Muzik held up a map in a plastic case. “Got it. Hopefully we’ll see you in two days. Just monitor your secure radio. Thanks for everything.” Muzik hopped out and took the driver’s seat.
“Right. Good luck.”
Fifteen minutes later they reached Russia, but this area was so sparsely populated there wasn’t even a sign, just a tumbledown shack that looked like it had last been used during the First Cold War. Twilight deepened but Muzik declined to turn on the lights until they broke out of the trees and onto a marginally paved road.
“Okay, it’s about twenty kilometers to Elisenvaara, then another twenty to Kurkiyeki. From there we just have to find the inlet.”
An hour of slow travel later – the road was terrible, and Muzik did not want to jostle the submersible too badly – they arrived at the fishing village they sought. Only a couple of lights burned in what looked to be a public house, and they quickly passed through, ignoring the few witnesses in the dark, driving out of town to the southwest. Two minutes later Repeth directed them onto another tiny road and into some heavy woods.
“This one should run right across a low bridge a long ways from any habitation.” She checked the satellite imagery in her hand with her dim flashlight once more. “Just up a couple of minutes.”
Soon they broke out of the trees and saw the bridge they expected in front of them. Pulling carefully off the road, they got out in the dim light of the false sunset and examined the lay of the land.
“Damn. Bank’s too steep. There’s no way we can back this trailer down it.”
Muzik looked at the water, the sheer five-meter drop-off, then at the truck. “We winch it down. It only weighs a ton or so. Then we float it out a bit, ditch the trailer, hide the truck and swim back out to it.”
“All right. Deflate the hide frame.” Soon they had the trailer back up to the edge of the short embankment and carefully slid the thing off the trailer and down to the water’s edge. At the bottom, they grasped the handles, two on a side, and braced their feet. “Ready? One, two, three.”
Laminated bones and polymerized muscles creaking, they lifted the micro-sub and carried it heavily into a meter of water or so, feet sinking a foot into the soft lake bed, then set it down and slid it further out until it floated.
“No current. It should be fine.” They scrambled up the bank muddy and dripping, and then detached the trailer. Carrying it fifty meters down the shore on the other side of the bridge, they lifted it together and launched it as far as they can to fall into the water. Fortunately, it was deep enough to cover the flat shallow thing.
Next the SUV itself went into the woods, with the boat tarps covering it first, then some cut branches. Hopefully no hunter or fisherman would stumble across it in the next days. Worst case scenario, if it was stolen or damaged they could hoof it back across the Finnish border to the cabin.
Returning to the bridge, they suddenly stopped short. A man stood upon it with a fishing pole and a tackle box, looking the other direction in the dim light.
Staring at the sub.
“How’s your Russian?” Repeth whispered.
“Decent, actually.”
She looked at Muzik in surprise.
“What, you think ‘Muzik’ is a good English name like yours? Grandpa came from Slovakia after the war. He made us learn Slovak and Russian.”
“All yours, then.”
“For what?”
“We can’t let him report this.”
“I’m not going to kill him, but if we knock him out, he’ll inform the police and they will find the SUV and the trailer. Not to mention he’ll tell them about the sub.”
“Dammit.” Repeth thought for a moment, hissed and pointed. “Do something. He’s going down to get a closer look.”
Muzik swore in response, then stood up and walked toward the bridge on the road. Once on the low bridge, he called out something Repeth could not make out. She crept up along the road’s embankment, staying out of sight.
Switching her vision on her left, cybernetic eye to infrared, she watched and listened as Muzik held a long conversation, not understanding a word. After almost ten minutes of tension, the two men shook hands and the local walked away down the road to the west.
Moments later, Muzik explained as they waded to the submersible and pushed it farther out into the water. “Name’s Rasmus. His Russian was worse than mine. I got him to admit he was a Finn living here illegally. I think he’s probably wanted in Finland.”
“Why won’t he report what he saw?”
“I gave him the cash I had on me, and promised him more when we return.”
Repeth climbed carefully through the narrow hatch. “I hope that’s enough incentive. There’s a lot that can go wrong.”
“We’ll worry about that when we get back. Five-meter targets.” He climbed in after her and sealed the hatch. “I’ll drive first, okay boss?”
“Sure.” Repeth stripped off her civilian clothes in the back as Muzik settled in to the control cockpit in front, powering up the vehicle.
Soon ghostly lights glowed – screens with readouts and a few old-fashioned gauges, and a low hum filled the cylinder as the electric motor began to push them through the shallow water. An inertial navigation system provided them with reasonably good direction, especially at the start of their journey. Such devices grew progressively less accurate if not updated with a solid positional reading, but all this had to do was get them to within sight of the lights of Salmi and they could pilot in manually from there.
Once she had changed into her skinsuit, Repeth lay down on the one narrow bunk to sleep. Waking up several hours later, she used the tiny facility, ate and drank, and switched positions with Muzik, squeezing past him on one side of the seat as he exited the other.
