Munoz closed the door quietly behind him, and the two of them went sideways down the steel staircase, keeping their backs to the wall and the M-16s at port arms.
It was a series of half-flights, with landings at every half-story. Below, McKenna could hear voices speaking in German.
On the fourth floor, he opened the stairwell door and looked out on a corridor that matched the one above. There was no apparent fire damage here, but water dripped from the ceiling.
No bodies, alive or dead.
He stepped into the hallway and tried the door at his right, which did not have a forbidding sign or a lock. Opening it an inch he peered into yet another corridor. This one was wide, about thirty feet across. It didn’t match the interior plan Pearson had drawn. He’d have to let her know she wasn’t infallible.
Or maybe he wouldn’t say anything about it to her. Damn, he was getting conservative.
The hallway was wide and long, from the well section to the outer curve of the dome. There were three Ping-Pong tables and a few electronic games situated around.
On the other wall he saw an elevator door and another door with the black letters Verboten. That seemed to be the place he wanted to be.
If not for the ten men milling about in the recreation space. They were armed with assault rifles and carried steel helmets.
The door across the way opened and an officer stuck his head out. Yelled.
The men snapped to attention, then donned helmets.
McKenna shut the door.
“Kev?”
“I think somebody wants to meet us.” He unclipped a grenade and pulled the pin.
“You don’t want to meet a new friend?”
“Not these.” He twisted the door handle, hauled the heavy door back, and rolled the grenade in.
Slammed the door.
Hit the floor with Munoz right beside him.
Heard yelling.
Dull boom.
The door blew out, slammed him in the shoulder.
Munoz yelped.
Smoke and dust and debris in the air.
McKenna pushed the door off of himself and struggled to his feet.
The Germans had been flung all over the room. Blood and flesh splattered the Ping-Pong tables and walls. Some of them were groaning, and some were screaming, and some were deathly silent.
The lieutenant in the other doorway was on his back, his hands clutched to his face.
Munoz hadn’t moved.
Keeping an eye on the opposite door, McKenna dropped to his knee.
“Tony?”
He moved his head groggily.
There was a long gash in his forehead, blood rushing freely from it.
“Hey, Tony?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m all right.”
“You sure?”
“Hell of a headache. I’m okay, jefe.”
Munoz rolled over and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. The blood dripped from his head onto the carpeted floor of the hallway.
McKenna dug into his right thigh pocket and came up with the first aid kit.
Munoz took it from him, settled onto his buttocks on the floor, and leaned back against the wall. He found his M-16 and rested it across his legs.
“Go, amigo.”
With a quick glance around the corridor, McKenna dashed across it and slammed into the wall next to the doorway. The wall was smeared with blood and riddled with shrapnel. The lieutenant moaned.
He inched his head around and looked inside.
Rows of electronic consoles.
A whole herd of people, down behind the consoles, peering over them.
A huge man in a uniform shirt, but with no insignia, leaned against the back of a chair, his arms crossed, staring at the doorway.
And a general. In full uniform. His face was almost black with his fury.
He didn’t see any guns in there, so he pushed off the wall and stepped through the doorway, careful to avoid the lieutenant. Kept the M-16 trained lazily in the direction of the senior officer.
The general stared at him.
McKenna got close enough to see the name tag on his breast pocket.
Eisenach.
What do you know? This was the guy Pearson tried to find out more about, but whose assignment as a special assistant to Marshal Hoch had been ultrasecret.
He walked sideways and looked down the next row of consoles. Fearful faces looked back at him. He didn’t see any weapons.
“General, you tell a couple of these people to tend to the wounded in the hallway.”
The general didn’t move.
The big man barked an order in German, and five men leaped off their knees and ran to the doorway.
McKenna checked the door and saw Munoz standing beside it. He had a bandage plastered to his forehead, but it was already orange.
“Tony?”
“I’m still here. Got it covered on this end.”
McKenna turned back to the German general. “The way I have it, Eisenach, you’re in charge of all this shit.”
Still not responding.
McKenna nodded at the big guy. “Who are you?”
“Colonel Hans Diederman. You are?”
“Colonel McKenna. U.S. Air Force. Well-wisher.”
“I am sure,” Diederman said.
No humor there. “What do you do in this room?”
Diederman looked at the general, then back to McKenna. “Monitor operations of the wells. Peaceful wells, Colonel McKenna.”
“They are very dangerous wells,” McKenna countered. “You have no controls in here?”
“None. And now, we have no monitoring. The antennas are gone.”
McKenna tilted his head to scan several of the screens. They were all blank.
“You have no radio communications?”
“None at all,” Diederman said.
The general’s face finally mobilized, changing from fury to something else. Fear? It looked as if he might have a heart attack.
“You and your people have overestimated the dangers, I am afraid,” Diederman said.
“What happens in a Force Ten gale?”
“Nothing. I designed these platforms myself.”
Egomaniac?
Eisenach looked down at the first console, then quickly away.
