by Joe Buff
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.
CHAPTER 19
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 all-weather 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 while 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 pseudo-random 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.
Once more Ilse watched Jeffrey's back. She could see the hump of his heavy pack under his camo smock; the men's gear all weighed more than twice what hers did. The pack made Jeffrey look hunchbacked. He didn't seem to be limping, so she figured his old wounded leg must be okay.
Ilse started. The steady rhythm hypnotized her, and she'd lost focus on the time and where they were. Again she heard the voice in her earphones, frequency-agile low-probability-of-intercept microsecond radar impulses in the Ku band, deeply encrypted — much better for SpecWar commo than conventional radio. Also, or so they'd been told, the low-energy pulses were unlikely to set off a German antiradar mine.
"Contact!" SEAL One repeated.
"Report!" Clayton ordered. Everyone crouched low. "Enemy patrol," SEAL One said. "Coming this way."
"Not on the schedule," Jeffrey said.
"They changed the bleeding schedule," Montgomery said.
"Into the water?" Jeffrey said.
"No time, with the razor wire. We'd leave spoor. Dead giveaway."
"Four, Six. Use proper procedure." Jeffrey shut up.
"One, Three. How many?" Montgomery snapped.
"Seven men, maybe eight."
"Team, Six," Clayton said, "get behind these bushes. Drop your packs and Draegers, cover the bushes with your camo smocks, white side out. Take cover behind your packs and form a firing line."
Jeffrey did what he was told, draping his smock over skeletal scrub at the base of the cliff. He knelt behind his pack, using it as a shield. Around him lay rounded rocks the size of footballs, but there was no time to improve his cover.
"One, Six. Status?"
"Six, One. Any second now."
Jeffrey could see Ilse through his goggles. She was fifteen feet to his right. She had he
r pistol out.
Jeffrey drew his weapon.
"Team, Six. Weapons power up, weapons tight."
Jeffrey slid the switch on the butt grip. His pistol's safety diode glowed green. The bullet count read 18, a full clip: metal jacketed hollow-point alternating with armor-piercing Teflon-coated. He checked the digital aiming reticle, superimposed on the view through his night-vision goggles.
"Team, Six. Steady," Clayton said.
Jeffrey's heart was pounding. He aimed his pistol out across the bay — this was its widest part, twelve miles to Rugen Island. The laser-interferometer-driven aiming reticle, superimposed on his field of view, bounced and jiggled wildly.
So much for my nerves of steel.
"Four and Five, Six," Clayton called in Jeffrey's earphones. "Status?"
"Ready," Ilse said. She sounded like she meant it.
"Ready," Jeffrey said, determined she wouldn't show him up. He heard the German footsteps now, and low murmuring voices. The voices stopped.
"They're still approaching," One whispered.
"Team, Six. Weapons off safe, selectors on semiauto only, but hold your fire…. Break break. Nine, Six. Report when their point man gets inside ten feet of you."
"Six, Nine. Understood."
"Team, Three. Aim low, so our bullets won't carry." Jeffrey shrank behind his pack as the soldiers approached.
"Wass ist das?" he heard, and not over his headphones. What is this?
A weapon coughed.
"Weapons free!" Montgomery hissed.
Other weapons fired. The Germans' rifles, with sound suppressors, clattered on full auto as their receivers cycled and spent brass cartridge cases flew. Bullets smacked into the cliff face. The SEALs' caseless electric ignition subsonic rounds were completely silent, until their .50-caliber bullets thudded and crunched into organs and bone. Ilse searched her front but had no targets.
"Five through Nine," Clayton shouted. "Flanking pivot left! Form an L-shaped ambush! Rapid fire!"
Ilse rolled across the snow and sand, saw Jeffrey do the same and block her line of fire. She rolled again, and Seven crawled up next to her. She began to fire at murky shapes when she saw muzzle flashes aimed her way.
"Eight and Nine, Six, go full auto!"
Ilse heard their weapons puff-puff-puff behind her. When her visor switched to infrared she could see the bullet traces, red-hot metal in friction with the air. Some of them hit home, and Germans grunted or writhed. Eight and Nine fired in short bursts. Enemy bullets snapped by overhead.
Ilse aimed her pistol at another German, who'd been driven against the barbed wire along the water. Before she could fire his muzzle flashed and something whacked the side of her helmet. The helmet flew off and she saw double SEAL Eight riddled the German.
"Cease fire," Montgomery said. "Cease fire."
"Did they get off a warning?" Clayton said.
"Negative," SEAL Two said. "Nothing intercepted on my signals intel receiver. We didn't give them time."
"Anyone hit?" Montgomery said. "Team sound off."
The SEALs called in by number. When her turn came Ilse said, "Five." Then she heard, " Six. Seven. Eight. Nine," in different voices.
"Now what?" Ilse heard Jeffrey say.
"We have to make it look like partisans," Clayton said.
"Concur," Montgomery said. "Eight and Nine, secure our rear. One and Two, hold point. Everyone else, police up the bodies."
Jeffrey was glad the seven Germans were dead. The SEAL team couldn't take prisoners, and a wounded enemy soldier would be a major problem Jeffrey didn't want to think about. He surveyed the carnage. Blood soaked the snow and sand, looking black on his visors. On IR he could see the bodies were already starting to cool. None of Clayton's team were hurt, though Ilse had a gouge in the side of her ceramic bulletproof helmet, and two of the SEALs took enemy rounds in their flak vests. A quick check of the packs showed nothing vital was damaged.
