Oceans of Fire

by Don Pendleton

  “Two shots on each arm.” Blancanales wasn’t happy. “And we’re outnumbered?”

  Kissinger shrugged. “Listen, the fact is I can’t guarantee those weapons. They’ve never been tested to the depths you’re going.” He tapped the stainless-steel, serrated pincer of one of the suits. “The fact is, you may have to go claw-to-claw with these guys.”

  Blancanales sighed. “Pink?”

  Price smiled. “You really want to be able to tell friend from foe down there. We don’t know what color their suits are, but we’re betting it’s not baby-doll pink.”

  Grimaldi rose up and down on his toes and pointed at a sixteen-foot object that looked like a cross between a double-nosed fighter plane and a cockroach. Iron T-bars had been strapped, a pair each above and below the hull. “And that?”

  “That, Jack,” Schwarz stated, “is the U.S. naval evaluation prototype of the Deep Flight II submersible. And it’s all yours.”

  Grimaldi grinned. “Cool.”

  “You’ve all been on board a submarine before. They pretty much float around the ocean operating exactly like blimps. The Deep Flights are designed to fly like a plane. The pilot is strapped in prone and can do any maneuver in water that a fighter plane can do in air—loops, barrel rolls, albeit a whole lot slower. You’ve got two manipulator arms. We’ll be putting an RKG grenade in each one. Extend the arms fully straight and you’ll pull the pins. You also have the option of dropping them if you need the claws for something else. The good news is that the Deep Flight has points for various external equipment fits. As you can see we’ve mounted two rifles beneath each wing and you’ll have an electrical trigger to fire them.”

  Carl Lyons glowered at his broken hand. “There’re only four suits.”

  Price took on his simmering wrath. “Carl, that’s all we could get given the timetable.”

  Lyons glowered. He wanted payback and everyone knew it. “And what are the seating assignments on this flight?”

  “Calvin is our most experienced diver. He’s leading the mission. Rafe is next best, then David. Gary is our best demolition man. He’s studied the captured nukes inside and out. If we have to diffuse anything down there, he’s the man. That’s our strike team. Jack is going to pilot the Deep Flight, of course, and Pol is going to operate the manipulator arms and weapons.”

  Lyons’s brows dropped down dangerously.

  “Your hand is broken, Carl. Besides, you hate pink.”

  Lyons was unconsoled.

  “You couldn’t operate the multiple right limb controls of an ADS suit even if we had one for you.” Price met Lyons’s eyes and didn’t back down. “You’d be a liability, and you know it.”

  Lyons suppressed his rage, knowing Price was telling the truth and hating every second of it.

  James’s mind was all business. “How are we inserting?”

  “A C-130 will fly in under their radar, all four suits and the Deep Flight will be strapped to a pallet. The pilot will slow just short of stalling speed and drogue chutes will deploy and pull you into the water. The straps will be within reach of the ADS manipulator arms. You should be able to cut through them with ease. The pallet will be made of aluminum and sink out from under you. The four divers will lock on to the Deep Flights’ tow bars and Jack will make the descent. We know that Deyn will be listening with passive sonar so you will sink down to target. Jack will vector you in silently just using his diving planes to steer and his own passive sonar to locate the targets. When you are right on top of your targets, you switch on your lights and motors, attack with surprise and secure the nukes.”

  “What’s the weather forecast?”

  “That’s the other good news. We’re expecting rain, gusty winds and surface chop, so the sound of you hitting the water should be diffused.”

  Barbara turned her eye on Bolan. “You have something to add?”

  “What about the platform?”

  “What about it?”

  “Akira is on it, so might some of the undeployed nukes. I say we take it.”

  “Washington has decided that assaulting the rig is too risky. The strike team will try to take out the threat to the hydrate ridge off Cape Hatteras. That is the number-one priority. We can’t afford to have Deyn detonate the weapons he’s already emplaced.”

  “He’ll do that anyway, once he knows there’s an attack going on downstairs.”

  “The President has authorized the Virginia to hit the platform with a full spread of cruise missiles once the strike team indicates they have the situation on the ridge under control or the mission has failed.”

