“Right,” Schiller said. “As we can see more clearly now,” and as he finished his words the film rolled again. The flashes were more brilliant and glowing balls drifted toward the camera. More flashes; Steve watched a battery of small rockets erupt away from his point of view. The rockets swept ahead in a spreading fan.
“ECM?” he asked.
Schiller confirmed it. “Right. Electronic countermeasure decoys.” A moment later the shore line vanished and they were looking at clouds. They remained for perhaps twenty seconds, and then brilliant blue sky appeared as the camera plane ripped its way for altitude.
“What type?” Steve asked Schiller.
“A-5, modified Vigilante. Three engines.”
Navy reconnaissance. Steve knew the ship. The screen went dark and the lights came on again.
“To the west of where this film was shot,” Schiller went on, “is the river city of Nieuw Amsterdam. A bit further west is the Surinam capitol of Paramaribo. We can still get people into the capital, but anything east of there is sealed off completely.” The map came onto the screen again and arrows picked out the points mentioned by Schiller. “To the east, just across the French Guiana border, is the riverport town of Mana. It, too, is closed off completely. You’ll have the opportunity to go over these charts in more detail. What you will really want to study, however, are the films of one major river channel, the Maroni.”
Schiller paused, nodded to his associate. “Ricardo?”
French and Spanish, Steve thought. But Cuban, or what? Just the touch of that accent. Carpentier leaned forward, his muscular forearms on the table, his hands toying with a pencil.
“We have clear evidence,” he began, speaking slowly and carefully, “that the Russians have moved a group of submarines into a secret new base in the area you have just watched on this film. They are of two types, Colonel. The first is their SSBN-Y class, which compares to the category of the Navy’s Ethan Allen. It is every bit as good as our latest submarines that carry sixteen Poseidon missiles. It has somewhat more power, and it accommodates sixteen Sawfly ballistic missiles with a range of perhaps twenty-two hundred miles. The second type is their SSN-V, or Victor, class, which is an attack submarine without missiles. Those are used to trail our own missile submarines, for obvious reasons.
“Now the submarines themselves are not our concern. The Navy is paid to worry about such things. It is the base that has our attention, and it is the base that has brought you here. We are almost certain this base is deep water. To handle the number of submarines we believe to be involved, it must include a major facility that is above the water line, but that is concealed completely from us. We believe Castro elements are involved but we cannot be sure. It does not really matter. Only the base and what it contains are important, and our evidence adds up to a deep underwater facility, perhaps a mountain hollowed out naturally or even artificially, in an area of jungle coast line about which we know less than we would like. It appears that the submarine approaches also are through deep water. We have not been able to get close enough with our own submarines, or even with aircraft, to get decent photography and soundings.” Carpentier shrugged. “They cover themselves very well.”
“That antiaircraft fire,” Steve said. “How do they get away with shooting at us? I would think there would be some repercussions from that.”
“Not really,” Schiller added. “They have declared the area a training base. They’ve posted it for international charts. A restricted area. Testing or training or what-have-you.”
“Including some pretty heavy AA,” Steve said.
“Very heavy,” Schiller confirmed. “Latest stuff from Czechoslovakia. Radar controlled. As good as anything we have. Makes it rough getting in there.”
“That Vigilante seemed to make out pretty good,” Steve observed.
Schiller nodded. “That he did. Two others didn’t.”
“Also,” Carpentier said, “we are in the anomalous position of technically being trespassers to prove a larger international illegality. The Surinam government is cooperating fully with the Russians. They are a poor people. The Russians, from what we understand, have made some very large gifts to the right people. Since they do have local cooperation they break no laws. There is the argument that the Russians are violating certain agreements of the Organization of American States. The OAS does not agree, and one wonders if some additional gifts have also found their way to the right people.”
“We must prove that there has been such violation, as well as a violation of the historic Monroe Doctrine,” Schiller added.
