He could still hear the static of channel 25 from the room above. He wasn’t sure if Kotler’s silence meant he’d found someone, or if there was some other problem. He’d err on the side of the positive, and spend his time looking for more resources.
Now that he had light, he could afford to move at a quicker pace, which allowed him to cover more ground. Here in the cargo area, there were plenty of crates and storage units to explore. Most of what he encountered wasn't entirely useful.
When he came to a large tarp, however, everything changed.
He untied the lashings and started to pull the tarp away, only to discover a sizeable cigar-shaped metal tube. He recognized it instantly, though he'd never seen one in person.
It was an ASDS—an Advanced SEAL Delivery System.
Or, more plainly, it was a miniature submarine, capable of long-range transport.
Even better, it could carry two people.
Denzel smiled and laughed. He'd been looking for anything that could give some hope to this situation, and now he was staring at a miracle. He had actually trained in an ASDS prior to his tour and figured he could remember things well enough to operate it. That was hope enough, at least. He'd take it.
Now all he had to do was find a way to open this seam in the floor and get the thing into the water. Maybe there was something in the control room. There were a lot of panels up there, and one of them could surely open things up.
He was about to hit the stairs again when he tripped over a thick cable. He followed it with his gaze and spotted a post mounted into the floor, away from the seam and the sub. On the post was a control box—essentially a rectangular cube, painted with alternating black and yellow stripes. It had two round buttons mounted to its face.
It looked too modern to be something the Nazis used, and Denzel decided it was another modern edition from Van Burren's people. Its proximity to the sub indicated it was the control he was looking for. Van Burren had made some modifications to this place, so he could use this thing to make a quick escape if needed. Smart. And handy.
Denzel picked up the control, hefting it, and resisted the urge to push the button. He doubted Kotler could have done the same. He smiled and laughed at this and thought about popping up to let Kotler know what he'd found. But on second thought, it was better to keep this secret. They couldn't risk Gail learning about this, and possibly setting a countermeasure.
Still, he should check in.
He hung the control back on the post and turned to make his way back to the stairs for the control room.
It was at that moment that one of the doors exploded inward, and all hell broke loose.
Chapter 19
“We have something,” Reggie said.
Gail had been standing on the catwalk, staring at her own name painted in a flourished script over a blotch of grey paint. The paint hid a swastika. She wondered if Dan Kotler would find some kind of metaphor in that—a symbol of pure evil masked by her name. She decided he would and turned to Reggie to hear his news.
“Team found cutting rigs. We have nearly a hundred acetylene tanks in a storage room a level down. Your granddaddy and Van Burren were set to do something big here. It’s enough acetylene to cut this U-boat into confetti.”
She smiled. “What about Agent Denzel?”
Reggie grinned. “We’re already cutting into that bay. Should be through the door in maybe half an hour. Team is focusing on cutting away the latch. Weakest point on that door. The Alpha team that was on him originally is still in position on the other side, blocking his escape. They reported that he left his lantern outside, so he should be in the dark in there. We’ll take him down soon.”
Gail nodded. “Get this sub open, Reggie.”
He nodded. “Yes Ma’am,” he drawled and left to organize a crew. Gail turned back to contemplating the Abigail.
She wondered, briefly—what would her grandfather have thought of all of this? How disappointed would he be? It had been a long time since she'd bothered to care about his opinion of her, but now the whole idea boiled up, and she couldn't help wondering.
What would he think, knowing that she now controlled the empire he’d always resented, and had always tried to keep from her?
What would he think, if he knew how she’d managed to come this far, and how far she intended to go?
He had tried to keep this from her, and she had defiantly claimed it anyway.
Stubborn. Just like him. Less naive, though. She had decided long ago that she would never have fallen for Van Burren’s manipulations. He would never have manipulated her into being a subservient partner.
That was the critical difference between her and her grandfather. They were both stubborn, but she was strong. Driven. Empowered. She'd done what her grandfather would never have been able to do—she'd grown out of Van Burren's shadow and taken control. The empire moved at her whim now.
It had its challenges. Things were not as they should be. She’d made some mistakes, as she’d grown into her new role. The network had suffered, and that was on her. But she’d fix that. Here, in the bowels of this base, was the tool she needed to fix the network and go on to do so much more than Van Burren had ever dreamed.
The payload on this U-Boat was a good start. It was enough to cement her power, for sure. But there was more. This place hadn't always been a Nazi base. Before that, it was a mining operation. Edison had learned of it, and of the element, had written of it in his notebooks, had even realized the potential of it all. That Nazis had learned of it from Edison's notebooks, just as her grandfather and Van Burren had done decades later. None of them had the strength of character to do what needed to be done, to use it to conquer the world. But she did. She would.
It wouldn't be long now.
Kotler was frustrated and—he could admit it—bored to tears with the radio. He was also getting worried.
