Fire Ice by Clive Cussler, Paul Kemprecos Page A

later and spat out several sheets of paper. Petrov studied the double-spaced transcript of the conversation between the Argo's captain and the man in the aircraft. His fingers stiffened as he read. the first sentence.
     
     
"Austin to Argo."
     
     
Austin. It couldn't be.
     
     
Petrov took a deep breath to steady his nerves. Austin was a common name in the United States, and NUMA was a large organization. He tried to persuade himself that it was sheer coincidence, but as he read the transcript, his lips curled into a grim smile. There was no mistaking the pilot's wisecracking tone. The irreverent reference to the director of NUMA clinched it. He was reading pure Kurt Austin. Petrov reached into the dusty file cabinet and extracted a thick folder marked NUMA, Kurt Austin. The dossier's well-worn pages told him what he already knew by heart. Austin had been born in Seattle, his father the wealthy owner of a marine salvage company. The sea had shaped his adventurous personality. He could sail as soon as he could walk, and as he grew older, he acquired a taste for racing speedboats, although in recent years he had taken up sculling on the Potomac. He lived in a converted boathouse below the Palisades in Washington, D.C., less than a mile from the Central Intelligence Agency at Langley. He enjoyed philosophy, collected dueling pistols, listened to progressive jazz....
     
     
Petrov read further, though his eyes barely registered the words. After studying for his master's in systems management at the University of Washington, Austin had attended a highly rated Seattle dive school and trained as a professional. He'd brought these skills to bear working on North Sea oil rigs, then returned to his father's salvage company before being lured into government service by a little known branch of the CIA that specialized in underwater intelligence-gathering. At the end of the Cold War, the CIA had closed down the branch and NUMA director Admiral James Sandecker had hired Austin to head up a special assignments team being assembled for oceanographic research.
     
     
Their backgrounds couldn't have been more different. Austin and Petrov. Like the American, Petrov had salt water in his veins, but his beginnings were more humble. He'd been born the only son of a poor fisherman. As a Young Pioneer, his intelligence and athletic ability were noticed by a visiting political commissar, and he was taken to Moscow and made a ward of the state. He never saw his parents or siblings again. Even worse, he didn't care to see them; the Soviet state had become his new family. He attended the finest Soviet schools, excelling in engineering, served a stint in the KGB as a submarine officer, and later moved to naval intelligence. Like Austin, Petrov had also served in a little-known ocean intelligence branch. Unlike Austin's group, which concentrated on oceanographic research, Petrov's people were authorized to carry out their duties by any means, including force.
     
     
Their paths had rust crossed after an Israeli submarine clandestinely sank an Iranian container ship carrying nuclear weapons. Petrov was ordered to retrieve the weapons at all costs: The container ship could be an embarrassment, because the weapons had been stolen from the Soviet arsenal. Meanwhile, the U.S. was performing a balancing act between its Arab allies and Israel, and Washington had worried that if Iran knew how the ship had been sunk, they would declare a holy war that would spread around the region. Austin had been made the director of an attempt to salvage the container ship and destroy the evidence.
     
     
Ships from the USSR and the U.S. had arrived over the sunken container ship at about the same time. Neither ship would give way to the other. The standoff dragged on for days. Warships from both countries hovered on the horizon. It was a tense time. Petrov was awaiting orders from Moscow when he was called to the bridge to hear a message from the American