“It is a dangerous situation,” Carpentier said. “You see, they use this base for supplies and crew changes. It lets them establish a deepwater nuclear patrol in a southeastern perimeter to the United States. One of the ways they cover themselves, besides the area being marked off for training, is with an oil-exploration program. On the surface it is sponsored by cooperative funds from Russia. This means they have a valid reason for their presence. An open presence. They bring in boats, floating derricks—”
“I didn’t see those in the films,” Steve interrupted.
“They weren’t in the shots you saw,” Schiller told him. “They were brought in afterward. You’ll see them in high-altitude recon film.” He nodded to his partner.
“They have derricks, all sorts of surface and hydrographic activity going on,” Carpentier explained. “They have also brought in a great deal of oil.”
“Brought it in?” Steve showed his surprise.
Carpentier nodded. “In the shallower waters near the shore line and along the river they release quantities of oil at different temperatures. The infrared patterns we use for tracking are then made worthless. We also believe they use iron filings, well magnetized, mixed in with the oil. This makes our magnetic anomaly detectors work very poorly.”
“The White House completely agrees with our evaluation, as does Defense’s military intelligence,” Schiller said. “They consider this base to be evidence of Russian duplicity, violating the agreement that came out of the so-called Cuban crisis. Now we’ve got far worse on our hands. We just can’t bull our way in there because we’d be interfering with the sovereignty of Surinam and French Guiana, and God knows what else, and we could precipitate all sorts of crises.”
“It is all much worse,” said Carpentier, picking up the theme, “because now the Russians, they have the missiles, right, but they also have perhaps fifteen to twenty V-class submarines, each with sixteen missiles, and they are never in one place long enough for us to—”
“What about the Victor-class boats?” Steve asked.
“Perhaps a dozen,” said Schiller. “Fast, maybe forty knots submerged. They’re playing cat-and-mouse games with our subs. They’re out in such numbers we know they’ve got to be resupplied. The Navy covers everything out at sea, so we know they’re not resupplying at sea. It’s all coming out of that base.”
“And where does this leave us?” Steve asked.
“Like I said,” Schiller said, “we need objective, convincing proof. Photographs. Pictures that leave no doubt, pictures that let our people walk into the meetings of the OAS and literally slap them down on the table. Same thing with the United Nations. We need the kind of proof that lets us act swiftly and decisively, that gives the White House the edge in telling the Russians to get the hell out—or else, and not appear arbitrary and provocative. We must demonstrate with this proof that our interests are also the interests of the international community—especially as represented in this hemisphere by the OAS. That’s a speech and I apologize.” Schiller shrugged. “What it comes down to is we’ve got to get inside that base and get some pictures.”
“And,” added Carpentier, “get them out again.”
“Who,” asked Steve, “is ‘them’?”
Schiller looked at him.
“You are, Colonel.”
CHAPTER 17
Ricardo helped him to polish his Spanish in case he might be force
d ashore and need to get out on foot. They made three-dimensional models, courtesy of the cartography people, of the coastal area for him to study. He went to the mat, literally, with Ricardo for some karate, took his considerable lumps, and then found what he could do with his remarkably powerful limbs in hand-to-hand encounters. McKay watched it all, delighted with the tight, fine edge Steve was obviously developing. There was more than one way to program a man.
Then came the special adaptations for the mission. They equipped him with new knee joints that reduced friction by nearly ninety percent and in which the heat rise was negligible after the equivalent of some four hours of steady swimming. Next was an immersion test, in which they lowered the water temperature to what could be expected below the surface of the ocean off the Surinam coast. Steve wore a special insulating swimming garment to keep his body warm in the ocean. Wire hookups, laced in a back-and-forth pattern through the suit, drew energy through one of the small nuclear-isotope generators. The same reduction in friction and lowered operating temperature that characterized his new knee joints were built into his feet, so that he had better fore-and-aft ankle movement. The bottom half of his feet now contained a sliding compartment. Steve could release a safety catch and a folded web of woven metal slid forward through an opening just behind his toes. The folded web hinged back and was locked in place, and the fins then opened to full size so that he was “wearing” swim fins that greatly increased his speed and maneuverability either on or beneath the surface of the water. If he needed to leave the water and move across land, he had only to unhinge the fins, snap the webs closed, bend the unit forward, and slide it back into his foot.
