Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

“I was. In my misspent youth.”

  “Still not a good idea, sir.”

  From the hard edge to Taylor’s voice, Dean knew that this was one argument he would not win.

  Although no one had told him specifically, he was reasonably certain that Taylor commanded a platoon of Navy SEALs. The Ohio SSGN conversion had specifically allowed the upgraded boats to carry up to sixty SEALs or other special ops forces, but on this mission SEALs were by far the most likely passengers. SEALs-the acronym stood for the three realms in which they operated, SEa, Air, and Land-were the Navy’s premier commando force. Their training was unbelievably rugged, and according to some, they were the toughest warriors on the planet.

  Dean held a deep respect for the SEALs but couldn’t resist a good-natured jibe. “When I come ashore at that base,” he told Taylor, “I do not want to see one of your damned signs waiting for me.”

  The SEAL Teams had evolved out of the old Navy UDTs, the Underwater Demolition Teams, which had been born in the Pacific in World War II. The Marines had prided themselves at always being the first ashore, but on island after island they would hit the beach only to find hand-lettered signs upright in the sand identifying a UDT recon element that had slipped ashore the night before. It was a tradition that had continued all the way through to Vietnam.

  Taylor actually smiled. Dean hadn’t been sure that the hard-faced man could smile. “Maybe you shouldn’t have told us you were a jarhead,” he said. “When you were just another spook, we didn’t know what to make of you.”

  The Teams, Dean remembered, had long maintained a tradition of close work with the CIA, but also preferred to develop their own local intelligence networks where possible. The Teams were close-knit and band-of-brothers tight and tended not to play well with others.

  “His ID says he’s CIA,” Grenville said. “Maybe we should just leave it at that.”

  Dean said nothing. NSA operatives rarely admitted that they were from the No-Such-Agency when they were in the field, even to friends and allies.

  “What exactly is your mission here, Mr. Dean?” Hartwell wanted to know.

  Dean reached into the pocket of the dungaree shirt he’d been given to wear when he’d come aboard, and extracted a photograph laminated in clear plastic. He handed it to Grenville.

  “Nasty scar,” Grenville said as he looked at the man in the photo. He passed it to Taylor.

  “Sergei Braslov,” Dean told them. “Also goes by the name ‘Johann Ernst.’ Used to be GRU. Now he may be working with Russian State Security, but he’s also working for the Russian mob. He may be at the Russian base up here, and he may be involved in whatever happened to our people at the NOAA ice station. What we do know, beyond a doubt, is that he was behind the murder of another government operative, someone who was also a friend of mine.”

  Taylor nodded, and his eye met Dean’s for just a moment. He knows, Dean thought. Comrades-at-arms, and all of that. Or maybe he just knows what it’s like to lose a buddy.

  “If you find Braslov,” Dean continued, addressing Taylor, “we want him alive for interrogation. The Russian mafia is putting together something pretty big. We think they’re trying to corner the whole Russian oil production network. Braslov may be able to give us some insight on that.”

  “Okay. So the mafia takes over Russian oil production,” Hartwell said. “So what? No skin off our noses, right? What’s the big deal?”

  “It is a big deal,” Dean told him. “Remember how gas prices soared in ’08? They will again, especially if the Russians start playing games with the market. Gas prices at five dollars a gallon. Higher in Europe. High oil prices mean the cost of everything goes up. High prices mean more unrest, turnovers in governments, even revolutions.

  “The Russian mob has been running their economy into the ground for twenty years. If they do the same thing to the Russian oil industry, it will have global repercussions. Bad ones. Half of Europe depends on Moscow for oil and natural gas. If Russian production goes under, it will be devastating.

  “And Washington is afraid they’re going to try to grab half of the Arctic Ocean, probably so that they can begin high-volume oil and gas exploitation up here. We know Canada and Denmark will fight their Lomonsov Ridge claim. A war over oil rights is going to shake the world market, too, maybe bring on a general economic collapse.”

  Taylor slid the photograph back across the table to Dean. “And finding this one guy is going to stop all of that?”

