Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold

by Arctic Gold (epub)

  Creating a Mafiya beachhead within the largest natural gas company and the third-largest producer of petroleum in the world.

  That left a few questions unanswered as yet. Why was the Mafiya so interested in GK-1? Had they, in fact, organized the project from scratch, or had they simply taken over an existing program? It might not matter. Either way, a sudden infusion of profits from the GK-1 drilling project might be the lever needed to move key power centers within Gazprom, facilitating a takeover of the entire company.

  A takeover that would make the Russian Mafiya the owners and the beneficiaries of the largest energy company in the world.

  As Golytsin pushed the throttle control forward, the whine of electric motors hummed from the aft end of the compartment. A joystick control pushed forward nosed the Mir minisub into a downward cant; steering the submarine, Dean thought, was a pretty simple seat-of-the-pants exercise, with one joystick controlling up-down and left-right maneuvers and the throttle providing forward thrust.

  “Move away from the control panel,” Braslov warned.

  “I’m not touching anything,” Dean replied. Carefully he placed his hands behind his back. “See? I just want to take in the view.”

  He doubted that Braslov was stupid enough to fire a weapon inside the Mir’s sealed passenger compartment; a cracked port or a broken hydraulics line would end the voyage quite quickly. By taking the lead and making decisions for himself, however small those might be, Dean was snatching a tiny bit of psychological advantage from the situation and perhaps keeping their captors just a little off balance.

  Braslov seemed about to bark an order, but Golytsin said something in Russian and laughed. Braslov shrugged. “Just touch nothing,” he growled.

  With his hands at his back, Dean stared out through the curved transparency on the starboard bow of the craft. There was very little to see. The water was lucidly, inexpressibly clear, like deep blue crystal, but there was simply nothing to see in all of that emptiness. As the Mir continued to descend, the blue grew rapidly deeper, darker, and more opaque, until the endless and absolute night of the deep abyss closed in.

  Golytsin hit a pair of switches overhead, and a faint glow answered from outside. A few isolated particles danced in the Mir’s lights like tiny white stars.

  “How deep are we?” Dean asked.

  Golytsin glanced at an LED readout on a TV monitor. “Four hundred meters,” he said.

  “And how deep can we go?”

  “Quiet,” Braslov ordered. “No more questions.”

  Electric motor shrilling, the Mir continued its steepening descent.

  The Art Room

  NSA Headquarters

  Fort Meade, Maryland

  1902 hours EDT

  “Yes, sir,” Rubens said. “Yes, sir, I understand. Thank you, Mr. President.”

  He hung up the red phone.

  At least the White House operator had put him straight through to the President this time. Bing was no longer keeping him isolated, at least for the time being.

  A map of the Arctic had been thrown up on one of the secondary wall monitors. A bright red triangle showed the position of a flight of six MiG-35s, now better than halfway between the mainland and the Lebedev.

  At Mach 2, they were ten minutes from the Lebedev and the Ohio. The President had not been pleased with this latest turn of events. The encounter in the Arctic, what was supposed to have been a quick in-and-out by the SEALs to rescue the Americans held on the Lebedev, was fast turning into a deadly confrontation.

  Over the past half hour, the Art Room had continued monitoring the situation on board the Lebedev. At last report, SEALs had taken over both the bridge and the engine room and a large number of seamen had been sequestered in a forward hold, under guard. Twelve American prisoners had been freed from an empty storeroom aft, and another, the seriously injured Commander Larson, had been found in the ship’s sick bay.

  Two were still missing—Harry Benford, the traitor, and the NSA employee Kathy McMillan.

  With the Lebedev under the control of the SEAL assault team, the focus of the operation had shifted to getting the former hostages off of the Russian ship and across the ice to the Ohio. A long gangway had already been set up, allowing people to reach the ice off the Lebedev’s deck. A similar gangway, with safety lines and stanchions, had been rigged to let them clamber off the ice and onto the Ohio’s forward deck.

