Primary Threat

“No, I wouldn’t,” the fat man, Viktor Ulyanov, said. “But I believe there are some in our circle who are concerned by the activity.”

Marmilov shrugged. “Of course.”

There were always those who were more concerned about the skin on their own necks than on leading the people to a brighter day.

“And there are some who believe that when the President…”

The President!

Marmilov nearly laughed. The President was a speed bump on this country’s path to greatness. He was an impediment, and a minor one at that. Ever since this President had taken the reins from his alcoholic mentor Yelstin, Russia’s comedy of errors had worsened, not improved.

President of what? President of garbage!

The President needed to watch his back, as the saying went. Or he might soon find a knife protruding from it.

“Yes?” Marmilov said. “Concerned that when the President… what?”

“Finds out,” Ulyanov said.

Marmilov nodded and smiled. “Yes? Finds out… What will happen then?”

“There will be a purge,” Ulyanov said.

Marmilov squinted at Ulyanov in the haze of smoke. Could the man be joking? The jest wouldn’t be that Putin finding out would lead to a purge. If handled incorrectly, of course it would. The jest would be that at this late date in the preparations, Ulyanov and unnamed others would suddenly be thinking about such a thing.

“The President will find out after it is too late,” Marmilov declared simply. “The President himself will be the one who is purged.” Ulyanov, and any others he was speaking for, must know this. It had been the plan all along.

“There is concern that we are arranging a bloodbath,” Ulyanov said.

Marmilov blew smoke into the air. “My dear friend, we are not arranging anything. The bloodbath is already arranged. It was arranged years ago.”

Here in Marmilov’s lair, a laptop computer had sprouted like a mushroom next to the small TV screen on his desk. The TV still showed closed circuit footage from security cameras at the oil rig. The laptop showed transcripts of intercepted American communications translated into Russian.

The Americans were tightening a noose around the captured oil rig. A ring of temporary forward bases were appearing on floating ice within a few miles of the rig. Black operations teams were on high alert, preparing to strike. An experimental supersonic jet had received clearance, and landed at Deadhorse perhaps thirty minutes ago.

The Americans were set to strike.

“It was never the intention to hold the rig for very long,” Marmilov said. “This is why we used a proxy. We knew that the Americans would take back their property.”

“Yes,” Ulyanov said. “But the very same night?”

Marmilov shrugged. “Sooner than we expected, but the result will be the same. Their initial assault teams will meet with disaster. A bloodbath, as you say. The bigger, the better. Their hypocrisy regarding the environment will be exposed. And the world will have occasion to remember their war crimes of the not too distant past.”

“And how much of this will blow back to us?” Ulyanov said.

Marmilov took another deep inhale from his cigarette. It was like the breath of life itself. Yes, even here in Russia, even here in Marmilov’s inner sanctum, you could no longer hide from the facts. Cigarettes were bad for you. Vodka was bad for you. Whiskey was bad for you. But if so, why had God made them all so pleasurable?

He breathed out.

“It remains to be seen, of course. And it will depend on the media outlets covering it in each country. But the first dispatches will of course be in our favor. In general, I suspect that events will reflect rather poorly on the Americans, and then, a bit later, they will reflect poorly on our beloved President.”

He paused, and thought about it just a bit more. “The truth, and events will confirm this as they unfold, is the worse the disaster, the better our position.”

CHAPTER NINE

11:05 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time (September 4)

US Navy Ice Camp ReadyGo

Six Miles North of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Two Miles West of the Martin Frobisher Oil Platform

The Beaufort Sea

The Arctic Ocean

“No way, man. I can’t do this.”

The night was black. Outside the small modular dome, the wind howled. A frozen rain was falling out there. Visibility was deteriorating. In a little while, it was going to be near zero.

Luke was tired. He had taken a Dexie when the plane landed, and another a few moments ago, but neither one had kicked in.

The whole thing seemed like a mistake. They had traveled across the continent in a mad dash, at supersonic speeds, the mission was about to get underway, and now one of his men was backing out.

“This does not look right at all.”

It was Murphy talking. Of course it was.

Murphy did not want to go on this thrill ride.

