“It wasn’t your fault, Andy,” Flynn assured him. He shrugged. “I wouldn’t have expected M-Squared to pull something like that, either.” For one thing, assault and desertion seemed wildly out of character for the usually happy-go-lucky young airman. Then again, he thought somberly, every man has his own breaking point.

“Let me go back into town and dig the son of a bitch out,” Takirak pleaded. “There aren’t many places he can hide.”

Flynn shook his head. “Not happening. We don’t have time for a manhunt, even if I wanted to drag Mitchell along under arrest.” He pointed at the big Super Hercules with its six-bladed propellers already spinning. “See?”

“Yes, sir,” Takirak agreed flatly. “I see.” He grimaced. “About Mitchell’s radio, Captain, the PRC-162?”

Flynn nodded. “That’s a problem. With the battery, the darned thing adds another thirteen pounds to our load. I hate to dump it on one of the other men, especially since we’re all going to be toting extra weight. But we sure as shit are going to need communications, so—”

“I’ll carry it, sir,” Takirak said gruffly. “I took the radio operator’s course a while back, and, anyway, it’s my fault that we’re down a man. So if anyone’s going to haul the extra weight, it should be me.”

Flynn nodded, understanding the older man’s need to prove himself. Letting himself get jumped by a junior enlisted man was the first crack in Takirak’s hard-won aura of invincibility. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time, right at the start of a highly risky mission. “Okay, Andy,” he said briskly. “You’ve got the radio.”

Aboard the Converted SSBN BS-64 Podmoskovye, in the Beaufort Sea

That Same Time

“Come up slowly to one hundred meters,” Captain First Rank Mikhail Nakhimov ordered quietly.

“Coming up to one hundred meters, aye, sir,” his diving officer intoned. He pushed controls. With a faint hiss, compressed air pushed water out of Podmoskovye’s ballast tanks. Gently, with constant adjustments to maintain an even trim, the eighteen-thousand-ton nuclear submarine edged upward toward the ice-covered surface.

“Holding at one hundred meters,” the diving officer reported at last.

Nakhimov nodded. Now came the hard part. Or rather, the dangerous part. Side-scan sonar, temperature, and pressure detectors all strongly suggested they had found a comparatively thin section of the polar ice cap—one where the ice was somewhere between one and two meters thick. But even the thinnest-seeming stretch of ice could hold hidden hazards, jagged-edged ridges, or stalactites pushed down by pressure from above . . . massive spears of ice that could shear open a submarine’s pressure hull on impact. “Activate our video cameras and turn on all the outer lights,” he said.

More officers around the control room obeyed. Screens brightened, showing a murky, half-lit view of the underside of the ice cap above. Nakhimov ran his gaze over each screen, closely studying the images they showed. He glanced at his executive officer. “Well, Maxim? What do you think?”

“It looks good,” the other man replied. He tapped one of the screens. “There are some pressure ridges off our starboard bow, but they’re well away from us.” He glanced at the diving officer. “If Senior Lieutenant Yalinsky can take us up straight, instead of weaving like a drunken whore, we shouldn’t have any trouble.”