Crush Depth (13 page)

Jeffrey was out of alternatives. Defeat tasted rancid and foul. It seemed to force its way down his throat, cutting like broken glass.

Jeffrey heard another roar outside the hull.
Here it comes.

“Shkval in the water!” Kathy screamed.

This is it,
Jeffrey told himself.
All we can do is keep running, and that thing is six times faster than we are. The only question is, will the Shkval kill us before our own torpedo room blows up?

Jeffrey looked around him. Most of the crewmen were barely half his age. They were much too young for their lives to end like this. He saw some of them holding their heads in despair, others pounding their consoles in impotent rage, others piously crossing themselves. He wished he could think of a way to somehow offer them final comfort.

“Captain,” Kathy shouted through her mask, “Shkval signal strength is not increasing!…
Captain,
assess Master One’s Shkval is on a hot run in the tube! Assess the Shkval on
von Tirpitz
is malfunctioning!”

“On speakers!”

There was a rumbling explosion in the distance, then a louder, heaving blast, then a whole series of sharp detonations.

“Assess weapons in Master One’s torpedo room have cooked off!”

Jeffrey listened to the horrible sounds as
Tirpitz
died. He heard a last dull
boom
as the enemy sub sank through her crush depth, when the unflooded parts at the back of the German submarine caved in.

“XO reports fire in our torpedo room is extinguished!” the phone talker yelled. “Fire relight watch is set!…Corpsman states no fatal injuries! No radiological leakage from damaged weapons!”

Jeffrey felt the weight of a thousand worlds lift from his shoulders.
Challenger
and her people would survive, at least until the next fight.

But he’d never felt so small, so inconsequential. Jeffrey hadn’t won this battle. It was the enemy who’d lost. Over a hundred men on
Tirpitz
paid the ultimate price for playing with undersea fire, using such high-risk weapons as the Shkval. There could be little satisfaction in this sort of victory, only a humbling realization of the role of sheer luck in war, and a recognition of one’s own personal insignificance.

Kathy, and Commodore Wilson, and the rest of Jeffrey’s crew all felt it too. There was no jubilation at the destruction of Master One, no cheering, no celebrating the kill. Just the noise of twenty air-breather masks, overly rapid hiss-whooshing, as everyone hyperventilated from fear and now giddy relief. Everybody was very quiet, turned inward, as each person in their own way tried to deal with having faced their own mortality, having really thought, having
known,
that they would die.

Simultaneously, on
Voortrekker,
in the eastern Indian Ocean

G
UNTHER
V
AN
G
ELDER
felt relaxation and inner joy, as much as this was possible for a sailor at sea in a war. He had the conn in
Voortrekker
’s control room, and Jan ter Horst was asleep.

Voortrekker
was doing what she did best, moving quietly near the ocean floor in water three kilometers deep—snaking through the massifs and fissures of the Mid–Indian Ocean Ridge. These endless undersea volcanic mountains and valleys formed the ideal landscape in which
Voortrekker
could hide. To Van Gelder, watching the stark, razor-sharp faults and escarpments go by on the ship’s gravimeter display, it was the ideal place for him to sightsee.

The ship made only seven knots, for safety as well as for stealth. A remote-controlled off-board probe was deployed well ahead of
Voortrekker,
scouting for enemy mines and hydrophone grids. The probe used special cameras to study the bottom in
Voortrekker
’s path, and Van Gelder watched the images raptly.

Starfish in large groupings waved their arms on the ground. Huge jellyfish rippled by in the slow and steady bottom current. Other deep-sea creatures, with hideous black faces or bodies too weird to describe, came to examine or
challenge
Voortrekker
’s probe. Diffuse glows, bright swirling starbursts, stabbing flashes of sheet lightning, all lit up the scene, in shades of otherworldly blue and electric white and vivid yellow. This was bioluminescence, Van Gelder knew. The ocean all around him, even this deep, was alive.

Voortrekker
passed another black-smoker hydrothermal vent field. Van Gelder heard it rumbling and gurgling on sonar, and sent the probe closer to look. Again, here was life. Primordial microbes fed a teeming community of albino crabs and giant clams and thick red-blooded tube worms.

Until recently, only a handful of scientists had visited places like this. Few men and women had ever seen firsthand what Van Gelder was seeing. To be here now, to witness such things with his own eyes, made Gunther Van Gelder feel himself a very privileged man.

On
Challenger,
after the rendezvous with the minisub

The ASDS minisub was safely stowed in
Challenger
’s in-hull hangar bay. The mini’s passengers were shaken up by the nearby
Challenger
-versus-
Tirpitz
fight, but they were otherwise unharmed. Once again,
Challenger
rushed along at flank speed, heading south-southwest inside the Gulf Stream. Jeffrey sat in his stateroom, pecking away at his laptop—commanders who neglected admin and paperwork might not get their fourth stripe. Jeffrey paused, agonized, typed another sentence, shook his head, deleted it, and sat there. His heart sank. The more he thought about his tactics against the
von Tirpitz,
the more he thought he’d never get that fourth stripe in any case, because he didn’t deserve it.

