Seas of Crisis

by Joe Buff

  Kurzin told Nyurba to go forward into Carter’s control room, to liaise there with Captain Harley during the next step needed to get the commandos toward shore.

  When Nyurba got there Harley greeted him, pointing at the tactical plot. “We’re already in the bay, Commander.” The Ularovskaya Guba. “See? The nav chart and the gravimeter show you the Indigirka delta, and the Alazeja mouth.” Harley tapped keys on his command console, and the gravimeter changed from its bird’s-eye-view display mode into look-forward mode.

  Now the arrangement of seafloor and coastal geography appeared to Nyurba as if he were seeing through the windshield of a car. He noted the big navigable channels into the Indigirka River, and, to his left on the screen, the two much smaller channels where the Alazeja River forked five miles before its outlet, creating a thin, low-lying island in midstream. The tactical plot showed the island was unoccupied—Nyurba knew it was totally lifeless.

  “Now we can’t avoid some noise,” Harley said. “I’m counting on chaotic thermal updrafts from heat sources on the bottom, and turbulent river outflows, to keep anybody from noticing.”

  “Understood, Captain.” Nyurba shuddered to think of what made that heat.

  “Sir,” the control room phone talker said, “Colonel Kurzin reports men are in position on superstructure.”

  “Very well. Helm, all stop.”

  They waited for the ship’s and the floe’s momentum to come off. This didn’t take long—the front of the floe made a lot of water resistance, like a barge.

  “Phone Talker, tell Colonel Kurzin to stand by to adjust mooring lines as needed.”

  “Colonel Kurzin acknowledges, sir.”

  “Chief of the Watch, blow more air into all main ballast tank groups as needed to reduce ship’s draft by three feet.”

  “More air, all groups, as needed, reduce draft by three feet, aye, sir,” Carter’s chief of the boat answered. Lanky and dour, he was quite a contrast to Challenger’s COB in both build and personality, Nyurba thought to himself.

  He heard the hiss of high-pressure air. He knew that submarines could adjust their depth at the keel this way, to some extent; being surfaced wasn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. But the more their hulls were lifted up, especially at the stern, the more their propulsors would cavitate—a distinctive hissing sound—or even throb, called blade-rate. If the COB wasn’t careful and deft, extra air might leak out through the open bottoms of the ballast tanks, bubbling to the surface alongside the hull, the worst acoustic giveaway of all.

  Harley’s previous jauntiness up on the bridge had deserted him. With the added effort of pushing the ice floe, starting from a dead stop could make Carter’s pump jet, bordering on the ocean-to-atmosphere interface, suck vacuum. The propulsion shaft would race, potentially causing permanent damage. The noise transient—a new one for the typical Russian sonar technician—would be impossible to miss. All the effort to convince Meredov that the floe was just a floe—by pushing it to the last place anyone in their right mind would want to approach—could be squandered in five seconds flat.

  And no matter how quiet Carter could be, her ruse might not hold up forever. She still faced a long trip surfaced like this, as Nyurba and Harley well knew. After the commando dropoff, Carter and the floe would make their way back to the marginal ice zone—it having looked then like the floe had drifted in a giant U that trended from west to east with the prevailing current and the variable winds. Harley’s men would take in the camouflage cover, detach from the floe, and submerge. Carter would then begin a whole new series of difficult actions to get ready to pick up the surviving squadron members with maximum stealth, several days hence.

  Carter had eased in as close to the beach as she could. It was time for the commando team to switch to a smaller taxi. They were in a location meant to be the seemingly least likely point of covert entry that mission planners could possibly conceive of. Self-preservation alone should discourage Russian forces from searching this place. Satellite surveillance had appeared to confirm the fact. But that didn’t mean that Kurzin and his followers were safe—not by any stretch of the imagination.

