Deep Sound Channel (01)

by Joe Buff

  "Or startling the birds," Jeffrey said.

  Ilse nodded. "There are a lot of really nice species here." She'd seen a crested guinea fowl once, and an osprey nest full of young.

  "I feel like we oughta say something," Jeffrey said. "As far as I know we're the first Allied troops to land in occupied southern Africa."

  "Lafayette, we are here, or something," Clayton said. "Anyway, Ilse," Jeffrey said, "for what it's worth, welcome home."

  Ilse's breathing was steady and hard, and so was her perspiration. The grade averaged 10

  percent as they worked their way inland, and her equipment weighed forty pounds. She couldn't complain, though—the men were all carrying twice that. They formed single file on a trail,

  one of the reserve's walking paths—this would mean fewer surprises. Sight lines were still short, from the rain and the plant life. If they moved through the sandy underbrush instead—normal tactics in bush—with the noise of the wind and flailing branches they could blunder into a patrol, triggering a chaotic encounter battle. A stand-up fire fight now would ruin everything.

  In a few minutes they did hear a patrol coming, from the other direction, upwind. The men were talking in Afrikaans, not happy being out in the storm. Ilse and Jeffrey and the SEALs moved off the trail at a bend. They blended with the terrain, using dips in the ground and deadfall. Jeffrey found her a good spot behind a broad strelitzia tree, then he silently crawled away. Ilse pressed her cheek low, trying to meld with the dune. The smell of the mulch was intense. Heavy raindrops pattered her backside, falling through leaves overhead.

  "A perfect L-shaped ambush site," she heard Jeffrey say, just audible on the circuit.

  "I know," Clayton whispered inside her helmet. "It's a shame to just let them go by."

  The patrol got closer and closer. Ilse tried not to breathe. One Boer said something vulgar, another snickered coarsely. Ilse was sure she'd be spotted, her heart was sending such hammerblows through the ground. An insect stung her neck, a burning that grew sharper as it fed. A snake slithered over her ankles. She waited to feel the kick of a boot, the prodding of a gun barrel, the jab of a bayonet. She waited for the stutter and flash of assault rifles, the full-auto spray of hard pointy bullets that would shred foliage and her flesh.

  Soon the enemy squad was past, oblivious to their presence. The gale broke too many stalks and twigs, and the rain flushed the gravel-strewn trail—the SEAL team's spoor went unnoticed.

  "Nine, Six, status," Clayton said when the soldiers could no longer be heard.

  "Six, Nine, wait one." Then, "They're not sneaking back. Rear is secure."

  "Be careful," Jeffrey said. "They might have been noisy on purpose. There may be another squad further on, hoping they've put us off guard."

  "I concur," Clayton said. "You all heard the man, stay focused."

  On Clayton's word they each drank an entire canteen so the water wouldn't slosh. They moved out again, cautiously, falling in line by the numbers. They headed west, paralleling the river. After a measured number of paces they turned south, into the Hawaan Nature Reserve. The way grew even steeper, the ground more soil than sand.

  Ilse's breathing came hard.

  "Six, Four," Jeffrey said, "a helo's coming."

  "Four, Six, I don't hear it yet."

  "Six and Four, Five," Ilse said, "shouldn't we just ignore it?"

  "Five, Four," Jeffrey said, "you're right. We'll look like a normal patrol, an extra because of the storm. I doubt they have the connectivity to validate us or not."

  "Concur," Clayton said. "All numbers keep moving."

  SEAL One, Ilse knew, had the point. He carried a small ground-penetrating radar, for detecting land mines and booby traps, buried or fastened to trees. It would also give some indication of metal weapons to the flanks or the front, and by changing modes One could scan for tunnels and foxholes.

  So far they'd bypassed ten mines, all plastic, sweep-resistant types sized to maim, not kill. Each time SEAL One found a mine the person behind him would kneel by it to warn all the others. That person let everyone else go by, resting in the meantime—if you could call that resting. Then he took position in front of Nine, who constantly brought up the rear.

