Thunder In The Deep (02)

by Joe Buff

  Two crewmen came to stand at the minesweeper's stern.

  "An officer and a phone-talker, I think," Ilse said. They wore battle helmets and life vests over foul-weather gear. She saw the officer look at her through big binoculars. A third man came over with a handheld signal lamp. He flashed a message.

  "They say it would be safer if we surfaced," Montgomery said.

  "No," Jeffrey said. "Tell them we're low on fuel. We get better mileage submerged."

  "They want to know how much fuel we have." "How much do we have?"

  "Eighty-two percent."

  "Tell them forty."

  "They want to speed up to ten knots. They have a lot of ground to cover. Can we make it to Bornholm Island at ten knots?"

  "Why Bornholm?" Jeffrey said.

  "That must be their training base for minis."

  "Can we?"

  "Yes, sir," Meltzer said, "running submerged. I memorized the speed/endurance curves."

  "Can we make it to Greifswald and back to Challenger after that?"

  "Greifswald, yes, sir, if we go slower. Back to the ship, no way, even at optimum cruising speed."

  Jeffrey worked his jaw again. "Chief, tell them Bornholm is okay but we prefer to go slower."

  "They say we can refuel when we get to barracks. They have work to do, and they're doing us a favor."

  "Blade-rate increase," Meltzer said. "They're speeding up." The signalman blinked. Montgomery translated.

  "They said if we run out of gas they'll give us a tow. . . . The German inflection is hard to convey in English, Skipper, but it's sarcastic:'

  "Ten knots it is."

  A few minutes later, on the periscope screen Ilse saw a sharp yellowish glare. There was a terrific detonation, ahead and to port of the Konstanz. She saw a mountain of water bursting skyward. It dropped back slowly, drenching one of the Troika drones. The officer on the minesweeper's stern spoke to the signalman. They waved to the mini's periscope. Ilse thought they were laughing. Cocky bastards.

  "Sir," Meltzer said. "I hate to bring it up again, but the mission. Getting back. How do we refuel?" Jeffrey frowned. "We'll deal with that when we have to. . . . How long to get to the Baltic?"

  "At this speed, Captain, six hours."

  "Those of us who can ought to get some sleep."

  "Concur, sir," Montgomery said. "The pilot and copilot reliefs will come forward soon enough." Some of the enlisted SEALs were trained in this duty. Montgomery reached for a thermos of coffee under his seat, and offered it to Meltzer.

  "Ilse?" Jeffrey said. "Let's go aft. They saved the two front seats for us." Before he left the control compartment, he glanced at the fuel gauge and the chronometer. We're falling more and more behind schedule with each new development, and lower and lower on fuel. This is starting to look like a suicide mission.

  Jeffrey jerked awake with a start: Something had scraped the top of the hull. He looked up frantically. A tethered mine?

  "Just brash ice, sir," Chief Montgomery said from the aisle next to Jeffrey's seat. "Time to get up anyway, Captain."

  Jeffrey looked at his borrowed dive watch: 1723 Berlin time-5:23 P.M., after dusk already this far north, so close to the shortest day of the year, the official start of winter. Jeffrey had slept more than nine hours straight, for the first time in weeks. That explained why he felt so good.

  The lighting was rigged for red. Montgomery handed him a steaming cup of coffee, then went forward. Jeffrey drank. He glanced across the narrow aisle. Ilse was wide awake.

  "Where are we?" Jeffrey said. He ran his fingers through his hair.

  "Entering Greifswald Bay," Shajo Clayton said from behind him. "Now comes the fun part."

  Jeffrey looked aft. Beyond the fourth pair of sleeper

  seats, at the rear of the transport compartment, one of the SEALs used the chemical head. Jeffrey felt the call of nature. The others looked away and made small talk while Ilse took her turn.

  Jeffrey and Ilse and Clayton went forward.

  "How'd you get rid of the Konstanz?"

  "Once we got to the Baltic proper," Meltzer said, "they gave us a course for Bornholm Island, then turned back north. We went east till we hit the German submarine training area, then headed south." He typed some keys. Their track, with time hacks, came on the nav chart.

  "No problems along the way?"

  "Negative, Skipper," Montgomery said. "We met a couple of two-twelves on exercise, some cargo ships serving as training targets, even heard a few practice torpedoes fired in the distance. Axis frigates screening the Swedish coast, against people like us. Some aircraft overflights. Everybody ignored us."

  "What's our fuel level?"

  "Peroxide's down to one eight percent."

  "So we're still stuck for a way back up the Sound." "Right now we're stuck for a way into Greifswald Bay, too."

  "We had to avoid the dredged channel into the bay, sir," Meltzer said. "It's mined, and much too obvious."