  Nyurba would lead the first ten-man group in their short underwater crossing to the minisub. From swim fins and scuba rebreathers, to dry suits and dive masks and weapons and everything else, what they wore or used or carried was Russian-made. Russia’s borders were porous, and a brisk underground bazaar of military equipment was constantly active. Nyurba knew that sometimes corrupt supply noncoms, or disaffected and demoralized soldier-draftees, often heroin addicts, would sell anything for hard cash, even to their enemies—especially on the steadily smoldering Chechen front, or along Russia’s newly tense border with China.

  The group, tethered in dive-buddy pairs, did final checks inside the jam-packed airlock chamber in Carter’s Multi-Mission Platform. Constituted temporarily as a point element for the squadron, they were by background a mix of Navy SEAL or Seabee, Marine Recon, Army Ranger or Green Beret or Delta Force, and Air Force Special Operations Squadron shadow warriors. From here they would put into practice armed forces jointness to the full, as they had in training for most of a year. They were part of a hand-picked elite from within the elites, and they knew it. Nyurba was proud to be leading them.

  They each, in their own way, showed the mix of eagerness and fear that he himself was feeling, the indescribable high that always preceded mission insertion. They placed their rebreather mouthpieces between their teeth, verified that their oxygen supplies were good, and made “okay” hand signs to Nyurba.

  “Don radiation suits and watertight hoods,” he ordered tersely. “Fins over the suit booties.”

  The radiation suits were thick and heavy. The hoods had Plexiglas window plates. Everyone helped their buddy use Velcro strips to bind the suits as snugly as they could to their bodies and gear, working from the legs upward. This was to squeeze out air pockets that might otherwise make them too buoyant—they’d pop to the surface like beach balls, helpless. If they forgot to exhale rapidly, an uncontrolled ascent could burst their lungs.

  Once the hoods were fastened on, the scuba rebreathers became the men’s self-contained respirators.

  They put on uninflated buoyancy-compensation vests—adjustable life jackets—over the suits. They strapped titanium dive knives to their left arms; these were survival tools, not weapons. Special weight belts went on last, so they could come off first if anyone did get into trouble.

  Nyurba signaled to the command center that the chamber was ready to be equalized. Air hissed in, increasingly, to match the pressure of the sea outside. Everyone swallowed to clear their eardrums. The pressure, for scuba divers, was mild, less than double the norm at sea level. It squeezed their suits and pressed hood windows against the dive masks covering their faces.

  A SEAL chief opened the bottom hatch. In pairs, with Nyurba and his dive buddy going last, they sat on the edge of the hatch, holding in their laps their seawater-proof backpacks and equipment bags, which were tethered to their waists. These had floatation bladders, to make them neutrally buoyant. They slipped into the pitch-black water, and disappeared.

  Carter’s chemo-sensors had already thoroughly tested this area for toxins.

  You would not want to swim in this water without a radiation suit.

  Nyurba and his buddy—a Marine Recon gunnery sergeant—slid into the water. They fell a very short distance and landed feet-first on hard sand. On foot, in slow motion because of water drag, they moved out from under Carter’s hull and her shadow as fast as they could; they had to crouch because the clearance was so small. Pockets of less salty water, thanks to the freshwater rivers, provided less lift to any object compared to regular seawater; if such a pocket drifted under Carter they’d be squashed like insects—the ship, even with ballast tanks blown empty, weighed more than ten thousand tons. From the surface swells alone the hull heaved up and down enough to make the diver lockout evolution be one hair-raising experience.

  Nyu
rba heard moaning and popping sounds from the floe attached to Carter’s other side, but such effects from any big floe were typical. He opened a tiny cover on the ship’s hull and rotated a handle, to signal to the command center that the chamber was ready for its next load of men, in case the chamber’s video cameras failed.

  Nyurba’s dry suit, layered inside his radiation suit, helped keep him warm. Even so, he felt a chill go up his spine. The water here was clear enough to see the edge of the dumping ground. The surface of the bay overhead, an undulating sheet of green discolored with hazy brown, gave uneven but adequate light that shone in rippling streaks—distorted sunbeams. The water was utterly lifeless, not a fish or eel or even a stalk of seaweed in sight.

