Operation Orion - Kevin Dockery [63]
Jackson’s breathing was the only sound in his ears, a raspy but reassuring in and out of air hissing slowly in his earphones. As per the plan he had outlined on the ridge crest, the men had their communicators turned off to avoid broadcasting any kind of signal. Still, they knew the drill: Baxter already was moving toward the front, his battery-powered plasma cutter in his hand.
The wiry SEALS was lifted by Dobson and Robinson, each man holding one of his legs so that he easily could reach the metal grid blocking access to the air vent. The cutter sizzled brightly, turning the water it contacted into steam, masking the actual touch of the tool to the metal. But it worked like a charm. Baxter pressed the cutter against one bar of the grate, and in the middle of a cloud of bubbles Jackson saw a red glow. The illumination started as a pale hint, but within five seconds it was bright, intense enough that the heat was not dissipated immediately by the cold water. Ten seconds after he started, the first of the grid’s bars had been sliced off right where it was anchored into the frame of the air vent.
Still, there were nearly a hundred individual contact points, and as the SEALS continued his cutting, Jackson was keenly aware of time ticking away. Already they had been in the water for ten minutes. In another ten, the diversion attack would begin, and his intent had been for the Team to be ready to infiltrate at the same time LaRue fired his initial round at the hatch.
Perhaps Baxter sensed his urgency, or maybe the warming water—the LT’s external thermometer indicated it had warmed nearly forty degrees Celsius in their immediate vicinity since the cutting had begun—made the task easier. In any event, the tool-wielding Teammate began to cut faster, and the timer showed seventeen minutes elapsed when he sliced through the last bar. The heavy grid fell away, sinking past the watching SEALS to come to rest on the bottom.
Again according to the prearranged plan, the two scouts went first, Marannis and Sanchez pulling themselves up out of the water. They slid single file into the exhaust vent as one by one the SEALS and sailors of the attack party moved into the unknown installation.
Jackson came fourth, and just as he pulled himself up and out of the water, the digital timer on his wrist clicked to eighteen minutes.
“It’s time,” Falco whispered to himself. Like the infiltrators making their way into the enemy installation, the two men on the ridge had their comlinks switched off, but each had been keeping an eye on the clock. Both SEALS lay prone in the snow, and the wind had dusted them over so much that they were virtually invisible to anyone more than a few meters away.
Of course, that was all about to change. Falco glanced at the big man next to him and saw that LaRue already was resting Baby’s barrel on the fold-down bipod, taking aim at the metal hatch. The sniper cradled his squirrel gun and removed the protective covers from the scope. He scanned the rest of the valley, leaving his partner to concentrate on the initial target.
The battery pack powering the rail gun was hot, and the weapon was ready. LaRue had braced the rail gun along the trough he had cleared through the snow, and he drew a bead on the steel door in the rock outcrop near the center of the circular valley. He pulled the trigger, and the counterblast erupted from the back of the weapon in a fiery burst even as the copper-jacketed slug shot unerringly through the air to impact against the steel hatch.
To the two men, the only visible effect was the bright red glow of the puncture hole that appeared almost directly in the middle of the hatch. They knew that bits of superheated metal had sprayed immediately, almost like a splash of liquid, through whatever occupied the space on the other side of the door. The copper coating would have sheathed off the depleted-uranium core as it penetrated the metal door, and the whole of the round’s kinetic energy might have liquefied it into a lethal spurt, a spray of deadly heat spreading