  Everything was going perfectly according to plan, with three serious problems.

  Russian MiGs were on the way, perhaps ten minutes out. The SEALs had to get the released prisoners off the ship and across the ice before those aircraft arrived, because when they did, the Ohio would be an easy and obvious target.

  That was one. The second was worse. Fifteen minutes before, the Ohio’s sonar operator had reported a new underwater contact . . . almost certainly a miniature submarine of some sort. Minutes later, however, a second contact had been reported, this one larger, much larger . . . most likely a Russian attack submarine. Because of the difficulties of determining range and bearing in the weirdly echoing undersea terrain of the Arctic ice cap, it was impossible to tell just where the new contact was, or how close. But the chances were good that someone on the Lebedev had called for help, possibly over an undersea hydrophone system, and the attack sub was moving in on the Ohio.

  And Charlie Dean had been captured. From the look of things, he and the other NSA employee, McMillan, had been taken aboard a miniature Russian sub and were now heading into the ocean deeps, presumably to rendezvous with GK-1.

  “The captain of the Ohio reports the last of the hostages are on board,” a communications tech said. “The SEALs are evacuating the ship.”

  “Very well.”

  But once the SEALs were aboard, the Ohio’s skipper would have a deadly choice. If he stayed on the surface, he would be vulnerable to attack by the incoming MiGs. If he submerged, he might drop squarely into the track of torpedoes fired by the Russian sub. Damned if you do . . . damned if you don’t.

  This was not shaping up to be one of America’s better days. . . .

  Mir 1

  Arctic Ice Cap

  82° 34' N, 177° 26' E

  1108 hours, GMT–12

  There were lights in the darkness.

  Dean leaned forward in an awed silence as the Mir continued its descent. According to the monitor readout, they were now at eight hundred meters, half a mile beneath the ice-locked surface of the Arctic Ocean. And GK-1 was just now coming into view.

  The thing was enormous—at least a hundred yards long, perhaps more. Bow and stern had the look of a conventional surface-going ship, but they were joined by a relatively slender center section holding the two together like the bar on a set of barbells. At first, Dean nearly didn’t recognize what he was seeing as a ship; it was moored in the darkness bow down, which is not the usual attitude for a vessel designed to move along the ocean’s surface.

  Five massive cables stretched out and down from the bow, vanishing into the darkness below. Several more slender cables reached straight up from the stern, tethering the structure to the Lebedev half a mile overhead. Something like a slender needle extended from the structure’s bow straight down into the abyss—the drill itself, Dean assumed. On the stern—the highest point on the ship in this position—was a round well or receptacle. Dean could make out one of the drill pipe sections hanging suspended just above the structure’s stern. Something like the remote-controlled arm of the Space Shuttle reached out of the stern, bent back at an elbow joint, and grasped the pipe section as though preparing to insert it into the receptacle.

  But nothing was moving. Work, it seemed, had halted.

  The technical challenges in designing the thing, Dean thought, must have been staggering . . . but the payoff was a stable drill rig that could operate half a mile beneath storms and rough seas, beneath moving ice, and well off the radar of any environmental groups that might oppose drilling on the ocean floor.

  �
�Not much happening,” he commented to Golytsin. “What is it, Russian workers’ holiday?”

  “No. We’ve run into a . . . snag, I believe you Americans call it.”

  “Don’t tell them any more,” Braslov ordered. “They don’t need to know.”

  “It hardly matters,” Golytsin said with a shrug. “If Kotenko doesn’t order them killed, they’ll still never be allowed to leave Russia.”

  “Methane,” Dean said, venturing a guess. “Methane clathrates on the bottom. Isn’t it?”

  “You’re too smart for your own good, old man,” Braslov said.

  Dean had received a last-moment briefing update from Rubens before the Ohio had moved to her new position off the Lebedev’s port side. It turned out that a report Lia had seen on Kotenko’s computer had concerned immense deposits of methane clathrate discovered on the seabed beneath GK-1. Evidently there’d already been one accident, fortunately rather minor. Work had been suspended until the problem could be resolved.

