Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

  It was a war the National Security Agency had been fighting since 1953… and Desk Three since its inception only a few years before.

  And it was a war in which good men and women died.

  In the early years of the Cold War there’d been no satellites, no huge and ultra-sensitive listening stations, no means of eavesdropping on the Soviets short of actually flying up to or even across their borders in deliberate acts of trespass intended to get them to turn off their defense radars and other electronic networks and record the results. It had been a deadly game, one played across decades, and there had been casualties. A still-classified number of unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been shot down, some inside the borders of the Soviet Union, others well outside, over international waters.

  And now, even with satellites and high-tech sensors and all of the toys and gadgets meant to make covert ops foolproof, sterile, and safe, good men and women died. Despite all the acts of Congress, all the black programs of the military, there simply was no way to get the job done without risk.

  As at the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, there was a wall downstairs in the NSA tower, a wall set with gold stars, some with names, many without… a star for every NSA employee to be killed in the line of duty.

  Tommy Karr dead? It didn’t seem possible.

  There would be a memorial service, of course… but later. For now, the rest of them had to carry on.

  For now, the information would be kept tightly compartmentalized. Dean knew, but he would be carrying out the investigation in England now. Rubens had already arranged for Dean’s flight to Russia to be canceled and put him on a flight to London instead-the same flight, in fact, that Karr had taken. What the hell? It was worth a shot.

  Rubens also had transmitted orders to have Lia and Akulinin meet Dean in London, but they would be kept out of the loop on Karr’s death for now. Need-to-know… and Lia, especially, would be emotionally sensitive to the news. Rubens didn’t want to break it to her while she was still, in effect, inside enemy territory.

  Several facts had become clear already. Desk Three knew who the killers were. Randolph Evans, a GCHQ operative who’d been nearby when Karr was killed, had flashed digital photographs of the three terrorists back to the Art Room.

  Right now, three digital photographs were displayed on Rubens’ monitor. The three had been positively identified as Jacques Mallet, Kurt Berger, and Yvonne Fischer, the three Greenworlders Karr had spotted and photographed on the trip in from Heathrow. Mallet-the one with the overcoat and the assault rifle-and Berger both were dead. Fischer was on her way to a London hospital with multiple gunshot wounds; she might live. If she did, she was going to have a visit from Dean. Rubens wanted answers.

  Another fact, and a worrisome one. The Russians were behind the Greenworld strike in London. Their motives weren’t clear yet-maybe Dean could come up with something there-but Sergei Braslov had been photographed with the Greenworld killers that morning. A careful search of TV broadcasts and security camera shots of the protest mob outside the London City Hall, using feature-matching software to pick faces out of crowds, had so far failed to turn up an image of Braslov. That didn’t mean he wasn’t there, but it did suggest he’d remained back and out of sight.

  It felt like Braslov had been running the three assassins, sending them in to kill Spencer while the local security forces were occupied with the Greenworlders putting up their silly banner. Rubens had flashed a strongly worded request to GCHQ: find Braslov. The Russian was the key to what had just happened on the observation deck outside London’s Living Room.

  A question remained, though: assuming Braslov had put them up to it, why had three political activists agreed to go on what amounted to a suicide mission? Dean had already had the files pulled on all three, and it didn’t make sense. Fischer, Berger, and Mallet were upper-middle-class college graduates. All three had been employed, and Berger had a family back in Germany.

  The Frenchman, Mallet, reportedly had a passionate hatred of all things American, and he also had a drug problem-heroin. Those might have offered handles by which Braslov had maneuvered the man, but had they been enough to make him commit suicide by bodyguard? Berger was a confirmed socialist, but he appeared to be a hanger-on, a follower, not someone who would risk being shot over a difference in ideologies.

  The woman, so far as could be told from her arrest record, was a passionate neosocialist ideologue who despised oil companies, global conglomerates, and capitalism. She saw herself as a freedom fighter at the barricades, joining the downtrodden masses in their righteous struggle against the robber-baron overlords of the planet, a worldview helped along by the fact that she was carrying sixty thousand pounds of credit card debt.

