Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

  “Negative,” Lia told him. “All that’ll do is tell them where we are, and give them a chance to surround us.”

  “Damn…” He lowered the weapon. “Those dogs will find us…”

  “We’ll worry about that when they get closer.” Lia was angry, and the words came out more harshly than she’d intended.

  She was angry at herself, though she was having some trouble identifying just what it was that had made her so mad. They’d done everything right, so far as she could tell, taking the op step-by-step.

  But in this kind of work, any operation that ended with shots being fired was a failure, at least on some level. The opposition should never have even known they were there. It was the op on the St. Petersburg waterfront all over again… and the second op in a row for her to end in a firefight. This was getting old very, very fast.

  The two men and the dog were closer now… about fifty yards away. They were walking slowly, and the man in front had a flashlight that he was using to examine the bushes and shadowed recesses on both sides of the road. Other men were spreading out in the distance, some going down to the beach, others following the road to the northwest.

  And she could hear the crack and snap of still more searchers in the woods directly across the road now, moving unseen among the trees.

  “Dragon!” Akulinin whispered. “Any time now would be very good!”

  “Another kilometer,” was the reply. “Can you show me a light?”

  “Negative!” Lia replied. “We have bad guys right across the road from us, and more coming along the road! If we move, they’ll spot us!”

  The tactical situation, she realized, was deteriorating to the impossible. Even if the van arrived right now, there were enough gunmen about to lay down a deadly barrage.

  “Listen, Dragon,” Lia said. “I think we need another plan. You can’t come in here without getting killed!”

  “Already got a plan, m’lady!” Llewellyn replied. “Sit tight! We’ll have you out of there in a mo’!”

  The two walking down the road were twenty yards away. The dog, its nose to the earth, whined, then growled.

  “Can I take them now?” Akulinin whispered.

  Something dropped out of the night.

  Even with the LI goggles, it was hard to see what it was, but it looked like a bird or a bat, and it was swooping low in front of the two guards with a flutter of wings, making both of the men shout and duck.

  It took Lia a second to realize what was happening. The dragonfly! Someone back in the Art Room had brought the dragonfly in as a diversion!

  At almost the same moment, a vehicle came careening up the road from the southeast, traveling backward at a high rate of speed. Lia could see the taillights glowing brilliantly in her goggles, followed by the sudden flash and glare of the brake lights.

  The guard with the flashlight raised his assault rifle.

  “Yes!” she told Akulinin. “Now!”

  They opened fire together, sending a fusillade of 9mm rounds slamming into the two guards, and both collapsed in a tangle at the side of the road. The dog, its leash trailing behind it, bolted toward them and was in mid-leap when the dragonfly slammed into its back. The animal yelped and turned, snapping at something no longer there. The dragonfly swooped once more…

  And then the van was there, the back door open, with Vasily leaning out and waving them on. More men were crashing down through the woods on the other side of the vehicle, and somewhere up the road a burst of automatic weapons fire cracked against the night.

  “Don’t forget your tool kit!” Lia called as she dove for the back of the van, lunging in headfirst.

  Akulinin didn’t answer as he landed heavily beside her, but she saw that he did, indeed, still have the heavy metal box with him.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Vasily was screaming as more gunfire cracked and thundered close by. Lia heard the clang of bullets piercing metal, but Llewellyn, in the driver’s seat, had floored the accelerator and the heavy vehicle peeled rubber as it sped up. Through the open back doors of the van, Lia got a glimpse of running figures on the road well behind them, until Vasily managed to slam both doors shut.

  There were bullet holes in the windows of the back door and more in the side of the van, just above their heads. That had been entirely too close…

  “Hang on!” Llewellyn called back to them. “Next stop, the Georgian border!”

  Lia lay on the floor of the van, trying to slow the galloping pace of her heart.

