Survivalist - 21.5 - The Legend Read Free Page B

Soviet Complex on a ridge beside an undersea volcanic vent providing its geothermal power source.
    Far away beneath the sea, sharing the same volcanic vent for the same purpose, lay Mid-Wake, the American undersea colony established five centuries before, only a moment in history before The Night of The War.
    Jason Darkwood, Captain, United States Navy, Commanding United States Attack Submarine Ronald Reagan, had gambled, and with the twenty-three U.S. Marines of his commando team, he’d
    won. The computer banks of the most recently captured Soviet Island Class submarines contained the latest safe route into the lagoon which was the harbor and central decking area for the Soviet Underwater Complex. The gamble was that the Soviets who controlled the complex would not have had the time to change the route beneath the dome and into the lagoon in time.
    There was always the possibility that the Soviets had, of course, left the route unchanged as part of a trap, but the purpose such a trap might achieve was unfathomable to him, and the risks were great. He could have brought two hundred men in with him, or more than that.
    A slip up had been on the part of the Soviet Marine Spetznas who coordinated security for the Complex. That he’d made it into the lagoon and stuck his helmet up above the surface without getting his head inside of that helmet blown off was concrete evidence of that.
    Now, Darkwood was tired of holding his breath-the hemo-sponge through which he breathed under the water was useless in atmosphere-and he was as certain as circumstances allowed that he and his men were undetected. So, he ducked under again, allowing his wings to unfold, then twisting his body into a downward roll, toward the shoaled area just beneath the main dock.
    His twenty-three commandoes waited for him, in a classic wedge-shaped defensive posture, their liberated Soviet shark guns poised and ready.
    With hand and arm signals, Darkwood communicated that all above seemed well and his intention, as planned, to assault the dock-now.
    The Marine lieutenant-Stanhope from the Reagan-and two Marine sergeants broke off toward the other dock ladders, taking five men apiece, five men falling in behind Darkwood himself.
    The old, rusty AKM-96 that had been there the one previous time he had entered the Soviet Underwater Complex was still there, if anything rustier. Darkwood wondered if the Marine Spetznas trooper who had lost it had finished paying for it yet. And, he smiled. With the wages the Marine Spetznas were paid in the lower enlisted ranks, he seriously doubted it.
    One way or the other, today, he hoped to bring that man debt relief…
    Soviet uniforms would have availed them no element of surprise, and certainly no entry to the Soviet Underground City in the Ural Mountains, because the Soviets would be using daily issue passes and regularly changed code phrases. Of that, John Thomas Rourke was sure. With the Allied Army camped virtually on their doorstep, they would have been fools to do otherwise.
    But, on the plus side, Soviet uniforms would get them to the main entrance unmolested.
    The system they used was exacdy the same which had worked successfully for them at Gur’Yev. Paul drove the ATV staff car, Michael sat beside him, Natalia sat on the driver’s side in the rear passenger seat, John Rourke beside her, all of them in appropriate Soviet uniform attire. The exception this time was they were more heavily armed, and secreted under the rear seat and behind it were explosives and the four German-made energy weapons.
    Paul turned the staff car onto the icy road heading toward the outer boundary gate for the Underground City, Soviet vehicles all around them, Soviet air power-fighters and gunships-in the sky above them.
    As they settled onto the road, the outer boundary gates just barely in sight and several minutes away on the ice-slicked roadway, Paul held up a tape recorder, the small, hand held kind businessmen five centuries ago had