Gray Matter Splatter (A Deckard Novel Book 4) (34 page)

Since the ekranoplan needed much longer stretches to land and
take off, they put down well outside the base, opting not to use
their airstrip. In the distance, four snowmobiles left a wake of snow
behind them as they sped toward the ekranoplan.

“Isn’t it splendid!” Mann blurted out.

Deckard flinched, not expecting the billionaire to be right
behind him.

“Gorgeous, just brilliant. You know this is the only place in
the world where three active glaciers come together as one?”

“No, I had no idea,” Deckard said.

“Well, I have you to thank. Short of an international security
crisis, they never would have let me fly an experimental airplane
like this over Danish territory.”

“You’re welcome. We’ll just be loading the cargo and then
we’ll be on our way.” Deckard excused himself.

As Deckard walked down the ramp to prepare to meet the American
airmen en route, Kurt Jager strolled alongside him.

“Not a big fan of Mr. Mann, are you?” the former GSG-9
trooper asked.

“Call it a difference in motivations.”

“I was thinking while we sat around waiting for Aghassi and
Nikita to report back to us—”

“Please don’t start waxing poetic on me. The last few days
have been bad enough as it is.”

“It’s not that, it’s just, I’ve realized what we all have
in common.”

“Yeah, fuck Hillary.”

“No, besides that. I mean, all of us here in this group,
from MARSOC, to SEALs, to the Italian 9th Regiment, to Delta Force,
to the Norwegian FSK, to Germans like me, what we all have in common
is that we have spent nearly our entire lives trying to hold Western
civilization together, trying to maintain the current global order.”

“I'm not sure we’ve done such a great job, then.”

“No, we underestimated the importance of advanced
communications networking and how this would lead to the erosion of
the state, to the end of the Westphalian system that we have been
trying to uphold all these years. Every deployment we have been on,
from training African soldiers, to shooting al-Qaeda terrorists in
Afghanistan, to low-visibility operations in Yemen, or Nigeria, or
wherever, it has all had the same goal of maintaining the status
quo.”

“We were already on a decline; global order was bound to
change and evolve,” Deckard said. “A world where states are not
so important freaks a lot of people out, but maybe it was
inevitable.”

“A non-state world with non-state actors may be yesterday’s
war. Now someone is challenging the global status quo. They don’t
want a non-state world, they want a world of one-state dominance, one
where they are crowned the kings in a new type of world order.”

Deckard squinted, his mind unsettled, then after a moment put his
hand up on the hydraulic cylinder that opened the back ramp. “Damn
Kurt, you should start charging parents to do kids’ birthday
parties. The youngsters would just have a gas of a time.”

Kurt just shook his head, trying not to laugh.

Chapter 32

Greenland

“You're behind schedule!” Jiahao barked at his men.

The truth was, for all of his hyper-competency and supernatural
abilities, Jiahao had little combat experience, and no real-world
leadership experience. He had the skills, but not always the maturity
that comes with hard-earned, real-world, life-or-death situations.
Not that it mattered. The men feared him, and that was enough to
motivate them.

His men were rapidly working to connect the weapon to the
facility’s geothermal power plant. They had enough juice in it for
a small-scale local event when they were on the ice floe, but for
what they had planned next, the geophysical weapon would need
substantially more energy. Oculus was quickly approaching the end
game, which would reduce America to a third-rate power and bring
about a world dominated by the East rather than the West.

“Vladimir!” he called to another of his cell commanders.

“Sir?” The response came almost immediately.

“I see you walking around conducting inspections. Are the
preparations already in place?”

“All the entrances, including emergency exits, have been booby
trapped and barricaded. As we speak, the men are preparing for a
defense in depth, setting up fortifications and anti-personnel mines
inside the corridors. Nothing less than a battalion will be able to
penetrate the facility, and even then it will take them hours and
many casualties,” the former Spetsnaz officer reported.

“How long until we are operational?” Jiahao asked the men
setting up the geophysical weapon.

