Jeffrey looked aft. Beyond the fourth pair of sleeper seats, at the rear of the transport compartment, one of the SEALs used the chemical head. Jeffrey felt the call of nature. The others looked away and made small talk while Ilse took her turn.
Jeffrey and Ilse and Clayton went forward.
'How'd you get rid of the Konstanz?'
'Once we got to the Baltic proper,' Meltzer said, 'they gave us a course for Bornholm Island, then turned back north. We went east till we hit the German submarine training area, then headed south.' He typed some keys. Their track, with time hacks, came on the nav chart.
'No problems along the way?'
'Negative, Skipper,' Montgomery said. 'We met a couple of two-twelves on exercise, some cargo ships serving as training targets, even heard a few practice torpedoes fired in the distance. Axis frigates screening the Swedish coast, against people like us. Some aircraft overflights. Everybody ignored us.'
'What's our fuel level?'
'Peroxide's down to one eight percent.'
'So we're still stuck for a way back up the Sound.' 'Right now we're stuck for a way into Greifswald Bay, too.'
'We had to avoid the dredged channel into the bay, sir,' Meltzer said. 'It's mined, and much too obvious.'
Montgomery nodded. 'We crawled over the Thiessower Bank instead.' The bank was very shallow, Jeffrey knew, and salinity here was low, so the water would freeze more readily — that's why the mini scraped floating fragments of ice and slush.
'Then,' the chief went on, 'we found this.' He typed, and a crisp image came on screen. Jeffrey could tell it was a laser line-scan picture from the mini's chin.
'This is live?'
'Affirmative.'
'Give me the fine-scale nav chart.'
The mini was at one of the less-shallow spots at the mouth of Greifswald Bay, all of twenty-two feet deep right here. Four thousand yards to starboard was Sudperd Point, on Rugen Island, heavily garrisoned by enemy troops. Six thousand yards to port was the military airfield at the tip of Peenemunde. The promontories — solid, inviolable land — seemed to devour the mini like giant incisors, with the bay as their gullet.
Jeffrey looked at the line-scan picture. Immediately ahead of the stationary minisub, underwater, lay a tangle of stainless steel concertina wire that stretched from the bottom to near the surface. The barrier was held in place and strengthened by vertical segments of railroad rail, driven into the mud and sand.
The mini's passive sonars tracked enemy helos patrolling overhead.
'We weren't briefed for this,' Montgomery said, meaning the barrier.
'They must have done the construction work submerged,' Jeffrey said, 'hiding from our recon drones. Any sign of mines or booby traps, or hydrophones?'
'Not that we can see, but they might be buried.'
Jeffrey nodded; they had no good way to check. The mini's magnetometers were useless in the solar storm now raging at G5 +, and they dared not use their active bottompenetrating sonar.
'Deploy the chin grapnels. Use the wire-cutter heads, and let's hope no one notices.' Montgomery repositioned the mini between two of the barrier rails. Meltzer worked his joystick in grapnel mode, and began to cut and cut. First upward, then once he got nine feet from the bottom he sliced sideways. The cutters made noise each time they scissored another strip of concertina, but constant surface wave action from the wind made the barrier rattle and clank anyway. Meltzer stopped when a helo hovered and dipped a passive sonar-head nearby, then continued when the helo left. There was no change in the pattern of the local airborne patrols.
'New contact on passive sonar,' Montgomery said.
Ilse, quiet and thoughtful up to now, craned to read the screen. 'Bearing-and blade-rate indicate some kind of speedboat. Constant bearing now. It's coming this way.' Meltzer stopped cutting, and turned off the laser line- scan.
'Photonics sensors picking up a searchlight,' Montgomery said.
'Pass the word,' Jeffrey whispered. 'Rig for ultra-quiet.' Clayton turned aft and made hand signals to his men. 'Speedboat's drawing away,' Ilse whispered. 'No change in blade-rate.'
Meltzer went back to work. 'Ready, Captain.' His cutting was done.
'Push through.'
