Skyfire (30 page)

The old man creased his wrinkled face and looked

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Dominique up and down.

"Do you remember last night" he asked her, his voice deep and solemn beneath the thick Norwegian accent.

She simply nodded, the very thought of the strange, au-toerotic episode sending another wave of pleasure throughout her sensory system.

Verden's eyes twinkled slightly, but then he lowered them and became deadly serious. "That was in preparation for the work you must do for me this day."

At that moment, Dominique noticed that a submarine had surfaced and was waiting near the bow of the Great Ship.

The sub wasn't anything like the kind the Norsemen used to carry their troops to battle. It was smaller, sleeker, and painted in shiny black with wild red designs that led up to the frighteningly realistic Migardsom monster head on its bow.

"You must go with Thorgils, and quickly," Verden told her, first pointing to his son and then to the nearby sub. "We are planning the biggest attack of this war and you must be present, or all may be lost. . ."

Dominique slowly shook her head.

"I do not understand," she said in a voice not much more than a whisper.

Verden looked up at her, all moisture gone now from his tired eyes.

"As my Valkyrie, you must observe my men in battle," he told her somberly.

"You must see what I cannot. You must hear the sounds that will not reach my ears.

"You must tell me who will live and who will die."

Once again, Dominique shook her head. But before she could speak again, Verden held up his hand.

"I have spoken," he said with deep finality. It was important to him that Dominique leave the ship before Elizabeth realized it, for he was certain the witch would want to claim his beautiful Valkyrie for her own. "Go now with my son," he continued. "He will explain any questions you might have. That boat you see is the fastest one we have, but you

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must leave immediately so that you will be there when the battle commences."

With that, Verden made a sweep with his hand, and then closed his eyes and began to weep softly. Dominique was then gently nudged by two of Thorgils's personal bodyguards and led to the bow of the Great Ship. Within a few minutes, she was riding one of the accursed see-through life rafts over to the waiting sub, Thorgils and his two grim-faced bodyguards sharing the short, stomach-churning trip with her.

Climbing down inside the conning tower, Dominique quickly realized that this submarine was nothing like the Norse tubs she'd been hi before.

"We must go at full speed all day to reach the battle area in time," Thorgils told the commander of the boat once they had reached the control room.

The sub's master quickly consulted a sophisticated TV radar read-out screen attached to the control-room wall. He lingered at it long enough for Dominique to determine that the sub was about two hundred miles off the coast of Florida. The man then checked the control room's clock which read 0700 hours.

"We should be on station with an hour to spare," the captain told Thorgils.

"I pray that we are," Thorgils replied. Then he turned back to Dominique and, taking her by the arm, led her away from the control room.

"Come with me," he told her roughly.

As they walked down the long corridor, Dominique could hear the sub's engines crack to life. Within seconds, she felt the familiar sensation of submerging and moving beneath the surface of the water. But unlike the other Viking subs she'd been on, this one seemed to move through the water like ice on glass.

She correctly attributed this to the sub's sleek design, a shape more reminiscent of prewar vessels than the lumbering, monstrous Norse Krig Bats.

Everything inside the sub appeared to be high tech, from the steering and navigation equipment to the lighting and

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vent systems. There was no reek of body odor on this boat. Even the crew members she saw looked high-tech. No scruffy beards or dirty uniforms for these men. Each one was smartly dressed in a neat black uniform, complete with heavy boots and a red beret.

Thorgils led her to the door of a small cabin at the end of the passageway and dismissing his bodyguards with a curt salute, he not too gently pushed her inside.

The room was luxurious compared to the cabins she'd been kept in aboard the larger Norse subs. This room featured a bed not a bed, a small galley, and a locker full of unmarked can goods.

"We have much to do," Thorgils told Dominique once they entered the room. "You must be prepared to carry out the wishes of my father."

