Grenville could hear the crack and rumble of ice on the hull. Normally, a submarine was moving forward as it dove and the diving planes were adjusted to literally “fly” the vessel into the depths. Starting from a dead stop surrounded by ice was a different matter. All you could do was pull the plug and go straight down.
Those MiGs would be almost on them now, bearing in from the north. What were the Russian pilots going to try to do? What were their orders?
He held the tactical layout in his mind . . . Ohio here . . . Lebedev there . . . aircraft there . . . and he smiled.
If they were trying for an attack run, the Lebedev was in the way. The ol’ Ohydro would have a few more crucial moments to slip back into her natural element.
GK-1
Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap
82° 34' N, 177° 26' E
1112 hours, GMT–12
The Mir’s hatch clanged open and Braslov climbed up the ladder. Dean followed, then McMillan, with Golytsin coming out last. Braslov gestured with his pistol. “This way.”
Although the submerged structure was huge, the livable portions were relatively few and cramped, which made sense given the tremendous pressure of their surroundings. Most of GK-1’s internal structure was given over to ballast and trim tanks, and to the machinery necessary for turning and maintaining the drill.
The passageway into which they’d emerged was so low that the three men had to stoop slightly to negotiate it; Dean noticed several emergency survival dry suits hanging from a rack along one side of the passageway—available, he assumed, in case there was a need for an emergency evacuation.
The sight of those emergency suits, and the claustrophobic feel of the corridor, drove home to Dean the nightmarish aspects of life on board this facility. It was cramped, it was damp, and it was cold, with moisture condensing on every exposed metal surface. Outside those curving steel decks, bulkheads, and overheads, the ocean was pressing in with an inexorable, crushing pressure of better than half a ton over every square inch. If anything went wrong down here, did the crew have any hope of escape at all? With an air pressure of one standard atmosphere on board, they weren’t going to be able to go outside without a very long period of pressurization inside an air lock. The only way to the surface in an emergency would be on board one of those miniature submarines docked outside.
As Dean walked, bent forward with his head brushing bundles of pipes and wiring with each step, it was all too easy to imagine those tons upon tons of seawater pressing in from every side.
What a hell of a way to live. . . .
The passageway led them over the control room, rather than past it. A large, open hatchway in the deck gave access to what was obviously the GK-1’s control center twelve feet below, a room thirty feet long filled with monitors, workstations, and consoles, and with both a ladder and an open elevator platform against the aft bulkhead leading up to the hatch at his feet. The perspective was odd and took some getting used to; it took Dean a moment to realize that the vessel was designed to ride both like a normal ship on the surface and in its vertical configuration during drilling operations. When the structure was rotated into the work configuration, decks became aft bulkheads, and forward bulkheads became decks.
There appeared to be eight or ten men on duty in the control center, though there were workstations for more than that. A large monitor on the forward bulkhead was showing what looked like a stark black-and-white image of the sea floor, though at this angle it was difficult to be sure. A murmur of Russian voices rose from the compartment.
Braslov gave Dean a hard nudge in the back with the muzzle of his weapon. “Keep moving,” he growled.
How many people were on board the facility? A normal drilling rig might have as few as fifty or sixty people on board, while one of the giants might have a population of hundreds. There would be other crew spaces—sleeping quarters, a mess deck that might double as a rec room, laundry facilities, probably lab spaces for analyzing core samples.
They reached a turning in the passageway and a door—set in the bulkhead this time, rather than in the floor. Golytsin produced a set of keys and fumbled at the lock. The door opened, and a young man tried to emerge.
“Hold it right there,” Braslov said, pointing his weapon at the prisoner. “Back!”
“Let me out of here!” the prisoner cried. “You have no right—”
“You two,” Braslov said, turning to Dean and McMillan. “Inside.”
“What’s this?” Dean said. “The brig?”
“It’ll do for now, until we decide what to do with you. Go on.”
