Arctic Gold

by Stephen Coonts

  Minutes dragged by as the deck rocked gently beneath Dean’s feet. The minisub’s commander must be juggling his trim and ballast tanks, trying to keep the ASDS at a motionless hover beneath the surface.

  “Right,” Taylor said, still listening to his earpiece. “The Ohio is surfacing.”

  And Dean could hear it now, a kind of heavy, crackling thunder filtering through the thick steel hull of the ASDS, sounding both muffled and very close.

  “That’s our cue,” Taylor said, removing the headset. “Let’s get wet! Hoskins!”

  “Sir!”

  “You make sure our… ah… guest makes it to the roof.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  The SEALs stood in the cramped compartment, gathering up their gear in tightly secured satchels, checking straps and buckles on one another, making sure everything was cinched tight and that there was no loose equipment to tangle, trip over, or fall. The SEAL behind Charlie Dean turned him around and tugged at several straps, then checked the settings on the Dräger unit secured to his chest before clapping him on the shoulder and motioning him forward.

  Dean waited in line, then, as the SEALs, two by two, entered the lock-out chamber. Since the ASDS was hovering just a few feet beneath the surface, they didn’t have to lock the doors and pump water in and out of the chamber each time. Instead, the air pressure inside the submarine kept the seawater from entering the lock-out chamber; when it was Dean’s turn to go, he ducked his head to step through into the spherical compartment and saw black water lapping in the open, circular hatch in the deck. Hoskins, the SEAL assigned to get him to the surface, pointed and gave him a gentle shove. Careful not to snag his baggy suit on the hatch combing, and with his waterproof gear bundle clasped tight in one hand, Dean stepped into the water, sliding down a pole extended from the side of the hatch for the purpose, letting himself sink.

  Deep, blue-green water closed over his head, and he felt the sharp bite of the cold at exposed portions of skin at wrists and ankles. The dry suit kept the rest of his body dry, however, and the temperature overall seemed cool but not cold. For a scary instant, claustrophobia threatened to close him in and paralyze his breathing, but he forced himself to stay calm and to continue to pull in each breath at a slow, steady pace. His Marine training kicked in, and he began to move to one side, getting out from under the open hatchway above him.

  Air rasped through his face mask, dry and cold. Unlike a standard SCUBA rig, the Dräger unit received his exhalations without releasing a telltale column of bubbles.

  The red lighting inside the ASDS had allowed the men’s dark adaptation to kick in during the hour-long cruise after releasing from the Ohio. Dean found himself adrift in a surreal blue-green cosmos with crystal-clear visibility, but where it was almost impossible to judge scale or distance. The ASDS loomed directly overhead; to his left was a curving steel cliff extending for some distance into the depths-the underwater portion of the Lebedev’s side. Beyond the ASDS, there appeared to be a ceiling of tortured, convoluted ice, the surfaces smooth and rounded but piled and folded into fantastic geometries that teased and tricked the eye.

  The surface of the water around the ship appeared clear of ice, however. Sunlight blazed and danced with the movement of the water, with shafts of light entering from above almost parallel to the surface. Below, the blue-green emptiness deepened into midnight black, a yawning gulf far beneath Dean’s gently stroking swim fins.

  Toward the aft end of the Lebedev, Dean could see the vast and shadowy shapes of the ship’s massive screws, along with several cables that appeared to descend straight down into blackness. In the opposite direction, toward the bow, he could just make out a shadowy something snug against the Lebedev’s side, but details were lost in the blue-green haze of ice-roofed water and scattering sun dance from above.

  Dean was having some trouble. Though skilled with re-breathers as well as standard SCUBA gear, thanks to Marine training decades before, he’d never used a full-face mask, and each time he breathed out, he tended to loosen the mask’s seal with his face slightly. Icy water had already seeped in between the mask and his face and was collecting now at the bottom of the faceplate, salty at his lips. Awkwardly, one-handed because he was still holding his gear, he tried to clear it, pushing down on one side, turning his head, and exhaling hard to force the water out.

