His arm felt like it was broken. The cold was a living thing, leeching the heat from his body, leaving him trembling and exhausted.
Almost there…
The methane cloud struck from beneath, totally unexpected, a sudden shock slamming into the construction submarine’s belly and stern. Braslov had the sudden sensation that he was rising, and then the submarine flipped end for end and he hurtled into the forward end of the compartment, screaming as he slammed into the control panel. Water cascaded over and around him, stunning him, immobilizing him.
And above the roar, he could plainly hear the shriek of metal as the tortured vessel began to tear open amidships…
Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 33' N, 177° 45' E 1231 hours, GMT-12
“I can see light!” Dean said, peering up through the view port. “I can see the surface!”
“Let me have the controls,” Golytsin said. “I’ll see if I can find open water.”
The Mir was drifting toward the surface slowly now, the weight of the water in its ballast tanks counteracting the lift induced by the release of the heavy keel plates. Under his guidance, one of the electric motors was coaxed to life, and the Mir began to respond…
The cloud of methane, expanding enormously as it rose out of the constricting pressure of the depths, caught the Mir, sending it rocketing upward as the vessel rode the shock wave for a moment. Then, with a savage jolt, the Mir dropped through a methane bubble, hit water beneath, then hit another bubble. For several interminable seconds, the Mir tumbled in the frothing sea, its occupants slammed from deck to overhead and bulkhead to bulkhead like rag dolls.
Water came thundering in…
Nearby, the bubble mass struck GK-1, ripping the anchoring cables free. The drill train, extending into the depths, snapped, then snapped again, again, and yet again as the shock wave worked its way up out of the abyss.
The shock wave ruptured ballast and trim tanks, flooding the forward section first. Unimaginable stresses clawed at the ship, and the relatively slender and unarmored midships section ripped apart as conflicting forces tried to draw the stern higher while dragging the bow down.
Then watertight seals ripped open and the ocean came pouring in.
The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 2032 hours EDT
“My God!” Jeff Rockman said, staring at the big screen on the wall. “What in hell is that?”
The view, a real-time image of the Arctic ice around the Russian base, showed an awesome transformation, worked in an instant. The ice crazed like shattered glass, then appeared to blur. At the same moment, geysers erupted around all three of the Russian ships, still holding position in the ice, and from the open-water footprint left behind by the Ohio as well.
“What is it?” Rubens asked, leaning forward. “A volcanic eruption?”
The geysers were growing in size. The Lebedev was swallowed whole. The cargo ship was ponderously rolling over onto her port side. In places, solid ice was breaking open now as enormous blocks of ice shattered and broke free.
“I don’t know,” Marie Telach said. “But it’s big.” The view receded several clicks as the magnification on the spysat’s optics was cut back. The polar ice cap seemed to recede suddenly as the curve of the Earth itself was revealed. Below, a vast stretch of the ice cap was smoking.
“Whatever it is, it’s affecting an area of over three hundred square miles,” Rockman said, his voice awed. “Too big to be a nuke…”
Rubens nodded his understanding and sighed. “I’m guessing… it’s Dean.”
Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 33' N, 177° 45' E 1235 hours, GMT-12
Dean recovered consciousness first. The Mir was riding on the surface; he could tell by the way the deck swayed and rocked as the stubborn little craft bobbed with the surface chop.
“Come on!” he shouted. He pulled Kathy’s head out of the water, slapped her face until her eyes fluttered open. “Get up! Get up!”
Nearby, Golytsin struggled to his feet. Benford, still bound hand and foot, struggled in the aft part of the compartment, panicking as water rose steadily around him. “Help me! Help me! Don’t let me drown!”
“Golytsin!” Dean yelled. “Get Benford. Cut those ropes! We’ve got to get out of here!”
Dean cracked the dorsal hatch, blinking as sunlight streamed into his face. He looked around, feeling curiously out of place. There was no ice visible at all… only mile upon mile of intensely blue and open ocean.
“Let me,” Golytsin said. “There is an emergency raft…”
Dean stepped back out of the way as Golytsin climbed the ladder, leaning out of the hatch to free the raft. The Mir was flooding slowly, settling gently by the bow as water continued to pour into ruptured flotation tanks.
“Quickly!” Golytsin called from outside. “Into the raft!”
Dean helped Kathy climb the ladder, then Benford, his hands and feet free now. Dean took a last look around, then climbed the ladder after them. Golytsin and Kathy helped him slide off the back of the Mir and into the raft.
