Thunder Run (Maelstrom Rising Book 6)

by Peter Nealen

  “We are here.” He kept his voice hushed, though the only sounds when I stepped out were the low purr of the van’s engine and the whisper of the breeze in the treetops.

  Jaromir got out, pulling his own pack out and slinging it onto his back. I followed suit, as the rest of the team did the same. We had packed light—none of us had what could be called a proper recon ruck. We were in mostly civilian hiking clothes and boots and carrying civilian day packs loaded with the absolute minimal, bare-bones gear we’d need on patrol. We hadn’t even brought our ghillies with us. This was more of a partisan linkup mission than a deep greenside recon mission.

  If Settar had seen our gear, she might have had questions, provided she understood anything about recon. I doubted that she did, though. From what the Recon bubbas I’d gotten to know in the Grex Luporum teams said, conventional leaders rarely knew what to do with recon teams. From what I’d seen, that made sense.

  In minutes, we were loaded up and ready to step off, Rattlers pulled out of their compartments in the packs, loaded, and with stocks extended and suppressors screwed on. Jaromir, who was carrying a Škorpion EVO III, spoke briefly to Tibor, who was driving the van, and then took the lead, heading up the hill and into the pines.

  Ordinarily, Chris would take point, but with Jaromir in the lead, I fell in on the usual number two spot and let Chris trail behind me. I wanted to be right there with our contact in case anything went wrong.

  My reasoning there was twofold. If he turned on us, I wanted to be in a position to deal with him. If things just went pear-shaped, then we would need him to get us out quickly. I did not relish the worst-case E&E plan, across most of the Czech Republic to Poland, without our primary contact.

  Been there, done that, would rather not do it again.

  The trees were pretty close together, and we had to stay tight to avoid a break in contact. Even though we’d donned our NVGs, using the soft “skullcap” mounts instead of bump helmets, in a forest that dense, you can still lose the rest of your team in the foliage in broad daylight if you’re not careful. In the dark, even on NVGs, it gets worse.

  We didn’t have far enough to go for the “slinky effect” to spread us out that much. In a matter of a couple of minutes, we were at the border.

  While we were on what had once been the Czechoslovak border with East Germany—so it had never been as heavily fortified as the Iron Curtain to the southwest—even that had changed. The agreements that had led to the effectual erasure of international borders within Europe were mostly in abeyance, but the Czechs hadn’t had the chance to re-secure the border, particularly up here in the hills.

  In the place of a border fence or any other visible demarcation, there was only a narrow, one-lane dirt road running through the woods.

  I stepped forward and stopped Jaromir, motioning for him to get down. He had his own NVGs on, though they were monocular and probably less efficient than ours. They were weird-looking, too, with the unit more of a flat box against his face, with the single objective lens over one eye.

  He didn’t object, but quietly sank to a knee behind a tree. I did the same, and carefully scanned the woods to either side of the border.

  I knew that if there were pressure sensors in place on that border, we probably would never see them. They’d be buried beneath the road, and had probably been emplaced there long enough that there wouldn’t be enough disturbed earth to point out their positions, even if there had been enough light to see. The trees overshadowed the road, casting the bulk of it in utter blackness, even in my PS-31s.

  I looked back and waved Scott up. The rest of the team had gotten set in, Rattlers out and ready, just in case.

  Scott joined us, already pulling the little tablet and its three wired-in pucks out of his pack, his Rattler cinched tight against his chest. I pulled the thin but opaque blackout cover out of the front pouch on my own pack, and I threw it over him as he crouched down and got to work.

  That took a few minutes, while the rest of us just stayed in place, scanning and listening. The wind rushed through the treetops, though it was actually moving a lot slower than it sounded. An owl hooted somewhere in the darkened woods.

  Finally, Scott pulled the blackout cover off. The tablet was dark. “Nothing’s transmitting. It’s possible that they’ve got something hard-wired to a repeater somewhere so I can’t pick it up, but...” He started shoving the electronics back into his pack. “That’s about all we can do.”