  What caught his eyes were eerie blue glows, where fresh spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors had been discarded carelessly. He also saw dozens of barrels, some of them rusted through and leaking, in haphazard piles. What gave him the willies, most of all, was the huge cylinder lying on the bottom, so big that its top must extend near the surface, so long that both ends were lost in the murk to Nyurba’s right and left. It was a derelict Russian sub, scuttled here, probably after being used for a while as a mobile nuclear power plant. Nyurba thought that this idea in itself was clever of the Kremlin, since Siberia, supercharged with rampant resource extraction, had an insatiable demand for electrical power. Vessels afloat that the Russian Navy couldn’t afford to keep battleworthy were still able to produce many valuable megawatt-hours. The casual discarding of the vessel once her reactor core was aged out, in contrast, he found abhorrent. She lay with her keel toward Nyurba, masking her sail and superstructure; he had no idea what class of sub she might be. But there were cracks in her hull, through which seawater circulated freely—maybe these fractures resulted from her scuttling, or afterward from storms and winter punishment by bergs. He wondered how many other subs had been dumped here, and how much of the waste in this area had been accepted from foreign countries in exchange for hefty fees. He glanced at his portable radiation instruments. The readings were more than sufficient to hurry him along.

  He knew that uranium or plutonium inhaled in tiny amounts caused cancer—symptoms took years or decades to show, and the cancer might be curable. But lighter radioactive isotopes, by-products of nuclear fission that built up by the tons in spent reactor cores, gave off vastly higher rems per hour—acute radiation sickness would kill within days. Outside his suit he was being bathed in offal from dead cores. The slightest leak and a hellish cocktail of strontium, cesium, barium, and yttrium would envelop his flesh and penetrate bodily orifices. He’d never live to reach the missile site, let alone launch armed ICBMs.

  Doing this is insanity.

  Nyurba tried to steady his respiration rate. The rebreathers had an endurance of about ten hours for a physically fit man exerting himself. Oxygen from a small pressurized tank would be added to the air Nyurba exhaled, while chemicals would scrub it of carbon dioxide, releasing more oxygen—and he’d breathe it again. He and his dive buddy trudged along the seafloor to the hovering minisub. They handed their equipment bags to men already inside, then with their help climbed up through the open bottom hatch, into the mini’s hyperbaric chamber. Nyurba reached for and lifted the bottom hatch until it shut, then turned the wheel to make it watertight.

  The two-man crew in the forward compartment reduced the chamber’s air pressure to one atmosphere. Nyurba and his dive buddy went into the transport compartment. They took seats, fully garbed like the others, still using their respirators. The crew in front kept the pressure-proof hatch to the control compartment dogged, and Nyurba knew why. Everything in the minisub aft of that hatch was badly contaminated by poisons the dripping-wet point team had unavoidably carried aboard.

  And there’ll be seven more shuttle trips like this before the entire squadron’s ashore.

  The eight-foot-high minisub brought Nyurba and his people as close to the beach as it could. The water was twelve feet deep, and the surf zone was a mile away.

  The men climbed down through the open bottom hatch, crawling into the narrow space between the mini’s hull and the seafloor, much as they’d done under Carter herself twenty minutes ago.

  The water here was unspeakably filthy, and almost completely opaque. The men all tethered themselves together, in single file, by feel, using lanyards.

  Nyurba led the way, guided by a glow-in-the-dark miniature inertial navigation system strapped to his wrist. He also held a waterproof mine detector, using it to check the mud and stones on the bottom in front of him. He wondered how well it would work in these conditions. Stray bits of metal debris, scattered on the bottom, forced him and the parade of divers behind to sidestep often—nothing they walked on exploded.

  It took more than an hour of this, underwater, to get close to shore. As nonchalantly as they could, they proceeded along the bottom until, one by one, their heads and then their torsos broke the surface. They wiped their hood faceplates as clean as they could; Nyurba’s view was streaked by oil and worse.

  Nyurba looked around, catching his first glimpse of his ancestral homeland—now to him foreign soil whose sovereignty he was violating in direct contravention of international law. After they dressed in Russian Army Spetsnaz uniforms, having come here to commit acts of war, if captured he and his men could—according to the Geneva Conventions as Moscow might choose to interpret them—be summarily executed by firing squad.

