by Joe Buff
Still, it isn't over yet. Morally torn, Van Gelder decided to bide his time. If I pretend to go along for now, and Bauer lets his guard down…
Bauer's radioman reported the militia reinforcements were getting closer.
"Hurry up," Bauer told his two bomb specialists. "Jawohl," one of the demolitions men responded. "We're rigging the booby traps and antitampers now."
"This is the tricky part, Commander," the other man said. "If we make one slip it could go off prematurely."
Van Gelder glanced at the bomb, and Bauer gave him a dirty look. "Don't worry, you wouldn't feel anything."
That made Van Gelder very angry. "I suppose you'll tell me a premature blast would still achieve our mission?"
"No, in fact it would not. Timing is very important. Our lives count for nothing, but timing is a vital part of the plan."
Ilse heard an eerie, wheezing, moaning sound from down-slope, from the rear. The skirling tune sent a chill up her spine. She realized it was bagpipes. The militia platoon from Owenga was moving up in style.
The martial music stirred her blood, as it was meant to, as it had for fighting men and women for centuries. Ilse's fatigue and post-adrenaline drowsiness fell away. She was eager to avenge the SEALs she'd watched be killed as she cowered behind the rock outcropping helpless and unarmed — the rock outcropping now in enemy hands.
She wished the militia would get here already. She needed more loaded magazines for her borrowed M-16. She glanced at the corpse of its previous owner, and promised him she'd use his weapon well.
Jeffrey saw the Owenga platoon's point element approach the SEALs' position carefully through the underbrush and broken terrain. They wore ill-fitting khaki combat fatigues, British Commonwealth style, that looked as if they dated back to World War II. When they got closer he saw their weapons were beat-up FNC assault rifles, an obsolescent British/Belgian design. The FNCs used the same ammo as the M-16: the NATO 5.56mm round. They even took identical magazines.
Quickly the militia platoon and the SEALs linked up. Cursory introductions were made.
Constable Henga and Clayton planned their counterattack on the Kampfschwimmer.
Henga understood the need to press home the assault with dispatch. Any minute "
Serenity's" presence might be betrayed to the Germans, by her own noise signature picked up on the SOSUS.
Jeffrey heard a sudden flurry of firing, far away on the right: at least one AK-47 and several FNCs. The shooting stopped just as abruptly. The platoon's radioman spoke to Henga.
"Our Saracen is almost in position," Henga told Jeffrey and Clayton.
"What was that shooting?" Jeffrey asked.
"A German tried to ambush the armored car."
"What happened?"
"My men captured him, with two antitank weapons he didn't get a chance to use.. They say he appears to be senior, probably a chief."
"Good work." Jeffrey was very impressed; he slapped Henga on the back.
"Thank you, Captain." Henga gave a ferocious grin. "The German was overconfident.
Some of my men used that against him. They took him by surprise on foot. No friendly casualties, and he's wounded in the leg."
"Terrific."
Henga smiled, proud for himself and his followers. "You don't have to go to Sandhurst, Captain, or West Point, to know you don't send armor into battle without close infantry support."
Speaking of infantry tactics gave Jeffrey a thought. "Constable, can you dismount a machine gun from the Saracen? Use it for suppressing fire against the one the Germans brought? We don't want all our heavy weapons in one basket. They may have more antitank rockets."
Henga gave the order over the radio.
The radioman answered another call. The Waitangi platoon was coming into position, infiltrating the Tuku nature reserve, to catch the Kampfschwimmer from behind.
Soon everything was ready. Clayton and Jeffrey agreed that Henga ought to command the assault. The radioman stayed glued to Henga now. Henga gave orders over the radio, then spoke with his platoon leader.
The Owenga platoon leader issued instructions. Three dozen militia troops crowded against the stone wall. The section sergeants brought their whistles to their lips.
The troops psyched themselves up to go over the top. Jeffrey thought that, for fanners and shepherds and fishermen, they made tough and eager soldiers. These people lived close to and off of their land and the sea, and loved them both. They were fighting to protect their children and their homes. A few of the troops were women, and Jeffrey was jarred to see at least one married couple serving side by side.