  He was right. It had taken some doing to put the little technological lash-up he was carrying together to the point it could pick up transmissions on certain bands that were ordinarily used to send sensor readings back to a central monitoring station. It wouldn’t tell us what was being transmitted, but with a little work—which, admittedly, would take a good deal of time—we could figure out where the transmission was coming from.

  But nothing was transmitting nearby, which meant either we were in the clear, and the EDC thought they had nothing to worry about from the Czechs, or we just weren’t checking the right frequencies.

  Either way, it was decision time. We could push on, taking the chance that we hadn’t missed anything important, or we could pull back, reset, and try to figure out a different avenue of approach.

  I wasn’t inclined to go with Option Two. This was hardly our first infiltration into Germany, and the enemy had had a much stronger security presence on the Baltic Coast. I pointed forward.

  Jaromir didn’t wait for Chris, but got up and started across the narrow road. He pushed a few yards into the trees on the other side, and then sank down to take a knee under a taller fir. I joined him, and soon we were all gathered under the same tree, eyes and weapons outboard, silent and watchful.

  It might seem like we hadn’t gone far enough to require another security halt, but when you’re crossing a border that might or might not be under active surveillance, it doesn’t pay to take chances. Jaromir clearly wanted to make sure that we hadn’t triggered anything before pushing deeper into Germany.

  We watched and waited for five minutes. During that time, I scanned the trees and the sky above us for movement. In fact, I was watching the sky through the evergreen boughs more closely than the ground. I remembered dodging drones in the Jura Mountains, on the way to hit the EDC’s mobile ICBM base, all too well.

  But their drones were apparently deployed elsewhere, and despite Prague’s bristling, the EDC was apparently confident enough that they had the Czechs by the throat that they weren’t too worried about their border security. The days of one big, happy European family might be gone—despite propaganda to the contrary—but there were only so many assets to go around.

  Of course, that went for everybody involved, too. I wondered, sometimes, what the war was going to look like once all the fancy electronic toys were used up.

  I expected it was going to look like the Balkans, writ large.

  No, I wasn’t particularly optimistic about Settar’s plan. Why do you ask?

  Finally, Jaromir was satisfied, and carefully got to his feet. I followed suit. I was as confident as I could be that we hadn’t been detected. Counter-infiltration requires a certain degree of speed, and nothing and no one is stealthy enough that they are completely silent and invisible, if you know what you’re doing in the bush.

  And my team knew what we were doing in the bush.

  With Jaromir in the lead, we headed downhill and into Germany.

  ***

  We didn’t have far to go. The road lay about six hundred fifty yards from the border, and Jaromir had started to slow about fifty yards before the trees thinned out, taking a knee again and pulling what looked like a cell phone out of his pack.

  I hesitated. We hadn’t known that he’d had that, but I relaxed a little when he shrouded it inside the pack and turned it on, the faint glow turned a brilliant white in my NVGs. He at least hadn’t dragged its signature across the border with us.

  I knew a little about tracking cell phone signatures—
they’d led us to the hostage we’d been trying to rescue in Slovakia, back when this had all kicked off. They weren’t as precise a homing beacon as a lot of movies made it out, but they were still dangerous.

  I briefly wondered if Specialist England was still alive. We hadn’t exactly been able to keep track of him after we’d gotten to Poland.

  Jaromir tapped rapidly at the screen, waited, then nodded and turned the phone off again. He turned to me and pointed toward the road. “He is here. A Vauxhall van on the turnout. We will go straight to the vehicle and you will get in. Once you have successfully made contact, I will go back over the border. My part is done.”

  I nodded. It was the best we could hope for. Jaromir had his own duties, and if this worked out, he would have already done a whole lot, putting us in contact with the best hope we had for a fifth column inside Germany.

