Crush Depth (10 page)

Very early the next morning, on the Thames River, New London, Connecticut

J
EFFREY STOOD IN
the open bridge cockpit atop
Challenger
’s sail—the conning tower. He was crammed between the phone talker and the officer of the deck. In spite of his parka, Jeffrey shivered in the heavy, freezing sleet and freakish wintertime hail. At least the wind was from behind him and the ship, from upriver. It was in the wee hours of the night. The total dark and terrible visibility were exactly what he and Commodore Wilson wanted. They were already five hours behind schedule, just now getting out of the pens. Fortunately this unexpected squall, with the perfect concealment it gave, took some of the edge off Wilson’s displeasure at Jeffrey’s delay.

Challenger
’s reactor was shut down, to suppress her infrared signature. As a consequence, the ship had no propulsion power. She was being pulled behind a big oil barge, itself pulled by a powerful civilian tugboat. The lash-up began to hurry down the river in the blinding squall.

The unladen, high-riding barge was there to mask
Challenger
’s already-stealthy radar cross section from prying enemy eyes. The barge also shielded
Challenger
from making telltale echoes off the tugboat’s busy navigation radar,
echoes which a hostile passive radar receiver might hear. To further avoid any witnesses, the Interstate 95 bridge was closed by state police—supposedly because of icing due to the squall. The railroad drawbridge was up, but it was normally kept open until just before a train came.

Jeffrey knew the path ahead had been swept for enemy mines, but such sweeps were made regularly in any case. He hoped that
Challenger
’s departure would go totally unnoticed.

Because of the dangers of this untried maneuver, Jeffrey himself had the conn. Now and then the wind shifted, and caught the sail, and
Challenger
rolled. Jeffrey would give helm orders over the intercom—the phone talker was there as backup, in case the intercom failed. Even without propulsion power, Jeffrey needed the rudder constantly to keep the submarine lined up behind the barge.

Challenger
’s helmsman was not the ship’s regular battle stations helmsman, Lieutenant (j.g.) David Meltzer. Meltzer was one of eight experienced men on leave who, because of travel delays nationwide and Wilson’s emergency order to sail, hadn’t made it back to the ship. Jeffrey was thus working even more shorthanded than he’d expected, and on any submarine eight missing fully qualified crewmen was a lot. Instead,
Challenger
brought a dozen civilian contractors along, needed to keep working away on critical repairs and upgrades. They’d all eagerly volunteered, in spite of their draft exemptions, even knowing they might never return from this cruise.

Jeffrey hoped his stand-in helmsman, a raw ensign, would do an effective job. Without her own propulsion power,
Challenger
had no way to stop quickly. She might ram the barge if something went wrong. If that happened, the bow cap and the sonar dome would be smashed, and the mission would end before it began. It was the railroad drawbridge that really worried Jeffrey. The gap there was infamously tight.

Jeffrey held his breath as the soaring I-95 bridge went by
overhead, unseen in the pitch-dark and bad weather. Jeffrey knew that broken concrete and twisted rebars dangled somewhere up there high above, damage from the cruise missile raid before Christmas that was still undergoing repair. People feared the whole bridge might come down, because of the constant heavy trucking that used the only two of the original six lanes still open. I-95 was a vital logistics artery for the whole Northeast. If the bridge did collapse—maybe because of wind stress from this storm—that artery would be cut. The wreckage, in the shallow riverbed, would also block the only way from the New London base to the sea.

The I-95 bridge, or debris from it, didn’t fall. Jeffrey wiped the lenses of his night-vision goggles again. The constant sleet buildup made them almost useless. Jeffrey realized he couldn’t count on much help from his lookouts either. They stood behind him, in their safety harnesses, on the roof of the sail. They peered intently into the murk all around, but Jeffrey knew no night-vision gear could penetrate such thick weather.