  “Team one!” Taylor’s voice said over the underwater radio. “Deploy…”

  Dean felt a sharp tug at his elbow; Hoskins hovered at his side, jerking his thumb up toward the surface. Dean’s mask still wasn’t clear, but he nodded and followed the SEAL toward the gleaming, shifting light, knowing he could remove the mask once he broke the surface. Several gentle kicks were sufficient to propel Dean toward the rust-streaked steel cliff ahead, then straight up along the Lebedev’s side. In another moment, his head broke the surface.

  He and three other SEALs had surfaced directly alongside the ship, which towered over them now, the side black against an intensely blue sky. They were so close that the chop of the water bumped them up against the metal; anyone on deck wouldn’t have been able to see them without leaning out over the starboard rail.

  Hoskins and another SEAL had taken up positions in the water several yards out from the ship, kicking gently to stay on the surface while holding submachine guns to their shoulders, the weapons trained at the railing above. They were the fire team one water security element, carrying special CAR-15s modified for use in seawater, with sound suppressors on their muzzles and with laser-sight targeting modules attached to their rails. “Water security,” in this instance, meant staying in the water to provide cover for the rest of the SEALs as they went up the side. They’d already pulled out the tight-fitting plastic plugs in muzzles and receivers that kept the salt water out of the weapons and were training them now on the ship’s main deck.

  A black rubber boat had been inflated and secured to the ship’s side with a length of white line and a powerful ceramic magnet with a mooring eye. Some of the SEALs had already removed fins, face masks, and Draeger units and tossed them into the boat, freeing them for the ascent. It was amazing how swiftly the evolution was proceeding. These men, Dean realized, had practiced this sort of maneuver time after time after time, until they had the closely choreographed movements down perfectly.

  “Ladders up,” a voice said.

  “Deck clear,” said another.

  Dean turned in the water and saw that two more SEALs had used long, telescoping poles taken from racks on the outside hull of the ASDS to raise a pair of boarding ladders up the side, hooking the upper ends of the ladders over the Lebedev’s gunwale. As soon as the narrow chain ladders were in place, the SEALs of teams two and four were on their way up, moving swiftly and with an elegant and death-silent economy of motion.

  “Fire team two, on deck!” a voice called over the radio. “Target! Engaging!…”

  “Team four, on deck! Moving aft!…”

  The assault on the Lebedev had begun.

  The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1825 hours EDT

  “There they go,” Rockman said. “Right at the waterline, about three-quarters of the way aft from the bow. See them?”

  Rubens placed his hands on Rockman’s workstation desk and leaned forward, staring into the big screen as if by sheer force of will he could influence the events unfolding there. Yes, he could see them, tiny antlike shapes moving up the huge ship’s rounded side.

  The scene being transmitted to the Art Room was real-time, images picked up by the NIKOS-4 reconnaissance satellite launched into a polar orbit from Vandenberg just two days earlier. The scene showed an oblique view of the Lebedev, looking down on her starboard side from about forty-five degrees above the horizon. Beyond the Lebedev, the Ohio had just surfaced, her conning tower showing as a narrow, black square protruding above the ice. The other two Russian ships were farther off, almost half a mile distant.

  From the wall speaker, bits of radio transmission, captu
red by the NIKOS satellite and transmitted back to Fort Meade, sounded against the crackle and hiss of background static.

  “Fire team two, on deck! Target! Engaging!…”

  “Team four, on deck! Moving aft!…”

  Rubens thought he could see one of the antlike figures advance on another, see the second figure crumple to the deck. But the details were lost, and he wasn’t entirely sure what he was seeing.

  It was frustrating, really. Desk Three and the Deep Black operation were built on the supremacy of technology, the ability to use sophisticated sensor platforms such as NIKOS to penetrate an enemy’s strongholds and reveal his secrets. Rubens was always mindful of the dictum of one of his favorite authors, a science fiction writer named Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The National Security Agency and the Art Room performed astonishing feats of magic on an almost daily basis.

