Delta Blue

Nineteen

“Cottonseed, Robin Hood Three.”

“Go ahead, Three.”

“We just lifted off the ice. Got us a Soviet pilot with a nasty chest wound.”

“Three, come on back to Daneborg.”

“Roger that, Cottonseed. Robin Hood Three out.”

Silence.

Then: “Cottonseed, Robin Hood Two.”

“I read you, Two.”

“Delta Blue One and Two are aboard and whole. They’re walking around, and Two wants a taco.”

“Copy, Two. Bring it home.”

“Well, hang on for a minute, Cottonseed. Delta Blue One’s got some kind of idea.”

Pearson was so relieved, her hands trembled. She gripped her left hand in her right to hide it. Overton was grinning broadly, perhaps masking his own concern. Milt Avery did a somersault in the middle of the compartment, something she didn’t often see from a full colonel.

Val Arguento and Donna Amber gave each other a high five, the contact of their palms sending each of them in opposite directions across the Command Center.

The telephone buzzed, and when she lifted it from the console, Pearson heard only a squeal. Amber pushed off a bulkhead, sailing into the Radio Shack to check on the satellite relays.

When the relay was reestablished, she heard, “Is Colonel Pearson around there somewhere?”

“This is Colonel Pearson.”

“Hey, honey. Walt MacDonald in NSA’s German section.”

“Hello, Walt. Is something the matter?”

“Well, I don’t know. My monitoring computer yelped on one of your LPs, and I just got through checking the tape.”

“Which one?”

“Peenemünde. Sounds to me like railroad cars moving on steel rails. Hell of a racket. Big diesel engines moving stuff around.”

“How long ago?”

“According to the tape it started about half an hour ago, and they’re still clanking around.”

“Thanks, Walt. I’ll get back to you.”

Pearson replaced the phone in its holder, and pulled herself up to the microphone. Overton and Avery were staring at her.

“Semaphore, Alpha Two. Are you still monitoring?”

“This is Semaphore,” General Brackman said.

“The LP at Peenemünde suggests heavy equipment moving. We need to check on it, and fast.”

A long pause. Brackman said, “Delta Yellow is close to that route.”

“Delta Yellow to Semaphore,” Conover said, “I’m copying you.”

“What’s your condition, Yellow?” the general asked. “Subpar, but I can make six-five-oh knots. I’ve got to stay subsonic.”

“How far are you from Peenemünde?”

“Hold one. Do-Wop?”

“I make it one-zero-five-zero miles,” Abrams said. “About an hour and a half, if I squeeze a couple more knots out of her,” Conover said.

“We’ll live with two hours, if we have to” Brackman told him. “Don’t push it. But see what you can see.”

“Roger that, Semaphore. Delta Yellow out.”

Pearson had thought that the battle was over, but now she wondered if it wasn’t just beginning.

After splashing the Tornado that attacked the Hercules, Dimatta had rolled out to the west, looking for the last three in that flight.

He felt good about that one, better than he had felt after downing the first two over the ice. This one had been a son of a bitch.

Where were the others?

Abrams had them on radar.

“Making like jackrabbits, Cancha. Headed southwest. Maybe they’re going to defect to England.”

“What speed are they making, Do-Wop?”

“Slow. Five-zero-zero knots at twelve thousand feet. Bet they’re low on fuel, conserving.”

Dimatta checked his own fuel load. Soon, he would have to turn for Jack Andrews, or he’d be boosting on rockets and coasting.

“I just lost one of them from the screen, Cancha. Probably flamed out. You want to chase the other two?”

“I’m about flamed out, myself, Do-Wop. Let the sea have them, if they don’t make it.”

Scanning his HUD, he noted the lack of green lights in the bottom right corner. “Hell, Do-Wop, we couldn’t do anything about them, anyway.”

“Damn. I’m checking. Nope, no missile control, Cancha. We must have taken debris somewhere. Maybe the electronics bay.”

“Anything else showing bad?”

“No, that’s it. But we sure want a full checkup on the ground before we go home.”

Dimatta circled back toward the Hercules, and was surprised to find it moving northward.

“Where’s that sucker going?” he asked Abrams.

Before the WSO could respond, Tac-1 brought up McKenna’s voice. “Cancha, you there?”

