Arctic Gold

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 33' N, 177° 45' E 1231 hours, GMT-12

“I can see light!” Dean said, peering up through the view port. “I can see the surface!”

“Let me have the controls,” Golytsin said. “I’ll see if I can find open water.”

The Mir was drifting toward the surface slowly now, the weight of the water in its ballast tanks counteracting the lift induced by the release of the heavy keel plates. Under his guidance, one of the electric motors was coaxed to life, and the Mir began to respond…

The cloud of methane, expanding enormously as it rose out of the constricting pressure of the depths, caught the Mir, sending it rocketing upward as the vessel rode the shock wave for a moment. Then, with a savage jolt, the Mir dropped through a methane bubble, hit water beneath, then hit another bubble. For several interminable seconds, the Mir tumbled in the frothing sea, its occupants slammed from deck to overhead and bulkhead to bulkhead like rag dolls.

Water came thundering in…

Nearby, the bubble mass struck GK-1, ripping the anchoring cables free. The drill train, extending into the depths, snapped, then snapped again, again, and yet again as the shock wave worked its way up out of the abyss.

The shock wave ruptured ballast and trim tanks, flooding the forward section first. Unimaginable stresses clawed at the ship, and the relatively slender and unarmored midships section ripped apart as conflicting forces tried to draw the stern higher while dragging the bow down.

Then watertight seals ripped open and the ocean came pouring in.

The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 2032 hours EDT

“My God!” Jeff Rockman said, staring at the big screen on the wall. “What in hell is that?”

The view, a real-time image of the Arctic ice around the Russian base, showed an awesome transformation, worked in an instant. The ice crazed like shattered glass, then appeared to blur. At the same moment, geysers erupted around all three of the Russian ships, still holding position in the ice, and from the open-water footprint left behind by the Ohio as well.

“What is it?” Rubens asked, leaning forward. “A volcanic eruption?”

The geysers were growing in size. The Lebedev was swallowed whole. The cargo ship was ponderously rolling over onto her port side. In places, solid ice was breaking open now as enormous blocks of ice shattered and broke free.

“I don’t know,” Marie Telach said. “But it’s big.” The view receded several clicks as the magnification on the spysat’s optics was cut back. The polar ice cap seemed to recede suddenly as the curve of the Earth itself was revealed. Below, a vast stretch of the ice cap was smoking.

“Whatever it is, it’s affecting an area of over three hundred square miles,” Rockman said, his voice awed. “Too big to be a nuke…”

Rubens nodded his understanding and sighed. “I’m guessing… it’s Dean.”

Mir Beneath the Arctic Ice Cap 82° 33' N, 177° 45' E 1235 hours, GMT-12

Dean recovered consciousness first. The Mir was riding on the surface; he could tell by the way the deck swayed and rocked as the stubborn little craft bobbed with the surface chop.

“Come on!” he shouted. He pulled Kathy’s head out of the water, slapped her face until her eyes fluttered open. “Get up! Get up!”

Nearby, Golytsin struggled to his feet. Benford, still bound hand and foot, struggled in the aft part of the compartment, panicking as water rose steadily around him. “Help me! Help me! Don’t let me drown!”

“Golytsin!” Dean yelled. “Get Benford. Cut those ropes! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Dean cracked the dorsal hatch, blinking as sunlight streamed into his face. He looked around, feeling curiously out of place. There was no ice visible at all… only mile upon mile of intensely blue and open ocean.

“Let me,” Golytsin said. “There is an emergency raft…”

Dean stepped back out of the way as Golytsin climbed the ladder, leaning out of the hatch to free the raft. The Mir was flooding slowly, settling gently by the bow as water continued to pour into ruptured flotation tanks.

“Quickly!” Golytsin called from outside. “Into the raft!”

Dean helped Kathy climb the ladder, then Benford, his hands and feet free now. Dean took a last look around, then climbed the ladder after them. Golytsin and Kathy helped him slide off the back of the Mir and into the raft.

“What happened to the ice?” Kathy asked, looking around. “My God! What happened to the ice?”

The ice wasn’t completely gone; there were still numerous floes. But where before there’d been an uninterrupted plain of solid, windswept ice and blowing snow, now there was a horizon-to-horizon expanse of open water littered by blocks of ice.

“I don’t know,” Dean replied. “Admiral? You guys didn’t have a nuke or two on board that underwater base, did you?”

“No. No nukes. I think…”

“What?”

“I don’t know how it happened, but I think there must have been a release of gas from the bottom. A very large release.”

“Methane?”

Golytsin nodded. “We know the sea floor here was covered in methane clathrates. That was why we were forced to stop drilling, while Gazprom decided what to do.” He shivered. “Something must have triggered an enormous explosion…”

Nearby, with a loud gurgle, the Mir was slipping at last beneath the surface of the water.

It would have a long fall to the bottom.

“Are we… are we going to die?” Benford asked at last.

“I don’t know,” Dean said. “How about it, Admiral? Does this thing have an emergency beacon?”

“It should have triggered automatically, as soon as I triggered the inflation release.”

“Then all we need to do is wait for someone to pick up the signal and send help,” Dean said. “Anyone want to take bets on whether we get picked up by the Americans first, or the Russians?”

“Russians,” Golytsin said. “Definitely the Russians. We are well inside Russian territorial waters, after all!”

“Says you,” Dean said. He looked up into the impossibly clear blue sky. “My bet is on some high-tech gadgets listening for our signal.” And the people ru

It was cold, and the wind was begi

Dean found himself face-to-face with Kathy. “Pretty good, James Bond,” she said. Her lips were blue and she was shivering, but she managed a smile.

“Nah,” Dean said. “If I were James Bond, it would be just you and me together in this thing, alone.”

And they drifted with wind and current, beneath an endless day…

EPILOGUE

Bethesda Naval Hospital Bethesda, Maryland 1520 hours EDT

“HOW’RE YOU FEELING, CHARLIE?”

Dean sat up a bit straighter in the hospital bed. He’d not been expecting Bill Rubens himself to come down to see him.

But, then again, he thought, Rubens is that kind of guy. He was tough, he could be a son of a bitch, but he cared about his people.

“Doing better, sir,” Dean replied. “They say maybe another week…”

“Well, don’t rush things. We want you back at Desk Three all in one piece. Understand?”

Dean nodded at the grisly joke. He’d come close to losing his feet, his ears, and his nose to frostbite. The four of them, Golytsin, Benford, McMillan, and Dean, had drifted in that open raft for forty hours before they’d been rescued.

The rescuers had not, as Dean had hoped, been the Ohio or the Pittsburgh, and after being pulled from the water he’d been relieved to hear that the two American submarines had survived the devastating explosion under the ice cap. Both had been slammed into the underside of the ice and sustained serious damage. Both had limped south through the Bering Strait, ending up at last at the Bangor submarine base across the sound from Seattle. The freed American prisoners had been taken off the Ohio while the SSGN was still north of Alaska, flown by helicopter a few at a time first to Point Barrow, then back to the Lower 48 for a full debriefing.