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 given the possible consequences, he wasn’t about to experiment.
The best plan Dean had been able to come up with so far was to bundle a blanket over a guard when he came in with a tray of food and pummel him into unconsciousness with a can of vegetables. That might work if the guard was alone-extremely unlikely if he was carrying food-and if he carelessly stepped into the room without ordering the occupants back against the far wall with their hands in plain sight before he entered.
These people were not stupid. They weren’t going to make many mistakes, certainly not dumb-ass Hollywood villain goofs.
He leaned back against a damp metal bulkhead. “Well, a fine James Bond I turned out to be. Sorry, Miss McMillan.” He was still wrestling with possibilities. Maybe if they could cut a thin strip from one of those sheets and use it as a garrote. The trick would be to get the tear started without scissors or a knife. Maybe he could do it with his teeth?…
“I’m Kathy. And you’re doing just fine.”
He found he was almost missing the presence of Jeff Rockman or Marie Telach in his head. With his personal transceiver working, they would be feeding him all sorts of helpful advice about now… something involving turning urine and stewed tomatoes into plastic explosives, perhaps.
Of course, even without the problems of maintaining clear communications this far north, there was no way a radio signal could penetrate the thick tempered steel of this compartment, the pressure hull of the facility itself, and half a mile of water, plus the ice on top of that.
He was about as isolated from outside as it was possible for a person to be.
“The way I see it,” Kathy mused, “they can’t really afford to just out and out shoot us. They need to know how much we know about their operation. About this base.”
He nodded. “Not only that; our side knows we’re here. They can’t make us disappear and hope our people forget about us. They won’t.”
“You know, I think the Russians, the organized-crime bosses, I mean, have been really scared of bad publicity.” She looked pointedly at Benford. “He was put in to give Greenworld a bad name, I think. To discredit them, and anything they might say about Russian drilling in the Arctic.”
“Makes sense,” Dean said. “What can you tell me about Golytsin?”
“He seems to be the guy in charge of all of this… At least he was until the mean one with the scar showed up. Golytsin takes orders from him.”
“Braslov.”
“That’s him.” She folded her arms and shuddered. “He’s bad news. Golytsin? He made some pretty terrible threats when he questioned me, when he first brought me aboard the Russian ship… things like turning me over to the crew if I didn’t tell him who I was really working for, or leaving me out on the ice to freeze, but I think it was all bluff. He’s been looking after the needs of the prisoners, gave orders that they weren’t to be hurt or molested in any way. I think…”
“What?”
“My impression is that he’s proud of being Russian… a patriot, you know? But he sees the people above him being assholes, maybe even doing things that will hurt Russia in the long run. He has to obey their orders, but I don’t think he likes it.”
“Well, that’s something we might be able to use, then…”
Keys rattled in the lock outside. Dean shoved the opened crate aside and stood up. The door swung open, revealing Golytsin and a man in a Russian naval infantry uniform, both of them holding Makarov pistols.
Golytsin glanced at the open crate. “Hungry?” he asked. He pointed the pistol at Dean and gestured with it. “You. Come with me. No sudden movements, please.”
“Where are you taking him?” Kathy demanded.
“Never mind.” Golytsin gestured again. “Come!”
Hands raised, Dean stepped out into the passageway and watched as Benford and McMillan were locked in once more.
“It’s time, Mr. Dean,” Golytsin said, “that you and I had a frank chat. This way.”
23
SSGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1132 hours, GMT-12
“BRIDGE, SONAR!”
“Go ahead.”
“Sir… the shrimp just cut a loud one.”
“Stay on it, Mayhew. I’m coming over.”
The Ohio’s sonar room was located just in front of the control room, adjoining it off the starboard passageway forward. Grenville walked down the passageway and stepped into the curtained-off room, a narrow compartment with four console workstations side-by-side, with a large acoustic spectrum analyzer at the far end.
At each station, display screens could be configured to show any of several key elements of the cascade of sonar data entering the Ohio’s AN/BSY-1 combat system, pronounced “Busy-One” by the men riding the boards.
Sonar Chief Kevin Mayhew was the sonar watch supervisor. At the other workstations, an ST/1 and two ST/2s sat at their boards, headphones on, their eyes locked on their sonar displays.
“Whatcha got, Chief?”
“An incidental, Captain. Wanna hear?”
“Play it for me.”
