Thunder In The Deep (02) (26 page)

Jeffrey moved around to warm up. His dry suit and long underwear did their job. He and Clayton clipped themselves together with a six-foot lanyard so they wouldn't be separated in the darkness and murk. Then they adjusted their flotation vests, admitting a little air; brackish water gave less buoyancy than seawater. They activated small flashlights fastened to their right forearms, and worked aft.

They saw the problem. A tangle of concertina snagged the main propeller's housing. Clayton reached for his compressed-air-powered wire cutters, and began to snip away. The compressed air bottle ran low, and it got harder for Clayton to cut. He used brute force—Jeffrey knew Clayton, like all active-duty SEALs, had terrific upper-body strength. But eventually Clayton tired. He signaled for Jeffrey to take over, and handed him the cutters.

Jeffrey heard a buzzing in his ears. He checked his regulator, fearing an equipment problem. It was too shallow for nitrogen narcosis, or oxygen toxemia, or baro-trauma. The noise got louder, seeming to come from everywhere at once. Underwater, at five times the normal speed of sound, it was hard for humans to judge direction to a sound source. But Jeffrey's dive computer had crude acoustic-intercept sonar. The speedboat. It was coming this way. Jeffrey and-Clayton turned off their pressureproof flashlights. The buzzing got louder still. Jeffrey saw a diffuse glow penetrating the water. The searchlight. The boat slowed. Jeffrey waited for the anti-swimmer charges to come down. At this range, in the water, the blasts would rupture his organs. He and Clayton would die in slow agony, forced to the surface to be captured as blood oozed into their lungs.

The boat sped up again. It roared by almost directly overhead. Its prop wash jostled him and Clayton, and the mini bucked and the concertina jangled. No explosions. But Jeffrey had dropped the wire cutters, and he'd forgotten to clip their lanyard—the cold was harming his judgment. He turned on his light, but didn't see the tool. He groped in the bottom muck, afraid he'd set off a mine. He found the cutters. He had to use both hands, and forced himself not to grunt from exertion. Clayton held each ribbon of concertina steady, and Jeffrey held himself in place by treading water. Bottom mines or not, they took care to avoid leaving marks in the sand from their swim fins, though at this point Jeffrey thought it made little difference. The last snagging piece of wire was cut. They checked that the mini wasn't damaged. Satisfied, they went back under the mini and emerged into the lock-out sphere. They closed and dogged the bottom hatch, signaled Meltzer, and he relieved the pressure in the sphere.

The operation had taken forty-five minutes. The Draegers still had plenty of endurance in their chemical oxygen regenerators, but the team was falling behind schedule yet again. Jeffrey and Clayton shook themselves off, then gave each other quick high-fives, still flush with adrenaline. Their faces were too numb from the cold to speak.

As the rest of the team got organized, Ilse, using her night-vision goggles, looked up at the fifty-foot chalk cliff. Through the swirling snow and enveloping darkness she could just make out the pines and firs along its upper edge. Somewhere above was the village of Lubmin, she knew, and a sea-surveillance radar site that swept the bay and the Baltic, plus German antiaircraft and anticruise-missile installations.

There was a hard knot in Ilse's gut that wouldn't go away. At least Durban, South Africa, had been home. Here was an alien landscape, giving no comfort at all. The snowfall was recent; there was barely an inch on the ground so far, and none in some spots scoured by the icy wind. The wind moaned hauntingly in Ilse's ears.

The cliff face ran east-west, above the narrow, sandy, ice-encrusted beach. To Ilse's left, east, the cliff and beach stretched for several miles, to Struck Island and then Peenemunde and the Baltic, all invisible with the snow squall. The SEAL team formed up in single file and began the route march in the other direction, to the landward, inner edge of Greifswald Bay.

Meltzer, in the mini with two SEALs held in reserve, was lurking somewhere in the bay. This was as close to their objective as he could drop them off—the inner bay was very shallow.

The razor wire along the water's edge had been easy to get through without leaving signs of intrusion. The SEALs used small grapnels to hold the coils apart, and everyone shimmied through. They knew from recon imagery that the beach probably wasn't mined—advanced synthetic aperture radar, though it couldn't see through water, gave resolution on dry land of under a foot.

