The force of the huge, unbalanced weight heaved Ray Schaeffer forward, and he pitched heavily into the field, breaking his fall with his right fist at the last second. They had gone only forty yards, and Rick climbed to his feet and made two owl-calls into the night. They both heard the Chief answer, “What’s up?”
“Bring the clothes bag, will you. I’ll talk you in…Ray, we gotta stop assing around here like a coupla second-class mud wrestlers…gotta get our stuff off before it gets torn and filthy — that means trousers, shirts, sweaters, and parkas. We can get back in the ship looking a bit wet, but if we stay dressed we’re gonna look like a coupla walking shitheaps on the upper deck. We can’t risk it…We’ll finish this in shorts and sneakers.”
“You mean I’m about to contract pneumonia and a hernia,” said Ray. “Sweet.” He climbed back to his feet and stripped down to his undergarments and stuffed them into Fred’s plastic black garbage bag. And then he grasped the handle on the canister once more, and he and Rick Hunter set off again in driving rain, clad only in their shorts and sneakers. Course 130. The temperature had dropped to 37 degrees Fahrenheit. In the rain and wind, it felt closer to freezing. Neither SEAL mentioned the cold. They just kept moving forward, toward the three-foot-high wall.
After sixty more paces they changed sides. Ray was sweating and shivering at the same time. The cold water streamed down his body, and his left arm was throbbing. He turned to try and grab the handle with two hands, but as he twisted he fell forward into the mud. The canister came down heavily on the back of his thigh, shoving his knee into a sharp flint.
He heard Rick Hunter mutter “Jesus” and felt the great weight move off his leg as the Lieutenant Commander, with an outrageous display of strength, pulled the heavy metal cylinder off him.
“You okay, Ray?”
“Yup. Fine. Just lemme get a grip.”
He struggled to his feet, feeling the warm blood streaming down his leg, feeling the rain trying to wash it away. He hoped the cut was not deep, but there was no time to find out. He grabbed the handle again with his left hand and walked forward, counting the strides as he went. He knew the wall must be close, and he hauled at the canister with every ounce of his strength, trying to ignore the pain in his arm, to dig deep within himself, as he had done so often before, when the chips were down. He did not dare to question whether he could repeat this two more times. He had to repeat it. In the blinding rain, he whispered, “Please, please don’t let me stop.”
“Here’s the wall, Ray.” The welcome words were whipped away by the wind. And then Rick Hunter said, “Okay, let’s rest for one minute, then we’ll get this baby on top of the stones, and drag it down the other side.” Chief Cernic materialized out of the darkness and announced he was heading back into the middle of the field, where the two remaining canisters rested in the mud.
Sixty seconds later, Ray Schaeffer dragged himself over the wall, and he and the big SEAL leader maneuvered themselves into position. Then they carried the canister forward, into the trees, where they lowered it to the ground by the green chemical marker the Chief had left.
The walk back, in the near-freezing rain and twenty-knot southwest wind off the Baltic, was not much short of paradise. Relieved of their heavy burden, the two SEALs marched along, smacking their feet into the mud. After three hundred paces they called out Fred’s name. Just out of sight on the right they heard the Chief snap, “Over here.”
Rick Hunter was concerned at the distance of separation, and he decided they should carry the last two canisters in fifty paces at a time, going back for the third one each time. “That way we get a rest between the drives, and it keeps Fred up close in case we need help.”
It was a psychological masterstroke. Ray Schaeffer felt he could handle fifty paces if he could just get a rest in between, and with a renewed vigor he picked up the new handle, this time with his right hand, and walked forward into the dark. He counted off the first twenty-five paces before the pain began to set in, right across his forearm. Even Rick Hunter was feeling the strain. And the ground seemed to grow more waterlogged by the minute. First Ray went down, then Rick, then Ray twice more. Rick’s knee was cut almost as badly as Ray’s.
But the SEAL code was never broken. Neither of them uttered one word of complaint. When they fell, they got up again. When the pain was too great, they ignored it and walked forward. When Ray felt he could go no farther, he drove on, assuming that he would either make it or die out here in this horrific Russian farmland.
It took one more hour. And it was a truly terrible hour. No ordinary man could have withstood it. The two SEALs, covered in mud, were almost at the end of their tether. Shivering violently, sweat pouring down their chests, they were exhausted by their titanic efforts carrying one-third of a ton across a saturated field, by hand. Neither man had much left.
But they had reached the wall, and now Chief Cernic was stripped for action down to his shorts and sneakers, trembling in the freezing rain, helping to manhandle the two final canisters over the wall. The three half-dragged, half-lifted them over to the trees, where Lieutenant Ray Schaeffer collapsed on the wet leaves of the woodland.
“Get him up, sir,” snapped the veteran Chief. “Get him up, sir…he’ll stiffen up in two minutes. Get the jackets out and get him upright.”
They pulled the shattered SEAL to his feet, and Rick Hunter wrapped one coat around Ray’s shoulders. The Chief came up with a small flask of brandy, and tipped it between Lieutenant Schaeffer’s lips. The liquid burned its way through the youngest SEAL’s throat and worked its magic. Ray came around, shook his head, and said, “Christ, guys, I’m really sorry. I’m okay. Just lemme sit here for a minute…”
“Keep moving, sir, straightway,” said Fred Cernic, who knew imminent hypothermia when he saw it. “And keep talking…don’t even think of stopping…keep moving.”
He moved to the first canister and opened it. Bull’s-eye. The first things he felt, right on top, were two shovels, and a flashlight. He grabbed them and shut the metal door, handed one to Rick and said, “Pick a spot and let’s start digging…what do you say, Ray?”
“That’s it, Chief…I’ll help in a minute. Just gimme a minute.”
Fred and Rick walked deeper into the wood, using the flashlight sparingly, looking for a spot in the undergrowth. The Chief picked one out under a loose straggling bush. “Let’s pull that out and bury them underneath, then stick the bush back in.”
“Good call, Fred. Let’s go.”
They pushed through the branches, ignoring the scratches and slammed their shovels into the area around the root, loosening the earth. Then they grabbed the stem and heaved, and the entire bush came out in one rush. They did not stop to discuss the matter. They just started to did three trenches, each one six feet long, four feet wide, and three deep, about the size of a well-proportioned grave.
Fred Cernic was tough. He was from New Jersey, and he knew how to dig. But he had never seen anyone dig quite like the country boy from Kentucky who worked beside him. Rick Hunter got into a rhythm, cleaving the shovel into the ground and lifting out a mound of wet earth with every stroke. Fred reckoned he could pull out ten such shovels without a break. Rick Hunter could do thirty.