When they reached the pile of brush, they stopped.
"It's in there," Carter said.
"Pull it out," Hansen ordered, poking the gun barrel in Carter's back.
Carter moved forward, shoved some of the brush away, and pulled the case out, swinging it around with all his might, just catching the end of the gun barrel.
The rifle went off, the bullet crashing harmlessly through the branches. In the next instant Carter dropped the carrying case and yanked the rifle out of Hansen's grasp. He poked the barrel in Hansen's chest, shoving the man backward.
"Do you know what makes me mad, Chuck?" Carter said savagely. "It's little men with big chips on their shoulders who go around poking guns into people's backs."
Carter jammed the barrel into Hansen's chest again, then tossed the gun aside.
"It's just you and me now, Chuck. For some reason you've wanted a piece of me from the moment we met. Now's your big chance."
"This is just an exercise, for crissakes," Hansen said warily, backing up.
"It slipped your mind when we were back at the greenhouse," Carter said, advancing.
"Shit," Hansen said, feinting to the left.
Carter was waiting for him as the Navy man swung around with a roundhouse right. Carter ducked under it and planted a neat, short-armed punch to the nose. Hansen's head snapped back with the totally unexpected blow and he sat down heavily.
Carter stepped back and waited for the man. A small trickle of blood seeped from Hansen's nose as he got to his feet and looked at Carter with new respect.
"Who the hell are you?"
Carter shrugged. "All I can tell you is that we're on the same side. We're fighting the same enemy."
"I could pull out a gun right now and shoot you," Hansen said.
"If you tried that, I'd have to assume you were working for the opposition. And in that case I would be forced to kill you before your hand touched your weapon."
Hansen looked at him for a long time. Very carefully he reached up, unbuttoned his coat, and with both hands, opened it wide to show that he was not armed. "No gun."
Carter turned slightly so that Hansen could see his right hand as he slipped his stiletto back into its chamois sheath.
Hansen's eyes widened. "I just wanted to know who you were, Carter, that's all."
Carter looked at him for a long time. He finally nodded. "You almost found out."
It was midnight by the time they were cleaned up and they all met back at the greenhouse planning center. Barber wanted to know what had gone on out in the orchard, but Carter refused to say anything.
Hansen came in, a contrite expression on his face, "I'll get a ride back into town first thing in the morning."
"Why is that?" Carter asked, looking up from the computer screen. "Are you quitting?"
"I…" Hansen said, shaking his head, confused. "I didn't think…"
"Get over here," Carter said. "We're trying to figure out this planning program of yours. If we're all going in together, we'd all better know what's going on."
"Yes, sir," Hansen snapped, and he hurried forward.
Barber looked from Carter to Hansen and back again, his mouth half open.
"The program is actually Ed Forester's, but we've gone together on the format and input," Hansen began.
"Chuck is the expert on the Soviet navy — I'm the computer man," Forester added. "We'll give you our best estimates now, and keep updating them on the run as new data comes our way."
Hansen hit the proper keys and a section of the Russian coast appeared with Svetlaya the town near the bottom and Svetlaya the naval base near the top.
"The naval base is about eight miles north of town itself," Hansen began.
"What do you show between the two?" Carter asked.
"Not much, Mr. Carter."
"There's a fishing village there, about three miles south of the base."
"Are you sure, Nick?" Barber asked.
"Reasonably," Carter said. "It's called Sovetskaya-Senyev. Beyond that, however, I can't tell you much."
Hansen punched in the new data and a small dot appeared south of the naval base with the town's name. "It'll mean we'll have to watch out for their fishing craft when we come in."
"It could also provide us with a good screening cover on the way in and out," Carter said. "If they fish out of there on a regular basis, the Soviet naval radar operators won't get too excited if they see a small boat coming in, on their screens."
"We'll have to land south of the village and walk around it. I'm sure the base security people up there take a very close interest in the territory between the village and their perimeter fences."
"That's up to Mr. Carter, I would suspect," Hansen said.
Barber just looked at him, and then he nodded. "Just making a suggestion."
"We'll play it by ear when we get there," Carter said. "What else have we got?"
Hansen hit another button, and a new diagram came up on the screen. This one showed a more detailed section of the coast in which Svetlaya the base covered most of the screen. An L-shaped breakwater jutted over half a mile out into the Sea of Japan, enclosing a reasonably well-protected harbor for a fair number of naval vessels of all sizes. A broad, very deep canal cut through the southern end of the harbor and ran for over three hundred yards into a man-made lagoon off which were cut the submarine pens, each of which was covered by a conventional, bombproof, reinforced concrete roof. An administration center was directly north, a research area within a separate fence was to the northwest, troop barracks were to the southwest, and just to the north and south, low scrub and light woods. About a mile and a half to the north of the sub pens themselves was a complete MiG base including a pair of two-mile-long paved runways.
"All of this we've gotten from satellites," Hansen said.
"We have no direct on-the-ground intelligence?" Carter asked.
"Not much. And what we have gotten tends to do nothing more than confirm what we've already seen from our eye-in-the-sky birds."
Carter hunched down in front of the screen and studied the sketch. He poked a finger at the coastline itself.
"What about the shore? Sand? Rocks? Cliffs? What?"
"Cliffs to the north, and a short way to the south. Past that, the land comes down to a very rocky coast," Hansen said. "The naval base itself is quite an engineering achievement. It was pretty much blasted out of the rock. The sub pen lagoon was a freshwater lake inland. When they opened up the channel, the lake drained and what they had left was a pool barely twenty feet deep that they had to dredge out."
"It's been there awhile?"
"They started on it a few years before the Second World War, and work really sped up during the war with Nazi POWs. Slave labor. They keep improving the place every year."
"How about security?" Carter asked.
"We can only guess," Hansen replied, "but I would suspect radar, sonar, infrared spotters around the perimeter, sound detectors within a few hundred yards of any fence. And then the human factor."
"What?"
"Foot patrols. Dogs. And the fishing village itself. I imagine they have informers there. Watchers."
"On top of that we have a hostile sea to the east, mountains to the west, a desolate coastline to the north and south, and now it's wintertime," Carter said.
"We couldn't have picked a better time," Barber said.
"I agree," Carter replied. "Their guard will be down compared to what it would be like during the summer." He turned back to Hansen. "How about the Petrograd-class subs themselves?"
"No way of knowing, sir. Not until we get there, because everything is under cover. My best guess would be that the subs would be nearest to the research facility, which would put them on the north side of the pens."