Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

  “Dmitry!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “This device has been screened for radio emissions?”

  “Yes, sir. There are no transmissions. Everything in the tool kit, and the case itself, is dead.”

  Devices such as this frequently included global positioning trackers and transmitters. Its manufacturers might also have placed very tiny listening devices or other intelligence-gathering sensors inside the case, and there was always the possibility that the tool kit had been deliberately abandoned at the warehouse, in order to lead its owners straight to him. In the world of espionage, nothing was ever quite what it seemed.

  So long as it was not actively transmitting to the Americans, it was probably safe, however.

  Probably…

  He set the device back inside the tool kit along with the other items he’d removed, closed it, and signaled to Dmitry.

  “Put this in the safe.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kotenko’s safe was a heavy walk-in downstairs, with walls three inches thick. If the device did start transmitting, the signals could not possibly penetrate those walls.

  “They checked the box and everything in it for RF transmissions in St. Petersburg, sir,” Antonov said as Dmitry walked out of the room with the tool kit. “The devices all are inert.”

  “I don’t pretend to know how these devices work, Mr. Antonov,” Kotenko said. Turning, he walked toward the large double doors leading out onto the western deck. “But I do know there are devices called transponders that will patiently wait to send out a signal, but which do so only when they receive a signal. Until then, the device could well be, as you say, inert.”

  He pushed open the doors and walked outside, with Antonov and the ever-watchful Andre following behind. It was mid-afternoon, and the westering sun glared from the broad expanse of the Black Sea. Laughter, male and female, sounded from somewhere nearby.

  Kotenko walked to the railing. The back deck overlooked his large pool two stories below, where six of his girls were entertaining two senior officers of Gazprom and a member of the Duma, all of whom had been invited to the Sochi dacha for a working weekend.

  At the moment, it appeared to be most enjoyable work. Swimsuits had been discarded some time ago, and shrill feminine laughter chimed from the patio. Expressionless servants silently came and went with bottles of vodka, the vital lubricant of all Russian business meetings.

  “In any case,” Kotenko continued, watching the pleasant scene below from the railing, “I intend to take no chances. I suspect that the communications equipment is from the American NSA… possibly on loan to the CIA, but not necessarily.”

  “The NSA?” Antonov asked. “What is that?”

  “An even larger, more secretive, and more powerful American spy agency than the CIA. The fact that many people have never even heard the name proves how good they are. Did our people carefully check the St. Petersburg shipment for tracking devices planted by the intruders?”

  “Yes, sir. Every square centimeter!”

  “And it was clean?”

  “Some slight radioactivity, but no radio signals of any sort.”

  “Hmm.” Kotenko chewed for a moment on one end of his bushy mustache, thinking hard. “Those… intruders on the waterfront,” he said after a moment, “were American. The equipment they carried proved that.” If the break-in at the warehouse had been engineered by one of the rival gangs of the Organizatsiya, they would have been using Russian, German, or Japanese devices… or less highly advanced American equipment, the sort of stuff in current use by the American military. That might include the light-intensification binoculars-he was pretty sure that such devices were in common use by American Special Forces like the SEALs and the Army Rangers-but the satellite communications equipment was not in widespread use, he was certain. Not yet.

  CIA? Or NSA?

  The CIA was the organization most likely to carry out covert operations-“black ops” he thought was the American term-in foreign countries. The NSA primarily handled electronic eavesdropping, employing a variety of listening devices both on the ground, in aircraft, and in spy satellites. Still, there were persistent rumors that the NSA also ran covert operations like their CIA brothers.

  In the long run it didn’t matter which organization was behind the operation. He did want to know, however, if only because Grigor Kotenko liked to know exactly who his opponents were. Knowing your enemy, knowing who he was and how he thought and what his strengths and weaknesses were, all was a long part of the path to victory.

  The CIA and their operating methods were well known to people in the Organizatsiya like Sergei Braslov, who’d once been GRU, Russian military intelligence. Some of their successes were known, but so, too, were many of their failures.

