The Target

  The Target

  A CHUCK BRANDT THRILLER

  ROGER WESTON

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, dialogue, and plot are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Weston Publishing Enterprises

  All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  PROLOGUE

  There were many ways to die, and Jake’s current plan opened the door to several of them. Cold dead wind cried in the rigging of his crab boat, peeling spray off wave tops and blowing it like mist on his numb face. To Jake, it all smelled like history.

  His deep study of World War Two naval history gave birth to the current mission. Reading old captains journals and log books from German U-boats, he’d stumbled onto references to an unknown submarine base from the 1940s.

  Now, in the dark polar night, he pulled on his fins and face mask and put his hand on the fishing boat’s rail to keep his balance. As the boat rose and fell, chunks of ice thumped against the hull like a traveler who’d fallen into the pitiless sea.

  “We should wait until morning,” Wan-Si said. “It looks rough enough up here, but down there anything could happen.”

  “Morning won’t be any better. Weather is supposed to be even worse.”

  Jake glanced across the water. Wave-tops flickered and glowed green under the northern lights that danced on the sky like glimmering gems, but all through the centuries men like Jake had fallen into the fatal trap of beauty’s lure or of seeking that which was not meant to be found. What he would find down there was unknown, but he knew what he sought and that it had a dark history.

  “Are you going to be alright?” Jake asked his old friend. Wan-Si occasionally covered Jake’s maritime history classes at the university and also skippered Jake’s boat.

  “You’re the one who should be worried. This is a bad time for a night dive.” Wan-Si took a sip from his flask of whiskey.

  Jake snatched the flask out of his fingers and threw it in the water. “Not now. What are you doing?”

  “Just a sip to calm the nerves.”

  “Do it again and you’ll need it to dull the pain.”

  “Calm down, man. How do you think I like waiting up here? What if you don’t come back?”

  “Stay sober until this is over.”

  A wave slapped the hull and doused Jake’s dry suit. He was protected from the cold, but he knew that the heaving waters were cold enough to suck the life out of an exposed man in just a few minutes. Ice cold waters and hideous storms were all the same to him—inviting and terrifying. He pulled on his buoyancy-control vest and air tanks.

  Wan-Si switched on the spotlight and played its beam across the steep shoreline of the fjord. Jake watched the dark shadow that surrounded the light. A cliff frowned down at him. The bare, steep terrain offered a visitor no shelter, no town, no other people—just exposure to the unforgiving elements. Over the years, the mountain had cried tears of stone—gargantuan boulders that had rained down into the water when the Germans blasted the hillside to seal off the tunnel forever. This caused a landslide that covered the entrance to the WW2 submarine lair. She was a cold blooded mountain with frigid sea water in her belly, indomitable with ice for a thick skin to endure polar wind.

  Jake sat down on the side rail of his rising and falling fishing boat. He fell back into the water and sunk into the blackness. Despite his dry suit, he felt the chill begin to slowly penetrate, which reminded him that he was still alive, at least for now. He switched on his waterproof Super Bright Diving Light. It was dependable underwater, equipped with a USA original XPH50 CREE LED bulb. The flashlight had a 50,000 hour lifespan with a maximum-intensity, 25,000cd. Maximum output brightness was 2000 lumens, offering super bright neutral white light underwater.

  He swung the beam through the murky drink. As he began swimming, there was little to see at first. Then enormous boulders emerged out of the gloom—house sized stones that had plunged down into the ocean decades ago and blocked the entrance to the U-boat den. As Jake approached the coast, his flashlight beam played across the wall of massive rocks. The rocks were so big that he could easily slip through the spaces between them.

  He released air from his inflatable BCD vest and sank to the ocean floor. Silt rose around him while he ground-hitched his rope to a stake he drove into the sand. As he swam between the rocks, he played out the rope so that he wouldn’t get lost in the maze of nooks and crannies. He kicked his fins gently so as not to stir up too much silt. When he came to dead ends among the landslide, he changed course and looked for a new passage. After ten minutes of searching, he found a thin breach and kicked his way through, his air tank scraping on a rock.

  When he surfaced, he found himself in a man-made subterranean water channel. He moved his flashlight slowly through a cavern that had not known light for decades. Fear and excitement surged through his blood. It took discipline to stay calm and not rush ahead. Off to his left, a catwalk lined the edge of the waterway, and it went on for as far as Jake could see. On the right side was a wide cement platform. Huge square cement pillars were spaced at ten-foot intervals. He swam slowly on his back and tagged the ceiling with a pool of brightness. Gaping cracks in the ceiling spoke of the massive explosions when the fleeing Germans sealed off their own sub base. It was an unstable place, but he was confident that there would be no seismic activity today. He had a name for life without risk—death. Still, breaths came hard, and the coward in him said to get out—and fast.

  Instead, he rolled over and swam beneath the surface, propelling himself easily with the slow kicks of his fins. If the old submarine U-530A was here, it would be close by, and he could swim to it. His prediction was promptly proven right, but in a dismal way. As he played his flashlight through the dark water, what took shape in the subterranean depths was an exhilarating sight. He came to the submarine, but it was no longer floating.

