He sat at his desk in a windowless basement office, smoking a cigarette. A ceramic ashtray was on the green steel desk in front of him. Although it was early in the morning, there were already five spent cigarette butts in the ashtray. A cup of coffee (with a splash of whiskey—Jameson, imported from Ireland) was also on the desk.

In the morning, the man smoked and drank black coffee. It was how he started his day. He wore a dark suit and his thinning hair was swooped over the top of his head, hardened and held in place by hairspray. Everything about the man was harsh angles and jutting bones. He seemed almost like a scarecrow. But his eyes were sharp and aware.

He had been around a long time, and had seen many things. He had survived the purges of the 1980s, and when the change came, in the 1990s, he had survived that as well. The GRU itself had come through largely intact, unlike its poor little sister, the KGB. The KGB had been broken apart and scattered to the winds.

The GRU was as large and as powerful as it ever was, perhaps more so. And Oleg Marmilov, fifty-eight years old, had played an integral role in it for a long time. The GRU was an octopus, the largest Russian intelligence agency, with its tentacles in special operations, spy networks around the globe, communications interception, political assassinations, destabilizing governments, drug trafficking, misinformation, psychological warfare, and false flag operations, not to mention the deployment of 25,000 elite Spetsnaz troops.

Marmilov was an octopus living inside the octopus. His tentacles were in so many places, sometimes a subordinate would come to him with a report, and he would draw a blank for a moment before thinking:

“Oh yes. That thing. How is it going?”

But some of his activities were right on the top of his mind.

Bolted to the top of his desk was a television monitor. To an American of the right age, the monitor would seem similar to the coin-operated TVs that once graced intercity bus stations across the country.

On the screen, live footage from security cameras cycled through. The man assumed there was a delay in the feed, possibly as much as half a minute. Otherwise, the footage was up to the moment.

It was dark in the footage, night had fallen, but Marmilov could see well enough. An iron stairwell climbing the side of an oil rig. A cluster of battered, corrugated aluminum huts on a cold and barren plot of land. A tiny port facility on a frozen sea, with a small, rugged ice cutter ship docked. There didn’t appear to be any people in the footage.

Marmilov looked up at the man standing in front of his desk.

“Well? Any news?”

The visitor was a younger man, who, while wearing a drab, ill-fitting civilian business suit, also seemed to stand at military attention. He stared at something in a far imaginary distance, instead of at the man sitting just a few feet before him.

“Yes, sir. Our contact has relayed the message that a group of commandos has been chosen. Most of them are already amassing at the airfield in Deadhorse, Alaska. Several more, who represent the civilian oversight of the project, are en route by supersonic airplane and will arrive within the next few hours.”

The man paused. “From then, it will likely be a very short time before the assault force is deployed.”

“How reliable is this intelligence?” Marmilov said.

The man shrugged. “It comes from a secret meeting held at the White House itself. The meeting could of course be a ruse, but we don’t think so. The President was in attendance, as were members of the military command.”

“Do we know the method of attack?”

The man nodded. “We believe they will deploy frogmen who will swim to the artificial island, emerge from beneath the ice, and mount the attack.”

Marmilov thought about that. “The water must be quite cold.”

The man nodded. “Yes.”

“It sounds like quite a difficult assignment.”

Now the young man showed the ghost of a smile. “The frogmen will be wearing cumbersome underwater gear designed to shield them from the cold, and our intelligence suggests they will carry their weapons in sealed packages. They are hoping for the element of surprise, a sneak attack by highly trained elite divers. The weather is forecast to be very poor, and flying will become difficult. As far as we understand, no simultaneous attack by sea or by air is planned.”

“Can our friends repulse them?” Marmilov said.

“Given advance warning of their approach, and knowing the method of attack, it’s possible that our friends can be waiting for them, and kill them all. After that…”

The man shrugged. “Of course the Americans will bring the hammer down. But that won’t be our concern.”

Oleg Marmilov returned the young man’s smile. He took another deep drag on his cigarette.

“Exceptional,” he said. “Keep me informed of developments.”

“Of course.”

Marmilov gestured at the monitor on his desk. “And naturally, I am a great fan of sport. When the action starts, I will watch every moment of it on the TV.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

12:45 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (8:45 p.m. Alaska Daylight Time, September 4)

The skies above the Upper Peninsula

Michigan

The experimental airplane rocketed across the black sky.

Luke had never been in a plane quite like it. Everything about it was unusual. As the SRT team had approached it on the tarmac, the lights had been out. Not just the lights on the plane itself, but any nearby runway or airport lights. The plane was just sitting there in something close to total darkness.

Its airframe had an odd shape. It was very narrow, with a drooped nose like a bird dipping its beak into the water. The rear stabilizers had an odd triangular shape that Luke hadn’t seen before, and couldn’t quite make out.

Inside, the cabin layout was also unusual. Instead of being set up like a typical corporate or Pentagon jet, or even the SRT jet, with bucket-type seats and pull-out tables, the thing was configured like someone’s living room.

There was a long sectional couch along one wall, its high back blocking where there would normally be small oval windows. There were two recliners facing it, and between the couch and the chairs, a heavy wooden table, like a coffee table, bolted to the floor. Even stranger, directly across from the sofa was a large flat-panel television, blocking where the other row of windows should be.

