by Joe Buff
The sniper’s job was to scare off or kill any polar bears that came too close. Polar bears were good swimmers; they negotiated the gaps between grinding floes with ease, and tended to be attracted to any surfaced submarine. The missiles would protect Carter in a different way, from attack by aircraft, but only as a last resort if the Russians opened fire first.
Carter’s topside, fore and aft, grew crowded with men from Kurzin’s team. They opened locker doors faired smoothly into her superstructure — a low, free-flooding casing that ran for much of her length just above the actual pressure hull. With coordination born of constant practice during training, the men hurriedly removed and laid out heavy scrolls — like baseball field ground cloths, only colored bluish-white. Divers were lowered on lifelines, and they fastened one edge of the cloths to Carter’s port side below her waterline. Other men threw grapnels, attached to thick manila ropes, past the ship’s starboard side, grabbing at the border of a large floe that drifted beyond a gap of fifteen yards of sea; the old-fashioned manila was needed because it wouldn’t stretch like modern nylon. Still other men lowered cylinder-shaped bumpers, attached to nylon lines, into the watery gap on the starboard side. They each played out some twenty feet of line, placing the bumpers to protect the widest part of Carter’s hull, then fastened the free ends to light-duty cleats that unfolded from the superstructure.
Nyurba could hear Kurzin shouting angrily for his men to work faster. Two from the commando team, Seabees under Nyurba, came up through the sail trunk, standing on upper rungs of the vertical ladder, with more rolled cloths across their shoulders.
Harley noticed them, inspected the other frenzied activity, gestured for them to come up, and then used his lip mike. “Helm, Bridge, on auxiliary maneuvering units, translate ship to starboard until physical contact is made with floe. Make your rate of closing one-tenth knot.” He sounded, if anything, jaunty, as if he were at a yacht club event — Harley seemed the type who’d belong to one, too.
The Seabees squeezed awkwardly into the overcrowded cockpit. They began to unfold the sheets they carried and lowered their edges over the sides of the sail, a twenty-five-foot drop into the hands of men waiting below on the hull; Nyurba’s chief almost poked him hard in the eye with his elbow. The lookouts, the missileers, and the sniper led one cloth aft on the sail roof, making sure it lined up with holes meant for Carter’s masts, then wriggled out from underneath. They tossed the cloth’s free end down at the back of the sail, then stood on the cloth and resumed their vigils. The Seabees fastened it to the other cloth, now draped over the front part of the sail. This cloth piece had a square hole cut for the cockpit, so Nyurba and Harley could see.
Captain Harley would speak into his lip mike now and then, saying things like, “Very well, Sonar,” or “ESM, Bridge, Aye,” or “On the acoustic link, signal minisub, ‘Understood.’ ” His vessel was at battle stations, and he had the deck and the conn. Two Seahorse III probes were on station, wide apart, miles ahead of the ship, their stealthy antennas raised, passing live signals intercepts back through the tethers to the NSA specialists and Carter’s supercomputer. There was still a chance, or so Nyurba hoped, that they’d pick up something useful to Kurzin later.
Nyurba felt a bump and saw a sloshing of greenish water, as Carter eased alongside and touched the floe. Harley had made very sure that her horizontal sternplanes would be far enough aft past the end of the floe to not be endangered by the invisible, hard, unyielding underwater part of this gigantic slab of ice.
Men handling the grapnel lines ceased taking in the slack. Keeping them taut, they wrapped their ends of the manila ropes around large unfolding cleats, ones big enough to hold against immense strain.
The divers, back up on the hull, swam across and climbed onto the floe. The whole thing projected barely a couple of feet out of the water, on average. Its sides were a wet, translucent blue; swells would slap against it, and seawater sloshed and sluiced in puddles and rivulets near its fringes. Its middle, almost as big as two football fields joined end to end, was featureless and flat. Dry parts of the top were covered with what looked to Nyurba like white detergent power — recent sleet or granular snow.
Carter was made fast to the floe, whose smooth bottom extended twenty feet beneath the waves. The third Seahorse probe had checked, and Kurzin and Harley had agreed that, from the several floes they’d examined while staying submerged, this one would do best. Camouflage-cloth edges were passed across to the floe, and were firmly fastened using ceramic-composite spikes.