A handful would stay by the wall, to hold a baseline the others could retreat to in an emergency — another standard infantry tactic. Jeffrey ordered Harrison to remain with them. The young man had already done enough.
There was a boom, off on the right somewhere. A cannon clear blast. He sighed from deep in his chest. Even treason as an escape was out of his reach. The enlisted Kampfschwimrner relaxed and went about their business, improving their defenses or emplacing the bomb — but several kept watching Van Gelder, and made sure he knew it.
Things might be out of his hands, but Van Gelder still had to make an inner personal moral choice. He did: he devoutly hoped the locals overran the Kampfschwimmer before the bomb was armed, and killed every one of the Germans. If Van Gelder himself died too, at leasr he'd meet his maker with his conscience clear. Near him the hard wind moaned around the satellite dish and the bunker. Its tortured cry reflected his dark mood.
The islanders' armored car opened fire. The shot was wildly off in range and direction.
Bauer ordered two of his men to crawl forward with antitank launchers. His machine gunner finished building a shelter of stones atop the rock outcropping, for an excellent all-around field of fire.
Privately Van Gelder despaired.
Jeffrey heard the heavy machine gun taken from the armored car, now dug in among some bushes, suddenly begin to fire at its German counterpart from long range. The Kampfschwimmer with his light machine gun atop the rock outcropping was forced to answer back. Thus one German threat was kept fully occupied. Both weapons belched hot flame, threw solid streams of high-powered slugs, and spat out empty shell casings.
They made a chattering racket as they dueled.
The platoon from Waitangi held their position to the Germans' rear. The next thing Jeffrey heard was them opening up with steady FNC fire, trying to pin down the rest of the Kampfschwimmer. The Saracen advanced, and fired its gun from closer in. This time the cannon round hit much nearer to the rock outcropping.
Henga set his jaw and nodded, and his sergeants blew their whistles up and down the line. SEALs and Owenga militia, and Jeffrey and Ilse, vaulted over the wall at a run. Some advanced upslope while others squeezed off covering rounds. Jeffrey flopped to the ground and aimed and fired his M-16. All around him friendly assault rifles crackled. He lunged to his feer and darted and zigzagged ahead. The others ran forward, or crouched and fired. Then they'd trade roles, crouching to fire or running instead. They were closing the distance to the Germans steadily this way, and taking scant incoming fire, but they had most of a thousand yards to cover, the length of ten football fields.
The Saracen fired another round. Jeffrey couldn't tell its effect. He was too busy reading the ground, using low spots and draws and boulders for cover. The wind sang in his ears, competing with the ceaseless reports of rifles and machine guns near and far. He tried to be as careful as he could, but it just wasn't in Jeffrey's nature to let those around him take all the risks.
There was a loud bang to Jeffrey's front, and he saw a flaming ball tear along, not at him but toward the Saracen. The way it would drift and then correct, Jeffrey knew it was a wire-guided antitank rocket. The Saracen was caught in the open. Jeffrey watched the crew bail out. through the hatches just in time.
The rocket hit. In a flash its shaped-charge warhead burned right through the armored car's thin steel. Sh
ell-propellant loads inside caught fire at once; flames shot from every orifice. There was a huge internal explosion as high-explosive warheads cooked off. The Saracen's turret blew into the sky, rolling end over end and trailing smoke. It thudded to the ground, upside down, a useless wreck.
"Come on!" Henga shouted to rally his troops. The heavy machine gun and light machine gun continued to argue vehemently. The supporting fire from the direction of Tuku Poured in from the other side — flat trajectories beating the soil, at an angle not endangering Henga's line of advance but forcing the sniper and the rest of the Germans to keep their heads well down.
Jeffrey fired off three quick bursts on full auto, then lurched to his feet and pressed forward. As he ran he reloaded. He was painfully breathless, and sweating in spite of the chill. The bayonet fixed to his rifle reflected the sun. Soon the fighting would be hand to hand.
Van Gelder squeezed flat in a low spot as bullets poured in from three sides. The enemy heavy machine gun chewed away at the top of the outcropping. The steady stream of big incoming rounds made sharp rock chips spew everywhere. The German machine gunner screamed and his gun stopped firing, and Van Gelder saw his blood drip down.