The beach was, however, frequently patrolled. Clayton's team was following in the footsteps of the latest patrol, a good precaution in case the beach was mined. Everyone's footwear bore a tread like that of German Army boots, to blend in. At least there were no canine prints; there was a shortage of trained guard dogs Axis-wide. There were wolves in the surrounding forests, but they usually avoided places humans went. From now on the team would communicate and identify themselves by number, not name, for clarity and security. SEAL One, at the point, was one of the surviving enlisted men from Texas. So was SEAL Nine, who brought up the rear. SEALs Two and Seven and Eight had been with Ilse at Durban. Montgomery was Three, Jeffrey was Four, Ilse was Five, and Clayton was Six. To Ilse this made sense. Montgomery's people were well trained for winter operations; Clayton's men, pressed for this mission out of necessity as reinforcements, had drilled for the tropics. The SEALs most used to snow and ice were at the front and back of the column, serving as guides and security. Everyone else was mixed together, a well-integrated unit, with the vulnerable mission specialists, Jeffrey and Ilse, protected in the middle. Clayton carried one of the nuclear demolition charges; SEAL Seven had the second one.

Ilse concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, following in Jeffrey's footsteps in the snow. The east wind, rushing along the base of the cliffs, howled and blustered relentlessly. Sometimes, in the distance, Ilse could hear the engine roar of German allweather aircraft. Light, crisp snowflakes swirled everywhere. With the windchill, it was

—10° Fahrenheit. The white smocks everyone wore, for camouflage, helped break the wind; the silvered linings suppressed their signature on passive infrared. The effort of the forced march with a big backpack, and also lugging her Draeger, helped keep Ilse warm. For a while things should be routine, she told herself, as long as the team keeps up the steady pace. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency satellites had shown that the German foot patrols came by at odd minutes after every

hour, to be unpredictable. But the local army battalion's commander, it seems, craved order and precision: The exact time after each hour for each patrol followed a pseudorandom number sequence, so the schedule was actually set well in advance. The National Security Agency had detected the pattern, decoded the sequence, and predicted the schedule for tonight.

Step, step, step, step, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. One foot in front of the other, minute after minute, mile after mile. Still the driving wind howled, the snow swirled and got deeper. Still Ilse planted her feet wherever Jeffrey planted his feet. Partisans worked from the forests and marshes near the Polish border, the briefing notes said. They might have infiltrated, and planted mines of their own. At Durban, Ilse remembered, the point man used a special radar mine detector, to spot sweep-resistant plastic mines. But Intel had warned that the Germans used a counterstrategy: mines with radar sensors, that detonated when you tried to detect them.

Ilse's breathing was heavy and her legs were sore and her back hurt. The approach march was very hard work. She had a sinus headache from the dry air, and her mouth was parched. Her earphones, under her ceramic battle helmet, hissed and crackled endlessly with static, but none of the team members spoke a word. She had to keep wiping the snow off her goggles and her lip mike. Her silenced electric ignition pistol in its holster was heavy against her thigh.

The SEALs all gripped their special machine pistols in their hands, scanning constantly for threats. They'd used white masking tape to break up the outlines of the weapons, and added white streaks to their face paint to blend in, given the weather. Their visors would be switching from image-intensification to infrared and back every half second, just like Ilse's. At latitude 55° north, in early evening in mid-December, it was pitch dark. Rush hour for the hectic night shift at the lab would be over by now, the personnel inside pressing ahead on the Mach 8 missiles. The road atop the cliff seemed deserted. The blackout of buildings and autos was complete.

Once more Ilse watched Jeffrey's back. She could see the hump of his heavy pack under his camo smock; the men's gear all weighed more than twice what hers did. The pack made Jeffrey look hunchbacked. He didn't seem to be limping, so she figured his old wounded leg must be okay.

Ilse started. The steady rhythm hypnotized her, and she'd lost focus on the time and where they were. Again she heard the voice in her earphones, frequency-agile lowprobability-of-intercept microsecond radar impulses in the Ku band, deeply encrypted—

much better for SpecWar commo than conventional radio. Also, or so they'd been told, the low-energy pulses were unlikely to set off a German antiradar mine.

"Contact!" SEAL One repeated.

"Report!" Clayton ordered. Everyone crouched low. "Enemy patrol," SEAL One said. " Coming this way." "Not on the schedule," Jeffrey said.

"They changed the bleeding schedule," Montgomery said.

"Into the water?" Jeffrey said.

"No time, with the razor wire. We'd leave spoor. Dead giveaway."