Kurzin, on the hull near where the minisub had been carried, shouted something. In a moment the phone talker spoke. “Colonel Kurzin asks, How do we look?”
Nyurba inspected their handiwork. Carter, draped in a tenting of camouflage cloth that extended over the water and onto the ice, would pass well enough for a medium-tall hummock at one side of a flat floe, a not uncommon shape for something broken off the edge of the pack ice. The cloth suppressed any heat signature and gave off a radar reflection similar to ice.
“What do you think, sir?” Nyurba asked Harley.
Harley smiled. “Perfect.”
“I agree.” Nyurba told the phone talker to ask Kurzin if they were ready to test the mooring lines yet.
“All men are off the floe and out of the water on deck, sir,” the phone talker said.
As the hubbub of manual labors subsided, sea birds began to alight on the floe, and even on portions of Carter.
“Good,” Harley said. “An illusion of normalcy.”
“Agree, sir. Can’t hurt.”
Harley used his intercom mike, sounding as always brisk and precise. “Helm, Bridge, ahead one-third, maintain present ship’s heading, using rudder as required. Make turns for three knots, inform maneuvering room that steam throttle will need to be opened wider due to drag of large moored load.”
Harley listened on his headset, and seemed satisfied. “Very well, Helm.”
Water churned aft of Carter’s rudder. The mooring lines creaked and seawater squirted from between their strands as they drew extra tight, but they held. Carter and the floe began to move, slightly crabwise until the helmsman found the rudder deflection that kept the lash-up on a straight course.
“Sir,” the phone talker said, “Colonel Kurzin reports special topside watch is set to monitor for gaps in cloth and possible problems with mooring.”
Harley made eye contact with Nyurba. He wasn’t smiling now.
“Let’s hope the Russians don’t notice we aren’t moving quite like the rest of the sea ice…. And that we don’t get in someone’s way in the Northern Sea Route shipping lane, so an icebreaker comes pay a visit to shove us aside.”
Nyurba just nodded. He could think of other things that might go wrong. When the sea ice around them now began to dwindle, as they eased their way toward the Alazeja River mouth, they’d appear more and more like an errant floe with a peculiar mind of its own. Given the restricting bottom contours and extremely shallow depth in this whole area, Carter would have to follow a course that bucked the trend of normal floe drift. At least the prevailing wind and surface current were mostly in their favor.
“Phone Talker,” Harley said crisply, “inform Colonel Kurzin that nonessential personnel may go below.”
“Colonel Kurzin acknowledges, sir.”
“Very well,” Harley said. “Helm, Bridge. Right five degrees additional rudder, use auxiliary maneuvering units to aid the course change, make your course one-five-five. Make turns for four knots.”
The helmsman acknowledged. Nyurba glanced aft. The white rudder shifted slightly, ropes creaked and ice groaned, and the floe began to rotate compared to those around it. Their heading steadied, south-southeast.
“We’re leaving a bit of a wake,” Nyurba said to Harley.
“Pump jet’s cavitating too. Can’t be helped. It’ll die down somewhat when the floe gets up to speed.”
“Understood, Captain. But what if an aircraft comes close?”
> “I’ll order all stop till it’s gone. If a wake-anomaly ASW satellite’s watching, even if they can pick us out from all this environmental clutter, they might think they’re seeing turbulence from a misshapen part of an ice keel. Right now my biggest worry is the sea ice gets too crowded and we hit something big, or need to nudge our way through with force to keep going.”
“Would the mooring lines hold if that happened?”
“Depends. We hit too much warm air, the mooring spikes could melt free on their own.”
Nyurba grunted. There wasn’t much he could say. He just hoped that this stunt was so reckless and offbeat that the Russians would never guess at the truth. In a few hours at four knots, with Carter’s surfaced draft displacing over thirty feet, her keel would almost be brushing the bottom. Even if the Russian Navy drove them off by nonlethal means, the mission would end in embarrassing failure — raising questions in Kremlin minds that would preclude a similar mission attempt in the future. The catastrophic result, Nyurba knew, as Commodore Fuller had put it succinctly, would be Apocalypse Soon or Apocalypse Later.
