“Leah Anderson.” She stretched her hand across the narrow space and shook Jack’s.
Her hands were soft and warm and felt comforting. Jack held on for a moment longer than etiquette would normally allow.
“What do you do when you’re not sightseeing in Nazi submarines?” Leah asked to cover the awkward moment. She felt it, too.
“If I tell you that…”
Leah held up a palm, “Please don’t say you’ll have to kill me. I’ve been cooped up with navy guys, tech nerds and conspiracy theorists for so long I’m ready to slap someone.”
He awkwardly withdrew his hand and tried to reposition himself on the bunk. As he sat up, the blankets pooled to the floor, leaving him naked apart from his shorts. Of course, they’d removed his wet clothing. He should have thought of that.
“Then I won’t say anything,” promised Jack.
He bent down to pick up the blankets so he could at least make himself decent. But it was too late. Her steel-blue eyes were already raking over his well-muscled torso and powerful shoulders before widening at the sight of the collection of ropey knife scars and puckered bullet wounds that formed a graphic representation of his life as a covert ops soldier. She wouldn’t be the first woman to sight his battle scars and make a run for it.
But she surprised him.
“Geez, what happened to the other guy?” she asked, tucking a strand of her blonde hair behind her ear.
Despite being half naked and in a closed in space with a woman who’d just had a near death experience, Jack Coulson laughed. It felt good, too. He couldn’t remember the last time something actually made him laugh.
“Glad we got that out of the way,” he said as he wrapped the blanket around himself. “Speaking of other guys, has anyone mentioned the guy I was on the sub with?” he asked.
“U-Boat. We are on a sub. You were on a U-Boat and that’s all anyone is talking about right now. Quite the grand entrance from what I saw before your U-Boat threw me into the water.”
“Sorry about that. We had no idea…” Jack looked sheepishly at Leah.
“Anyway, if that’s not enough of a talking point, apparently your buddy Sam discovered something on board the U-Boat while you were playing Baywatch.”
“Found something?” Jack sat bolt upright.
“I’ve no idea what, but it’s given my two scientists a hard-on like I never thought possible. They haven’t even been in to see how I’m doing. So whatever it is you two guys have in that U-Boat, it must be absolutely mind blowing.”
A pair of coveralls had been left on the end of the bunk for Jack, as he threaded his limbs through them he noticed an evacuation diagram on the wall opposite. He took a moment to commit the sub layout to memory, an instinctive impulse for a man in Jack’s profession. He wasn’t even fully conscious that he’d done it, the habit was so in-built.
Jack shook his head in disbelief. He couldn’t imagine the ham-fisted, red headed giant finding his own ass without a map, least of all something that got a couple of nerdy looking scientists all worked up.
Chapter 27
Karl Muller was built like a Russian war monument. He had a head like a cinder block mounted atop impossibly broad shoulders and crowned with a purposeful blonde buzz cut. He cut a fearful and imposing figure, even in the vastness of the Antarctic ice shelf. In fact, Muller made a hell of an impression wherever he found himself deployed. While the men he served with used their downtime to Skype with family or girlfriends back home, or just watch online porn, Muller spent his time in the gym, pumping iron. Lots of iron, in his case, and beating sparring partners to the canvas in brutal and bloody bouts of hand-to-hand combat. At 6 feet 5 inches tall and a well-muscled 230 pounds, he’d yet to find a sparring partner who could last a single round.
Muller had been born into The Brotherhood. He wasn’t a paid mercenary like many of the other soldiers who served the cause. Money didn’t mean much to Muller. All he wanted was to serve the Reich and see the pathetic, liberal world he despised bow before the new order. Standartenführer Muller, they would call him and that would be just the start of his rise through the ranks of the new Reich.
For ten years, at The Brotherhood’s behest, he’d served in the German army to learn the skills and tactics of a Special Forces soldier in the Kommando Spezialkräfte or KSK. Having spent much of his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the KSK before being given his own command within The Brotherhood, Muller was struggling to come to terms with the cold, harsh environment of the Antarctic. There was a time when he thought the scorching and barren deserts were hell on earth. Now he was finding out what hell was really like.
Weapons seized and became inoperable. Batteries barely functioned out in the open, so radio communications were unreliable. Aircraft couldn’t fly most of the time and even if they were able to de-ice their wings for take-off, the grease that coated vital mechanicals like landing gear and flaps would freeze solid, leaving the aircraft icebound. Their flight from Belgrano II to the drop zone had been delayed due to the blizzard, compromising the mission. But he’d known better than to try to tell Barnes about the unique dangers of Antarctic flight. That man was focused on one thing only and that was the U-Boat.
His years in the stinking desert fighting a bunch of camel humpers hadn’t prepared him for this glacial mission. And who knew the sub was going to be where it was, in full view of their enemy’s snooping satellites. They’d been waiting for 70 years for it to reappear, he’d been told and they’d expected it to return to the U-Boat bunker where they knew it had docked after the long and silent journey from Argentina. Something had gone wrong, but it wasn’t his job to work out what that might have been. His mission was to find and secure the sub at any cost. And then make sure the contents of the sub remained secret. No survivors. No witnesses.
As he and his team trudged through the crisp, powdered snow that covered the ice, a hellish wind tore at them like an invisible fist trying to drive them back. Progress was slow but they were making ground toward where he hoped to find the entrance to the bunker he’d circled on the map after receiving the coordinates from Barnes. Compasses were useless so close to the magnetic South Pole, so Muller was forced to rely on a GPS to navigate through the near zero visibility of the blizzard. He hoped like hell the damned batteries handled the cold better than he did.
Chapter 28
“What do you mean the navy doesn’t know where their subs are?” Preston was horrorstruck at the idea that the navy had nuclear weapons scattered around the globe like forgotten toys and nobody knew where they were. Not even Naval Command.
“Our subs run silent and deep during their patrols. Only the captains of these boats know their patrol area, which is highly classified. The Ohio class subs deployed with ballistic missile launch capability but the attack subs are deployed with Tomahawk cruise missiles and have both conventional and nuclear warheads,” DIA Director George Turner explained. “And one surgical strike with a nuclear tipped Tomahawk is all we need.”
Preston was only an Assistant Director and, worse, An AD in charge of SIGINT or Signals Intelligence. Turner didn’t think he had a right to know about the nation’s nuclear weapons capability in any detail, but the scenario unfolding before them called for extraordinary measures. The fact that The President had authorized a nuclear strike only served to confirm the true horror of the consequences should they fail.