  And none of that could help now. Up there on the Arctic ice, satellites in geosynchronous orbit, orbiting above the equator in step with Earth’s twenty-four-hour rotation, were simply too close to the horizon to be useful for surveillance. You needed spysats in a low polar orbit to see what was going on down there, and those passed across the entire span of the sky within a minute or so. The image on the screen was already dwindling as NIKOS-4, at an altitude of 120 miles, raced toward the southeastern horizon.

  “Damn it, can’t you zoom in any closer?” he asked Rockman.

  “A little, I think. But we’re pushing the limits of our resolution now…” Rockman entered a set of commands on his keyboard. The view rushed in closer, but still not close enough. He could just make out figures moving on the Lebedev’s deck, but the details tended to blur and fuzz out at the extreme limit of NIKOS-4’s resolution.

  “Here,” Rubens said. Reaching into his coat jacket, he produced a laser pointer and switched it on. He let the red dot dance around a portion of the Lebedev, on her starboard side up near the bow. “Any ideas about what that is?”

  Whatever it was, it had not appeared on any of the ship plans and schematics the Art Room had been able to pull up for the Lebedev or her sister research vessel, the Akademik Sergei Vavilov. It appeared to be a temporary structure hung over the ship’s side, something like an enclosed vertical tunnel or ladder shroud, with what looked like a swim platform at the level of the water, close by the ship’s waterline. Rubens had never seen anything like it.

  “That platform,” Rockman said, thoughtful. “Might be for small craft tying up alongside the ship.”

  Rubens nodded. “Makes sense. Boats must go back and forth between all three ships, and that’s how they get on board.”

  A logical assumption… but Rubens was worried. Assumptions based on insufficient data always worried him.

  If the satellite had been directly above the Lebedev, the men and women here in the Art Room would not have been able to read newspaper headlines over someone’s shoulders, as the popular myth had it, but they would have been able to distinguish Navy combat dry suits from Russian parkas, spotted weapons, detected ambushes, and maybe seen clearly the structure hanging over the Lebedev’s starboard bow. But the satellite was too close to the horizon for that now, and in another few seconds it would vanish over the curve of the world.

  Whatever was going to happen now was in the hands of those Navy SEALs, the skipper and crew of the Ohio, and one NSA agent.

  The image on the screen broke into shifting, jumping pixels, then re-formed as empty ice. It was tracking over the edge of the ice pack now. Rubens saw the dark blue of open water, and broad leads where the ice cap had cracked open. As he watched, ice gave way to deep blue, open water, and a patch of brilliant glare where the sun was reflecting off the sea and into space.

  “NIKOS-4 is passing over the horizon, sir,” a technician reported from another station. “We’ve lost transmissions from the Ohio.”

  “How long before the next satellite reaches the AO?” he demanded.

  “That would be NIKOS- 1,” Rockman said, consulting his monitor. “Fourteen minutes.”

  Fourteen minutes. An eternity in combat.

  And Rubens was as helpless to affect the outcome as he would be if the boarding action were taking place on the far side of the moon.

  Damn!

  Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1026 hours, GMT-12

  Treading water close beside the Lebedev’s waterline, Dean wondered if he was about to make a fool of himself. It had been years since he’d even climbed an obstacle course cargo net, and his recent round of quals had stressed the purely physical-push-ups, timed runs, and target shooting-rather than acrobatic activities like climbing chain ladders.

  “Dean!” Taylor’s voice crackled in his hood. “You’re up next!”

  He swam over to the rubber boat and clung to the side as he pulled off his fins and breathing equipment, dropping them with the rest of the SEAL swim gear in the bottom of the boat. He then sidestroked his way carefully to the nearest ladder, slung his waterproof pack over one shoulder, and, with Taylor steadying the ladder at the bottom, started up. No doubt about it, Dean thought. I’m getting way too old for this.

  With Taylor holding the ladder taut, though, the climb wasn’t as bad as Dean had feared. He was breathing heavily by the time he rolled over the starboard rail and dropped onto the starboard companionway, but he was able to un-sling his satchel and break out the Master Blaster, unfolding the stock and locking the foregrip in place.