  Behind them, the dragonfly swooped far and high out over the Black Sea before suddenly inverting and plunging at high speed into the water. On the security camera pole at the dacha entrance, the piece of hardware left behind by the probe burned as its magnesium casing ignited, a tiny, hot star at the top of the pole that left nothing behind but a severed length of cable and a charred spot on the wood.

  This time, no incriminating hardware would be left behind.

  18

  USGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 0915 hours, GMT-12

  DEAN SAT AT THE WARDROOM table, staring into the screen on his handheld PDA. Rubens’ lined face stared back out at him. “I know, Mr. Dean,” Rubens was saying. “But the President was most insistent. We treat this as a terrorist hostage situation.”

  Captain Grenville had let Dean use the wardroom for his communications session with Fort Meade. The Ohio had shifted position some seventy miles to the north of Ice Station Bear, taking her closer to the Russian ships parked in the ice. An hour ago she’d surfaced in a polynya, rising just enough to extend the sub’s communications mast and establish a link with one of the National Security Agency’s dedicated comsats. The image on Dean’s handheld tended to fuzz and break up at times-atmospherics were still playing hell with RF signals, and the satellite was quite close to the horizon-but at least there was nothing on the horizon to block the signal completely.

  “But suppose the hostages aren’t there any longer?” Dean said. “Suppose they’ve been moved to the mainland?”

  “Fourteen, fifteen people, plus their guards, would need a fairly large transport,” Rubens told him. “Something the size of a Hip at least.”

  “Hip” was the NATO designation for the Russian Mi-8 helicopter, an old design going back to the early 1960s, but still common both throughout the Russian Federation and with numerous Russian military export customers.

  “And there’s one of those operating off the Lebedev,” Dean said, nodding.

  “Right. But satellite reconnaissance has picked up no air traffic at all between the Russian base and the mainland. It’s nine hundred miles at least to the nearest land base; that’s a flight time of six and a half hours for a chopper… and an Mi-8 would require at least two refuelings en route. It doesn’t have air-to-air fueling capabilities, so it would have to land on ships with helipads. We have some holes in our satellite coverage up there, but none big enough that we wouldn’t have seen an operation of that size. If the Russians had moved our people to the mainland, we’d have spotted it.”

  Dean didn’t have the same faith in high-tech magic that Rubens did, but he was willing to accept that Desk Three was satisfied that the Americans were still at the Russian ice base. But he could see a lot of problems blocking any attempt to get them out.

  “Is there any way of imaging those ships to get an idea of where our people might be held?”

  We’ve been collecting a lot of satellite recon data,” Rubens told him, “especially from the IRSAT series. We’ve been building up a coherent picture over the past couple of days. Here…”

  The image on Dean’s handheld screen changed from Rubens’ face to a photograph of the Lebedev, taken from overhead and to one side. The picture then changed, becoming fuzzy, green, and somewhat translucent, as the ice and water around the vessel turned black and certain parts of the ship, her engine rooms in particular, glowed in mingled tones of white, yellow, and pale green. A number of light green dots were scattered in irregular clumps through the s
hip.

  “Infrared imagery,” Rubens said. “Heat. IRSAT is sensitive enough to pick up the heat radiated by a living human body, even behind walls. The detector’s not sensitive enough to pick up warm bodies on the lower decks, but the walls of the superstructure are pretty thin. We’re picking up sixty human signatures here.”

  “That’s less than half of the Lebedev’s complement.”

  “Correct. But we can see where people are congregating in the superstructure. The bridge. Berthing quarters. Mess room. And here…” A red disk winked on, highlighting a tight clump of green dots near the aft end of the superstructure. “And here. The supply lockers.”

  “Interesting.”

  “We count sixteen human-sized heat sources in this one area. Our ship experts believe these would have been stores lockers, which are empty now, after months at sea. Good places to quarter a large number of supernumeraries.”

  “Hostages, you mean,” Dean said. “And their guards. Okay. I’ll buy it.”

