Oil and gas was also Russia’s bane. Blessed with hydrocarbon resources that were abundant but for decades mismanaged and pilfered, Russia had become so dependent on the export market that over half of its national income came from the sale of oil and natural gas. The recent crash in the price of crude had revealed Russia’s vulnerability to the entire world.
“We of course welcome your interest in our petroleum operations,” Elena offered. “I will convey your interest to both Gazprom and Rosneft.”
“Yes, please do that.”
The discussion concluded with coal and rare earth exports. Servants then brought in bowls and trays of traditional Chinese fare. All used chopsticks; Elena had insisted that her staff become proficient with the implement prior to the trip.
Elena was on her second cup of tea when a young woman entered the conference room and whispered to Yu Lin, handing her a thumb drive.
Ms. Yu then turned to face Elena. “It appears that there has been an interesting development regarding the oil spill in the Arctic.”
“The one in Alaska?”
“Yes.” Yu turned to an assistant with a laptop. She handed over the drive and issued instructions in Mandarin. He attacked the keyboard. Half a minute later the huge wall-mounted plasma screen on a nearby wall blinked on.
“I think we’ll all find this video interesting,” said Yu. “It’s from a U.S. television broadcast, just recorded.”
Elena watched, more than curious, as the narrator introduced the story. The female reporter was aboard a helicopter, flying along the Alaska coastline in twilight conditions. The camera focused on the frozen sea; the sheer whiteness stretched to the North Pole. But as the aircraft descended, the focus of attention crystallized. An enormous black animal lay on the ice, obviously injured; its head rotated toward the chattering helo. The narrator explained that another polar bear was near death after encountering the black-stained waters.
The reporter ended the story with a recap of the YouTube clip of the eco attack in the Anchorage restaurant.
All those gathered around the table laughed when Aurora Offshore’s CEO took the direct hit. The United States was a common adversary to both Russia and China. Whenever it got what it deserved there was cause for celebration.
Yu ordered champagne.
After the glasses were filled and the toasts made, Elena graciously thanked her hosts and invited Yu and her entourage to visit Vladivostok.
While Elena’s staff chatted with the Chinese, she remained mute, still not quite sure what she had seen in the video.
It can’t be him, she thought.
CHAPTER 9
“Hey, boss.”
“Hi, Bill,” Yuri said as he approached Bill Winters. They were inside a warehouse in Barrow. Winters stood next to Deep Explorer, which rested on its cradle.
“I heard Aurora flew you up in that fancy bird of theirs.”
Yuri smiled. “It was a nice ride all right.” Yuri and two other AOS employees had made the six-hundred-mile trip from Anchorage aboard a Hawker 850XP jet. They had touched down twenty-five minutes earlier.
Yuri scanned the rest of the warehouse. “Where’s the crew?”
“Breakfast. I told ’em to load up. No telling how long we’ll be out on the ice today.”
“Good idea. The Explorer ready to go?”
“Yep, everything checks out five by five. I’m giving the batteries a final charge. As soon as we get some light, we’ll shove off.”
It was still black outside. Sunrise was in two and a half hours—a few minutes after ten o’clock.
“I saw the caravan of snow machines out front. You got room for me?”
“Sure do, but you’ll need to suit up. Forecast is minus thirty with a twenty-knot northerly. It’s going to be a real bitch out there today.”
“Okay. My gear is in the truck.”
Yuri had started for the door when Winters said, “We heard about what happened last night.”
Yuri turned. “You see the video?”
“Yep. Looked like an obvious setup to me.” Winters rubbed an ear. “You manage to stay out of the line of fire?”
“Yeah, I lucked out, not even a drop.”
“How’d Matheson take it?”
“Remarkably well, more embarrassed than anything else. But you can be certain that he’ll have security around him now. They could just have easily thrown acid or had a gun.”
“What happened to those fruitcakes?”
“They got away. Everyone in the restaurant was just as bewildered as we were. They flew out the front door. A car was waiting for ’em.”