  There was a dead man on the companionway deck in front of a door twenty feet away, one of the Lebedev sailors gunned down by silenced shots from one of the first of the SEALs to come aboard. There was no room here for gentlemanly conduct or proper rules of war. SEALs relied on total surprise coupled with a concentrated focus of overwhelming firepower and violence to achieve their aim… and a random sailor unexpectedly strolling out onto the starboard side companionway for a smoke couldn’t be allowed to sound the alarm.

  The SEALs, once on board, had split into separate elements and dispersed, moving both fore and aft to secure the Russian vessel’s main deck. “Team four!” sounded over the radio. “Multiple targets, port! Engaging!…”

  Dean heard a kind of sharp clicking and recognized it as shots fired from the sound-suppressed H &K, coming from the other side of the ship’s main deck superstructure. Shouts and screams followed, the sounds of spreading panic.

  Gripping the grenade launcher, Dean hurried aft.

  Golytsin’s Office CFS Akademik Petr Lebedev Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 1027 hours, GMT-12

  The ship’s general alarm shrilled from the intercom speaker overhead, bringing Golytsin to his feet. Someone pounded on the door. “Sir! The ship is under attack!”

  Only moments before, the report had come down from the Lebedev’s bridge: an American submarine was surfacing just a hundred meters off the port side. Golytsin had been preparing to go outside to see the spectacle for himself when the alarm had gone off.

  The ship under attack? From the submarine?

  “I’m coming.” He reached into a bottom desk drawer and extracted his sidearm, a PM-Pistole Makarov-still in its holster and slung from a web belt. His parka was on a coat hook by the door.

  Down the main port-side passageway, through a watertight door, and out onto the deck, where a blast of cold and keening wind cut into his face like myriad thrusting needles. A dozen or more of the Lebedev’s crew were already along the port railing, staring out into the glare of the ice. There was the American submarine there, her sail black against the ice. An American flag had been unfurled above the conning tower, so there could be no mistaking the vessel’s nationality. He could even see two tiny human figures in the weather cockpit in front of the flag and more figures on the submarine’s forward deck, putting down a gangplank to the ice.

  Well, well, he thought with grim surprise and something approaching admiration. Perhaps the Americans have grown some balls after all. But, while surprising, the surfaci
ng of that submarine didn’t constitute an attack, as such…

  “Sir!” Lieutenant Alexei Stilchoff gripped his upper arm. “Sir, you should get below! Now!”

  “Alexei! What the devil’s going on?” Golytsin demanded. Stilchoff was the commanding officer of the contingent of naval infantry stationed on board the Lebedev. He was an old hand, a veteran of the Chechnyan War, and not easily flustered or scared.

  Stilchoff pointed aft. “American commandos! They’re already on board!”

  Golytsin looked back along the port-side railing toward the Lebedev’s fantail. Even as Stilchoff turned and pointed, a pair of gray-clad figures appeared around the corner of the superstructure aft, menacing figures with compact submachine guns held rigidly against their shoulders as they moved forward with the deadly grace of predatory cats. Nearby, one of Stilchoff’s men fumbled with the AKM assault rifle slung over his shoulder, dragging back the charging lever and raising the weapon to take aim. At the same moment, Stilchoff grabbed the butt of his holstered PM, trying to drag the pistol free of its holster.

  Before either man could complete the move, however, triplets of bullets slammed into them both, knocking them back a step, sending them crumpling to the deck in untidy sprawls. Golytsin hadn’t even heard the shots as they were fired.

  Golytsin was still standing in the open door leading onto the deck outside. At the instant Stilchoff and the other man were hit, Golytsin jumped backward, pulling the heavy door shut, hearing and feeling the clang of bullets striking it outside. With his right hand, he pulled out his own PM, and stood leaning against the bulkhead for a moment, breathing hard. God, that had been close!

  He chambered a round in his pistol but didn’t even consider trying to engage those two invaders. They would be American commandos from that submarine… most likely U.S. Navy SEALs, who were widely regarded even in countries other than the United States as the best, most deadly small-unit fighters in the world. To attempt to face those two men outside in combat was nothing less than suicide.