As he counted silently to himself he followed the length of electrical cable from the lights and traced it to its power source. The thick cable looped its way up the sail and over the top. There was no way he’d make it up the sail without taking a bullet. Or three. He’d have to unplug it at the other end, which meant covering the open deck between the cover of the sail and the light array.
Still he maintained the count in his head. Time was running short. It was now or never.
Launching himself in to the open, he had faith that Jack would see him and try to cover him as he dove for the power cable. He heard Coulson’s return fire. The man had his back.
Sparks flew in every direction as the deck came alive with automatic rounds hitting the steel. Still he powered on, keeping low and zig zagging to avoid becoming an easy target for the unseen shooters in the shadows.
With a final turn of speed, he reached the light assembly, grabbed the power cable and yanked it with all his might.
The entire bunker was instantly plunged into darkness.
Still Sam continued to count, his lips moving silently as he did so.
Jack’s lips weren’t moving. His mental clock kept time like a metronome. Tick tock… tick tock. Without even thinking about it, he knew how many seconds had elapsed and how long before Sam would trigger the next part of the plan. Jack pulled the night vision goggles over his eyes and powered them up.
Smoothly and quietly, he swapped out his near empty magazine for a fresh thirty round mag and flicked the fire mode selector from automatic to semi-automatic, allowing him one shot per trigger pull.
All around, he could see the others slipping their night vision into place. He knew they could see him, but for the moment that didn’t matter. All he had to do was commit the locations of the other shooters to memory, which he did before lowering himself back down into the drain channel. Jack slowly pushed the night vision rig up on top of his head again and closed his eyes for a moment.
Three.
Two.
One.
He stood, in full view of the entire contingent of armed soldiers and presented himself as a perfect target. They thought he couldn’t see them. They were wrong.
The lights blazed to full brightness as Sam, right on cue, plugged the power back on and lit them up.
Screams of agony erupted from all around the cavern. The shooters were being painfully blinded by the powerful floodlights that were magnified a thousand times by their night vision equipment. They tore the goggles from their head, but it was too late to do them any good. The effect would only last a short while, but that’s all the time Jack needed.
One by one Jack started to pick them off. Not in a Hollywood movie style blaze of gunfire that would have emptied his clip in seconds.
Just one round per man fired with near surgical precision at the positions he locked away in his memory.
With each shot, one man went down and Jack’s spent brass kicked out of the ejection port, ringing as it hit the cold concrete floor.
Chapter 39
The pounding against the lead lined bulkhead hatch continued relentlessly. Sohler imagined the two grease covered, stockily built engineers working in tandem with sledgehammers like railway men hammering spikes in a practiced cadence. They would have used the boats one and only cutting torch to cut through the hatch if Sohler hadn’t commandeered it and locked it, along with himself, inside The Bell’s compartment.
Sohler was a sailor. A U-Boot Kapitänleutnant and a damned good one. He knew the sea, he knew submarines and he knew how to sink enemy ships with his torpedoes.
He wasn’t an atomic scientist but he’d heard enough rumors about the work of Werner Heisenberg to be afraid. Nobody should possess a weapon of such devastating destructive power, especially one that even the scientists who built it couldn’t predict its true power or the lasting effects of an atomic detonation. If the stories he’d heard about the atomic weapons tests were only half true, these weapons had the potential to turn Europe into a nightmarish wasteland. He wouldn’t let his family live or die like that.
The Allied and Norwegian resistance operation in Telemark and the subsequent sabotage of the ‘SF Hydro’, the Norwegian ferry transporting the last of Germany’s heavy water supply and manufacturing equipment, was a grim reminder for Sohler. It wasn’t just about building a better bomb. There was more to the atomic weapon project than that, and it made Sohler uneasy. His moral compass faltered between his patriotic duty as a Nazi U-Boot Kapitänleutnant and his moral objection to the use of these terrible atomic weapons that had been designed to destroy entire cities inhabited by innocent people.
If the Norwegian resistance were willing to undertake such a daring raid and sacrifice the lives of their own civilians to sink the heavy water consignment, thwarting one of Germany’s most promising atomic programs, then perhaps preventing this Bell weapon from being used was worth his own personal sacrifice. He only hoped his wife and son would one day understand that he wasn’t a traitor, no matter how history portrayed him.
These thoughts fueled his frantic efforts to weld shut the hatch before he set the timers on the scuttling charges he had strategically placed around the compartment. Even if they weren’t enough to destroy the device, they would surely breach the pressure hull and flood the compartment. Although sealed, the compartment would hold enough water to take the boat all the way to the bottom of the sea under the Antarctic ice shelf where it would never be found.
There was no way they could stop him.
Kammler would either go down with the boat and die quickly in the frigid depths or he would die slowly, trapped in an ice bound concrete bunker. Either way, Sohler didn’t care, so long as Kammler and his hideous ideas died.
Before he could finish welding the hatch, the two halves of the machine began to rotate in opposite directions on their axis and the entire room filled with an unnatural and eerie blue light.
“Nein!” Sohler screamed, scrambling to set the timers on the explosives.
He was too late.
Chapter 40
“The shooting’s stopped,” Juan whispered weakly. When he’d signed up for adventures in the Antarctic, he had something else in mind. Spectacular scenery, uncharted subpolar oceans, days that lasted months.
Grenades exploding and being shot at with automatic weapons wasn’t featured in the recruitment brochure.
They’d all regrouped in the control room for no other reason that they felt more at home there and it was the compartment that could be most easily sealed off from outside forces if the need arose.
To keep his mind off the sound of bullets ricocheting off the hull, the XO, Durand had resumed reading the former U-Boat captain’s log.
“He thinks it’s an atomic bomb,” he blurted out as soon as he’d translated another page of the U-Boat log.
“I thought the Nazi’s never developed an atomic bomb,” said Dave.
“Of course they did!” shrieked Juan, his eyes sparkling with excitement. “Haven’t you ever wondered why the American Manhattan project wasn’t able to deliver its so called ‘gadget’ on Hiroshima until after the German surrender? The Germans already had the technology. Our guys had been working for years to find the right way to detonate the bomb, but they never figured it out. We captured the top Nazi atomic guys in Europe after the surrender and secretly brought them back to the States to finish off the Manhattan project.”