The capacity of the oxygen cylinder inside Steve’s left thigh, just above the knee of the bionics limb, was supplemented by a unit strapped to his body that could provide another thirty minutes of oxygen. The installation was repeated on his right.
He was given a camera, but in case he lost it, a miniature camera was inserted in the false eye. To activate the camera, Steve pressed against the side of his head, where a trip switch was embedded beneath the plastiskin that had been built around his once-shattered eye socket. This released the shutter mechanism. To take a picture he merely blinked his eye. The muscles still worked. His eye-camera had a capacity of twenty exposures.
If the way back from the underwater approach to the submarine pen were blocked, he could try to swim north or even south along the coast and they’d find him through a homing transmitter. But they also equipped him with weapons in case he had to fight his way overland through jungle and swamp—when the transmitter might not pick him up and he’d be entirely on his own.
His left hand, the bionics hand, was modified so that the outer side was provided with a bottom layer of silastic, over which went a strip of steel, extending from the wrist down to the end of the fifth finger. Plastiskin camouflaged steel. The outer covering of the hand when clenched into a fist received the same treatment. Properly braced he could punch his way through heavy wood or light metal. The middle finger gave him a weapon with reach beyond his body. Fanier’s technicians disconnected and removed the finger and replaced it with a digit built to Schiller’s specifications. When he extended the finger straight out and snapped a presslock, the curving cylinder that formed the finger became rigid. Once he rigidified the finger it became the barrel of a needle dart gun. It activated with a small CO2 cartridge and a revolving chamber that contained a swift-acting poison. The darts were designed to penetrate skin, dissolve with impact, and spread the poison into the system to take its effect within six seconds.
Getting information back was the primary purpose of the operation, even if they couldn’t get Steve and the photos back. A miniature wire recorder powered with two mercury-cell batteries was inserted into Steve’s right leg. He could tape up to ten minutes through a small microphone extractable from the limb. He would have to be back on the surface for this action. When he completed taping his message he could twist a control on the microphone to rewind the wire. Then, using the radio transmitter built into his right leg, he could burst-transmit the recorded message. It was a system that had been in use for years aboard scientific satellites—compressing long periods of data into a single-burst message sent out in only minutes. In the case of Steve’s recording equipment, ten minutes could be burst-transmitted in fifteen seconds.
There would be no great trouble picking up the transmission. The network of military communications satellites meant that there would always be two or three of those birds in position. If there were a problem in transmission power, the Air Force would have a U-2 or an RB-57B overhead at seventy thousand feet. One way or another they hoped to pick up whatever Steve sent.
They had required nearly a week for the modifications, for other equipment to be installed within his bionics system, for the equipment to be checked out and tested.
Now Dr. Wells stood before Jackson McKay’s desk, ignoring for the moment the gestured invitation to be seated. To McKay’s left, Oscar Goldman stood by his own leather chair. “Where are they now?” Wells asked.
McKay pressed a button on the left side of his desk and the room darkened. A wall screen leaped into glowing life with a clear map representation of the northeast coast of South America. “This is a replica of the chart being used at this moment in our situation room,” McKay said. “The latest reported positions of Soviet vessels, surface and underseas, are shown there, and,” he pointed with a desk ruler, “there. Of course there’s a time lag in such reports. We gather these by satellite reconnaissance and aircraft reconnaissance. Now, over here,” he pressed another button and a glowing line snaked its way across the map, “is the intended course of our force. But they are doing everything possible to avoid being tracked and they are very good at their business.