McKenna released the stock with his left hand and pointed downward at the floor. “What’s down there?”
“The Switching Center.”
“Collects and distributes the electricity?”
“Exactly. You have destroyed an enterprise designed solely to help mankind, Colonel McKenna.”
“Jesus, Diederman. How long has it been since you’ve been on the mainland?”
The man frowned. “Several weeks ago.”
“But you’re usually here?”
“I am.”
“Then you don’t know that the juice you’re generating is replacing other energy consumption so that Eisenach and his buddies can store up fuel for war? Along with all the new tanks and ships and planes?”
Diederman swung his big head toward General Eisenach and stared.
“You will never prevail.”
“I’ll be damned. You can talk, General.”
“I know things you do not know.”
This son of a bitch was a walking zombie. Staring right through McKenna.
“You probably do. Like what?”
One hand lifted slightly and turned palm up. Not much of a gesture.
“This? This? Only a mild setback. The Aryan nation is destined to lead, to control, to people this world.”
One of those.
McKenna shifted the muzzle of the assault rifle toward the general. He now thought that Eisenach was more dangerous than Diederman.
“And even now,” Eisenach said, “you have won nothing. You will have, in fact, created an environmental calamity. It is your own doing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Eisenach smiled at him.
Diederman pointed to a black box on the first console. A red light was blinking on the face of it.
“The general thought it would be an excellent idea to wire each of the wells with explosives. That box activates the system.”
Eisenach smiled. “It cannot be stopped. The wells will all erupt within fifty minutes.”
“However,” Diederman said, “I did not think it was such a good idea. The explosives are in place, but they are not wired.”
Eisenach spun around toward the big man, his mouth agape, a snarl emitting from it. He pawed his uniform jacket, scratching, digging.
And came up with a Walther automatic.
Diederman moved fast for his size. He went down sideways, kicking a castered chair at Eisenach.
The technicians scattered, diving under desks and chairs.
The chair caught Eisenach in the knees as he fired his first shot. The report rang in the confined space, but the slug went into a wall.
The general toppled over the chair, then fell trying to get off it. He rolled onto the floor and raised the pistol at McKenna.
McKenna shot him in the forehead, slamming his head into the floor, snapping his eyes wide open.
A very small hole, barely trickling blood.
“Good shot, amigo.”
McKenna wasn’t so sure. Maybe hatred for this kind of bastard got in the way of justice.
The long, slow, rambling, errant wheels of justice. Diederman struggled to his feet.
“Colonel,’’ McKenna said, backing toward the doorway, “I think you’d better get your people back to the mainland.”
The large German didn’t say anything. He just looked at the body of the dead Nazi.
McKenna and Munoz ran back across the corridor and down the stairs. Several men rushing up the stairs, to see what all the noise was about, changed their minds, and ran back down ahead of them.
By the time they reached the first floor and stepped out into another wide and long corridor, there were only a half-dozen men to be seen. And they quickly disappeared through a doorway on the left.
It was a hushed atmosphere, despite the muted whine of the turbine generators on the other side of the corridor’s end wall.
“How you doing, Tony?”
“Aspirin’ll take care of it.”
“None in the kit?”
“Sure. I took six.”
McKenna rushed across the corridor to another Verboten door and found it locked. He backed away and fired four shots into the lock.
The 5.56-millimeter slugs disintegrated the lock and the door swung open.
There were six men inside the three-story-high room, and they all cowered against the back wall. Thick cables traversed the space, fifteen feet and more off the floor. Metal-clad boxes lined the room and ran in rows down its center. All of them bore markings in German and control panels — dials, gauges, digital readouts, levers, buttons.
“If it says ‘on’, Tony, we want it off.”
“Damn betcha, compadre.”
The six men didn’t move as McKenna and Munoz went down the rows, throwing switches.
McKenna envisioned various parts of Germany going dark. The mainland engineers, with no warning that the Greenland generators were going off-line, would be scrambling to find new sources of energy with which to restore power. The fact that it was night might help them out a little, but tomorrow, those factories and industries that had converted from fuel oil and coal to electricity might well be shut down.
One of the men against the back wall began to babble in excited German.
“What’s he sayin’, Kev?”
“Damned if I know. I’d cover a bet, though, that shutting the output down will throw an overload on the turbine generators on all of the wells. Might even burn them out.”
“Too damned bad,” Munoz said. “What about the alternate route, though? On eleven?”
“Their communications are down. The people on eleven might not find out until it’s all over.”
The lights in the Switching Room blinked, came back, blinked again, then went out. A few seconds later, they came back on, but very dim.
“Emergency generator,” Munoz said.
As soon as they’d reversed as many switches and levers as they could find, McKenna gestured with his rifle and herded the Germans out of the room.
Then he and Munoz burned up two magazines apiece of 5.56 ammo. The racket was deafening, and when they were done, the control panels were a shambles.
They slipped into the corridor to find twenty men gathered around, backing away as they changed magazines
“Hey!” McKenna yelled.