  “Maybe not. But he just might have the key to figuring out what the Russians are really up to.”

  Grenville looked thoughtful, then stood and walked around behind the table to a wall safe. He punched several numbers in on the digital keypad, pulled open the door, and extracted a thick manila folder marked “Secret.”

  “Your home office transmitted your clearance to see this stuff,” he told Dean, selecting several laser-printer color copies and pulling them out of the folder. He grinned. “Turns out your security clearance is better than mine. Have you seen these yet? Courtesy of the NRO.”

  The first print showed three large ships in the ice, a shot obviously taken from an oblique angle from high overhead. Black water was clearly visible around each vessel, and Dean could see disturbances in the water caused by station-keeping thrusters.

  The next two zeroed in on one of the ships, massive and red-hulled. One showed the entire length of the ship from her starboard side, from far enough back that the entire vessel was visible, sitting in a large hole of black water surrounded by ice. She had a massive, blocklike forward superstructure and a large, open deck aft. Her name, in Cyrillic letters, was easily legible on her raised prow-Akademik Petr Lebedev.

  “A civilian scientific research ship, sixty-six hundred tons,” Grenville said. “Launched in 1989, the second in her class. Designed for physical oceanography and ocean floor sampling. See that mast just forward of the stack, like an oil derrick? Used for drilling core samples.”

  The next photo was a close-up, focusing on the Lebedev’s afterdeck. Individual crewmen could be seen, bundled up against the cold as they worked around a stack of long, slender tubes, each around thirty feet long, Dean guessed. One of the tubes hung off an A-frame over the stern, apparently caught as it was being lowered into the ice-free water next to the ship. A second tube was being lifted clear of the deck by one of five starboard-side cranes. Dean could even make out the face of one man who appeared to be in charge; he had his arms up, his gloved hands twisted in an obvious “come on, keep coming” gesture as he directed the operation.

  More photos showed other details of a large-scale Arctic expedition-close-ups of the other two ships, an ice breaker and a cargo vessel-as well as a helicopter, small prefab structures on the ice, and piles of supplies and heavy equipment. Time and date stamps on each of the printouts indicated they’d been taken three days before in two passes about ninety minutes apart.

  The NRO, or National Reconnaissance Office, was one of America’s sixteen separate intelligence agencies and was responsible for IMINT, or imagery intelligence-photographs shot by spy satellites, in other words. Headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia, it was officially part of the Defense Department, but was staffed by employees from both the NSA and the CIA, as well as by military personnel and civilian contractors.

  “No,” Dean said. “I hadn’t seen these.” That much was true, though Rubens had told him about the Russian base on the ice during his long-distance briefing at Menwith Hill.

  “What’s the matter?” Hartwell said with a chuckle. “Don’t you guys talk to one another?”

  “You’d be surprised what we don’t even tell ourselves,” Dean replied. He studied the photo of the activity on the Lebedev’s afterdeck more closely. “What are they doing? Pulling core samples?”

  “According to the message transmitted with these photos,” Grenville told him, “the pipes appear to be the business end of an oil-drilling rig. However, there’s no sign of a derrick or platform, and the water at that point
is over two thousand meters deep. So the whole thing is pretty much a mystery.”

  “You can see that they’re stringing those sections of pipe together and feeding it over the transom,” he said. “The pipe sections are too thin to be a seabed pipeline.”

  “I was wondering if it was a pipeline myself,” Grenville said. “But the ship isn’t moving, so she’s not paying it out astern. Besides, the water is pretty deep at that spot-almost half a mile. A regular pipeline would have to be a lot thicker, with lots of insulation to keep the oil warm enough to flow.” He shook his head. “It would also need some hellaciously big pumps, and we’re not seeing anything like that.”

  “It might also be a natural gas well,” Dean said, “but that would still require a derrick.” He remembered what Lia had told him a few nights ago about the movement of the ice. “There’s something here that’s just not making sense.”

  “Well, we should be at the NOAA station by twenty-two hundred hours tomorrow,” Grenville said. “We’ll surface there… and maybe then we can start getting some answers.”

