“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 starb
oard-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 that 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.
“Shore party,” the COB called, “break out cold-weather gear and report topside.”
Dean turned to the captain. “Permission to go ashore, sir?”
“Granted. But watch your ass out there.”
Twenty minutes later, Dean was on the ice, trudging toward a forlorn cluster of prefab huts. The air was surprisingly warm, though the wind had a bite to it; the sun was low above the northwestern horizon in this land of the midnight sun, even though it was nearly 2200. The sky was a deep, clear blue. The Ohio’s sail cast long shadows across the ice at his back.
Several Navy SEALs were already at the NOAA base, clad in black dry suits and holding assault rifles with the trigger guards removed, so they could be fired while the SEALs were wearing heavy gloves. Taylor’s SEALs—sixteen of them—had boarded the ASDS hours before, slipping ahead of the Ohio to perform a surface reconnaissance. They’d located a polynya, broken through the ice, and deployed into the NOAA base, determining that it was abandoned. They’d lowered a sonar beacon through the hole in the ice—Signal Sierra One—to guide the Ohio in on the deserted encampment.
Lieutenant Taylor was standing next to a flagstaff planted in the ice outside the main building. The white, blue, and red-barred flag of the Russian Federation fluttered in the stiff breeze above him. Dean watched as the man pulled a diving knife from somewhere under his heavy parka and sawed through the line securing the flag. In an instant, the flag fluttered away on the wind, trailing a loose four feet of line. Another SEAL standing nearby produced an American flag, neatly folded in a triangle. The two men used the remaining rope to secure the flag, then hauled it quickly to the top of the staff and tied it off.
“Well done, Mr. Taylor,” Dean said.
“Thank you sir,” Taylor said. “Our base is secure.”
“And no sign of the enemy?”
“Nothing, sir. No sign of our people, either.”
“I’d still like to have a look.”
The door to the main building was hanging open. Dean stepped inside and immediately made a face. “God, it stinks in here!”
Taylor, behind him, nodded. “Yessir. Too many people in too small a space for too damned long.”
“Like on board the Ohio, huh?”
“Hell, at least everything on the Ohydro has a place and is squared away,” Taylor said, using a nickname that went back to the sub’s service as a boomer. “This is a damned rat’s nest.”
Dean agreed. The hut was cluttered with human debris—clothing hung up to dry, a camera sitting next to a chess game in progress and a plate with half a sandwich. Much of the stench was from a long-untended chemical toilet in the back of the room, but the air was also thick with the mingled stinks of perspiration, wet clothing, oil, stale food, and mildew. Curtains that had divided the sleeping quarters had been ripped down and left on the floor. Radio equipment at the opposite end of the room had been smashed, apparently with rifle butts.
Dean stepped away from the SEALs and tried switching on his personal transmitter. “George, this is Charlie. Do you copy?”
He could hear static behind his ear and a faint, dopplering whistle.
“George, Charlie. Are you there?”
“Reception up here sucks, man,” one of the SEALs told him. “Satellites are too close to the horizon.”
“I guess so.” He would have to transmit from the Ohio’s much larger UHF antenna later. He switched off the unit in his belt and continued exploring the base.
A storeroom in a nearby building was a charnel house, the air thick with the stink of blood. Someone had gone down the passageway, methodically shooting the sled dogs in their kennels. The act appeared random and cruel . . . until Dean suppressed his anger and thought it through. The Russians evidently had been here on a quick in-and-out to grab the Americans. They hadn’t been able to take the dogs along, so they’d shot them rather than leaving them to starve in their cages or freeze on the open ice.
At the far end of the passageway, near some carefully stored snowmobiles, there was a rusty stain on the floor that looked like more blood. Dean studied it for a moment. It might have splashed out of a nearby cage—there were plenty of bloodstains on the wall above the dead dogs—but it looked more like someone had fallen here, bleeding. The stain streaked across the floor, as though smeared by someone dragging a body, and all of the dogs were inside their cages.
Dean used a tiny digital camera to record everything, including the gruesome contents of the cages and the long smear on the floor. Other supply sheds and buildings scattered about the compound appeared to have been searched but seemed to be intact. Eventually, he returned to the main building.
“Mr. Dean?” Taylor said, holding something up as he stepped into the building. “You might be interested in this.”
Dean accepted the device, which looked like a small transistor radio. There was no tuning knob, however, just a knob for volume and on-off. When he turned it on, he could hear a squeal of atmospherics and, just barely, a voice, though the static was too bad to understand the words.
“Where’d you find this?”
“Jones found it underneath that mattress over there,” Taylor said, pointing. “It may be nothing, but . . .”
“But the fact that it
was hidden makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Curious, Dean popped a back panel off and looked at the batteries. They were double-As, but the words printed on the casings were spelled out in Cyrillic letters.
So, what was someone on the NOAA expedition doing with a single-channel radio powered by Russian batteries?
Dean could think of only one reasonable answer to the question.
“Let’s check the personal effects,” Dean told the SEALs. “Whose bunk was this?”
Each of the bunks, racked two high in the cramped sleeping area, had a pair of small steel lockers next to it. Methodically, three of the SEALs began going through each, removing the contents and bagging them.
There wasn’t a lot—wallets, personal items such as rings and jewelry, toiletries, packs of cigarettes, sewing kits, socks and underwear, and the like. The radio had been found under one of the bottom bunks, so the owner had kept his personal items in one of two small lockers close by. ID cards in the wallets gave the names of the owners.
Steven Moore, Dean knew from his briefing, was one of the Greenworld documentary filmmakers.
Randy Haines was one of the NOAA meteorologists.
And one of them, Dean knew, was a traitor. . . .
The Art Room
NSA Headquarters
Fort Meade, Maryland
1515 hours EDT
William Rubens sat at his desk, staring at the computer screen. The e-mail, on a special, secure feed from Men-with Hill, had come through from decryption only moments before. Lightly he touched the screen, as though wondering if the message would vanish.
“Thank God,” he murmured as he began to read the message again. He shook his head. “Thank God. . . .”
Major Richard Delallo recovered and safe, the decoded message read. He ejected into the sea south of Kotka, Finland. He was unconscious when he hit the water, but he was pulled out by Finnish fishermen, who took him back to their village. There was some delay in getting word back to Lakenheath. Major Delallo’s flight suit was sterile for the op, and the fishermen thought he might be Russian. It was several days before they contacted the UK embassy in Helsinki.
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 24