Thunder In The Deep (02) (27 page)

"How do we make this look like partisans?" Jeffrey said.

"Disfigure the bodies," Montgomery said.

"What is it about you and cutting with knives?"

"It's my training," Montgomery snapped. "I don't like it, sir. I just have to do it."

"Sorry, Chief. What do you suggest?"

"Gouge out their eyes. Leave the corpses behind the bushes. Cover the blood with fresh sand and snow, but not too thoroughly."

"So it doesn't look like SEAL work?"

"Right," Clayton said. "Psychological warfare by the Resistance instead. . . . Then make it seem like we, they, came down the cliff in ambush and egressed back that way. Toss the German weapons and ammo out into the bay, since the partisans would collect them."

"Ilse," Jeffrey said, "how are you at climbing?" "I like rock climbing."

"Think you can make it to the top and back real fast?" "Yes. What about our footprints?"

"Trackers would read them as captured Army boots." "Take these," Clayton said. He handed Jeffrey crampons

and climbing rope. "Make it look good, plant them at the top. They're German brands."

"German?" Ilse said.

"Bought before the war."

"That's planning ahead," Jeffrey said.

"The CIA has whole warehouses full of useful stuff they buy from, friends who might turn into enemies."

Jeffrey glanced at the bodies as Montgomery and Seven-went to work with their K-Bar fighting knives. Jeffrey had to look away.

Jeffrey and Ilse climbed. The footing was uneven but firm, and the underbrush gave good handholds. The vertical set of the cliff precluded land mines—or so Jeffrey hoped. On the way down, he passed old bird nests in cracks in the rock. He knew the wetlands around Greifswald were an important breeding area in the spring.

In a few minutes he and Ilse were back on the beach. "What do we do next?" Jeffrey said.

"Into the water," Clayton said. "We've covered about four miles along the shore so far. It'

s another mile to the Danische Wiek. We'd've gone back to Draegers there, anyway." Montgomery came over. "To hell with this humping infantry-style. It's way too dangerous."

TWO HOURS LATER, UNDERWATER

IN THE DANISCHE WIEK.

"Team, Six," Jeffrey heard by skullbone induction, above the sound of his own breathing through his bulky Draeger mouthpiece. "Communications check," Clayton said. "Status check. Sound off."

When Jeffrey's turn came, through the built-in mouthpiece mike he said, "Four. Good to go."

He heard Ilse say, "Five. Good to go." Although she was Clayton's swim buddy, Jeffrey had unclipped from Montgomery and fastened his lanyard to hers to form a threesome. Ilse was close enough for Jeffrey to see her cyalume hoop through the murk. The depth gauge on his dive mask read eighteen feet, salinity-adjusted. His dive computer told him the water temperature here was 37° Fahrenheit. The chronometer said that in barely sixty minutes, ARBOR's computer worm would expire. The team's unexpected extra swim had added more than an hour to their approach to the lab, burning up time they didn't have to spare. Once that worm went dormant and erased itself, any further intrusion by the SEALs would set off alarms.

Jeffrey floated horizontally, resting; to swim fast wearing a backpack, even one designed to be neutrally buoyant, was a bear. He listened as the team finished checking in.

The clandestine secure gertrude—the undersea counterpart to their frequency agile digitized-radar commo—worked well enough, even amidst the unstable haloclines formed by freshwater from the Ryck River's mouth, several thousand yards to the south. Jeffrey knew the Ryck skirted the north edge of Greifswald town itself. It emptied into the Danische Wiek, a small bay-within-the-bay, one mile wide at the point where the team swam across underwater.

The wind topside blustered again, stirring the shallow Wiek. Jeffrey was jostled by wave action. Now his dive display showed he had a sink rate of four feet per minute. He let more gas into his own and his backpack's buoyancy bladders.

"Six, Three." Montgomery spoke slowly and clearly. "First obstacle inspection complete. Confirmed the movement sensors are cased in titanium, and the land downlinks are fiber-optic lines we can't bypass."

"Three, Six. Very well," Jeffrey heard Clayton say. His voice was hollow and scratchy over the gertrude. Besides halocline effects, there was heavy flow noise, from the cooling water intake just ahead.

"Remove the bolts," Clayton ordered.

Jeffrey heard clinks, and grunting. He kept floating in the dark. Watching the amber inertial nav readout on his mask, as well as Ilse's greenish glow, he worked his legs to hold position. Otherwise, the readout told him, he kept drifting toward the intake pipe.