  Dean nodded. “You’re not expecting any problem with breaking through the ice?”

  Grenville smiled and shook his head. “Believe me, the ice is the least of our worries. The stuff’s so thin we won’t even need to look for a lead.”

  “I heard it was two or three yards thick.”

  “Normally, yeah. But the ice cap has been unusually thin for, oh, eight or ten years now. The people preaching global warming aren’t just blowing smoke. In August of 2007, over half of the usual summer ice cap was just… gone. The Beaufort Sea, the Chukchi Sea, and the East Siberian Seam all the way to well beyond the North Pole, the whole damned region was completely ice free. First time that’s ever happened since we started paying attention to the Arctic.”

  “But that’s where they built the NOAA station.”

  “Right. The sea froze over again the next winter, of course. Right now, though, it’s only maybe two feet at the thickest, and with lots of melt holes. The climate guys think even more of the ice cap will vanish this summer. One reason they put Bravo where they did was to monitor the summer breakup of the ice.”

  Dean thought about the Greenpeace kids and their movie. That would have been some good documentary footage on global warming… shot as the ice cracked open beneath them.

  “Sounds like the ice cap is melting faster than even the doomsayers are claiming.”

  “The Canadians are actively expanding their fleet,” Hartwell put in. “Eight new patrol vessels just so they can safeguard maritime traffic going through the Northwest Passage. And they’re building a big new naval base to support them.”

  The Northwest Passage, of course, had been a fabled ice-free sea-lane from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the object of hundreds of exploratory attempts as far back as the 1500s and continuing through the Arctic explorations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That passage had been a myth… but as the Arctic ice cap dwindled year by year, the myth had come closer and closer to becoming a year-round reality. The same was true for the Siberian passage from Europe to the Far East by way of the Siberian sea-lanes.

  An ice-free Arctic might one day prove to be a boon to global trade… if not for the local ecosystems.

  Dean thought for a moment about the man Tommy Karr had been protecting. What was his name? Spencer. Yeah.

  That the Arctic ice was vanishing was undeniable. Was human activity to blame, however, or was it part of an ongoing and completely natural cycle, as Spencer claimed? The answer might never be known with certainty… and so far as Dean was concerned, the answer might not even matter. The Arctic was on its way to becoming an ice-free ocean, one way or another, and either way, humans would have to learn to live with the result.

  The Russians, apparently, were trying to get a jump on the rest of the world’s population, however, by staking out their ownership boundaries early. If they could enforce their claim to half of the newly exposed ocean at the top of the world, they would have clear access to an incredible bounty of oil and natural gas-enough to challenge the long-standing near monopoly of the sheiks and strongmen of the Middle East.

  Enough to replace them as a global source of petroleum as the Middle East reserves inevitably dwindled…

  “So what are you going up there for, Captain?” Dean asked Grenville.

  “Our orders are, first, to ensure the safety of distressed American citizens in the area and, second, to assert our rights to passage through international waters.”

  “Any sign of those distressed Americans?”

  “No. But there’s been helicopter activity near those Russian ships… and nothing between the ships and the nearest Russian ports. Intelligence thinks they’re being held on the Lebedev.”

  “Which is where you and your men come in, I suspect,” Dean told Taylor.

  “That’s why we’re here,” the SEAL said.

  But Dean found the man’s grave confidence somehow disturbing.

  As a former Marine, Dean was no stranger to combat; while war was never a good option, sometimes it was the best of a raft of genuinely bad possibilities. As a Marine scout/sniper he’d accepted the intensely personal issue of killing a particular individual rather than randomly, justifying what amounted to murder with the knowledge that he was saving the lives of brother Marines.

  But a global war over the oil and gas hidden beneath the melting ice would serve no one… except, possibly…

  The jokers in this game were the leaders of the Russian mafia, and that was what made things so dangerous. They didn’t care whether there was a war or not. In fact, a good old-fashioned war, even a limited naval engagement, might well present them with unparalleled opportunities to make more money. They might broker deals with foreign companies, invest in military-based industries, control the financial institutions bankrolling military construction, hoard reserves of vital strategic materials like… oil.

