Thunder Run (Maelstrom Rising Book 6)

by Peter Nealen

  I knew that just trying to replace the EDC probably wasn’t going to work. I’d lived almost my entire life with the consequences of trying to fight wars as quickly and cheaply as possible, damn the reality. Iraq had been the first and most glaring example, though an Afghanistan that now consisted of little more than Kabul, with the rest of the country split between the Taliban in the south and a handful of Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara militias in the north, had eventually become every bit as emblematic as the Land Between the Rivers. Libya had been in utter chaos for over a decade. Syria and Kosovo hadn’t been—technically—regime change operations, but they’d been every bit as nasty and unpredictable as any of the others.

  War is nasty and unpredictable. But the commanders who’d thought this war plan up didn’t seem to be all that aware of that fact. They were so sure that their plan was genius that I doubted they had thought through all the ways it could go wrong.

  But then, I figure that every grunt who’s been briefed on the plan ahead of time thinks that the leadership’s crazy. Maybe I was just being cynical. Maybe they had looked at the situation and figured out just the right way to hit it.

  But they hadn’t been on the ground. I had. These men around me, sitting quietly, wrapped in their own thoughts as the door closed and the engines spooled up, had been on the ground. We’d seen the savagery unleashed at the EDC’s orders, because those damned Eastern Europeans wouldn’t fall in line, and worse, the Americans weren’t playing along, either. We’d stopped a nuclear launch, for crying out loud.

  What made these newcomers think that they could just hit a forty-person reset button and make all that go away?

  I sat back in my seat as the bird started to taxi, brooding.

  We were on our way.

  ***

  The stop in Gothenburg was hardly long enough to notice. We touched down at Göteborg Landvetter Airport and taxied over to the refueling point. The engines spooled down and we got up and started moving around, just to get the blood flowing, though we weren’t going to get off the plane.

  I couldn’t see much when I peered out the window. The airport was completely surrounded by woods, and the land was almost completely flat. I stretched, limbered up, and got back in my seat.

  Nobody talked much. Stenberg looked like he wanted to, but he looked around at us, took in our quiet and refrained. Fortunately.

  There wasn’t much to talk about. We were all wrapped in our own thoughts about the mission and what we were going to find on the ground. Some of us thought about family. Chris had a wife and kids back in the States, whom he hadn’t seen for months. I was pretty sure Scott was married, though he hardly ever talked about it. Most of the rest were single. I had Klara to think about, but I’d pushed the imminent meeting with her family and what it meant into a deep, dark lockbox in the back of my mind. This wasn’t the time or the place.

  Finally, after about an hour on the ground, the fasten seatbelt sign came on again, the engines spun up, and we turned toward the runway. Next stop, Copenhagen.

  ***

  On the surface, Copenhagen was a friggin’ postcard.

  We weren’t technically in Copenhagen itself yet, of course. Tårnby was its own town, on the island of Amager, separated from Zealand itself by a narrow channel that had been dredged out into a canal and fortified, once upon a time. But the town was effectively a suburb, and close enough that we could at least start to get some idea of the atmospherics.

  There was some tension on the air. But the streets were clean—most of the town was residential, anyway—and the mostly brick homes and row houses were fairly well kept up. In fact, they looked to be in better shape than many of the places we’d seen in Poland, which was still suffering from the aftermath of Communism.

  But the tension was still there. Some of the people we saw didn’t seem to care about much—some of them were obviously doped to the gills. But others that we’d seen as we rode through town from the airport went about their business with an air of worry and trepidation that went against the stereotype of the happy Danes.

  I was watching out the window of the third-floor apartment that Stenberg had let us use as a safehouse. It wasn’t big, and eight of us with gear and weapons made it pretty crowded. We’d be sleeping on the floor for the most part. That was fine; we’d all slept in far less comfortable conditions, and quite recently.

  It was a far cry from sleeping inside the boughs of a fallen tree, covered in snow, less than a mile from the Baltic.

  I turned away from the window. There wasn’t much to see—just a wide, green, recently-mowed lawn between this apartment building and the next one over. “Are your friends going to have any difficulty renting those cars?” Since we were technically not supposed to be in the country, it would be hard for any of us to rent a vehicle, and Stenberg couldn’t exactly rent three cars in his own name.

  He shook his head. “No. They are all Danish citizens, so no one will ask questions.” He laughed a little. “No one would ask questions anyway. I understand your concerns coming in, especially as Americans, but part of why Denmark is in the shaky position it is now is because no one wants to ask questions or seem harsh.”

  There was a knock at the door, and Jordan moved to check on it, his Rattler in his hands. We had brought our Polish PR-15 pistols, but we hadn’t been able to get them with threaded barrels, so we couldn’t suppress them. The subsonic .300 Blackout would be quieter than a 9mm if he had to start shooting.

  Jordan peered through the peephole, then stepped back and opened the door. Scott and Chris ducked inside, both wearing jeans and light jackets. “Probably not going to need that.” Scott nodded at Jordan’s SBR as he closed the door. “This place is nervous as hell, but not ‘waiting for the next IED on the corner nervous.’”

