The Black Knight by Dean Crawford

Author:Dean Crawford [Crawford, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventure
Goodreads: 27393159
Publisher: Fictum Ltd
Published: 2015-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

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XXVIII

Ethan hurried up the stairwell in pursuit of Riggs as they rushed toward the command center. Riggs had placed two fresh SEALs near the tunnel entrance to relieve Saunders and Del Toro, ready to ambush the MJ-12 troops once they arrived, and now they dashed into the command center to see Sully beckoning them to follow.

‘This way.’

Ethan followed the two soldiers down a narrow flight of steps that headed away from the main docks, descending down until they reached a steel door that had been burned open by the SEALs, the harsh odor of burning metal hanging in the air.

Sully led them out onto a smaller, secondary dock, and this time the dock was not empty.

Ethan slowed as he stared at the submersible moored alongside the dock, a metallic device that reminded him of a U-Boat except that it was only around twelve meters long, its black hull and red stencil markings looking cruel and dangerous in the minimal illumination offered by their flashlights.

‘I’ll be damned,’ Riggs said, ‘it’s a Seehund.’

‘A what?’ Ethan asked.

‘It’s a German midget submarine,’ Riggs replied, ‘two man crew, two torpedoes. They were deployed toward the end of the war and sank a fair few vessels before Germany surrendered at the end of the conflict. They were also known as Type Twenty Seven U-Boats, and were based on a British design used in an attempt to sink the German battleship Tirpitz.’

Ethan looked at the submarine, which had almost certainly been abandoned in the dock since the end of the war.

‘Is it serviceable?’ Ethan asked.

Riggs looked the submarine over. ‘It’s floating, but I don’t know whether she’ll hold water once submerged.’

Ethan saw that the submarine had a clear dome atop her bridge, allowing for visual inspection of her surroundings, and that her torpedo shoots were empty.

‘It’s too small to have come all the way down here from the North Atlantic,’ Ethan guessed. ‘That means it must have been brought here for a reason.’

‘The warm water channel,’ Riggs picked up on Ethan’s train of thought. ‘They built this base and planned to investigate the channel, and this submarine would be the only vessel that was small enough to do the job.’

‘And that’s not all,’ Sully added. ‘Take a look at this.’

Sully led them back inside the base to a hatch that Ethan had not taken much notice of when they had walked in. Inside the door entrance was a large box-like structure suspended in mid-air within an underground chamber.

‘It’s an anechoic chamber,’ Sully explained, ‘although what the hell they’d have built one of these down here for I have no idea.’

An anechoic chamber was a form of room that was isolated from exterior sound or electromagnetic radiation sources, preventing the reflection of wave phenomena. The chamber was supported slightly above the floor using tensile springs and surrounded on all sides by sound-proofing layers of anechoic tiles, a concrete shield and a full six inches of near vacuum-pressure air.

Ethan stepped inside and looked around. ‘It’s quite small, no more than ten men.

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