  Jeffrey had just had mine guard duty again, so Ilse walked behind SEAL One. The next booby trap would

  be hers. The helo passed low overhead, hovered up

  there past the acacia tops, then tore away in the dark. "Eight, Six," Ilse heard, "did you copy their traffic?" "Six, Eight, negative. Everything's deeply encrypted." "Pick up the pace," Clayton said.

  The terrain was getting rocky, and Ilse's legs were very sore. She reminded herself the whole hike to the Sharks Board was barely three miles—it seemed like forever already.

  She passed some eucalyptuses, then erica, protea, heather. She finally broached the plateau. Suddenly Ilse saw One freeze. She paused and then moved toward him, since he didn't give her the danger sign. All she had to do now was crouch and point at the mine, as she'd done once before, but she still felt nervous as hell.

  SEAL One hit the deck and crawled forward, his mine detector abandoned, his machine pistol gripped in both hands. "Contact, contact, contact," he whispered.

  Ilse dropped to the ground. She knew he hadn't been spotted, since she didn't hear any shots. But then she remembered their weapons were silenced—could the Boers have silencers too?

  "One, Six, report," Clayton said.

  "Six, One, disregard, clear." Then One added, "Oh Christ."

  Ilse crawled up and joined him behind a wild almond tree, lugging the mine detector, her pistol out in her hand. Through her visor she saw what One had spotted. Ahead was a clearing with benches, one of the arboretum's picnic areas. Near its center some mannequins twirled in the wind. Then she saw they weren't mannequins.

  Each body hung a half meter or so from the ground. All of them were naked. Three were men, two were women, all Caucasian. Their hands were tied behind their backs. Nooses were tight round their necks, simple slipknots, nothing fancy, the ropes fastened to a stout oak tree branch. The heads were cocked inanely at

  different angles, one woman looking down with her chin near her chest, as if she were shy or had watched herself as she died.

  Both women's hair had been braided, crudely, to keep it out of the way. Their legs were also bound snugly at knees and ankles, so they bent slightly. For some reason the men's legs weren't tied—they pointed straight down toward the ground, their now-useless genitals dangling between. From the way each corpse twisted and swung, Ilse could tell they were stiff, though the women's breasts jiggled strangely as their feet jostled each other, no rigor mortis in the fat underlying their nipples.

  From the look of the bodies their flat bellies, they all appeared fairly young, fit. Maybe they were troops who'd spoken out one time too often. Maybe the others in their unit had been made to watch in the clearing, or even to yank the benches out from under them.

  Did they hang them all at once, or one at a time so the remaining victims could watch and listen? Ilse knew it could take five or ten minutes before each stopped struggling completely, and then they'd hang limp, hips cocked slightly forward, buttocks and members relaxed.

  As Clayton and SEALs One and Seven scouted, Ilse moved toward the corpses. Their faces were horribly swollen and dark, eyes bulging blindly, tongues sticking out, giving them from the neck up an odd uniformity, androgynous, sexless. Ilse looked farther down, fascinated in spite of herself. From the length of one woman's pubic hair, either she trimmed it frequently or she couldn't be more than sixteen—Ilse could make out the cleft of her crotch, as rainwater streaked down her thighs.

  Ilse realized Jeffrey was standing next to her now, also staring. This had happened recently, probably the evening before—the bodies weren't bloated yet, and there wasn't much of a smell. If they'd lost control of their bowels and bladders while led to the gibbet or on it, the deluge had washed it away. If the men came hard like some did, there wasn't a tr
ace of it now. But the associations were too strong for her. Ilse turned to Jeffrey and buried her head, helmet and all, in his chest.

  "Use the anger," Jeffrey said, holding her, stroking her back. "Feel it stirring your blood."

  DOWNTOWN DURBAN

  Gunther Van Gelder ordered another straight gin. This wasn't recommended for people recovering from heatstroke, but he needed something to deaden his mind. The cabaret was noisy and crowded, full of tobacco smoke and wild people, and the raunchy floor show music blared. Given the late hour and very strict curfew, the customers were all military officers, high-powered politicos, and women they'd brought as their dates.

  Several people had offered to buy Van Gelder a drink. His naval uniform with gold submarine badge did the trick. But each time he politely refused. He needed to be alone.