  According to the bank records pulled in through the NSA’s far-flung computer nets, both Berger and Mallet were deep in debt as well. Might that be the common link, the handle Braslov had used? Their bank records didn’t show any large deposits, but money might have been placed in new accounts under false names, or even into Swiss accounts.

  The fact remained, the three assassins had launched an attack that had all but guaranteed their deaths or, at the very least, arrests for murder. Money, even lots of money, wasn’t much of an inducement if you couldn’t enjoy it. The three weren’t fanatic jihadists seeking eternal life. What in hell had Braslov promised them in order to get them to attack Spencer?

  Dean felt like he was juggling, and he was beginning to lose the rhythm. Russia, England, plus the administrative and political threat here at home to Desk Three, with the loss of that F-22 and the death of a Desk Three agent.

  And of course it all had to hit at once.

  Rubens checked his watch and sighed. Soon it would be time for him to head inside the Beltway for his three o’clock appointment with Wehrum. Damn.

  He wasn’t looking forward to this.

  CFS Akademik Petr Lebedev Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 2215 hours, GMT-12

  Kathy McMillan sat on the narrow bunk in a ship’s cabin, waiting.

  They’d brought her here several hours ago, she thought, though she wasn’t sure of the time. They’d taken her watch, along with her boots, parka, and other cold weather gear, and most of her clothing, and unceremoniously shoved her in here. Through the single tiny, round porthole, she could see the ice outside; at this time of the year, however, the sun never set but circled endlessly above the horizon.

  How long before they miss us back at the camp? she wondered.

  She tried not to think of the corollary… that even when they missed the three-person team, what would the rest of the expedition be able to do about it?

  Their captors had hustled them across the ice to one of the helicopters and flown them across the ice to a large ship with the name Akademik Petr Lebedev picked out in Cyrillic letters on the bow. A civilian ship, then, probably one of the fleet of exploration and science vessels the Russians used for Arctic surveys and research. Two other ships were visible nearby, an icebreaker and what was probably a transport of some kind. She only had a glimpse of the activity on the ice around the three ships, but the Russians appeared to have constructed a small base and there were stockpiles of supplies and carefully shrouded equipment everywhere.

  The Toy Shop indeed. What the hell were they building?

  Once on board the ship, they’d herded the three Americans belowdecks, taking their things and putting them in three separate cabins. McMillan had tried pounding on the door and shouting, but after a while her voice was raw and her hands sore, so she’d been waiting quietly ever since.

  She heard a rattle at the door and came to her feet. Half a dozen ill-formed plans flitted through her thoughts-of knocking down whoever was coming inside and racing for the deck-but common sense won out. Where the hell could she go, barefoot, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties?

  The door swung open, and a tall, blond, rugged-looking man stepped inside. Behind him, she could see a guard, a man in a Russian naval uniform, holding a
n AKM assault rifle.

  “Good morning,” the man said in almost faultless English. “How are we doing?”

  “We are demanding to be allowed to talk to an American consul,” she said. “We are protesting being captured and dragged here by your goons! We were engaged in a scientific-”

  “We were spying, darling,” the man said evenly. “The captain of our submarine got excellent video footage of you scuttling your equipment on the ice. What was it… an unmanned undersea rover? A robot submarine?”

  “I am part of a NOAA survey expedition,” she told him. “We are mapping and measuring the thinning of the ice cap, and monitoring ice drift.”

  “Indeed. And you seem to have drifted into Russian territory.”

  Russian territory. McMillan bit back a harsh laugh. “I hate to break it to you, Ivan. These are still international waters.”