  The public knew very little about the NSA, however, and that spoke volumes for their efficiency, as well as for their potential deadliness in the arena of international espionage. A successful spy mission was the one of which no one ever heard.

  Kotenko survived because he took no chances. He prospered because he could see angles other people could not and he had the muscle to take advantage of that.

  In fact, Kotenko had believed for some time that the NSA was trying to get a line on him for intelligence purposes, and the St. Petersburg affair had been arranged to give him the upper hand. He’d recruited a low-level enforcer in his organization-Alekseev-to approach an employee at the American consulate in St. Petersburg with information on the beryllium shipment to Iran, and then he’d carefully orchestrated the trap at the waterfront warehouse.

  That ambush should have netted a couple of American agents for deep interrogation. Some of the people working for Kotenko had learned the fine art of interrogation with the KGB, in the basement of the infamous Lubyanka Prison in Moscow during the Soviet era. They enjoyed their work and were quite good at what they did. The information they extracted from prisoners could be most valuable.

  And afterward, if there was anything left, the prisoners might prove to be profitable in other ways, either as insurance or for ransom.

  But the ambush had misfired. There’d been at least two Americans, as Alekseev had promised, but they’d arrived at the warehouse separately and the men led by Mikhaylov, concentrating on Alekseev and the woman with him, had missed the second agent. That second agent had been able to help the woman escape from the trap… but evidently he’d left behind the tool kit in the chaos of the firefight.

  No matter. Kotenko thought he could still make a handsome profit from the affair.

  “The special Rybinsk shipment at St. Petersburg,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Is it safely away?”

  “Yes, sir,” Antonov told him. “It left for Bandar Abbas two days ago, as scheduled.”

  “Then it’s the Iranians’ problem now. Andre!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Alert the staff. We will be going to first-level security here at the dacha. We may be having… visitors.”

  “Immediately, sir.”

  He would also transmit further instructions to Braslov, though he would use Antonov to do so, using a onetime satellite phone, and from a location far removed from the dacha, just to be sure. The enemy might soon be taking an interest in Operation Cold War, as well as in his activities here in Sochi.

  His opponents in this game, whether they were CIA or NSA, were not magical, whatever their reputations might be. They were good, very good, but there were limits to their powers, and to what they were able to pull off with their technology. The Americans were feared, and justly so, for their technological prowess in the military arts, but technology could only take you so far.

  In this game, you needed-what was the American expression?-“boots on the ground,” that was it. The Americans would need to put boots on the ground to get at Kotenko and his operation. When they tried it, he would cut them off at the ankles.

  Meanwhile, he had work to do. The Duma representative from St. Petersburg and the Gazprom ind
ustrialists needed to be convinced that their best interests would be served by a closer alliance with Tambov and what Kotenko could offer them. At the moment, he saw, looking down from the deck, his girls were doing their very best to demonstrate one aspect of Kotenko’s generosity. His guests seemed to be enjoying their visit quite a lot at the moment.

  All three visitors were married, and all three had solid reputations as stolid, sober, and principled businessmen of the post-Soviet era, the new Russia. Vladymir Malyshkin, there, looked a little less than stolid at the moment, with a vodka bottle in one hand, Tanya nude on his lap, and Natasha’s bikini briefs draped over his bald pate like a bright green aviator’s cap.

  Kotenko trusted that both of the film crews hidden in the house were getting all of this.

  In an hour or two, he would go down to the pool and join in the fun. In a few days, at the end of their visit, he would apprise them of some of the other benefits to be found in a closer alliance with Grigor Kotenko-such as the promise that the contents of certain videotapes would not be made public.

  In the meantime, he had special instructions to give to Yuri Antonov.

  Baffin Bay 73° 54' N, 75° 48' W 0920 hours, GMT-6

  Dean sat on the hard, straight-backed seat in the Sea King’s cargo compartment and tried not to think of the next few minutes. He wanted this part of the trip to be over.