Bauer's bomb specialists crawled out of the bunker in the outcropping. "Commander, we're done!"
"Put up the sign, and give me the vial."
Van Gelder watched as one man fastened a preprinted poster to the inside of the bunker door. He left the door propped open. Bauer took the vial and placed it primly on the ground near the door.
In the shade, the vial glowed an eerie green. Van Gelder read the sign, in big block letters in English.
He was speechless with impotent rage. Bauer had Iled to him again, by a factor of more than a hundred.
"It's a done deal!" Bauer shouted. "Nothing can stop it now?'
"You—"
"Watch out!" a Kampfschwimmer yelled.
Van Gelder stood there, transfixed. A handful of enemy troops had crept very close, and now they aimed at Van Gelder like a firing squad. One of them looked too familiar.
Van Gelder stared. The woman stared back, then shouted something; she hesitated a moment too long. Bauer knocked Van Gelder to the ground, saving his life. Bullets snapped and whizzed and ricocheted, close by and right overhead.
"That's, that's…" Van Gelder stammered.
"Whot?"
"It's Ilse Reebeck."
Bauer didn't Ilsten. "Save your nonsense for later." Bauer turned to his surviving men.
They'd been falling back under pressure, tightening their perimeter, purely on the defensive now. "Withdraw," Bauer ordered. He took Van Gelder by the arm and urged him away. Van Gelder glanced back, and saw troops from Waitangi joining the pursuit.
Van Gelder followed Bauer through the drainage ravine in utter resignation, retreating back the way they'd come, fleeing the scene of unspeakable Axis hypocrisy.
But Ilse Reebeck is here. She's alive… How did she get here?
The Kampfschwimmer retreated just as Henga's troops overran their positions around the rock outcropping. The Germans were falling back the only way they could, toward the naked cliffs and the sea. Most of Henga's force pursued them, angry and yet jubilant that they'd won. Clayton, his SEALs, and Ilse joined the chase. A few of the islanders held back, to treat their wounded and count their fataIlties. The slope up to the rock outcropping held scattered injured, with medics in charge, plus several corpses joined by comrades in arms and their grieving relatives and friends.
Jeffrey held back too, glad to be alive. He approached the bunker carefully, his rifle aimed to his front. The only Germans he saw were clearly dead, and the bunker door stood open. The remnants of the SEAL tents and the hulk of the Land Rover smoldered; the ground was cratered by Saracen hits. The dead SEAL's burnt skeleton lay scattered, groups of bones still held together by remnants of sinew like tar.
Jeffrey noticed that dry grass by the Saracen turret was burning fiercely now; the brush fire was fanned by the wind, quickly spreading eastward, away from the battle zone but toward the main road and Owenga. There was another fire in the distance, where the spotter plane had gone down.
Montgomery came back. Silently, he began to gather the dead enlisted SEAL's remains.
He used an entrenching tool with soil to stop the smoldering, then piled the bones on a poncho he lay on the ground.
Montgomery looked very sad.
Ilse ran up to Jeffrey. She was panting, and had to lean forward with hands on her knees to catch her breath. "I. I saw…" She gagged at the stench of the place.
Jeffrey felt too grim to hear or care. We didn't win this battle. We lost a larger one. He was reading the sign taped to the door. He looked at the foreign object in the bunker, so out of place and threatening, obscene. A big timer in its side was counting down the seconds one by one.
"The rest of them got away," Ilse said. "They rappelled using ropes down the cliff face."
She paused and took deep breaths. "Right into the water wearing Draegers."
"Draegers? That doesn't make sense."
"Jeffrey, I–I saw… Gunther Van Gelder was with them."
"Who?" Jeffrey said distractedly.
"Jan's first officer. I know him, and he knows me. He saw me too."
"From Voortrekker? Here?" Jeffrey seemed shocked. Ilse nodded, still panting.
Jeffrey grabbed her arms roughly. "Did you kill him?" "He got away."
"That means Voortrekker's close, really close… If this Van Gelder knows you're alive, they'll make the connection. They'll know Challenger's here."