  The Russian claim was utter nonsense, of course… sheer political posturing and muscle flexing. The NOAA ice station had been deliberately, almost ostentatiously, constructed on the ice over international waters. Over the past month, however, the ice cap’s normal clockwise drift-as much as twenty-five or thirty miles in a single day, depending on winds and currents-had carried the station across the antemeridian, the 180-degree longitude line, and, according to the latest Russian claims, at any rate, into Russian territorial waters.

  No one was taking the Russians very seriously, of course. In the summer of 2007, they’d pulled a kind of high-tech publicity stunt, sending a couple of their Mir three-man minisubs to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean at the North Pole, some twelve thousand feet beneath the ice. They’d planted a large titanium Russian flag at the bottom and operated a kind of ultra-exclusive tourist service, ferrying several people able to pay the eighty-thousand-dollar fare to what they were calling the real North Pole.

  The flag planting was solely symbolic, of course… but the Russians were trying to make something more of it. According to the way they read the map, their territorial waters, by international treaty, extended two hundred miles from their continental shelf. They were trying to make a case for the undersea Lomonosov Ridge, which extended out from the Siberian landmass almost all the way to Greenland, as a part of their continental shelf, a declaration that allowed them to claim fully half of the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole and as far over the top of the world as the 180th meridian, as their sovereign territorial waters.

  The whole matter was due to be adjudicated by the United Nations within the next couple of years, but in the meantime, the Russians had been doing a lot of saber rattling.

  And the West had been rattling back. Canada and Denmark, especially, weren’t about to let the Russian claim go unchallenged, and the United States was weighing in as well. As barren and cold as the ice cap was, various geological surveys conducted by both the United States and several other nations suggested that fully 25 percent of the world’s as-yet-undiscovered oil and gas reserves might lie beneath the floor of the Arctic Ocean, a staggering bonanza of fossil fuels that might power the industrial nations for another century or more. If the Arctic Ocean remained for the most part international waters, anyone with the technological know-how could tap those petroleum reserves. Russia wanted to grab the bear’s share of that treasure for herself, a move that could revitalize their creaking post-Soviet economy and make Mother Russia once again a major force in the modern world.

  The NOAA station had been set up at least in part to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to the Arctic Ocean being international waters. And McMillan and Yeats had come along with their own agenda, of course.

  “What is your name?” the man asked, his voice disarmingly pleasant.

  “Katharine McMillan,” she told him. There was no harm in admitting that much, and the truth would be safer than a lie.

  “Katharine. And my name is Feodor Golytsin. I work with a private corporation called Siberskii Masla.”

  McMillan had heard of it. The name meant “Siberian Oil,” and it was less a private corporation than it was an arm of the Russian government.

  “And who,” Golytsin continued, “are you working for?”

  “NOAA,” she replied. That was a lie but a completely plausible one. A check of NOAA’s personnel files would show her listed as an employee. “That’s the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.”

  “I know what NOAA is,” the Russian said. “I suspect, however, that you are, in fact, CIA or possibly DIA. NOAA doesn’t usually have access to such high-tech equipment as what we saw you dumping into the ocean. Or such a need for secrecy. You will tell me the truth.”

  “I’ve told you the truth. Go screw yourself. You have no right to-”

  “Right does not enter into the picture, Katharine. Not here.” He looked thoughtful. “If you choose not to cooperate, we have several possible courses of action.”

  Suddenly Golytsin reached out and grabbed her, yanking her close and spinning her around so he was holding her from behind. She shrieked and tried to hit him, but he was strong enough to clamp his arms down over hers and hold her immobile. She tried kicking his kneecap, but he lifted her off the deck and grabbed her left breast, hard.

  “Let go of me, you bastard!”

  For answer, he squeezed her, painfully, through her shirt. She shrieked, “Stop! Let me go!”

  “There’s the crew of this ship, for instance,” he continued, ignoring her squirming and her shouts. “One hundred twenty-eight men on board the Lebedev. Another one hundred fifty on the Taymyr. Perhaps fifty on the Granat. And for most of them, it has been a very long time since they’ve seen their wives and girlfriends. You are an attractive woman, Katharine. For them, you might have considerable… entertainment value.”

