Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

  “The pickle” was D.C. insider-speak for the President’s Intelligence Checklist, a daily ten-page newsletter prepared by the Director of Central Intelligence for the President on overnight developments of five or six items of immediate presidential concern. CIA headquarters at Langley was sometimes called “the pickle factory” for that reason.

  “You’re just pissed that you don’t have POTUS access through George Haddad anymore.”

  That hurt. He frowned, sitting back.

  “I’m sorry, Bill,” she said, seeing his expression. “I shouldn’t have said that. But you’ve got to know that every time you try working through the back doors in this city, you’re stepping on toes. Powerful toes.”

  “And sometimes working through back doors and stepping on toes is the only way to get anything done. Look… did you do as I asked?”

  “Yes. I was in on the briefing on the Arctic situation this morning, and I brought up the intercepts. I have to tell you, though, both Bing and Collins were there, and they were furious.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Presidential briefings tended to be carefully scripted affairs, with no digressions from the planned agenda. Rubens had asked Barbara to interject a new issue into the session, bringing up the Powerhouse intercepts as hot new intel just received from the NSA… which was true, as far as it went. But to bring up something not already on the agreed upon list of topics was a serious breach of protocol.

  “I didn’t say where the message had come from. I just said ‘a highly placed intelligence source.’”

  “They’ll guess. It’s okay. I was expecting that. Did it get you into trouble, departing from the agenda like that?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway, though Dr. Bing did tell me she wants to have a chat with me.” She grimaced. “First, though… the President wants to hear those intercepts for himself.”

  “Good.”

  “This afternoon.”

  Rubens’ eyebrows went up at that. “That was fast.”

  “Do you have them?”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a small, flat case, half the size of a credit card and a little thicker, a data storage device similar to an iPod, but with more memory and the ability to link into computer networks. He handed it to her, and she slipped it into her handbag.

  “So what’s the word on the Russian ice-grab as of now?” he asked her.

  “Canada and Denmark are both screaming bloody murder. They’re dispatching warships.”

  “That bad?”

  She nodded. “That bad. The President has decided to send a couple of subs into the region as well. The Ohio and the Pittsburgh.”

  That news startled Rubens. It represented a major, and very serious, escalation in the growing crisis.

  The Ohio was a relatively new addition to the U.S. special ops arsenal. She’d started out as a ballistic missile submarine, a “boomer” in naval parlance, but with the end of the Cold War, she and several other SSBNs had been targeted for decommissioning in order to adhere to treaties requiring a reduction in ICBM platforms in the post-Soviet drawdown.

  Instead of being scrapped, however, four excess boomers had been converted into SSGNs, guided-missile submarines equipped to carry out covert Special Forces operations. The Ohio and her sister boats could carry over sixty SEALs or other special ops troops, as well as over 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles with either conventional or nuclear warheads.

  The other sub, the Pittsburgh, was a Los Angeles-class attack boat and would be operating under the Arctic ice as the Ohio’s escort. The deployment was an indication of just how sharply the situation up there had deteriorated over the past week.

  The waiter returned with their coffee. Rubens thought about what this new wrinkle might mean for the NSA and Desk Three.

  “You and your people are still in rather bad odor in the White House basement,” she told him. “Collins has been pushing to take over Desk Three.”

  He smiled. “Nothing new there.” Debra Collins could be a most… determined woman.

  “The President put his foot down this morning,” Stahl continued. “There will be no talk of another reorganization within the intelligence community until after the crisis is resolved, one way or another. And the investigation of the F-22 shoot-down incident is on hold.”

  Rubens’ heart quickened a bit at that. President Marcke had always been a staunch supporter of Desk Three. And why not? The team had produced good results in the past. And Marcke’s administrative philosophy tended to run along the lines of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  For the past few weeks, though, Rubens had been cut off from presidential access.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he told her. “But what do you-?”

  “Listen, Bill,” she said, interrupting. “You have friends in the Administration, at the Pentagon, and in the NSC, and they all know that Collins and Bing are using the situation to pull off a fast hatchet job. But those two will be talking to their friends on the Hill, and that could be bad for you. Even the President won’t be able to help you if this ends up in front of a Senate Investigations Committee.”

  “I understand that.” Even if things were to go well, a congressional investigation could prove disastrous. Neither Rubens nor the NSA worked well under the spotlight of publicity. He could win the battle and find he’d lost the war if some details of Deep Black and Desk Three became public.

  “The President wants you to get solid intel on what the hell is going on in the Arctic,” she told him. “Do that and maybe he can derail Bing and Collins on the F-22 thing.”

  “We’ve been passing the relevant SIGINT up the chain right along,” Rubens said. “Our Alaskan listening post, especially, has been picking up a lot, despite the bad atmospheric conditions lately.”

  “So why did you send it to me?”

  He shrugged. “Like I said. The President needed to know.”

  “Have you seen an analysis of this stuff?”

  “No. Remember, we just collect. Other agencies do the analysis.”

  “Give me a break, Bill. We both know it’s not that clear-cut. If it were, Desk Three would be totally useless.”

