Thunder In The Deep (02) (35 page)

The interlocking space was filled with plastic particles, not flaming gas—the recoilless antitank weapon was meant for use in confined space after all. The armored car was in flames—the shaped charge warhead burned through its thin armor. Its 75mm ammo began to cook off. The whole vehicle jumped and shivered, then the turret blew sky high. SEAL Nine opened the blast door wider and Ilse and the others charged. The air was crisp but still. The ground was covered with four or five inches of snow. The sky was clear and bright. Ilse lifted her night-vision visors.

Above her, powered by the solar storm, a brilliant aurora flickered and pulsated, dancing sheets in evanescent red and green and blue, forming arcs and curtains and long converging lines. From her left, tracer rounds arced in the SEALs' direction. From her right she heard another heavy motor, another armored car. She-saw the sparkle of its laser range-finder. SEAL One fired the other antitank rocket, but he missed. The armored car fired, and a high-explosive shell tore up the dirt—its shock wave made the aurora seem to ripple. Turks rose and charged the armored car from opposite directions, while its gunner hurried to reload. The commander stuck his head out, and reached for the top-mounted machine gun. Ilse cut him down; his body draped the top hatch. The armored car's hull-mounted machine gun opened up. One Turk lived to reach its engine deck. His satchel charge exploded. The armored car exploded. Jeffrey led his people instinctively to the right, away from the heavy machine guns and toward the bay, the water, a SEAL's best refuge. He knew his group was in the installation's parking lot. In the distance, by the auroral lights, Jeffrey saw people piling into buses. Some buses were already further off, on the road to Greifswald—surviving lab staff, rushing to safety. They were out of range of his weapons. SEAL Nine had said there was supposed to be a freight train.

Jeffrey knew from intel that many westbound trains here were laden with explosive ordnance, manufactured in occupied Poland. Helo gunships escorted the trains to protect them from local partisans. This train wasn't on any known schedule, but the enemy must'

ve seen the magnetic storm as a chance to sneak one through. Most trains 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 Jeffrey and rolled across his legs. Pieces of sheet metal fell more gently, and clanged on top of asphalt or autos or Gastarbeiter. The rain of solid debris formed a nonstop counterpoint to the roaring and bursting of the ammo train, and the crackling of burning vehicles in the lot.

Jeffrey ordered his people forward. They had to reach the water, and a platoon or more of German soldiers was rushing down from the north, beyond the front end of the freight train. The machine gun on the pier opened up again—it had escaped the earthquakes and the conflagration, and its crew were angry men. Jeffrey hit the dirt. Salih dropped next to Jeffrey. "I think I can make a diversion for you," Salih shouted. " If we all stay here we're dead men. I'll lead my people in the other direction, and we can try to join the partisans in the forest."

"No," Jeffrey yelled. "I want you to come back with us." Salih shook his head. "I can't leave my followers." Nearby, Ilse's light machine gun fired at the heavy one on the pier. Rifles cracked on semiauto or crackled on full auto—the SEALs were long out of ammo for their sound-suppressed electric guns. Ilse's MG made a tearing sound, and the heavy MG bellowed. The approaching German soldiers' fire grew more effective, too.

A big wave hit the seawall. It broke, and drenched the parking lot with spray—a local tsunami, another effect of the massive explosions.

"Look, Gamal, we need you, to go in front of the U.N.

It might get your mother country to come in on the Allied side, or at least give Third World neutrals second thoughts about joining the Axis."

SEAL Nine crawled up next to them. Ilse fired again, from a different position, at the German soldiers this time. Some of them spun and fell in lifeless heaps. The others continued advancing by squad, using fire and movement steadily. Jeffrey filled Nine in.

"Mr. Salih," Nine said, "I can stay and work with your men. An even trade, me for you." Nine's name was Andy Cooper, from northern Idaho.

Jeffrey didn't disagree with Cooper. A SEAL, training and leading a partisan group, would make a formidable force. There was a sick social Darwinism here—the surviving Turks were good but cautious fighters, and combat-blooded, too.

Salih turned to Jeffrey. "I can't swim."

"If we're lucky you won't need to. We'll try to capture a speedboat, or make a raft." Salih looked at Jeffrey like he was crazy

Montgomery crawled closer. "I think you should come with us, Mr. Salih. We SEALs are good at water egress." Once more Ilse's MG exchanged short bursts with the German soldiers. Their light MGs responded. The surviving heavy MG also tried to find and silence her. Salih shot at its emplacement on the pier. He didn't answer Jeffrey or the chief.