The large spool of fiber-optic cable mounted on McMillan’s sled played out rapidly with a faint hissing sound. An age ago, in what seemed now like another life, Kathy McMillan had worked for Raytheon on the ADCAP torpedo for the U.S. Navy. Five years ago, she’d come to work for the National Security Agency, bringing her experience—and her security classification—with her. For the past year, though, she’d been seconded from the NSA to the CIA and had been working with the Company’s Directorate of Science and Technology to fine-tune the Orca for CIA operations worldwide.
The Orca was actually quite similar to the wire-guided torpedoes used on board U.S. submarines—considerably smaller, lighter, and slower, of course, and lacking a high explosive warhead, but powered by batteries, driven by pumpjet propulsors, and remotely piloted over its two-way data feed. McMillan had about ten miles’ worth of cable on her spool, though it didn’t look bulky enough for that.
Her handset looked like a video gamer’s control box, with a pair of inch-long joysticks, one for left-right-up-down, the other for controlling speed. Touch-pad controls handled the sophisticated array of underwater sensors and cameras into its nose. Headlamps set into the Orca on either side of the nose cast an eerie, cold-white light ahead, illuminating swirling clouds of gleaming white motes in the vehicle’s path. McMillan was getting a clear picture on her small display—a deep blue-green and featureless haze, with an oddly wrinkled and rugged ceiling of white overhead.
“How’s she look?” Yeats asked, coming up beside her.
“We’re beneath the ice,” she told him. “On course, fifteen knots. We’ll be there in about half an hour.”
“Good. I don’t want us to hang around here longer than we have to.”
“Relax. They don’t even know we’re here.”
“They would’ve heard the explosion,” Yeats told her. “Sound travels underwater, you know.”
“Yes, Dennis,” she said in her most acid, yes-dear tone. She hated it when men patronized her. “I know something about sonar, okay?”
“Oh, yeah. All that work for the Navy.”
“And I also know that it’s almost impossible to track underwater sounds under the ice. They heard the explosion, all right, but they won’t have a clue as to where it came from, or how far away it is. So far as they know, it was something echoing in from the oil derricks off the North Slope.”
Minutes passed. The fiber-optic cable continued unreeling from its drum, vanishing into the hole in the ice. On her monitor, the bottom side of the ice raced past overhead with a flicker of fast-shifting shadows. Twice she adjusted the Orca’s depth to avoid looming pressure ridges—inverted mountain ranges plunging down into the black. This part of the ice cap, though, was fairly uniform and relatively thin. Maybe, she thought, the environmentalists had something after all; the ice cap was thinning rapidly from year to year. A couple of years ago, for the first time since such things could be checked, ice-free water had actually opened around the North Pole itself.
Then she thought of the Greenworlders back at the main camp on the ice and dismissed the thought. That bunch of screwups couldn’t be right about the time of day, much less something as dynamic and ever-changing as the Arctic.
She felt a shudder pass through the ice beneath her boots.
“What the hell was that?” Haines asked.
Yeats eyed the hole uncertainly. “Dunno. Maybe we should move back from the edge a bit, though. We might’ve used too big a charge.”
Another shudder was transmitted through the ice, a solid shock. “Nah, it’s not that,” Haines said. “That’s not like ice breaking. More like a thump from underneath.”
“A whale, maybe?” Yeats suggested.
Haines gave Yeats a sour look. “No.”
“We should probably move the sleds back a bit anyway,” McMillan told them. “Just to be safe.”
“Right,” Yeats said. “I’ll—”
And then the ice was shuddering and bucking so hard that Haines fell down, and Yeats and McMillan both grabbed hold of the edge of the sled to stay standing. There was a roar, like avalanche thunder, and the ice between the party and the met station began to heave and buckle skyward.
McMillan’s first thought was that a pressure ridge was forming . . . but the buckling and upthrust continued. Blocks of ice toppled backward and slid down the growing mound, and then something like a smooth, black cliff appeared above the center of the mound, rising slowly.
“Submarine!” McMillan screamed. “It’s a fucking submarine!”
The conning tower, or sail, as submariners called it, continued to loom slowly above the ice, which was rising and cracking now to either side of the structure as the submerged vessel’s hull ponderously broke through to the surface. As more of the structure came into view, she noted that the sail was rounded and sloped both fore and aft, giving it the streamlined look of a teardrop. That was emphatically not an American design. It was almost certainly a Russian boat, probably a Victor II or III, nuclear powered, with about eighty men on board.
“It’s Russian!” she called to the others. “Quick! We’ve got to ditch the gear!”
She rammed both joysticks on her controller full forward, sending the UUV into a vertical dive. Then she released the ice brakes on the equipment sled and locked the cable reel. Immediately the tough plastic wire snapped taut and the sled began to slide, slow but steady, toward the hole in the ice.
It hurt, destroying a $4-million piece of hardware like this, but the team was under orders to be careful not to let it fall into unfriendly hands.
She just wished they’d had a chance to get close enough to actually see what the Russians were doing at Objective Toy Shop.
“Shit!” Yeats said. “C’mon, Randy!” The two of them released the brakes on the second sled, unhooked the snowmobile, and began sliding the empty cradle toward the ice-melt depression.