“We are about to start firing some test shots now to make sure
our calibrations are correct. Another thirty minutes and we will be
ready to trigger the event.”

“Tell me when you are ready.”

Jiahao paced back and forth inside the chamber, watching as the
technicians worked, sending out invisible pulses of electromagnetic
energy, firing them straight through the Earth’s core. Soon, very
soon, he would attain the status of a hero in the People's Republic.

Regardless of whether or not he ever lived to see his home
country again, Jiahao would find immortality in a legacy that would
live on for thousands of years.

* * *

The Ekranoplan lowered its ski wheels and landed on the
tundra, skidding across the ice a few times before finally coming to
a halt. Once the ramp dropped, the mercenaries disembarked, dragging
plastic Skedco medical litters packed with the weapons and equipment
they would need for one final assault.

There were only about 60 of the Samruk International mercenaries
left after those who had been wounded or killed. All of them were
well aware that they would be squaring off against a force that still
outnumbered them and who occupied a dug-in, fortified position. They
would have to rely on surprise, speed, and violence of action to
level the playing field.

“Sergeant Major,” Deckard said. Korgan turned toward him, the
big Kazakh soldier’s face in a permanent scowl. “Let’s get ‘em
moving.”

Deckard turned and watched as the Ekranoplan took off and flew
back to Thule Air Base. The sun was getting low on the horizon now,
and the mercenaries were running out of time before they would freeze
to death on the barren ice field and before the enemy activated the
stolen weapon one final time.

Getting their skis on, the mercs roped into the Skedco sleds and
hauled them forward. Four hundred pounds of demo distributed between
four plastic litters still made for a heavy load, but they had enough
personnel to pull and rotate out as needed. Dag once again took the
lead. With GPS not working and unreliable due to poor satellite
coverage and probable enemy interference, Dag had to make some very
careful calculations. Nate was backing him up, making his own
separate calculations to cross reference with Dag’s. This far
north, magnetic compasses were also next to useless.

As the sun continued to sink beneath their field of view,
it cast upon the snow brilliant shades of pink and orange, a deadly
type of beauty in the world’s most unforgiving environment.

The mercenaries pressed on, their legs burning, their arms numb
from the straps of their rucksacks digging into them. The little rest
they had gotten on the aircraft soon slipped away, replaced by the
complete and utter exhaustion of pushing the human body beyond what
it is supposed to be capable of over the course of their mission.
Fedorchenko saw his men struggling and began stalking the lines,
motivating them to press forward.

The offset infiltration had been necessary, as Samruk could not
risk alerting the enemy by landing the airplane too close by. Too far
away, and the movement would have killed the men, especially after
nightfall. They just had to hope that the enemy had not put out
seismic sensors that could give early warning.

Deckard simply focused on a fixed point in the distance, forcing
his legs to keep moving and his arms to keep swinging as he dug his
whippets into the snow. He had to admit that he had been shocked by
what the Danes had told them when he finally got the full story.
Recent Russian military aggression had inspired the Danish government
to dust off a decades-old Cold War-era program that the U.S. Army had
initiated back in the 1960s.

Called Camp Century, Army engineers had dug out an ice base under
Greenland’s ice sheet. It was a cut-and-fill type of construction
that saw massive tractors digging out trenches that were then covered
over with metal roofs. Then, the entire construct was buried under
the snow. Officially, Camp Century was an Army experiment to try out
new Arctic construction techniques and conduct scientific
experiments. The reality was that it was just a cover for a highly
secretive program called Project Iceworm.

All of this had been news to Deckard, who had only been
told about it by the guys in Tampa while he was on the ekranoplan. It
turns out that Uncle Sam had a plan to dig out 4,000 kilometers of
tunnels under the ice and station 600 Minuteman nuclear missiles
there, which could then be fired over the North Pole to strike the
Soviet Union during a future nuclear war that never occurred.