“Is Matheson coming up to observe?”
“No, he’s headed back to Houston—he’s a very busy fellow.” Yuri yawned. “It’ll just be us up here on our own.”
“Fine by me. Besides, I can just about guarantee he would not enjoy the trip today.”
Yuri didn’t take the bait. “You’re probably right. Anyway, I’m going to get my gear.”
“Great.”
As Yuri tracked across the concrete floor, he couldn’t help but think that Bill was trying to discourage him from tagging along on today’s trip. He and Winters coexisted, but Yuri still detected resentment. Laura had acquired controlling interest in NSD and Yuri represented her ownership, which meant he was in charge. Winters, as one of the founders, still considered NSD his creation.
* * *
The bay was sloppy this morning, three-foot swells rolling in from under the Golden Gate. The boat swayed in response, upsetting more than a few bellies. But Nicolai Orlov was used to it, just part of the commute.
Under way for about ten minutes, the passenger ferry from Sausalito would dock at the Ferry Building in another fifteen. He would hustle up to California and Drumm and catch the cross-town cable car to Van Ness. He would then hoof it the rest of the way to his office. On average, his commute from the floating home he rented in Sausalito to the consulate general of Russia in downtown San Francisco took over an hour.
Orlov loved San Francisco. It was hands down the best duty station of his seventeen-year career in the SVR—Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki. As the successor to the former first chief directorate of the KGB, the SVR served as Russia’s CIA.
Orlov had a full day ahead. A general staff meeting was set for ten o’clock; the SVR rezident would be expecting progress reports from the various case officers on their recruitment efforts. As assistant rezident and head of Special Projects, Orlov would only need to listen. He’d already submitted his report in writing; it was for the rezident’s eyes only and for a select few back in Moscow.
Over the noon hour, Orlov and a colleague planned to lunch at the Oakland Rotary Club. The consulate general was the featured speaker. The title of his talk, “Improving Trade between Russia and the USA.” He and his associate would mingle with the club’s business and community leaders, spreading goodwill as best they could. But they also would provide security for the consulate general. Relations between the United States and the Russian Federation remained sour due in part to the nasty business in Ukraine and elsewhere. Although there had been no direct threats to the consulate, public opinion in the United States was decidedly negative toward Russia’s adventurism with its neighbors. The fear was not of the Rotarians; it was concern about others who might try to “crash” the luncheon. The Bay Area was loaded with potential troublemakers.
As the ferry charged ahead, Orlov took out his iPhone and called up the morning national news on SFGate—a digital version of the San Francisco Chronicle. In the middle of the headlined story, he clicked on the link to the referenced YouTube video. He watched the sneak attack on the CEO in Anchorage; it was just the type of event he worried about for the consulate general.
Near the end of video, he muttered, “Kakógo chërta!”—What the hell.
Orlov replayed the video. He increased the magnification and moved the screen closer to his eyes.
“Tvoyú mat’!”—Son of a bitch. “It’s Yuri!”
CHAPTER 10
It was a bone-chilling minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but the wind remained tolerable, just a ten-knot breeze from the north. There was enough light to work but it was waning; the sun would drop below the horizon in another hour.
Yuri stood next to the pit. Carved out of ice, the four-foot-deep by eight-foot-wide and twenty-five-foot-long hole had been a Herculean effort. Chainsaws had efficiently ripped through the ice, but removing the twenty-three-ton block of frozen seawater was the problem. Bill Winters’s crew sliced the slab into sections, wrapped each unit with a nylon lifting strap, and yanked it out of the water with a snowmobile.
Deep Explorer remained on its sled at the edge of the launching pit. Intense yellow, twenty feet long, and three feet in diameter with a bullet-shaped nose cone, stubby tailfins, and a ducted propeller, the autonomous underwater vehicle looked like an apparatus of war. Stenciled in black paint on both sides of the fuselage, RESEARCH identified its true purpose.