  “Go to hell, you sick bastard!”

  He released her suddenly, shoving her hard across the cabin. She tumbled into the bunk and lay there on her back, panting.

  Golytsin took a step forward and bent forward, looming over her. “But I imagine even you would lose your appeal after a time. How long would it take, do you think? A month? Two? If we then decided you were worthless, that we needed to dispose of you, I might order you dropped into the ocean alongside this ship. Just how long do you think you would live? The water temperature here is actually a bit below freezing-minus two, maybe minus three degrees Celsius. The salt content, you know. You might survive, oh, two or three minutes.

  “Or… better still, if we dropped you on the ice out there, somewhere. Even if we chose to return your cold weather gear, how long before you froze to death, do you think? There are lots of very hungry polar bears out along the edge of the ice pack, hunting for seal. Do you think you would still be alive when the bears found you?

  “In any case, Katharine, your body would never be found. Never.”

  “I’m telling you the truth!” she yelled. “I’m with NOAA! I’m-”

  Golytsin captured her jaw with one hand, silencing her, holding her head motionless. For a horrible moment, she was forced to look into his eyes. She was certain he was about to…

  Then he released her. “But not yet,” he told her. “I’ll give you some time to think about your options, mm? But I suggest, Katharine, that you not test my patience.”

  He turned, strode to the door, and was gone. She heard the lock click behind him.

  She lay on the bunk, still breathing hard. She was terrified-there was no other way to describe it. She was convinced that the bastard would do whatever he needed to do to get information out of her… rape, beatings, torture…

  When she’d joined the National Security Agency, she’d done so as a technician, a very skilled and highly trained technician. The idea of being sent out into the field had been ludicrous; hell, as far as she knew, the NSA didn’t even have field agents. And when she went over to the CIA, that had strictly been a temporary technical assignment.

  How the hell had she let them talk her into fieldwork? This wasn’t supposed to happen!

  She began revi
ewing her options. Not one of them, she found, was at all pleasant.

  9

  Ice Station Bear Arctic Ice Cap 82° 24' N, 179° 45' E 0125 hours, GMT-12

  EIGHTY-FIVE MILES FROM THE Lebedev and twelve time zones away from London, another storm was coming in. Dr. Chris Tomlinson could see it in the dark band of clouds just beginning to shroud the southwestern horizon in shadow, could feel it in the icy bite of the freshening wind. He finished wiping the rime ice from the anemometer high in the met tower and awkwardly clambered back down the narrow ladder. It was a thrice-daily chore shared by the odd mix of personnel here at the ice station. The anemometer and other weather instruments were mounted on the fifteen-foot tower to keep them clear of wind and spray at ice level, but they still tended to accumulate a thin layer of ice under the incessant spring wind.

  The sun hung just above the southeastern horizon, wan and pale and as seemingly devoid of warmth as a silvery full moon.

  In a more civilized clime, 0130 was the middle of the frigging night. Late in May at these latitudes, a month before the summer solstice, the sun never set but circled the horizon slowly clockwise with the turning of the Earth. With no real day or night, the actual time scarcely mattered, so the team ran on Eastern time. The National Climatic Data Center was in Asheville, North Carolina, and it was easier to coordinate work and communications schedules with everyone on the same clock.

  Tomlinson carefully stepped off the ladder, his thick boots crunching lightly on the ice. Lieutenant Phil Segal was waiting for him at the bottom-his safety buddy, present just in case. Personnel were encouraged to go about in pairs or teams when they left the shelter of the Quonset hut that served as the small base’s living quarters. Tomlinson had seen for himself how fast the wind could kick up sometimes, and when it mixed with fog or blowing snow, whiteout conditions could set in so fast that someone outside could become hopelessly lost just a few short feet from safety.

  “Looks like we’re fixing to have a blow,” Segal said, looking up at the anemometer, now wildly and freely spinning in the breeze.