  “What did you see?” I’d sent Scott and Chris out to get some idea of the atmospherics in our vicinity shortly after we’d gotten settled in.

  “Like I said, people are nervous. They’re not acting furtive or looking over their shoulders.” He looked around for a spot to sit down, didn’t see one, and leaned against the wall. “Everybody’s friendly and smiling. But there’s something about ‘em. It’s almost as if the happy faces are all a façade. It’s… I don’t know. Brittle? Maybe that’s the word I’m looking for.”

  Stenberg was nodding where he stood in the kitchen. “There is a shooting war going on all around them. Some of the airstrikes during the battle for Gdansk went through Danish airspace, and it was made abundantly clear what would happen to the Royal Danish Navy if they interfered. The attempted coup in Germany, which saw some violence in Hamburg, not far from Denmark, has made them even more nervous. Most of these people just want to go about their lives, smoke their weed, and be comfortable and nice. They don’t really want to think about everything getting blown to hell, but it’s happening much too close for comfort.”

  “Did you see anything that looked like rival agency activity?” I was pretty sure I knew the answer, just from what I’d seen on the drive from the airport. But it paid to be sure, especially under these circumstances.

  Scott shook his head. “Nothing obvious. But this doesn’t feel like the kind of place that the opposition would be focused on. Aside from the airport, maybe, but I didn’t see anyone following us on the way here.”

  “Neither did I.” We’d had Stenberg and his driver take a few odd turns on the way, and had noticed no one following us. There was a growing number of CCTV networks in Denmark, though, and it was possible that we’d been observed on camera and tracked that way. We would have needed to catch someone’s attention, though, and they would have to work at it. So far as I knew, while the Danish police could take control of private CCTV systems, our intel didn’t indicate that they had done it on any sort of permanent basis.

  Another actor, on the other hand, might be able to backdoor it. Especially if the systems were Chinese-made, which many of them were.

  But we didn’t have the tech assets to be sure. If we’d
had a month to do this, we might have gotten such assets in place. But we didn’t have that kind of time; command wanted this done now. So, we were going to have to wing it.

  Stenberg’s phone buzzed. He looked down at it. “The first car is here.”

  I pointed to David. “Let’s go. I want to take a look around in Copenhagen itself.”

  ***

  Across the bridge, things were a little different.

  The area around the port—and the Aalborg University Copenhagen campus—was a lot more built-up and industrial. Most of the buildings were blocky collections of steel and glass, though there were still strips of green and rows of trees, that were sprouting leaves in the warmth of spring. I spotted quite a few more CCTV cameras around, too.

  I’d developed a healthy dislike for CCTV cameras in places in the States. If we’d been planning on doing something sneakier than contacting Landau and hopefully escorting her out of the country, they’d be a lot more of a threat. As it was, depending on who was watching, they still could be. They might not be obvious, but given Denmark’s position, both politically and geographically, I had no doubt that there were EDC, Russian, Chinese, and various other opposition operatives in Copenhagen.

  We were in the 21st Century equivalent of Casablanca.

  David was driving our white Audi sedan, and slowed slightly as we neared the campus. I waved him forward. “Keep driving. I can see what we need to see from the road at normal speed.” I didn’t want to draw attention to ourselves. We had forged Canadian passports—which was a little irksome, given some of Canada’s moves in the last few years. But better not to have to pull them out at all.

  The campus was very modern. Like a lot of the rest of the port, the buildings were all abstract blocks of concrete, steel, and glass. Oddly, there were a few small camper trailers parked in the parking lot out front. I didn’t see any significant security—in fact, I hadn’t even seen a single cop yet.

  The row houses off to the left, across the highway from the university, were much older and built of solid brick, their red tile roofs forming a decided contrast to the stark, glassy gray of the industrial zone. That side looked slightly more run-down than the port, and I thought I saw some graffiti on some of the walls, though we were moving too fast to make any of it out clearly through the trees that lined the highway.

  Then we were past the university and moving north, dipping down into the underpass beneath the railroad tracks. “You want to circle back and take another look?” David kept his eyes on the road and the mirrors. So far, anyway, the traffic had been light and remarkably polite. But we had our eyes out for more than just the traffic.

  “Not yet.” I glanced at the map in my lap and pointed. “Hang a left up here, and let’s go take a look at the tertiary escape route, then we’ll circle back, get another look at the campus, then check the primary and secondary escapes.” The plan called for a meeting on campus to start with, which should hopefully lead to a more private meeting, followed by a drive north to Liseleje, where we’d link up with helos or Ospreys off the USS Abraham Lincoln. From the Abraham Lincoln, Landau could be ferried to wherever they planned to keep their replacement Council safe.

  But in case that went badly, we had picked three marinas where boats were moored that might get us off the island and far enough out to sea to get picked up.

  David took the next left turn, heading toward the neighborhood—or suburb, I wasn’t sure—labeled “Valby” on my map. The road went past a massive park centered around a red brick church, and then we were turning into the neighborhood itself.

