Arctic Gold

The NOAA station had been set up at least in part to reaffirm the United States’ commitment to the Arctic Ocean being international waters. And McMillan and Yeats had come along with their own agenda, of course.

“What is your name?” the man asked, his voice disarmingly pleasant.

“Katharine McMillan,” she told him. There was no harm in admitting that much, and the truth would be safer than a lie.

“Katharine. And my name is Feodor Golytsin. I work with a private corporation called Siberskii Masla.”

McMillan had heard of it. The name meant “Siberian Oil,” and it was less a private corporation than it was an arm of the Russian government.

“And who,” Golytsin continued, “are you working for?”

“NOAA,” she replied. That was a lie but a completely plausible one. A check of NOAA’s perso

“I know what NOAA is,” the Russian said. “I suspect, however, that you are, in fact, CIA or possibly DIA. NOAA doesn’t usually have access to such high-tech equipment as what we saw you dumping into the ocean. Or such a need for secrecy. You will tell me the truth.”

“I’ve told you the truth. Go screw yourself. You have no right to-”

“Right does not enter into the picture, Katharine. Not here.” He looked thoughtful. “If you choose not to cooperate, we have several possible courses of action.”

Suddenly Golytsin reached out and grabbed her, yanking her close and spi

“Let go of me, you bastard!”

For answer, he squeezed her, painfully, through her shirt. She shrieked, “Stop! Let me go!”

“There’s the crew of this ship, for instance,” he continued, ignoring her squirming and her shouts. “One hundred twenty-eight men on board the Lebedev. Another one hundred fifty on the Taymyr. Perhaps fifty on the Granat. And for most of them, it has been a very long time since they’ve seen their wives and girlfriends. You are an attractive woman, Katharine. For them, you might have considerable… entertainment value.”

“Go to hell, you sick bastard!”

He released her suddenly, shoving her hard across the cabin. She tumbled into the bunk and lay there on her back, panting.

Golytsin took a step forward and bent forward, looming over her. “But I imagine even you would lose your appeal after a time. How long would it take, do you think? A month? Two? If we then decided you were worthless, that we needed to dispose of you, I might order you dropped into the ocean alongside this ship. Just how long do you think you would live? The water temperature here is actually a bit below freezing-minus two, maybe minus three degrees Celsius. The salt content, you know. You might survive, oh, two or three minutes.

“Or… better still, if we dropped you on the ice out there, somewhere. Even if we chose to return your cold weather gear, how long before you froze to death, do you think? There are lots of very hungry polar bears out along the edge of the ice pack, hunting for seal. Do you think you would still be alive when the bears found you?

“In any case, Katharine, your body would never be found. Never.”

“I’m telling you the truth!” she yelled. “I’m with NOAA! I’m-”

Golytsin captured her jaw with one hand, silencing her, holding her head motionless. For a horrible moment, she was forced to look into his eyes. She was certain he was about to…

Then he released her. “But not yet,” he told her. “I’ll give you some time to think about your options, mm? But I suggest, Katharine, that you not test my patience.”

He turned, strode to the door, and was gone. She heard the lock click behind him.

She lay on the bunk, still breathing hard. She was terrified-there was no other way to describe it. She was convinced that the bastard would do whatever he needed to do to get information out of her… rape, beatings, torture…

When she’d joined the National Security Agency, she’d done so as a technician, a very skilled and highly trained technician. The idea of being sent out into the field had been ludicrous; hell, as far as she knew, the NSA didn’t even have field agents. And when she went over to the CIA, that had strictly been a temporary technical assignment.

How the hell had she let them talk her into fieldwork? This wasn’t supposed to happen!

She began reviewing her options. Not one of them, she found, was at all pleasant.

9

Ice Station Bear Arctic Ice Cap 82° 24' N, 179° 45' E 0125 hours, GMT-12

EIGHTY-FIVE MILES FROM THE Lebedev and twelve time zones away from London, another storm was coming in. Dr. Chris Tomlinson could see it in the dark band of clouds just begi

The sun hung just above the southeastern horizon, wan and pale and as seemingly devoid of warmth as a silvery full moon.

In a more civilized clime, 0130 was the middle of the frigging night. Late in May at these latitudes, a month before the summer solstice, the sun never set but circled the horizon slowly clockwise with the turning of the Earth. With no real day or night, the actual time scarcely mattered, so the team ran on Eastern time. The National Climatic Data Center was in Asheville, North Carolina, and it was easier to coordinate work and communications schedules with everyone on the same clock.

Tomlinson carefully stepped off the ladder, his thick boots crunching lightly on the ice. Lieutenant Phil Segal was waiting for him at the bottom-his safety buddy, present just in case. Perso

“Looks like we’re fixing to have a blow,” Segal said, looking up at the anemometer, now wildly and freely spi

Tomlinson looked up at the instrument. “Ah. Thirty knots. Hardly worth the notation in the log.”

“Tell you what, though,” the NOAA officer said with a nasty chuckle. “Next time we send the tree huggers out here, right? Let them enjoy some of this here global warming first hand!”

Tomlinson laughed, but without much feeling. Like the other official perso

Kids? He snorted. Hardly. The youngest was in her mid-twenties, the oldest thirty-something. But the ten regular station perso