'Retract the side thrusters,' Montgomery said. Meltzer worked some switches. The mini began to slide sideways in the gentle current; Jeffrey knew there was almost no tide in Greifswald Bay. Montgomery worked the rudder and throttle, and the mini moved into the gap. When they were almost through, there was a scraping noise, then a strange boing from the stern. The mini stopped. Montgomery increased the screw-prop turns, but the mini was trapped.
'We're tangled,' Montgomery said. 'Damn. Someone has to go out and cut us free.'
'I'll do it,' Jeffrey said. 'Shaj, you be my swim buddy.' Jeffrey and Clayton donned their gear. First, their digital dive-computer chest packs, linked to heads-up displays in their masks, and the analog backups, strapped to their left forearms. Then came neutrally buoyant flak vests, just in case. Next, an adjustable buoyancy compensator, which doubled as flotation vest. Draeger closed-cycle rebreathers, worn over their chests. Weight belts, custom calibrated for each man. Titanium dive knives; the dive masks themselves with fiber-optic hookup wires; and big Special Warfare swim fins. They activated chem-glow cyalume hoops; each put one on his right arm.
They went into the lock-out sphere and dogged the hatches. They checked each other's rigs, then tested their two-stage regulators. On the intercom they told Meltzer to equalize the sphere. This took but a moment, the mini was so shallow. Clayton opened the bottom hatch and let it drop down.
In the hatchway Jeffrey saw a pool of black water. He knew the bottom was very close beneath the mini. Clayton sat on the hatch coaming, held his mask in place, and rolled forward, making hardly a ripple. Jeffrey sat, positioned his mouthpiece, held his mask, and rolled forward.
Jesus. His mask display said the water was 31° Fahrenheit — only salt content kept it from freezing solid. The water here was brackish, because of river runoff into the bay mixing with seawater from the Baltic.
Jeffrey moved around to warm up. His dry suit and long underwear did their job. He and Clayton clipped themselves together with a six-foot lanyard so they wouldn't be separated in the darkness and murk. Then they adjusted their flotation vests, admitting a little air; brackish water gave less buoyancy than seawater. They activated small flashlights fastened to their right forearms, and worked aft.
They saw the problem. A tangle of concertina snagged the main propeller's housing. Clayton reached for his compressed-air-powered wire cutters, and began to snip away. The compressed air bottle ran low, and it got harder for Clayton to cut. He used brute force — Jeffrey knew Clayton, like all active-duty SEALs, had terrific upper-body strength. But eventually Clayton tired. He signaled for Jeffrey to take over, and handed him the cutters.
Jeffrey heard a buzzing in his ears. He checked his regulator, fearing an equipment problem. It was too shallow for nitrogen narcosis, or oxygen toxemia, or baro-trauma. The noise got louder, seeming to come from everywhere at once. Underwater, at five times the normal speed of sound, it was hard for humans to judge direction to a sound source. But Jeffrey's dive computer had crude acoustic-intercept sonar. The speedboat. It was coming this way. Jeffrey and-Clayton turned off their pressureproof flashlights. The buzzing got louder still. Jeffrey saw a diffuse glow penetrating the water. The searchlight. The boat slowed. Jeffrey waited for the anti-swimmer charges to come down. At this range, in the water, the blasts would rupture his organs. He and Clayton would die in slow agony, forced to the surface to be captured as blood oozed into their lungs.
The boat sped up again. It roared by almost directly overhead. Its prop wash jostled him and Clayton, and the mini bucked and the concertina jangled. No explosions. But Jeffrey had dropped the wire cutters, and he'd forgotten to clip their lanyard — the cold was harming his judgment. He turned on his light, but didn't see the tool. He groped in the bottom muck, afraid he'd set off a mine. He found the cutters. He had to use both hands, and forced himself not to grunt from exertion. Clayton held each ribbon of concertina steady, and Jeffrey held himself in place by treading water. Bottom mines or not, they took care to avoid leaving marks in the sand from their swim fins, though at this point Jeffrey thought it made little difference. 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