Dominique sat on the edge of the bed, now showing none of the pleasing aftereffects of the myx. She felt tired, and caught herself trembling slightly. It was the uncertainty of what lay ahead that was causing the tremors. Although her experience aboard the Great Ship had been bizarre, at least she had felt a certain sense of security there. Now she was riding a warship right into what Verden claimed would be the biggest action so far by the Norsemen against the United Americans. And just what her role in the upcoming battle was supposed to be, she didn't have a clue.

Thorgils produced a well-worn notebook from his uniform pocket and opened it to page one.

"These are the instructions for a Valkyrie," he told her gruffly, obviously not relishing the task of explaining it all to her. "You must learn them, memorize them, before we reach the battle zone. . . ."

Dominique closed her eyes and tried to will her body to stop shaking. To suddenly let herself cave in to the strange events of the past week would be tantamount to giving up completely. She knew she had to regain some strength, no matter how she did it. Somehow she had to use the situation to her advantage.

She opened her eyes and for the first time noticed that 266

there was a flask of myx hanging from the back of the cabin door. Suddenly her body was revived, her mind flashing with options.

"Go ahead," she told Thorgils, undoing the top few buttons of her tight-fitting jumpsuit. "If the Verden wishes it, then I am suddenly very anxious to learn . . ."

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Part Three

Wolf stared into the large green eye of the SLNQ-55 surface radar and, for a moment, couldn't believe his eyes.

Just seconds before, the screen had been blank, the only indications bouncing back to the sophisticated radar set being a handful of small weather systems creeping up the North Carolina coast and the occasional flight of seabirds.

But now the long-range radar screen had come alive with blips.

Wolf checked his watch and then made an entry into his ship's log: "Enemy has shown himself at 1630 hours." He shook his head in amazement. Hunter had predicted that the Norsemen would begin surfacing right at this time.

The masked man made a quick check of his present position-fifteen miles off the coast of Fernandina Beach, Florida, and cruising due south-and then punched a brightly red-lit button next to the radar console.

Within seconds, the battleship's insides were ringing with the sound of an ear-piecing klaxon, calling the crew to their battle stations.

Wolf turned his attention back to the radar screen, and as one of his junior officers read from the long list of directions left by Hunter, he fiddled with the SLNQ's various buttons and knobs, finally refining the screen's contrast and focus to peak levels.

"Enter this into the log," he told another officer. "Five groups of subs evident on surface radar at 1645. Position is

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forty miles south-southwest of our location. Enemy surfacing in packs of three apiece."

The junior officer wrote as fast as he could.

"Three more enemy groups evident now," Wolf continued, never taking his eyes from the screen. "All enemy ships are heading due west. Time is 1646 . . ."

Wolfs gunnery master rumbled into the room, called there by the battle station alert.

"Your orders, sir?" the officer, a Scotsman, asked from beneath a snap salute.

"Prepare all guns," Wolf told him after a moment of thought. "High-impact HE

shells, long trajectory powder for the sixteen-inchers. Standard draw for the five-inchers."

The Scotsman snapped another salute and was gone to be replaced by the ship's defensive systems officer.

"Program all surface defensive systems to automatic, with a slave command to manual," Wolf told this man, reading from another set of instructions Hunter had left behind. "Switch on all auxiliary generators for the Phalanx guns and make sure that the magazine is sealed tight."

This officer also quickly saluted and left. Next in line was the ship's intelligence officer, a former Norwegian lieutenant commander named Bjordson, the same man who captained the ship's undercover fishing boat.

Wolf quickly motioned Bjordson to the radar screen.

"There they are," he said, pointing to the staticky white clusters of blips that were now covering the lower left-hand corner of the large screen. "They are coming up in packs."

"Surfacing in full battle formations," Bjordson said, nodding. He had seen the tactic used many times before by the Soviet Navy, yet never on this grand a scale. "They will attack within the hour . . ."

"We should radio the Americans," Wolf said, pushing a button and summoning the control room's communications officer.