Chapter 19
Weps, Bridge,” Harley said blandly, “deploy Seahorse III unit from tube six to examine our projected track for obstructions or mines.” This was the probe that had studied the undersides of floes, while the units from tubes seven and eight listened in for Russian signals. Harley waited a beat. “Very well, Weps.” He turned to Nyurba. “Mines are doubtful in these parts, I think, but you never know. And an uncharted wreck could ruin our whole day.”
“Yep.”
“You can stay up here or not, Commander,” Harley said. “Your choice, but please don’t feel you have to keep up with me. You need your sleep before we make landfall. I rather doubt I’ll get much myself for a while. ESM room says we’re being tickled by Bear-F radars, now and again. So far, just intermittent routine search sweeps, but it could get exciting later.”
“Captain, is that your way of telling me to sleep well?”
Harley grinned broadly, enjoying himself. “Take a nice nap. We’ll be fine.”
Nyurba turned away.
“ESM, Bridge, aye,” he heard Harley say into his lip mike. “ESM, Bridge, wait one.”
The change in Harley’s tone caught Nyurba’s attention.
“Commander, the NSA boys say they have something for you.”
“What?”
“Here. Talk to them.” Harley handed Nyurba his headset.
“Where’s Colonel Kurzin?” Nyurba asked the phone talker.
The young crewman used his microphone. “Sir, Colonel Kurzin is topside, aft.”
Nyurba pulled the headset on, and spoke to one of the NSA signals analysts. The Seahorses had overheard what was encoded as a routine administrative supply requisition, but the context — once flagged and decoded by the supercomputer — revealed the schedule of the next shift change for the silo crews at the missile field that was the special ops squadron’s ultimate destination and target. The analyst gave Nyurba the information.
“Captain,” Nyurba asked with sudden impatience, “can the phone talker by the colonel be patched into this intercom?”
“Negative. The circuits are incompatible.”
“Phone Talker,” Nyurba said, “inform Colonel Kurzin that…” He tried to choose how to phrase it. Intel reports had amply confirmed that silo crews rotated every three days. But because of deception tactics such as dummy activity at Russian missile fields, no one could be positive when real shift changes took place. Satellite imagery analysts in the U.S. had, with care, formulated a best estimate. Now, too late, it was realized they’d been wrong. “Next shift change is in four to six hours.”
The phone talker repeated this stark fact into his mike, verbatim, then waited for an answer.
“Colonel Kurzin says, excuse me, sir, he says ‘Shit.’ ”
“Your boss is nothing if not pithy,” Harley said.
“I need your rig,” Nyurba told the phone talker. He returned Harley’s intercom headset and donned the sound-powered phones. “This is Commander Nyurba,” he told the crewman at the other end. “Have Colonel Kurzin put on your rig.” He waited.
“Kurzin.”
“Nyurba here, sir.”
“If the next change is in only two days, then the one after that is in five days, not six like we were told.”
“I know, sir,” Nyurba said. “It’s either that or wait for the following one, in eight days.”
“We can’t afford to loiter or dawdle! I won’t add three extra days in-country, with thirty times the risk! We’d destroy our coordination with Challenger too!”
“Then we have to make the approach march over four days, sir, not five. The men will arrive exhausted, going straight into the assault.”
“Don’t you think I know that? We have no choice…. All right. So be it. At least now we know what we needed to know.” Kurzin sighed. “Meet me in the command center in ten minutes…. We’ve got to rework our entire schedule and the whole damn duty roster among eighty men. Find different route waypoints and encampments, change everybody’s man-packed loads, less food and more ammo. Christ.”
“Sir, we have almost a full day before we reach shore.”
“We’ll need every minute of it.” He paused as if he wanted to say something else, but didn’t. “Out,” Kurzin ended testily.
Nyurba gave back the sound-powered rig.
“More time pressure?” Harley asked.
“To put it mildly, Captain.”