“Damn near right beside you, Snake Eyes. What’s up?”

“How’s your fuel?”

“Got plenty of pellets. Maybe an hour of JP-7.”

“Ride herd on platform number one for a little while, will you? We’re going to make a visit.”

“Roger,” Dimatta said, wondering what the hell was going on.

Abrams spoke up on the intercom, “What the hell’s going on?”

Semaphore asked the same question. “Delta Blue, what the hell’s going on?”

McKenna laid the headset aside without responding and waddled back to the ramp. Munoz was waiting for him, standing next to the cargomaster.

“Never, ever, ever thought I’d be a Green Beret, amigo.”

“Me, either, Tony.”

They were both still in their environmental suits, but had discarded the helmets and gloves. The parachute harness was snug, and they had located webbing belts on which to hang their extra magazines, flashlights, K-Bar combat knives, and M-16s. They each had two fragmentation grenades.

The cargomaster patted them roughly on the shoulders, then pointed to the port bulkhead, where a red light had changed to amber.

McKenna moved carefully out to the edge of the ramp and crouched. The wind screamed around him.

The light changed to green.

He stepped off, Munoz right beside him.

He thought Munoz had yelled something, maybe, “Geronimo!” but couldn’t tell in the combined noise of the engines and the prop wash.

He tumbled once, then pulled the rip cord.

They were jumping from 1,500 feet, and there wasn’t much margin for error. After an enforced jump from a thousand feet, though, it seemed as if he had plenty of time.

The parachute casing released with a loud pop, and the drogue chute streamed the fabric out above him. When the canopy blossomed, the sudden deceleration jerked him upright, then swung him from side to side.

“Hey, Kev! Twice in one night. We’ll have to start a club.”

Munoz was to his left, slightly above him.

“You start the club, Tony,” he yelled back. “I’ll be the treasurer.”

The sea was dark around them, more terrifying now that he had been in it once tonight. His toes ached, but that was a good sign. To the northeast, he saw a fire which was probably on number eleven. The lights of some ship were closing in on it.

Slightly below and ahead of him was the dome and pad of platform number one.

There was a helicopter on the pad, but no one near it. The AA and SAM batteries appeared deserted.

Almost the whole top of the dome on the near side was gone, and the hole was defined by the interior lights shining through it.

He tugged on the left shroud, spilling air, and changing his direction.

He wouldn’t mind falling short, landing on the pad, but he didn’t want to overshoot and go in the water again.

Cold wind hitting him on the left. His face felt red from the cold.

Still too high and too far right. The wind was drifting him. He pulled on the shrouds again.

Unclipped the M-16 from its D-ring on the web belt.

Looked up.

Munoz was dumping air. They were closing toward each other.

The canopies bumped.

Dome coming up fast.

One more tug.

The edges of the hole were jagged, sharp aluminum shards pointing at him.

Over the hole, and Munoz’s canopy was fighting his own for space.

The light was coming from the well section and from two bulbs he could see in the top floor of what must be a residential area. There were a couple beds showing through the wreckage where the dome had collapsed on the inner ceiling, also tearing large holes in the ceiling.

A body in one of the beds, the back of its head dull brown-bloody red.

The canopies bumped again as the two of them dropped through the hole.

It was a lot farther from the dome roof to the interior ceiling than he had expected.

He hit hard on ceiling panels, and his legs went right through the soft gypsum board. His hips stopped him, and he hit the quick release buckle on the harness with the palm of his hand as the canopy collapsed around him.

Setting the M-16 aside, McKenna leaned back on his right hand and tried to get his legs free. The gypsum buckled under his hand, but he got his right leg free, rolled over on to a joist, and pulled his left leg out of the hole.

Scrambling, he rose and stepped out of the harness, bent to retrieve the rifle. Peering down through the hole, he didn’t see anyone moving around.

Munoz was already free of his chute and waiting for him, standing on the juncture of two walls.

The noise was tremendous. He hadn’t expected that much noise.

Munoz gestured down into the well section of the dome with the muzzle of his rifle.

McKenna, stepping on ceiling joists and avoiding large chunks of dome panels, crossed to his WSO and looked down. They were about a hundred feet above the floor. There weren’t as many floors inside the dome as Pearson had expected. Down on the deck were three gigantic turbine generators, as well as enough pipe to plumb several houses. Steam vapor, smelling highly sulphurous, gorged out of the section.