Maybe the higher-ups were right, sending Commodore Wilson along as a nursemaid. Idly, and forlornly, Jeffrey wondered how many more millions of innocent fish and whales and dolphins he’d helped kill in this latest battle.
Challenger
’s crew was shielded from radiation sickness by
all the water between her and the bursting warheads, and by the thickness of her hull, and the ship could quickly leave the contaminated area. The local sea life was stuck, and the effect of the war on the seafood industry and beachside resorts was devastating already.

Someone knocked. It was Bell, there to present his regular evening report.

“Sorry, XO, I lost track of the time.”

“No problem, Skipper.”

“Come on in. Sit.”

Bell made himself comfortable quickly; he seemed matured, more well-anchored internally, and more outwardly positive about life since becoming a father. Jeffrey envied him these things.

Bell filled Jeffrey in on the status of the cleanup and repairs in the torpedo room. It would take a lot of work to custom-machine replacement parts to get the torpedo autoloader functioning again. The countermeasures launchers—which took up half the space in the medical corpsman’s cubicle back near the enlisted mess—also needed more time to be made serviceable after the battle damage.

Jeffrey got up and shut the door and sat down again. “How are the wounded doing?”

“Our one potential crisis, sir, is the man whose arm was crushed by that loose torpedo. Circulation past the shoulder is not good. With what little more the corpsman can do for him here, he might lose the arm.”

“Amputate?”

Bell nodded.

“Then we need to get the guy to a proper hospital…. With a minisub in our hangar now, maybe we can drop him off, covertly. I’ll talk to the commodore.”

“It would be important for morale for you to do something, Captain. Nobody wants to see the guy get gangrene and get sent home to his family maimed.”

Jeffrey hesitated. “XO, what’s your read on morale in
general?” Jeffrey knew morale in war was a very volatile thing. Submarine crews, living in such close quarters, felt a strong sense of community and reacted emotionally as a group. To be at their best, they needed steady support and constant input of encouragement and good news. Jeffrey already intended to tour the ship again this evening, for exactly that purpose.

“Actually, sir,” Bell said, “morale went from somewhat bad to rather good in a hurry, because of the
Tirpitz.
” Bell smiled. “The men think you’re a lucky captain, Captain. They’re happy to be sailing with you now.”

Jeffrey frowned. “What’s the emphasis on the ‘now’ part?”

Bell took a deep breath. “The guys were troubled to see us ordered to leave dry dock before we were ready, missing qualified men and stuck with two dozen clueless replacements. They thought we were taking too many chances, and we wouldn’t come back.”

Jeffrey grunted. He couldn’t entirely disagree with their reasoning. “But you say morale is up?”

Bell nodded.

Jeffrey didn’t want to come across to Bell as insecure, but he was puzzled. “Explain the mechanics of this to me.”

“Our meeting the
Tirpitz
at all was a sheer coincidence, one-in-a-million odds. The fact the score came out
Challenger
one,
Tirpitz
nothing, when
Tirpitz
had us dead to rights, was also pure random chance.”

“But that was the enemy’s bad luck, not our good luck. I don’t get it.”

“If you put the whole thing together, Captain, we’ve
had
our shakedown cruise and our working-up period now, in that battle. Everybody feels much better there. Plus, it’s like it was destiny or something, an act of God, us meeting the
Tirpitz
—”

Jeffrey held up one hand. “I’m not sure about that last part, XO. I want to talk to you more about that in a minute.”

“Well, the final thing I wanted to say is that we got to
score a kill, a big one. We got even for the New York raid.
Us,
sir, USS
Challenger,
on our very first day at sea. That makes us a lucky ship, and you a lucky captain.”

Jeffrey worked his jaw pondering this. Then he grinned. “I did think your crack about being too underdressed to die was pretty good.” Both men laughed. Then Jeffrey glanced at his laptop, and felt a sinking feeling again.

Bell read Jeffrey’s face and was confused. He thought Jeffrey was signaling that the meeting was over.

“You wanted to talk to me more about meeting the
Tirpitz,
sir?”

Jeffrey debated whether to confide in Bell or keep it to himself.
My XO is supposed to be my sounding board. But a captain is a superior being, all-knowing and infallible….

Hell, if I try to stay arms-length from my key people all the time, I’ll wind up with ulcers for sure.

“I’m writing my after-action report on the battle with
Tirpitz.
I’m thinking about my turn away when we first made contact. I think I blew it, and endangered the ship and our crew and our mission.”

“Sir?” Bell looked flabbergasted. “From where I sit, the men worship you now, even more than after the Germany raid. You always stay clearheaded in battle, and kept us fighting until the bitter end. You’ve got the best sort of credibility that any sub skipper could ask for. You produce results in combat, time after time.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “Turning beam-on to the
Tirpitz,
showing them our full side-profile noise signature, with erratic sound-propagation conditions at the time, was just too risky.
Tirpitz
got a datum off us, and it let them shoot. If they hadn’t blown up from their own weapon failure, we’d’ve definitely been sunk.”

