“No,” Dean said. “I hadn’t seen these.” That much was true, though Rubens had told him about the Russian base on the ice during his long-distance briefing at Menwith Hill.

“What’s the matter?” Hartwell said with a chuckle. “Don’t you guys talk to one another?”

“You’d be surprised what we don’t even tell ourselves,” Dean replied. He studied the photo of the activity on the Lebedev’s afterdeck more closely. “What are they doing? Pulling core samples?”

“According to the message transmitted with these photos,” Grenville told him, “the pipes appear to be the business end of an oil-drilling rig. However, there’s no sign of a derrick or platform, and the water at that point is over two thousand meters deep. So the whole thing is pretty much a mystery.”

“You can see that they’re stringing those sections of pipe together and feeding it over the transom,” he said. “The pipe sections are too thin to be a seabed pipeline.”

“I was wondering if it was a pipeline myself,” Grenville said. “But the ship isn’t moving, so she’s not paying it out astern. Besides, the water is pretty deep at that spot-almost half a mile. A regular pipeline would have to be a lot thicker, with lots of insulation to keep the oil warm enough to flow.” He shook his head. “It would also need some hellaciously big pumps, and we’re not seeing anything like that.”

“It might also be a natural gas well,” Dean said, “but that would still require a derrick.” He remembered what Lia had told him a few nights ago about the movement of the ice. “There’s something here that’s just not making sense.”

“Well, we should be at the NOAA station by twenty-two hundred hours tomorrow,” Grenville said. “We’ll surface there… and maybe then we can start getting some answers.”

Dean nodded. “You’re not expecting any problem with breaking through the ice?”

Grenville smiled and shook his head. “Believe me, the ice is the least of our worries. The stuff’s so thin we won’t even need to look for a lead.”

“I heard it was two or three yards thick.”

“Normally, yeah. But the ice cap has been unusually thin for, oh, eight or ten years now. The people preaching global warming aren’t just blowing smoke. In August of 2007, over half of the usual summer ice cap was just… gone. The Beaufort Sea, the Chukchi Sea, and the East Siberian Seam all the way to well beyond the North Pole, the whole damned region was completely ice free. First time that’s ever happened since we started paying attention to the Arctic.”

“But that’s where they built the NOAA station.”

“Right. The sea froze over again the next winter, of course. Right now, though, it’s only maybe two feet at the thickest, and with lots of melt holes. The climate guys think even more of the ice cap will vanish this summer. One reason they put Bravo where they did was to monitor the summer breakup of the ice.”

Dean thought about the Greenpeace kids and their movie. That would have been some good documentary footage on global warming… shot as the ice cracked open beneath them.

“Sounds like the ice cap is melting faster than even the doomsayers are claiming.”

“The Canadians are actively expanding their fleet,” Hartwell put in. “Eight new patrol vessels just so they can safeguard maritime traffic going through the Northwest Passage. And they’re building a big new naval base to support them.”

The Northwest Passage, of course, had been a fabled ice-free sea-lane from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the object of hundreds of exploratory attempts as far back as the 1500s and continuing through the Arctic explorations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That passage had been a myth… but as the Arctic ice cap dwindled year by year, the myth had come closer and closer to becoming a year-round reality. The same was true for the Siberian passage from Europe to the Far East by way of the Siberian sea-lanes.

An ice-free Arctic might one day prove to be a boon to global trade… if not for the local ecosystems.

Dean thought for a moment about the man Tommy Karr had been protecting. What was his name? Spencer. Yeah.

That the Arctic ice was vanishing was undeniable. Was human activity to blame, however, or was it part of an ongoing and completely natural cycle, as Spencer claimed? The answer might never be known with certainty… and so far as Dean was concerned, the answer might not even matter. The Arctic was on its way to becoming an ice-free ocean, one way or another, and either way, humans would have to learn to live with the result.

The Russians, apparently, were trying to get a jump on the rest of the world’s population, however, by staking out their ownership boundaries early. If they could enforce their claim to half of the newly exposed ocean at the top of the world, they would have clear access to an incredible bounty of oil and natural gas-enough to challenge the long-standing near monopoly of the sheiks and strongmen of the Middle East.

Enough to replace them as a global source of petroleum as the Middle East reserves inevitably dwindled…

“So what are you going up there for, Captain?” Dean asked Grenville.

“Our orders are, first, to ensure the safety of distressed American citizens in the area and, second, to assert our rights to passage through international waters.”

“Any sign of those distressed Americans?”

“No. But there’s been helicopter activity near those Russian ships… and nothing between the ships and the nearest Russian ports. Intelligence thinks they’re being held on the Lebedev.”

“Which is where you and your men come in, I suspect,” Dean told Taylor.

“That’s why we’re here,” the SEAL said.

But Dean found the man’s grave confidence somehow disturbing.

As a former Marine, Dean was no stranger to combat; while war was never a good option, sometimes it was the best of a raft of genuinely bad possibilities. As a Marine scout/sniper he’d accepted the intensely personal issue of killing a particular individual rather than randomly, justifying what amounted to murder with the knowledge that he was saving the lives of brother Marines.

But a global war over the oil and gas hidden beneath the melting ice would serve no one… except, possibly…

The jokers in this game were the leaders of the Russian mafia, and that was what made things so dangerous. They didn’t care whether there was a war or not. In fact, a good old-fashioned war, even a limited naval engagement, might well present them with unparalleled opportunities to make more money. They might broker deals with foreign companies, invest in military-based industries, control the financial institutions bankrolling military construction, hoard reserves of vital strategic materials like… oil.

The insight stunned him momentarily. Everyone so far had been assuming that the Organizatsiya was simply carrying out business as usual, a kind of neocapitalism gone wild. But what if the Russian mafia or even just a few of its key leaders were actively attempting to start a war, operating on the theory that war is always good for business?

Dean wondered if the idea had occurred to Rubens already, and wanted to discuss the idea with him. Unfortunately, Dean’s communications implant couldn’t find a satellite on board a Navy sub six hundred feet beneath the polar ice. He would have to wait until they surfaced, then hope he could get a clear channel.

He thought the idea important enough, however, that he decided to ask if he could borrow a computer in order to write a full report, to be broadcast back to Fort Meade as soon as the Ohio surfaced.

So far, the rest of the world-including America’s intelligence community-had been two steps behind the unseen enemy. As with al-Qaeda, there’d been a tendency here to think of that enemy as a government, with a government’s concerns, responsibilities, and vulnerabilities. When that enemy instead was, like al-Qaeda, a criminal network, the problem became infinitely more difficult.