  “That may not stop him in time, and for that matter, when the cruise missiles hit, you have a decent chance of one or more of the nukes still on the surface detonating low-order.” Bolan’s finger traced Cape Hatteras on the map. “With a surface detonation of one to ten kilotons you stand to lose the towns of Avon and Buxton, not to mention the ecological devastation of Pamlico Sound.”

  “The President and the Joint Chiefs are aware of that. A direct assault on the rig has been deemed too risky. All psychological assessments indicate Deyn will detonate if he finds himself under attack. We can’t risk an amphibious insertion or a combat drop against the rig. The possibility of detection is just too great.”

  “Not with a high-altitude, high-opening jump.”

  “We don’t know how good the radars are on the rig. Deyn could detect the plane and push the button.”

  “No matter what kind of radars he has on that rig, I doubt he could detect a B-2 stealth bomber flying at ten thousand feet.”

  Price simply stared. “You’re suggesting jumping out of the bomb bay of stealth, into a squall, at night.”

  “I’m not suggesting anything. Carl is going to lead the surface strike team and I’m volunteering to go with him.”

  Lyons nodded at the wisdom of the statement and both men turned to T.J. Hawkins, who rolled his eyes. “Oh, like you have to ask.”

  Bolan turned back to the satellite picture of the platform. “With any luck, at least one of us will manage to hit the rig undetected. We go in soft and poke around for any loose nukes. Failing that, we take the control room and hopefully anyone who’s on a deadman switch. Once that’s done, we locate and secure Akira and Franka Marx. Anyone who misses the platform and doesn’t drown can swim to it and work their way up underneath from the boat dock and secure us extraction. The final option is still the same. If it looks like the situation has gone FUBAR, I’ll call in the missile strike from the Virginia myself.”

  “I’ll…have to clear this with the President.” Price composed herself. “Meantime, Calvin, Commander Cole is going to take you and your team through ground school with the suits and Deep Flight. Then you and your team have four hours’ practice time in the Potomac. Then there will be two hours while they are rechecked, reloaded, and recharged with fresh air and battery supplies. It’s six o’clock now, we expect you airborne by midnight.”

  “You heard the lady.” James grabbed a chair. “Commander Cole, we’re all yours.”

  James’s team assembled and the commander began explaining the finer points of atmospheric diving. Price pulled out her phone and handed it to Bolan. “Hal’s still in the hospital.”

  “You want me to explain my plan to the President?”

  “I don’t think I can outline it in any way that doesn’t sound like suicide.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Diamond Shoals, Atlantic

  The Hercules vorticed up rooster tails of spume as it roared over the water ten feet off the deck. Calvin James lay in the cargo hold, strapped to a pallet and encased in an eight-foot-tall, pink carapace of titanium and carbon composite. It was eerily quiet inside the suit. What few sounds came through were muffled and distant. The stub wing of the Deep Flight II hung over him, the tow bar within easy reach. If he craned his head back, he could see the nose of the sub through the massively thick observation bubble encasing most of his head. James smiled. During the two-hou
r refuel and retrofit of the suits and the sub, Grimaldi had taken the opportunity to paint the Flying Tigers shark teeth insignia on the twin noses of the sub. Grimaldi loved his submersible.

  The dive team hated the hard suits.

  Any kind of fight was going to take place in slow motion. Moving the arms and legs was like moving through mud and there was distinct lag time between the human limb moving and the hydraulic joints of the suit following. It took a full second to crank the manipulator claws into the weapon-firing position and then off it. During firing practice in the Potomac River, nearly the entire team consistently fired off twenty of the twenty-six rounds in the magazine. McCarter had managed 15-round bursts, but in combat conditions under the sea James knew that anyone one of them would be lucky to get off the trigger before blowing the whole magazine. Grenade deployment was torturously slow. Again, it took a full second to pull the trigger, another second for the piston to extend, and that still left three seconds of fuse time. That would leave a lot of time for an opponent to try to break contact, and that was just practice in the Potomac. At nearly a thousand feet below the ocean, things would be even slower.

