“You and your people are still in rather bad odor in the White House basement,” she told him. “Collins has been pushing to take over Desk Three.”

He smiled. “Nothing new there.” Debra Collins could be a most… determined woman.

“The President put his foot down this morning,” Stahl continued. “There will be no talk of another reorganization within the intelligence community until after the crisis is resolved, one way or another. And the investigation of the F-22 shoot-down incident is on hold.”

Rubens’ heart quickened a bit at that. President Marcke had always been a staunch supporter of Desk Three. And why not? The team had produced good results in the past. And Marcke’s administrative philosophy tended to run along the lines of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

For the past few weeks, though, Rubens had been cut off from presidential access.

“I’m glad to hear that,” he told her. “But what do you-?”

“Listen, Bill,” she said, interrupting. “You have friends in the Administration, at the Pentagon, and in the NSC, and they all know that Collins and Bing are using the situation to pull off a fast hatchet job. But those two will be talking to their friends on the Hill, and that could be bad for you. Even the President won’t be able to help you if this ends up in front of a Senate Investigations Committee.”

“I understand that.” Even if things were to go well, a congressional investigation could prove disastrous. Neither Rubens nor the NSA worked well under the spotlight of publicity. He could win the battle and find he’d lost the war if some details of Deep Black and Desk Three became public.

“The President wants you to get solid intel on what the hell is going on in the Arctic,” she told him. “Do that and maybe he can derail Bing and Collins on the F-22 thing.”

“We’ve been passing the relevant SIGINT up the chain right along,” Rubens said. “Our Alaskan listening post, especially, has been picking up a lot, despite the bad atmospheric conditions lately.”

“So why did you send it to me?”

He shrugged. “Like I said. The President needed to know.”

“Have you seen an analysis of this stuff?”

“No. Remember, we just collect. Other agencies do the analysis.”

“Give me a break, Bill. We both know it’s not that clear-cut. If it were, Desk Three would be totally useless.”

That was true enough, at least as far as it went. The NSA by design gathered and decoded electronic intelligence-SIGINT-and distributed it to agencies and departments that needed it: the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council. For the most part, though, they did not analyze it, again by design. A cell phone intercept from a known terrorist leader, data on an electronic funds transfer in Lebanon, and the recording of a landline conversation between Paris and Beirut might all be reported to the CIA, but it was not the job of the NSA to put together the jigsaw pieces and predict a terrorist attack against American tourists in France… a situation that the NSA’s signals intercepts had helped prevent just last year.

But, as Barbara had pointed out, things weren’t that simple in reality. The NSA gathered such a huge volume of electronic information in the course of a single day that a certain amount of analysis was necessary just to determine what was important and what was garbage. And once Desk Three had come online and begun operating all over the world, it made more sense to pull hard data out of the NSA’s own networks than it did to wait for the CIA or the State Department to crunch the numbers and return the SIGINT in usable form.

Operation Magpie was a good example of this. A CIA request for help in tracking a possible theft of contaminated beryllium in Rybinsk had gotten things rolling, but NSA signals intercepts had picked up details of a sale to Iran, of Grigor Kotenko’s involvement, of the use of a Liberian freighter to make the transfer, and on the location of the beryllium in a St. Petersburg warehouse. While all of that information had been passed on up the intelligence distribution network, as always, Desk Three’s own analysts had worked on it as well, assembling the complete picture that had allowed Rubens to send Akulinin and DeFrancesca to St. Petersburg in order to find the beryllium shipment and plant the tracking device.

If Rubens had waited for the analysts at Langley to get back to him with the complete picture, he’d still be waiting.

“Let’s just say,” Rubens told Barbara after a moment’s thought, “that I don’t usually see the raw data when it comes in. There’s way too damned much of it… and it takes time to massage it into something useful. I do know there’s been a lot of radio chatter out of Mys Shmidta over the past couple of weeks and lots of high-energy RF jamming. POW-Main has been keeping an eye on it. Looks like military maneuvers, probably routine. I was only marginally aware of the details.

“But when we intercept, first, a call for help from a NOAA ice station-something about a civilian being murdered by a NOAA officer-and then a few minutes later we pick up Russian military transmissions discussing orders to seize that base and take the people there, American citizens, into custody… yeah. Someone figured out what it meant, and they made sure I saw it.”

“What I’m about to tell you is classified, Bill,” Barbara said.

“Of course.”

“The base in question is NOAA Arctic Meteorological Station Bravo.”

“Sure. A NOAA climate research station a few hundred miles north of Mys Shmidta.”

“That’s it. Three NOAA officers, seven scientists, and five kids with Greenworld.”

That caught his attention. “Greenworld?”

“Yes. One of them is a congressman’s daughter, heavily involved in environmental issues.”

He closed his eyes. He could just imagine it. A too-young, too-rich, and too-well-connected WASP princess, most likely, with the politics of Jane Fonda and the common sense of a Christmas tree ornament. “Shit.”

“Just so.”

“What the hell is Greenworld doing up there?”

“Filming a documentary on global warming,” she said. “But they’re not our concern at the moment. Two of the expedition scientists are CIA officers.”

“Christ. This just gets better and better.”

“Three days ago, three members of the expedition-Randy Haines, Kathy McMillan, and Dennis Yeats-set off across the ice, ostensibly to check a remote met station. Haines is a meteorologist and an experienced Arctic hand, but Yeats is CIA and McMillan is NSA. She’s a tech specialist, seconded to the CIA.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. What is the Agency doing in the Arctic?”

“About eighty miles northwest of Station Bravo-they call it ‘Ice Station Bear,’ by the way-there is a surface Russian expedition. Three ships, the polar icebreaker Taymyr; the Akademik Petr Lebedev, a civilian geological research vessel; and a support ship, the Granat. Five months ago they took up their current position, and have been station keeping ever since. Satellite reconnaissance shows they’re building something, building something pretty big, in fact, but we haven’t been able to determine what it is.”

“So the Agency sent a couple of spooks out for a look-see, is that it?”

She nodded. “The remote met station was set up in a particular spot on the ice. A deliberate spot.”

“What… close enough that they could approach those ships?”

“The ice up there is constantly moving,” Barbara said. “Over a hundred, hundred-fifty miles a week. The Russian ships cut through the ice to reach a specific set of coordinates, and they’ve been maintaining station on top of those coordinates ever since.”

“So… the ships are staying put, and the ice is moving around them?”

“Exactly. The Taymyr keeps breaking up the ice around the Lebedev and the Granat. Over the past few weeks, the remote met station has drifted with the ice almost five hundred miles. It’s less than ten miles from the Russian position now. Yeats and McMillan hoped to launch a UUV three days ago to give them an up-close look at what was going on, underwater.”