The submarine had come to rest, surrounded by huge, cracked blocks of ice. A figure, made tiny by comparison with the huge vessel, appeared at the top of the sail. A second figure appeared next to the first a moment later . . . and a hatch behind the sail broke open to disgorge a line of men, all in heavy parkas, all carrying assault rifles.
“Stoy!” a voice boomed from the sail over a loud-hailer. “Nyeh sheveleetess!”
“How’s your Russian?” Haines asked.
“He’s telling us to halt, to not move,” McMillan told them.
The sled with the reel of cable was well out into the ice-melt depression now. It hit the black opening and vanished with a splash. The sled with the Orca cradle was in the depression but not moving.
There was nothing that could be done about that.
“Brahstee arujyeh!”
“He wants us to drop our guns.”
“I suggest we do what they tell us,” Yeats said, stepping away from the snowmobile, unslinging his assault rifle, and dropping it on the ice. Carefully he raised his hands.
Heavily armed sailors were clambering down off the submarine’s deck now, using a long extending gangplank to cross the broken ice. In another few moments, the three Americans were being herded back toward the surfaced submarine.
In the hard, blue sky overhead, a pair of Russian helicopters circled, apparently searching for other trespassers. One of them was gentling toward the ice ahead.
A sailor behind her nudged her hard with the muzzle of his rifle. “Skarei!” Quickly.
Hands up, she stumbled forward.
Just possibly, she thought, they were about to see the Toy Shop up close after all, without any high-tech help from the Orca.
Rubens’ Office
NSA Headquarters
Fort Meade, Maryland
1035 hours EDT
Rubens sat alone in his office, staring out across the Maryland countryside. The morning rush hour was long since past, and traffic on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway was light and brisk. All those people, he thought. All those people with no idea that we’re at war. . . .
From William Rubens’ perspective, that war had little to do with terrorism, or with oil, or with specific geographical locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. It was, instead, a war between the forces of civilization and the barbarian night, a last-ditch stand against the ultimate night that had been clawing at the light of culture and rationality and science for as long as such concepts had been understood. The storming, dark passions of National Socialism; the stolid gray and monolithic rigidity of the Soviets; the shrill sloganeering, the witch hunts, and the petty sabotage of the more ignorant branches of political activism; the mindless embrace of God’s will as excuse for any act of bloodshed, stupidity, or bigotry . . . all were, in Rubens’ mind, aspects of the same darkness, the same ancient and abyssal evil that threatened to tear down all that Humankind had built, all that was decent and civilized and safe.
It was a war the National Security Agency had been fighting since 1953 . . . and Desk Three since its inception only a few years before.
And it was a war in which good men and women died.
In the early years of the Cold War there’d been no satellites, no huge and ultra-sensitive listening stations, no means of eavesdropping on the Soviets short of actually flying up to or even across their borders in deliberate acts of trespass intended to get them to turn off their defense radars and other electronic networks and record the results. It had been a deadly game, one played across decades, and there had been casualties. A still-classified number of unarmed reconnaissance aircraft had been shot down, some inside the borders of the Soviet Union, others well outside, over international waters.
And now, even with satellites and high-tech sensors and all of the toys and gadgets meant to make covert ops foolproof, sterile, and safe, good men and women died. Despite all the acts of Congress, all the black programs of the military, there simply was no way to get the job done without risk.
As at the headquarters of the CIA in Langley, there was a wall downstairs in the NSA tower, a wall set with gold stars, some with names, many without . . . a star for every NSA employee to be killed in the line of duty.
Tommy Karr dead? It didn’t seem possible.
There would be a memorial service, of course . . . but later. For now, the rest of them had to carry on.
For now, the information would be kept tightly compartmentalized. Dean knew, but he would be carrying out the investigation in England now. Rubens had already arranged for Dean’s flight to Russia to be canceled and put him on a flight to London instead—the same flight, in fact, that Karr had taken. What the hell? It was worth a shot.
Rubens also had transmitted orders to have Lia and Akulinin meet Dean in London, but they would be kept out of the loop on Karr’s death for now. Need-to-know . . . and Lia, especially, would be emotionally sensitive to the news. Rubens didn’t want to break it to her while she was still, in effect, inside enemy territory.
Several facts had become clear already. Desk Three knew who the killers were. Randolph Evans, a GCHQ operative who’d been nearby when Karr was killed, had flashed digital photographs of the three terrorists back to the Art Room.
Right now, three digital photographs were displayed on Rubens’ monitor. The three had been positively identified as Jacques Mallet, Kurt Berger, and Yvonne Fischer, the three Greenworlders Karr had spotted and photographed on the trip in from Heathrow. Mallet—the one with the overcoat and the assault rifle—and Berger both were dead. Fischer was on her way to a London hospital with multiple gunshot wounds; she might live. If she did, she was going to have a visit from Dean. Rubens wanted answers.
