used special radiophones that propagate along the rails. But now there'd be huge DC voltages coursing through, and the engineer was probably out of touch.
The German heavy machine guns on the left fired more bursts of tracer. In the parking lot, the SEALs and Turks tried to use the remaining vehicles for cover — their owners must have been killed, or told to get on a bus. Mercedeses and Porsches in the reserved section jumped and sagged as 12.7mm heavy MG rounds shredded their tires. Their windshields dissolved in greenish clouds of fragmented safety glass. Bullets clicked through sheet metal and clanged through engine blocks. Gas tanks blew, and liquid fire poured along the ground.
Jeffrey saw a neat row of BMW motorcycles, in gaudy colors. Tracers stitched them all, seeking out a running squad of Turks. Several men were hit. The 'cycles toppled like dominoes, then their gas tanks cooked off one by one, ignited by the heavy fire. The dead armored cars continued to burn merrily, throwing fireworks of their own into the air. Rubber, fuel, ammo, bodies, all gave off thick black smoke. Through the stinking fumes red tracers probed and pierced, sweeping back and forth, long killing bursts. Here on the Ryck River's floodplain, the land was flat; Jeffrey and the others were pinned down. They were all going to die, here in this parking lot.
Where the hell was that freight train? Had its helo gunship escorts spotted the action in the parking lot, and flagged the engineer down?
In the distance, from due north, Jeffrey saw a sharp flash. Instantly he heard a roaring sound, and a high explosive shell hit the far end of the tot. Four thousand yards away, atop the cliff that overlooked a cove, the Kooser See, a main battle tank was firing at them. Another flash, another tearing roar, another shell — this time it hit much closer. Jeffrey knew Leopard III's had 120mm cannon, almost as big as a modern cruiser's five-inch gun.
Where the hell was that train?
Another flash, due east this time, and another big shell blew the burning motorcycles to fragments. There was another tank, at the edge of the cliff across the Danische Wiek. Jeffrey's team was surrounded, cut off on low ground.
In the distance Jeffrey heard a train's air horn, and the growl of mighty diesel locomotives. Finally. Then he heard the beating of helo rotor blades. He looked at his watch — the A-bombs should have blown already! Had they been disarmed by German nuclear-munitions disposal experts? How good were Clayton's backup antisabotage devices?
The tank on the Kooser See cliff fired again. Wounded Turks writhed and screamed. The tank across the Danische fired again. It almost hit the model missile. The diesel growl got deeper and louder. No! The train was going faster. They were rushing it on through, to escape this local threat. Once it passed the lab, the SEAL team's situation would be hopeless.
In a burst of anger and resentment, Jeffrey concluded the Joint Chiefs knew all along this raid would be a one-. way mission. We had to try, I guess. He thought of the SEALS, the Gastarbeiter, him and Ilse, all sacrificed on the altar of military necessity. Was it worth it?
Suddenly the whole world jumped, and there was an ungodly sound like thunder from below: Clayton's nuclear booby-traps had beaten the German experts after all. Atomic earthquake shocks repeated, and the ground began to move.
Ilse knew the soil at Greifswald was sandy, and the water table high. The lab structure actually floated in the soil, with pilings driven deep for added stability. The shock of the atomic detonations drove down beneath the lab, hit the underlying bedrock, then bounced back, over and over. The frequency hit a natural resonance of the massive structure. The soil around began to ripple in waves, literally liquefying. The shattered asphalt of the parking lot heaved up and down like sea swell.
Jeffrey yelled for everyone to use these temporary hillocks as opportunistic cover, and make their way northeast. Ilse ran and threw herself to the ground. She rose and ran again, past a burning Audi. Its vanity plate said GAUBATZ. As she watched, the plate's enamel burned off from the heat.
In the distance, the train whistle blew again. Then Ilse heard a harsh screeching that went on and on: The train was trying to stop. Still more tracer rounds followed the SEALs and Turks. Some of the men carrying the model missile were hit. Others took their places. Still others helped Clayton, who hobbled and bled.
Mother heavy machine gun opened up from a different quarter. Ilse realized it sat on the speedboat pier that Jeffrey was trying to reach. Now they were caught in a terrible crossfire, between the MGs and the tanks.