“What happened to the ice?” Kathy asked, looking around. “My God! What happened to the ice?”
The ice wasn’t completely gone; there were still numerous floes. But where before there’d been an uninterrupted plain of solid, windswept ice and blowing snow, now there was a horizon-to-horizon expanse of open water littered by blocks of ice.
“I don’t know,” Dean replied. “Admiral? You guys didn’t have a nuke or two on board that underwater base, did you?”
“No. No nukes. I think…”
“What?”
“I don’t know how it happened, but I think there must have been a release of gas from the bottom. A very large release.”
“Methane?”
Golytsin nodded. “We know the sea floor here was covered in methane clathrates. That was why we were forced to stop drilling, while Gazprom decided what to do.” He shivered. “Something must have triggered an enormous explosion…”
Nearby, with a loud gurgle, the Mir was slipping at last beneath the surface of the water.
It would have a long fall to the bottom.
“Are we… are we going to die?” Benford asked at last.
“I don’t know,” Dean said. “How about it, Admiral? Does this thing have an emergency beacon?”
“It should have triggered automatically, as soon as I triggered the inflation release.”
“Then all we need to do is wait for someone to pick up the signal and send help,” Dean said. “Anyone want to take bets on whether we get picked up by the Americans first, or the Russians?”
“Russians,” Golytsin said. “Definitely the Russians. We are well inside Russian territorial waters, after all!”
“Says you,” Dean said. He looked up into the impossibly clear blue sky. “My bet is on some high-tech gadgets listening for our signal.” And the people running those gadgets.
It was cold, and the wind was beginning to pick up. The four of them huddled together in the raft for warmth.
Dean found himself face-to-face with Kathy. “Pretty good, James Bond,” she said. Her lips were blue and she was shivering, but she managed a smile.
“Nah,” Dean said. “If I were James Bond, it would be just you and me together in this thing, alone.”
And they drifted with wind and current, beneath an endless day…
EPILOGUE
Bethesda Naval Hospital Bethesda, Maryland 1520 hours EDT
“HOW’RE YOU FEELING, CHARLIE?”
Dean sat up a bit straighter in the hospital bed. He’d not been expecting Bill Rubens himself to come down to see him.
But, then again, he thought, Rubens is that kind of guy. He was tough, he could be a son of a bitch, but he cared about his people.
“Doing better, sir,” Dean replied. “They say maybe another week…”
“Well, don’t rush things. We want you back at Desk Three all in one piece. Understand?”
Dean nodded at the grisl
y joke. He’d come close to losing his feet, his ears, and his nose to frostbite. The four of them, Golytsin, Benford, McMillan, and Dean, had drifted in that open raft for forty hours before they’d been rescued.
The rescuers had not, as Dean had hoped, been the Ohio or the Pittsburgh, and after being pulled from the water he’d been relieved to hear that the two American submarines had survived the devastating explosion under the ice cap. Both had been slammed into the underside of the ice and sustained serious damage. Both had limped south through the Bering Strait, ending up at last at the Bangor submarine base across the sound from Seattle. The freed American prisoners had been taken off the Ohio while the SSGN was still north of Alaska, flown by helicopter a few at a time first to Point Barrow, then back to the Lower 48 for a full debriefing.
The four castaways in the rubber life raft had been plucked from the freezing waters by the Algonquin, an Iroquois-class destroyer, operating in the Arctic in conjunction with a Danish frigate, the Peter Tordenskjold. The two had been deployed north to show their respective flags and to contest the Russian ice-grab claims, reasserting their rights to free passage through international waters. NSA monitoring stations and satellites had picked up the distress locator signal in the raft; Rubens himself had talked to the Canadian ambassador in Washington, requesting that the little international flotilla be diverted to search for survivors.
All four had been suffering the beginnings of severe frostbite by the time they’d been rescued. “How are the others doing?” Dean asked.
“They think they’ll be able to save Golytsin’s left foot,” Rubens said. “Right now our… associates with the Agency have him at an undisclosed but secure medical facility, and are talking to him about Mafiya activities in Russia and in the United States. Turns out turning him was quite an impressive intelligence coup. As good as bringing in Braslov would have been.”
“Listen, about Braslov-”
Rubens held up a hand. “It’s not a problem. There was no way you could have brought him out as well as the others. You brought us Golytsin. Well done.
