“If you don’t know that, pal, you don’t belong on this net. Clear off, we need this for official traffic,” the voice answered coldly. Edwards stared at the radio in mute rage for several seconds before exploding.
“Listen up, asshole! The guy who knows how to work this damned radio is dead, and I’m all you got. The base at Keflavik was hit seven hours ago by a Russian air and ground attack. The place is crawling with bad guys, there’s a Russian ship coming into Hafnarfjordur harbor right now, and you’re playing fucking word games! Let’s get it together, mister. Over!”
“Copy that. Stand by. We have to verify who you are.” Not a trace of remorse.
“Dammit, this thing works on batteries. You want me to run them down while you open a file cabinet?”
A new voice came on the circuit. “Edwards, this is the senior communications watch officer. Get off the air. They might be able to monitor you. We’ll check you out and be back in three-zero minutes from now. You got that? Over.”
That was more like it. The lieutenant checked his watch. “Roger, understand. We’ll be back in three-zero minutes. Out.” Edwards flipped the power switch off. “Let’s get moving. I didn’t know they could track in on this.” The good news was that the radio broke down in under two minutes, and they were moving again.
“Sarge, let’s head for this Hill 152. We should be able to see pretty good from up there, and there’s water on the way.”
“It’s hot water, sir, full of sulfur. Just as soon not drink that shit, if you know what I mean.”
“Suit yourself.” Edwards moved off at a slow trot. Once as a boy he’d had to call in to report a fire. They’d believed him then. Why not now?
MV JULIUS FUCIK
Kherov knew that he was finishing the work that the Americans had begun. Driving his ship into the harbor at eighteen knots was worse than reckless. The sea bottom here was rock, not mud, and a grounding could easily rip his bottom out. But he feared another air attack even more, and he was sure that a flight of American fighters was heading this way, laden with missiles and bombs that would rob him of success in the most important mission of his life.
“Midships!” he called.
“Rudder amidships,” the helmsman acknowledged.
He’d learned minutes before that his first officer was dead, from wounds sustained in the first strafing attack. His best helmsman had died screaming before his eyes, along with many of his skilled deck crewmen. He had only one man qualified to take the shore sightings necessary for a positive position fix. But the quay was in sight, and he’d depend on a seaman’s eye.
“Slow to half speed,” he ordered. The helmsman relayed the order on the engine room telegraph.
“Rudder right full.” He watched his ship’s head come slowly right. He stood on the centerline of the bridge, carefully lining his jackstaff up with the quay. There was no one trained to handle the mooring lines. He wondered if the soldiers could manage it.
The ship touched bottom. Kherov was thrown from his feet and cursed loudly with pain and rage. He’d misjudged his approach. The Fucik shuddered as she slid across the rocky bottom. There was no time to check his chart. When the tide turned, the harbor’s strong eddy currents would make his landing an impossible nightmare.
“Reverse your rudder.” A minute later the ship was fully afloat again. The captain ignored the flooding alarms that hooted behind him. The hull was penetrated, or maybe the damaged seams had sprung farther. No matter. The dock was a mere thousand meters away. It was a massive quay made of rough stone. “Midships. All stop.”
The ship was moving far too fast to stop. The soldiers on the dock could already see that, and were slowly backing up, away from the edge, fearing that it would crumble when the ship struck. Kherov grunted with dark amusement. So much for the line handlers. Eight hundred meters.
“All back full.”
Six hundred meters. The ship’s whole mass shuddered as the engines fought to slow her. She headed into the berth at a thirty-degree angle, her speed now eight knots. Kherov walked to the engine room voice tube.
“On my order, shut down the engines, pull the manual sprinkler handle, and evacuate the engine spaces.”
“What are you doing?” the General asked.
“We cannot moor to the quay,” Kherov answered simply. “Your soldiers don’t know how to handle the lines, and many of my seamen are dead.” The berth Kherov had selected was precisely half a meter shallower than his ship’s draft. He went back to the voice tube.
