Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

  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.”

  “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—”

  Lieutenant Segal whirled and advanced on Benford, fury in his face and clenched fists. “You slimy little bastard!” Segal shouted. “Isn’t it convenient that there was no one else there to back up your story! You know what I think? I think you shot Richardson and then you clobbered the skipper to cover your tracks!”

  “That’s ridiculous! Why would I do something like that?”

  “Why would a man with sixteen years in NOAA and a wife and two kids just up and shoot a guy? Huh?” Segal reached Benford and grabbed the man by the throat. “Answer me that, you little prick!”

  “He hated us!” Benford cried, pounding at Segal’s hands. “Let me go, you big—”

  “Break it up, you two!” Masters shouted. “Both of you! Stand down!”

  “This is the criminal, Fred!” Segal said. “This little bastard right here!”

  “Let him go, Phil. He’s not worth it.”

  Segal shoved Benford hard, slamming him back against the wall as he released him. “No. He’s not.”

  “Larson did have it in for all of us Greenworld people,” Lynnley Cabot said. “We all saw it!”

  “Commander Larson wouldn’t have shot anybody,” Fritcherson said. “I don’t believe Benford’s story, not for a second. But it won’t do us any good arguing about it. Save it for the trial.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody!” Benford screamed.

  Tomlinson was about to snap back a reply, but he stopped, his mouth open. There was a new sound rising above the wind outside . . . a deep, almost throbbing rumble, punctuated by the unmistakable crack of breaking ice. “What the hell is that?” he asked.

  The others were listening now, too.

  “Pressure ridge,” McCauley said. “Ice coming together, buckling, creating an upthrust.”

  “We have to get out of here!” Cicero cried. She bolted for the door.

  “Don’t go out there!” Masters shouted.

  Steven Moore reached out and grabbed her arm, pulling her back. “Just . . . chill!” he said. “Don’t panic! Everything’s going to be okay. . . .”

  “It sounded pretty close,” McCauley told the others. “We should check it out.”

  The sounds from outside had stilled, save for the blustering of the wind.

  “I’ll go,” Tomlinson said, rising. Pressure ridges could form anywhere on the ice, at any time. It wasn’t likely, but if one decided to come up underneath the Quonset hut, the base could be torn apart, leaving them without shelter in the storm.

  Fortunately, it sounded like whatever it was had stopped. . . .

  The door banged open. Surrounded by swirling snow and a blast of frigid wind, a heavily bundled man stepped into the hut.

  Cicero screamed. McCauley started, then reached for a rifle leaning against a nearby wall. For a moment, Tomlinson wondered if an American expedition had come up after all . . . but the assault rifle in the man’s gloved hands was wrong—orangewood and ugly black metal, with a curved, banana clip magazine.

  A Russian AKM.

  “Be still,” the intruder barked in accented English. “All of you! Be still!”

  A second man pushed his way inside behind the first. Both of them wore fur caps with the earflaps down. The first kept his assault rifle pointed at them; the second held a small but deadly-looking military pistol.

  “What the hell are you—,” McCauley started to say.

  “Silence!” the man with the pistol shouted. “Hands up, all of you!” He aimed the pistol at McCauley. “You! Stand back from that weapon!”

  Hands raised, McCauley did as he was told. Through the open door, in the wan light of the never-setting sun, Tomlinson could see other Russian soldiers and, beyond, the sheer, smooth black cliff of a submarine sail, rising vertically up from the broken and jumbled ice.

  “This . . . territory,” the man with the pistol said, “is the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation, and you are here illegally.”

  “Get over yourself, Ivan,” Walters said. “This ice isn’t yours until the UN says it is. In the meantime, this is an American outpost—”

  “Not anymore,” the Russian said. “We . . . understand that a crime has been committed here. A crime on Russian territory. You will all come with us until this matter can be properly settled.”

  “This man is badly injured,” Tomlinson said, pointing at Larson. “Can you get him to a hospital?”

  The man gave a short, sharp nod. “Da. There are . . . medical facilities where we are going. He will be taken care of. Get your winter gear. Quickly!”

  Stunned, the Americans began doing as they’d been told. As he donned his parka, though, Tomlinson glanced at Benford. The man seemed relaxed, now, almost at ease.

  Tomlinson saw him slip something beneath the mattress of Steven Moore’s bunk.

  What the hell was going on?

  13

  Oval Office, the White House

  Washington, D.C.

  1508 hours EDT

  “THE PRESIDENT WILL SEE YOU now.”

  The three of them had been waiting on benches set against the walls of the main corridor of the West Wing, Collins, Bing, and Rubens. None of the three had spoken a word when they’d arrived separately half an hour earlier, but Rubens could feel the chill in the air, the psychic sharpening of knives. For his part, Rubens had leaned back on the bench and focused on a relaxation mantra, calming himself. If these two harpies were going to descend on Desk Three, he wanted to be able to respond with cool logic, not a storm of emotion.

  As the secretary held the northwest door of the Oval Office open, they stood and, still without a word to one another, entered the historic room.

  All three had been here before, of course. The ancient grandfather clock against the northeast wall still clucked quietly to itself. The familiar portrait of George Washington still glowered down from over the fireplace on the room’s north wall, the rosy-cheeked figure still looking as though his mouth hurt. Swedish ivy, grown from cuttings in a series going back to President Kennedy, adorned the mantle itself while, elsewhere, Remington bronzes of horses and western themes graced tabletops and niches in the walls.

  P
resident Marcke sat behind the familiar Resolute Desk . . . so named because it had been made from the timbers of a British frigate, HMS Resolute, a gift from Queen Victoria to President Hayes in 1880 and brought out of storage a century later by President Carter. That touch seemed appropriate to Rubens now. They would need to rely a lot on their British counterparts if they were going to have a chance at getting a team back into Russia anytime soon.

  James Fenton and Roger Smallbourn both were already in the room, standing before the desk. A third man stood near the east wall, the only uniform present. He was Admiral Robert Thornton, the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  Rubens was surprised to see them, but he could feel the startled shock of both Bing and Collins; obviously they’d not been expecting the DNI or the D/CIA to be here, the top two men in U.S. intelligence. As for the number-two man in the DIA, Rubens could only imagine why he was here as well. It was almost unprecedented, having this many top spooks together in the same room at the same time.

  “Ladies,” President Marcke said, looking up. “Charlie. I would like to know what the hell is going on.”

  “I . . . I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. President,” Bing said.

  “I mean how the hell this mess could have exploded in the Arctic and no one in U.S. intelligence was aware of anything going down!”

  “Sir, we were aware of ongoing developments,” Collins said. She spoke with a crispness that might have been meant to convey cool efficiency, but Rubens could hear her gears shifting in her mind. “We had two officers up there with the NOAA expedition with orders to determine what was going on at that Russian base. It was all there in your pickle a couple of weeks ago.”