Mayhew touched a key. His sonar display winked out, then came back on, with a green trace drawing out a horizontal line. Grenville held a headphone to his ear. A moment later, he heard a sharp scrape, a thump, and a hiss as the green tracing zapped up and down
like an earthquake seismograph. As the initial sound faded, he heard something in the background, a fluttering rattle… like the piece of cardboard he sometimes had attached to hit the spokes of his bicycle when he was a kid.
“Hear it, sir?”
“He bumped the ceiling.”
“Yes, sir. And did you catch at the end?…”
Grenville smiled. “He throttled up, probably to get the hell out of there, but he did it too fast. He was cavitating.”
“Exactly my thought, sir.”
Increase your speed too quickly and tiny bubbles built up on the surface of your propeller blades. When they popped, it made a hell of a racket, an effect known as cavitation.
“It’s not the ’Burgh,” Mayhew added. “Not a damned rookie trick like that. And we got enough of the engine noise to analyze. It’s a Victor III… probably the same one we recorded a year ago in the North Atlantic.”
“Not such a rookie trick, Chief,” Grenville said. “Let’s not underestimate him.”
If you scraped the ceiling of ice, it was because you were hugging the ice cap, staying tucked in close… and the only reason to do that was to lose yourself in the scatter of sound bouncing off the ice. In a way, it was like a helicopter pilot flying nape-of-the-earth in order to stay hidden for as long as possible.
Only very good sub drivers would try that.
And here was another possibility as well, a chilling one. That Russian sub driver out there might have brushed against an ice ridge and put the pedal to the metal for just an instant deliberately, knowing the American boat would hear… and just possibly respond a little too hastily, a little too carelessly.
No, Grenville did not intend to underestimate this fellow.
“Best guess on range and bearing, Chief.”
“Strongest registration was starboard side fairwater, sir. Range…” Mayhew screwed up his face, as though unwilling to go out on too slender a limb. “Not close, like right alongside close. Maybe one mile. Maybe two.”
“Good enough.” Grenville picked up an intercom mike. “Control Room, Captain. Helm, come right nine-zero degrees. Ahead slow.”
“Helm right nine-zero degrees, ahead slow, aye, aye,” was the response.
The Ohio was turning directly toward the Russian boat, slowly and quietly. The only question was whether the Russians had spotted them yet.
GK-1 Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1134 hours, GMT-12
Golytsin and the Russian marine led Dean down the long passageway, up a stairway, and directed him at last into a small and nondescript office. It might, Dean thought, have been Golytsin’s office while he was aboard the submerged GK-1 platform, but it could as easily have been a workplace for any administrator who needed one. There was a desk and two chairs, a computer and a telephone, but nothing in the way of photographs or decorations, books or paperwork, no human touch.
The marine stayed outside as Golytsin closed the door and gestured at one of the chairs. “Have a seat.”
“Is this where the torture starts?” Dean asked.
Golytsin shrugged, then dropped into the chair behind the desk and clattered an entry into the computer keyboard. “If you like.”
Dean was measuring the man. Golytsin was a little older than him, he thought-probably in his late fifties or early sixties. He had the look of a senior corporate executive.
He also looked lean and fit. If he spent much of his time behind a desk, he also must work out a lot, or get out into the country to work off the fat. Dean thought he could probably take Golytsin in hand-to-hand, but that assumption was by no means assured.
Besides, he still had the Makarov, and Dean’s chair was a good five feet from the desk. And there was the marine outside.
Golytsin completed the entry, then turned his full attention to Dean. “To tell you the truth, however, I dislike the idea of torture. I’m sure there are things we could do to you that would in quite short order have you telling us everything we want to know… or everything you think we want to know, anything at all to stop the pain. And yet, what would be the point? At the end, we still wouldn’t know whether you’d told us the truth or not. We would, in fact, have to start all over, at the beginning, and go through the whole process again. And again. And yet again. And then again, but this time with drugs, questioning and cross-questioning each of your answers. And then do it again with you wired to a polygraph.
“And we keep doing it all again until we can tell from changes in your responses at varying levels of stress whether you are, in fact, telling the truth… or making up stories, what you think we want to hear, simply in order to make us stop. That is the trouble with torture, you know. It takes so very long to arrive at the truth.”
“That, and the fact that you can never be sure you’ve actually gotten there,” Dean agreed. “Have you broken the subject? Or is he a very talented actor? Or might he truly believe what he’s telling you… but what he believes is a lie because someone lied to him?”