The sleet turned into hail the size of lima beans. The hail beat against Jeffrey’s shoulders and his parka hood. It made a drumming, spattering sound against
Challenger
’s hull and the barge dead ahead. Sharp, cold fragments of hail punished Jeffrey’s face. He and the phone talker and the officer of the deck huddled closer together for warmth and protection. The hail went through the grating on which they stood, down through the open hatches of the bridge trunk, and into a corridor inside the hull. Hail or worse getting into the ship just had to be put up with: It was a navy safety regulation to always keep these two hatches open when the bridge was manned.

Jeffrey held his breath again as the low railroad drawbridge came up, barely outlined on his goggles, close in on both sides.
Challenger
was committed.

The wind veered unexpectedly, and
Challenger
started to yaw off track. Jeffrey snapped more helm orders. But the yaw increased and Jeffrey saw they were going to hit the
bridge. He looked ahead, then looked behind him, cursing that he couldn’t see his rudder or wake in the murk. Something was very wrong.

“Helm, Bridge,” he snapped into his intercom mike. “I said
right
ten degrees rudder, not
left.
”

Silence on the intercom. The phone talker also stayed mute.

Jeffrey’s heart was in his throat.
We’re going to hit the bridge.
It was much too late to signal the tug to stop. It was too late even to try to maneuver on what battery charge Jeffrey had.

“Helm,
hard
right rudder smartly,
now now now!
”

Challenger
began to yaw the other way, but not fast enough.

“Collision alarm!” Jeffrey could hear it blaring down inside the ship.

Jeffrey leaned over the side of the sail cockpit. He stared aft, watching helplessly, dreading the grinding thud of impact and the screaming tearing of ceramic composite and steel. The lookouts knelt and braced themselves.

The wind veered again, and caught the broad side of the barge. The barge yawed. The side force came back through the tow cables. The cables made
Challenger
pivot. The pivoting barely steered the sub through the opening in the drawbridge.

Jeffrey let himself breathe again. They’d made it, but only by the grace of a puff of wind, pure random luck.

“Helm, Bridge,” Jeffrey called on the intercom, “please try to remember your right from your left.”

“Bridge, Helm, sorry, Captain,” a scared young voice responded. “No excuse, sir.”

Jeffrey bit down his fright and his temper. “Helm, Bridge, no harm done.” Jeffrey knew now he and Bell had their work cut out, melding all the newcomers from a rabble into a genuine, smooth-running crew.

From here, at least, the river was more open. Jeffrey’s main concern for the moment was the big barge looming in
front of him. Empty of oil, riding so high, the barge continued to catch the wind. It kept drifting right and left in the navigable channel. The tug crew did what they could to compensate, but this threesome follow-the-leader, snaking down the river at high speed to keep up with the squall, was nerve-racking.
Challenger
had deep draft even while surfaced. To run aground would be as bad as a collision: a permanent blot on Jeffrey’s record, never mind what it meant to
Challenger
and his intercepting ter Horst.

They passed the spot where off to starboard, on the land, sat the railroad station. So recently Jeffrey had stood there in the early morning sun, waiting for the train to Washington, wishing instead he was headed out to sea, dreading he’d get stuck in a rear-area land job after his training course.

I got my wish. I’d gladly give it all up in a minute, if it would restore my mother to health and bring Ilse Reebeck back.

At dawn

To get the ship concealed before morning, Commodore Wilson ordered Jeffrey to dive
Challenger
as soon as they reached a hundred feet of water. Jeffrey knew this was much shallower than the minimum considered safe in peacetime, but it was a very long way from New London to the edge of the continental shelf, where the water first got deep. The dive would be all the more tricky with an inexperienced man at the helm and no propulsion power—but after some sweat-filled moments they made it down all right. The tug and barge proceeded on their way, tow cables coiled, their duty to
Challenger
done.

Jeffrey sat in the control room uneasily. He rubbed his hands together for warmth. He was out of his sleet-covered parka, and he’d changed to a dry set of clothes, but now, underwater, it was very cold on the ship with no heat. It was also strangely quiet, and dark. Only dim emergency lighting
was on. The air fans were turned off, and hardly any other equipment was running—all to conserve precious amps from the battery banks.

