If they got pushed back from there, they would retreat to the tool room, which had a metal anti-flood door with a brace bolt they could shelter behind. It wouldn’t hold long, but they had a little surprise in store for anyone who started knocking on the tool room door. Bunny had mounted a belt of 25mm Fantom fragmentation ammunition in the pipes in the roof that would fire mercilessly down into the corridor when triggered. The ammunition was fired by electrical primer, an innovation that completely eliminated ‘lock time’ when the single barrel cannon of the Fantom was firing, but which also meant it could be ignited by the electrical primer cable Bunny had pared and clipped to the contacts on the belt and wired to a fuel cell with a simple switch. She’d set the detonation range to zero so that the slugs would immediately frag into lethal .50 cal sized shrapnel, shredding anything in their path.
If they were forced to abandon the toolroom, there was a service hatch leading to the 30-foot wide aircraft elevator shaft. They probably wouldn’t have time to ride the heavy elevator down so they had put it in maintenance mode and parked it at the top of the shaft, fixing ropes to a workbench so that they could slide down to the lower level drone hangars and maintenance bays. The lower levels of NCTAMS-A4 were wide and open with no obviously defensible positions apart from the ordnance storage facility which was not a place you would want to be sheltering in a firestorm. They both knew that if they were forced down that elevator shaft, it could only end one way.
Bunny had a remote detonator switch in one hand, and a sandwich in the other as she and Rodriguez sat with their backs up against the graphite barrels in the corridor.
Rodriguez was a little troubled by how careless she seemed to be with the switch. “Can you put that down?” she asked. “I don’t want anything going off while we’re out in this corridor.”
Bunny held it in two fingers and showed her the light on the end, which was dead. “It’s safe Boss,” she said. “But if it makes you feel better.” She leaned over and put the trigger on the ground between the barrels, taking a bite of her sandwich and pulling her HK416 rifle closer to her. Suddenly she froze.
They heard muffled voices outside.
Russian voices.
One of the Spetsnaz troopers had jumped the gap over the Pond between the launch ramp and chute with a rope tied around him, and secured it on the other side. It was only a three-meter gap, but Bondarev had held his breath as the man sailed through the air, half expecting him to miss or hit the lip on the other side, but he cleared it with room to spare. The gap wasn’t designed to prevent access, it was there so that defunct drones could be pushed off the catapult, into the pond and out of the way. On the other side he found a control that extended a bridge across the gap and they all moved into the main chamber of the cavern. There were only a few wan red emergency lights still burning inside the cavern, so they kept their low light visors down.
Bondarev was fascinated by the mini aircraft carrier flight deck the Americans had built under the island. It was simply amazing. And it was the first time he had seen one of the amphibious F-47F Fantoms up close and personal. It was bigger than it seemed in the air and seemed to have been able to ride out the missile strike further down in the dock without visible damage. Of course, its systems could be fried. He could get right under it, and saw the retractable ski-floats it used for take-off and landing. They would have to have been replaceable — even coated with graphite lubricant, they would have worn out after just a few launches. The aircraft was hanging from a claw that held onto three hardpoints on its upper shell and the claw ran on a belt that went back into the rock to where he assumed there were hangars and service bays.
And if there were service bays, that meant there had to be maintenance and ordnance crew access somewhere, probably on multiple levels. He passed his assessment on to Borisov as his men worked their way around what remained of the misty cavern, ensuring it was clear of threats.
His eye followed the wall away from the Fantom, into the gloom in the corner of the base. “Can I borrow your torch?” he quietly asked a trooper standing beside him. The man handed him the light and they walked down into the darkness. At the end of the wall he came to the door he had known must be there. It was solid metal, and he had more than a hunch that it would be locked, but he took out his pistol, stood to one side and spun the wheel that served as both a handle and lock. It turned freely, but did nothing. It was either locked from the other side or warped hard into place by the cruise missile blast. Walking along the wall the full length of the launch ramp, he found another heavy blast door further down. Judging by what he could see of the drone conveyor belt and loading system, he made an educated guess that the second door opened into the system of hangars that fed the drones up to the flight deck for launch, exactly as on an aircraft carrier.
Automated or not, machinery had to be maintained. The drones that flew out of here had to be stored, along with fuel, ordnance. He was certain that behind these doors had to be a network of hangar bays, maintenance floors and storage facilities.
He looked around for Borisov, “Captain! Over here.”
As he called out, he heard a telephone buzzing. With a frown he looked around and realized it was coming from a pocket in his flight suit. He had been given a satellite phone by Borisov so that he could let his staff know he was down and safe and to get an update on the tactical situation before he went down into the base. He had given the number to his operations staff on Saint Lawrence and ordered them to re-route any urgent calls to his official cell number to this one, but he hadn’t expected he could get a signal down here.
It seemed he could, even under 300 feet of rock. The Americans must have built a signal repeater into the base which a brace of thermobaric bombs and several air-to-ground missiles hadn’t managed to disrupt. He shook his head — there was no end to the surprises this base held.
“It’s ringing,” said Devlin McCarthy.
The ringtone stopped and a gruff voice came on the line, “Eto Bondarev, kotoryy zvonit?”
“Major-General Bondarev, please hold. I am putting you through to the Ambassador for the United States in Moscow, Devlin McCarthy,” HOLMES voice announced, like he was just any other embassy official.
For a moment she thought the man had hung up, then she heard him say in English, “Who are you and how did you get this number?”
“Connecting you now,” HOLMES said. “Go ahead please Ambassador.”
Devlin took a deep breath, “Major-General Bondarev, this is Ambassador McCarthy, I hope you have a few minutes to speak.”
There was another silence at the end of the line, then a caustic laugh, “Whoever this is, no, I do not. Thank you and goodbye.”
Devlin jumped in as soon as she heard his tone of dismissal, “Yevgeny, I’m the grandmother of your child. The child you had with my daughter, Cindy?” Devlin heard a voice in the background and Bondarev barked at them. She had no doubt they were being told to shut up.
“Cindy McCarthy is your daughter?” he asked.
“Yes Major-General, you are the father of my grandchild, Angela.”
“I know my child’s name. Why are you calling, has something happened to the child?” he asked.