The mob stopped moving.
McKenna crossed the corridor, picked out two men, and relieved them of their parkas. He tossed one to Munoz and they slipped into them, then pulled the hoods over their heads.
Munoz led the way to the door and outside onto the helicopter pad.
The rotors were already turning, the faces of the two pilots lit by red instrument panel lights.
“Leave the rifles,” McKenna said, dropping his onto the deck.
Munoz dropped his own, and they marched across the pad toward the chopper, looking, McKenna hoped, like departing German bigwigs.
The pad was littered with pieces from the dome. One of the SAM radar trailers lay on its side, shattered. The other one was gone entirely, probably blown into the sea.
The wind coming across the pad was chilled, but not too strong.
They performed the obligatory ducking from rotors that were high overhead, but it helped to conceal their faces.
Munoz parted from him, headed toward the other side of the chopper. When he reached the helicopter, a small MBB converted to command use, McKenna ignored the passenger compartment, reached for the pilot’s door, and jerked it open. He leaned in toward a startled pilot, flicked open the quick release harness buckle, then hauled him out of the cockpit.
“Sorry,” he said. “This one’s taken.”
The man spluttered his indignation in German while McKenna scrambled inside and pulled on a headset.
Munoz had similar success and similar indignation on the other side. When he plopped into the copilot’s seat, he asked, “How long’s it been since you’ve flown rotary, Snake Eyes?”
“Fourteen, fifteen years.”
“That’s comfortin’.”
“Like riding a bicycle,” McKenna said, running the throttles up. When the tachometers showed high, but not yet in the red, he pulled collective.
And nearly went back into the dome, overcorrecting for the wind, skittering across the pad, dragging the skids, before he got it stabilized and airborne.
The wind was strong enough to not disregard little mistakes.
“Oops,” Munoz said.
McKenna got a feel for the stick, put the nose down, and raced off the platform toward the east. “Just find us a radio channel, huh?”
Munoz had to use the unscrambled frequency for Tac-2.
“Snake Eyes, that you in the chopper?”
“Roger, Delta Green.”
“You fly like shit.”
“That’s because he thinks it’s a bicycle,” Munoz said.
“Cancha, I want you to put down at Daneborg. Think you can get it on the ground there?”
“Tight, Snake Eyes, but we’ll do it. I’m going to radio ahead for fuel.”
“Good. Take off. Robin Hood, you there?”
“Got ’im.”
“You still have some of our flight gear. And I don’t know if we’re going to figure out this German equipment. You want to lead us to Daneborg?”
“I always wanted a Pathfinder code name.”
*
Conover had been relieved to hear McKenna’s voice on the air.
Abrams had told him on the intercom, “Told you so.”
“Go to hell.”
When the coast came up, Conover lost altitude to 2,000 feet, and they passed silently over Peenemünde.
“Okay, you can get
us back some altitude, Con Man”
“What’d you see?”
Conover had not watched the night-vision screen. His focus was on the HUD. He was starting to get a few red lights on electrical and hydraulic systems.
“Not good,” Abrams told him, then went to Tac-1. “Alpha Two, Delta Yellow.”
“Go ahead, Yellow,” Pearson said.
“The rocket’s on the pad, Alpha. Tanker trucks around, vapors like they’re transferring hydrogen and oxygen. Lots of lights and lots of people scurrying around. Very active. They’re going to launch that hummer soon.”
“Thank you, Yellow. Alpha out.”
Conover didn’t like the sound of it. He wondered what the target was, and given what had just taken place in the Greenland Sea, was almost as certain that he didn’t want to know.
Twenty
General Brackman felt as drained as if he had been flying the combat mission himself.
Despite the fact that it was all over except for the mop-up, he and Thorpe remained in the crow’s nest overlooking the Command Center. Milly had replenished the coffee and the Danish. Delta Yellow was approaching Greece. Delta Green had taken off from Daneborg. On the big plotting board, the Soviet and British-American task forces continued to close in. They would be there by midmorning to begin the monumental task of plugging the wells.
Brackman did not understand the technology, but someone had said that the wells were to be pumped full of concrete for several hundred feet below the seabed and the well casing above the seabed broken off. The Germans would be allowed to tow their platforms out of the Greenland Sea and to remove them from the ice.
Just details. The small things had to be cleaned up. He would have to testify before Congress, of course, and justify the loss of a three-quarter-billion-dollar aerospace vehicle.
The politicians would bring pressure on the German government. Already, the CIA was reporting exceptional activity at the High Command’s headquarters in Bonn. Middle of the night changes in leadership?
And one pressing detail.
“What about this rocket at Peenemünde, David?”
Thorpe sighed and looked over at him. “I don’t know, Marv. The launch could have been scheduled for months. Even years. The only thing that bothers me, beyond knowing about those MIRVs, is the fact that Weismann has been seen around there so much.”
“Maybe Sheremetevo will have something when he calls.”
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