Dean followed McMillan inside. It was a storeroom, mostly empty, but with a pile of musty-smelling mattresses at the back, stacked crates labeled with Cyrillic lettering, and shelves of folded sheets and blankets.
“There’s a bucket for your . . . sanitary needs,” Golytsin said, pointing to one corner. “I’m sorry about the accommodations, but as you can imagine, we’re a little cramped for space down here. Someone will bring food to you a little later.”
“If you’re lucky,” Braslov added with a sour sneer.
The door slammed shut, and they heard the sound of Golytsin’s key turning in the lock.
Dean looked at their new roommate. “Harry Benford, I presume?”
The man’s eyes widened. “Yeah! How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
“Listen! They’re trying to blame me for murdering Ken Richardson! It’s a damned lie! I never murdered anyone!”
“Oh? Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know! It . . . it was Commander Larson. He shot Ken. Then I hit the commander with a pry bar, took him down. But then the Russians came in and arrested everybody! And they took me off from the others and brought me down here. And now they say they’re going to blame me for the murder!”
“Sounds like your playmates play pretty rough,” Dean said.
“Kathy! You gotta believe me! I didn’t kill anybody!”
“Harry, right now we’re all in a pretty bad fix. I suggest you sit down, be quiet, and let us think about how we’re going to get out of this.”
Benford seemed inclined to argue. “They can’t do this to us!”
Dean stepped between McMillan and Benford, towering over the smaller man. “Do as the lady says,” he growled. “We’ll worry about who did what later, after we get out of here.”
“Who are you, anyway?”
“Charlie Dean. I’m here to help.”
“Looks to me like you’re a prisoner just like us! Fat load of help you’ll be!”
“Sit down and shut up.” Dean considered whether or not to let Benford know how much he knew and decided that the information might give them a psychological edge. “Just so you know, Benford, we know you were feeding information to the Russians, we know you gave them blueprints to help them build this station—possibly illegally—and we know the Russians planned to use a murder at the NOAA station as a pretext for taking it over. If they knew about the murder in advance, then the murder was planned ahead of time . . . and that strongly suggests that you were the killer.”
As Dean spoke, Benford’s eyes got wider and wider, his mouth open. He tried to interrupt at several points but was unable to do more than sputter protests.
“You . . . you’re with them! It’s all lies! . . .”
“You can prove your innocence later. Now shut up!”
Sullen, Benford retreated to the back of the storeroom, collapsing on a mattress on the deck with his back to Dean and McMillan.
“I’m Kathy McMillan,” she said.
“I know. Charlie Dean.”
“Are you—”
He held up his hand, then tapped his ear. “Never say anything,” he told her.
Her eyes widened slightly, and she nodded. Dean didn’t know if the room was bugged or not, but the oldest trick in the book was to put prisoners in a room where they could talk freely with one another—and listen in from somewhere nearby.
“So .
. . is that all true?” she asked Dean quietly. “He was a Russian agent?”
“Looks that way,” Dean told her, his voice a low murmur. Even if there were no hidden mikes, he didn’t want Benford listening, either. “He had a small, one-channel receiver. We think the Russians gave him a signal and he murdered Richardson to give them their excuse to come in.”
“Why’d the Russians blame him, then?”
Dean shrugged. “Probably because it’s just not that plausible that the commander of a NOAA scientific expedition would kill the leader of the Greenworld contingent at his base. Doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t know,” McMillan said. “There was no love lost between those guys. Scientists and nutcase environmentalists. It was bad news, believe me.”
“You’re not serious!”
She smiled. “No, I honestly don’t think Commander Larson would have killed anyone . . . not even someone as annoying as Richardson.”
“If it’s any consolation, the rest of the expedition people were being evacuated off the Lebedev about the time I ran into you and Golytsin.”
“That’s good.” She folded her arms and shivered. The storeroom was cold. Dean went to a storage shelf, pulled down a military-style wool blanket, and draped it over her shoulders. “Thank you. Aren’t you cold?”
He shook his head. “This dry suit’s almost too warm.” He was eyeing the door, the bulkheads, the overhead. “We need to think of a way to get out of here.”
