‘Where exactly is this SP_1 Plot?’
‘Down there, beside the Søndre Strømfjord; it give us easy access to Labrador Sea, and Submarine Graveyard beyond. Is most desolate. Carter should like this place.’
‘You trying to say I’m a hermit?’
‘Had crossed my mind,
compadre.’
The coastline was a desolate yet strangely beautiful rugged stretch of rocky ground dropping in steps towards the grey waters. Carter shivered, looking down from the warmth of the Comanche’s interior. The sight filled his veins with ice.
Mongrel slowed their speed and the chopper banked again, coming in low over the fjord as armoured rotors whipped the calm waters into a frenzy. Then they carefully touched down beside a derelict cabin on the shores of the Strømfjord.
The cockpit folded back, and Carter climbed down, stretching and shivering as the numbing cold hit him. Mongrel followed in his ragged T-shirt, breathing deeply, cheeks a rosy red.
‘Smell that, lad!’ he boomed, slotting a thirty-round magazine into his H&K MP5K. The modest sub-machine gun looked like a toy in his large rough hands. Across the fjord they could see several pure white gannets floating majestically on the cold current. The birds looked at ease, at one with their surroundings.
‘Come on, Mongrel. And get a jumper on or you’ll freeze to death out here.’
‘Ha! It take more than ice and wind and cold to kill this old war-dog!’
Carter and Mongrel moved across the rocky ground towards the abandoned shell of the cabin. It had no roof, just bare stone walls, one of which had mostly crumbled into dereliction. Inside, there were the black scorch marks of previous fires on the rock floor and Carter crouched to examine them. The rocks were speckled with discoloured bird droppings; no fires had been lit there for some time.
Mongrel grabbed their packs from the Comanche, and the two men set off on a short half-kilometre walk inland. Using his ECube, Mongrel located a ravine that dropped down through the rock. Shouldering packs and pulling zips up tight on their Berghaus fleece jackets, the two men started to descend a narrow trail. It dropped steeply, dangerously, into the incredibly constricted ravine and they both used gloved hands to steady their descent, reaching out to touch the smooth, crystal-veined walls as the steep rock reared above them. Gloom descended as the sides of the cleft blocked out the light.
Claustrophobia loomed threateningly.
‘You been down here before?’ asked Carter.
‘Yeah. The Mongrel not like.’
‘You
sure
this is the entrance to the Sp_Plot?’
‘Would
you
forget descent like this?’
They dropped perhaps three hundred feet on the narrow rocky pathway. At the base of the steep slope the two men hopped from a narrow ledge. Mongrel moved forward, located a steel doorway and integrated his ECube. The rock-coloured portal slid open and lights flickered dimly into life within the freezing, frost-layered interior of the cave that was revealed.
Carter peered in. ‘Looks homely.’
‘It get worse,’ croaked Mongrel, shivering.
They stepped in, boots tramping over slivers of ice, and the portal closed behind them, locking them inside the mountains.
It took the two Spiral agents ten minutes to gather thermals, extra weapons and ammunition, food supplies and UPTs—pressurisation tablets used when planning a deep-sea excursion. This particular Sp_Plot in Greenland was only rarely accessed, but it had been superbly stocked when Spiral was in its heyday. Now, with both men carrying two packs and dressed for Arctic exploration, Mongrel led Carter through a labyrinth of passageways carved through the rock to the dark shores of an underground lake.
The sight took Carter’s breath away. There, under a few globes of dull yellow light, was a huge glass-black expanse of water measuring perhaps a kilometre across. As Carter’s breath steamed and his ears and nose tingling with cold, his boot kicked a tiny rock which bounced down to the shoreline. The sound echoed around the vast cavern, making both men jump, and ripples spread out across the previously perfectly still surface, destroying the illusion of slick gleaming glass.
‘If there
are
dinosaurs living in there, I pretty sure you woke them up now,’ muttered Mongrel disapprovingly, a frown carving contours down his rugged face.
‘Yeah—but what an incredible place!’
‘Not as incredible as the secrets she hold. Look!’