“We’re running fine at one meter depth, with at least a hundred meters under the keel,” Muzik reported as he changed his clothes. “Inertial says we’re well out into Lake Ladoga, and it’s the middle of the night, so now would be a good time to run up the snorkel and use the generator. Sonar shows nobody around.”
“Right.” They had a compact diesel generator to recharge the batteries, but of course that needed air and a place to put the exhaust gases. A touch of another control deployed the dual pipe arrangement and soon the generator rumbled. It should be nearly silent on the surface, with just a ten-centimeter conduit poking up.
An hour of this and the batteries were full again. By that time the sun was starting to come up, around three in the morning.
By midday they had arrived outside Salmi harbor, and slowly, carefully bottomed the craft in fifty meters of water.
“This would have been a lot easier with more darkness,” Repeth grumbled.
Muzik shook his head. “Yes, but the lake starts icing up by September and doesn’t thaw until May. They keep the harbors and some channels open with icebreakers, but that would have made for worse problems than this. Besides, we can’t let the program go on that long. It’s bad enough that Russia has a puppet government at the top. What if they have time to manufacture thousands of Shadow Men – and Women I suppose – to bird-dog every important official?”
“I know that. Just venting. What else is there to do?” The lights were low to conserve power and there was no heater so the air was chilly.
“You could read.” Muzik waved an old Kindle at her. “Got the latest Star Force book downloaded just before we left.”
“What’s that, #23 now?”
“Yeah. Good stuff.”
Repeth snorted. “Who needs science fiction when the aliens really are invading?”
“Hey, everyone needs an escape,” he replied defensively. “I got a few hundred books on here. I’m sure you can find something you like.”
“No, you go on,” she said. “I’ll just sleep.”
Muzik grunted. That was the last thing she heard before she nodded off.
-14-
When the sun went down again they let go the anchor and allowed the cr
aft to rise upward to surface. In the dimness the tiny hatch was unnoticeable, barely protruding from the still waters of the lake. Armored and kitted out completely, they deployed fitted floats to allow them to swim to shore while snorkeling. Several plans existed for extraction; they hoped one would work.
As the craft settled below the surface on its bottom tether, the two ungainly figures finned toward shore, powerful cybernetic legs pushing them in a reasonable facsimile of swimming while the floats kept them from sinking. A few minutes later they climbed onto the shore next to a large drainage pipe, about two meters across.
Tight security in a military base was almost always a misnomer. As a military police specialist, Repeth knew how difficult it was to secure a large base, especially one that included shoreline and was built on the bones of an old civilian town. Almost by definition there were holes aplenty, and who better than a cop to identify them?
And she had, studying intelligence reports and overhead imagery in normal photographs, IR, radar, and other even more exotic spectra. She probably knew more about the base than its owners, especially regarding its underground.
With carbon-fiber prybars strong enough to accept cybernetic pressure without bending, the two quietly broke the pins that held the rusty grate that covered the outflow.
“Wait,” Muzik said before Repeth pulled it off. He reached carefully inside, lifting a dirty, innocuous-looking wire with a fingertip. “Alarm.”
“Got it.” Flipping up her HUD faceplate, she quickly ran a bypass, blessing the intense Agency training of the past few months. Then she picked up the three-hundred-kilo barrier to set it carefully aside.
In they went.
Faceplates down and HUDs up, the IR lamps on their foreheads illuminated the tunnel like miners’ lanterns. High-frequency sonar projected from their suits looked ahead like bat vision, and the computers in their suits built pictures for them from all available data. Such active ranging carried with it a small risk, believed by the Agency people to be acceptable.
Acceptable to an analyst is always a bit different from acceptable in the field, when your butt is on the line, Repeth thought.
“Motion sensor,” Muzik called at about the same time that Repeth recognized it for herself. The distinctive box, set high in a corner to cover that section of tunnel, also gave off continuous sonic pings, on a different frequency from their own. But while the detector could only receive its own wavelength, their sonar could see in a much wider range.
And do much more.
“Got the freq? Turn on your masking,” Muzik breathed into his suitcomm, and selected a function on his sonar, as did Repeth.
Their computerized emitters had analyzed the detector’s frequency and characteristics, and now blasted out a tone on the same wavelength that overwhelmed the sensitive sonic receiver on the detector with noise several orders of magnitude more powerful. Since it was set to analyze minute Doppler shifts from moving objects, this effectively deafened it.
The two infiltrators walked directly past the device, confident that it could not see or hear them, and it was too unsophisticated to report an anomaly like something screaming in its “ear”.
They handled two more such detectors in the same manner before the reached their destination, an undistinguished point on the tunnel map. “Now it gets interesting,” Muzik mumbled.
Repeth replied, “You know, it occurs to me that the Agency could have used non-Eden nanocommandos and gotten this far, and then just planted one hell of a big bomb.”
“Yeah, I thought of that too…I even asked about it. Obviously they think retrieving the data is worth risking our very expensive selves, and we can’t be sure it would be destroyed. And then there’s the collateral damage.”
“No innocent lives, I know. I feel the same way, but the coldly rational part of me believes it might be worth it.”