The attack hadn’t shut down the generators.

“What now, jefe?” Munoz yelled.

“Down.”

He crossed to a large hole. Joists were broken here, and large pieces of aluminum had crashed through the ceiling, burying the room. Massive hunks of styrofoam were everywhere, like boulders strewn on a hillside. The room below was dark, though light spilled into it from somewhere else.

They slid down the face of the debris and found themselves standing in water. The ceiling was at least ten feet above. Big, spacious rooms to detract from the claustrophobia of the dome interior.

McKenna saw an open door into a lighted hallway and sidled toward it while slipping the safety on the M-16. He put his back to the wall, then peered around the doorway.

No one there.

The hallway was awash in water, also, and he saw the reason for it twenty feet away. One of the rooms had caught fire after the missile attack. Blackened walls in the hallway and the charred remains of mattresses. A limp firehose snaked down the corridor.

The racket of the generators was noticeably decreased. At the end of the hallway was a steel door with a sign on it. Written in German, the message was one that he couldn’t interpret much beyond the one word of VERBOTEN.

Also on the door was a large “5.”

Well, that helped a little.

General Felix Eisenach was totally humiliated.

The VORMUND PROJEKT was in ruins.

Almost.

The Control Center was in pandemonium. People dashing about aimlessly, telephones ringing, alarms buzzing. Some of the soldiers had been issued weapons. Frightened console operators remained at their posts only by the sheer intimidation of the giant Diederman.

Oberst Diederman strode back and forth along the rows of consoles, watching the ever-changing flow of information coming in. Stunned almost beyond speech, Eisenach sagged against the first console, where he had watched the eradication of Germany’s premier aircraft wing.

Diederman walked past him. “No blowouts. A leak on Platform Fifteen. We continue to generate power.”

Precision. The attackers had precision. Eisenach wished he controlled such precision.

Two consoles down, an operator held up his hand. Diederman whirled toward him. “Sergeant?”

“Platform Eight, Herr Colonel. A ship approaches, saying Admiral Schmidt has ordered evacuation.”

“Are they in danger?” Diederman asked.

The feldwebel spoke into his microphone, listened, reported: “There is no danger, Herr Colonel. The fires are out, there is damage to the dome above the engineering spaces. They have five wounded and the interior temperatures are dropping.”

“They are to remain at their duties,” Diederman ordered. “We must not shut down production.”

Diederman went to another console and attempted to reach Schmidt. After a few moments, he did, and Eisenach listened with detachment to the argument.

The general had almost lost track of events. Three domes only were undamaged. The Soviets and American ships approached steadily.

Spinning toward the leutnant still standing by him, Eisenach said, “Get me Peenemünde.”

“At once, Herr General.”

It took four minutes to run down Weismann.

“Yes, General Eisenach.”

“Your squadrons are destroyed.”

“I know this. I have been hearing from New Amsterdam.” Weismann’s voice carried despair.

“The Ghost. Launch it now.”

“Soon,” Weismann said. “The tower shroud has been moved back, and it is erected on the pad. The fueling is under way.”

“Immediately!”

“It will go nowhere without fuel and computer programs, General.”

“Speed it up!”

“The ballistics people have computed the space station orbit and the interception path. It will be soon.”

“Speed it up, I said!”

“As you wish, Herr General.”

Weismann hung up on him.

“Herr General,” the leutnant said, “Marshal Hoch wishes to speak to you.”

“Say that I will get back to him. Can you not tell that I am busy?”

Shrugging, the leutnant spoke into his phone.

Eisenach had not moved from the spot where he had been standing for forty minutes. Now he took a step, found his legs almost dead.

“Diederman.”

The big man came back toward him. “Yes, General?”

“The radio control?”

“No need for that, General. Everything continues to operate smoothly. The engineering sections hum.” Diederman tried to smile, but the dark eyes sunken into his face did not join in.

“The foreign ships approach. In hours, they will assault the platforms.”

Alarm appeared on the leutnant’s face.

“Nonsense. This is German property.”

“I want it now.”

The smile went away. “It is right beside you.”

Eisenach looked down to where the engineer pointed. A small black box affixed to the top of the console. One green light, one unlit light, and a key slot.