Carter focused on the ten objects covered by tarpaulins at the water’s edge. He moved forward and grabbed the edge of one of the tarps, hauling the cover free from a Viper ZX.
The Viper ZX was built by Kawasaki, a sleek black sea-craft whose hull was created from interleaving semi-morphic panels of Titanium-II. It could house three people in comfort inside its high-walled narrow hull, and sported a 380 bhp 3000cc four-stroke engine with QOHC and fully waterproof twin-line electronics. The Viper could travel in complete silence, using USD-tx Ultra Sonic Dispersers, and it sported direct-drive axial-flow jet pumps, twin three-blade impellers and quad 168mm jet-pump nozzles for powerful acceleration—even vertically. Which was where the Viper really surprised and delighted first-time users and made a liar out of any man referring to its sleek design merely as ‘speedboat’. At the touch of a button, the Kawasaki machine would slide panels in a dome above the occupants, realign control settings and effectively become a high-speed submarine. It could dive vertically to a depth of three kilometres, had advanced pressure-control mechanisms and used a variety of underwater sighting systems, combined with powerful hull-mounted STK rockets and an industrial green-beam Greeneye laser. This could easily slice through twelve-inch plate steel and could also double as a tactical weapon. The final touch of genius was the machine’s ability for a remote-control operation. Utilising a tiny black pad with an inbuilt LCD screen, the Viper could be piloted from a distance of five kilometres: useful for setting up decoys, or using the vehicle as an unmanned reconnaissance vehicle, or—drastically—a mobile bomb.
Carter stared at the sleek black hull.
‘Wow,’ he said, visibly impressed.
‘You piloted one of these beasts?’ asked Mongrel, nudging the vehicle with his boot.
‘I’ve been in the simulators,’ said Carter softly. ‘They were pretty new, even when Durell was stomping the fuck out of us with his nukes. Just past prototype stage, if I’m not mistaken.’
‘You not mistaken.’ Mongrel grinned, scratching at his head. He beamed. ‘I have had honour of piloting one. Just once, mind, and I spill gravy on control dash and blew something up and got us trapped under sea for fifty-five minutes and we nearly ran out of air because air-recyc went titties up. But hey, I still got to drive beast on op beneath oil rig! Is
very good
machine for missions. Very reliable. Has many fancy function.’
Carter thought about this, as his eyes ran down the sleek lines of the Viper. ‘You spilled gravy?’ he said at last.
‘Is long story.’
‘I bet it is.’
‘I tell you later. Come on!’ Mongrel threw his packs into the Viper, which rocked only slightly under the weight, then jumped in boots first.
Carter followed, sliding into one of the well-sculpted pilot seats and grinning suddenly like a little boy. His hands stroked over the smooth synthetic seat-covering. Then he reached forward and switched on the power. The dash lit up in a swathe of bright colours. Carter nodded in satisfaction, hand reaching out to flick on several more switches.
‘You got the coordinates for this Submarine Graveyard?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Let’s pay our old friends the Nex a surprise visit, then.’
‘Mongrel not argue with that. I just hope this
is
surprise for the copper-eyed fuckers.’
Carter smiled coldly. ‘If they are waiting for us ...’ He palmed his battered Browning, and placed it on the seat beside him. ‘Well, we both know what we will have to do.’
The engine started with a quiet hiss. Carter turned a dial and watched as panels slid neatly all around him and Mongrel, sealing them within the hull of the machine.
Then the Viper slid silently, gracefully and quickly into the underground lake, with hardly a disturbance of the black waters to indicate its passing.
T
he Søndre Strømfjord was calm, blue-grey waters lapping quietly against rugged ancient shores. Huge blocks of gleaming glacier ice rocked gently, glowing in the sun.
A distant whine penetrated the stillness and then the sleek black hull of the Viper ZX broke through the surface, engine rumbling throatily across the freezing fjord as the craft took momentarily to the air, black plates peeling back to shed cascading silver droplets. It crashed back into the water, banked in a shower of spray and then powered out down the fjord towards the open sea. ‘Not bad,’ muttered Mongrel.