  Several whores who worked the bar had approached him aggressively too. Again he refused, not because he didn't like girls. He was just in the wrong sort of mood. He'd been at sea too long. The changes around him were shocking.

  The war was going so well, everyone said. Axis strength was increasing, the Allies a mere empty shell, right thinking had total control. Was this, then, why the nightly news on the one TV station still working—government-owned—always opened with more executions? Was this why even right-thinking Boers averted their eyes from the sky, wearing dark sunglasses outdoors even at night, afraid of an infernal nuclear flash? Was this why children were starving, white children, and people were eating their dogs?

  Careful, Gunther, he told himself. This is dangerous talk, even alone in your mind. Van Gelder laughed, chiding himself at the irony, that he'd come here of all places for solitude. But a submariner made his own privacy wherever he went, internally.

  Duty, patriotism, glory, and honor. Disaffection, dissent, treason, and death. There was no middle ground anymore. Slavery, oppression, environmental destruction, all were common currency of this New Order that wanted to run half the world. It was becoming too much like the last New Order, the torchlight parades and the terror, the fearful or eager obedience, abdicating all moral standards, the marching bands and the slaughter.

  He could see it much too clearly now—how could everyone else be so blind?

  Another woman approached him. She wasn't bad-looking, this one, nice clothes and subtle makeup—but then the resurgent Union of South Africa's brave fighting men deserved the best of the best. She fingered Van Gelder's qualification badge, the diesel boat over oak leaves and trident which he'd striven so hard to deserve. She couldn't possibly know what it stood for, the sacrifices, the risks. She offered to party for free.

  Van Gelder told her to leave him alone, and looked at his watch. He was due back on Voortrekker, inside the bluff, in barely a couple of hours, and he knew he was getting intoxicated. He had a responsibility, to his captain and ship and his crew.

  Van Gelder sighed. When push came to shove, there really was no escape. The navy was his life, his family, the underwater world was his home, the sea his most passionate mistress.

  The hooker was very persistent. She told him he was

  cute and snuggled against him. She said she'd do whatever he wanted, and reached for his crotch.

  Very well, Number One, he told himself, then laughed at his own little joke. There were other distractions than drinking, other forms of release and denial. He asked the young woman her name.

  UMHLANGA ROCKS

  To Jeffrey it seemed Ilse had gotten past some kind of hump, made some sort of decision. Her eyes and her jaw said no nonsense now, and her tone of voice backed it up.

  SEAL Two, their corpsman, treated the welt on her neck with an ointment.

  After more mines, another helo, and another enemy patrol, the team egressed the Hawaan Nature Reserve. They skirted a commercial nursery, closed and looking abandoned. Apparently they'd made it through the main defensive crust along the water's edge. They moved south, paralleling the beach, through forests and fields bordering a residential development, exclusive homes on big tracts. The houses were quiet, bare, completely blacked out. Jeffrey thought them evacuated.

  The raiding party changed course to the west, inland again, and climbed more. They crested the ridge above Umhlanga Rocks, crossing the skyline in a clump of trees down on their bellies. This side of the crest there were no structures, no local roads. The ground in front of them dropped off steeply, and it was tricky to balance with their gear.

  Fully exposed to the weather, face-on to the wind and the rain, their progress was slowed to a stagger.

  Somewhere below them, Jeffrey knew, lay the N2 Freeway, the major multilane artery that paralleled the

  coast— it was ten miles straight to downtown Durban. Jeffrey thought he heard heavy truck engines going north from the city, either troop movements or a supply column.

  They were too distant to see anything, no hope to get useful intel. Three miles beyond the N2, the briefing maps had shown, was a major railroad line, but no sign right now of a train. Beyond that, Jeffrey also knew, were the Durban defense district's mobile reserves, including main battle tanks.

  The group headed south again. They avoided a remotely operated

  antishipping/antiaircraft radar site ideally placed on the ridge. The team kept a safe distance from Autumn Drive, a dead-end road with a police station. Twice in natural clearings in the woods they found camouflaged heavy-machine-gun nests, stocked with lots of ammo and with perfect fields of fire—both emplacements were unoccupied, with no thermal signature, lying in wait for an Allied invasion.

