The others focused on hoisting their gear up and out of the red-lit belly of the undersea vessel: loaded backpacks, white equipment, and ration-stuffed duffel bags, collapsible fiberglass man-hauling sledges, and cases of ammunition and explosives. All that they would need to live, fight, and destroy in a polar environment for a protracted time.

The commanders of both the naval Spetsnaz platoon and the submarine were the last up the ladder to the submarine’s bridge.

“Damnation, but this is cold,” the sub commander muttered.

Lieutenant Pavel Tomashenko of the Naval Infantry Special Forces grinned in self-superiority and repeated the old saw. “In weather like this the flowers bloom in the streets of Pinsk.”

The submarine commander was not amused. “I need to submerge as soon as possible. I want to give this lead a chance to refreeze before the next American satellite pass.” As was the case with all good submariners, he was a nervous and unhappy man on the surface. And he had reason to be so. He was inside Canadian territorial waters in an area forbidden to probing foreign submarines. And while the Canadian naval forces were totally incapable of enforcing this prohibition, the atomic hunter-killer boats of the United States Navy also cheerfully and routinely disregarded this restriction.

“Do not worry, Captain, we will be away in a few more minutes,” Tomashenko replied, glancing down at his men as they loaded their sleds. “We must be under cover by the time of the next pass as well. There will be no problems.”

“So we can hope,” the submariner grunted. “I will endeavor to keep to the communications schedule, but I must remind you, Lieutenant, I can make no promises. It will depend on my finding open-water leads for the deployment of my radio masts. I will return to these coordinates once every twenty-four hours, and I will listen for your sounding charges and your through-ice transponder. I can do no more.”

“That will be quite adequate, Captain. You run a very efficient taxi service. Dos ve danya.”

Tomashenko swung himself over the rim of the bridge and lowered himself toward the frozen lead.

The sub skipper only muttered his response under his breath. It galled to take such lip from a mere snot-nosed lieutenant, but these Spetsnaz types considered themselves God’s anointed under the best of circumstances. Unfortunately, this particular example came with a curt set of sealed orders from the Pacific Fleet Directorate that squarely placed the sub commander and his boat at the beck and call of Tomashenko. To disregard either the word or spirit of those orders would be extremely bad joss in the shrinking Russian navy.

The sub skipper watched as Tomashenko and his platoon lined out, dark shapes against the ice, trudging toward the shadowed silhouette of Wednesday Island. He was glad to see them go. His soul and his ship were his own again for a time. He was pleased to have that particular outfit clear of his decks as well. Tomasheko’s force had to be one of the most thoroughly cold-blooded- and murderous-looking crews he had ever encountered. And given his twenty years of service in the Russian military, that was saying something.

“Clear the bridge!” The submarine commander lifted his voice in a hoarse bellow. “All lookouts below!”

As his seamen brushed past him to clatter down the ladder, he pushed the brass button beside the waterproof intercom. “Control room, this is the bridge. Prepare to take her down!”

The USS Alex Haley

Randi Russell nudged a scarlet plastic disk an inch forward with a fingernail. “King me,” she said, staring across the game board with the focused intensity of a cougar preparing to pounce.

Muttering under his breath in Russian, Gregori Smyslov took a counter from his minimal pile of trophies and clapped it down where indicated.

“You’re in trouble, Gregori,” Valentina Metrace said, munching a chip from the bowl resting beside the tabletop battlefield.

“Draughts is a child’s game,” Smyslov said through gritted teeth. “A child’s game, and I am not in difficulty!”

“We call it checkers, Major.” Smith chuckled from where he sat beside Randi. “And yes, you are in trouble.”

“Even the great Morphy would find it impossible to concentrate with certain people incessantly crunching crackers in his ear!”

“They’re tortilla chips, to be precise,” Valentina said, enjoying another savory crunch. “But your real problem is, you’re trying to logic the game as you would chess. Checkers are more like fencing: a matter of finely-honed instinct.”

“Indeed.” Smyslov pounced, jumping one of Randi’s red checkers with a black. “I told you I was in no difficulty.”

The riposte was lethal, Randi’s freshly minted king clearing the board of black counters in a swift, final tic-tic-tic triple assault. “Best four out of six?” she queried with just the faintest hint of a smile.

Smyslov’s palm thumped into his forehead. “Shit, and for this I left Siberia!”

Smith grinned at the Russian. “Don’t feel too bad, Major; I’ve never beaten Randi at checkers, either. I don’t think it can be done. Now, who’s for bridge?”

Smyslov lifted his head and started to collect his dead soldiers. “Why not? Being tortured with hot irons can’t be worse than having one’s fingernails torn out.”

The ice cutter was four days out of Sitka. After rounding Point Barrow she was now driving hard for the northeast and the Queen Elizabeth Archipelago. Only a certain portion of those days could be filled with briefings and brainstorming sessions about what they might find on Wednesday Island. Many hours were left to kill, and as outsiders to the tight seaborne community aboard the Haley, Smith and his people had been thrown together on their own resources.

Smith was pleased with this mechanism. Team building was not purely an aspect of training and discipline. It was a matter of the components learning one other. How they thought. How they acted and reacted. Minutiae down to how they liked a cup of coffee. It all accumulated into a projection of how this individual might react in a given crisis. Precious information.

Fragment by fragment, he was expanding his mental files.

Randi Russell: She was one he had known before. He had a base to build on with her. She was solid, inevitably solid. But out on the edge of perception there was always that faint, frightening whiff of don’t-give-a-damn. Never about the mission, but only about herself.

Gregori Smyslov: Clearly a good soldier, but also a man thinking a great deal. And from the moods Smith caught on occasion, he wasn’t happy with his thoughts. The Russian was working toward a decision. What that decision might be was something for Smith to think about.

Valentina Metrace: She was something else to think about. Specifically, just what lurked inside the history professor’s vivacious, smoothly polished shell. There was some other entity in there. In his lengthening conversations with her he had caught only the slightest flavor of this alternate being. It wasn’t the slipping of a mask so much as the tracing of the camouflaged gun ports of a Q-ship. “Weapons expert” could mean any number of things.

Not that her overt personality wasn’t interesting in its own right.

The cabin’s overhead speaker clicked on. “Wardroom, this is the bridge. Pick up, please.”

Smith rose and crossed to the interphone beside the hatchway. “Wardroom here. This is Colonel Smith.”

“Colonel Smith, this is Captain Jorganson. You and your people might want to come on deck and have a look to port. We’re passing what you might call a local landmark.”

“Will do.” Smith returned the interphone to its cradle. The others looked up at him from their places at the mess table. “The captain suggests we have some sights to see, people.”