  “You’ll need to use that special equipment to try to confirm their location,” Rubens told him as the image was replaced once more by his face. “I’ve already spoken with Lieutenant Taylor. You will accompany the SEALs on board the ship. Just try to stay out of their way. Let them do their business.”

  Dean groaned inwardly, however. No military commander liked being micromanaged, and none liked it when spooks, no matter how high up they were on the org chart, told them they had to drag along unwanted baggage. He kept his feelings to himself, however, and simply nodded at the handheld’s optical pickup. “Of course.”

  “We’ve had a breakthrough, of sorts, thanks to Lia and the new man, Akulinin.”

  “Their op went okay then?”

  “Well enough.” Something about Rubens’ expression on the tiny screen told Sean it hadn’t been as simple as that. “They’re both okay. They made it through to the Georgian border, then to Turkey. They’re still in Ankara, waiting for a flight back to the U.S.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. What did they find?”

  “The three ships up there in the ice are part of an operation called Deep Well, or GK- 1,” Rubens told him. “It’s a new and experimental drilling process for oil.”

  “Pretty much what we thought, then.”

  “Yeah. The unexpected part is the drilling platform.”

  “They’re using the ship, right? The Lebedev?”

  “No. Or, rather, not directly. The drilling platform is underwater.”

  “So. Literally ‘Deep Well.’ How the hell did they pull that off?”

  “Lia found a report on Kotenko’s computer that let us piece things together.”

  The screen cut to a series of schematic views, plans and elevations of something that looked more or less like a conventional ship with a slender midships section between much larger bow and stern sections. Dean was strongly reminded of the FLIP, or Floating Instrument Platform, an odd-looking vessel used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography since the 1960s. Like FLIP, the Russian undersea oil platform appeared to be designed with ballast tanks that let it rotate ninety degrees into a vertical position, bow high. It could then be anchored by cables to piers sunken at the planned drill site, and then, unlike with FLIP, ballast and trim tanks could submerge the structure to any desired depth, all the way down to three thousand feet. The drilling rig ran down the length of the vessel, from bow to stern; feeder tubes could be raised to the surface on flotation buoys to take on air if necessary, though he saw provisions in the blueprints for desalinization plants to make fresh water, and hydrolysis units to break oxygen out of seawater. Other tubes could be raised in order to pump oil or natural gas up to a waiting tanker.

  “GK-1 is a prototype,” Rubens continued, “a test bed for new technology and proof-of-concept. The bugs Lia planted in Sochi have led us to a Houston company called Wildcat Technologies.” More schematics appeared of a design identical to the Russian structure. “They call the thing Deepsea. It’s an oil rig anchored to the sea floor at a depth of anything from a few hundred feet to half a mile down. Teleoperated robots and something like the Canadian arm used on the Space Shuttle let them take drill segments passed down from a ship on the surface, piece them together one after another, and add them to the drill train.”

  Dean studied the schematics for a moment. “So… it doesn’t need anything at the surface at all? The whole thing’s entirely underwater?”

  “Obviously, once the structure’s in place, it needs to be serviced by ships on the surface. During the drilling operation, a vessel like the Lebedev lowers the drill sections down to the rig, but once the well is producing, the design allows supply ships to come and go without needing to shut down the operation between visits. A relatively small crew lives on board the submerged rig. Docking ports here… and here allow miniature submarines to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the surface. The whole thing can be self-sufficient for a couple of months at a time, maybe longer.”

  “Like one of our nuclear missile subs,” Dean said. “They can stay submerged for months. I don’t see any engines, though.”

  “The structure is designed to be towed into place. No engines, except for station-keeping thrusters. Oil or natural gas brought up from the sea floor is pumped into large collapsible bladders secured to the hull until they can be transferred to a tanker. The bladders increase the structure’s buoyancy as they fill, of course, but that’s counteracted by progressively flooding onboard ballast tanks.”

