Hardy scowled for a moment, then answered, “Emmers is a horse’s patoot, but he’s also right. We don’t have enough intelligence to predict where Fedorin will move next. By the time we’d doped out what was going to happen in Belarus, it was too late.”
“Maybe even Fedorin doesn’t know,” Joanna suggested. “He could just sit there and stir the pot until he sees an opening, and then act.”
Hardy nodded agreement. “Being a dictator does let him move more quickly. But without taking the analogy too far, he has more than one bubbling pot on the stove, and there’s lots of different things he can do: build up the fire or put in different ingredients, and we don’t even know the recipes he’s trying to make.”
“But you do know,” she insisted. “He’s trying to make borscht, every time.” Her husband’s annoyed frown caused her to chuckle. She held up a hand, smiling. “Okay, I’m sorry. I broke your metaphor. I understand that you need more information, and that Fedorin has the initiative. He can choose the time and place, and all you can do is react. But you also know his goals.”
“And Ray Peakes is working that angle, as he tries to improve our intelligence collection and analysis capabilities on Russia. We’ve been spread pretty thin with most of our attention being in the Middle East and Asia for the last couple of decades, as you well know, my dear. We need to essentially rebuild our Russian analytical cadre. You just can’t order decent analysts online. They need to be recruited, trained, and grown. But this takes time, something that our allies, and my critics, don’t get.”
“Meanwhile, Emmers and his allies will snipe at you.”
“I’m not worried about that; I’m already developing a thick hide. But Fedorin is not our friend, and wants to do us harm.”
“He’s trying to take over entire countries,” Joanna persisted. “He can’t do that entirely out of sight.”
“Perhaps not. But, we’re still depending far more on luck than I’d like.”
Commander Louis Weiss strolled slowly into the control room, carefully cradling his extra large mug. He wasn’t completely awake yet and he didn’t want to spill a drop of the precious hot black liquid. Although the mug was capable of holding twenty ounces, Weiss had only filled it to the “sea line,” which meant a mere sixteen. A gift from his wife, it was a simple, sturdy design adorned with the ship’s patch and motto, Semper Optima—“Always the Best.”
Pausing to look around control, he found everything running smoothly, despite the fact that their deployment had taken a hard left turn. Two days earlier the boat had rendezvoused with the Coast Guard icebreaker Polar Star at Smith Bay, a remote ice-infested cove at the top of Alaska. Polar Star had hightailed it from Anchorage, on the other side of the state, after stopping just long enough to pick up a navy detachment and their cargo that had been flown into Elmendorf Air Force Base. It took nearly six days for the Coast Guard ship to reach the northern bay; thick broken ice slowed them down a little as they rounded Barrow.
By comparison, Jimmy Carter had it easy. Weiss was able to bring her in submerged until they were well within sight of land. Once tied up alongside Polar Star, navy and coast guard personnel quickly transferred the supplies, spare parts, mission data, and mail. Commodore Mitchell had promised the last item as compensation for what promised to be a long deployment. Five hours later, Jimmy Carter slipped back beneath the Arctic Ocean.
Acknowledging the officer of the deck’s greeting, Weiss wandered over to the plotting tables. His executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Joshua Segerson was hunched over the port table, studying a chart of the Severnaya Zemlya area.
“Good morning, Skipper,” hailed Segerson without looking up.
“Morning, XO. So how’s the search plan coming along?”
“Nav finished it about half an hour ago, he was up all night tweaking the damn thing. I had him hit the rack.”
Weiss nodded his understanding; the ship’s navigator, Lieutenant Commander Kurt Malkoff, was a perfectionist. “Yeah, well, Kurt can get pretty focused when he thinks he needs to.”
“Which is all the time,” noted Segerson with confidence. “But still, after thirty-some hours staring at this chart I figured there was a distinct risk of us ending off of Australia, so I booted him out.” The executive officer stood up straight, rolled the chart up and offered it to Weiss. “I’ve just finished looking it over, and it is one finely polished cannonball. It’s ready for your review, sir.”
“Thanks, I’ll study it when I grab my second mug,” said Weiss as he stuffed the chart under his arm. “But what’s the bottom line, XO? How long does Kurt think it’ll take to find Toledo?”
Segerson shook his head. “I asked him the same thing, Skipper, and I got a typical answer. If we’re really lucky, about a week, if we’re really unlucky, never, and then there is everything in between.”
“I just hope we find her, Josh. There’s a lot of attention on this mission. A lot of presidential attention.”
“I’d say that’s normal when a boat goes missing.”
Weiss shook his head vehemently. “No, no, XO, it goes way beyond that. You see, the new president, our squadron commodore, and Toledo’s skipper all served together on Memphis. From what I heard, that wardroom got really tight during their last mission — a SPECOP in Russian waters.”
Segerson whistled softly, then said, “No pressure.” He hadn’t been aware of that little fact.
“You got that right, Josh.” Weiss paused to take a stiff drink of his coffee and then motioned toward the navigation chart. “We’re still good, position-wise?”
“Yes, sir. We’ll be in the search area in a little less than twenty-four hours. Then the real fun begins. I take it you still intend to make a quick pass of the area, get the lay of the land, in a manner of speaking?”
Weiss nodded. “Yes, XO, and we go in at battle stations. I don’t know what happened to Toledo, but I’m not taking any chances.”
3
DRAGON’S LAIR
Vice Admiral Nikolai Vasil’evich Gorokhov steadied himself against the biting wind as he peered through his binoculars out into the Laptev Sea. He didn’t like what he was seeing. Theoretically it was summer, theoretically. But at the far end of Cape Baranova he was nearly thirteen degrees north of the Arctic Circle, and while the current temperature of minus one degree Celsius was balmy by comparison to the frigid cold of a typical Arctic winter, it still wasn’t all that cozy. The blustery northwest wind didn’t help matters, coming in from over the polar ice pack with gusts of up to twenty-five knots. The wind-chill factor wasn’t horrible; he’d experienced much worse while stationed in the Northern Fleet. No, his concern was the large ice floes the wind was pushing into his construction area.
From his perch on the small cliff, he could see the icebreaker Arktika and the floating workshop, PM-69, rocking at their moorings some thirteen kilometers away. The background was filled with large chunks of ice heaving in the swells, advancing slowly on the islands that made up Severnaya Zemlya. Sea spray and the ever-present overcast skies made it difficult to see any details; at times he could barely make out the vessels themselves. He felt bad for the men on the two ships as they struggled to get the last monstrous launch tube lowered over the icebreaker’s side and down to the divers 180 meters below. But the weather would be the least of their worries if they didn’t keep to the schedule.