“Now, Comrades!”
Below, the chief engineer gave the orders. His chief machinist cut off the diesel engines and ran to the escape ladder. The engineer yanked the emergency handle for the fire-suppression system and followed, after counting heads to make sure that all his men had gotten out.
“Rudder hard right!”
A minute later the bow of JULIUS FUCIK rammed the quay at a speed of five knots. Her bow crumpled as though constructed of paper, and the whole ship pivoted to the right, her side slamming against the rocks in a shower of orange sparks. The impact ripped the ship’s bottom open at the turn of her starboard bilges. Instantly her lower decks flooded, and the ship settled rapidly to the bottom, only a few feet below her flat keel. The JULIUS FUCIK would never sail again. But she had reached her objective.
Kherov waved to the General. “My men will deploy the two baby tugboats we have in the stem. Tell them to remove two barges and set them between the stem and the end of the quay. My men will show you how to secure the barges properly so they don’t drift off. Then use your bridging equipment to take your vehicles off the elevator onto the barges, then from the barges to the quay.”
“We can do this easily. Now, Comrade Captain, you will see my surgeon. I will brook no further argument.” The General waved to his orderly and both men assisted the captain below. There might still be time.
HILL 152, ICELAND
“You decide who I am yet?” Edwards asked testily. Another really annoying thing was the quarter-second delay caused by the signal’s travel time to and from the satellite.
“That’s affirmative. The problem is, how do we know it’s really you?” The officer had a telex in his hand confirming that one First Lieutenant Michael D. Edwards, USAF, had indeed been the met officer for the 57th FIS, information that could easily have been in Russian hands before the attack.
“Look, turkey, I’m sitting here on Hill 152, east of Hafnarfjordur, okay? There is a Russian helicopter flying around, and some godawful big ship just docked in the harbor. It’s too far to see a flag, but I don’t figure the son of a bitch came from New York, y’know? The Russians have invaded this rock. They pounded hell out of Keflavik, and they got troops all over the place.”
“Tell me about the ship.”
Edwards locked the binoculars to his eyes. “Black hull, white superstructure. Big block letters on the side. Can’t quite make it out. Something-Lines. The first word begins with an L. Some kind of barge-carrying ship. There’s a tugboat moving a barge around right now.”
“Have you seen any Russian troops?”
Edwards paused before answering. “No. I’ve just heard radio reports of the Marines at Keflavik. They were being overrun. They’ve been off the air ever since. I can see some people on the dock, but I can’t tell what they are.”
“Okay, we’ll be checking that out. For the moment I’d suggest that you find a good, safe place to belly-up, and stay off the air. If we have to contact you, we’ll broadcast on the hour, every even hour. If you want to talk to us, we’ll be here. Understood?”
“Roger, copy. Out.” Edwards switched off. “I don’t believe this.”
“Nobody knows what the hell’s going on, Lieutenant,” Smith observed. “Why should they? We sure as hell don’t.”
“Ain’t that the truth!” Edwards repacked his radio. “If those idiots would listen to me, we could have some fighter-bombers here to blast that ship inside two hours. God, but she’s a big one. How much equipment can you Marines load in something that big?”
“A lot,” Smith said quietly.
“You think they’ll be trying to land more troops?”
“It figures, sir. They couldn’t have hit Keflavik with all that many-figure a battalion, tops. This here’s a pretty big rock. I’d sure as hell want more troops to hold it than that. Course, I’m just a buck sergeant.”
HAFNARFJORDUR, ICELAND
The General could finally get to work. The first order of business was to board the single working helicopter, now operating off the dock, its pilots delighted to see the ship sunk alongside the quay. He left a rifle company to secure the harbor area, sent another to Reykjavik airport to reinforce that, and detailed his last to get the division’s equipment moving off the ship. Then he flew to Keflavik to survey the situation.