The temporary ice camp, basically a dozen modular weatherproof domes on a floating ice sheet, had sprung up like so many mushrooms after a spring rain, apparently in the past two hours. It was one of several camps just like it, ringing the oil rig a safe distance away. The establishment of several camps out here on the periphery was in case the terrorists were watching. The activity was designed to make it hard for them to know where the counterattack was coming from.

Inside each of the domes, a rectangular hole had been cut through the ice, roughly the size and shape of a coffin. The ice here was two or three feet thick. A deck made of some wood-like synthetic material had been snapped into place around each hole. Diving lights had been affixed underwater, giving the hole an eerie blue color. New ice was already forming on the surface of the water.

Luke and Ed were in their neoprene dry suits, sitting in chairs near the hole. Brooks Donaldson was doing the same. Each man was being worked on by two assistants, men in US Navy fleece jackets, who busied themselves putting on the men’s equipment. Luke sat still as a man mounted his buoyancy compensator around his torso.

“How’s it feel?” the guy said.

“Bulky, to be honest.”

“Good. It is bulky.”

Luke’s hands weren’t in his gloves yet. They kept straying to the waterproof zipper across his chest. It was tight and hard to pull. As it should be. It was cold water down there. The zipper made a firm seal. But that meant it was going to be hard to open when they reached the destination.

“How am I supposed to open this thing?” he said.

“Adrenaline,” one of the assistants said. “When the shit starts flying, guys practically rip these suits off with their bare hands.”

Ed laughed. He looked at Luke. His eyes said it wasn’t that funny.

“Oh, man,” he said.

Murphy wasn’t laughing at all. He had come here with them from Deadhorse, but he never even began the process of suiting up.

“This is a death trap, Stone,” he said. “Just like last time.”

“You have nothing to prove to me,” Luke said. “Or anyone. No one has to go. It’s not like last time at all.”

Last time.

The time when they were both in Delta, back in eastern Afghanistan. Luke was the squad leader, and he had failed to overrule a glory hound lieutenant colonel who had led everyone—everyone except Luke and Murphy—to their deaths.

It was true. He could have aborted the mission. Those were his guys—they had no allegiance to the lieutenant colonel at all. If Luke had said stop, the mission would have stopped. But he would have risked a court martial for insubordination. He would have risked his entire military career—a career, oddly enough, which ended that night anyway.

Murphy looked at Ed. “Why are you going?”

Ed shrugged. “I like excitement.”

Murphy shook his head. “Look at that hole, man. It’s like someone dug your grave. Drop a coffin in there and you’re all set.”

Murphy wasn’t a coward. Luke knew that. Luke had been in at least a dozen firefights with him in Delta. He’d been in the shootout with him in Montreal, the one that saved Lawrence Keller’s life and brought President David Barrett’s killers to justice. He’d even had a fistfight with Murphy on top of John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame. Murphy was a tough customer.

But Murphy didn’t want to go. Luke could see he was scared. That might be because Murphy didn’t have the training for this. But it just might be because…

“Okay, guys, listen up!”

A burly man in a Navy fleece had come into the dome. For a split second, as he pushed through the heavy vinyl drapes that formed the airlock to the outside, the wind shrieked. The man’s face was bright red from the cold.

“As I understand it, you were all briefed in Deadhorse.”

The guy stopped. He looked at the empty seat where Murphy should be sitting. Then he looked at Murphy.

Murphy shook his head.

“I ain’t going.”

The guy shrugged. “Suit yourself. But this is a classified operation. If you’re not going, you’re not going to hear what I’m about to say.”

“I’m part of the civilian oversight team,” Murphy said.

The guy shook his head. “My orders are that two members of the civilian oversight team are at the command center in Deadhorse, and the rest of the team is suited up and going in with the SEALs.”

He raised his empty hands as if to say: That’s all I got.

“If you’re not at the command center and you’re not suited up, I don’t think you’re on the team.”

Murphy shook his head and sighed. “Ah, hell.”

He shrugged a heavy green parka over his thick coveralls.

“Murph,” Luke said. “Call Swann and Trudy. They’ll get you on a chopper.”

