Survivalist - 23 - Call To Battle Read Free Page B

uncased, gravel crunching as men repositioned themselves with equal haste. At first, Rourke saw nothing, so he put the glasses down, focused his eyes on the approximate spot, then raised the glasses and tried again.
    This time he saw something on the surface of the water, only an irregularity, unidentifiable, but somehow out of place. Paul was saying, “Ifs a snorkel. Someone near the surface, maybe reconning the beach.”
    The optics were treated, of course, but Rourke ordered, “Glasses down, everybody. Pull back. Ed, tell Washington, and tell him to have his men do the same.”
    “All right,” Shaw said. “We got ‘em.”
    Just because the SS commando unit was coming toward the shore, there wasn’t proof positive of victory. Rourke decided not to burst any bubbles, however, so he didn’t mention that at the moment…
    Dark shapes moved near the surface of the water, breaking the foam-flecked crests of the waves with their bodies. Rourke’s eyes squinted against the light as he watched them over his iron-sighted rifle. “Be patient,” John Rourke counseled the men around him. The storm clouds were rolling in more rapidly now Rourke gave the weather system between five and ten minutes before it crashed over the beach.
    There were telltale clicks, scrapes and ripping sounds within the cavelike niche of rock here in the cliffs, too soft to be heard more than a few feet away, the sounds those of safeties being checked, equipment snaps and buckles double checked, hook and
    loop fasteners being resecured, a knife blade given a few last-minute honing strokes.
    The radio frequency shared by the Tac Team and Washington’s SEAL Team was continually open now, because if the SS commando unit moving out of the water and onto the beach had not picked up a transmission by now, they would not pick it up at all. The danger, of course, had been that they scanned. Rourke would have done so, moving such a large body of men. These SS personnel apparendy had not. A tactical error, and everyone made one from time to time; only occasionally were they critical. Similarly, Rourke would not have brought such a group in without cover of darkness, even in so remote and little-frequented a spot as this.
    But, this latter would not be a tactical error, rather circumstances imposed by the inescapable exigency of some rendezvous that could not be set for a more advantageous time.
    Fortunately, those problems he mentally enumerated were those of the SS unit’s commander, not John Rourke’s. But John Rourke’s problems were sufficient without borrowing those of someone else. The size of the SS unit was impressive, vastly larger than Rourke had anticipated. All told, he estimated there were some sixty men in diving gear reminiscent of the underwater equipment he had first used with the heroic men of Mid-Wake more than a century ago, but obviously further advanced.
    To his credit, Ed Shaw did not ask, “What the hell do we do now?” But the question was implicit in his tone when he murmured, “More than we thought, huh?”
    Their numbers-the Tac and SEAL Teams combined-amounted to a rough half of those of the enemy.
    John Rourke glanced at Paul Rubenstein, saw the worried look in his friend’s eyes as Rourke advised Ed Shaw, “Get the rest of your people and Washington’s people ready to move out. All the men with these powered hang gliders? How safe are they?”
    “Pretty safe, if the operator does his part.”
    “Controls pretty simple?”
    “Just a joystick. Push it forward and you nose down, pull back-“
    “I get the idea. How about lateral orientation? Side to side?” “Yeah.” “And speed?”
    “Twenty-five miles per hour, tops, but you’ve gotta ride the thermals or you crash like a stone. You’re not thinking-” “Yes I am,” John Rourke nodded …
    Fully five minutes had passed, Rourke strapped into the harness for the powered glider. He thought, sometimes, when he encountered technology so radical as this, that he