"Six, Three. The bolts are off."

"Three, Six. Open the access gate." Clayton's voice was tense and clipped. Jeffrey forced himself to breathe evenly. If the security alarms weren't suppressed, they would know it soon. He heard a creaking sound.

"The flow rate is much faster than we expected,"

Montgomery said. "We're going to have to rappel in one by one, feet first, against the hydrodynamic drag."

"Copy," Clayton said.

"We are rigging the grapnels and lines."

Copy"

Jeffrey waited.

"Watch it," he heard on gertrude. Through the water he heard a whack, a scraping noise, then a clunk. The rushing of the inflow was louder than before.

"Report," Clayton ordered. .

"We dropped a bolt cutter," Montgomery said. "The flow's so strong now it got sucked into the pipe. I think it fetched up against the first debris catcher. . . . One is inside. . . . Two is starting in."

Again, Jeffrey waited in the dark. This close to the surface, this close to shore, they dared not use their flashlights.

Montgomery swam up to Jeffrey, startling him. "Four, let's go." Jeffrey unclipped from Ilse, then attached his lanyard to the chief's equipment belt.

Soon they were at the intake gate. It was a giant fine-meshed titanium cage. Jeffrey was sucked against the outside of the cage.

"Hold on hard," Montgomery said. "Then stay still." Jeffrey gripped the bars. He felt Montgomery probing with his hands, checking Jeffrey's equipment by feel, cinching the straps and fasteners uncomfortably tight. Montgomery gave a final yank to the straps of Jeffrey's dive mask and mouthpiece/mike.

The chief unclipped his own end of their swim-buddy lanyard, and clipped the free end to the cage near the gate. This way Jeffrey was secured, but had some slack. Montgomery tapped his shoulder. "Climb inside. Grip your regulator with your teeth hard. Face upstream, backward, into the flow, or your mask will get pulled off." Jeffrey struggled through the access gate, into the cage. He had a surge of claustrophobia, for the first time in

his life. He felt the water tearing at him, at his gear. The rapid flow began to chill him. It made a constant roaring, noise.

Montgomery, himself clipped to the cage now with a spare lanyard, guided Jeffrey's hand to the guide rope. By feel, facing the flow and gritting his teeth, Jeffrey threaded the rope through the rappel fitting buckled to his weight belt. By feel, Montgomery checked him again.

Jeffrey heard thumps and clunks and almost pissed his pants. Were Germans setting up a crew-served weapon on the shore of the Wiek? The team was so shallow, machine gun or mortar fire would kill them easy.

"Relax, Commander," Montgomery said. "That's One and Two, cutting through the debris catcher."

Jeffrey looked at his vital signs on the mask display. His pulse was 132, his respiration 38. Too high. This was scary.

"Ready?" Montgomery said.

"Ready."

"Start down."

Jeffrey loosened the friction brake at his waist and slid into the pipe a little at a time. The pipe was less than five feet in diameter. His body partly blocked the flow, and made the suction stronger. The inlet was too constricted for someone else to work beside him—he was on his own.

Jeffrey tried to keep track of how far inside he'd gone, and which direction was up, underwater. In the dark, in the pipe, he relied completely on his head-up display. When he judged the distance was right, he turned on his flashlight. He started searching. Nothing. He went further in. Still nothing. Unless he found it, they'd have to scrub the mission. He slid along the pipe a little more.

There. He spotted the outer automatic blast-shield door, recessed into the top of the pipe. He traced the flange in the bottom of the pipe, into which the door dropped tightly shut. He reached for the edge of the door. He lost control and spun wildly in the flow. Fighting panic and vertigo, he

tried to brake himself by splaying arms and legs against the slippery pipe walls. His mask said his pulse was up to 170, his breath rate a ragged 52. He had to reach that door edge. Almost losing his mouthpiece twice, he finally got a hand on it. The liquid jet stream tried to bend him double. He fought with all his strength. The noise of the cascade was deafening.

He pushed up. His orders said he had to make doubly certain. The blast shutter gave an inch or so, with increasing reluctance. He let go, and it came back down and stopped. It was spring-loaded, and held in place by an electromagnet or solenoid. So far, so good, for the mission ROEs.

Jeffrey switched off his light to save the battery. It was running very low, because of the cold.

Barely intelligible over the gertrude, Montgomery told Jeffrey to hurry up. Jeffrey went further into the pipe, in pitch darkness. Still the water roared in his ears. His own blood roared in his ears. His fingers grew numb, from effort and cold, the fast water flow the equivalent of an undersea windchill.