Another fact, and a worrisome one. The Russians were behind the Greenworld strike in London. Their motives weren’t clear yet—maybe Dean could come up with something there—but Sergei Braslov had been photographed with the Greenworld killers that morning. A careful search of TV broadcasts and security camera shots of the protest mob outside the London City Hall, using feature-matching software to pick faces out of crowds, had so far failed to turn up an image of Braslov. That didn’t mean he wasn’t there, but it did suggest he’d remained back and out of sight.
It felt like Braslov had been running the three assassins, sending them in to kill Spencer while the local security forces were occupied with the Greenworlders putting up their silly banner. Rubens had flashed a strongly worded request to GCHQ: find Braslov. The Russian was the key to what had just happened on the observation deck outside London’s Living Room.
A question remained, though: assuming Braslov had put them up to it, why had three political activists agreed to go on what amounted to a suicide mission? Dean had already had the files pulled on all three, and it didn’t make sense. Fischer, Berger, and Mallet were upper-middle-class college graduates. All three had been employed, and Berger had a family back in Germany.
The Frenchman, Mallet, reportedly had a passionate hatred of all things American, and he also had a drug problem—heroin. Those might have offered handles by which Braslov had maneuvered the man, but had they been enough to make him commit suicide by bodyguard? Berger was a confirmed socialist, but he appeared to be a hanger-on, a follower, not someone who would risk being shot over a difference in ideologies.
The woman, so far as could be told from her arrest record, was a passionate neosocialist ideologue who despised oil companies, global conglomerates, and capitalism. She saw herself as a freedom fighter at the barricades, joining the downtrodden masses in their righteous struggle against the robber-baron overlords of the planet, a worldview helped along by the fact that she was carrying sixty thousand pounds of credit card debt.
According to the bank records pulled in through the NSA’s far-flung computer nets, both Berger and Mallet were deep in debt as well. Might that be the common link, the handle Braslov had used? Their bank records didn’t show any large deposits, but money might have been placed in new accounts under false names, or even into Swiss accounts.
The fact remained, the three assassins had launched an attack that had all but guaranteed their deaths or, at the very least, arrests for murder. Money, even lots of money, wasn’t much of an inducement if you couldn’t enjoy it. The three weren’t fanatic jihadists seeking eternal life. What in hell had Braslov promised them in order to get them to attack Spencer?
Dean felt like he was juggling, and he was beginning to lose the rhythm. Russia, England, plus the administrative and political threat here at home to Desk Three, with the loss of that F-22 and the death of a Desk Three agent.
And of course it all had to hit at once.
Rubens checked his watch and sighed. Soon it would be time for him to head inside the Beltway for his three o’clock appointment with Wehrum. Damn.
He wasn’t looking forward to this.
CFS Akademik Petr Lebedev
Arctic Ice Cap
82° 34' N, 177° 26' E
2215 hours, GMT–12
Kathy McMillan sat on the narrow bunk in a ship’s cabin, waiting.
They’d brought her here several hours ago, she thought, though she wasn’t sure of the time. They’d taken her watch, along with her boots, parka, and other cold weather gear, and most of her clothing, and unceremoniously shoved her in here. Through the single tiny, round porthole, she could see the ice outside; at this time of the year, however, the sun never set but circled endlessly above the horizon.
How long before they miss us back at the camp? she wondered.
She tried not to think of the corollary . . . that even when they missed the three-person team, what would the rest of the expedition be able to do about it?
Their captors had hustled them across the ice to one of the helicopters and flown them across the ice to a large ship with the name Akademik Petr Lebedev picked out in Cyrillic letters on the bow. A civilian ship, then, probably one of the fleet of exploration and science vessels the Russians used for Arctic surveys and research. Two other ships were visible nearby, an icebreaker and what was probably a transport of some kind. She only had a glimpse of the activity on
the ice around the three ships, but the Russians appeared to have constructed a small base and there were stockpiles of supplies and carefully shrouded equipment everywhere.
The Toy Shop indeed. What the hell were they building?
Once on board the ship, they’d herded the three Americans belowdecks, taking their things and putting them in three separate cabins. McMillan had tried pounding on the door and shouting, but after a while her voice was raw and her hands sore, so she’d been waiting quietly ever since.
She heard a rattle at the door and came to her feet. Half a dozen ill-formed plans flitted through her thoughts—of knocking down whoever was coming inside and racing for the deck—but common sense won out. Where the hell could she go, barefoot, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties?
The door swung open, and a tall, blond, rugged-looking man stepped inside. Behind him, she could see a guard, a man in a Russian naval uniform, holding an AKM assault rifle.
“Good morning,” the man said in almost faultless English. “How are we doing?”
“We are demanding to be allowed to talk to an American consul,” she said. “We are protesting being captured and dragged here by your goons! We were engaged in a scientific—”
“We were spying, darling,” the man said evenly. “The captain of our submarine got excellent video footage of you scuttling your equipment on the ice. What was it . . . an unmanned undersea rover? A robot submarine?”
“I am part of a NOAA survey expedition,” she told him. “We are mapping and measuring the thinning of the ice cap, and monitoring ice drift.”
“Indeed. And you seem to have drifted into Russian territory.”
Russian territory. McMillan bit back a harsh laugh. “I hate to break it to you, Ivan. These are still international waters.”
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 12
