“Like one of our nuclear missile subs,” Dean said. “They can stay submerged for months. I don’t see any engines, though.”

“The structure is designed to be towed into place. No engines, except for station-keeping thrusters. Oil or natural gas brought up from the sea floor is pumped into large collapsible bladders secured to the hull until they can be transferred to a tanker. The bladders increase the structure’s buoyancy as they fill, of course, but that’s counteracted by progressively flooding onboard ballast tanks.”

“So the whole drill rig can’t be affected by waves or storms, and they can carry out long-term drilling operations underneath the ice.” Dean nodded. “Slick.”

“Exactly. Icebreakers give access from the surface when they need to send down supplies, or to fill a tanker. When a well gives out, they just attach guide cables from above, release the anchor cables below, and float the structure up to a hole cut in the surface ice, where it’s righted. Then they tow the whole thing to a new location.”

“So what’s the payoff?” Dean asked. “It sounds expensive.”

“It is. The big oil companies have been using semi-submersible rigs since the 1960s, using ballast tanks to partially sink the rig, but this idea required a lot of new technology. The project was initiated ten years ago, with the idea of developing an oil platform immune to storms.”

That made sense, Dean thought. There’d been several nightmarish accidents when storms had toppled conventional oil rigs on the surface. He remembered reading about one, the Ocean Ranger, a drilling platform that had sunk in a storm in the North Atlantic in 1982, killing all eighty-four people on board.

“There’s also a considerable public relations bonus if it works,” Rubens went on. “Environmentalist groups have been targeting visible drilling operations off of Los Angeles, and in the Texas gulf. If the drill platforms are out of sight, they’re out of mind. That was the idea, anyway.

“But the real advantage, of course, would be for drilling underneath the Arctic ice cap. A couple of the global oil giants have been working on the technology for some time, now. They’ve known for years that the North Slope fields extend pretty way out into the Arctic basin. They just weren’t sure how far, or how extensive they might be. The Russians have been doing exploratory drilling up there for at least fifteen years now. According to the data Lia found on Kotenko’s computer, it’s a bonanza.”

“You said this is an American design?” Dean asked. “Did the Russians buy it, or did they steal it?”

“We’re… investigating that. We’ve come across an interesting tidbit. One of the Greenpeace people at Ice Station Bear used to be a mid-level manager at Wildcat Technologies.” A new image came up onscreen, a dark-haired, bearded man with a worried look on his face. “Harry Benford. According to some of the intelligence we developed in Solchi, he evidently was working for the Russians. He might have provided them with the Deepsea engineering specs.”

“Something’s not right here,” Dean said. “When I was at the ice station, we found that little one-channel radio receiver in the bunk belonging to either Steven Moore or Randy Haines. Seems like it’s pushing things a bit to assume that there were two Russian spies at the base.”

“I agree. It would have been easy enough for Benford to plant the radio in another bunk, especially in all of the confusion when the Russians arrived at the base. Of course, it’s also possible that Wildcat was cutting a backroom deal with Moscow.”

“Oh?”

“We’ve been doing some checking. Wildcat is in deep financial trouble right now. The company put a lot of money into R and D for this thing, but the oil companies that might have purchased Deepsea are holding off on investing in the new technology.”

“God. Why? This looks like a really decent idea.”

“Because it is so damned expensive. Because a lot of the technology is still unproven. And the way things are going with the Arctic environment, it may be they just need to wait a few years for all of the ice up there to melt. Then they could build cheaper, traditional ocean-rig platforms.”

But the Russians, Dean thought, might not want to wait for that to happen.

“Anyway,” Rubens went on, “there are laws that would block the transfer of some of this technology to another country. The Justice Department will be investigating to see if any of those laws were broken by Wildcat… or if this is simply a case of simple industrial espionage.”

“I see.” Dean considered the situation for a moment. “So we’re going to take them down.”

He didn’t like this. It was inevitable, perhaps, that as oil reserves dwindled around the world, as war continued to wrack the Middle East, as the demand for oil increased, those countries dependent on petroleum for economic and political stability would begin to squabble among themselves over what was left. It was a depressingly Malthusian scenario.

“Just so you know, Dean,” Rubens said, “this is not about oil.”

Damn. Sometimes Dean swore that Rubens could read minds. “No, sir. I didn’t say it was.” Not out loud, at any rate.

“Espionage aside,” Rubens continued, “it’s the President’s assumption that the Russians have a perfect right to drill for oil up here. That’s not the issue. They do not have the right to hold American citizens hostage, to take over American science stations, or to claim half of the Arctic Ocean as their own personal backyard.”

“I understand, sir.”

“And they especially don’t have the right to kill or capture my people.”

That, of course, was the telling point-especially to a former Marine. Presidents and politicians might take their countries into war for the most selfish, shortsighted, vainglorious, or otherwise idiotic of reasons… but the men on the front lines didn’t fight for political causes. Not really. They fought for their buddies, the other grunts in the trenches with them. That had most likely been a basic principle of war even before Narmer united Egypt.

“If Braslov’s up here, I’ll find him,” Dean said.

“Good. Alive. I’ll also want you to keep an eye on the people the SEALs rescue, make sure they all get out okay. Two of them are intelligence operatives, remember-Yeats and McMillan-and McMillan is one of ours.”

“Yes, sir.”

“According to the diplomatic communiqué, two of the hostages are injured, one of them seriously.”

“Jesus. What happened?”

“No details yet, but the Russians reportedly have both of them in the hospital facility on board one of the ships. They also have a body.”

“Of who?”

“According to the Russians, the dead guy is Kenneth Richardson. He was the leader of the Greenpeace film crew at the NOAA ice station. They say the NOAA CO shot him twice, and that another Greenpeace guy smacked the CO in the face with an iron bar.”

“That’s the badly injured man?”

“Commander Larson, yes.”

“And the guy who hit him?”

Rubens’ mouth twitched in an almost smile. “Harry Benford.”

“Well, well, well. The possible spy.”

“Benford is the other man. Apparently, Larson shot him in the arm before Benford was able to hit Larson.”

“And if Benford was working for the Russians, maybe he set the whole thing up.”

“That is the belief of the analysts we have working on the intelligence developed by Miss DeFrancesca and Mr. Akulinin,” Rubens said. “The Russians were looking for an excuse to move in and grab the NOAA station. Quite possibly, they’d already realized that we were spying on their base from one of our met stations nearby. A murder is reported-a murder supposedly committed by the leader of the scientific expedition, no less-and the Russians, claiming that region as their legal jurisdiction anyway, move in. They probably hope to use the incident in support of their official claim to the Arctic basin.”