“Give me the key.”

Diederman dug into his pants pocket and came up with a small key on a ring with a brass tag. It was unmarked. “The delay is one hour?”

“It is as you ordered, General.”

Eisenach inserted the key, twisted it, then pulled it out. Slowly, he bent the key tang back and forth until it snapped.

“I suggest you call Schmidt back, Hans. He has an hour to get the men off the platforms.”

Diederman shook his head in dismayed resignation, Eisenach thought.

Eisenach also thought that people were going to remember his name. He had done his best for the fatherland.

“Now, Lieutenant, find my pilots and tell them to prepare the helicopter.”

Diederman was staring at an unteroffizier at a far console.

The man was sitting with his hands in his lap and his chin resting on his chest.

“Corporal, what the hell are you doing?” Diederman shouted.

The head jerked up, whipped around.

“Colonel?”

“What is going on?”

“Colonel, I think the dome camera saw parachutes.”

“Back up the damned tape! Call the security squad!”

Eisenach knew then that he had done the right thing.

Cottonseed was reporting ships closing on the platforms. German ships from the north.

Dimatta stayed in his wide circle over the platform, wondering what McKenna and Munoz were doing.

“Fifty minutes’ fuel, Cancha.”

“When it gets to ten minutes, Nitro, we’ll keep that for reserve, and boost on rockets.”

“Snake Eyes and Tiger?”

“The Herc is still here.”

He kicked in the autopilot. Going around in circles was boring him.

“Delta Green, Semaphore.”

“Go, Semaphore.”

“What’s Snake Eyes doing?” Brackman asked.

Dimatta had only met the commanding general once, but he’d never forget the voice.

On the intercom, he asked Williams, “What’s the boss doing?”

“Beats the hell out of me. Maybe looking for… how about self-destruct devices?”

“Good, Nitro. I like it,” Dimatta said and went back to Tac-1. “Semaphore, Snake Eyes is checking for self-destruct explosives. We don’t want the Germans doing what we tried not to do.”

“Copy that, Delta Green. Semaphore out.”

“Jesus, Cancha! What if I was right?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Be like Kevin to think of it, though.”

“Yeah,” the WSO said, “but you know what else? These platforms are spread over a few hundred square miles. Only one way they’re going to set off explosives.”

“By radio.” Dimatta looked out the left side of his canopy at the dome. At the undamaged top of it, the radar antenna continued to rotate. A mini-forest of UHF, VHF, and other antennas was sprinkled around it.

“What have we got left, Nitro?”

“Air-to-air, but they’re not working, remember.”

“Let’s go with landing gear.”

“Mow ’em down. Gotcha.”

Dimatta disengaged the autopilot and brought the MakoShark into a tight left turn, lining up on the dome. “I’m ready,” Williams said.

Dimatta lowered the landing gear, feeling the increase in drag tug lightly at the hand controller.

The screen displayed the dome on the night-vision lens.

He retarded his throttles on the approach.

“Down a tad, Cancha.”

The antennas came up fast, and he leveled out, using the light spillage from the left side of the dome as his landing strip.

The right gear slammed into the antenna group.

Sparks and metal flying.

As they flashed across the top of the dome, Williams reported, “Communications blackout.”

McKenna and Munoz went to the floor when they heard the racket from above, the sound of tearing metal.

It died away, they looked at each other, shrugged, and stood up.

The steel Verboten door was locked and would not budge. McKenna turned to his right, found another steel door, and pushed it open to find a stairway.

“This way, Tony.”

Munoz closed the door quietly behind him, and the two of them went sideways down the steel staircase, keeping their backs to the wall and the M-16s at port arms.

It was a series of half-flights, with landings at every half-story. Below, McKenna could hear voices speaking in German.

On the fourth floor, he opened the stairwell door and looked out on a corridor that matched the one above. There was no apparent fire damage here, but water dripped from the ceiling.

No bodies, alive or dead.

He stepped into the hallway and tried the door at his right, which did not have a forbidding sign or a lock. Opening it an inch he peered into yet another corridor. This one was wide, about thirty feet across. It didn’t match the interior plan Pearson had drawn. He’d have to let her know she wasn’t infallible.

Or maybe he wouldn’t say anything about it to her. Damn, he was getting conservative.