  “So the whole drill rig can’t be affected by waves or storms, and they can carry out long-term drilling operations underneath the ice.” Dean nodded. “Slick.”

  “Exactly. Icebreakers give access from the surface when they need to send down supplies, or to fill a tanker. When a well gives out, they just attach guide cables from above, release the anchor cables below, and float the structure up to a hole cut in the surface ice, where it’s righted. Then they tow the whole thing to a new location.”

  “So what’s the payoff?” Dean asked. “It sounds expensive.”

  “It is. The big oil companies have been using semi-submersible rigs since the 1960s, using ballast tanks to partially sink the rig, but this idea required a lot of new technology. The project was initiated ten years ago, with the idea of developing an oil platform immune to storms.”

  That made sense, Dean thought. There’d been several nightmarish accidents when storms had toppled conventional oil rigs on the surface. He remembered reading about one, the Ocean Ranger, a drilling platform that had sunk in a storm in the North Atlantic in 1982, killing all eighty-four people on board.

  “There’s also a considerable public relations bonus if it works,” Rubens went on. “Environmentalist groups have been targeting visible drilling operations off of Los Angeles, and in the Texas gulf. If the drill platforms are out of sight, they’re out of mind. That was the idea, anyway.

  “But the real advantage, of course, would be for drilling underneath the Arctic ice cap. A couple of the global oil giants have been working on the technology for some time, now. They’ve known for years that the North Slope fields extend pretty way out into the Arctic basin. They just weren’t sure how far, or how extensive they might be. The Russians have been doing exploratory drilling up there for at least fifteen years now. According to the data Lia found on Kotenko’s computer, it’s a bonanza.”

  “You said this is an American design?” Dean asked. “Did the Russians buy it, or did they steal it?”

  “We’re… investigating that. We’ve come across an interesting tidbit. One of the Greenpeace people at Ice Station Bear used to be a mid-level manager at Wildcat Technologies.” A new image came up onscreen, a dark-haired, bearded man with a worried look on his face. “Harry Benford. According to some of the intelligence we developed in Solchi, he evidently was working for the Russians. He might have provided them with the Deepsea engineering specs.”

  “Something’s not right here,” Dean said. “When I was at the ice station
, we found that little one-channel radio receiver in the bunk belonging to either Steven Moore or Randy Haines. Seems like it’s pushing things a bit to assume that there were two Russian spies at the base.”

  “I agree. It would have been easy enough for Benford to plant the radio in another bunk, especially in all of the confusion when the Russians arrived at the base. Of course, it’s also possible that Wildcat was cutting a backroom deal with Moscow.”

  “Oh?”

  “We’ve been doing some checking. Wildcat is in deep financial trouble right now. The company put a lot of money into R and D for this thing, but the oil companies that might have purchased Deepsea are holding off on investing in the new technology.”

  “God. Why? This looks like a really decent idea.”

  “Because it is so damned expensive. Because a lot of the technology is still unproven. And the way things are going with the Arctic environment, it may be they just need to wait a few years for all of the ice up there to melt. Then they could build cheaper, traditional ocean-rig platforms.”

  But the Russians, Dean thought, might not want to wait for that to happen.

  “Anyway,” Rubens went on, “there are laws that would block the transfer of some of this technology to another country. The Justice Department will be investigating to see if any of those laws were broken by Wildcat… or if this is simply a case of simple industrial espionage.”

  “I see.” Dean considered the situation for a moment. “So we’re going to take them down.”

  He didn’t like this. It was inevitable, perhaps, that as oil reserves dwindled around the world, as war continued to wrack the Middle East, as the demand for oil increased, those countries dependent on petroleum for economic and political stability would begin to squabble among themselves over what was left. It was a depressingly Malthusian scenario.

  “Just so you know, Dean,” Rubens said, “this is not about oil.”

  Damn. Sometimes Dean swore that Rubens could read minds. “No, sir. I didn’t say it was.” Not out loud, at any rate.