"I–I know." Then Ilse read the sign. She gasped. It said the silvery casing held a tritium-boosted fission device with a yield of sixty kilotons. It said the weapon had foolproof antiramper traps, and shouldn't be touched. According to the timer, the weapon would go off several hours from now, at dusk.
Sixty kilotons was five times as strong as the bomb that wiped Hiroshima off the map.
The whole of Chatham Island would be destroyed, turned into a charred and blasted radioactive wasteland.
"Do you think they're serious?'
A little vial sat on a fancy display bracket, Ilke what someone would use on a shelf of cherished housebold knickknacks. Affixed to the bracket was a label: EXAMINE ME PLEASE.
Jeffrey picked up the vial. "Some kind of tritium compound, Ilke they use to make luminous night sights… It looks real enough to me. I think this sample's meant to say they're very serious."
THIRTY
On Chatham Island
Ilse bounced uncomfortably as she rode with the SEALs in the back of a rickety farm truck. This was the best that Constable Henga could manage right after the battle, since the island's transport assets were rather limited. The truck kept backfiring, and the engine knocked, as the driver pressed forward as fast as he could — forty miles an hour, not nearly quickly enough. Never in her life had Ilse felt such need for speed. Lieutenant Clayton, an expert in disarming unexploded nuclear ordnance, said that even if he could get all his tools he shouldn't touch the bomb. The risk of setting it off by mistake while trying to defuse it was too great — the Germans used fiendishly clever antitamper boobytraps. If he tried to rig a shaped charge, to wreck the bomb's implosion lenses to make it fizzle, shock sensors would send the firing signal at the speed of light.
Ilse grimaced when the truck's transmission protested as the driver shifted gears to go uphill. The wind gusted so powerfully it caught the truck from the side and made the whole vehicle rock. The Tuku-Waitangi Road followed the towering headlands north along the west side of the island. On Ilse's left a strong surf pounded the base of the cliffs. The incoming waves were already visibly larger than when she and Jeffrey looked out to sea before the Kampfschwimmer attack. A massive tropical storm was hammering New Zealand and advancing relentlessly on Chatham Island from the west.
Jeffrey had taken a different route, rushing back to Owenga for the minisub to Challenger. His orders to Ilse and Clayton were very direc
t: Get to Waitangi immediately. Establish communications with Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, at the four-star admiral's Pearl Harbor base. Keep the Chatham Island civiIlans calm, and organize an evacuation before the bomb could blow. Jeffrey decided the SEALs should help, both with logistics and psychologically, their presence a reassuring sign that the islanders weren't abandoned. Jeffrey told Ilse her steady demeanor under stress was needed too: the lives of a thousand innocents were about to be torn to shreds. Ilse could smooth through countless family minicrises that might leave big, strong, scary U.S. Navy SEALs at a loss.
The driver reached the peak of the upgrade. The truck lurched as its transmission crunched and screeched. They started to go downhill, moving faster.
Ilse's mind raced on, sifting the facts, as she tried to grapple with the team's appointed tasks. She had never felt more grim. The entire population needed to be moved somehow to safety. The nearest usable land, the only dry land of consequence for many thousands of miles, was New Zealand itself.
New Zealand had major airports, with very large planes. But the Chatham Island airstrip was so short, any airliner that tried to land would simply run out of runway and hit the lagoon. The airstrip could take small propeller planes, of which New Zealand had a good number. But the winds of almost hurricane force would destroy such aircraft with ease, probably on rheir takeoff rolls, no matter how brave and skilled their pilots.
Constable Henga, sitting next to llse and talking constantly on his radio, ruled out escape by sea. As Ilse knew too well, the island's fishing boats could not survive the powerful winds and crashing swells that would batter them on the high seas in the hours to come. New Zealand had frigates patrolling the ANZA Gap, but even at flank speed the closest wouldn't reach the island soon enough — it was already after noon, and the bomb would go off at sunset. Relief ships from New Zealand couldn't possibly cover the distance in time. The handful of neutral merchant vessels in range, contacted and told of the problem, instead of helping turned to flee the impending fallout cloud.
