Keeping his voice low to prevent his words echoing throughout the cavernous chamber, Jack explained his idea to Sam with whispers and urgent hand gestures. Hoping he’d been understood, Jack rolled over and fired short, controlled bursts from his weapon to give Sam a chance to make it back to the Barracuda. “Go! Go! Go!” he yelled, no longer caring if he was overheard and turned to urge Sam on.
Sam was already gone. For such a large man, he could be quite agile when the situation called for it and being used as live fire target practice was one of those situations. Sam ran like his life depended on it and reaching the edge of the Barracuda’s dock, threw himself over the gap between the concrete landing and the subs hull.
Bullets pinged off the sub and chased him across the deck to the sail where he found a blind spot from the shooters. It was too small for him, but he’d take it. He continued the agreed countdown in his head. Jack’s life depended on him being able to get the timing right. And if Jack’s life depended on it, then so did everyone else’s.
As he counted silently to himself he followed the length of electrical cable from the lights and traced it to its power source. The thick cable looped its way up the sail and over the top. There was no way he’d make it up the sail without taking a bullet. Or three. He’d have to unplug it at the other end, which meant covering the open deck between the cover of the sail and the light array.
Still he maintained the count in his head. Time was running short. It was now or never.
Launching himself in to the open, he had faith that Jack would see him and try to cover him as he dove for the power cable. He heard Coulson’s return fire. The man had his back.
Sparks flew in every direction as the deck came alive with automatic rounds hitting the steel. Still he powered on, keeping low and zig zagging to avoid becoming an easy target for the unseen shooters in the shadows.
With a final turn of speed, he reached the light assembly, grabbed the power cable and yanked it with all his might.
The entire bunker was instantly plunged into darkness.
Still Sam continued to count, his lips moving silently as he did so.
Jack’s lips weren’t moving. His mental clock kept time like a metronome. Tick tock … tick tock. Without even thinking about it, he knew how many seconds had elapsed and how long before Sam would trigger the next part of the plan. Jack pulled the night vision goggles over his eyes and powered them up.
Smoothly and quietly, he swapped out his near empty magazine for a fresh thirty round mag and flicked the fire mode selector from automatic to semi-automatic, allowing him one shot per trigger pull.
All around, he could see the others slipping their night vision into place. He knew they could see him, but for the moment that didn’t matter. All he had to do was commit the locations of the other shooters to memory, which he did before lowering himself back down into the drain channel. Jack slowly pushed the night vision rig up on top of his head again and closed his eyes for a moment.
Three.
Two.
One.
He stood, in full view of the entire contingent of armed soldiers and presented himself as a perfect target. They thought he couldn’t see them. They were wrong.
The lights blazed to full brightness as Sam, right on cue, plugged the power back on and lit them up.
Screams of agony erupted from all around the cavern. The shooters were being painfully blinded by the powerful floodlights that were magnified a thousand times by their night vision equipment. They tore the goggles from their head, but it was too late to do them any good. The effect would only last a short while, but that’s all the time Jack needed.
One by one Jack started to pick them off. Not in a Hollywood movie style blaze of gunfire that would have emptied his clip in seconds.
Just one round per man fired with near surgical precision at the positions he locked away in his memory.
With each shot, one man went down and Jack’s spent brass kicked out of the ejection port, ringing as it hit the cold concrete floor.
Chapter 39
January 12, 1945
U-Boot-Bunker (Submarine Pen)
Kriegsmarine Base 211
Ronne Ice Shelf (Antarctica)
77° 51' 19.79" S -61° 17' 34.20" W
U-2532
The pounding against the lead lined bulkhead hatch continued relentlessly. Sohler imagined the two grease covered, stockily built engineers working in tandem with sledgehammers like railway men hammering spikes in a practiced cadence. They would have used the boats one and only cutting torch to cut through the hatch if Sohler hadn’t commandeered it and locked it, along with himself, inside The Bell’s compartment.
Sohler was a sailor. A U-Boot Kapitänleutnant and a damned good one. He knew the sea, he knew submarines and he knew how to sink enemy ships with his torpedoes.
He wasn’t an atomic scientist but he’d heard enough rumors about the work of Werner Heisenberg to be afraid. Nobody should possess a weapon of such devastating destructive power, especially one that even the scientists who built it couldn’t predict its true power or the lasting effects of an atomic detonation. If the stories he’d heard about the atomic weapons tests were only half true, these weapons had the potential to turn Europe into a nightmarish wasteland. He wouldn’t let his family live or die like that.
The Allied and Norwegian resistance operation in Telemark and the subsequent sabotage of the ‘SF Hydro’, the Norwegian ferry transporting the last of Germany’s heavy water supply and manufacturing equipment, was a grim reminder for Sohler. It wasn’t just about building a better bomb. There was more to the atomic weapon project than that, and it made Sohler uneasy. His moral compass faltered between his patriotic duty as a Nazi U-Boot Kapitänleutnant and his moral objection to the use of these terrible atomic weapons that had been designed to destroy entire cities inhabited by innocent people.