Not only had he cruised through his designated 25 channels, but he'd also gone through Denzel's 25 as well. He kept thinking he'd hear his friend calling for help, but after three runs through the bands, he'd heard nothing.
Something was wrong.
Kotler popped back to channel 25. “Roland, this is Kotler, do you copy?”
Silence. He tried again several times over the next hour, with the same result.
Dread was creeping like hoarfrost into his chest and stomach, gripping him to the point that he could barely breathe. It combined with the boredom to create a growing knot of anxiety, made worse by the knowledge that there was literally nothing he could do to help. Not here. Not trapped in this giant cigar tube with a contingent of armed mercenaries waiting outside.
He was not good at being powerless.
But maybe he didn’t have to be.
One of the first rules of conflict was to assess your strengths and weaknesses. So far, he'd lapsed into thinking that his weaknesses dramatically overwhelmed his strengths, believing his only advantages were all limited to the inside of the U-boat. But strictly speaking, this wasn't entirely true.
For instance, Kotler knew what Gail and her team were after. The element in the hold of the U-boat would be a devastating tool in Gail’s hands. She could use it in all sorts of nefarious ways. But above all, she actually needed it.
With the ability to literally cloak herself in invisibility Gail could stay ahead of the world agencies indefinitely. Cloaked aircraft and cargo ships could deliver the ill-gotten goods of the smuggling network without anyone realizing it was there. Gail could have an armada of warships and helicopters strafe and raze cities to ash, and no one would know who or what was attacking them.
With the element under her control, Gail gained the power of a mighty nation.
Without it, she had only so much time before her luck ran out and she found herself in a cell for life, buried so deep that she daylight would be a distant memory.
She needed the element desperately, to keep her empire and her freedom.
Dan had full control of the element. That wa
s an advantage, and one he intended to play.
The U-boat, for all its age and antiquated systems, was nearly an impenetrable fortress. Even if Gail’s people managed to find a way to cut into it, the job would take hours, maybe days. Add to that the fact that Kotler had at least enough resources and weaponry to fortify his position and fight back—holding the line for a good, long while—and the sub was becoming more of an asset than a liability.
But there were more advantages to the U-boat than using it as a stronghold.
Kotler left the radio tuned to channel 25, with the volume up, and wandered back through the sub. He came to the crates where the substance was stored. Looking from the ratcheted towers of crates, his eyes fell on the torpedo tubes.
Gail was after the element and would stop at nothing to get it.
Kotler couldn’t let that happen.
In the radio room, he had found several manuals of operation, written in German with the occasional scribbled note in English. Van Burren's team had clearly used these for reference as they'd retrofit the U-Boat. In that documentation, Kotler hoped, there had to be a procedure for utilizing those torpedo tubes.
He took every relevant manual he could find with him into the torpedo bay, spreading them out on the floor as he combed through them. It reminded him of his college days, cramming for exams in the cinder-block bunker that was his dorm room, tomes spread over every flat surface, driving his roommate nuts. Where those sessions had a tinge of hopeful excitement, however, as the potential of the future opened up from all of those books about the past, this particular cram session had Kotler feeling the crushing weight of history, and the question of his survival. The final exam here would likely end with his death if he couldn't think of a way out.
All the more reason to make sure Gail couldn’t get her hands on this stuff. A final act of defiance against the woman who had somehow managed to gain such influence over his life for the past few years.
It took some time, but eventually, Kotler found what he was looking for. In a creased and grunge-covered operations manual, he discovered the steps for activating, loading, and firing torpedoes.
The steps were accompanied by a series of line-drawn diagrams, with notations corresponding to the text. It was heavy stuff, much more technical than Kotler was used to reading, but not so different from some of the work he'd studied over the years.
The mechanics and engineering behind these torpedo tubes were clever and impressive, in an intimidating sort of way. The whole system relied on a network of pressure and water control systems, regulated with valves and pumps and airlocks. Launching one of these submersible missiles was made tricky because of the ambient pressure of the seawater surrounding the sub. It necessitated a complex catacomb of tanks and chambers and water rams. It was baffling, but Kotler thought he was seeing the sense of it, after a time.
At any rate, he had a set of steps to follow. Even without a deep understanding of the mechanics of the thing, he felt confident he could get it to work. He did a dry run, to see if anything hung him up, and was pleased with the progress.
Now to get to work.
He unlatched the first tower of crates and began taking them down one at a time. He emptied their contents onto one of the fold-down cots, lining the little metal tubes up like rows of ammunition, side by side. When there was no room on the bunk, Kotler got to work loading then into the torpedo tube.
The canisters were not torpedoes. They didn't have onboard systems that would propel them out of the torpedo tube. But Kotler had worked out that the shift in ambient water pressure and the subsequent rush of water would suck the small canisters out, spewing them into the icy currents around the sub. It was a little like flushing a toilet, with a much more complex operation in the background.