"How do we make this look like partisans?" Jeffrey said.
"Disfigure the bodies," Montgomery said.
"What is it about you and cutting with knives?"
"It's my training," Montgomery snapped. "I don't like it, sir. I just have to do it."
"Sorry, Chief. What do you suggest?"
"Gouge out their eyes. Leave the corpses behind the bushes. Cover the blood with fresh sand and snow, but not too thoroughly."
"So it doesn't look like SEAL work?"
"Right," Clayton said. "Psychological warfare by the Resistance instead…. Then make it seem like we, they, came down the cliff in ambush and egressed back that way. Toss the German weapons and ammo out into the bay, since the partisans would collect them."
"Ilse," Jeffrey said, "how are you at climbing?"
"I like rock climbing."
"Think you can make it to the top and back real fast?"
"Yes. What about our footprints?"
"Trackers would read them as captured Army boots."
"Take these," Clayton said. He handed Jeffrey crampons and climbing rope. "Make it look good, plant them at the top. They're German brands."
"German?" Ilse said.
"Bought before the war."
"That's planning ahead," Jeffrey said. "The CIA has whole warehouses full of useful stuff they buy from, friends who might turn into enemies."
Jeffrey glanced at the bodies as Montgomery and Seven-went to work with their K-Bar fighting knives. Jeffrey had to look away.
Jeffrey and Ilse climbed. The footing was uneven but firm, and the underbrush gave good handholds. The vertical set of the cliff precluded land mines — or so Jeffrey hoped. On the way down, he passed old bird nests in cracks in the rock. He knew the wetlands around Greifswald were an important breeding area in the spring.
In a few minutes he and Ilse were back on the beach.
"What do we do next?" Jeffrey said.
"Into the water," Clayton said. "We've covered about four miles along the shore so far. It's another mile to the Danische Wiek. We'd've gone back to Draegers there, anyway."
Montgomery came over. "To hell with this humping infantry-style. It's way too dangerous."
CHAPTER 20
TWO HOURS LATER, UNDERWATER IN THE DANISCHE WIEK
"Team, Six," Jeffrey heard by skullbone induction, above the sound of his own breathing through his bulky Draeger mouthpiece. "Communications check," Clayton said. "Status check. Sound off."
When Jeffrey's turn came, through the built-in mouthpiece mike he said, "Four. Good to go."
He heard Ilse say, "Five. Good to go." Although she was Clayton's swim buddy, Jeffrey had unclipped from Montgomery and fastened his lanyard to hers to form a threesome. Ilse was close enough for Jeffrey to see her cyalume hoop through the murk. The depth gauge on his dive mask read eighteen feet, salinity-adjusted. His dive computer told him the water temperature here was 37° Fahrenheit. The chronometer said that in barely sixty minutes, ARBOR's computer worm would expire. The team's unexpected extra swim had added more than an hour to their approach to the lab, burning up time they didn't have to spare. Once that worm went dormant and erased itself, any further intrusion by the SEALs would set off alarms.
Jeffrey floated horizontally, resting; to swim fast wearing a backpack, even one designed to be neutrally buoyant, was a bear. He listened as the team finished checking in.
The clandestine secure gertrude — the undersea counterpart to their frequency agile digitized-radar commo — worked well enough, even amidst the unstable haloclines formed by freshwater from the Ryck River's mouth, several thousand yards to the south. Jeffrey knew the Ryck skirted the north edge of Greifswald town itself. It emptied into the Danische Wiek, a small bay-within-the-bay, one mile wide at the point where the team swam across underwater.
The wind topside blustered again, stirring the shallow Wiek. Jeffrey was jostled by wave action. Now his dive display showed he had a sink rate of four feet per minute. He let more gas into his own and his backpack's buoyancy bladders.
&n
bsp; "Six, Three." Montgomery spoke slowly and clearly. "First obstacle inspection complete. Confirmed the movement sensors are cased in titanium, and the land downlinks are fiber-optic lines we can't bypass."
"Three, Six. Very well," Jeffrey heard Clayton say. His voice was hollow and scratchy over the gertrude. Besides halocline effects, there was heavy flow noise, from the cooling water intake just ahead.
"Remove the bolts," Clayton ordered.
Jeffrey heard clinks, and grunting. He kept floating in the dark. Watching the amber inertial nav readout on his mask, as well as Ilse's greenish glow, he worked his legs to hold position. Otherwise, the readout told him, he kept drifting toward the intake pipe.
"Six, Three. The bolts are off."
"Three, Six. Open the access gate." Clayton's voice was tense and clipped. Jeffrey forced himself to breathe evenly. If the security alarms weren't suppressed, they would know it soon. He heard a creaking sound.
"The flow rate is much faster than we expected," Montgomery said. "We're going to have to rappel in one by one, feet first, against the hydrodynamic drag."
"Copy," Clayton said.
"We are rigging the grapnels and lines."
"Copy."
Jeffrey waited.
"Watch it," he heard on gertrude. Through the water he heard a whack, a scraping noise, then a clunk. The rushing of the inflow was louder than before.
"Report," Clayton ordered.
"We dropped a bolt cutter," Montgomery said. "The flow's so strong now it got sucked into the pipe. I think it fetched up against the first debris catcher…. One is inside…. Two is starting in."
Again, Jeffrey waited in the dark. This close to the surface, this close to shore, they dared not use their flashlights.
Montgomery swam up to Jeffrey, startling him. "Four, let's go." Jeffrey unclipped from Ilse, then attached his lanyard to the chief's equipment belt.