"Four, Six. Use proper procedure." Jeffrey shut up. "One, Three. How many?" Montgomery snapped. "Seven men, maybe eight."

"Team, Six," Clayton said, "get behind these bushes. Drop your packs and Draegers, cover the bushes with your camo smocks, white side out. Take cover behind your packs and form a firing line."

Jeffrey did what he was told, draping his smock over skeletal scrub at the base of the cliff. He knelt behind his pack, using it as a shield. Around him lay rounded rocks the size of footballs, but there was no time to improve his cover.

"One, Six. Status?"

"Six, One. Any second now."

Jeffrey could see Ilse through his goggles. She was fifteen feet to his right. She had her pistol out.

Jeffrey drew his weapon.

"Team, Six. Weapons power up, weapons tight."

Jeffrey slid the switch on the butt grip. His pistol's safety diode glowed green. The bullet count read 18, a full clip: metal jacketed hollow-point alternating with armor-piercing Teflon-coated. He checked the digital aiming reticle, superimposed on the view through his night-vision goggles.

"Team, Six. Steady," Clayton said.

Jeffrey's heart was pounding. He aimed his pistol out across the bay—this was its widest part, twelve miles to Rugen Island. The laser-interferometer-driven aiming reticle, superimposed on his field of view, bounced and jiggled wildly.

So much for my nerves of steel.

"Four and Five, Six," Clayton called in Jeffrey's earphones. "Status?"

"Ready," Ilse said. She sounded like she meant it.

"Ready," Jeffrey said, determined she wouldn't show him up. He heard the German footsteps now, and low murmuring voices. The voices stopped.

"They're still approaching," One whispered.

"Team, Six. Weapons off safe, selectors on semiauto only, but hold your fire. . . . Break break. Nine, Six. Report when their point man gets inside ten feet of you."

"Six, Nine. Understood."

"Team, Three. Aim low, so our bullets won't carry." Jeffrey shrank behind his pack as the soldiers approached.

"Wass ist das?" he heard, and not over his headphones. What is this?

A weapon coughed.

"Weapons free!" Montgomery hissed.

Other weapons fired. The Germans' rifles, with sound suppressors, clattered on full auto as their receivers cycled and spent brass cartridge cases flew. Bullets smacked into the cliff face. The SEALs' caseless electric ignition subsonic rounds were completely silent, until their .50-caliber bullets thudded and crunched into organs and bone. Ilse searched her front but had no targets.

"Five through Nine," Clayton shouted. "Flanking pivot left! Form an L-shaped ambush!

Rapid fire!"

Ilse rolled across the snow and sand, saw Jeffrey do the same and block her line of fire. She rolled again, and Seven crawled up next to her. She began to fire at murky shapes when she saw muzzle flashes aimed her way.

"Eight and Nine, Six, go full auto!"

Ilse heard their weapons puff-puff-puff behind her. When her visor switched to infrared she could see the bullet traces, red-hot metal in friction with the air. Some of them hit home, and Germans grunted or writhed. Eight and Nine fired in short bursts. Enemy bullets snapped by overhead.

Ilse aimed her pistol at another German, who'd been driven against the barbed wire along the water. Before she could fire his muzzle flashed and something whacked the side of her helmet. The helmet flew off and she saw double. SEAL Eight riddled the German.

"Cease fire," Montgomery said. "Cease fire."

"Did they get off a warning?" Clayton said.

"Negative," SEAL Two said. "Nothing intercepted on my signals intel receiver. We didn'

t give them time."

"Anyone hit?" Montgomery said. "Team sound off." The SEALs called in by number. When her turn came Ilse said, "Five." Then she heard, " Six. Seven. Eight. Nine," in different voices.

"Now what?" Ilse heard Jeffrey say.

"We have to make it look like partisans," Clayton said.

"Concur," Montgomery said. "Eight and Nine, secure our rear. One and Two, hold point. Everyone else, police up the bodies."

Jeffrey was glad the seven Germans were dead. The SEAL team couldn't take prisoners, and a wounded enemy soldier would be a major problem Jeffrey didn't want to think about. He surveyed the carnage. Blood soaked the snow and sand, looking black on his visors. On IR he could see the bodies were already starting to cool. None of Clayton's team were hurt, though Ilse had a gouge in the side of her ceramic bulletproof helmet, and two of the SEALs took enemy rounds in their flak vests. A quick check of the packs showed nothing vital was damaged.