The new guy shook his head. “Choppers are grounded. The storm is coming in hard. We don’t want any accidents out there. The mission is bad enough.”

Murphy cursed under his breath and went out the way the man had just come in. The vinyl flapped and the wind shrieked again. The man watched Murphy leave, then looked at the three divers remaining.

“Okay,” he said. “This is an ice dive, at night, in a storm, in an overhead environment. I almost can’t think of a more challenging assignment. A year ago, we lost two experienced divers in a similar overhead ice environment, but it was a daytime training dive, there was no storm, and they were tethered to their home base. Okay? You should know that.”

“Were they swimming toward a firefight?” Ed said.

The man just looked at him. He was in no mood for humor. Luke felt much the same way. There was nothing funny about this.

“As you probably realize, this is not a tethered dive. For much of the swim, the ice above your heads will be frozen solid. You do not want to make contact with it. You want to drop five meters below it, then maintain neutral buoyancy, and good level trim.”

There were four swimmer delivery vehicles at his feet. They were basically small, battery-powered electric torpedoes. Each diver would hold the handle on a vehicle with one hand, and the propulsion would carry him to the destination much faster, and with much less effort, than he could swim by himself.

The man picked one up in both arms. “Who here has used one of these?”

All three hands went up.

The man nodded. “Good. Normally, we would use Mark 8 submarine delivery vehicles, each carrying two to four men, but we couldn’t get them here in time, and the environment is a difficult one in which to deploy them. So we’re going with the handhelds. All right?”

He paused. But no one said a word. It was what it was. It didn’t matter if it was all right or not.

“Watch your compass. You are headed due east. You’ve got seventeen other guys…” He looked at Murphy’s empty chair again. “Sixteen other guys down there. Move with the flow of traffic. This group is the oversight group, so you are taking the rear. If you get confused, you get lost, the way back is due west. This camp is lit up like a Christmas tree down there, so just head for the lights.”

He held up a waterproof helmet, with visor and mask.

“Your head gear has two-way radio communications. Keep chatter to a minimum. Listen for the leaders up ahead. Visibility is going to be low. Your ears might save you. Your mouth might kill you.”

He stared hard at them all.

“No air support. No amphibious support. It could get hot. Keep an eye above you. When you notice open air, you are almost there. As you reach the overhead ice’s edge, turn off your headlamps. The idea, gentlemen, is to take them by surprise.”

The man held up an MP5 machine gun with a pre-mounted magazine. The gun was shrink-wrapped in thick, translucent plastic. He held up a three-pack of grenades, wrapped the same way.

“These things are out of the elements right now. This is one hundred percent waterproof packaging. When you get onto land, use your knives to cut it open.”

He smiled, then shook his head. “If you need to, use your knives to cut yourselves out of those suits, too.”

Luke glanced at Ed. Ed made a grimace, a funny facial expression that Luke had never seen him make before. He looked like a kid in elementary school when the teacher suggested the class should sing some Christmas carols.

The assistants behind Ed lifted his helmet, and then let it settle into place on his head. His breath fogged up the visor.

The assistants behind Luke were about to do the same.

“Any questions?” the man at the front said.

What are we doing? came to mind.

“Good. Then let’s hit it.”

* * *

Murphy was in a bad mood.

“I’m sick of this mission, Swann. I never liked Navy people, and now I really don’t like them.”

The communications here were okay, despite the storm. Swann had explained it to him, but Murphy hadn’t listened to the whole thing. Something about antennas built into these domes, plus satellite signals that penetrated fast moving cloud cover and precipitation, plus the unbreakable encryption Swann was known for…

Whatever.

He waited through the delay as the signal bounced around so the terrorists couldn’t trace and listen in.

Murphy was fed up, irritated. He wasn’t a diver. Stone and Newsam weren’t divers either. The SEALs had been training with elite cold-water dive teams from Norway and Sweden for the past several years. Meanwhile, the unprepared SRT had been tacked onto this mission like some kind of garish hood ornament.

The way that big guy had looked at the empty chair… then at Murphy… then back at the chair. He was lucky they were both on the same team. Murphy would gladly remodel the guy’s face with that chair.

