In the tunnel a skeleton crew of four men worked like navvies at the winches that would let down one of the fifty-foot-long by fifteen-foot-wide toroidal subs, its eight “anti-lake-access” torpedoes looking for all the world like stovepipes attached to its superstructure, the bulges of the four cruise missiles wider but shorter on the outer casing.
The first sub was a quarter of the way down the hundred-yard ice slipway; retractable wing vanes extended from either side of the black, egg-shaped sub like the outriggers of a canoe to stop the midget from rolling before it reached the water. The four Siberians working the winch, not realizing that it wasn’t the sub that was under fire but rather the library and hotel, frantically redoubled their efforts — a line of twenty to thirty KGB border guards racing toward the slipway. Behind them came the squeak of a tank heading down from its defilade position on the steep forested slope along the narrow road leading westward from the town.
There were screams of men hit, one flung backward like a rag doll under the impact of the forty-millimeter, while at the far end of the tunnel, the two-man Goryonov 7.62-millimeter machine-gun crew were dead, one slumped over the gun, the other, his face missing, flung back over the sandbags by the rail tracks that had carried the midget submarines the last few miles to the slipway. There was more screaming now, mixed with a sound like wasps swarming as the three Arrows surged up the incline from the lake, stopping about twenty yards abreast, close to a heavy ice bank that formed the eastern wall of the slipway. The line of border guards fifty yards ahead across the slipway and now slightly above them poured fire in their general direction. David Brentwood, hard up against the ice wall, smacked Choir’s shoulder hard so that he’d feel it through the Kevlar vest. “Get the M-19 off the Arrow and on its bipod. Aussie, three o’clock high!”
Aussie Lewis looked up, squinting despite the shades, and saw the twin bubble nose of the Hind rising from behind the hotel into the sun, its pilot now realizing it had been an enemy force they’d seen on the lake.
The chopper, relying on the glare to blind its opponents, was in Aussie’s line of sight for only three seconds — the time it took him to fire the Stinger from two hundred yards, which was virtually point-blank range. The explosion was crimson, spilling fiery fuel down around the hotel, some of the gasoline sweeping across four or five of its defenders, sending them screaming, rolling into the trench behind the border guards’ ice wall, distracting their comrades and kicking up so much ice and snow in their efforts to douse themselves that two of the three Delta men had no difficulty lobbing six grenades in as many seconds, the grenades’ flashes lost in the sunlight but going off deep in the trench, killing at least another three defenders.
The sub, passing down the slipway between them and the defenders, was nearing the water.
“Stop those bastards!” yelled Aussie, swinging the Stinger to his left at the men working the winch and executing his own command before any of the other S/D men needed to. Two of the winchmen simply disappeared under the rocket’s impact; what was left of them splattered over the remaining submarine. Aussie reloaded, got a bead on the second sub in the tunnel, and heard Robert Brentwood shouting, “No! Let’s be sure of the first one before we—”
“Roger!” said Aussie and, turning right, fired the Stinger round into the hotel, a hundred yards front right, just to keep things moving. The next instant he heard a “thwack!” and one of the Delta men, a moment before spread- eagled atop the ice wall for a better shot, was tumbling backward, grabbing at his throat, but there was no hope. The jugular severed, he was spurting blood in jets, tumbling into the slipway, sliding all the way down, smashing into the midget sub’s keel. But by now the defenders, thoroughly demoralized, were retreating to the library as David Brentwood, attaching three “bread rolls”—balls of plastique — on the cable leading from the winch to the sub, pushed in a pencil-size detonator and flicked the fuse selector to “three minutes.”
“Off you go!” he told Robert and, without a look backward, Robert Brentwood and the two remaining submariners slithered down the gutter-shaped slipway, using their boots to brake themselves against the keel, one of them already with a hand on the right side vane to haul himself up to the six-foot, oil-drum-shaped conning tower.