“I don’t suppose you brought along any James Bond gadgets? A thimble-sized laser to cut through the door, maybe? An origami flamethrower?”
Dean made a face. “Gadgets have their place, I suppose,” he said. “But the only thing that’s essential is right here.” He tapped his forehead.
In fact, Dean was wishing he’d brought along something—the components of a binary explosive, for instance, with which he could have shattered the lock. Lacking that, however, the possibilities included finding something here in the storeroom that would help them break out—unlikely—and waiting for the bad guys to show up and overpower them.
“Let’s check those crates and see what we have to work with,” he said.
SSGN Ohio
Arctic Ice Cap
82° 34' N, 177° 26' E
1120 hours, GMT–12
“You knew those guys weren’t going to shoot at us, Skipper!” Lieutenant Dolby said. “How?”
Grenville gave a modest shrug. “They zipped past south to north, pulled a major U-turn, and came straight back for us, north to south. But on that bearing, the Lebedev was between us and them. At their altitude, they weren’t about to drop anything nasty, not without hitting their own people. Hell, they were lucky if they didn’t clip the Lebedev’s mast.”
The Ohio drifted once again in her preferred world, the abyssal deep, her screw turning over just enough to give her way.
Grenville picked up a microphone and keyed it. “Sonar, this is the captain.”
“Sonar, aye,” came the immediate response.
“Talk to me, Chief. What’s out there?”
“It’s pretty much a hash, sir,” Sonar Chief Kevin Mayhew replied. “Ice grinding. Lots of incidentals from the Russian ships.” There was a puzzled hesitation. “I . . . I think they’re cheering over there.”
“You can hear that, Mayhew?”
“That’s what it sounds like, sir.”
“What about submarines?”
“We had two on the waterfall for a while there, sir. Sierra One-one-five was the midget. The library tagged Sierra One-one-six as a probable Victor III. Right now, they’re both shut down. Not a thing on the boards.”
“Any sign of the Pittsburgh?”
“Sir, they could be right alongside and all we’d hear would be the hole in the water.”
“Well, do your best listening, understand? I want to know the moment you hear a shrimp fart.”
“Shrimp fart. Aye, aye, sir.”
The Ohio had been in terrible danger while exposed on the surface. She might pack 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles in her vertical launch tubes, capable of striking targets fifteen hundred miles away, but she had absolutely no way to defend herself against an air strike save by seeking the quiet safety of the depths.
Now, however, she was in far greater danger. It was one of the axioms of submarine warfare: the best way to kill a submarine is with another sub, and somewhere out in all of that ice-noise hash, there was a Russian Victor III waiting . . . and listening.
Victor IIIs were decent attack submarines—about the same size as the American Los Angeles boats but a little lighter, a little slower. Some of them had an odd eight-blade screw consisting of two co-rotating four-bladed props, which gave them a unique signature on passive sonar. Grenville had dogged a Victor or two back when he’d skippered the Miami and, earlier, when he’d been the XO on the Cincinnati.
Now a Victor was dogging him.
When they surfaced, the surrounding ice had formed a protective bastion. The only way to hit the Ohio with a torpedo would be to have it detonate under her keel, and the chances were good that with all of that surrounding sonar-reflecting ice, the enemy wouldn’t even be able to locate the Ohio well enough to target her.
Down here in the deep, though, it was different. The Victor was listening for them, trying to sort their sound signature out from the same background hash that Chief Mayhew had complained about. And the Ohio was listening for the Victor.
The Ohio had three major advantages, however, and Grenville intended to take full advantage of them both. American subs were the quietest in the world; it would take some very good sonar people on the other side to pick her out of the background noise. American submarine technology was the best as well, especially as demonstrated by the Ohio’s sonar suite and computers.
And finally, and more important by far, American submariners were the best trained in the world and their sonar operators were capable of seemingly magical feats of sensitivity and accuracy.