“Always easier to think that way when the pucker factor rises.” he paused. “There might be another reason.” Muzik stared at her imperturbably, faceless in his armor.
“You think they are trying to get rid of us again?”
Even through the face shield she could sense his surprise. “Not that at all. I just bet there’s a lot of folks that would love to see us go up against Shadow Men for real. You don’t think these suits are wired to record everything? Performance intel might be secondary, but you know analysts.”
She grunted, not happy with Muzik’s theory. “Well, let’s get to it.”
“Yeah. Turn around.”
Muzik unclipped the lightweight back-rack she had been fitted with, much smaller and slimmer than the Space Marine model on which it was based. Instead of bulky weapons, it held EMP grenades and breaching charges. He took off several of the latter, sticking them to the ceiling in a circular arrangement guaranteed to open a hole all the way through to the room above. Wiring them together, he attached a radio detonator.
“Next one’s up here,” Muzik led them another hundred meters along the pipe to an intersection. There he tested the detonator they had set for function, well away from any mistake. His handheld showed ready, in the green.
He turned to let Repeth remove his charges from his back-rack and do the same.
Once she had emplaced the second detonator, with a different encryption code, they moved carefully toward their egress point. Once there, she tested the detonator function, then clipped it to her armor within easy reach. Now they had two sets of explosives ready to provide surprise access from above to the underground.
Repeth looked around. They stood in a large cistern that brought many smaller feeds together into one location before exiting through the pipe they had entered and to the lake. Several of them drizzled small amounts of water, condensation or drainage seeping though the ground. No rain had fallen for some days, and none was expected.
A rusty ladder led up to a hatch in to top. Muzik eyed it, then reached up to grasp a rung, and set a foot on another. Slowly he put his full weight on the lower one, then began climbing.
The third snapped under his foot.
He skipped that one, climbing up father, gingerly testing each. The seventh also broke, then the eighth.
“I’m too heavy,” he said, climbing back down. “Plan B.”
“Right.” Repeth eyed the hatch ten meters up. “I’m going to jump and try to grab the rim up there. If I can, I’ll attach a cable and you can climb it. Catch me if I fall, will you?”
“Right.”
Catching her was not necessary to avoid injury, but noise. She could probably rebound and land on her feet without difficulty, but it might be quite loud. Muzik could reduce that considerably if he must.
“Ready, set, go,” she said, then leaped flatfooted, with as much accuracy as she could muster. Her hands scrabbled on the cement lip of the hatchway, then she fell.
Muzik caught her, chest and back, taking enough of the shock to set her down on her feet without trouble. They froze that way for a moment, listening with their suit microphones. They heard nothing, so after a full minute, they tried again.
This jump she grasped the rim with her fingertips and held on. Placing one foot gently on the rusty ladder, she used it to bear some of her weight. Then she put her other foot on a different rung, and let go one hand to take out a gas-powered piton.
This was the most dangerous part of the operation yet, or at least, the most likely to draw attention. She took a deep breath, then triggered it.
Compressed gas shot the spike into the crack between the cement rim and the old steel hatch. Enough of both had deteriorated that the piton lodged deeply. Repeth attached a thin cable that unrolled from her suit. “Wait,” she said. “If I open the hatch, the piton will fall out. I have an idea. Give me your hook.”
Muzik unrolled his own cable and gently tossed the hooked end up. Repeth caught it and ran it around the braces that connect the hinges to the hatch, then clipped it to itself. “That should hold you. Come on up.”
Carefully, Muzik climbed his line,
reeling it back into its receptacle as he did so. Soon he hung awkwardly below the hatch, cable-locked. “What now, maestro?”
“Now we get up and through this awkward-ass thing.” She placed a hand on the hatch hinge brace, hoping it could take a few more kilos, and moved her weight off her own cable, unclipping it from the piton and stowing it. Now she hung with two feet on two separate rungs and one hand on the hinge.
With the other she took out a small block of plastique and handed it to Muzik, who had both hands free, supported by nothing but his cable. “Break me off about twenty grams of that.”
“It’s not going to work. As soon as you set it off, it will blow you off the ladder even if your armor holds – or the rungs will break, or the braces will break.”
“Yeah, I just figured that out. Plan C then. Stick a cap in it and give me the whole block.”
“Okay…” Muzik handed her the whole 500-gram chunk with the blasting cap in it. “You know that canks Objective One. A blast will alert the whole base.”
“Yeah, I know. Too bad. I told them I did not do wet work. If they wanted Winthrop Jenkins dead so badly, they should have sent someone else. The data will have to do.”
“I’m all right with that.”
Repeth jammed it opposite the hinges, where the latch should be that must hold it closed from the other side. Then she leaped to the shallow water below, making a loud splash. “Come on, rappel down your line.”
“Right.” He slid down as the mechanism belayed him, then backed up into the tunnel. “This cable might survive the blast. Is that your plan?”
“No, I was just going to jump through the open hatch.”
Muzik looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. “That big an explosion is going to drop the crap in the pot, you know. We’re full-on breach from now on.”
Cyborg Strike Page 11