“Hmmm…You
had
to evade, Captain. That was in the Commodore’s standing orders from above. We couldn’t get Master One’s course or speed, exactly
because
of said bad sonar conditions. For all you knew, she was coming right at us fast. You
had
to turn well away.”

“I’m not sure you’re right.”

“What were you going to do? Put the ship into
reverse?
We’re unstable enough going backward with a
seasoned
guy at the helm. It seems to me your turn away, a simple maneuver for Harrison, was the safer decision, given all the circumstances.”

Jeffrey absorbed that. “Thanks, XO. I suppose needing to think about it again, to write out a formal report, it’s got me second-guessing myself.”

Bell smiled. “Nobody said it was easy being CO. That’s what they pay you the big money for.”

Both men laughed again. Jeffrey was glad he’d confided in Bell. The man’s perspective had cheered Jeffrey up.

But then Bell frowned, which was rare for him. “Maybe you’ve got me second-guessing too now, Captain, but something’s starting to not smell right, about meeting the
Tirpitz
the way we did…. Either it really was just one humongous coincidence, or the
Tirpitz
knew we were coming.”

This was someplace Jeffrey didn’t want to go. “How could they know we were coming?”

“Compromised our sound surveillance system data, maybe?”

“The good commodore insists that’s not the case.”

“You believe him?”

“I
think
I believe him. The
Tirpitz
is—was—a lot slower than us. How could she have been vectored into position so soon? She was right there in front of us, a perfect setup.”

“Maybe they didn’t tap our hydrophone grids. Maybe they’ve planted their own along our coast, or have some new secret weapon we don’t know about.”

“I think you’ve been watching too many old Cold War movies, XO.”

Bell pursed his lips. “They might still have known in advance that we were coming, from a spy.”

“The commodore told me he didn’t decide which way to go, north or south, until we submerged. So it’s not like anyone off the ship knew…. We’re probably okay, about there being a leak.”

Bell didn’t relax. “The Germans didn’t need to know we were heading south, Captain. All they needed to know was that we were sailing. Anybody can look at a map of the globe…. Maybe they sent
Tirpitz
south, and they sent another submarine north, to hit us near Newfoundland, say, in case we took the Arctic route.
Tirpitz
was the one that got lucky, or unlucky.”

Jeffrey nodded slowly, reluctantly. “Don’t tell anyone else about this, XO. If we’ve been compromised, I want the crew to stay in blissful ignorance…. I’m going to talk to Commodore Wilson.”

Jeffrey knocked on Wilson’s stateroom door. Lieutenant Sessions’s voice called from inside, “Who’s there?”

Jeffrey was annoyed. “Captain Fuller.”

Sessions unlocked the door, and Jeffrey went in.

Wilson glanced up at Jeffrey. Wilson’s eyes were sunken and red. He didn’t look good. Wilson waited for Jeffrey to speak. On top of the filing cabinet, a computer printer was running.

“Commodore, I have some matters we need to discuss.”

“Lieutenant,” Wilson said, “stay, but close and lock the door.”

Sessions and Jeffrey sat in the two guest chairs. Again Wilson waited for Jeffrey to speak.

“Sir, you’re aware one of the men has a serious injury.”

Wilson nodded. “His arm.”

“We need to get him to a hospital.”

“How do you propose to accomplish that?”

“Drop him off in the ASDS.”

“And just where would you drop him off in the ASDS?”

“When we pass through the Yucatán Strait, sir, we’ll have Cuba to port and Mexico to starboard.” Mexico was one of the Allies, and Cuba was rabidly anti-Axis.

“And what will you do? Leave him at somebody’s beach cottage, or a fishing village pier in the dead of night? With a note in Spanish, ‘Please get me to a hospital’?”

Jeffrey was taken aback. “Sessions and I could work out the details, but yes, something like that.”

Sessions’s face brightened, but Wilson’s did not.

“I need you to think more as my operations officer, Commander Fuller, not just as captain of your ship. You have to put the mission of my battle group above the fate of one man’s arm.”

Jeffrey, thunderstruck, shook his head. “Sir, that’s much too harsh.”

“No, it’s not…. What else? Sessions and I are busy.”

“I’ve just had a discussion with my XO. We believe that, after all, the Axis may know that we’ve sailed.”

“From circumstantial evidence, like meeting
Tirpitz
? From making a nuclear datum off Cape Fear that surely carried through the deep sound channel clear across to Europe?”

Wilson was obviously ahead of Jeffrey on this, and not pleased. He’d told Jeffrey to keep
Challenger
’s signature
out
of the deep sound channel.

“Exactly, sir. What also concerns me, both as ops officer and as captain, is that we can’t be sure either way. It’s a key parameter of our strategy and tactics, Commodore, knowing whether or not we’ll really catch
Voortrekker
by surprise.”