‘You see any gravy stains?’ snapped Carter, his eyes glowing. He accelerated the boat on a surge of torque, and the black hull crashed rhythmically across the icy fjord.
‘It was a
particularly
tasty meat pie,’ rumbled Mongrel indignantly. ‘It not
my
fault the microwave overcook damned thing, and it go slippy-slop through Mongrel’s paws.’
‘Yeah—but on a mission?’
‘A man has to eat,’ snapped the huge tufted squaddie complacently.
Cold air beat at the two men. Carter veered gently left, avoiding a massive block of ice. He glanced up as they passed in its shadow and could see gleams of sunlight refracting through it.
Carter increased the boat’s speed again, powering up to 100 knots per hour. They left a wake of foam, and passed several fishing boats from which Inuit fishermen gave friendly waves. Carter frowned, and then revised his first impression: they were not waves of friendship; rather, they were acknowledgements born of fear, directed at a quite obviously military vessel in the hope that the fishermen wouldn’t be machine-gunned on the spot. It’s a shocking world we inhabit, he thought darkly.
Once more, Carter accelerated, the engine moaning softly as Mongrel hunkered down behind the protective upswept windshield. Wind howled around the two men as the Søndre Strømfjord widened and they leapt out into the sea, bounding from ocean swells and giving a wide berth to groups of rocks that protruded like sharp black teeth. The Davis Strait opened up before them, and Carter powered them across it towards the Labrador Sea ...
‘Coordinates?’
‘At this speed, ECube estimates arrival at surface site in three hours.’
Carter gritted his teeth. ‘We’d better get a move on, then. Get down low and for the love of God put on a woolly hat. Your ears are already glowing blue with the chill.’
‘Mongrel not like hats.’
‘This ain’t about what you like or don’t. This is about frostbite. Come on, Mongrel, last thing I need when the shit hits the fan and we’re in the middle of a firefight is you fucking moaning about your chewed-up ears.’
‘I not moan,’ moaned Mongrel.
‘You’re doing it now.’
‘Well, Carter lad,
you
the one who nag.’
‘Nag?’
‘You once say I was like having your fucking wife along on a mission. Well, har har, now we have role reversal for sure, and from where I sitting, it look like
you
the one who is wearing nice flowery dress. By God, you become
pedik!’
Carter frowned. His voice was dangerously low. ‘What’s
pedik?’
‘Is man who is used as a ... female—usually in jail. It go something like: “Hey fat boy, bend over and pick up the soap!”‘
Carter slammed the accelerator hard forward. Engines howled. Mongrel was thrown back violently against his seat as the Viper stormed at an astonishing rate across the waves, flying from one crest to the next, as the wind howled savagely around the two men.
‘Tetchy,’ observed Mongrel. He set about trying to oil his H&K—not the easiest task when slamming across the sea at nearly 200 knots an hour and with his last fried breakfast rolling around like a greased cannon ball in his belly.
To begin with, Carter was wholly focused on the task of piloting the Viper ZX. But as the minutes ticked by and he watched the huge black clouds rolling across the heavens, he felt the gentle tug of low-grade mental tension—a jabbing reminder that the clock was ticking. Carter was painfully aware that they were running out of time; that the whole fucking
world
was running out of time.
Gradually the sky darkened and Carter manipulated the craft’s digital controls. Several panels rolled up over the two men to create an armoured roof as ice rain started to sheet down from the sky.
With the flick of a switch, powerful white lights swept in a swathe from the speeding boat. The sea rolled and heaved, and Carter had to reduce their velocity a little for fear of capsizing.
As they travelled Mongrel serviced both men’s guns and checked that their packs contained everything they could possibly need. Food, hydration pills, UPTs, ammunition, combat knives, spare clothing, wetsuits, compact sachets of HighJ explosive, Babe Grenades with a variety of different explosive fillings and, of course, Carter’s trusty Browning HiPower 9mm and its clips of ammo. ‘You love this gun, eh, Carter?’