“Exactly! So… you can see my dilemma. I very much want to know about you, Mr. Dean. Who you work for. Why you’ve come here. What you know about this operation. What your employers know. What your employers might plan to do about us in the future. I could torture you until you told me… but I’d never be sure I was getting accurate information.”
“I appreciate your predicament.”
In fact, Dean was wondering where this line of conversation was leading. Golytsin evidently had tried threats of torture or sexual abuse to get information from Kathy. Why was he using such a markedly different approach with him?
“I tend to believe, personally, that torture is counterproductive.” Golytsin hesitated, then added, “Of course, not everyone shares this belief, you understand. And not everyone cares that it’s counterproductive. There are people who enjoy torturing subjects simply because… because they very much like doing it. My colleague, Sergei Braslov, for instance…”
Then it clicked for Dean. Of course! Golytsin was trying different psychological approaches, probing for weakness. With Kathy, he’d seen a woman, vulnerable, alone, a prisoner on a ship full of hostile male strangers… and he’d threatened her with rape, or with a cold and hideously lonely death exposed on the ice cap, with no one to help. With Dean, Golytsin was trying to engage him in an almost friendly, chatty relationship-not comrades-at-arms but certainly with the feeling that they all were in this together… with just a hint that the other guy might be a psychopathic monster capable of anything. It was, in fact, a variant of the old good-cop/bad-cop ploy, where a prisoner would willingly confide in the “nice” interrogator in order to avoid the mean one.
Okay. Dean could play this game.
In fact, Dean thought, he had an advantage over Golytsin. The Russian knew nothing about Dean whatsoever, but Dean already knew some of Golytsin’s background. He’d been a submarine skipper. That meant he was smart… and he knew psychology. He was also supremely loyal-back in the bad old Soviet days, Russian sub drivers were selected almost exclusively on that one factor alone. However, he’d been outspoken enough in his opposition to the war in Afghanistan that he’d been imprisoned. That suggested both a willingness to think for himself and the possibility that his loyalty might lie to his country, rather than to his government.
Feodor Golytsin, Dean thought, was a true patriot, a lover of Mother Russia willing to risk arrest and prison in her defense.
A patriot, but one working for the Organizatsiya, a criminal organization that had already done incalculable harm to post-Soviet Russia.
And at that moment, Dean saw Golytsin’s tragic flaw.
“Ah, yes,” Dean said, nodding. “Braslov. We have quite a file on him, you know.”
Dean saw the flicker of interest in Golytsin’s eyes. “File. And you work for?…”
“The Agency, of course.” Carefully, he didn’t specify which agency.
“Really? Some of my… superiors are of the opinion that the American NSA has been rather interested
in their activities recently.”
Dean waved a hand carelessly, as if dismissing the thought. “Don’t be ridiculous. The NSA are mathematicians, technicians, and electronic eavesdroppers. They tap telephones. They don’t even have field agents, for God’s sake!”
“No. No, that’s what I always thought.” Golytsin was looking at him strangely, as though wondering if Dean was being honest and aboveboard… or putting on an act. He would be suspicious if Dean seemed too cooperative. “So, Mr. Dean. You claim to be a CIA agent?”
Dean spotted what was either a bit of carelessness… or a trap. “CIA agents are foreign locals recruited to work for us, one way or another. The people working out of Langley, or running local agents in other countries, are called case officers.”
“Quite so. Quite so.”
“And I gather you’re with Gazprom,” Dean said, taking the initiative. “You play with the big boys.”
“Actually, Mr. Dean, I believe that I’m the one conducting this… interview.”
“Ah. And would the information you’re looking for be for you? For the Gazprom Board of Directors? Or…” Dean leaned forward in a properly conspiratorial manner. “Or is it for the Organizatsiya?”
Golytsin looked startled, then uncomfortable. “What do you know about them?”
Dean shrugged. “Enough. I know Sergei Braslov works for them. As I said, we have quite a file on him. And we know he works for Grigor Kotenko, and Tambov. Kotenko would be the guy pulling the strings on this operation.”
“And why would the American CIA be interested in them? What happens inside Russia has nothing to do with American foreign interests.”
“Come, now, Admiral,” Dean said. He paused. “It was Admiral, was it not?”
Golytsin grimaced. “Actually, I was deprived of that rank.”
“By the Politburo board that censured your stand on the war in Afghanistan. I know. The Soviet leaders of that era had gotten the Rodina into some serious trouble, and you tried to point that out. They didn’t appreciate the attempt, I seem to recall.”
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