Jeffrey didn’t like his present tactical situation one bit.
Challenger
sat in such shallow water, in windswept seas, that she rolled constantly from side to side, from wave action right overhead. She was much too vulnerable like this, motionless except for the caprice of waves and currents and tide. She had no way to move on her own yet, with the reactor still shut down. If proper trim was lost, they could easily hit the bottom, only several feet beneath the keel, and suffer serious damage—or they might broach, exposing the sail or even the hull, and thus destroy their stealth, because the sun was coming up.

Passive sonar conditions here were poor. If a deep-draft merchant ship suddenly rounded Montauk Point on a collision course…Jeffrey didn’t want to
begin
to think about that.

Jeffrey watched the status displays on his console, one of the very few switched on. Around him, in the cramped space, stood or sat some twenty members of his crew. The tension was palpable, and no one spoke unless they needed to.

Challenger
’s chief of the boat, whom everyone called COB, sat beside the helmsman at the front of the compartment; on the newest subs, the helmsman was a junior officer who himself controlled the bowplanes and sternplanes and rudder. COB was very busy, adjusting the ballast and trim. For now, the newbie helmsman had nothing to do. The contrast as they sat there with their backs to Jeffrey seemed to say so much: COB, Latino, forty-something, salty and irreverent, came from Jersey City, and was short and squat like a bulldog. The helmsman, Ensign Tom Harrison from Orlando, was barely twenty. His voice was as reedy as his build, and he would seem nerdy even in a crowd at MIT—where he finished college in three years.

Lieutenant Commander Jackson Bell sat just to Jeffrey’s
right, at the two-man command workstation in the middle of the control room. He perched on the edge of his seat, sharing Jeffrey’s screens to save power. Bell was literally on the edge of his seat: as executive officer he was in charge of damage control. With the rush to get out of port on a shoestring—with hardly enough in the battery charge for one try to get the reactor restarted—no one knew when something might break, something fatal.

The compartment’s phone talker, a young enlisted man wearing a bulky sound-powered rig, relayed status reports to Jeffrey and Bell from other parts of the ship. The phone talker’s throat sounded tight and dry, reflecting how everyone felt. The
Thresher
had been lost with all hands because of defects at the start of what was supposed to be a routine shakedown cruise.

The weapons officer, a lieutenant who in combat reported to Bell, was working at a console on a lower deck, outside the torpedo room. With the war, Weps’s station was shifted there, for positive control of special—atomic—weapons in a fast-attack submarine. At the moment, Weps, who was new to the ship, was supervising final assembly of the warheads.

Lieutenant Willey,
Challenger
’s engineer, was overseeing the propulsion plant restart, back in the maneuvering room, aft of the reactor compartment. His two dozen people had begun this work before the ship left dry dock, but only now could they do the important steps, the ones which involved heat. This cold startup with no outside support was a difficult endeavor. It would never have been attempted at all if there weren’t such a drastic need for secrecy and stealth. Thermal energy from the reactor had to be used in carefully measured spurts to gradually warm up every main steam plant component. If one step didn’t go right,
Challenger
would need to surface and radio for a tow back to the pens.

Jeffrey liked the tall and straight-talking Willey, who’d been with the ship on
Challenger
’s previous missions. Jeffrey understood the immense pressure Willey was under now—Jeffrey had been the engineer on a
Los Angeles
–class
boat during his own department-head tour four years previously. There was no point in asking Willey to hurry. He was as aware as anyone else on board of the imminent danger of being run down by some civilian cargo vessel that didn’t even know
Challenger
was there.

After a lengthy and worry-filled wait that saw Jeffrey eye the chronometer often, the phone talker relayed briskly, “Maneuvering reports ready to answer all bells.”

Jeffrey wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but he said a heartfelt prayer. He was about to find out, all at once, if the steam pipes and the condensors, the main turbogenerators and the big electric motors attached to the shaft, and the repaired pump-jet propulsor at the back of the boat really worked. There’d been no time to test the power train the proper way, tied up at a pier.

This is one hell of a way to begin the patrol, waiting step by step for a part of the ship to fall off.