“Yeah, I don’t get it,” Swann said finally. “We’re pretty much window dressing back here at mission control. Nobody wants civilian oversight on this thing. They want a rubber stamp. They put us in our own office, away from everybody else, with a couple of computers and a coffee machine.”

Murphy smiled. He could picture hardened SEAL and JSOC officers getting a load of the tall, gangly, long-haired, bespectacled computer freak Swann, and the tender young morsel Trudy Wellington, and thinking…

Nothing. The engines powering the typical military brain would grind to a halt. The sight of Swann alone was enough to pour sugar in the gas tank.

Put them in another room, somewhere out of sight.

“Those guys are gonna get themselves killed down there. I tried to tell Stone, but then some Navy chump kicked me out because the briefing was classified.”

“Where are you now?” Swann said.

Murphy looked around. He was inside an empty dome, sitting on a chair that until recently must have held a Navy SEAL. The hole in the ice glowed blue. There was a command dome around here somewhere, and after the SEALs went in, the support staff must have gone there to watch the radar blips moving under the ice sheet.

“I’m in hell,” Murphy said. “A frozen hell.”

Trudy’s voice came on. It was musical, like fingers lightly tinkling the piano keys.

“What do you want to do?” she said.

The answer to that was easy enough. Murphy wanted to disappear. He wanted to leave this Arctic wasteland, this pointless terrorist atrocity, whatever it was, go down to Grand Cayman, grab his $2.5 million in cash, and just evaporate.

It was easier said than done, however. It was going to take planning, and time to engineer a disappearance like that. Time he didn’t have. Don still wanted him to do six months in Leavenworth in exchange for an honorable discharge. Meanwhile, Wallace Speck was in custody, out of Murphy’s reach, and could start saying unfortunate things at any moment.

The worst-case scenario was Murphy arriving in Leavenworth at the exact moment Speck mentioned his name.

Naturally, these were not things Murphy could talk about with Mark Swann and Trudy Wellington. But there were things he could talk about. Swann and Trudy could help him, not to get out of here, but to get further in.

Stone was wrong. Murphy had something to prove. He always had something to prove. Maybe not to Stone, and maybe not to that Cro-Magnon-skulled SEAL trainer, but to himself. This mission had rubbed him the wrong way. They had catapulted across the country at warp speed, for what? A half-baked operation that was FUBAR before it even got underway. Who dreamed this up, Wile E. Coyote? It was the Iran embassy rescue operation part two, with ice this time instead of sand.

That it seemed so poorly and hastily designed irritated Murphy. The fact that Stone went along with it irritated him more. The fact that Newsam went along with it piled the irritation sky high.

The fact that he, Murphy, couldn’t bring himself to squeeze into that claustrophobic diving suit and climb through that grave hole in the ice added a little bit of humiliation to the mix. And the way that mindless drone looked at that chair…

Murphy’s hands clenched and unclenched. He had come to terms long ago that part of why he had joined the military, and then Delta Force, was to do something constructive with his anger.

He knew his history. He had studied skilled, prolific killers from past wars. Audie Murphy in World War II. Bloody Bill Anderson during the American Civil War. Much of what drove those guys was rage.

In his mind’s eye, he could see Audie Murphy at Colmar, standing alone atop a burning tank killer, mowing down dozens of Germans with a .50 caliber machine gun, while taking enemy fire the entire time.

Murphy, Newsam, and Stone had all taken Dexies earlier. Murphy had been tired and taken two. They were kicking in hard right now. He could feel his heart beginning to pound and his breathing pick up. Items inside this dome began to jump out at him in exquisite detail. He stifled an urge to stand up and do a bunch of jumping jacks.

He could kill someone right now, a lot of someones. And Cayman Island was far away, out of reach for the moment. Stone and Newsam had just sent themselves off with the underwater version of the Donner Party, a frozen suicide mission that could only end in disaster. And there were a bunch of terrorists out there who had already killed innocent people. The men holding that oil rig were bad guys, and no one was going to be bothered all that much if they died.

Murphy’s mind began to race along. Swann and Trudy had been banished to their own office, and that was not necessarily a bad thing. They were both wizards with technology. If their communications weren’t quarantined… a big if, but…

“Murph? What do you want to do?”

