Stephen Coonts - Arctic Gold

“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 running those gadgets.

It was cold, and the wind was beginning to pick up. The four of them huddled together in the raft for warmth.

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…

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.

The four castaways in the rubber life raft had been plucked from the freezing waters by the Algonquin, an Iroquois-class destroyer, operating in the Arctic in conjunction with a Danish frigate, the Peter Tordenskjold. The two had been deployed north to show their respective flags and to contest the Russian ice-grab claims, reasserting their rights to free passage through international waters. NSA monitoring stations and satellites had picked up the distress locator signal in the raft; Rubens himself had talked to the Canadian ambassador in Washington, requesting that the little international flotilla be diverted to search for survivors.

All four had been suffering the beginnings of severe frostbite by the time they’d been rescued. “How are the others doing?” Dean asked.

“They think they’ll be able to save Golytsin’s left foot,” Rubens said. “Right now our… associates with the Agency have him at an undisclosed but secure medical facility, and are talking to him about Mafiya activities in Russia and in the United States. Turns out turning him was quite an impressive intelligence coup. As good as bringing in Braslov would have been.”

“Listen, about Braslov-”

Rubens held up a hand. “It’s not a problem. There was no way you could have brought him out as well as the others. You brought us Golytsin. Well done.

“Benford is at a different secure location, discussing things with the FBI. Again, it turns out the Russian Mafiya has penetrated deep into a number of American organizations and corporate structures. We’re learning a lot. He’s promised to testify in exchange for leniency.”

“Leniency? The man murdered Ken Richardson in cold blood, and assaulted an NOAA officer with a crowbar!”

“Life might be considered leniency in some circles, especially when the alternative is the death penalty. So would transfer to a regular Federal penitentiary, instead of the ADMAX facility in Pueblo.”

“And Kathy?”

“She’s doing just fine,” Kathy said from the door. She was wearing a blue hospital robe and fuzzy slippers. “Now awaiting her official transfer to something called Desk Three. And how’s my James Bond?”

“On the mend, I’m told.”

“‘James Bond’?” Rubens asked, one eyebrow rising.

“Don’t ask.”

“I won’t. I just wanted to drop by and see how you two were doing. Oh, and you might be interested in this…”

He dropped a newspaper on Dean’s bed. It was folded to page 5 and had a one-column article circled. Dean picked it up and scanned it rapidly.

Dr. Earnest Spencer, a U.S. government climatologist, had given a speech at a Press Club luncheon in Washington the day before, claiming that the large-scale release of methane gas beneath the Arctic ice cap the previous week-apparently a completely natural phenomenon-had released the equivalent of two years’ worth of human-produced greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. He pointed out how lucky everyone concerned was that that enormous volume of gas hadn’t ignited in the atmosphere.

While global warming was an incontrovertible fact, he said, human responsibility for that warming was still very much an open question.

“I don’t know, sir,” Dean said. “It didn’t feel very warm when we were bobbing around in that raft.”

“I imagine not. Of course, Al Gore is back on TV saying the gas release is a global disaster. About a quarter of the ice cap appears to have been broken up by the outgassing, and the pieces are melting much faster than expected. There’s now open water all the way to the Pole, they say.”

“And our involvement in what happened is-”