This time, no incriminating hardware would be left behind.

USGN Ohio Arctic Ice Cap 82° 34' N, 177° 26' E 0915 hours, GMT-12

DEAN SAT AT THE WARDROOM table, staring into the screen on his handheld PDA. Rubens’ lined face stared back out at him. “I know, Mr. Dean,” Rubens was saying. “But the President was most insistent. We treat this as a terrorist hostage situation.”

Captain Grenville had let Dean use the wardroom for his communications session with Fort Meade. The Ohio had shifted position some seventy miles to the north of Ice Station Bear, taking her closer to the Russian ships parked in the ice. An hour ago she’d surfaced in a polynya, rising just enough to extend the sub’s communications mast and establish a link with one of the National Security Agency’s dedicated comsats. The image on Dean’s handheld tended to fuzz and break up at times-atmospherics were still playing hell with RF signals, and the satellite was quite close to the horizon-but at least there was nothing on the horizon to block the signal completely.

“But suppose the hostages aren’t there any longer?” Dean said. “Suppose they’ve been moved to the mainland?”

“Fourteen, fifteen people, plus their guards, would need a fairly large transport,” Rubens told him. “Something the size of a Hip at least.”

“Hip” was the NATO designation for the Russian Mi-8 helicopter, an old design going back to the early 1960s, but still common both throughout the Russian Federation and with numerous Russian military export customers.

“And there’s one of those operating off the Lebedev,” Dean said, nodding.

“Right. But satellite reconnaissance has picked up no air traffic at all between the Russian base and the mainland. It’s nine hundred miles at least to the nearest land base; that’s a flight time of six and a half hours for a chopper… and an Mi-8 would require at least two refuelings en route. It doesn’t have air-to-air fueling capabilities, so it would have to land on ships with helipads. We have some holes in our satellite coverage up there, but none big enough that we wouldn’t have seen an operation of that size. If the Russians had moved our people to the mainland, we’d have spotted it.”

Dean didn’t have the same faith in high-tech magic that Rubens did, but he was willing to accept that Desk Three was satisfied that the Americans were still at the Russian ice base. But he could see a lot of problems blocking any attempt to get them out.

“Is there any way of imaging those ships to get an idea of where our people might be held?”

We’ve been collecting a lot of satellite recon data,” Rubens told him, “especially from the IRSAT series. We’ve been building up a coherent picture over the past couple of days. Here…”

The image on Dean’s handheld screen changed from Rubens’ face to a photograph of the Lebedev, taken from overhead and to one side. The picture then changed, becoming fuzzy, green, and somewhat translucent, as the ice and water around the vessel turned black and certain parts of the ship, her engine rooms in particular, glowed in mingled tones of white, yellow, and pale green. A number of light green dots were scattered in irregular clumps through the ship.

“Infrared imagery,” Rubens said. “Heat. IRSAT is sensitive enough to pick up the heat radiated by a living human body, even behind walls. The detector’s not sensitive enough to pick up warm bodies on the lower decks, but the walls of the superstructure are pretty thin. We’re picking up sixty human signatures here.”

“That’s less than half of the Lebedev’s complement.”

“Correct. But we can see where people are congregating in the superstructure. The bridge. Berthing quarters. Mess room. And here…” A red disk winked on, highlighting a tight clump of green dots near the aft end of the superstructure. “And here. The supply lockers.”

“Interesting.”

“We count sixteen human-sized heat sources in this one area. Our ship experts believe these would have been stores lockers, which are empty now, after months at sea. Good places to quarter a large number of supernumeraries.”

“Hostages, you mean,” Dean said. “And their guards. Okay. I’ll buy it.”

“You’ll need to use that special equipment to try to confirm their location,” Rubens told him as the image was replaced once more by his face. “I’ve already spoken with Lieutenant Taylor. You will accompany the SEALs on board the ship. Just try to stay out of their way. Let them do their business.”

Dean groaned inwardly, however. No military commander liked being micromanaged, and none liked it when spooks, no matter how high up they were on the org chart, told them they had to drag along unwanted baggage. He kept his feelings to himself, however, and simply nodded at the handheld’s optical pickup. “Of course.”

“We’ve had a breakthrough, of sorts, thanks to Lia and the new man, Akulinin.”

“Their op went okay then?”

“Well enough.” Something about Rubens’ expression on the tiny screen told Sean it hadn’t been as simple as that. “They’re both okay. They made it through to the Georgian border, then to Turkey. They’re still in Ankara, waiting for a flight back to the U.S.”

“I’m glad to hear it. What did they find?”

“The three ships up there in the ice are part of an operation called Deep Well, or GK- 1,” Rubens told him. “It’s a new and experimental drilling process for oil.”

“Pretty much what we thought, then.”

“Yeah. The unexpected part is the drilling platform.”

“They’re using the ship, right? The Lebedev?”

“No. Or, rather, not directly. The drilling platform is underwater.”

“So. Literally ‘Deep Well.’ How the hell did they pull that off?”

“Lia found a report on Kotenko’s computer that let us piece things together.”

The screen cut to a series of schematic views, plans and elevations of something that looked more or less like a conventional ship with a slender midships section between much larger bow and stern sections. Dean was strongly reminded of the FLIP, or Floating Instrument Platform, an odd-looking vessel used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography since the 1960s. Like FLIP, the Russian undersea oil platform appeared to be designed with ballast tanks that let it rotate ninety degrees into a vertical position, bow high. It could then be anchored by cables to piers sunken at the planned drill site, and then, unlike with FLIP, ballast and trim tanks could submerge the structure to any desired depth, all the way down to three thousand feet. The drilling rig ran down the length of the vessel, from bow to stern; feeder tubes could be raised to the surface on flotation buoys to take on air if necessary, though he saw provisions in the blueprints for desalinization plants to make fresh water, and hydrolysis units to break oxygen out of seawater. Other tubes could be raised in order to pump oil or natural gas up to a waiting tanker.

“GK-1 is a prototype,” Rubens continued, “a test bed for new technology and proof-of-concept. The bugs Lia planted in Sochi have led us to a Houston company called Wildcat Technologies.” More schematics appeared of a design identical to the Russian structure. “They call the thing Deepsea. It’s an oil rig anchored to the sea floor at a depth of anything from a few hundred feet to half a mile down. Teleoperated robots and something like the Canadian arm used on the Space Shuttle let them take drill segments passed down from a ship on the surface, piece them together one after another, and add them to the drill train.”

Dean studied the schematics for a moment. “So… it doesn’t need anything at the surface at all? The whole thing’s entirely underwater?”

“Obviously, once the structure’s in place, it needs to be serviced by ships on the surface. During the drilling operation, a vessel like the Lebedev lowers the drill sections down to the rig, but once the well is producing, the design allows supply ships to come and go without needing to shut down the operation between visits. A relatively small crew lives on board the submerged rig. Docking ports here… and here allow miniature submarines to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the surface. The whole thing can be self-sufficient for a couple of months at a time, maybe longer.”