  His journey had begun two days ago with a flight on board an aging C-2A Greyhound COD out of Lakenheath for an eleven-hundred-mile flight to the deck of the USS Harry S. Truman, cruising the North Atlantic south of Iceland. “COD” stood for “Carrier On-board Delivery,” and the ugly little Greyhound bounced him down onto the carrier’s flight deck in the middle of a rain-swept night.

  He was on board just long enough for a meal and a friendly argument with the senior chief assigned to escort him, an argument over the carrier’s name. President Harry S Truman was notorious for not having a period after the S in his name, which the President jokingly had claimed was not an initial but his middle name. According to Senior Chief McMasters, though, most official documents, the Truman Library, the Associated Press Handbook, and, frequently, even Truman’s own signature all used a period… as did the carrier’s blue and orange crest on the quarterdeck, with its motto “The Buck Stops Here.”

  Dean told McMasters that he was not convinced and was going to need to do some research on the question when he got back to civilization. The good-natured banter helped Dean keep his mind off the inevitable end of his journey.

  Within another two hours, the COD had been refueled and he was bouncing once again through a stormy night for another thousand-mile flight to Nuuk/Godthab Airport on the rocky west coast of Greenland. That time, he didn’t even get to deplane-not that there was much to see by the cold, near-Arctic glow of sunrise at 0300, local time.

  Then the COD flew him north, far north, up the coast to icebound Thule Air Force Base overlooking Baffin Bay 950 miles north of Nuuk. There he was hustled immediately across the tarmac to a waiting helicopter, an SH- 60F Ocean Hawk, for the final leg of his flight.

  By this time it was the middle of the night by both his watch and his stomach, both of which were still on GMT, but a dim, gray, and heavily overcast morning according to the light, though McMasters had reminded him that the sun never set at this time of the year north of the Arctic Circle. They packed him onto the helo, which promptly lifted off from Thule and flew a straight-line course almost due west, low above the choppy waters of the bay. Soon the cloud deck lowered even more and it began to rain. The aircraft shuddered with heavy gusts of wind, and lightning flared off to the south.

  Just freaking great…

  On board the Truman, they’d packed him into a wet suit, over which they’d placed layers of thermal clothing, a parka, a helmet, and a life jacket, creating a fashion statement that made it tough to move and almost impossible to go to the bathroom. Somehow, though, he’d managed over the past several hours, but when the Ocean Hawk’s crew chief began strapping him into the harness, he started having serious doubts.

  During his Marine career, Dean had fast-roped out of helicopters numerous times, and more than once he’d taken an unscheduled dip in the drink. This time, though, there could be no room for error.

  What was bothering him at the moment was a remembered scene from an old Tom Clancy novel.

  As best as Dean could remember it, the hero had been a CIA officer trying to track down a rogue Soviet submarine. At one point in the story, the officer had been lowered from a helicopter down toward the deck of an American submarine somewhere in the Atlantic. When high winds and rough seas-plus the fact that the helicopter was bingo fuel-had forced the helo crew to abort the operation and start winching the hero back up to safety, the officer had hit the safety release on his harness and dropped into the ocean.

  That hero had, of course, survived his dunking in the frigid Atlantic waters and gone on to win the day in the finest tradition of literary and cinematic heroes everywhere. The waters beneath the Ocean Hawk this morning, though, were bitterly cold, colder even than the water into which Clancy’s fictional hero had fallen. If Dean hit the freezing water of Baffin Bay, he would have a few minutes at best before hypothermia numbed him into insensibility and he drowned.

  The Ocean Hawk was hovering now, and the crew chief slid aside the big side-panel door. Spray from the aircraft’s rotor wash swirled past the cargo compartment, salty and cold.

  At least the rain had stopped.

  “We’re dipping our tallywacker now!” the crew chief said, shouting into Dean’s ear above the thunder of the helo’s rotors. “Think of it as ringing their doorbell!”

  “Yeah!” Dean yelled back. “Or fishing! Fishing for submarines!”

  The chief laughed and clapped Dean on the shoulder.