  Montgomery nodded. "We crawled over the Thiessower Bank instead." The bank was very shallow, Jeffrey knew, and salinity here was low, so the water would freeze more readily—that's why the mini scraped floating fragments of ice and slush.

  "Then," the chief went on, "we found this." He typed, and a crisp image came on screen. Jeffrey could tell it was a laser line-scan picture from the mini's chin.

  "This is live?"

  "Affirmative."

  "Give me the fine-scale nav chart."

  The mini was at one of the less-shallow spots at the

  mouth of Greifswald Bay, all of twenty-two feet deep right here. Four thousand yards to starboard was Sudperd Point, on Rugen Island, heavily garrisoned by enemy troops. Six thousand yards to port was the military airfield at the tip of Peenemunde. The promontories—solid, inviolable land—seemed to devour the mini like giant incisors, with the bay as their gullet.

  Jeffrey looked at the line-scan picture. Immediately ahead of the stationary minisub, underwater, lay a tangle of stainless steel concertina wire that stretched from the bottom to near the surface. The barrier was held in place and strengthened by vertical segments of railroad rail, driven into the mud and sand.

  The mini's passive sonars tracked enemy helos patrolling overhead.

  "We weren't briefed for this," Montgomery said, meaning the barrier.

  "They must have done the construction work submerged," Jeffrey said, "hiding from our recon drones. Any sign of mines or booby traps, or hydrophones?"

  "Not that we can see, but they might be buried."

  Jeffrey nodded; they had no good way to check. The mini's magnetometers were useless in the solar storm now raging at G5 +, and they dared not use their active bottompenetrating sonar.

  "Deploy the chin grapnels. Use the wire-cutter heads, and let's hope no one notices." Montgomery repositioned the mini between two of the barrier rails. Meltzer worked his joystick in grapnel mode, and began to cut and cut. First upward, then once he got nine feet from the bottom he sliced sideways. The cutters made noise each time they scissored another strip of concertina, but constant surface wave action from the wind made the barrier rattle and clank anyway. Meltzer stopped when a helo hovered and dipped a passive sonar-head nearby, then continued when the helo left. There was no change in the pattern of the local airborne patrols.

  "New contact on passive sonar," Montgomery said.

  Ilse, quiet and thoughtful up to now, craned to read the screen. "Bearing-and blade-rate indicate some kind of speedboat. Constant bearing now. It's coming this way." Meltzer stopped cutting, and turned off the laser line-scan.

  "Photonics sensors picking up a searchlight," Montgomery said.

  "Pass the word," Jeffrey whispered. "Rig for ultra-quiet." Clayton turned aft and made hand signals to his men. "Speedboat's drawing away," Ilse whispered. "No change in blade-rate."

  Meltzer went back to work. "Ready, Captain." His cutting was done.

  "Push through."

  "Retract the side thrusters," Montgomery s
aid. Meltzer worked some switches. The mini began to slide sideways in the gentle current; Jeffrey knew there was almost no tide in Greifswald Bay. Montgomery worked the rudder and throttle, and the mini moved into the gap. When they were almost through, there was a scraping noise, then a strange boing from the stern. The mini stopped. Montgomery increased the screw-prop turns, but the mini was trapped.

  "We're tangled," Montgomery said. "Damn. Someone has to go out and cut us free."

  "I'll do it," Jeffrey said. "Shaj, you be my swim buddy." Jeffrey and Clayton donned their gear. First, their digital dive-computer chest packs, linked to heads-up displays in their masks, and the analog backups, strapped to their left forearms. Then came neutrally buoyant flak vests, just in case. Next, an adjustable buoyancy compensator, which doubled as flotation vest. Draeger closed-cycle rebreathers, worn over their chests. Weight belts, custom calibrated for each man. Titanium dive knives; the dive masks themselves with fiber-optic hookup wires; and big Special Warfare swim fins. They activated chem-glow cyalume hoops; each put one on his right arm.

  They went into the lock-out sphere and dogged the hatches. They checked each other's rigs, then tested their two-stage regulators. On the intercom they told Meltzer to equalize the sphere. This took but a moment, the mini was so shallow. Clayton opened the bottom hatch and let it drop down.

  In the hatchway Jeffrey saw a pool of black water. He knew the bottom was very close beneath the mini. Clayton sat on the hatch coaming, held his mask in place, and rolled forward, making hardly a ripple. Jeffrey sat, positioned his mouthpiece, held his mask, and rolled forward.

  Jesus. His mask display said the water was 31° Fahrenheit—only salt content kept it from freezing solid. The water here was brackish, because of river runoff into the bay mixing with seawater from the Baltic.

  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.

  ON THE SHORE OF GREIFSWALD BAY

  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 whil
e 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.