If that shrimp did cut a hot one, Mayhew and his team of sonar techs would hear it.
GK-1
Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap
82° 34' N, 177° 26' E
1122 hours, GMT–12
“Not much here,” McMillan said. She slumped back, the set of her shoulders showing her despair.
“Well, you didn’t think they were going to lock us in the storeroom with all the guns in it, did you?” Dean said. “But there’s stuff here we might be able to use.” He held up a one-liter tin of stewed tomatoes, hefting it. “This could make a nasty club.”
“Kind of awkward.”
“Yeah,” Dean admitted, dropping the can back into an open crate. “And it doesn’t quite have the same reach as a nine-millimeter Parabellum.”
They’d been going through a sampling of the crates stored in the narrow compartment. Peeking into three of them, so far, they’d found only foodstuffs—canned goods and boxes, all of it, and not a single bottle that might be judiciously broken into a makeshift knife. They’d examined the wooden slats of the crates themselves, but the wood was soft pine, each slat only a couple of feet long, and they were fastened together with staples rather than nails. You could do some damage with the things, surely—but not against a couple of alert men holding pistols.
He’d considered bunching a wool blanket up in a big wad and using it as a shield as he rushed the guard. Would a crumpled blanket absorb the kinetic energy of a 9mm round with a muzzle velocity of about twelve hundred feet per second? Or would the bullet slice right through and kill him before he’d taken two steps? Dean wasn’t sure, and given the possible consequences, he wasn’t about to experiment.
The best plan Dean had been able to come up with so far was to bundle a blanket over a guard when he came in with a tray of food and pummel him into unconsciousness with a can of vegetables. That might work if the guard was alone—extremely unlikely if he was carrying food—and if he carelessly stepped into the room without ordering the occu
pants back against the far wall with their hands in plain sight before he entered.
These people were not stupid. They weren’t going to make many mistakes, certainly not dumb-ass Hollywood villain goofs.
He leaned back against a damp metal bulkhead. “Well, a fine James Bond I turned out to be. Sorry, Miss McMillan.” He was still wrestling with possibilities. Maybe if they could cut a thin strip from one of those sheets and use it as a garrote. The trick would be to get the tear started without scissors or a knife. Maybe he could do it with his teeth? . . .
“I’m Kathy. And you’re doing just fine.”
He found he was almost missing the presence of Jeff Rockman or Marie Telach in his head. With his personal transceiver working, they would be feeding him all sorts of helpful advice about now . . . something involving turning urine and stewed tomatoes into plastic explosives, perhaps.
Of course, even without the problems of maintaining clear communications this far north, there was no way a radio signal could penetrate the thick tempered steel of this compartment, the pressure hull of the facility itself, and half a mile of water, plus the ice on top of that.
He was about as isolated from outside as it was possible for a person to be.
“The way I see it,” Kathy mused, “they can’t really afford to just out and out shoot us. They need to know how much we know about their operation. About this base.”
He nodded. “Not only that; our side knows we’re here. They can’t make us disappear and hope our people forget about us. They won’t.”
“You know, I think the Russians, the organized-crime bosses, I mean, have been really scared of bad publicity.” She looked pointedly at Benford. “He was put in to give Greenworld a bad name, I think. To discredit them, and anything they might say about Russian drilling in the Arctic.”
“Makes sense,” Dean said. “What can you tell me about Golytsin?”
“He seems to be the guy in charge of all of this. . . . At least he was until the mean one with the scar showed up. Golytsin takes orders from him.”
“Braslov.”
“That’s him.” She folded her arms and shuddered. “He’s bad news. Golytsin? He made some pretty terrible threats when he questioned me, when he first brought me aboard the Russian ship . . . things like turning me over to the crew if I didn’t tell him who I was really working for, or leaving me out on the ice to freeze, but I think it was all bluff. He’s been looking after the needs of the prisoners, gave orders that they weren’t to be hurt or molested in any way. I think . . .”
Stephen Coonts' Deep Black: Arctic Gold Page 34