  The insight stunned him momentarily. Everyone so far had been assuming that the Organizatsiya was simply carrying out business as usual, a kind of neocapitalism gone wild. But what if the Russian mafia or even just a few of its key leaders were actively attempting to start a war, operating on the theory that war is always good for business?

  Dean wondered if the idea had occurred to Rubens already, and wanted to discuss the idea with him. Unfortunately, Dean’s communications implant couldn’t find a satellite on board a Navy sub six hundred feet beneath the polar ice. He would have to wait until they surfaced, then hope he could get a clear channel.

  He thought the idea important enough, however, that he decided to ask if he could borrow a computer in order to write a full report, to be broadcast back to Fort Meade as soon as the Ohio surfaced.

  So far, the rest of the world-including America’s intelligence community-had been two steps behind the unseen enemy. As with al-Qaeda, there’d been a tendency here to think of that enemy as a government, with a government’s concerns, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities. When that enemy instead was, like al-Qaeda, a criminal network, the problem became infinitely more difficult.

  And infinitely more deadly as well.

  16

  Arctic Ice Cap 82° 24' N, 179° 45' E 2135 hours, GMT-12

  “POLYNYA, CAPTAIN!” THE EXEC called out. “Thin ice!”

  “I see it,” Grenville said, face pressed against the starboard-side periscope. “Sonar! What have you got on the roof?”

  “Control, Sonar,” a voice came back over the intercom speaker. “The roof appears flat, Captain. No ridge echoes or keels for at least one hundred yards. Signal Sierra One is remaining steady, bearing one-six-niner, range approximately two hundred yards.”

  Dean stood next to the periscope well, watching the TV monitors high up on the port side of the control room, aft of the side-by-side helm and planesman stations forward. A camera mounted on the scope was revealing what the captain was seeing through the eyepiece of the Mk. 18 scope, which was now angled so tha
t it was looking straight up, toward the underside of the “roof,” the layer of ice now twenty yards above them. Details were indistinct, but there was definitely a hazy glow of light up there-sunlight, meaning that the ice over this particular patch of ocean was quite thin.

  There were two periscopes, mounted next to each other, port and starboard. The port scope was a Type 2 attack scope; starboard was the Mk. 18, a much more sophisticated instrument with low-light capabilities and built-in cameras. Grenville pulled back from the eyepiece and checked another monitor on a nearby bulkhead, this one showing an almost flat line-a readout of the inverted topology of the ice overhead. For the past few days, the line had looked like an inverted mountain range, but the current display showed a long stretch of flat-and therefore thin-ice. Submariners referred to such thin-iced stretches by their Russian name: polynya.

  “Rig ship for surface, ice,” Grenville called.

  “Rig ship for surface, ice, aye, aye,” the Diving Officer of the Watch echoed.

  “Forward planes to vertical orientation.”

  “Forward planes to vertical, aye, aye.” The Ohio’s forward diving planes were mounted to either side of her sail, rather than on her bow as with the newer Seawolf and Virginia boats. Moving them to an up-and-down orientation let them cut through the ice, rather than risking being bent by the impact.

  “Okay, gentlemen,” Grenville said. “Down scope! Let’s put her on the roof.”

  “Now hear this; now hear this,” the COB, or Chief of the Boat, said over the shipwide intercom. “All hands brace for surface, ice. All hands brace for surface, ice!”

  The periscope slid back safely into its well. “Blow main ballast, Mr. Dolby.”

  “Blow main ballast, aye, aye, sir,” the diving officer replied.

  Dean heard the shrill hiss of water and air venting from ballast tanks, felt the faint surge of elevator movement beneath his feet and in his gut as the Ohio began rising straight up. He felt more than heard the crunch as the top of the sail impacted squarely against the bottom of the ice, felt the Ohio stagger in her movement, then resume her ascent with a slight, crackling shudder.