The hallway was wide and long, from the well section to the outer curve of the dome. There were three Ping-Pong tables and a few electronic games situated around.

On the other wall he saw an elevator door and another door with the black letters Verboten. That seemed to be the place he wanted to be.

If not for the ten men milling about in the recreation space. They were armed with assault rifles and carried steel helmets.

The door across the way opened and an officer stuck his head out. Yelled.

The men snapped to attention, then donned helmets.

McKenna shut the door.

“Kev?”

“I think somebody wants to meet us.” He unclipped a grenade and pulled the pin.

“You don’t want to meet a new friend?”

“Not these.” He twisted the door handle, hauled the heavy door back, and rolled the grenade in.

Slammed the door.

Hit the floor with Munoz right beside him.

Heard yelling.

Dull boom.

The door blew out, slammed him in the shoulder.

Munoz yelped.

Smoke and dust and debris in the air.

McKenna pushed the door off of himself and struggled to his feet.

The Germans had been flung all over the room. Blood and flesh splattered the Ping-Pong tables and walls. Some of them were groaning, and some were screaming, and some were deathly silent.

The lieutenant in the other doorway was on his back, his hands clutched to his face.

Munoz hadn’t moved.

Keeping an eye on the opposite door, McKenna dropped to his knee.

“Tony?”

He moved his head groggily.

There was a long gash in his forehead, blood rushing freely from it.

“Hey, Tony?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m all right.”

“You sure?”

“Hell of a headache. I’m okay, jefe.”

Munoz rolled over and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. The blood dripped from his head onto the carpeted floor of the hallway.

McKenna dug into his right thigh pocket and came up with the first aid kit.

Munoz took it from him, settled onto his buttocks on the floor, and leaned back against the wall. He found his M-16 and rested it across his legs.

“Go, amigo.”

With a quick glance around the corridor, McKenna dashed across it and slammed into the wall next to the doorway. The wall was smeared with blood and riddled with shrapnel. The lieutenant moaned.

He inched his head around and looked inside.

Rows of electronic consoles.

A whole herd of people, down behind the consoles, peering over them.

A huge man in a uniform shirt, but with no insignia, leaned against the back of a chair, his arms crossed, staring at the doorway.

And a general. In full uniform. His face was almost black with his fury.

He didn’t see any guns in there, so he pushed off the wall and stepped through the doorway, careful to avoid the lieutenant. Kept the M-16 trained lazily in the direction of the senior officer.

The general stared at him.

McKenna got close enough to see the name tag on his breast pocket.

Eisenach.

What do you know? This was the guy Pearson tried to find out more about, but whose assignment as a special assistant to Marshal Hoch had been ultrasecret.

He walked sideways and looked down the next row of consoles. Fearful faces looked back at him. He didn’t see any weapons.

“General, you tell a couple of these people to tend to the wounded in the hallway.”

The general didn’t move.

The big man barked an order in German, and five men leaped off their knees and ran to the doorway.

McKenna checked the door and saw Munoz standing beside it. He had a bandage plastered to his forehead, but it was already orange.

“Tony?”

“I’m still here. Got it covered on this end.”

McKenna turned back to the German general. “The way I have it, Eisenach, you’re in charge of all this shit.”

Still not responding.

McKenna nodded at the big guy. “Who are you?”

“Colonel Hans Diederman. You are?”

“Colonel McKenna. U.S. Air Force. Well-wisher.”

“I am sure,” Diederman said.

No humor there. “What do you do in this room?”

Diederman looked at the general, then back to McKenna. “Monitor operations of the wells. Peaceful wells, Colonel McKenna.”

“They are very dangerous wells,” McKenna countered. “You have no controls in here?”

“None. And now, we have no monitoring. The antennas are gone.”

McKenna tilted his head to scan several of the screens. They were all blank.

“You have no radio communications?”

“None at all,” Diederman said.

The general’s face finally mobilized, changing from fury to something else. Fear? It looked as if he might have a heart attack.

“You and your people have overestimated the dangers, I am afraid,” Diederman said.

“What happens in a Force Ten gale?”

“Nothing. I designed these platforms myself.”

Egomaniac?

Eisenach looked down at the first console, then quickly away.

