Jack Mars - Primary Threat

There were four swimmer delivery vehicles at his feet. They were basically small, battery-powered electric torpedoes. Each diver would hold the handle on a vehicle with one hand, and the propulsion would carry him to the destination much faster, and with much less effort, than he could swim by himself.

The man picked one up in both arms. “Who here has used one of these?”

All three hands went up.

The man nodded. “Good. Normally, we would use Mark 8 submarine delivery vehicles, each carrying two to four men, but we couldn’t get them here in time, and the environment is a difficult one in which to deploy them. So we’re going with the handhelds. All right?”

He paused. But no one said a word. It was what it was. It didn’t matter if it was all right or not.

“Watch your compass. You are headed due east. You’ve got seventeen other guys…” He looked at Murphy’s empty chair again. “Sixteen other guys down there. Move with the flow of traffic. This group is the oversight group, so you are taking the rear. If you get confused, you get lost, the way back is due west. This camp is lit up like a Christmas tree down there, so just head for the lights.”

He held up a waterproof helmet, with visor and mask.

“Your head gear has two-way radio communications. Keep chatter to a minimum. Listen for the leaders up ahead. Visibility is going to be low. Your ears might save you. Your mouth might kill you.”

He stared hard at them all.

“No air support. No amphibious support. It could get hot. Keep an eye above you. When you notice open air, you are almost there. As you reach the overhead ice’s edge, turn off your headlamps. The idea, gentlemen, is to take them by surprise.”

The man held up an MP5 machine gun with a pre-mounted magazine. The gun was shrink-wrapped in thick, translucent plastic. He held up a three-pack of grenades, wrapped the same way.

“These things are out of the elements right now. This is one hundred percent waterproof packaging. When you get onto land, use your knives to cut it open.”

He smiled, then shook his head. “If you need to, use your knives to cut yourselves out of those suits, too.”

Luke glanced at Ed. Ed made a grimace, a funny facial expression that Luke had never seen him make before. He looked like a kid in elementary school when the teacher suggested the class should sing some Christmas carols.

The assistants behind Ed lifted his helmet, and then let it settle into place on his head. His breath fogged up the visor.

The assistants behind Luke were about to do the same.

“Any questions?” the man at the front said.

What are we doing? came to mind.

“Good. Then let’s hit it.”

Murphy was in a bad mood.

“I’m sick of this mission, Swann. I never liked Navy people, and now I really don’t like them.”

The communications here were okay, despite the storm. Swann had explained it to him, but Murphy hadn’t listened to the whole thing. Something about antennas built into these domes, plus satellite signals that penetrated fast moving cloud cover and precipitation, plus the unbreakable encryption Swann was known for…

Whatever.

He waited through the delay as the signal bounced around so the terrorists couldn’t trace and listen in.

Murphy was fed up, irritated. He wasn’t a diver. Stone and Newsam weren’t divers either. The SEALs had been training with elite cold-water dive teams from Norway and Sweden for the past several years. Meanwhile, the unprepared SRT had been tacked onto this mission like some kind of garish hood ornament.

The way that big guy had looked at the empty chair… then at Murphy… then back at the chair. He was lucky they were both on the same team. Murphy would gladly remodel the guy’s face with that chair.

“Yeah, I don’t get it,” Swann said finally. “We’re pretty much window dressing back here at mission control. Nobody wants civilian oversight on this thing. They want a rubber stamp. They put us in our own office, away from everybody else, with a couple of computers and a coffee machine.”

Murphy smiled. He could picture hardened SEAL and JSOC officers getting a load of the tall, gangly, long-haired, bespectacled computer freak Swann, and the tender young morsel Trudy Wellington, and thinking…

Nothing. The engines powering the typical military brain would grind to a halt. The sight of Swann alone was enough to pour sugar in the gas tank.

Put them in another room, somewhere out of sight.

“Those guys are gonna get themselves killed down there. I tried to tell Stone, but then some Navy chump kicked me out because the briefing was classified.”

“Where are you now?” Swann said.

Murphy looked around. He was inside an empty dome, sitting on a chair that until recently must have held a Navy SEAL. The hole in the ice glowed blue. There was a command dome around here somewhere, and after the SEALs went in, the support staff must have gone there to watch the radar blips moving under the ice sheet.

“I’m in hell,” Murphy said. “A frozen hell.”

Trudy’s voice came on. It was musical, like fingers lightly tinkling the piano keys.

“What do you want to do?” she said.

The answer to that was easy enough. Murphy wanted to disappear. He wanted to leave this Arctic wasteland, this pointless terrorist atrocity, whatever it was, go down to Grand Cayman, grab his $2.5 million in cash, and just evaporate.

It was easier said than done, however. It was going to take planning, and time to engineer a disappearance like that. Time he didn’t have. Don still wanted him to do six months in Leavenworth in exchange for an honorable discharge. Meanwhile, Wallace Speck was in custody, out of Murphy’s reach, and could start saying unfortunate things at any moment.

The worst-case scenario was Murphy arriving in Leavenworth at the exact moment Speck mentioned his name.

Naturally, these were not things Murphy could talk about with Mark Swann and Trudy Wellington. But there were things he could talk about. Swann and Trudy could help him, not to get out of here, but to get further in.

Stone was wrong. Murphy had something to prove. He always had something to prove. Maybe not to Stone, and maybe not to that Cro-Magnon-skulled SEAL trainer, but to himself. This mission had rubbed him the wrong way. They had catapulted across the country at warp speed, for what? A half-baked operation that was FUBAR before it even got underway. Who dreamed this up, Wile E. Coyote? It was the Iran embassy rescue operation part two, with ice this time instead of sand.

That it seemed so poorly and hastily designed irritated Murphy. The fact that Stone went along with it irritated him more. The fact that Newsam went along with it piled the irritation sky high.

The fact that he, Murphy, couldn’t bring himself to squeeze into that claustrophobic diving suit and climb through that grave hole in the ice added a little bit of humiliation to the mix. And the way that mindless drone looked at that chair…

Murphy’s hands clenched and unclenched. He had come to terms long ago that part of why he had joined the military, and then Delta Force, was to do something constructive with his anger.

He knew his history. He had studied skilled, prolific killers from past wars. Audie Murphy in World War II. Bloody Bill Anderson during the American Civil War. Much of what drove those guys was rage.

In his mind’s eye, he could see Audie Murphy at Colmar, standing alone atop a burning tank killer, mowing down dozens of Germans with a .50 caliber machine gun, while taking enemy fire the entire time.

Murphy, Newsam, and Stone had all taken Dexies earlier. Murphy had been tired and taken two. They were kicking in hard right now. He could feel his heart beginning to pound and his breathing pick up. Items inside this dome began to jump out at him in exquisite detail. He stifled an urge to stand up and do a bunch of jumping jacks.