The last thing he knew was a pounding in his temples that was like monstrous drumbeats, and then someone whispering in Russian for him to be quiet, to relax, and let go.

He did.

*   *   *

The agent opened the door a crack; seeing no one outside, he quickly dragged the body back to the submariner’s cabin. He sorted through the man’s travel documents and identification, substituting his own for those that needed new facial photographs.

He then quickly sent a confirmation back to his controller – mission was go.

He grinned as he saw the small glass of vodka already poured, waiting. He lifted it, saluting, and downing it in one. He wiped his mouth, and then set to prising up the wooden floorboards. He’d bury the body under the cabin. With the coming winter, it would be months before the ground was warm enough to give up its stinking secrets.

He had hours before the helicopter to Baranof Island. He poured another vodka.

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 6

The Bering Sea, ten miles west of the Baker-Shevardnadze Line

– 168 deg 58’ 37’

Captain Boris Gorkin flicked the thick, unfiltered cigarette over the railing, where the freezing, iron-gray sea quickly swallowed it in its cap of froth and foam. The Russian drill ship, the Viktor Dubynin, was attached to the ocean floor by six sea anchors each weighing thirty thousand pounds and connected to the ship by steel cables two inches in diameter.

They were designed to hold it in place even in the roughest of conditions. But still the vessel bucked and pulled like a stallion refusing to be broken. The Dubynin was in an area of the Bering Sea that was just ten miles from the Russian-USA Maritime boundary, and in water that was shallow at only five hundred feet. Twelve thousand years ago this area was a land bridge between what is now Russian and Alaska, and had been honeycombed with caves.

Captain Gorkin looked westward, out over the freezing chop. Below the water, he would normally have feeder pipes already laid down and ready for them. The pipeline would be thirty inches in diameter and allow millions of gallons of under-pressure liquid to be extracted and then transported per minute. But that was for a standard petroleum extraction project.

The job their masters had told them to execute would be one of retrieval, and the pipes they used would be stouter, wider – fifty inches overall – and the pumping would be of a single object. It sounded to be more like sucking a tablet through a drinking straw; he grinned at the madness of it.