  If it worked out. We weren’t through this yet.

  We spread out as we threaded our way through the trees toward the road. It was dark and quiet; I couldn’t even hear the sound of the van’s engine, if it was really there. A faint breeze in the treetops and the fainter crunch of our boots in the undergrowth and fallen needles were the only sounds we could hear.

  Reaching the edge of the woods, I got Chris and Greg set in, covering up and down the road. I was slightly surprised to find it paved; we were pretty deep in the woods and we’d seen a lot of dirt roads in former East Germany the last time we’d been in country.

  There was the van, a dark rectangle against the lighter gravel of the turnout, starlight faintly reflecting off the windows. I could see faint plumes of exhaust coming from the tailpipes, but no lights shone. If that was Elias, he was being careful.

  Jaromir led the way across the road, skirting the woods on the far side to approach the van from the rear. I followed, about ten yards back, my Rattler held ready. If this was going to go south, it would happen fast. I could already imagine the back doors flying open and masked and armored GSG-9 operators spilling out.

  I might get most of them with one burst, provided I aimed high, over their plates. The subsonic .300 Blackout rounds didn’t have a hope in hell of penetrating rifle plates.

  I wasn’t getting too fixated on the van, either. It could just be the bait, with the ambush waiting in the trees. As carefully as I scanned, however, I couldn’t see anything. Just tree trunks and undergrowth.

  Jaromir reached the van and tapped on the window, his Škorpion still held ready. A moment later, the driver’s side door opened, and Jaromir and a tall, broad-shouldered young man came around toward the back.

  I had halted under a tree about twenty yards back, just in case. I couldn’t help but tense up a little as the younger man swung the back doors open.

  The back of the van had been stripped out, though the floor was covered in what looked like several inches of foam. There were no GSG-9 shooters inside. It was completely empty, the windows blacked out by curtains.

  I still didn’t relax, exactly. But I keyed my radio. “We’re clear. Bring it in.”

  The rest of the team filtered out of the trees, still spread out on-line, weapons up and ready. I kept an uneasy eye on the road. All we needed right then was to have another vehicle come around the bend, headlights illuminating nine dudes with guns around a blacked-out van.

  But the Good Lord must have been looking out for us, because the road stayed deserted and dark as we closed in on the van.

  “You’re Elias?” I had to step in and let Tony and Scott take external security as the rest of the team collapsed on the van and started to climb in. I was about an inch shorter than the young man who’d driven the van, but we were probably about equal in weight.

  “I am Elias.” His voice was low, and his accent was pronounced, but his English was clear enough. He also sounded young as hell. Of course, being in my late thirties, a lot of the regular Army kids we’d worked with, even the Special Forces guys, seemed awfully young. “You are… Deacon?”

  It was just as well that we used our callsigns, at least for the moment. “That’s me. Did you see anything on the way here that suggested you might have been followed?”

  He seemed a little taken aback by my directness, but we didn’t have a lot of time to make sure we weren’t walking into a trap. He might be part of an ambush, but then again, he might not, in which case asking these questions might just save all our lives, including his.

  “No. I do not think so.”

  I nodded. “How far to the safehouse, and does the route take us past any Polizei or other government offices?”

  “We are going to Regenstauf. It is about two hundred twenty kilometers. We should be there in about three hours. There are a couple of checkpoints on the way, but I know the way around them. The only delays should come if we have to avoid any new ones.” I couldn’t read his expression—the image in the PS-31s was a bit blurry that close and under those light conditions—but he seemed a little pensive. “There are often new, temporary checkpoints around Regensburg, Nuremberg, and Ingolstadt.”

  That was interesting. But the team was all in the back of the van, except for Scott, Tony, and I, and the sooner we were away from here, the better. “All right. Chatty, Weeb, collapse and load up. I’ll ride up front with Elias.” I watched our contact as I said it. If he reacted strongly, that might be a warning sign.