“Benford is at a different secure location, discussing things with the FBI. Again, it turns out the Russian Mafiya has penetrated deep into a number of American organizations and corporate structures. We’re learning a lot. He’s promised to testify in exchange for leniency.”
“Leniency? The man murdered Ken Richardson in cold blood, and assaulted an NOAA officer with a crowbar!”
“Life might be considered leniency in some circles, especially when the alternative is the death penalty. So would transfer to a regular Federal penitentiary, instead of the ADMAX facility in Pueblo.”
“And Kathy?”
“She’s doing just fine,” Kathy said from the door. She was wearing a blue hospital robe and fuzzy slippers. “Now awaiting her official transfer to something called Desk Three. And how’s my James Bond?”
“On the mend, I’m told.”
“‘James Bond’?” Rubens asked, one eyebrow rising.
“Don’t ask.”
“I won’t. I just wanted to drop by and see how you two were doing. Oh, and you might be interested in this…”
He dropped a newspaper on Dean’s bed. It was folded to page 5 and had a one-column article circled. Dean picked it up and scanned it rapidly.
Dr. Earnest Spencer, a U.S. government climatologist, had given a speech at a Press Club luncheon in Washington the day before, claiming that the large-scale release of methane gas beneath the Arctic ice cap the previous week-apparently a completely natural phenomenon-had released the equivalent of two years’ worth of human-produced greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. He pointed out how lucky everyone concerned was that that enormous volume of gas hadn’t ignited in the atmosphere.
While global warming was an incontrovertible fact, he said, human responsibility for that warming was still very much an open question.
“I don’t know, sir,” Dean said. “It didn’t feel very warm when we were bobbing around in that raft.”
“I imagine not. Of course, Al Gore is back on TV saying the gas release is a global disaster. About a quarter of the ice cap appears to have been broken up by the outgassing, and the pieces are melting much faster than expected. There’s now open water all the way to the Pole, they say.”
“And our involvement in what happened is-”
“Classified,” Rubens said pointedly. “Highly classified. The submarine battle with the Russians never happened. The loss of their experimental drilling facility and two of their research ships is a tragic accident… an accident which also destroyed one of our NOAA research weather stations, by the way.”
“Someone already had me sign a paper,” Kathy said.
Rubens nodded. “We don’t want people to know we were in a pissing match with the Russians; they don’t want people to know they might have triggered the outgassing with their drilling.”
“And the Mafiya?” Dean asked.
“Stopped cold,” Rubens said, “at least for the moment. Golytsin’s interrogation suggests that the Tambov group was using both honey-trap tactics and the promise of billions of dollars of new income to pull key members of the Russian Federation Duma into line. Some of those politicians are having second thoughts about the whole thing now. Kotenko had promised that all of the world environmentalist concerns would be crippled when Greenworld was revealed as a terrorist organization, but the reports of the gas explosion in the Arctic have kind of driven Greenworld to the back page all over the world. And we now have Kotenko’s computer under constant electronic surveillance. We think we may be able to put pressure on some of those Duma members and strengthen the campaign against the Mafiya. At least that’s our hope.”
“Sounds like it’s not over, though.”
“No. In some ways, the Organizatsiya is a more deadly enemy than al-Qaeda. They don’t go around blowing up skyscrapers… but they don’t mind selling nukes to al-Qaeda or anyone else who wants one. Anything for a buck, or even just a ruble.” He looked around. “Well, I’ve got to get back to the Puzzle Palace. You two enjoy your vacation. There’s going to be a lot for you to do when you get back.”
He left, leaving Kathy at Dean’s bedside.
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said.
She grinned. “Same for you… Double-oh Seven.”
He made a face. “Listen, I should tell you before the teasing goes any further… I am in a relationship right now.” Lia, the last he’d heard, was now back at Menwith Hill with the new kid, Ilya Akulinin. But they both would be back in Maryland soon.
“So?” She shrugged. “Doesn’t mean I can’t tease you. Or even see you once in a while, right?”
“No,” he replied. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Mr. Rubens said he wanted to bring me into Desk Three, that you could show me the ropes and everything. He seems to think we’ll be dealing with the Russians again soon.”
“Of that,” Charlie Dean said, “I have no doubt whatsoever.”
He had a feeling that, for Desk Three and the National Security Agency, at least, the new Cold War was not yet over.
***
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Arctic Gold Page 38