  The update had included a brief discussion of clathrates, also known as methane hydrate or methane ice. Apparently outcrops of the stuff were often associated with stretches of seabed rich in petroleum and also marked fields of natural gas bubbling up to the surface through fissures or geological fault lines in the ocean floor. Methane—natural gas—formed in underground pockets. When it percolated through to the ocean at depths of over about five hundred meters, the cold and extreme pressure of those depths sometimes formed clathrate fields. As Dean understood it, water froze into normal water ice on the sea floor and adhering to it and within it, rather like permafrost, clinging to the bottom instead of floating to the surface. As the water froze, it trapped molecules of methane—CH4—inside its crystalline structure. A piece of methane hydrate liberated from the seabed to a laboratory counter looked like an ordinary chunk of ice. Set a match to it, however, and the ice burned with a hot, bright red flame as the methane was liberated.

  Methane clathrates had been advanced as a possible solution to the energy crisis, since it appeared that there was more methane locked up inside seabed deposits of clathrates than there were reservoirs of natural gas under dry land. But they also posed certain risks of unknown magnitude. A few climatologists had actually suggested that periods of global warming in the past had been caused by massive releases of seabed methane. A mass extinction of life on ancient Earth—like the one that had wiped out the dinosaurs, but almost 200 million years earlier and on a far larger scale—had been blamed by some on an explosive release of undersea methane into the atmosphere.

  “It could put a real stopper on your pet project, couldn’t it?” Dean continued after a moment’s silence. “I mean, you drill into the sea floor and find you’re drilling through ice. What happened? The drilling broke some pieces off that floated to the surface and ignited?”

  “GK-1 sustained minor damage when a large block of methane ice floated up from the bottom and struck one of the anchoring cables,” Golytsin said. “Mainly, though, Gazprom called a halt to activities while an assessment was made on the possibility of harvesting methane ice in quantity from the ocean floor.”

  Some more pieces fell into place for Dean. The organized crime groups trying to infiltrate Gazprom were doing so through the GK-1 drilling project. Probably the revenue from newfound petroleum was going to give Kotenko and Tambov leverage within the organization.

  But now another branch of Gazprom had interfered, stopping work at the GK-1 site while decisions were made about the natural gas resources discovered there. A power struggle? Or simply a delay? It would be interesting to know what was happening within Gazprom’s halls of corporate power.

  The Mir sub drew closer to the undersea station now, approaching the stern of the submerged and vertical ship. In the glare of the outside lights, Dean saw other Mir submersibles docked with their upper hatches snug against a massive tube, evidently a boarding tunnel or air lock.

  “What kind of pressure do you maintain in there?” Dean asked.

  “Standard sea level pressure,” was Golytsin’s surprising answer. “Just as inside the Mir. We haven’t had to work with high atmospheric pressures in some years now. We build very good in Russia, you see. . . .”

  Impressive, given that the outside seawater pressure on the GK-1 must be incredible. Dean did some fast calculations. The pressure exerted by seawater went up by .445 pounds per square inch for every additional foot of depth, he knew. Eight hundred meters was about twenty-six hundred feet and a bit, times .445 . . .

  At a rough estimate, the pressure at this depth was over half a ton per square inch. Most of the outside work at GK-1 must be handled by robots or with miniature submarines like the Mir, equipped with mechanical arms. He noticed that there weren’t any windows or portholes on the vessel, not even at the lower edge of the stern section, where he expected the bridge to be.

  Skillfully Golytsin maneuvered the Mir underneath the docking tube, watching the approach through a TV monitor relaying the view from a camera mounted on the Mir’s dorsal hull next to the hatch. For a moment, Dean had memories of space-docking events he’d seen, of Apollo spacecraft docking with Lunar Excursion Modules, or the Space Shuttle connecting with the space station.