  That was true enough, at least as far as it went. The NSA by design gathered and decoded electronic intelligence-SIGINT-and distributed it to agencies and departments that needed it: the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council. For the most part, though, they did not analyze it, again by design. A cell phone intercept from a known terrorist leader, data on an electronic funds transfer in Lebanon, and the recording of a landline conversation between Paris and Beirut might all be reported to the CIA, but it was not the job of the NSA to put together the jigsaw pieces and predict a terrorist attack against American tourists in France… a situation that the NSA’s signals intercepts had helped prevent just last year.

  But, as Barbara had pointed out, things weren’t that simple in reality. The NSA gathered such a huge volume of electronic information in the course of a single day that a certain amount of analysis was necessary just to determine what was important and what was garbage. And once Desk Three had come online and begun operating all over the world, it made more sense to pull hard data out of the NSA’s own networks than it did to wait for the CIA or the State Department to crunch the numbers and return the SIGINT in usable form.

  Operation Magpie was a good example of this. A CIA request for help in tracking a possible theft of contaminated beryllium in Rybinsk had gotten things rolling, but NSA signals intercepts had picked up details of a sale to Iran, of Grigor Kotenko’s involvement, of the use of a Liberian freighter to make the transfer, and on the location of the beryllium in a St. Petersburg warehouse. While all of that information had been passed on up the intelligence distribution network, as always, Desk Three’s own analysts had worked on it as well, assembling the complete picture that had allowed Rubens to send Akulinin and DeFrancesca to St. Petersburg in order to find the beryllium shipment and plant the tracking
device.

  If Rubens had waited for the analysts at Langley to get back to him with the complete picture, he’d still be waiting.

  “Let’s just say,” Rubens told Barbara after a moment’s thought, “that I don’t usually see the raw data when it comes in. There’s way too damned much of it… and it takes time to massage it into something useful. I do know there’s been a lot of radio chatter out of Mys Shmidta over the past couple of weeks and lots of high-energy RF jamming. POW-Main has been keeping an eye on it. Looks like military maneuvers, probably routine. I was only marginally aware of the details.

  “But when we intercept, first, a call for help from a NOAA ice station-something about a civilian being murdered by a NOAA officer-and then a few minutes later we pick up Russian military transmissions discussing orders to seize that base and take the people there, American citizens, into custody… yeah. Someone figured out what it meant, and they made sure I saw it.”

  “What I’m about to tell you is classified, Bill,” Barbara said.

  “Of course.”

  “The base in question is NOAA Arctic Meteorological Station Bravo.”

  “Sure. A NOAA climate research station a few hundred miles north of Mys Shmidta.”

  “That’s it. Three NOAA officers, seven scientists, and five kids with Greenworld.”

  That caught his attention. “Greenworld?”

  “Yes. One of them is a congressman’s daughter, heavily involved in environmental issues.”

  He closed his eyes. He could just imagine it. A too-young, too-rich, and too-well-connected WASP princess, most likely, with the politics of Jane Fonda and the common sense of a Christmas tree ornament. “Shit.”

  “Just so.”

  “What the hell is Greenworld doing up there?”

  “Filming a documentary on global warming,” she said. “But they’re not our concern at the moment. Two of the expedition scientists are CIA officers.”

  “Christ. This just gets better and better.”

  “Three days ago, three members of the expedition-Randy Haines, Kathy McMillan, and Dennis Yeats-set off across the ice, ostensibly to check a remote met station. Haines is a meteorologist and an experienced Arctic hand, but Yeats is CIA and McMillan is NSA. She’s a tech specialist, seconded to the CIA.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. What is the Agency doing in the Arctic?”

  “About eighty miles northwest of Station Bravo-they call it ‘Ice Station Bear,’ by the way-there is a surface Russian expedition. Three ships, the polar icebreaker Taymyr; the Akademik Petr Lebedev, a civilian geological research vessel; and a support ship, the Granat. Five months ago they took up their current position, and have been station keeping ever since. Satellite reconnaissance shows they’re building something, building something pretty big, in fact, but we haven’t been able to determine what it is.”

  “So the Agency sent a couple of spooks out for a look-see, is that it?”

  She nodded. “The remote met station was set up in a particular spot on the ice. A deliberate spot.”

  “What… close enough that they could approach those ships?”

  “The ice up there is constantly moving,” Barbara said. “Over a hundred, hundred-fifty miles a week. The Russian ships cut through the ice to reach a specific set of coordinates, and they’ve been maintaining station on top of those coordinates ever since.”

  “So… the ships are staying put, and the ice is moving around them?”

  “Exactly. The Taymyr keeps breaking up the ice around the Lebedev and the Granat. Over the past few weeks, the remote met station has drifted with the ice almost five hundred miles. It’s less than ten miles from the Russian position now. Yeats and McMillan hoped to launch a UUV three days ago to give them an up-close look at what was going on, underwater.”