Ilse rolled onto her back and reloaded in the snow She watched and felt red tracers snap by right above her. She watched veils and rays and streamers in the ionosphere shimmer and play, beckoning to her in eerie silence from a hundred or a thousand kilometers up. She knew they were glowing atmospheric molecules, excited by the massive charges of the solar flare, a record-setting aurora that easily outshone the setting quarter moon. Ilse knew the energies involved in this otherworldly celestial display vastly exceeded all the nuclear weapons ever assembled on earth.
Ilse finished changing belts. She rolled again and fired.
Through a pair of binoculars held to his night-vision visor, Jeffrey could see helicopter gunships peel off from escorting the freight train. He watched the headlight of the train, at the front of a line of ten throbbing diesel locomotives. The boxcars trailed off into the distance, to the east, Poland — there were over a hundred of them. Jeffrey saw that the helos were heading right for him now. Their gunners fired bursts of 30mm cannon shells from their chin-mounted gatling guns, to test the weapons and test the range. Jeffrey had to duck as more machine gun tracers probed in his direction from the land, first from near the road to Greifswald and then from the speedboat pier. White-hot razor-sharp shrapnel whizzed by from different directions, as the tanks kept shelling the parking lot. The earthquake shocks subsided. Jeffrey had a job to do, even if he'd never make it out alive. The lab structure, its massive roof jutting above the ground, seemed intact. He pulled out a handheld radiac. The radiation from the blast appeared to be contained — if there was a bad leak he'd know it, solar flare or not.
The helo gunships fired again, peppering the parking lot. Jeffrey really, really didn't want to die.
Ilse heard the screech of train brakes go on and on — the tracks must have been damaged by soil movement effects. Then there was a series of ten heavy, thudding rumbles, heard through the air and felt through the ground. Diesel fuel ignited as the locomotives' huge fuel tanks tore open. There was another staccato, thunderous noise as each freight car derailed in turn.
The freight cars began to pile up, then exploded one by one or in groups. There was a long series of blinding flashes, moving progressively away, back toward Greifswald. The ground trembled again. The airborne shock waves hit. It felt like sledgehammers were pounding Ilse's intestines and ovaries repeatedly, much worse than the twin atom bombs. She remembered to keep her mouth wide open, and put her hands to her ears — she was so deafened by now her radio was useless, even if it 'hadn't been overwhelmed by static from the sky.
Jeffrey watched, appalled, as the whole ammo train cooked off. He remembered now each freight car could hold one hundred tons. That meant a train a hundred cars long carried ten kilotons of high explosives — enough to take the whole neighborhood with it, including Jeffrey and all his team.
The effects were just like those of a nuclear weapon, without the fallout. Jeffrey saw helos knocked out of the sky by the endless explosions and shock waves. The aircraft fell to the ground or into the bay in pieces, as their fuel blazed in midair. Jeffrey saw the evacuating lab staff buses fall on their sides or go flying. They were swallowed by the spreading flames, pulverized by exploding crates of iron bombs and mortar shells. Jeffrey heard a new kind of roar, from the north and from the east. Both chalky cliff faces gave way, under the burden of the tanks, because of the terrible seismic shocks. He saw the seventy-ton vehicles plummet into the water, making huge splashes. He looked back toward the train. A narrow but mile-long mushroom cloud of glowing gas rose into the sky, tallest at the near end where the cars had blown up first. It seemed to reach for the aurora, and Jeffrey watched their colors embrace. Jeffrey drew grim satisfaction that his idea to move up the timing of the atom bombs had worked; by derailing the freight train, the ground around the lab — jutting into the bay between the Danische and Kooserwas mostly isolated from the mainland now, and from enemy reinforcements.
Then things began to come down — no radiation from this weird-shaped chemical mushroom cloud, but there was fallout after all.
A whole train wheel whizzed by and clanged into the
parking lot and pulped a Turk. Another flew overhead, then skipped like a giant stone across the bay. Uncrated mortar shells whistled and tumbled through the air at random; some burst where they landed, some were duds. The burning, fulminating train gave off waves of radiant heat, so intense the snow was turned to slush. Shapeless pieces of steel and wood pelted the SEALs and Turks, some of it burning or red-hot. Jeffrey saw a blackened arm land nearby and steam. Then a German army helmet, human head still inside, plopped down next to