McKenna released the stock with his left hand and pointed downward at the floor. “What’s down there?”

“The Switching Center.”

“Collects and distributes the electricity?”

“Exactly. You have destroyed an enterprise designed solely to help mankind, Colonel McKenna.”

“Jesus, Diederman. How long has it been since you’ve been on the mainland?”

The man frowned. “Several weeks ago.”

“But you’re usually here?”

“I am.”

“Then you don’t know that the juice you’re generating is replacing other energy consumption so that Eisenach and his buddies can store up fuel for war? Along with all the new tanks and ships and planes?”

Diederman swung his big head toward General Eisenach and stared.

“You will never prevail.”

“I’ll be damned. You can talk, General.”

“I know things you do not know.”

This son of a bitch was a walking zombie. Staring right through McKenna.

“You probably do. Like what?”

One hand lifted slightly and turned palm up. Not much of a gesture.

“This? This? Only a mild setback. The Aryan nation is destined to lead, to control, to people this world.”

One of those.

McKenna shifted the muzzle of the assault rifle toward the general. He now thought that Eisenach was more dangerous than Diederman.

“And even now,” Eisenach said, “you have won nothing. You will have, in fact, created an environmental calamity. It is your own doing.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Eisenach smiled at him.

Diederman pointed to a black box on the first console. A red light was blinking on the face of it.

“The general thought it would be an excellent idea to wire each of the wells with explosives. That box activates the system.”

Eisenach smiled. “It cannot be stopped. The wells will all erupt within fifty minutes.”

“However,” Diederman said, “I did not think it was such a good idea. The explosives are in place, but they are not wired.”

Eisenach spun around toward the big man, his mouth agape, a snarl emitting from it. He pawed his uniform jacket, scratching, digging.

And came up with a Walther automatic.

Diederman moved fast for his size. He went down sideways, kicking a castered chair at Eisenach.

The technicians scattered, diving under desks and chairs.

The chair caught Eisenach in the knees as he fired his first shot. The report rang in the confined space, but the slug went into a wall.

The general toppled over the chair, then fell trying to get off it. He rolled onto the floor and raised the pistol at McKenna.

McKenna shot him in the forehead, slamming his head into the floor, snapping his eyes wide open.

A very small hole, barely trickling blood.

“Good shot, amigo.”

McKenna wasn’t so sure. Maybe hatred for this kind of bastard got in the way of justice.

The long, slow, rambling, errant wheels of justice. Diederman struggled to his feet.

“Colonel,’’ McKenna said, backing toward the doorway, “I think you’d better get your people back to the mainland.”

The large German didn’t say anything. He just looked at the body of the dead Nazi.

McKenna and Munoz ran back across the corridor and down the stairs. Several men rushing up the stairs, to see what all the noise was about, changed their minds, and ran back down ahead of them.

By the time they reached the first floor and stepped out into another wide and long corridor, there were only a half-dozen men to be seen. And they quickly disappeared through a doorway on the left.

It was a hushed atmosphere, despite the muted whine of the turbine generators on the other side of the corridor’s end wall.

“How you doing, Tony?”

“Aspirin’ll take care of it.”

“None in the kit?”

“Sure. I took six.”

McKenna rushed across the corridor to another Verboten door and found it locked. He backed away and fired four shots into the lock.

The 5.56-millimeter slugs disintegrated the lock and the door swung open.

There were six men inside the three-story-high room, and they all cowered against the back wall. Thick cables traversed the space, fifteen feet and more off the floor. Metal-clad boxes lined the room and ran in rows down its center. All of them bore markings in German and control panels — dials, gauges, digital readouts, levers, buttons.

“If it says ‘on’, Tony, we want it off.”

“Damn betcha, compadre.”

The six men didn’t move as McKenna and Munoz went down the rows, throwing switches.

McKenna envisioned various parts of Germany going dark. The mainland engineers, with no warning that the Greenland generators were going off-line, would be scrambling to find new sources of energy with which to restore power. The fact that it was night might help them out a little, but tomorrow, those factories and industries that had converted from fuel oil and coal to electricity might well be shut down.

One of the men against the back wall began to babble in excited German.

“What’s he sayin’, Kev?”

“Damned if I know. I’d cover a bet, though, that shutting the output down will throw an overload on the turbine generators on all of the wells. Might even burn them out.”