Stranger than that, from where Luke was sitting on the couch, to his left was a thick glass partition. A glass door was carved into the middle of it. On the other side of the partition was another passenger cabin, this one with seating more typical of a small passenger jet. And strangest of all, two men were seated inside the cabin, discussing something and looking at the screen of a laptop.

The glass partition was apparently soundproof, because the men seemed to be speaking normally, and Luke couldn’t hear anything they were saying. The men were both crew-cutted and of military bearing, one wearing a jacket and tie, and one wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The man in the T-shirt was big and well-muscled.

“It’s an SST,” Swann said. He was sitting on the couch with Luke, just on the other side of Trudy Wellington, who sat between them, poring over documents on her laptop. The plane’s very existence seemed to excite Swann in a way that Luke didn’t quite understand.

“Supersonic, but not a fighter plane. A passenger jet. Since the French gave up on the Concorde and the Russians gave up on the Tupolev, no one on Earth will even acknowledge working on supersonic passenger jets.”

“I guess someone’s been working on this one,” Luke said.

Murphy, sitting in one of the recliners, gestured with his head at the glass partition.

“I’m wondering who the monkeys are behind door number three.”

Big Ed Newsam, slouched like a large mountain in the other recliner, nodded slowly. “You and me both, man.”

“Never mind about that,” Swann said. He pointed at the TV screen across from the couch. The screen was currently showing an image of an airplane, skirting the northern border of the United States above the state of Michigan. Data along the bottom showed altitude, equivalent groundspeed, and time to destination.

“Look at those numbers. Altitude 58,000 feet. Groundspeed 1,554 miles per hour, roughly Mach 2, twice the speed of sound. We’re in the air a little more than thirty minutes, and we’ve got only two and a half more hours to go. Absolutely mind-blowing for a jet this size, which I’d guess is about the same profile as a typical Gulfstream. Can you imagine the thrust this thing must put out to overcome the drag? I didn’t even hear a sonic boom.”

He stopped for a second and looked around.

“Did you hear anything?”

Nobody answered him. Everyone else seemed to have their minds on the destination, the mission, and the mysterious nature of the two men in the other room. How they were getting to the mission was beside the point. To Luke, the plane was just another big boy toy, probably overpriced.

But Swann loved his toys. “Notice something about our flight path. We’re on our way to the Alaskan Arctic, and by far the most efficient way to get there is by crossing into Canada and moving diagonally north and west across their heartland. But we hug the border instead. Why?”

“Because we like inefficiency?” Ed Newsam said, and smiled.

Swann didn’t even catch the joke. He shook his head. “No. Because if we cross into Canada, we have to explain to them what this thing is that’s moving twice the speed of sound above their airspace. They might be one of our closest allies, but we don’t want to tell them about this plane. That tells me it’s classified.”

“As a practical matter,” Trudy said, without glancing up from her computer, “we’ll have to cross into Canada at some point. Alaska isn’t attached to the rest of the United States.”

Swann stared at Trudy.

“Ouch,” Ed said. “Geography lesson. That had to hurt.”

“Can we talk about something else?” Murphy said. “Please?”

Luke looked at Trudy Wellington, sitting next to him. She was curled up on the sofa in a customary pose for her, legs curled under her. She could be sitting on her couch at home, eating popcorn and about to watch a movie. Her curly hair was hanging down, and her red glasses were at the end of her nose. She was scrolling through a screen.

“Trudy?” Luke said.

She glanced up. “Yes?”

“What are we doing here?”

She stared at him. Her owlish eyes went wide in surprise.

“Best guess,” he said. “Who are the terrorists, what do they want, why did they hit an oil rig, and why now?”

“Is that going to help you?” she said. “I mean, with the mission?”

Luke shrugged. “It could. We seem to be in the dark about everything, and no one seems interested in enlightening us even a little bit.”

“Or talking to us, for that matter,” Murphy said. He was still staring at the men on the other side of the glass.

“Okay,” Trudy said. “I’ll give you the easy part first. Why hit an oil rig and why now. Then I’ll do a very hazy guess about who they are and what they want.”

Luke nodded. “We’re all ears.”

“I’m going to assume no prior knowledge,” Trudy said.

Ed Newsam was slouched so low in his chair he looked like he might slide off onto the floor. “That’s probably the safest assumption I’ve heard all day.”

Trudy smiled. “The Arctic Ocean is melting,” she said. “People, countries, the media, large corporations, they’re all debating the long-term effects of global warming, or whether it even exists. The consensus among the vast majority of scientists is that it’s happening. No one has to agree with them. But what can’t be denied is that the polar ice caps, which have largely been frozen since the beginning of recorded human history, are now melting, they’re doing it quickly, and at an accelerating pace.”

“Scary,” Mark Swann said. “The end of the world as we know it.”

“And I feel fine,” Murphy added.

Trudy shrugged. “Let’s not go there. Let’s just stick with what we know. And what we know is that each year, the Arctic Ocean has less ice on top of it than the year before. Soon, possibly within our lifetimes, it’s not going to freeze over anymore at all. Already, the ice cover is thinner, and covers less of an area, for less of the year, than at any time we know of.”

“And this means…” Luke said.

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