Before going below, Nyurba looked around one last time, at the austere yet beautiful scenery. Local time was midnight. But the sun, a misshapen golden orb softened by mist and fog in the distance, kissed the horizon in full view, glinting off intervening spots of open water. Kurzin for a moment felt disoriented and slightly depressed, in the same way he’d get from extreme jet lag. Something was wrong, something that made the vista seem like a landscape on an alien planet. Then he put his finger on it: the sun was due north. For days yet, until summer aged more past the solstice, the sun at this latitude would circle round and round the entire horizon and never set.
It seemed unnatural, although he understood astronomically why it happened. He took his leave of Captain Harley, and climbed down the ladder. As he reached the second of the two open watertight hatches in Carter’s sail trunk, he had a disturbing thought. All too soon, if things went as planned, he’d be unleashing new suns that were horribly more unnatural.
For a day, the strange little flotilla moved south. Carter steamed at four knots, moored to the ice floe. The minisub, small enough to stay submerged even in such shallows, followed beside, getting good fuel economy at such a low cruising speed. The Seahorse IIIs probed ahead and to both flanks, checking the bottom and airwaves for threats or new information. The special ops squadron leadership cadre, Kurzin and Nyurba especially, used the Multi-Mission Platform’s command center nonstop, to revise their logistics and land-travel arrangements, since the NSA experts’ signals intercept told them they’d lost a valuable day. The stay-behind support section, and the eighty commandos who’d go on the raid, ate and slept when they could, which was rarely.
The changes didn’t just involve computer and console work. Most of over a hundred hermetically sealed heavy backpacks and equipment bags, already combat-loaded in the U.S., had to be opened, spread out, reloaded with a different mix of contents, and checked and sealed again, one by one. This needed to be performed in the cable-tapping clean-room chamber, under antiseptic conditions, to avoid leaving the slightest forensic trace — particulates, lubricants, lint — that would reveal that the packs and bags had ever been aboard a U.S. Navy submarine. The process was an annoying, exhausting chore.
Twice near the start of the passage south through the East Siberian Sea, men in dry suits had to cross to the floe, hiding under the tented camouflage cloth, and emplace new mooring spikes as previous ones came loose. Other men, in parkas and ski pants, stationed on Carter’s hull, often needed to take u
p the slack on the lines while the floe slowly shrank from melting, as by the hour both air and sea grew ever slightly warmer. Nyurba and Kurzin took turns overseeing this work. When free, Nyurba would climb down a hatch and go into the command center, to note the broader situation status on the displays.
Coastal sea surveillance radars swept over Carter wearing her disguise. Their signal strengths were gradually rising, coming from directions that — thanks to Commodore Fuller’s trick with his decoy and K-335—presented few surprises and so far posed no risk of counterdetection as anything other than an ice floe. But Nyurba was experienced enough at combat to understand how radars would play cat-and-mouse. Some were mobile, driving quickly elsewhere after they’d given themselves away, to peek again from a bearing and range that might be a lot more dangerous. Not all installations would radiate during a single alert, to be able to electronically bushwhack the enemy later. That steadily approaching hostile shore held many unknown risks.
Nyurba increasingly felt as if Rear Admiral Meredov was watching for him and his team in a personal way.
Patrol boats with antiship cruise missiles more than once crossed Carter’s path. Were these patrols routine, or were they sneaking into position to get Carter surrounded where they knew she couldn’t possibly dive? Three times Carter’s lookouts saw merchant ships go by much closer than the horizon; their navigation radars, once detected, could be tracked, and Harley made very sure that none were collision dangers. But the Russians sometimes used merchant ships for spying or counterespionage. Did these have concealed sonar rooms and passive arrays below their waterlines, recording every whiff of tonals and broadband that Carter gave off?
The closer the floe drifted toward the nuclear-waste dumping ground — with Carter surreptitiously pushing — the less Russian forces of any type came within visual range. The continental shelf continued rising. When the bottom of his ship got too near the bottom of the sea, Harley ordered that several variable ballast tanks be pumped dry, to raise Carter’s hull slightly higher out of the water. Soon, Nyurba knew, even that wouldn’t be enough.