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.
Soon they were at the intake gate. It was a giant fine-meshed titanium cage. Jeffrey was sucked against the outside of the cage.
'Hold on hard,' Montgomery said. 'Then stay still.' Jeffrey gripped the bars. He felt Montgomery probing with his hands, checking Jeffrey's equipment by feel, cinching the straps and fasteners uncomfortably tight. Montgomery gave a final yank to the straps of Jeffrey's dive mask and mouthpiece/mike.
The chief unclipped his own end of their swim-buddy lanyard, and clipped the free end to the cage near the gate. This way Jeffrey was secured, but had some slack. Montgomery tapped his shoulder. 'Climb inside. Grip your regulator with your teeth hard. Face upstream, backward, into the flow, or your mask will get pulled off.' Jeffrey struggled through the access gate, into the cage. He had a surge of claustrophobia, for the first time in
his life. He felt the water tearing at him, at his gear. The rapid flow began to chill him. It made a constant roaring, noise.
Montgomery, himself clipped to the cage now with a spare lanyard, guided Jeffrey's hand to the guide rope. By feel, facing the flow and gritting his teeth, Jeffrey threaded the rope through the rappel fitting buckled to his weight belt. By feel, Montgomery checked him again.
Jeffrey heard thumps and clunks and almost pissed his pants. Were Germans setting up a crew-served weapon on the shore of the Wiek? The team was so shallow, machine gun or mortar fire would kill them easy.
'Relax, Commander,' Montgomery said. 'That's One and Two, cutting through the debris catcher.'
Jeffrey looked at his vital signs on the mask display. His pulse was 132, his respiration 38. Too high. This was scary.
'Ready?' Montgomery said.
'Ready.'
'Start down.'
Jeffrey loosened the friction brake at his waist and slid into the pipe a little at a time. The pipe was less than five feet in diameter. His body partly blocked the flow, and made the suction stronger. The inlet was too constricted for someone else to work beside him — he was on his own.
Jeffrey tried to keep track of how far inside he'd gone, and which direction was up, underwater. In the dark, in the pipe, he relied completely on his head-up display. When he judged the distance was right, he turned on his flashlight. He started searching. Nothing. He went further in. Still nothing. Unless he found it, they'd have to scrub the mission. He slid along the pipe a little more.
There. He spotted the outer automatic blast-shield door, recessed into the top of the pipe. He traced the flange in the bottom of the pipe, into which the door dropped tightly shut. He reached for the edge of the door. He lost control and spun wildly in the flow. Fighting panic and vertigo, he tried to brake himself by splaying arms and legs against the slippery pipe walls. His mask said his pulse was up to 170, his breath rate a ragged 52. He had to reach that door edge. Almost losing his mouthpiece twice, he finally got a hand on it. The liquid jet stream tried to bend him double. He fought with all his strength. The noise of the cascade was deafening.
He pushed up. His orders said he had to make doubly certain. The blast shutter gave an inch or so, with increasing reluctance. He let go, and it came back down and stopped. It was spring-loaded, and held in place by an electromagnet or solenoid. So far, so good, for the mission ROEs.
Jeffrey switched off his light to save the battery. It was running very low, because of the cold.
Barely intelligible over the gertrude, Montgomery told Jeffrey to hurry up. Jeffrey went further into the pipe, in pitch darkness. Still the water roared in his ears. His own blood roared in his ears. His fingers grew numb, from effort and cold, the fast water flow the equivalent of an undersea windchill.
Jeffrey just kept sliding down the rope. He glanced at his inertial nav. So far yet to go. He felt his determination flag — the cold was getting to him, and would only get worse and worse.
Jeffrey's jaw began to ache, but he dared not let up on his-mouthpiece and trust the strap alone. If he should lose it, without first rotating closed the airway seal, salty water would get in the rebreather works. The caustic soda would turn to acid. Trapped deep in the pipe, with nothing to breathe and no swim buddy near, he'd drown for sure. FORTY MINUTES LATER.
Ilse tried to rest, frozen solid. She'd begun to shiver, and had almost no feeling in her hands and feet and face. Her dark-adapted eyes could see well enough, by reflected glow from flashlights, as the SEALs worked above her.
Ilse glanced up. The whole team was bunched inside the accessway, several hundred yards into the cooling pipe. Below the maintenance ladder, beneath Ilse's feet, the water rushed. A fine mist filled the accessway, and droplets splashed her dry suit. Everyone still used the Draegersthe accessway was hermetically sealed, to avoid breaking the suction of the cooling flow. The Draegers protected the team from asphyxiation in the stagnant air, tainted by swamp gas from below, and maybe by chemical weapons to discourage intruders, from above.
Ilse clung hard to the ladder. Out of the water, her equipment regained its full weight. She glanced up again, impatient to get on with it. SEAL One was holding a stethoscope to the wall.
On Clayton's command, everyone helped each other out of their packs; they fastened the packs securely to the steel rungs of the ladder. They withdrew their weapons, removed the waterproof muzzle plugs, and inspected them carefully. They powered them up on safe with rounds in the chamber. They pulled out several kinds of grenades, and loaded the pockets of their combat vests. They donned their battle helmets and eye shields and night-vision goggles; they'd worn their flak vests, neutrally buoyant, all along. They put their dive knives in their packs, but retained their K-Bars and their survival knives. They also retained their Draegers, as gas masks.
Ilse realized Jeffrey had noticed she was shivering; he massaged her arms and legs. She tried to relax, and let him go to work. When his hands got too close to her backside, she shoved them away.
'Standard procedure,' he said, enunciating inside his mouthpiece. 'Against hypothermia. Works every time.'
'Thanks,' Ilse said, grateful for his help, and sorry she'd misinterpreted his explorations.
'It was good for me, too,' Jeffrey said.
Ilse realized what he'd done. By flirting, he'd made her core body temperature rise fast, and her fatigue melt away. She made eye contact with him for a split second, then looked away before it went too far. Inside a secret German lab, of all places. Just when I think I have Jeffrey figured out, he surprises me again.
