave and buckle skyward.

  McMillan’s first thought was that a pressure ridge was forming… but the buckling and upthrust continued. Blocks of ice toppled backward and slid down the growing mound, and then something like a smooth, black cliff appeared above the center of the mound, rising slowly.

  “Submarine!” McMillan screamed. “It’s a fucking submarine!”

  The conning tower, or sail, as submariners called it, continued to loom slowly above the ice, which was rising and cracking now to either side of the structure as the submerged vessel’s hull ponderously broke through to the surface. As more of the structure came into view, she noted that the sail was rounded and sloped both fore and aft, giving it the streamlined look of a teardrop. That was emphatically not an American design. It was almost certainly a Russian boat, probably a Victor II or III, nuclear powered, with about eighty men on board.

  “It’s Russian!” she called to the others. “Quick! We’ve got to ditch the gear!”

  She rammed both joysticks on her controller full forward, sending the UUV into a vertical dive. Then she released the ice brakes on the equipment sled and locked the cable reel. Immediately the tough plastic wire snapped taut and the sled began to slide, slow but steady, toward the hole in the ice.

  It hurt, destroying a $4-million piece of hardware like this, but the team was under orders to be careful not to let it fall into unfriendly hands.

  She just wished they’d had a chance to get close enough to actually see what the Russians were doing at Objective Toy Shop.

  “Shit!” Yeats said. “C’mon, Randy!” The two of them released the brakes on the second sled, unhooked the snowmobile, and began sliding the empty cradle toward the ice-melt depression.

  The submarine had come to rest, surrounded by huge, cracked blocks of ice. A figure, made tiny by comparison with the huge vessel, appeared at the top of the sail. A second figure appeared next to the first a moment later… and a hatch behind the sail broke open to disgorge a line of men, all in heavy parkas, all carrying assault rifles.

  “Stoy!” a voice boomed from the sail over a loud-hailer. “Nyeh sheveleetess!”

  “How’s your Russian?” Haines asked.

  “He’s telling us to halt, to not move,” McMillan told them.

  The sled with the reel of cable was well out into the ice-melt depression now. It hit the black opening and vanished with a splash. The sled with the Orca cradle was in the depression but not moving.

  There was nothing that could be done about that.

  “Brahstee arujyeh!”

  “He wants us to drop our guns.”

  “I suggest we do what they tell us,” Yeats said, stepping away from the snowmobile, unslinging his assault rifle, and dropping it on the ice. Carefully he raised his hands.

  Heavily armed sailors were clambering down off the submarine’s deck now, using a long extending gangplank to cross the broken ice. In another few moments, the three Americans were being herded back toward the surfaced submarine.

  In the hard, blue sky overhead, a pair of Russian helicopters circled, apparently searching for other trespassers. One of them was gentling toward the ice ahead.


  A sailor behind her nudged her hard with the muzzle of his rifle. “Skarei!” Quickly.

  Hands up, she stumbled forward.

  Just possibly, she thought, they were about to see the Toy Shop up close after all, without any high-tech help from the Orca.

  Rubens’ Office NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1035 hours EDT

  Rubens sat alone in his office, staring out across the Maryland countryside. The morning rush hour was long since past, and traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway was light and brisk. All those people, he thought. All those people with no idea that we’re at war…

  From William Rubens’ perspective, that war had little to do with terrorism, or with oil, or with specific geographical locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It was, instead, a war between the forces of civilization and the barbarian night, a last-ditch stand against the ultimate night that had been clawing at the light of culture and rationality and science for as long as such concepts had been understood. The storming, dark passions of National Socialism; the stolid gray and monolithic rigidity of the Soviets; the shrill sloganeering, the witch hunts, and the petty sabotage of the more ignorant branches of political activism; the mindless embrace of God’s will as excuse for any act of bloodshed, stupidity, or bigotry… all were, in Rubens’ mind, aspects of the same darkness, the same ancient and abyssal evil that threatened to tear down all that Humankind had built, all that was decent and civilized and safe.