“Not yet!” Robert Brentwood ordered the seaman. “Not till the charge goes. Get forward of midships. Otherwise when that cable blows it’ll—” It blew, the sudden release of tension recoiling one half of the wire back to the winch, making a high, singing noise, the other half whipping toward the sub but catching Lawson, one of the Delta men, and almost severing his right foot. For a second or so he felt absolutely no pain, only astonishment, realizing that in breaking the impact of the wire, he’d saved the life of one of the two submariners with Robert Brentwood. The cable smacked the keel, flopping to the icy slipway and finally lying still, like a dead snake.
The sub was now afloat with Robert Brentwood and the two submariners already down the conning tower. The powerful whiff of sweat assaulted Brentwood’s nose, and for a split second he thought one of the winchmen was hiding in the sub; but there was no one, the sub simply not having had enough time to be aerated by the cold pine smell of the taiga.
By now Choir and the remaining Delta man, Salvini, had the M-19 on its stand and were pouring a terrible fire into the library and hotel. Aussie rested the Stinger tube across the Arrow’s cockpit for a good shot at the second sub. There was a “swoosh” of back blast from the Stinger, a crimson explosion in the tunnel, and a ringing of scrap metal. That GST was gone.
Once inside the midget submarine it was easier than Robert Brentwood and his two crewmen thought it would be. They didn’t need to know anything about the Cyrillic alphabet, the dials self-explanatory to any submariner. The three men moved automatically to the stations they’d have to operate as a skeleton crew. For them, the sensation was very much like moving from a fully automatic automobile to a VW Beetle with standard shift. It was all more or less clear at a glance, the only real difference being the pipes that went round and round the toroidal hull, which allowed for the storage of recycled gaseous oxygen for them to breathe; it also ran the GST’s closed-circuit diesel engine.
The immediate concern was to submerge as quickly as possible. “Hatch closed!” said Johnson, one of the two remaining submariners. The other man, Lopez, stood by the diesel motor control and steerage levers that would allow him to work the relatively primitive yet effective horizontal hydroplanes that would govern their “up” and “down” angles, and the vertical rudder, half above, half below the horizontal plane, to control the yaw, or left-right movement.
“Very well,” Brentwood responded to Johnson. Turning to Lopez, he ordered, “Stand by to discharge.”
“Stand by to discharge, sir.”
Brentwood switched on the small sonar screen by the narrow twin day and nighttime periscopes column, no bigger than six inches in diameter, and checked there was no obstruction ahead or below registered by the “passive” radar sensors that were built into the GST’s hull.
“Dive! Dive! Dive! Open all vents!” he commanded.
“Opening all vents, aye, sir!” responded Johnson, and they could hear the water rushing and gurgling in, its noise transmitted through the pressure hull. Lopez immediately put her nose into a sharp dive, Brentwood wrapping an arm around the scope column as the GST went down on a twenty-degree incline.
“Twenty feet… thirty feet… forty feet…” announced Johnson unhurriedly, rhythmically, multiplying the readout in meters by three, already getting the feel of her.
“Level at one hundred,” ordered Brentwood.
“Level at one hundred, aye, sir… Forty feet… forty-five…” They could hear the icy growl above them as huge plates shifted. The slight movement was unnoticeable to the naked eye, but it was in part a response to the enormous struggle, the pulling apart of tectonic plates far below the five-thousand-foot lake which caused fissures that accounted for the temperature inversions throughout the lake and gave rise often to the fast, warm, upstreaming currents that created thin ice here and there.
“Seventy feet… eighty feet…”
“Stand by to declutch.”
“Stand by to—” began Lopez.
“Declutch!” ordered Brentwood, and within three seconds Lopez had levelled the tiny sub, though it was rocking slightly, and disengaged the generating power from the diesel that had been charging up the batteries, shifting the power to propulsion charge. All three of them were surprised by the lack of any forward sensation other than levelling out. It was an extraordinarily quiet vessel.
“Steer one one two,” ordered Brentwood.
“One one two, sir.”
“Half ahead,” ordered Brentwood.
“Half ahead, sir.” Within five seconds they were running at eight knots. Brentwood, for the first time in the