  Finding a lost World War Two Nazi sub lair was a big discovery for a maritime historian even if the subs were in poor condition. In this case, the top of the conning tower was ten-feet under. Holes had rusted through her sides, letting sea water in. Unfortunately, the log books would have long ago disintegrated. Time had snatched the ultimate prize from him. He groaned at the loss, but after so much time, it was expected. He stopped kicking, and because of his weight belts, slowly started to sink into the dreary depths. He sank all the way to the bottom and lay in the mud. A dark cloud rose around him, but he enjoyed this rare moment. Then he gently pushed himself through the water with his fins.

  In the gloom, he spotted an underwater cement stairwell with iron railings. The stairs rose out of the water to a platform. Jake was looking through his air bubbles toward the steps when he noticed a slime-covered scuba outfit caught up in a tangle of wire. He slowly kicked up close and turned over the drysuit. He almost spit out his regulator when he found himself looking into the face of a skull.

  Maybe
twenty years ago based on the age of the skeleton’s gear, the doomed soul had found this submarine base but never made it out alive.

  Jake breathed fast and quick through his regulator, expelling enough bubbles for a sinking ship.

  Shining his light through the stirred up mud, he followed the wire that tangled the dead man. It ran across the stairway. Any frog man who used the stairs to climb out of the water would trip over it. The wire continued up the side of the canal. Jake surfaced and used his flashlight to trace the wire up a huge pillar to the roof of the manmade cave. The wire ended at a hook on the ceiling.

  It was clear that many years ago, it was a trip wire that had been attached to a grenade or some sort of mine.

  “Booby trapped,” he said. “Always are.”

  He pushed back away from the stairs. Stuart had always told him to avoid narrow passages and well-worn trails. Jake lobbed his grappling hook up onto the platform and pulled it in a direction so that it hooked on the corner of one of the giant cement pillars. With the hook set, he shinnied up the rope.

  On the platform, he removed his scuba gear in the glow of his flashlight. He removed the regulator from his mouth and inhaled. The air was stale and cold, but it was air. Shining his light around the Nazi submarine lair, he noticed a set of rail tracks that ran parallel to the channel and right underneath a car-size stack of 4’x8’ steel plates. He turned and walked slowly along the platform following the rail tracks. The tracks took a sharp turn through a set of colossal, super-reinforced blast doors.

  Following his flashlight beam like a fish follows a shiny lure, Jake kept close watch for any wires strung across the tunnel. Electrical wires and pipes ran along the ceiling, but those were for utilities. He kept seeing wires at the corner of his eye, but when he looked, there were none.

  As he skulked through a torpedo room, he realized what the rail tracks were for. A rowboat-sized rail car had been set up so that the Nazis could easily move torpedoes out to the submarine pen. Ten torpedoes rested peacefully side-by-side on racks. An eleventh torpedo sat on a flatbed train car as if ready to deploy to a waiting submarine. Four metal whiskers poked out of the bomb’s nose. Jake told himself to keep his distance. He was no expert on explosives, but he knew that he didn’t want to bump into a detonation whisker on an unstable warhead.

  The Germans must have used the rail car for other things as well because the tracks continued on down the tunnel. Carefully, he passed through a workshop that was stocked with an abundance of tools. He didn’t dare touch anything. A parts room door tried to keep him out, but his mini pry-bar broke the lock. Inside, spare U-boat parts filled rows of metal shelves.

  Moving on, he found the dusty living quarters furnished with decrepit bunks, lockers, and facilities. Many personal items remained as if the Nazis had cleared out in a hurry—uniforms, family photos, rifles, tooth brushes, and razors. Jake imagined what this place would have been like in the 1940s. He wondered if he could describe it accurately for his World War Two maritime history classes. There were so many details he must remember to describe to his students. A seven-foot high mural of Adolf Hitler adorned the bunkhouse wall. Jake stood there a minute staring at the mural then cautiously went on.

  As he pressed deeper into the lair, he walked over a big metal plate. He approached a huge set of metal doors that hung on massive hinges. He was about to go through when he noticed the texture of the floor changed slightly there. He knelt down and inspected the cement. The area between the doors, a six-foot section, was camouflaged. Jake got out his diving knife and cut through a super thin, yet durable material. He pulled back the flap of his knife cut and filled the compartment below with illumination.

  What he saw made him glad he hadn’t eaten lately. Two bars with rotating spikes waited just below the fake floor. Had he stepped on it, his legs would have plunged through the rotating spikes. He’d have been seriously wounded and probably bled to death. He leaned against the wall and breathed deeply to calm himself and oxygenate his cells, a habit he’d acquired as an avid free diver. He lunged away from the wall and studied where he’d just been, checking that he hadn’t leaned against some trigger mechanism.