  An air crewman knelt beside James, knocked on his helmet bubble and held up five fingers. Five minutes to go. James ran a final systems check on his air and electrical. All indicators were in the green. He craned his head back and could see Grimaldi grinning down from his cockpit. The pilot gave his teammate the thumbs-up. The air crewman went around tapping helmets and holding up one finger.

  One minute to go.

  James felt the vibration in the pallet beneath him as the Hercules’s cargo ramp opened and air blasted at the straps. Water sprayed inward and misted his helmet. The air crewman stood over him and pumped the thumbs-up three times.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  James lay on the pallet and watched as the rope to his right whipped like an angry snake as the drogue chute deployed out into the storm. The pallet jerked as the rope snapped tight. For a moment nothing happened. Then James heard the groan and clank through his suit as the pallet began to move on its rollers. The air crewman saluted as he rolled past. James looked up and saw the tail of the Hercules and then the world ended.

  His stomach lurched as the Hercules flew out from underneath him and well over a ton of armored suits and sub fell through space. The fall was mercifully brief. The pallet hit the Atlantic, and the shock of the hit was like being backhanded by God. Rain splattered James’s helmet. A second later a wave sluiced over him, and he was submerged. All became rocking, bucking blackness. He ran a second quick check on air, electrical and motors and all lights blinked green. The rocking and rolling ceased as the entire pallet slid beneath the surface.

  James’s suit hydraulics gave a soft whine as he extended his right hand. He had practiced the maneuver twenty times on the ground. He reached out and opened his manipulator claw from memory. His manipulator claw was like a pair of needle-nose pliers with narrow tips, a few inches of serration inside for grip and shearing surfaces in the back. The tow bar was exactly where it was supposed to be. He closed his claw around the tow bar and locked it. He reached out with his right and felt resistance. The Phoenix Force warrior vised down, and the retaining strap parted beneath his claw.

  The rest of the dive team cut their straps and the pallet slipped away.

  James rotated his right arm so that he hung beneath the Deep Flight facing forward. They were in Grimaldi’s hands now, running silent and dark as the pilot vectored them in just using his diving planes and passive sonar. The sea was silent and as pitch-black as the grave as they sank into the crushing depths.

  CARL LYONS SAT in the belly of a Stealth bomber. Mack Bolan and T.J. Hawkins sat beside him. The jumpmaster was an extremely confused Air Commando. This model didn’t have a pod. The bomb bay of the B-2 had never been designed for passengers. In fact, a man couldn’t fully stand up inside it. The only compromises that had been made for passenger comfort were three folding aluminum beach chairs and oxygen bottles attached to the bomb racks above their heads. The crease of the bomb bay doors sat directly under Lyons’s chair. Luckily it was a short hop to the drop zone. They were maintaining strict radio silence so the pilot was speaking to the jumpmaster through a cell phone. The Air Commando listened and then nodded to Lyons. “Five minutes, Jump Leader. We’ve reached the area of radio-jamming, so once you go out the door your tactical-communication gear will be nonfunctional.”

  “Roger, that,” Lyons responded. The team rose to a crouch and stowed their chairs and checked one another’s gear. Lyons gave Bolan’s straps a yank. “Thanks, Mack.”

  They both knew that if Bolan hadn’t spoken to the President himself, there would be no airborne mission, and Carl Lyons wouldn’t be leading it. Bolan checked Lyons’s straps. “You sure you’ll be okay to jump with that busted paw of yours?”

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Bolan had known Carl Lyons a very long time, and he could read the Ironman like a book. “You know, I lost Akira once, too. We’ll get him back.”

  Lyons’s blue eyes were cold beneath his goggles. “The nukes are our number-one priority.”

  Bolan smiled under his oxygen mask. That was what he wanted to hear.

  “One minute, Jump Leader!” the jumpmaster called. “Switch to bailout bottles!”

  The team unhooked from the overhead oxygen and switched to the small bottles attached to their jump rigs. The jumpmaster passed by each member of the team and checked his gear a final time. He gave Lyons the thumbs-up. “Hook your men up!”

