Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

“Nazi pussies,” he murmured.

Then he heard the slide of a H&K USP pull back, chambering a round.

Click .

Safety off.

For a lab rat, she knew her way around guns.

“It’s okay Leah. I’ve got this under control,” said Jack without taking his eyes off Muller.

“I’m sorry Jack, but I’m afraid you really don’t.”

The cold steel of the barrel pressed against Jack’s neck.

That was most definitely unexpected.

Countdown to impact: 2 hours.

Bullet-head hit Jack in the gut with the buttstock of his machine pistol, hard, doubling him over in pain.

Leah aimed her newly acquired handgun at the man’s temple and pulled the trigger. He dropped like a brick with a horrendous exit wound on the other side of his head. The sharp report of the gun made them all jump. The heat of the bullet had sizzled past Jack’s ear.

“Sorry about that, Jack. That little shit had it coming for threatening to shoot me if you tried to escape.” Leah’s voice was calm and devoid of all emotion.

“You haven’t changed a bit, have you, little sis?” Muller snatched his weapon from the ground, walked over to Leah and gave her a bear hug that made her look like a doll cradled in his enormous arms. “You still have that temper.” He smiled and wagged a finger at her like she was a naughty child. “You know I’m already desperately short of manpower, thanks to your boyfriend over there.” He pointed at Jack. “Now I’m another man down.”

“The man was too volatile. Besides, he started it. And for the record, Jack is not my boyfriend.”

Sam and Jack gave each other a ‘what the fuck?’ look. Until now, neither man thought that their day could get any stranger.

“You did well finding this place. I wasn’t expecting you to actually be here, though. What happened?”

“In a word? Russians. There’s a Russian sub down there. It fired on us and we came here to stay clear of it.”

“Why didn’t you blow it the hell up?” Muller spread his hands wide in a gesture of mock despair.

“No weapons. They stripped this thing,” she looked toward the Barracuda, “bare to the bone to fit in all the equipment we needed to find the bunker.”

Muller roared with laughter so loud Jack swore he felt the air vibrate.

“They took a perfectly good nuclear attack submarine, stripped it of its weapons systems, renamed it ‘Barracuda’ and turned it into a floating sonar buoy. All because I told them I had a new technology that had strategic military applications.” Her voice bubbled with pride.

“You were right about that, sis.” Muller clapped her on the back and broke out a hearty belly laughed again.

“How did you get the coordinates to Barnes without them finding out?”

“Easy, I hid a subroutine in the sonar drone’s systems and it’s been zipping around out there transmitting to Barnes’ secure satellite network. Even these two clowns had no idea. Like programming a drone is complicated.” She rolled her eyes.

Juan and Dave turned pale.

“You bitch!” Juan spat. “You used us for… for… this ?” He pointed to the bell shaped object only feet away from where they stood before taking a step toward Leah.

Muller and the remaining guard trained their weapons on the group. Their intention to fire made clear.

Juan balled his fists in frustration and glared at her, pure hatred burning in his eyes.

Boots clanging against steel on the nearby U-Boat deck drew their attention. The soldiers who had been working below had emerged, one of them nodded wordlessly to Muller.

Job done, thought Jack. But what job exactly?

“Kurt,” Muller called out to the other guard, “cuff the rest of them but cut the big one free. We need him.”

Sam raised his cuffed wrists and gave Muller a one finger salute.

Muller instinctively aimed his weapon at Sam, then thought better of it. “There’s no point killing you. I need you to help move the device into the other sub.” He paused. “But we don’t need a chubby Hispanic to do that, do we?”

He swung his machine pistol around onto Juan.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll help. Just don’t shoot him. Alright?” Sam pleaded.

“That’s better.” Muller lowered his barrel.

The door to Assistant Director Henry Preston’s office burst open.

“What the—”

“Sorry, sir, but you said you wanted to know as soon as we had some comms links operational,” the harried assistant blurted before Preston could yell at him. Again. The kid looked like he should be at a Justin Bieber concert, not acting as a liaison between the National Security Agency and the other military branches. Then again, everyone looked young to Preston these days.

“Well?”

“They’ve rerouted a lot of the satellite traffic through other stations that were on ‘hot standby’ but still nothing from the Barracuda or from Jack Coulson.”

“Who the hell is Jack Coulson?”

“They haven’t told you?” The assistant was unsure how to proceed. Maybe he’d said too much?

“Son, this is the military. Nobody tells anybody squat. Now who the hell is Coulson?”

“He’s a covert operative. He was at Pine Gap to be briefed when it got hit. They managed to escape and were air-dropped onto the Ronne Ice Shelf.”

“They?”

“There were two of them. The other guy is a navy enlisted man. They were sent on a search, find and secure mission after the U-Boat showed up on the surveillance images. Are you sure they didn’t tell you, sir?”

Preston’s cheeks flamed red.

“I think I’d remember if they told me Jason fucking Bourne and a deck ape were air-dropped onto the goddamn ice pack!”

Henry Preston took a deep lungful of air and counted to ten. He felt calmer straight away. That anger management therapy really did work, although Preston had a sneaking suspicion he was supposed to do his breathing exercises before screaming his head off.

“What do you want me to do, sir?” the confused assistant asked timidly.

“Get me everything you can on this… this Coulson and the navy guy.”

“Krupsky, sir. His name is Sam Krupsky.”

“I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what his name is. Just get me everything you can find and keep monitoring the entire region for traffic.”

“What kind of traffic, sir?”

“All of it! If two whales start humping and we pick it up on sonar, I want to know about it. Got it?”

“Sir.” The door slammed shut again.

Preston massaged his temples and squeezed his eyes shut. “The government’s got your back Coulson.”

An image of the Tomahawk missile cruising over the sea bound for the ice pack with an armed nuclear warhead flashed through his mind.

“Or not.”

“We have a new mission,” Jack quietly addressed the four surviving crew of the Barracuda. Captain Jameson, the XO, Durand and the two civilian scientists — Juan and Dave, all looked to Jack as their leader.