  There was the faintest of bumps, and a hollow clang. Golytsin threw a series of switches. “We’re home,” he said.

  “The last home they’ll ever know,” Braslov said with an unpleasant grin.

  22

  SSGN Ohio

  Arctic Ice Cap

  82° 34' N, 177° 26' E

  1112 hours, GMT–12

  “BRIDGE, RADAR!” AN URGENT VOICE called over the intercom. “Two bogies incoming at very high speed, bearing one-seven-five, range twenty miles! We’ve got maybe fifty seconds!”

  “Very well,” Captain Grenville replied. He glanced at the southern sky, saw nothing, and turned his attention back to the forward deck. The last of the Navy SEALs scrambled up the gangway. A deck detail of sailors started to haul the gangway in. Grenville picked up a loud-hailer. “Chief of the Boat!”

  Master Chief Fuselli, bulky in his Navy-issue parka, turned and looked up at the weather bridge.

  “Jettison the gangway!” Grenville called.

  Fuselli tossed him a salute and started bellowing orders. In seconds, the lines making the gangway fast had been freed and the long metal bridge had been heaved over onto the ice.

  He took another look at the Lebedev, just one hundred yards to the north. When the firefight had finally sputtered out, the SEALs had disarmed the crew and herded them into a hold, but it hadn’t taken long for Russians hiding elsewhere in the ship to set their comrades free. There’d been a couple of gunshots from the Lebedev as the SEALs crossed the ice, but nothing concerted and nothing accurate.

  “Lookouts below,” he ordered. The two lookouts in their cockpits aft of the weather bridge began securing their posts. One pulled in the fluttering American ensign.

  Grenville’s major concern at the moment was the fact that he didn’t know what the Russians were going to do. Those incoming aircraft might be lining up a bombing run on their very first pass . . . and that would be very, very bad. More likely, they would overfly first, to get an eyes-on look at the ships in the ice and to make sure they knew which targets were friendly, which hostile. Then they would attack if, in fact, they’d been ordered to do so.

  Grenville assumed that the Russian pilots had those orders. From their point of view, their people had been attacked first, on board the Lebedev. They would assume the commandos had come from his boat. Besides, right now the Ohio was the only American target around.

  Master Chief Fuselli was the last man down the forward hatch. Grenville heard it bang shut, saw the wheel dog tight.

  “Diving Officer of the Watch,” he said over the intercom as his hand came down on the dive klaxon button. “Dive the boat!”

  He turned to descend into the Ohio’s sail but stopped as he heard a low-voiced growl, a distant, trembling thunder. He looked so
uth . . . and then, almost before his brain could register what he was seeing, two sleek high-performance jet aircraft streaked in low above the ice, traveling almost wingtip to wingtip. He had the briefest of instants to take in details—broad, delta wings; canards riding far forward under the cockpits; the glaring flash of sunlight off of canopies; the red-star-inside-white-star roundels on the wings.

  MiG-35s, definitely. They passed two hundred yards east of the Ohio, streaking past the Lebedev and dwindling to specks above the northern horizon. Grenville heard a far-off roar emerge from the dwindling thunder of engines and wondered what it was.

  Then he knew. Cheering. The crew of the Lebedev was cheering.

  He descended the ladder into the Ohio’s sail.

  The Ohio’s ballast tanks were already flooding by the time he reached the control room. “Captain on deck!” the Officer of the Watch cried as he walked in.

  “As you were. Radar! What’re our friends up there doing?”

  “Bogies have made a full one-eighty and are coming back at us, bearing three-five-four, range five miles. Looks like an attack run, sir.”

  “Very well. Diving officer. Take us down. Make depth two-five-zero feet.”

  “Make depth two-five-zero feet, aye, aye, sir.”

  Bridge operations on an American submarine were a meticulous choreography of order and order repeated back, each step checked and checked again to make sure a command had been properly heard and was being properly executed.