Free Seas of Crisis by Joe Buff Page B

still on the same page.”
    Eventually the water got much deeper, past the continental shelf, over the Chukchi Abyssal Plain. On Bell’s orders, Challenger began maintaining a depth of nine hundred feet, and resumed a silent speed of twenty knots.
    Along the way, submerged through the Chukchi Sea, Challenger began to pass more and more chunky icebergs, and flatter floes, bobbing and tumbling noisily on the ocean surface above. Then she crossed beneath the edge of the 2012 summertime Arctic ice cap. The boundary zone was extremely noisy, with wind and wind-driven wave action making broken ice chunks grind against one another and the outer margin of the solid cap. What marine mammals were heard now, on sonar, changed from whales—who rarely went under the ice cap since they needed to surface often to breathe—to amphibious creatures: seals and walruses, who ate the many Arctic fish. The seal and walrus adults and pups would enter and leave the water through open areas called polynyas or leads, which existed even in winter, but became more common and larger in summer. Teeming flocks of sea birds also lived off fish they caught in these polynyas.
    Jeffrey reminded himself that polar bears walked around on the ice and snow up there. They hunted the seals and walruses. Inuit walked around, or paddled kayaks, or drove dog sleds or rode on snowmobiles, too. They also hunted walruses and seals, and sometimes had confrontations with the polar bears—which were edible, but just barely.
    Challenger turned east, entering the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska, and began to steam across the Canada Abyssal Plain, in water nine to twelve thousand feet deep. Three and a half days after transiting the Bering Strait, well up under the ice cap, Challenger neared her rendezvous with USS Jimmy Carter.
    Commander Dashiyn Nyurba was impressed by the food on Challenger. Whether breakfast, lunch, dinner, or midrats, the ingredients were the highest quality, the cooking the most skilled and imaginative, that he’d ever experienced in his fifteen years as a naval officer. And he’d traveled far and wide, ashore and on many surface ships, before being tapped for the Air Force Special Operations Squadron joint-service outfit that he was second in command of now.
    The dinner dishes had been cleared a while ago. Nyurba’s people were in the wardroom with Commodore Fuller, playing their last poker game before they transferred to Carter. While the card-playing helped to kill time—the Seabees had a lot to spare as they rode along on Challenger —the rounds weren’t friendly. Everyone, including the commodore, spoke only in Russian. Since gambling was forbidden by Navy regs, the stakes were toothpicks and ego, especially the latter, which made the play extremely competitive. Nyurba thought that the commodore was getting noticeably better at both his poker face and his language fluency. His accent was atrocious, but that part didn’t matter. Unlike the special ops team, Fuller wasn’t supposed to disguise his nationality. No, his duty would be to emphasize it.
    Through hooded eyes Nyurba looked the commodore over one last time. Soon enough, he knew, Fuller would find out for himself what his orders were in total. Nyurba had known his squadron’s purpose for most of a year, though he’d beseeched the Lord that this mission never be put into effect. He expected that when they all went over to Carter in Challenger ’s minisub for a major briefing and planning session, and the commodore opened his inner orders pouch when he got there, he’d be appalled.
    As well he should be. What Fuller was being asked to do was truly appalling, but Nyurba had been told that it was the least of all the evils left for America to choose between. And at one point, Captain Jeffrey Fuller, United States Navy, would have to personally pull off the biggest, most important bluff ever conceived in military history.
    The mere idea of it sent shivers up Nyurba’s spine, and Nyurba