“Somewhere in this area, the submarine with Austin will ease to the surface. There will, of course, be considerable distraction through the entire area. That distraction will lead the Russians to assume, as we would, that some infiltration attempt will be made or is under way. A two-man torpedo sub will work its way into the defense zone, where it will be tracked by the Russians, and the two men aboard the sub will be killed—I’m sorry; the two men who will be ‘lost’ at sea died accidentally in the twenty-four-hour period before the task force left port. A plane crash, in fact. We expect the Russians will be convinced when they find the bodies of two Americans and will not spend time looking for Steve.”
“The truth is you’re a cold bastard, McKay. But I suppose you have to be in your line of work.” Wells sighed and leaned his head back against the chair. “I really don’t mean to be this antagonistic, it’s just that Steve . . .”
“We understand,” McKay told him.
“Do you? Really understand? In every respect, no matter what has happened to him, what’s been done to him, Steve remains a man. An extraordinary man, superior, marvelously flexible, but still very much and in many ways, a vulnerable human being. If his skull is crushed, despite the additional protection he now has, he will die like any other person. If his heart is pierced, the puncture will be just as fatal as for any other human being. If he bleeds excessively, he will die. He can freeze, burn, drown, suffocate. He feels pain, even though he can withstand more pain, and still function, than before. He’s been in so many ways transformed into even more of an extraordinary individual than he was before, he’s indeed superior, but by no means superhuman.”
Marty Schiller joined them. “We’ve received the coded signal through the comsat net,” he said quietly. “The Russians picked up the two bodies on the decoy sub. That means Steve is on his way.”
CHAPTER 18
The explosions came to them as distant, muffled booms, rolling coughs of sound from miles away. Steve Austin stood on the small platform of the submarine deck, listening to the sighing thunder, trying to hear details above the sound of water off metal. A light breeze came from the west. He ignored the rumbling sounds, the explosions brought on by the decoy maneuveri
ng to draw attention away from them. Ricardo Carpentier tugged at his arm. “They’re almost ready,” he told Steve.
“Okay,” Steve replied, and turned to watch the mixed Navy and OSO crew at work.
The nuclear submarine was a modification unlisted in any public document. A teardrop in shape, with twin nuclear turbines, it could do fifty knots a thousand feet beneath the surface. It carried eight torpedo tubes forward and four aft. It was designed as a killer sub, but it had been modified for special operations such as the mission now under way. The sub rolled uncomfortably on the surface, a strange wallowing motion that reminded everyone she wasn’t designed for stability anywhere except down deep. Steve ignored the motion and concentrated on the men working just forward of his position. A large hatchway had opened, and dim red lights showed the men moving two dull forms through the water in the open compartment. Steve glanced along the deck and noticed gray shadows, men with automatic weapons at the ready. He knew there were more at the stern. Above and behind him a sweep radar kept watch on the sea lost in darkness. Nothing within miles. It wouldn’t stay that way for too long.
They were fourteen miles off the Surinam coast. Far enough to avoid immediate attention, yet the distance would not overly complicate what he had to do. He turned his attention back to the compartment. Several swimmers were moving the larger forms away from the submarine, and Steve saw that the securing lines were still in place before activation. A voice called from the water, “They’re ready.”
Steve turned to Ricardo. Another man held a shaded red lamp in position for Ricardo to make a last-moment visual check of his equipment. Ricardo went expertly over the scuba gear, the cameras, infrared equipment. He had performed this same inspection a hundred times before, was still edgy about the final examination. He nodded his head slowly and slapped his hand lightly against Steve’s arm. “It is time,” he said. Steve reached out and squeezed Ricardo’s shoulder. They had become friends. Ricardo and another man helped Steve slip into the water. The fold-snap flippers were already in place, and Steve eased his way to the first of the two dark shapes rolling in the sea, still tethered to the sub.
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