Kotler had the first batch loaded, and closed the breech door, locking it. He turned a series of valves then, flooding the torpedo tube and venting the chamber as the water level rose, clearing any air. He then opened the muzzle door—the egress that would allow the contents of the tube to launch into the surrounding waters.
Kotler activated the water ram.
High-pressure water pushed into the tube in a torrent, and from Kotler's side, he could hear the rush of it. When the sound stopped, he reversed everything he'd done and opened the tube.
Empty.
It was a complex and repetitive task, to the point of being tedious, and it required a lot of back-breaking labor to get the crates open and emptied, but after a quick calculation, he figured he could have all of the element disposed of in about three hours. Four if he had to take breaks.
That was a lot of time. But he figured he had it. His only concern was that Gail’s team might find a way to breach the sub in that time.
He had to make a decision—continue to dispose of the element, to keep it out of Gail's hands, and risk being caught unprepared, or tend to the task of fortifying the sub first and hope he had time to flush the element later.
It really wasn’t a choice. No matter what happened to him, he had to make absolutely certain that Gail never captured the element. He’d die before he’d let that happen.
He started attacking the columns of crates with renewed zeal, loading the torpedo tube directly before laying more canisters out on the cot.
He got into a rhythm, worked out a pattern of load, fire, load. It was painful and strenuous, but he kept to it. And all the while the only sounds he heard were those of his own labor.
Until the radio crackled to life, back in the radio room.
“Mayday! Mayday! Kotler, do you read me? You there?”
Kotler had just shoved another batch of the element into the torpedo tube and left it to race back to the radio. He picked up the handset.
“Roland? Where have you been? Everything alright? Are you …?”
“Hard to explain, but I’m right under you. We need to get you out of that boat. The bad guys have torches.”
“They’re cutting their way in?” He hadn’t heard any signs of that, but the entry hatch was separated from him by quite a bit of space, and his work might have masked any sound.
“We have to get you out,” Denzel repeated.
Kotler looked around. He’d made good progress, but he wasn’t finished. He needed more time. “I can’t leave, Roland. Not yet. I need another hour.”
“Kotler, we ain’t got it!”
“Roland, this is it. This is what Gail’s after. I have it here. And if she gets her hands on it, the game’s over for all of us. Under no circumstances should we let her get this cargo.”
There was a pause, and Denzel’s voice came back strained but resolved. “I’ll hold the line for as long as I can,” he said. “I assume you have a plan?”
“I do,” Kotler replied. “And it’s working. But I need all the time you can give me.”
“You have it. Get to work.”
Kotler signed off and rushed back to the bay, hitting the crates with renewed energy. He was simply prying open the crates and dumping their contents on the floor now, loading the torpedo tube and launching. His hands were cut and bleeding, his lungs were burning, his head was pounding, and he would not stop.
He didn’t know what his friend was facing out there, or how he was buying them time, but Kotler intended to make the most of it.
For the first time in some while—years, perhaps—he prayed. And he hoped God was listening.
Chapter 20
As the mercenaries breached the cargo bay, Denzel leaped for cover and raised his weapon. He fired in pulses, bothering to aim to conserve ammunition, but making sure to lay enough fire to push the bastards back to the door.
Their return fire pinged and whined all around him, but his position was solid.
What he needed were options.
The radio room was too far—he'd be dead before he'd even reached the steps. That would have been a dead end at any rate. Once inside there'd be nowhere left to go. At least out here, he had a chance of escape. He could move around, m
ake for one of the doors, create an opening.
He'd stashed weapons in several places, so if he needed to dash from cover, he could regroup somewhere else. But the risks were high. Better to hold his position for as long as possible and try to think of some other way out.
These guys had cut their way in while he’d been distracted. That meant they had the tools to get into any of the other two doors. It seemed unlikely that they could have gotten a cutting rig to the door behind him, but it was possible. He might end up being pinched in the middle. So, come to think of it, staying put wasn’t an option either.
He needed to make a hole.
There was a way out, but it was going to be a considerable risk.
The ASDS was smack in the middle of the bay floor, wide open to gunfire. His only approach, from his current cover, would make him a walking duck gallery. If that was, McCarthy's men were still in a condition to shoot at him.
He patted his vest and found what he was after. He pulled two of the grenades, hefting them like baseballs. He clipped one to a loop on the vest, then pistol-gripped the Bushmaster M4 in his left hand. He took three deep breathes, then pulled the pin for the first grenade.
He raised the M4 and laid some suppression fire on the door, and as the mercenaries ducked for cover, he chucked the grenade right into the center of them as he sprinted for the ASDS.
“Grenade! Cover! Cover! Cover!”
The detonation was deafening as it was, but it multiplied as it echoed from the steel walls. Smoke filled the room, giving Denzel a small bit of additional cover. He’d take it.
He slapped the red button on the control box as he sprinted by, and an alarm pulsed and echoed in the bay, like the sound of a half-time buzzer on repeat.
The Antarctic Forgery Page 16