Jeffrey just kept sliding down the rope. He glanced at his inertial nav. So far yet to go. He felt his determination flag—the cold was getting to him, and would only get worse and worse.

Jeffrey's jaw began to ache, but he dared not let up on his-mouthpiece and trust the strap alone. If he should lose it, without first rotating closed the airway seal, salty water would get in the rebreather works. The caustic soda would turn to acid. Trapped deep in the pipe, with nothing to breathe and no swim buddy near, he'd drown for sure. FORTY MINUTES LATER.

Ilse tried to rest, frozen solid. She'd begun to shiver, and had almost no feeling in her hands and feet and face. Her

dark-adapted eyes could see well enough, by reflected glow from flashlights, as the SEALs worked above her.

Ilse glanced up. The whole team was bunched inside the accessway, several hundred yards into the cooling pipe. Below the maintenance ladder, beneath Ilse's feet, the water rushed. A fine mist filled the accessway, and droplets splashed her dry suit. Everyone still used the Draegersthe accessway was hermetically sealed, to avoid breaking the suction of the cooling flow. The Draegers protected the team from asphyxiation in the stagnant air, tainted by swamp gas from below, and maybe by chemical weapons to discourage intruders, from above.

Ilse clung hard to the ladder. Out of the water, her equipment regained its full weight. She glanced up again, impatient to get on with it. SEAL One was holding a stethoscope to the wall.

On Clayton's command, everyone helped each other out of their packs; they fastened the packs securely to the steel rungs of the ladder. They withdrew their weapons, removed the waterproof muzzle plugs, and inspected them carefully. They powered them up on safe with rounds in the chamber. They pulled out several kinds of grenades, and loaded the pockets of their combat vests. They donned their battle helmets and eye shields and night-vision goggles; they'd worn their flak vests, neutrally buoyant, all along. They put their dive knives in their packs, but retained their K-Bars and their survival knives. They also retained their Draegers, as gas masks.

Ilse realized Jeffrey had noticed she was shivering; he massaged her arms and legs. She tried to relax, and let him go to work. When his hands got too close to her backside, she shoved them away.

"Standard procedure," he said, enunciating inside his mouthpiece. "Against hypothermia. Works every time."

"Thanks," Ilse said, grateful for his help, and sorry she'd misinterpreted his explorations.

"It was good for me, too," Jeffrey said.

Ilse realized what he'd done. By flirting, he'd made her core body temperature rise fast, and her fatigue melt away. She made eye contact with him for a split second, then looked away before it went too far. Inside a secret German lab, of all places. Just when I think I have Jeffrey figured out, he surprises me again.

Ilse reminded herself why she was here. To help the SEAL team spy, and then escape, if espionage and escape were really possible. In any case, to help make very sure to thoroughly destroy the place. Beyond that, because of ARBOR's arrest, they didn't have much of a plan, and she had no idea what to expect from moment to moment. Ilse glanced up. At the top of the ladder, SEALs One and Two worked to unfasten the manhole cover from underneath. Clayton kept eyeing his wristwatch.

"Ready," One said.

Clayton cleared his throat. "This is when we find out if they're waiting for us. . . . Weapons free."

The team poured out of the manhole as fast as they could and formed a perimeter. Jeffrey saw they were in a utility space. It was large and hot and humid, and deserted. Air whistled as it was drawn into the accessway. SEAL One used a handheld chemical sniffer.

"Air's clean."

Quickly the team retrieved their packs. SEALs One and Two resealed the manhole.

"We're here," Montgomery said. "ARBOR was supposed to have hidden a package."

"I don't see anything," Jeffrey said.

"Find it," Clayton said.

The team searched, systematically at first, then with increasing desperation. Inside storage cabinets, behind equipment, on top of pipes hung from the overhead. Jeffrey warmed up, then began to sweat. He opened his flak vest and unzipped the front of his dry suit.

"Trouble," SEAL One hissed. Jeffrey heard footsteps approaching steadily from around the corner of a drab, ill-lit corridor.

Everyone lifted their packs and hid them and knelt behind the pumps and transformers. Jeffrey pulled a dental mirror from his load-bearing vest, and peeked around the corner of an electrical switching cabinet. The cabinet bore the international symbol for DANGER—HIGH VOLTAGE: big red lightning bolts. Jeffrey wondered if he'd fry if a bullet hit the cabinet.