Denmark had utilized the Cold War-era plan and built their own
Arctic base in complete secrecy. The base was not to house nuclear
weapons, since Denmark didn’t have any, but would act as a
perfectly camouflaged and secure military base in the event of a war
with Russia. It would be a staging area for troops, and apparently
they even planned on building an underground airstrip in the future.
As he had witnessed firsthand, the Arctic was nearly impossible to
run military operations in because of the tyranny of the long
distances and harsh weather.

Denmark aimed to overcome some of those difficulties by situating
a military base in the heart of Greenland. The whole thing was
surreal, but at this point Deckard was just rolling with the punches.

Up ahead, Dag raised a fist into the air, halting the patrol. He
didn’t use his radio, but simply waved Deckard forward in the last
rays of sunlight poking out from behind the Norwegian mercenary.
Face-to-face communication was better, as none of them were trusting
their electronics not to be jammed, spoofed, or homed in on.

“It is time to put metal to matter and watch gray matter
splatter,” Deckard said as he skied up to the front of the patrol
and took a look around.

Kurt ushered forward the mercs hauling the sleds. He was in
charge of running the demo team and helped offload the 40-pound
cratering charges that they had picked up at Thule Air Base. The
Danes had advised that finding the entrances to the ice base would be
almost impossible, and getting inside even more difficult. They were
not going to take any chances. If the entrances were blocked, they
would simply make a new one.

While the former GSG-9 operator got the charges arranged in an
oval shape on the ice, another team led by Maurizio sank metal shanks
into the ice 100 meters away to serve as their hard points.
Fedorchenko and Shatayeva conducted a final inspection of men,
weapons, and equipment. Everyone was going into the breach on this
one: mortars, recce, every swinging dick who could carry a rifle and
shoot in a generally straight direction.

* * *

Tampa, Florida

“It has begun,” Joshua said, hanging up the phone.

“Seismic readings?” Craig asked.

“Small ones.”

“They are test firing,” Will said. “Getting ready for the
real deal, making sure they kill us with the first shot.”

“Which is exactly what will happen if the Yellowstone caldera
cooks off.”

“No, that is the thing,” Joshua said. “It isn’t
Yellowstone. These odd readings are being reported by seismic
stations in Europe. They are being detected near the Canary Islands.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Craig said, shaking
his head.

“Get the seismologist on the phone again,” Will whispered.

Joshua picked up the phone and dialed.

“What do you think this means?” Joshua asked as the phone
rang.

“I think it means we are fucked.”

Joshua blew out his cheeks impatiently until someone picked up on
the other end of the line.

“Uh, yeah, hello. This is Joshua again. Yes. We need a threat
assessment on an earthquake on or near the Canary Islands.” Joshua
set the phone down and hit a button on the console. “Dr. Flynn, you
are now on speaker.”

“OK, well without knowing the specifics, I can project some
scenarios,” the seismologist told the think tank.

“We already know that the opposition has put an unprecedented
amount of resources into making this attack happen in a way that
cannot be attributed to the sponsor,” Will said. “Give us the
worst-case scenario, which is exactly what we have to expect.”

“Worst case is that the earthquake triggers a mega-tsunami,
which happens when a large mass displaces a significant amount of
ocean water. They are far more dangerous than a tsunami created by
seismic activity along the tectonic plates on the seabed. The initial
wave could reach hundreds of meters high, if not more.”

“I’m not sure I’m tracking here, Doc,” Will said.

“In the worst case, the seismic activity would trigger the
Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Canary Islands, causing the entire flank
of the island to collapse into the ocean. This would displace enough
water to create an initial wave over a thousand meters high. Eight or
nine hours later, the resulting tidal wave would hit America’s
Eastern Seaboard. That wave would be somewhere between fifty to a
hundred meters high.”

“My god,” Craig said, his eyes getting wide.

“Yes, it would take out a good portion of southern England as
well,” Dr. Flynn informed them.

“An earthquake that triggers a volcano that triggers a tidal
wave,” Will said to himself. “And none of it can be traced back
to those responsible because of all of the human and geological
cutouts used.”