One of the techs ran a final check. Despite the brutal cold, all systems were go.
“Okay, gents, it’s showtime,” Bill announced.
“Lower the cradle?” asked a technician.
“Yep, crank her down.”
The man used both gloved hands to rotate a handle that lowered the forward end of the cradle. About a minute later, Deep Explorer’s bow was aligned with the end of the pit. A cable on the opposite end of the cradle restrained the AUV, preventing it from sliding.
Winters turned toward two others who knelt on the ice at the forward end of the cradle. “Go ahead and connect the ramp.”
“Will do,” answered one of the men. The techs connected a rounded aluminum sheet about four feet wide and ten feet long to the end of the cradle and lowered it into the ice fissure.
Bill walked over to Yuri, who stood next to Deep Explorer’s propulsor, a ducted fiberglass propeller. “We’re ready to launch. You okay with that?”
“Absolutely.”
“All right.” Winters turned to face his chief tech. “Let’s get her wet.”
“Yes, sir.”
Within half a minute, the autonomous underwater vehicle was free-floating in the ice pit; already the exposed seawater had begun to freeze, forming a pencil-thick sheet that shattered when Deep Explorer slid gracefully into the hole.
Bill and Yuri stood at the trench edge opposite Deep Explorer’s midsection. Winters held an insulated freeze-protected laptop; both men studied the display. The wireless transmitter antenna projecting six inches above the hull communicated with the Apple.
“Everything’s in the green,” Winters announced.
“Excellent. Let’s proceed.”
The fore and aft ballast tanks soon flooded, submerging the AUV. When the Deep Explorer sank below the ice keel, the propulsor engaged and it sprinted forward. The yellow hull of the submersible swam out of view after traversing the ice pit.
“She’s on her way,” Bill said.
“Let’s check the hydrophone,” Yuri said.
“Okay.”
Bill and Yuri walked to the opposite side of the launching pit, stopping next to a stainless box about the size of a cooler. Bill squatted to open the lid. He removed a softball-sized device with its connecting black cable. He lowered the hydrophone into the ice pit and let it submerge about five feet below the underside of the ice. Bill next extracted a pair of Bose headphones from the container and handed them to Yuri.
“Can you hear it?” Bill asked.
The soft swishing tone of Deep Explorer’s propeller broadcast into Yuri’s ears from the noise-canceling mini-speakers. “Sounds normal.” Yuri removed the headphones and handed them to Winters.
Bill listened for about half a minute before smiling. “She’s running perfect.”
“When’s the first check-in?”
Bill rolled the sleeve back on the left arm of his parka, exposing the wristwatch. “We should get our first ping in about five minutes.”
“And after that?”
“Every hour.”
“Okay. Assuming she makes her first check-in, we should start getting ready to head back to shore. I don’t like the look of what’s coming in from the north.”
Winters turned around and eyeballed the mass of black vapor surging from the pole zone. “We’ll be back on shore before that shit hits.”
Deep Explorer’s initial sonar ping arrived on schedule, which was a relief to both Yuri and Bill. The next underwater check-in, and those following, would be transmitted to NSD’s shore station via a short-range radio connected to the hydrophone. Mounted on a cable-stayed aluminum antenna pole that jutted twelve feet above the ice surface, the radio signal represented NSD’s sole means of tracking the AUV. Because the entire surface under which Deep Explorer would be operating was encased by ice sheets anywhere from four to eight feet thick, and up to sixty feet plus at ice ridges, underwater sound was the only viable communication method. But that link would be tenuous at best. The Chukchi Sea and the connecting Arctic Ocean resonated with sound energy, ranging from grounding ice keels and colliding planes of pack ice to tectonic plate movements and erupting subsea volcanoes. The natural racket could dampen the minuscule sound pulse broadcast from the AUV.
Even more worrisome were topside conditions. A curious polar bear just might decide to wage war on the radio tower.