  Suspended beneath a length of cable, lowered from the Ocean Hawk’s belly, was a dipping sonar, a device sending out intense pings of sound through the water. Normally, it was used to find lurking submarines underwater, pinpointing them by echolocation. This time, though, as the chief had suggested, it was a pre-arranged signal for the submarine to surface.

  Nothing happened for several minutes. Dean, despite his layered Arctic clothing, suppressed a sudden shiver, though whether it had been brought on by the cold or from high-stress anticipation, he couldn’t tell. Then one of the sailors on board the Ocean Hawk pointed out the open door. “There! There she is!”

  Dean followed the man’s pointing finger and saw a white rooster tail of spray on the surface several hundred yards away. A dark, slate-gray shape sliced upward through the foam, becoming the squared-off cliff of a submarine’s sail, its forward hydroplanes extending from either side like small wings. As the vessel continued to rise, a second shape emerged from the spray aft of the sail-an Advanced Seal Delivery System, or ASDS, a miniature submarine just sixty-five feet long and riding on the bigger submarine’s afterdeck like a black, torpedo-shaped parasite.

  In another moment, the deck appeared, immersed in a broad, V-shaped wake. The SSGN Ohio was 560 feet long overall, with a beam of 42 feet; it was startling how tiny the sail and the ASDS looked by comparison with that dark sea monster’s awesome length and mass.

  In another moment, the Ocean Hawk had reeled its dipping sonar back on board and repositioned itself above the surfaced submarine. Dean leaned over, looking down out of the open door, to see the Ohio nested within the disk of the helo’s rotor wash. Men scrambled out of an open deck hatch forward of the sail, and he could see two officers in the tiny, open cockpit on top of the sail, shielding their eyes as they looked up at the Ocean Hawk’s belly. Several of the seamen on the forward deck carried long, slender poles.

  “Don’t worry about those poles!” The crew chief shouted to be heard above the roar. “They’re going to reach up with them and hit your cable before you touch the deck! We’ve built up an electrical charge in flight, and if they don’t bleed it off, it could knock you on your ass!”

&nbs
p; Dean nodded understanding. He’d seen this maneuver done before at sea, especially during stormy weather.

  They were signaling from the deck, waving him on.

  “Okay, Mr. Dean!” the crew chief bellowed. “Out you go! Good luck!”

  “Thanks for the lift!”

  “Don’t worry about the lift! It’s the drop that scares the shit out of me!”

  Gripping the cable attached to his harness, Dean stepped into emptiness. Immediately the prop wash caught him, buffeting him back and forth as he dangled, like bait on a fishing line, beneath the hovering Ocean Hawk. The ear protectors on his helmet shut out much of the roar, but it still felt and sounded like being caught inside a wind tunnel. Below him, five men in heavy, olive-drab parkas, bright orange life jackets, and safety lines waited with upturned faces. Two of them jabbed at him with static discharge poles.

  Of one thing Dean was certain: he was not going to release the harness and drop into the sea. If the Ocean Hawk’s pilot decided to reel Dean back in, he’d be quite happy to accede to their judgment.

  He was starting to drift past the submarine’s hull. He could see one of the men below, however, talking into a headset, and the helicopter’s pilot adjusted, bringing Dean back and gently down. The fear wasn’t as bad as he had thought it would be; somehow, the wind and the pounding of the rotors and the shrill whine of twin high-powered turboshafts and the biting cold all combined to numb the brain and anaesthetize the mind. He dropped lower… still lower and then felt gloved hands grabbing hold of his boots and legs and hauling him down to the deck.

  “Permission to come aboard!” he shouted as they helped him with his harness.

  “Granted!” the chief in charge of the deck party called back. “Welcome aboard!”

  In another instant, the cable was reeling away up into the cargo deck of the Ocean Hawk, and the helicopter, dipping its nose, began arrowing away through leaden skies back to the east, toward Thule. One of the sailors guided Dean with a hand on his shoulder aft toward the open hatch in the deck. “Mind your skull, sir,” the man told him. “It’s a tight fit.”