Valdas Narbekovas looked out at the sea. It was relatively calm, unlike the churning feeling within him. He'd been approached by a pair of youngish Asian men around a month ago. They wanted to arrange to accompany him on a trip into the Barents, while he trawled for shrimp. An extremely odd request. As things had progressed, it turned out that they wanted to bring a few other men with them. They'd had him leave behind a couple men. He would be adequately compensated for the loss of them, they said, and he could always pick them up in Norway once they got off.
They wanted to place some buoys for an experiment in the Barents, something to do with the crabs there, they would tell him more on the way. These didn't really seem to be the scientific type. They seemed a bit rougher than that.
As the voyage wore on, they revealed that the buoys were to monitor the king crabs in the area, to see if it was worthwhile sending ships up there to get them. The Russian introduced population were causing problems for the environment, and crab was a very sought after food in their country. They hoped to piggyback on the Norwegian practice of ultrasonic tagging crabs to see how far they moved, maybe map the migration routes. Of course no one could know, as it would put them at a disadvantage when negotiating for fishery access. The men seemed somewhat anxious, but were well organised. There was always one of them up and wandering the ship
Finally they got up over the top of Norway, into the Barents. He made a bee line for the coordinates where they wanted to drop the first buoy. It wasn't terribly large, a bit more than a foot in diameter, and had a long weighted line underneath to help keep it stationary, with another cylinder of similar size nearer the bottom, for the hydrophone array. The mate used the crane to lift it, while the engineer pushed the weight off the side. Odd that it was gray all over though, like they wanted it to be hard to see.
With the first one plonked in the sea, he pushed on to the next 2 stops. He purposely didn't think about how they were arranged in an arc that seemed somewhat focussed on the White Sea. That was not his concern. His concern was to get this done so that he could get back to fishing.
It was a lot further East to the fourth stop, which made him think about the rumours of old Soviet submarine bases in the Pechora sea, and all the oil activty there, that might mask the acoustics of a submarine. He hoped that there weren't any watching them now. They might not be called gulags anymore, but there were still camps in Siberia that a man would never leave, if he ever got that far. He would make up the log later, that he was never this close to the Russian EEZ, and this bad dream would go away, leaving him only with the cash to buy a really nice used Mercedes.
He had them get ready ahead of time for the last one, their main man standing at his shoulder watching the GPS and occasionally checking his own handheld one. The throttle was up as high as he'd ever had it, beyond the time that a man had to be rushed to the hospital. He watched the GPS, and flicked his eyes across the radar and horizon. Nobody out there that he could perceive.
At long last they were in the grid square. He cut the throttle and waved down to the crew. The Asian technician had done his last checks 15 minutes before, so this one would be dropped live, without having to stay stationary to check it once it was in. He watched as they craned it on out over the side, saw it release, saw the mate's thumbs-up, nodded back and jumped on the throttle, then got them turned round and out of there.