To his relief he was no more than twenty yards from shore and a hundred yards south of the end of the beach that was his goal. He dove back down and started up the torpedo again. A few minutes at low power, and he set it down on the bottom again. This time he unhooked the anchor and dug it firmly into the sand. Then he unfastened the raft and the waterproof equipment pack from the torpedo and swam slowly toward the beach.

He swam until the water became too shallow. Then he began to walk, feeling out each step with his fins and meanwhile trying to look in all directions at once. For the twentieth time he told himself that the ideal soldier or secret agent would have eyes not only in the back of his head, but in the top and the sides as well!

Blade watched the trees on the shore with special care. For the moment he was virtually helpless in the face of an ambush, his torpedo out of reach, his raft uninflated, and no weapons ready for use except the sheath knife on his belt.

Nothing happened. He made it to the shelter of the trees and kept going for another fifty yards, until he was out of sight of the beach. Then he unslung his scuba gear and shoved his two packs out of sight under a bush. With his sheath knife he cut a branch from the bush, walked back to the beach, and with the branch brushed out his tracks. Now even a beach patrol would not easily realize that a man had come out of the sea and hidden in the forest. With that out of the way, he was finally able to strip off his wet suit and start unpacking his weapons.

He did not stop until they were all out and ready for use. A submachine gun, not an Uzi but another model with a folding stock and a barrel extension that could be screwed in place to give extra range and accuracy. Four fifty-round magazines of caseless 9-mm rounds. A flare pistol and six flares. Six hand grenades. Two knives, razor-sharp and balanced for throwing.

Blade checked all the working parts of the gun, then inserted a magazine and chambered a round. As it clicked into place he let out a sigh of relief. Now he was in shape to give anything short of a platoon of infantry a fight the survivors would remember all their lives. He hoped it wouldn't come to that. His mission depended on stealth and silence and speed, not on firepower and cutting down enemies in swaths. But it was never a good feeling to be nearly helpless, and it was always a happy moment when that helplessness came to an end.

Blade propped the gun ready to hand against a tree and stood up. Between the cool shade of the forest and sitting still in his damp underwear, he felt chillier now than he'd been in the water. He exercised for five minutes, made a quick tour of the area, then exercised for another ten. By the time he'd finished exercising, he was as limber as he needed to be and as warm as he could hope to be. He sat down again and started digging rations out of the pack.

He planned to keep most of the rations in reserve, in case he did have to spend a few days in the raft. But he needed some food now, to replenish the energy he'd used up making it to shore. He unwrapped chocolate and meat bars and began nibbling.

Over the next half-hour Blade slowly nibbled the ration bars down to crumbs. Then he carefully squeezed the foil wrappings into tiny balls, stowed them away in his pack, and relaxed. The courier with the files was not scheduled to make his appearance at the northern end of the beach until two hours after sunset. Sunset today was at 8:23. It was now just before eleven in the morning. Blade had nearly twelve hours of waiting in front of him.

Waiting, however, was another of the agent's skills that Blade had learned very thoroughly.

Blade spent most of the day safely out of sight in the forest, sitting with his back to a tree and the submachine gun across his knees. Every hour he got up and made a quick patrol through the area around his hiding place. He didn't expect to find anything unusual or dangerous. He did want to make sure he knew the area better than anyone who might possibly sneak up on him.

Every two hours he slipped down to the beach and spent half an hour watching the channel and the sky above it. Once he saw three planes go over, three white vapor trails against the blue sky with a tiny metallic glint at the head of each trail. Both Imperial and Red Flame planes might have equally good reasons to fly high over this stretch of disputed land and water.

Another time he saw three fishing boats come down the channel, their engines puffing out blue smoke and their crews on deck laying out nets and buoys for the night's fishing. Blade scanned the boats from stern to stern with his binoculars, checking for signs that they might not be what they seemed. The Russlanders had taken over a good many Nordsbergen fishing boats and were using them to patrol the waters, which were rapidly becoming their private preserve.

Most of the confiscated boats were only lightly armed, so Blade doubted they could interfere directly with his mission. But they might put landing parties ashore, which would be a nuisance. They could also radio for help from the strong Russland naval and air forces only an hour or two away. That could be worse than a nuisance. Russland antisubmarine tactics were crude, but with overwhelming force against a submarine caught in shallow water they might be unpleasantly effective. Blade did not want to have to sail five hundred miles across the Nord Sea, bobbing along in his raft and living on ration bars and raw fish.

The men aboard these fishing boats looked like ordinary Nordsbergen fishermen who'd been sailing out after the herring and the cod for thirty years. Blade watched until they were out of sight, wishing he could do something to make it certain they could go on sailing out peacefully for another thirty years.

The late morning turned into early afternoon. The early afternoon turned into late afternoon, and the sun began to sink down toward the peaks of Tagarsson Island. The sunlight washing over the sea and the forest began to turn from yellow to orange and then from orange to red, slowly fading as it changed.

The light went swiftly after the sun sank behind the peaks of Tagarsson Island. A blue darkness settled down upon the sea and the forest, rapidly turning black. By nine it was nearly dark. Blade screwed the extension onto the barrel of the submachine gun. The extension tripled the gun's effective range. Now he could command the whole beach from end to end and a respectable stretch of sea as well.

He also pulled the infrared monocular viewer out of his pack and adjusted it. With the viewer to one eye he could scan his surroundings for infrared traces-including the signals from the IR lamp his courier would be carrying. Blade examined the whole beach with the viewer, noticing the wavering patterns that showed where the day's sun had heated the sand unevenly. He swung the viewer out to sea, examining the chill waters of the channel. Then he put the viewer away and again settled down to wait.

At a quarter to ten Blade pulled on his wet suit. Having it on might save him a valuable minute or two on his way back to the submarine. Then more waiting.

Ten o'clock came and went. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. So far, so good. Nothing seemed to have happened to hurry the courier on to the rendezvous. Blade picked up the IR viewer, scanned the beach once more, then looked out to sea.

Suddenly he stiffened. Out on the seaward horizon to the south was an unmistakable heat source, large, steady, and slowly but surely growing. Blade kept the viewer trained on the source until he could identify it as the hot gases streaming from the funnel of a ship. A good-sized one, too, and coming fast. Blade adjusted the range-finder element of the viewer and took a reading. Less than six miles off now, and coming on at twenty knots. It would be off the beach in less than twenty minutes and within striking range of the submarine in less than that. It was already within gun range.