  Jake swung his rope and heaved the grappling hook over a cross-pipe on the roof. He pulled on it hard to make sure that the pipe was solid. He then swung over the fake floor. As his feet landed on solid cement, the bolts holding the pipe to the ceiling came loose. He double tugged to collapse the grappling hooks. As he coiled his rope, he fought off the raw edge of panic, knowing he would not be able to swing out of there. Entering this place alone had been risky, and the smell of death seemed to close in all around him. He recalled the time he’d found a decomposing octopus on the rocks off the Washington coast. If that could happen to a sea creature, it could happen to him. Sure, but there were worse ways to die.

  Jake moved on and came to where the rail tracks passed through a store room. He took in a quick, sudden breath. It appeared that the crew had emptied out the submarine. Jake knew from history that this was sometimes done to carry out repairs. As he opened metal storage bins, he worked in super slow motion in case any of the boxes were booby trapped. He would have lost a race with a sea star. He went through old food supplies, cooking gear, and bedding. He put aside zodiacs that infiltration teams would have used to surreptitiously land on enemy shores. He set aside shovels that those teams would have used to bury the zodiacs and mask their presence. He got interested when he found boxes of navigational charts and maps. As he opened one of these boxes, he stopped just as he lifted the lid. Shining the light in, he spotted a wire. He couldn’t see where the wire went, but he recalled the doomed scuba diver out in the submarine pen and shined his flashlight up to the ceiling. Right above him, a grenade hung on a hook next to a burned out light fixture.

  Jake took a deep breath and kneeled in the darkness for a minute. He shined the light all around and studied everything. He removed wire cutters from his pocket and cut the wire. Because the wire had been rigged to pull the grenade’s pin when the box was opened, cutting it neutralized the threat. Opening the crate, he removed several log books and put them inside his heavy-duty waterproof bag, zipping it closed. He laughed quietly.

  Heading down the corridor, he came to the pit that he’d swung over on the way in. Now his rope would not help him. He broke into a run and leapt over the six-foot hole like a track star doing the long jump, easily clearing the spike-filled pit. He laughed. He figured that the Germans weren’t very sophisticated with that trap.

  He followed his flashlight back through the areas he’d seen on the way in. As he stepped through the steel hatchway into the final passage, a brick-size chunk of cement shifted under his foot. He dove to the side, fearing he’d triggered another rigged grenade, but there was no explosion. He breathed deeply as his tension fell away.

  Jake got up, relieved. Then he heard something. He listened carefully to a hollow rumbling sound. Suddenly, the giant blast doors opened up behind him. The rail car was rolling down the tracks toward him—carrying a torpedo. He realized that he’d somehow triggered the release. The passage was too narrow here to let it go past, so Jake sprinted for the sub pen, the rail car right behind him. As he broke out onto the platform, he noticed that the rail turned left and ran parallel to the canal for thirty yards. Jake shot straight ahead, dove into the canal, and swam straight down. At twenty feet, his ears began to hurt, so he quickly equalized them and swam all the way to the bottom.

  The explosion above sent a shock wave across the surface of the water. Even forty feet down, Jake felt like he’d been rammed in the chest by a hammerhead shark. Dazed, he swam for the surface like a desperate man. He broke through the surface and gasped for breath. The bitter smell of nitroglycerin and TNT swirled in the air. A sound like thunder caused him to aim his flashlight down the canal in time to watch a terrifying sight.

  Forty yards down, the roof caved in, launching a twenty-foot high wave that rolled toward him. It swept him up and carried him down t
he tunnel with enough speed to crush him against a rock wall. Now body surfing, he dove down, but the giant breaker swept him back up. Again he dropped down the face of the wave. This time he managed to get underneath the wave’s suction, and it left him behind.

  Jake swam over to the platform which was now a couple of feet under water. He slogged back to the store room, where he’d seen the old zodiacs. He grabbed a shovel and followed his flashlight to the cave in. Digging his way out seem like a huge undertaking, but he had nothing else to do.

  When the wave returned, the water level in the tunnel rose to waist high, but soon the water settled down. Leaving his waterproof book bag in the store room, he began digging a tunnel through thousands of pounds of dirt and rock.

  ***

  On the fishing boat, Wan-Si was on anchor watch when he heard the mountain rumble. Because of the stormy weather, he tried to convince himself that he’d heard distant thunder, but he knew better. He knew that the Nazis and Japanese loved to leave booby traps all over the place. He figured that Jake had triggered an explosion and been blown into red mist like the pollution sunset over Los Angeles.

  Wan-Si began to shake. There was nothing for him to do right now but wait. If by some miracle, Jake had survived the blast, he would be back soon. Yes, Wan-Si would wait. If Jake wasn’t back in half an hour, he would call the Norwegian Coast Guard, although they were probably hours away by boat. If they came, it would only be to pronounce Jake dead and have Wan-Si fill out paperwork. He shook badly.

  After ten minutes, he got the extra bottle of whiskey out of his bag and had a drink.

  ***

  It took Jake four hours to dig a tunnel through the cave in. When he finally broke through, he was no better off. Sure, he went and got his waterproof bag and was ready to go, but all of his scuba gear was buried under hundreds of thousands of pounds of dirt and rock. It would take him years to find it, and the only way out of the submarine lair was underwater.