  They hauled ass farther on, paused to take five, and turned back toward the Indian Ocean, back over the ridge crest. Behind Jeffrey now, inland across the N2, was the sprawling Mount Edgecombe Country Club, presumably deserted this time of night. To Jeffrey's left, in the direction of the Ohlanga estuary from whence they'd come, was a ten-acre overgrown field.

  Off to Jeffrey's right was a small airstrip, meant for microlights and gliders before the war. Past it lay more unused land, and in another mile came the tall concrete structures of the Tongaat-Hulett sugar refinery.

  Now the local flying club was defunct, the short runway broken up, long steel rods driven in to skewer an airborne assault. The SEAL chief and two of his shooters found the place protected by several old men, retired cops or home guard militia. They died quickly, silently, to protect the rear, the bodies concealed where they'd later be blasted to pieces.

  Jeffrey and Ilse and the SEALs were 3,500 yards south of the estuary, 1,400 yards in from the beach, at an elevation of four hundred feet. Before them, eastward, just down the hill on the way to the sea, were the empty outdoor amphitheater, caltrop-covered tourist parking lot, and two-story beige-brown concrete-andmasonry headquarters building of their target, the Natal Sharks Board.

  Seeing the bodies hanged in the clearing had forced Ilse to make a decision. There was so much death all around, so many lives being snuffed, what difference was one more, her own? It was best to assume she would die so she could get on with her job. Fear was a useless distraction; concern for survival was dulling her edge. If the mission failed, her death was the least of anyone's worries.

  Somehow—perversely, she knew—seeing it this way would help. It brought her a calm concentration, turned everything into a game—granted, a blood sport—an adventure with outcome unknowable, one she'd do her damnedest to win.

  She gazed at their objective, vague shapes through her visor, strobed by frequent lightning. The heat signature of the installation told her the laboratory staff was going full bore. Inside that building, behind the blackout curtains, an abomination was taking shape, perverting fifty years of world-class research on marine biology and swimmer safety. By morning Ilse's life might be over, but tonight her task was direct: cauterize these people and what they were doing, send them straight to a hot man-made hell.

  Jeffrey crouched amid the chilly runoff in the erosion gully on the south flank of the Sharks Board. He peered

  into the drip
ping viewer scope, seeing through the fiber-optic cable—the image was constantly streaked by the heavy downpour. SEAL One panned the cable's other end around. Jeffrey knew One was at the very edge of the semitropical underbrush, wearing a lightweight gillie suit he'd pulled out of his backpack. The gillie suit was designed as sniper camouflage, with an insulated silver lining to suppress the point man's infrared.

  "One, Four," Jeffrey whispered. "No guard dogs?"

  "Four, One, no," the point man said. "Just foot patrols."

  "Pan right," Jeffrey said. "Show me the missile bunker." The image shifted as ordered. "

  Hold it." Jeffrey zoomed in as lightning flickered again. He studied the emplacement, its rounded corners jutting from the slope. Its bulk was nestled in dead ground inside the as-phalt crescent formed by the main entrance's big U-shaped driveway. More thunder rumbled.

  "The bunker's thermal signature's diffuse even this close," Jeffrey said. "Looks like they put a resistor grid under the reinforced concrete."

  "Yeah," Clayton said as he lay to Jeffrey's right. "Just like with the lab in the basement."

  "We can't tell if it's occupied."

  "That's the idea."

  Something out of focus blocked Jeffrey's view, then passed. He realized it was a soldier.

  "One, Four, what are they carrying?"

  "Different stuff, Commander," SEAL One whispered, sounding scratchy above the roar of the driving rain. "I see some H&Ks, some Uzis and Galils, and homegrown models."

  "One, Six," Clayton said. "Are they using silencers?" "Everyone I've seen so far, boss, yes. And night-vision goggles."

  Jeffrey turned to Clayton. "It's like we thought," Jeffrey said. "Stealthy security. Nothing excessive or

  obvious. No hostage encampments nearby, to draw attention or make for witnesses."

  "That must be why they put a missile bunker here," Clayton said. "An excuse for the fence and patrols." "Six, Three," came over the circuit.

  "Go ahead, Chief," Clayton said.