Murphy’s eyes were shooting laser beams. His hands could throw flaming fireballs. He was unstoppable right now, the way he’d always been. All these years in combat, and he’d hardly ever seen a scratch. It was amazing how things came together.

“I want a boat,” he said, without realizing he would say that. “I want weapons, I want drone support, and I want guidance across the storm to that oil rig.”

He paused, his mind moving so fast now, pure images, that he could barely articulate the thoughts in words.

“I want to get in the game.”

* * *

Luke jumped into the dark hole.

He dropped through a thin sheen of ice into a surreal underwater world. In an instant, the utilitarian, almost locker-room like environment of the dome was gone, replaced by this…

The sea was dark blue, disappearing into the black void below him. Above his head, the ice was a stark bluish white, with glowing rectangles of bright white light marking where the domes were, where the holes had been cut through the ice.

It was an alien place.

He could be an astronaut sailing weightless through deep space.

The most pressing thing he noticed was the cold. It wasn’t the frigid cold of jumping into the ocean during late autumn. It didn’t penetrate him. The dry suit was perfectly effective at keeping out the ice water that would kill him in moments.

In that sense, he wasn’t cold. But he could feel the cold all around him, against the outside of the thick neoprene. His skin felt cold. It was if the cold was alive, and trying to burrow its way in to reach him. If it found a way, he would die down here. It was just that simple.

The only sound he could hear was his own breathing, loud in his ears. He noticed it was fast and shallow, and he concentrated on slowing it down and deepening it. Shallow breathing was the beginning of panic. Panic made you lose your head. In a place like this, it would make you lose your life.

Relax.

Luke put his cylindrical, torpedo-like delivery vehicle into gear, and surged gently forward.

Ahead, the group of divers moved, their headlamps lighting up the dark, casting eerie shadows. Luke half expected a giant shark, a prehistoric megalodon, to suddenly appear out of the darkness in front of them.

As they left the camp behind, he noticed the sea was moving, roiling, and the thick ice ceiling above their heads rippled and surged like land under the effect of a powerful earthquake. He and Ed moved side by side, traveling through the heavy currents, the diver delivery vehicles in their hands doing most of the work.

Luke felt himself being pushed around, he felt the water’s attempts to turn him upside down, or send him reeling into Ed, but he rolled with it and pushed on.

He glanced at Ed. Ed had good trim, his body nearly horizontal, pitched forward just a touch, his head up. Luke could not see Ed’s face beneath his helmet. The effect was alienating. Ed could be an imposter, or a machine.

Murmured voices started to come through the helmet radio. Luke could barely hear them, and couldn’t make out what they said. The sound of his breathing apparatus was much louder than the radio. It was going to be hard to communicate.

He glanced back. The lights penetrating into the darkness from above were fading into the distance. They had already left the base camp behind.

Time entered a strange sort of fugue state. He glanced at his watch. He had set the mission timer just before he had dropped into the water. It had clocked a little over ten minutes since that moment.

They passed the edge of the ice sheet and the ceiling above them became dark, even black, punctuated with moving blocks of ice. Everything went dark now, lit only by their headlamps, and the headlamps ahead of them.

They were already close, and it had happened much faster than he expected.

Steady… steady.

He passed a small device, glowing green in the darkness. It was a metal box, perhaps ten meters to his right. At a guess, it was a meter tall and half a meter wide. There were controls of various kinds along one side. It was small enough and far away enough that he almost didn’t see it at all.

It was a robot, what Luke knew as a remotely operated underwater vehicle, or ROV. It was attached to a thick yellow tether that disappeared into the black distance to the north. The tether was probably its primary electricity source. It probably also contained the wires that controlled it, and through which it sent data back to… where?

It had a large round eye, likely the lens of a camera.

Hadn’t anyone else noticed this thing?

He tried to make a turn in that direction, but his momentum carried him past before he could get anywhere near it. Ed turned to look at him. Luke tried to point to the ROV, but it was well behind him now, and the suit and the equipment were too bulky.

They should go back, grab that thing, and at least inspect it. No one said anything about remote controlled cameras being deployed on this mission. It was sending images to someone.