  A UUV-an Unmanned Underwater Vehicle. Desk Three had similar devices in its arsenal, which allowed an underwater inspection of enemy ports, harbors, or ship bottoms from a safe distance… as much, say, as twenty or thirty miles. The CIA’s device was probably similar to a small wire-guided torpedo with a ten-mile range and cameras and other sensors instead of a warhead. The whole assembly, UUV plus miles of control wire and a remote piloting unit, would have been small enough to carry on, say, a sled towed by snowmobile. At the met station, they would have dropped the UUV in through a hole in the ice and wire-guided it to the objective, allowing for an underwater reconnaissance impossible for satellites, for men on top of the ice, or for something as large and as intrusive as a submarine.

  “You said ‘hoped to,’” Rubens pointed out. “They didn’t make it?”

  “They reached the met station. They established a satellite relay and reported that they were about to launch the UUV. Then the relay went bad. We haven’t heard from them since.”

  “Sunspots.”

  “Communications at high latitudes have been god-awful lately.”

  “Tell me about it,” Rubens said. “That’s why things went so wrong in St. Petersburg.”

  “The Russians have been jamming, too. Anyway, there’s no sign of our people at the remote station, and they’re long overdue back at Ice Station Bear. It’s possible that the Russians spotted them and picked them up. And now you get an intercept that claims our people are murdering each other up there on the ice… and the Russians are moving in because this is happening on their territory.”

  “It smells like a setup.”

  “Maybe. The Russians might have all of our people in custody now, including a congressman’s daughter. But we don’t know.”

  “No ideas what the Russians are doing up there? Drilling for oil, maybe?”

  “The water is too deep in that area for conventional drilling-rig technology,” Barbara told him. “Over twenty-five hundred feet. But they’re up to something on a big scale.”

  “Can the Danes or the Canadians help?”

  “Maybe. But the President wants answers, and he wants them soon… sooner than other countries are going to be able to get anything up into that region. That’s why he’s thinking about you and Desk Three.”

  “That’s most gratifying… but I imagine Debra Collins is going to have her own ideas about that.”

  “The President’s exact words were, ‘I want to talk to Rubens. If his people can’t get me what I want, nobody can.’”

  “I see.”

  “Besides, one of the missing people is yours.”

  He nodded. “Kathy McMillan. Although she’s working for the Agency right now.”

  “Is she Desk Three?”

  “No. She works for the NSA’s tech department.” The vast majority of the NSA’s employees were technologists, computer programmers, and mathematicians. In fact, the NSA had more mathematicians working for it at Fort Meade than any other single employer in the country. Deep Black ran only a handful of agents like Dean or DeFrancesca.

  Or Karr.

  As a result, Desk Three was stretched to the breaking point right now.

  “But you’re right,” Rubens continued after a moment. “She belongs to us, we’re going to take care of her.”

  “I imagine the Company feels the same way,” Barbara said carefully, using insider-speak for the CIA. “But they’re stretched pretty thin right now.”

  “And we’re not?” Still, there was an opportunity here. If Deep Black could get the missing Americans back-all of them, of course, not just the NSA technologist-it would weigh heavily in Desk Three’s favor.

  He despised thinking of the situation as a kind of game played with numbers and accounting ledgers, but an agency’s worth, or the worth of its individual people, came down to just how effective they were at getting the job done.

  Not that such thinking went far these days in cutting the deadwood out of the pile in this town. He looked at his watch.

  “So, when does the President want to see me?”

  “You have a three o’clock appointment tomorrow afternoon,” she told him. “And both Bing and Collins will be there.”
r />   “Oh, joy.” But he’d expected that. Both women would be jealously guarding their own respective turfs.

  And he would be guarding his.

  Ice Station Bear Arctic Ice Cap 82° 24' N, 179° 45' E 1340 hours, GMT-12

  “Damn it, Bill!” Lieutenant Segal was frantic. “Can’t you raise anyone?”

  Bill Walters shook his head, one earphone pressed up against his ear. “Nada,” he said. “Nothing but static… and Russian jamming. They’re on every frequency now.”

  Outside, the wind gusted with the freshening gale. Behind its keening they could hear the bang-bang-bang of the storage shed door, slamming in the wind. Most of the base personnel-NOAA and Greenworld-were crowded together at one end of the Quonset hut as Walters tried to establish contact with the outside world. At the other end of the room, near the curtains leading to the women’s bunk space, Susan Fritcherson and Dr. Chris Tomlinson sat with the unconscious Commander Larson. Tomlinson had bandaged the injured man’s head and made sure his breathing passage was clear… but there wasn’t much more he could do. Larson needed to be in a hospital, and soon. Soon.

  “Are-are they coming, do you think?” Harry Benford asked.

  “Who?” Fritcherson demanded.

  “The Russians, of course.”

  Tom McCauley turned and glared at Benford. “Why? What’s it to you?”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? I mean, we need to get the commander to a hospital, and if we can’t raise our own people-”

  “Just shut the hell up and stay out of the way,” Fred Masters told him. “You’ve done enough damage.”

  “Look, I didn’t mean to hurt him that bad! But it’s like I said… he shot Ken, and then I thought he was gonna shoot me, too, and I-”