He swung his machine pistol around onto Juan.
“Okay. Okay. I’ll help. Just don’t shoot him. Alright?” Sam pleaded.
“That’s better.” Muller lowered his barrel.
Chapter 51
The door to Assistant Director Henry Preston’s office burst open.
“What the—”
“Sorry, sir, but you said you wanted to know as soon as we had some comms links operational,” the harried assistant blurted before Preston could yell at him. Again. The kid looked like he should be at a Justin Bieber concert, not acting as a liaison between the National Security Agency and the other military branches. Then again, everyone looked young to Preston these days.
“Well?”
“They’ve rerouted a lot of the satellite traffic through other stations that were on ‘hot standby’ but still nothing from the Barracuda or from Jack Coulson.”
“Who the hell is Jack Coulson?”
“They haven’t told you?” The assistant was unsure how to proceed. Maybe he’d said too much?
“Son, this is the military. Nobody tells anybody squat. Now who the hell is Coulson?”
“He’s a covert operative. He was at Pine Gap to be briefed when it got hit. They managed to escape and were air-dropped onto the Ronne Ice Shelf.”
“They?”
“There were two of them. The other guy is a navy enlisted man. They were sent on a search, find and secure mission after the U-Boat showed up on the surveillance images. Are you sure they didn’t tell you, sir?”
Preston’s cheeks flamed red.
“I think I’d remember if they told me Jason fucking Bourne and a deck ape were air-dropped onto the goddamn ice pack!”
Henry Preston took a deep lungful of air and counted to ten. He felt calmer straight away. That anger management therapy really did work, although Preston had a sneaking suspicion he was supposed to do his breathing exercises before screaming his head off.
“What do you want me to do, sir?” the confused assistant asked timidly.
“Get me everything you can on this… this Coulson and the navy guy.”
“Krupsky, sir. His name is Sam Krupsky.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what his name is. Just get me everything you can find and keep monitoring the entire region for traffic.”
“What kind of traffic, sir?”
“All of it! If two whales start humping and we pick it up on sonar, I want to know about it. Got it?”
“Sir.” The door slammed shut again.
Preston massaged his temples and squeezed his eyes shut. “The government’s got your back Coulson.”
An image of the Tomahawk missile cruising over the sea bound for the ice pack with an armed nuclear warhead flashed through his mind.
“Or not.”
Chapter 52
“We have a new mission,” Jack quietly addressed the four surviving crew of the Barracuda. Captain Jameson, the XO, Durand and the two civilian scientists — Juan and Dave, all looked to Jack as their leader.
Even Sam listened intently as Coulson spoke.
They were all still assembled on the wet-dock while Muller and Leah argued. They couldn’t hear what the argument was about and they were speaking German anyway, but the word Glocke kept coming up. They appeared to be arguing about what to do with the bell shaped device they’d earlier unloaded from the U-Boat.
“We have to destroy that thing. No matter what the cost. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
They all nodded solemnly.
“If we take what I read in the U-2532 log, factor in these neo Nazi commandoes and consider where you found the U-Boat and its condition, then we have to assume, as crazy as it sounds, that this thing really does work and can, somehow, move through time,” Durand concluded.
He continued, “And if there’s only a small chance they could use it to go back in time and change the outcome of the war, then we have no option but to stop them, right here and right now. If they succeed, a Nazi ruled world would be…” He couldn’t find the words.
“Unthinkable.” Sam summed it up in just one.
“Could they really win, though?” asked Jameson.
“They were already so close,” Durand explained, “that it wouldn’t take much, in time travel terms, to change the world as we know it.”
“Man, there was a time I would have thought it was cool to hear those words in the same sentence,” Juan lamented. After being so close to so much death and mayhem, Juan wasn’t as enthusiastic about the theory of time travel as he once had been.
“Seriously,” Durand went on, “all they would have to do is start building these Type XXI U-Boats earlier and they would control the seas for one thing. Imagine if they produced more V2 rockets or even larger ballistic missiles to strike New York or Moscow. I don’t even want to think about how quickly a Nazi atomic bomb on one of those things might have turned the tide against us.”
Silence.
“Okay, everyone understand what’s at stake here?” Jack asked all five of them.
To a man, they nodded gravely.
“But how?” Dave spoke up at last and asked the obvious question.
“Bluey, are you ready to share your special skills with the rest of the class?”
“I think it’s time. You two,” he directed his attention to Durand and Jameson, “you said you found some crates of munitions. What were they and more importantly, where were they?”
“Over there, in some kind of grotto at the end of the dock. You can’t see it from here because the generators are in front of the entrance.” Durand pointed past the rusted shells of the disused generators. “I can read German but the stenciling on the crates has deteriorated pretty badly. I couldn’t really read much of it.”
“Well, what could you read,” asked Sam impatiently.
Jameson and Durand shared a look and shrugged.
“Panz… something or other, I think it might have said,” Jameson offered, “but I don’t think that’s right. Even I know Panzer is a tank and there sure as hell aren’t any tanks down here.”
“Panzerfaust? Could that have said Panzerfaust?”
Both men shrugged uncertainly. Durand stroked his chin, “Maybe.”
“Is that good?” Jack asked Sam. He had no idea what the big man had in mind.
“Good if they still work. We’re all dead if they don’t.”
“Captain, do you still have the cutters?” Sam asked Jameson. He nodded.
“Okay, I need to be cut loose so I can run like hell to the generators. To do that, I need a diversion. The kind of trouble only you can make, Jack. You haven’t pissed anyone off badly for, what, twenty minutes? You must be going stir crazy by now, right?”
“It’s like you read my mind, Bluey.”
Jack turned to face Muller and Leah.
“Hey Muller, are you telling your sister how you took me down with one punch? Did you happen to mention I was at gunpoint and you sucker punched me?”
“Why don’t you shut-the-fuck-up?”
“You’re right. I’ll shut up now. Unarmed and toe to toe, you wouldn’t last two rounds with me, anyway. You’re just a big kraut cheater. If you were as good as you thought you were, you might win in a fair fight.”