  Lyons and his team hooked their static lines into the struts of the bomb racks overhead. Jumping out of a B-2 wasn’t a skydiving best-case scenario. Luckily the engine intakes were on top of the plane so no one would get sucked into and food processed through the turbines. But the stalling speed of a B-2 was still around 120 knots. The jet wash would be fairly ugly, and there was a chance of being smashed against the fuselage on the way out. Static lines would insure that the chutes opened even if a man had been knocked unconscious or passed out because his oxygen bottle had been ripped off. Still they were jumping into a squall, and any man who hit the water unconscious or injured wasn’t likely to live long.

  “Green light!” the jumpmaster shouted. The Air Commando and the team grabbed the bomb racks and braced themselves. The bomb bay doors opened beneath them and wind roared up into the cramped weapons’ compartment. At ten thousand feet the night was indescribably beautiful. There was a full moon, and it shone down on the clouds as if there were a carpet of cotton beneath them.

  “We are over target area!” the jumpmaster called. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Hawkins released the bomb rack above, bent his knees and fell out of the plane.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  Bolan pushed out into the night.

  Hawkins’s static line went taut and then flapped and whipped as it released.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  Bolan’s line went tight.

  Lyons dropped into emptiness. The wind whipped him away from the aircraft and the giant black bat-shape pulled away with a rumbling whine. His harness yanked against him as the static line ripped his chute from his pack, and then the straps tried to squeeze the life out of him as his chute deployed. He’d had a medic at Patuxent shoot up his hand with a local anesthetic. He couldn’t feel his hand, but his first two fingers and thumb woodenly obeyed his will. Lyons grabbed his toggles and stabilized his flight. Bolan and Hawkins were clearly visible in his night-vision goggles. The air was thin, clear and stable, and their descent line toward the target was textbook despite the rough deployment. It was a High Altitude, High Opening jump so they had a few minutes of flight-tie on their chutes. They arced down toward the target in large lazy circles, guided by their compasses and the radio signal trackers strapped to their forearms. Lyons watched the carpet of clouds come up toward him. The wind was picking up.

  Things were about to get interesting.

  Hawkins disappeared into
the clouds. Moments later Bolan was enveloped. Lyons flared his chute slightly as he hit the mist. The world became a wet, black, buffeting sponge. A second later it became hell on earth. Lyons was whipped 360 degrees around on his lines as the wind ripped at him and driving rain hammered his airfoil. The Ironman didn’t fight; he powered through the circle and used the momentum to sling him straight again. Through the wind and the rain the platform was a bright beacon of light below him and to the east. The wind was in his favor, but it stood a good chance of flinging him past his target. Lyons worked his toggles, going with the gusts and arcing through them rather than fighting them and overcorrecting. He followed Bolan’s lead, and Bolan followed Hawkins. Lyons’s eyes flared beneath his goggles. Hawkins was making his approach. The platform was huge, but the ocean was vast and the winds were pushing them along with far too much velocity.

  Hawkins flared his chute to slow down. The wind blasted up into his chute and ripped him around in a series of vicious circles, nearly collapsing his canopy. He finally managed to power through it and straighten out as Lyons had, but the damage was done. Modern airfoil parachutes made a jump much more like flying than falling, but in the end the only real direction was still down. The gust had braked Hawkins too hard and lost him too much speed. His approach was too low.

  Their radios were being jammed and Lyons wouldn’t have broken radio silence anyway, but he still shouted through his mask into the storm. “T.J.!”

  Hawkins wasn’t going to make it.

  The black shadow of the platform eclipsed him as he sailed beneath it. Lyons judged Bolan’s line with a practiced eye and could see his line was going to bring him down on top of the platform, so he stuck to Bolan’s tail as much as the winds would let him. The Executioner flared his chute and the wind tried to rip him around, but his boots hit the platform. The chute filled with wind and tried to pull him back over the edge, but he hit his quick-release buckles and dropped into a crouch. The half-collapsed airfoil flew up into the night like a crazed ghost and danced away into the darkness borne upon the wind. Bolan scuttled to tarp-covered pallet of heavy machinery and glanced back.