* * *
Laura Newman was in Cognition’s main conference room this afternoon. With over two thousand employees and six offices, the software company that specialized in generating insight from Big Data generated big profits.
One of Laura’s project managers wrapped up his presentation, allowing Laura to call for a ten-minute break. While sitting at the head of the table, she took the opportunity to check messages on her cell phone. Since the meeting had started, a dozen e-mails and four text messages had accumulated. Hoping to hear from Yuri, she raced through the e-mails, his preferred method of digital communication. Nothing. She checked the texts. The third message astounded her; it was from a 415 area code with a one-word message: NEVA.
Oh dear Lord, Laura thought.
After the conference, Laura walked along the sidewalk in front of the downtown Bellevue midrise that served as Cognition’s headquarters. She informed her secretary that she needed to run an errand and would return in an hour.
She hurried to the library. Once there, she took a seat in front of a public computer and logged onto a Gmail account. She checked the draft folder. Her pulse quickened as she opened the message. It was from Nick: YURI MAY BE COMPROMISED. RECOMMEND PLAN B.
After stopping at the day care center to pick up Maddy, Laura returned to her office. She closed the door and instructed her secretary to hold all calls, except from Yuri.
Laura sat at her desk, cradling her daughter in her arms. Maddy was awake, her chubby cheeks dimpling as she smiled and her navy blue eyes following her mother’s every movement. Laura smiled back, but her mind was elsewhere. She remained shaken to her core.
While she sat at the library computer, dread had overwhelmed Laura’s well-being with the suddenness of a mountain avalanche, burying her alive with the awful memory of Ken, struck dead by a single blow to the temple, blood everywhere.
Months had passed since her last attack. She had barely made it to the library bathroom when she vomited. The therapist warned her that flashbacks could erupt at any time, triggered by myriad precursors.
For the past year, she and Yuri kept in touch with Nicolai Orlov, but carefully. They used the Gmail account to pass messages, always from public computers. When they needed more interaction, they met face-to-face.
Nick’s warning confirmed Laura’s suspicions.
Yuri’s real identity might have been exposed.
CHAPTER 11
Yuri and Bill had a table to themselves in the corner of the surf-and-turf establishment. The rest of Northwest Subsea Dynamics’ crew opted for the teriyaki place. They all made it off the ice as the leading edge of the storm roared
into Barrow. Howling winds chilled to minus forty-five now buffeted the town of forty-five hundred.
Yuri was especially grateful to be indoors. The arctic chill pierced his ice armor, and the last few minutes of his ride on the snowmobile were brutal. He’d been chilled to his core once before during a deepwater dive mission. The hours of in-water decompression during that ascent triggered hypothermia; it nearly killed him.
Yuri was halfway through the tasty halibut. Bill Winters had inhaled the porterhouse and was now working on the remnants. Yuri checked his wristwatch and looking toward Bill said, “She should be checking in in about ten minutes.”
Bill polished off the last morsel of steak. He pulled out a cell phone from his coat pocket and placed it on the table. “I’ll get a text when she checks in.”
“I just hope we get a signal.”
“Don’t worry, she’s in fine form. You’ll see.”
But Yuri was worried. The company’s future was currently miles offshore, deep under the ice, prowling in utter darkness—all on its own. From Yuri’s experience of working underwater, he envisioned countless glitches, every one a potential mission killer.
“If we end up needing the backup, how long will it take to get it ready to ship?” asked Yuri.
“Deep Adventurer is in excellent shape. No more than a day to run diagnostics and charge the batteries.”
“Good. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”
Bill frowned. “I know you’re looking out for Laura’s interests. Of all people, I’m the most grateful that she rescued the company. But you don’t yet have the hands-on experience I have with this technology. It really does work. Just wait a few minutes.” He tapped the cell phone with his right index finger.
“Okay.” Yuri stood. “I need to use the head first.”
“I’m going to have another beer, you want one?”
The Forever Spy Page 4