  Terrific. Welcome to the old country.

  The looming threat didn’t really bother Nyurba. He and his men had arrived to kill or be killed. His rules of engagement said that lethal force was authorized to preserve the security of the operation, and no one could let themselves be taken alive. Each squadron member had a cyanide pill and a pistol; the medics were bringing enough morphine syrettes to—if need be—put all of them to sleep forever. He knew that real Spetsnaz in wartime worked the same way.

  The terrain to Nyurba’s front was barren and flat, the Arctic tundra on the fringe of the Kolyma Lowland. The sound of the surf was muted by his antiradiation hood. The wind was strong, maybe fifteen knots, and blew in his face, off the land.

  They pressed on, plodding through the thigh-high breaking waves that shoved and tugged at their bodies, and onto a strip of gravel that crunched beneath their swim fins and Kevlar combat bootie heels. The mine detector still hadn’t found any mines. The tidal range was modest, but the high-water line was well inland because the beach slope was so gradual. The high-water line was discolored with scum and goo in livid green, sickly pink, and clotted black. Dead fish and dead birds floated among the waves or lay decomposing on the gravel; others had been reduced by hardy bacteria to skeletons, or to nothing but scattered bleached bones and bits of feathers. Nyurba was very glad that his suit and respirator kept out the smells. He saw no sign whatsoever of seals or polar bears, and wasn’t surprised.

  The team made no attempt at concealment. They didn’t remove their firearms from the waterproof equipment bags—not yet. Their radiation suits were colored blaze orange, for maximum visibility. From now on only Russian would be spoken. The intention was to hide in plain sight.

  Their cover story for this mission phase, in the unlikely case that someone came along the beach and asked, was straightforward: They were Navy Spetsnaz troops on a training operation, infiltrating a simulated nuclear battlefield. And it isn’t so “simulated.” They’d locked out of a secret compartment below the waterline of a passing merchant ship beyond the horizon, then used undersea scooters to get close to shore. They were part of a larger unit that was following, who would climb out of the waves soon to join up.

  None of the men carried papers or any ID, since Spetsnaz wouldn’t do so on a practice or full-blown op—nor would rogues or terrorists, or German Kampfschwimmer pretending to be Russian rogues or terrorists.

  Nyurba reached for his respirator mouthpiece, and grabbed it with his gloved hand through the flexible material of his hood—this way he could speak. He
told the nine guys with him to rest while they had the opportunity, then inserted the respirator back between his teeth. They put down their backpacks and bags, unfastened their tethers and lanyards, and removed the Velcro straps—no longer needed—from around their suits, so they could move about more freely. Even so, their walking was slower than normal, ponderous and deliberate; out of the water, the radiation suits and respirators inside were heavy.

  Nyurba glanced out to sea. He examined the lonely floe and its hummock, only four miles away. From here, the camouflage was convincing. The birds that had roosted on it earlier were gone. The horizon in that direction was hazy from mist. The sun was to his right as he gazed at the water, low in the sky, northeast. It provided a glaring, diffuse light through thin overcast.

  It occurred to Nyurba that today was the Fourth of July. Happy birthday, America. The big fireworks haven’t started.

  Nyurba used his instruments to make and record more measurements of the water, the air, and the grit between the larger pieces of gravel. He used a sample kit to collect small portions of the different-colored goos. This information would be of great importance soon, and later.

  Not only would he study it to advise the squadron on which decontamination techniques to follow, and what German-made detoxifying medications to take. Eventually, if they returned from the mission, the data would be invaluable to environmental scientists in the U.S. already planning the postwar global cleanup effort. Secretly quantifying in detail the chemical and radioactive mess in this particular climate, at this high latitude, would fill in crucial blanks, extending available data from nearer the equator, thereby bracketing the latitude range of Europe—still a potential tactical nuclear battleground. Far more realistic, efficient, and cost-effective methods could then be devised to help heal the war-maimed worldwide ecology.