If the Norwegian resistance were willing to undertake such a daring raid and sacrifice the lives of their own civilians to sink the heavy water consignment, thwarting one of Germany’s most promising atomic programs, then perhaps preventing this Bell weapon from being used was worth his own personal sacrifice. He only hoped his wife and son would one day understand that he wasn’t a traitor, no matter how history portrayed him.
These thoughts fueled his frantic efforts to weld shut the hatch before he set the timers on the scuttling charges he had strategically placed around the compartment. Even if they weren’t enough to destroy the device, they would surely breach the pressure hull and flood the compartment. Although sealed, the compartment would hold enough water to take the boat all the way to the bottom of the sea under the Antarctic ice shelf where it would never be found.
There was no way they could stop him.
Kammler would either go down with the boat and die quickly in the frigid depths or he would die slowly, trapped in an ice bound concrete bunker. Either way, Sohler didn’t care, so long as Kammler and his hideous ideas died.
Before he could finish welding the hatch, the two halves of the machine began to rotate in opposite directions on their axis and the entire room filled with an unnatural and eerie blue light.
“Nein!” Sohler screamed, scrambling to set the timers on the explosives.
He was too late.
Chapter 40
November 9, 2017, 09:00 UTC
U-Boot-Bunker (Submarine Pen)
Kriegsmarine Base 211
Ronne Ice Shelf (Antarctica)
77° 51' 19.79" S -61° 17' 34.20" W
USS Barracuda
“The shooting’s stopped,” Juan whispered weakly. When he’d signed up for adventures in the Antarctic, he had something else in mind. Spectacular scenery, uncharted subpolar oceans, days that lasted months.
Grenades exploding and being shot at with automatic weapons wasn’t featured in the recruitment brochure.
They’d all regrouped in the control room for no other reason that they felt more at home there and it was the compartment
that could be most easily sealed off from outside forces if the need arose.
To keep his mind off the sound of bullets ricocheting off the hull, the XO, Durand had resumed reading the former U-Boat captain’s log.
“He thinks it’s an atomic bomb,” he blurted out as soon as he’d translated another page of the U-Boat log.
“I thought the Nazi’s never developed an atomic bomb,” said Dave.
“Of course they did!” shrieked Juan, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “Haven’t you ever wondered why the American Manhattan project wasn’t able to deliver its so called ‘gadget’ on Hiroshima until after the German surrender? The Germans already had the technology. Our guys had been working for years to find the right way to detonate the bomb, but they never figured it out. We captured the top Nazi atomic guys in Europe after the surrender and secretly brought them back to the States to finish off the Manhattan project.”
Leah, Dave, Durand and Captain Jameson all rolled their eyes at Juan’s crackpot theory.
“What about the German U-Boat full of enriched uranium we captured after Germany fell. What do you think happened to that? I’ll tell you — it ended up in the ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ bombs they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that’s what happened to it. Enriched uranium was as rare as rocking horse shit back in those days. Mock me if you want, but I’m telling you —”
“You’re telling us what you’ve been reading in those stupid conspiracy theory blogs you’re so addicted to,” Dave broke in.
“Well, let’s see what Herr Sohler has to say about it, shall we?” Juan turned to Durand and signaled for him to continue.
“In his final entries, it looks like they made it here to this base and that’s where he starts not making much sense. Sohler claims The Bell is in a lead lined compartment on board our U-Boat over there. He’s positive it’s an atomic bomb and he doesn’t want German, or anyone else, by the sound of his ramblings, to have atomic weapons. He keeps mentioning his wife and child and how he doesn’t want them involved in an atomic war.
Then he goes off the rails and documents his plan to seal up the compartment containing this ‘atomic weapon’ and scuttle the boat so it never gets found.”
“He clearly didn’t get around to doing that did he?” Juan suggested.
“The only way we’re ever going to know for sure is if we get a look inside that compartment,” Captain Jameson spoke up, having stayed out of the conspiracy theory argument.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea. What if there’s a dead U-Boat captain in there? Eeew!” Leah screwed up her nose and shivered.
“From a tactical point of view, I think we need to take a look. It’s becoming obvious that there’s a lot going on here we don’t understand and that U-Boat and its cargo, whatever it is, seems to be the center of attention. The more we can find out about what’s going on here, the better our chances of making it through this debacle.”
“The Captain’s right,” Durand agreed.
Juan rubbed his hands together. Finding the answer to one of the greatest mysteries of the Second World War might almost be worth getting shot at. Almost.
Chapter 41
November 9, 2017, 09:15 UTC
South Pacific Ocean
2,000 miles from target
Location: Classified
USS Indiana (SSN 789)
“Man battle stations missile.”
“Man battle stations missile.”
A raucous alarm whoop whooped throughout the boat causing a frenzy of organized chaos from aft to stern.
‘This is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill.”
Following an unspoken convention that could only ever be understood by experienced submariners who had earned their ‘Dolphins’, sailors hugged bulkheads to let others pass in both directions, men slid down companionways, others climbed up. The whole boat moved to a hectic choreography of men moving in all directions at once without ever colliding or causing bottlenecks and it was all performed to a blaring cacophony of alarm bells.