“Too damned bad,” Munoz said. “What about the alternate route, though? On eleven?”

“Their communications are down. The people on eleven might not find out until it’s all over.”

The lights in the Switching Room blinked, came back, blinked again, then went out. A few seconds later, they came back on, but very dim.

“Emergency generator,” Munoz said.

As soon as they’d reversed as many switches and levers as they could find, McKenna gestured with his rifle and herded the Germans out of the room.

Then he and Munoz burned up two magazines apiece of 5.56 ammo. The racket was deafening, and when they were done, the control panels were a shambles.

They slipped into the corridor to find twenty men gathered around, backing away as they changed magazines

“Hey!” McKenna yelled.

The mob stopped moving.

McKenna crossed the corridor, picked out two men, and relieved them of their parkas. He tossed one to Munoz and they slipped into them, then pulled the hoods over their heads.

Munoz led the way to the door and outside onto the helicopter pad.

The rotors were already turning, the faces of the two pilots lit by red instrument panel lights.

“Leave the rifles,” McKenna said, dropping his onto the deck.

Munoz dropped his own, and they marched across the pad toward the chopper, looking, McKenna hoped, like departing German bigwigs.

The pad was littered with pieces from the dome. One of the SAM radar trailers lay on its side, shattered. The other one was gone entirely, probably blown into the sea.

The wind coming across the pad was chilled, but not too strong.

They performed the obligatory ducking from rotors that were high overhead, but it helped to conceal their faces.

Munoz parted from him, headed toward the other side of the chopper. When he reached the helicopter, a small MBB converted to command use, McKenna ignored the passenger compartment, reached for the pilot’s door, and jerked it open. He leaned in toward a startled pilot, flicked open the quick release harness buckle, then hauled him out of the cockpit.

“Sorry,” he said. “This one’s taken.”

The man spluttered his indignation in German while McKenna scrambled inside and pulled on a headset.

Munoz had similar success and similar indignation on the other side. When he plopped into the copilot’s seat, he asked, “How long’s it been since you’ve flown rotary, Snake Eyes?”

“Fourteen, fifteen years.”

“That’s comfortin’.”

“Like riding a bicycle,” McKenna said, running the throttles up. When the tachometers showed high, but not yet in the red, he pulled collective.

And nearly went back into the dome, overcorrecting for the wind, skittering across the pad, dragging the skids, before he got it stabilized and airborne.

The wind was strong enough to not disregard little mistakes.

“Oops,” Munoz said.

McKenna got a feel for the stick, put the nose down, and raced off the platform toward the east. “Just find us a radio channel, huh?”

Munoz had to use the unscrambled frequency for Tac-2.

“Snake Eyes, that you in the chopper?”

“Roger, Delta Green.”

“You fly like shit.”

“That’s because he thinks it’s a bicycle,” Munoz said.

“Cancha, I want you to put down at Daneborg. Think you can get it on the ground there?”

“Tight, Snake Eyes, but we’ll do it. I’m going to radio ahead for fuel.”

“Good. Take off. Robin Hood, you there?”

“Got ’im.”

“You still have some of our flight gear. And I don’t know if we’re going to figure out this German equipment. You want to lead us to Daneborg?”

“I always wanted a Pathfinder code name.”

Conover had been relieved to hear McKenna’s voice on the air.

Abrams had told him on the intercom, “Told you so.”

“Go to hell.”

When the coast came up, Conover lost altitude to 2,000 feet, and they passed silently over Peenemünde.

“Okay, you can get us back some altitude, Con Man”

“What’d you see?”

Conover had not watched the night-vision screen. His focus was on the HUD. He was starting to get a few red lights on electrical and hydraulic systems.

“Not good,” Abrams told him, then went to Tac-1. “Alpha Two, Delta Yellow.”

“Go ahead, Yellow,” Pearson said.

“The rocket’s on the pad, Alpha. Tanker trucks around, vapors like they’re transferring hydrogen and oxygen. Lots of lights and lots of people scurrying around. Very active. They’re going to launch that hummer soon.”

“Thank you, Yellow. Alpha out.”

Conover didn’t like the sound of it. He wondered what the target was, and given what had just taken place in the Greenland Sea, was almost as certain that he didn’t want to know.