"Transmit the last two pages of the log to the American AWAC's," Wolf said quickly as soon as the radio officer arrived. "Top code. Double scramble, reply will be the pass

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phrase of the hour."

Another button was pushed and the ship's meteorologist appeared.

"What is the exact time of sunset on the Florida coast?" Wolf asked.

The man didn't miss a beat. "Eighteen hundred hours, fourteen minutes, sir."

Bjordson checked his watch. "Assuming that the attack plan is to hit the beaches simultaneously, that will give them about an hour to disembark all their troops," he said.

"That's the time window we have to hit them," Wolf said, nodding grimly. "Once it gets dark, the job will be harder by five times. . ."

'Ten . . ." Bjordson replied.

Wolf turned to the navigation officer who was but five feet to his right.

"How long until we reach our station?" Wolf wanted to know.

"Twenty-three minutes," the officer responded instantly.

Wolf looked back at the SNLQ and pushed a full bank of buttons. The screen suddenly expanded its view, utilizing a grid map that included most of the eastern shore of North Florida. The cluster of enemy subs heading toward that coast was now reduced to a single white dot.

Wolf checked with the officer in charge of reading the SNLQ's directions and then entered a barrage of numbers into the radar's keyboard. Soon enough he had conjured up. another white blip, this one blinking every second and indicating the battleship's approximate position twenty-three minutes from then.

"If we hold true, we can cross their sterns just as they are offloading troops," Wolf said, moving his projected course-indicator cursor as if he was crossing the top of a gigantic letter T. "In our sector alone that could be as many as thirty boats. . ."

"Even when they spot us, there'll be little that they can do," Bjordson said.

"They can submerge and thereby drown many of their troops or they can stay on top and

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wait for us to hit them with a barrage."

"A turkey shoot' is what the Americans call it," Wolf said somberly. "With us behind them and the American aircraft bombing them on the beaches, it will be a massacre, at least in our sector ..."

Bjordson just shrugged. Like many of the Norwegian sailors on board, he had no idea whether the Norse fleet included any relatives. There would be no way to know such a thing. Besides, it was useless to worry about it. They were mercenaries. Their job was to kill a particular enemy. This one happened to be, for the most part, Norwegian.

Still, Bjordson could not help but feel a twinge of remorse for his courageous but woefully unsophisticated and highly predictable enemy. As an intelligence man, he knew the Norsemen's mind, and massing for a gigantic attack on Florida made sense. In the past, their brutal, plow-straight-ahead tactics had borne results. So why not try it on a larger scale? Casualty estimates among the Norse soldiers were of no consequence. It made no difference how many of them died-they were soldiers, and therefore to the Norse way of thinking, it was their job to die. It was the results of their deaths that made the difference between victory and defeat.

And Bjordson knew the Norse felt the odds were in their favor. To them it was a simple matter of the numbers: naively relying on then-recent smaller attacks on Cape Cod and the mid-Atlantic states, the clan leaders undoubtedly believed that some of their troops would be killed as soon as they reached the shore. But others would not. Some of those units meeting resistance once they moved off the beaches would certainly be battered and destroyed. Yet others would not. Many would invariably sweep past any defenders and advance on the target, and a percentage of these troops would be killed at the target or withdrawing from it. But not all would be. Many would make it back to the beaches to be picked up by the surviving subs, and if past experience was the guide, then that number would be substantial.

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Thus, to the clan leaders, the plan virtually ensured that many units would be successful and that tons of loot would be had in return for the operation.

But Bjordson also knew that the anarchic warriors were not taking into account was the possibility that an accumulation of high-technology weapons-as in the United American ground attack squadrons as well as the New Jersey's gigantic guns-were waiting to pounce on them once the attack commenced. It hadn't happened before, so why should it happen now? would be their line of thinking.

And if it did, then so what? Wars weren't supposed to be a way of life. They were for dying in.

"Reply code received from American station," the communications officer yelled out. "We now have an open line to the AWAC's aircraft."