  He looked a little nervous, but he didn’t object. Scott and Tony got into the back, and I helped Elias shut the doors. It was pretty crowded back there—that was probably part of the reason why Elias hadn’t objected when I’d invited myself up front.

  I turned to Jaromir and stuck out my hand. “Thanks for the help.”

  “You are welcome.” He shook firmly. “I hope that you can make life very difficult for our mutual adversaries.”

  “You and me both.” I returned his sketchy salute as he started across the road and quickly disappeared into the woods.

  Elias was still standing there by the back of the van, and I waved him toward the front. “Let’s get going. We’ve got a long way to go.” He started a little, as if I’d just jarred him out of his train of thought, and then nodded, and started toward the open driver’s side door.

  I hustled around the other side to clamber in before he could drive away. I didn’t think he would, but it pays to be paranoid when you’re on an infiltration.

  Pulling the door shut behind me, I peeled my skullcap off, shutting the NVGs down, and stuffed it into the day pack at my feet. In another few seconds, even as Elias put the vehicle in gear and switched on the headlights, I had the Rattler broken down and shoved into its compartment in the back of the pack. It was heavy and awkward, and wouldn’t stand up to a close inspection, but I hoped to avoid such an inspection if possible.

  “You did not bring much.” Was there a note of resentment in Elias’s voice?

  “This is an information-gathering mission, first and foremost.” I wasn’t going to get his hopes up too high. That was for two reasons. It’s always a bad idea to make too many promises right out the gate when it comes to unconventional warfare, for one thing. The resources you might be able to bring in are always subject to the fortunes of war, or worse, the whims of politicians and bureaucrats. The other factor to take into consideration was always the fact that until you got on the ground and saw the situation with your own eyes, there was no way to know if you really were backing the right horse. And with the paucity of unbiased information coming out of EDC territory, we had no way of really knowing if the Verteidiger in Bayern were legit, someone who we could genuinely partner with to oppose the EDC, or if they really were the discount Fourth Reich that the EDC’s propagandists painted them as. “And even if it wasn’t, there probably won’t be a whole lot of material support coming out of Poland for a while.” I zipped up the bag as best I could. I’d have to rip it open to get at the gun, but that was the price of stealth. “Everybody’s fighting this war on a shoestring these days.”

  He didn’t have a reply to that.
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br />   Chapter 12

  I tried to pick Elias’s brain on the way to Regenstauf, but he actually didn’t have a lot of information, which already didn’t bode well for this op. He was in his early twenties, looked like he could have been on a Waffen-SS recruiting poster, and was clearly passionate about pushing back against the forces he and his fellows saw as tearing their country apart, but the more questions I asked, the more I saw that he had invested a lot more emotion than he had attention to detail.

  “The Polizei raided one of our meetings just last week. They had no reason. No one had done anything wrong, at least according to the law. No one even had any weapons—we don’t have many, and those are well-hidden. But meanwhile, a DDSB meeting went on in broad daylight in Regensburg two days later, calling for violence in the streets, and no one did anything.” He gripped the wheel until his knuckles turned white.

  It was a familiar-enough song. Something similar had led to Colonel Santiago’s decision to form the Triarii, and it was still common in too many states back home. But it didn’t sound like the Verteidiger in Bayern were anywhere close to matching the Triarii for effectiveness.

  In fact, just going by what Elias was telling me, they were a pack of angry amateurs who weren’t sure of anything but that they needed to fight back.

  That wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle. Hell, Triarii had worked with local militias in some of the trouble spots that had started as little more than a bunch of white-collar nerds who had finally decided, despite themselves, that enough was enough. But that took time. Organization, training, and establishing logistics and information networks all took time. Time that we didn’t have in this case.

  Still, a plan was starting to form. It wasn’t what we’d briefed, and it was far from the mission that Gutierrez had gotten Settar to agree to, but if it worked, it might just save a lot of lives.