  We were soon surrounded by more closely-spaced brick row houses, though they quickly gave way to much more modern, blocky, gray concrete and glass buildings. I watched our surroundings carefully as we drove through. David was driving casually, neither going overly fast nor crawling like we were casing the place. If we had to make a run for it, the atmospherics along the route could be as much of a make-or-break criterion as the actual situation at the emergency extract point.

  I didn’t see much that seemed off. It was a typical, affluent Western city. Even the older buildings were clean and well kept-up. Mostly.

  It took some looking to see some of the fraying at the edges. Young people gathered in knots at streetcorners. That alone wasn’t out of the ordinary, but we soon noticed that most of the older folks moved carefully to avoid those groups. Bus stops and telephone poles were plastered with activist signs that I couldn’t always read because I didn’t speak Danish, but I could kind of figure out from context. Some graffiti denounced racism and war.

  We passed a series of car dealerships on the left and a much more traditional, single-family home residential area on the right. It stayed much that way as we crossed a small river running through a strip of parkland and continued through the Copenhagen suburbs toward the marina we’d identified from the map.

  In a way, it was eerie. Everything looked perfectly normal and peaceful. I honestly wasn’t used to such a bucolic scene anymore. I’d been running from trouble spot to trouble spot for the last five or six years. I was used to chaos, destruction, constant threat, and urban decay. To see a town, not all that far away from a shooting war, looking and acting like nothing was particularly wrong, felt weird.

  Yes, I know that’s not normal. “Normal” ceased to be a factor in my world a long time ago.

  Of course, even in the middle of warzones, people still try to go about their lives with as little disruption as possible. The longer the chaos drags on, the more careless some people seem to get about it. I knew guys who talked about how crazy many Iraqis had seemed, all but completely uncaring about their own personal safety, but it was probably simply because they’d become numb to the threats around them.

  Nothing cropped up on our personal threat radar as we threaded our way between Hvidovre and Friheden, down to the coast. And we were looking. If things looked a little shabbier on second glance than they might have at first, that could be put down to the general global economic downturn that had started long before the war broke out.

  Finally, about forty minutes after we’d left the apartment, we came to the marina at Brøndby Havn.

  David pulled over onto a turnoff just short of the causeway that led onto the marina and stopped the car. We sat there for a moment, looking the place over.

  There were a lot of boats anchored offshore or pulled up onto the small—presumably artificial—island that formed the core of the U-shaped marina. We could ostensibly take our pick.

  Of course, we had brought some considerable escape and evasion funds, in both euros and dollars. If we could, I intended to pay for the use of the boat, if not the boat itself.

  Call it, “Buying or hiring under duress.” Because if it came to that, we sure as hell weren’t taking “No” for an answer.

  “I like that one.” David pointed to a forty-foot yacht moored on the near side, between two sailboats.

  “We’re not here to pick one right now,” I replied dryly. “This is an atmospherics and recon run.”

  “Recon means knowing our options.” He grinned. “And while I’m not a boat guy, I kinda like that one.”

  “Whatever.” I looked over my shoulder. There were a couple other cars parked nearby, and several more in the marina’s small parking lot. “I didn’t see anything off on the way here. I’d say that this is as viable an option as any.”

  “Not much potential for ambushes, I’d agree.” David nodded, glancing in the rear-view mirror. “Still feels weird.”

  “I know. But let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.” I looked at the map again. “Okay, let’s get turned around and go check the other two sites.”

  We still had a lot to do, and the lecture was coming up in a day and a half.

  Chapter 7

  “There they are again.”

  I followed Chris’s gaze. We were in position, so he didn’t point. There was no reason to call unnecessary attention to ourselves.

  The black sedan d
idn’t stand out on its own, but the fact that we’d seen it and the two men in the front three times in the last thirty-six hours did. And each time we’d seen them, they’d been somewhere around Landau.

  We’d already identified Landau’s security. They were the obvious beefy dudes in black suits currently hanging out near the SUV in the Aalborg University parking lot, backed by the arched glass bridge that stretched over the artificial inlet between buildings. Two more had gone into the building with Landau herself.

  I was reasonably sure that these two were not part of her detail. And they weren’t the only pieces out of place.

  Copenhagen was still as generally calm as our initial impression had established. There was some trouble brewing from the Islamists dug into Nørrebro, and the hard-left agitation and drug trafficking was spreading from Freetown Christiania. We’d seen a couple of small riots as we’d expanded our zone reconnaissance the day before Landau’s talk, but more importantly we’d seen what looked very much like a number of covert actions in progress.

  We hadn’t had enough time to map out exactly what was happening. We didn’t even know for sure who was who. But we’d seen active surveillance set up in several spots in the city—not all of them on Landau, either—and what had looked very much like a couple of furtive meetings in back alleys, that didn’t quite smell right to be drug deals—though I was sure that a few of them were.

  These guys had been watching Landau. They were two of about six we’d identified. While they weren’t quite as sneaky as they thought they were, we still weren’t sure who they were working for.

  It would be just our rotten luck that they were working for another ostensibly friendly faction. But until we knew for sure, we had to treat them as hostile.

  They hadn’t shown any indication that they recognized us. So, they weren’t quite as observant as they should have been. I was going to take advantage of that, if I needed to.