“This is the Executive Officer. The launch of nuclear weapons has been authorized and verified. This is not a drill.” The XO cradled the mic solemnly and turned to the commander.
“Thank you Mr. Merrill. You have the Conn — take us to launch depth and enter the target package for tube one.”
“Aye, sir. I have the Conn.”
The commander made his way to his stateroom where the missile keys were housed in a locked safe. Only he knew the combination.
“Take us to launch depth,” the XO ordered as he punched the target package into the missile control system console. Beads of sweat crowded his brow.
What felt like an hour later, but in reality had only been a few minutes, Commander Ryan returned with a launch key swinging from his neck by a red lanyard.
Merrill had seen the launch keys a hundred times before during missile drills but only now in this grim scenario did he note, ironically, that the keys that fired a missile bearing a nuclear payload was almost indistinguishable from his own gym locker key. He wondered why they made them look so bland and innocent.
The Launch Control Officer had retrieved his key from his own safe the minute the XO had called battle stations missile. Only he had the combination. Manning his station at the Attack Center, he verified the target package and waited for the commander to give the order to initiate the firing sequence. Both the Launch Control Officer and the commander had to insert and turn their keys at the same time before the missile could be launched.
As soon as the target package had been entered by the XO and confirmed by the Launch Control Officer, the missile in Vertical Launch Tube one began to spin up its gyro and initialize its onboard GPS to lock in its exact launch position. With that information and the target package successfully uploaded, the nuclear tipped Tomahawk would fly undeterred to the target area and deliver its warhead to devastating effect.
The ready light on the indicator screen turned green.
The Commander and the Launch Control Officer inserted their keys and on the Commander’s count of three, turned them clockwise a quarter turn.
The LCO flipped up the bright red safety cover guard exposing the missile launch switch.
Commander Ryan gave the command, “Fire missile one.”
The LCO pushed the fire control, his nerves strong and his fingers steady. This is what he’d been trained to do.
The missile, one of six clustered in the latest Virginia Payload Module, was propelled from the submarine. Initially launched with a fiery and spectacular solid-fuel rocket booster, once airborne and clear of the water it appeared to hover in space for a moment, then it deployed its stubby wings, whirred up a powerful turbo-fan engine and accelerated toward its cruising speed.
This particular missile was programmed to use its jam resistant GPS to navigate to target in sea-skim mode at subsonic speed just above the waves until it hit its target with pinpoint accuracy.
The 2,000 mile, 4 hour countdown had begun.
The men aboard the USS Indiana didn’t see the spectacular launch of the missile or hear the boom as its solid booster lit up and spewed flames and white smoke from its tail. They remained in the silent, dark depths of the South Pacific and would do so until ordered to stand down or launch another missile. In the meantime, they would have time to reflect on being the first submarine to launch a nuclear missile with hostile intent.
Chapter 42
November 9, 2017, 09:30 UTC
U-Boot-Bunker (Submarine Pen)
Kriegsmarine Base 211
Ronne Ice Shelf (Antarctica)
77° 51' 19.79" S -61° 17' 34.20" W
U-2532
“Peterson, SITREP,” Muller said quietly into his throat mic. He’d heard a hell of a lot of shooting from the docks and needed a situation report ASAP.
No response.
“Peterson. Respond.”
Still no response. Losing his second in command wasn’t something he’d
factored into his action plan. Muller needed to check the status out in the bunker first hand.
There was nothing more they could do in the U-Boat, anyway. The compartment hatch was welded shut. They’d need to blast it open to get to the device and the explosives had been left up on the ice, along with the rest of their equipment. The reconnaissance into the bunker was only supposed to be a search and recovery mission, securing the U-Boat against minimal resistance. They’d expected to encounter the two crazy men on the U-Boat but they hadn’t expected to come face to face with an attack submarine when they penetrated the concrete bunker.
Circling his hand anticlockwise and gesturing upward, Muller signaled his men to rally at his position then climb the ladder to the conning tower. There was no point risking radio communication if things hadn’t gone to plan up above. He’d follow right behind them, allowing them to draw any enemy fire on their position first, of course.
As the last man paused at the top of the ladder, Muller paused, too. So far silence.
He gave three sharp taps on the man’s leg, signaling for him to continue up.
Reaching the inside of the conning tower, it took Muller only a few seconds to assess the damage. Not a single man remained on post at the perimeter he’d ordered them to establish after disposing of the sailors on the American sub.
Someone had taken his men out. They were handpicked, elite soldiers and getting the better of them wouldn’t have been easy. Muller would not underestimate the Americans again.
Muller felt two taps on his shoulder and turned to the man next to him. Pointing to his own eyes, then to the sail of the American sub, Muller looked but couldn’t see anything. Then there was a slight movement. At least one man was sheltered behind the sail. But one man couldn’t take out thirty of his. There had to be others.
Another series of taps on his shoulder and he followed the raised hand of another of his men. An irregular shape against the hard and uniform edge of the concrete revealed another man, lying flat, sheltered behind some kind of depression or step in the concrete floor.
Ice Fortress (A Jack Coulson Thriller) Page 15