Crush Depth (17 page)

On
Challenger

J
EFFREY’S INJURED TORPEDOMAN
was gone to a hospital. The
Prima Latina
was slowly being towed through the entry locks, at the beginning of the Panama Canal, by electric locomotives running on tracks along the bank. Sitting at his console in the control room, Jeffrey had to take this mostly on faith. He couldn’t exactly go up on the freighter’s bridge to greet the canal pilot and customs officials at Cristobal. All
Challenger
’s periscope showed him was the inside of the submarine hold. He had to take Rodrigo’s word for what was going on.

The feeling in the control room was stuffy and tense. There was nowhere to go, trapped inside the tramp steamer, herself imprisoned inside the shallow canal locks. Jeffrey had set
Challenger
at battle stations hours ago, as a precaution, but the crew had no real way to defend themselves—except for last-ditch small arms.

Silence was their best, their
only
protection. Even though the decks all rode on sound-isolation gear, Jeffrey’s crew walked gingerly on tiptoe. They spoke in whispers and sign language, if they spoke at all. Now and then someone would grab a wad of toilet paper, kept handy to clean the console touch screens. Instead they’d mop their brow. With
the fans stopped the air was warm, and getting warmer all the time.

Doubts and worries kept running through Jeffrey’s mind. From the looks on the faces around him, he wasn’t alone. Jeffrey hated this feeling of loss of control. The helpless wait was excruciating—and the trip of half a day through the canal had barely begun.

What if the
Prima Latina
had engine failure? What if she collided with another ship crossing big Gatun Lake in the middle of the canal? What if one of the locks got jammed, or the submarine-hold doors malfunctioned and dropped wide open and snagged the canal bottom? What if there was an earthquake here, or a landslide in the narrow Gaillard Cut through the high southern mountains? A dozen things could go horribly wrong.

COB and Meltzer manned the ship controls gamely, though there was nothing at all for them to do. COB, exhausted from days of nonstop repair work, began to nod off. He started to snore, and Meltzer immediately nudged him. COB roused, and Harrison offered a cup of stale coffee. COB gulped it gratefully.

Jeffrey himself had to stifle a yawn. He’d already had so much coffee he was getting acid stomach, so he resisted asking for another cup. He was sure he wouldn’t sleep until his command was through the canal, and out of the freighter and out of this waking nightmare, safely submerged and free in the Pacific Ocean at last.

A nervous fire-controlman began to cough—he’d choked on his own saliva, his throat was so tight. He desperately covered his mouth with both hands to suppress the hacking noises. A friend pounded his back, firmly but quietly. The fire-controlman eventually stopped choking.

For the moment, it was so quiet Jeffrey could hear the sound of his own circulating blood, an unnerving rush in his ears. Jeffrey drew a deep breath. The ship’s chronometer seemed to move so slowly, he thought it must be broken. But the chronometer and his wristwatch agreed, as did Bell’s.

The same awful thoughts plagued Jeffrey again and again. Trapped within the
Prima Latina,
cornered in the canal,
Challenger
was a clay pigeon. Panama’s armed forces, bitter since America’s anti-Noriega sanctions wrecked the local economy years ago, would act violently.
Challenger
’s too-thin cloak, this secret hold, could easily become a secret execution chamber.

Worst thing of all, if found out—USS
Challenger,
a belligerent’s nuclear submarine bearing many nuclear arms—she’d provoke a diplomatic incident of monumental proportions. The scandal and outrage as word spread fast might well push teetering Latin American countries to spurn the U.S. altogether and join the Axis cause. The impact on the outcome of the war would be disastrous.

Jeffrey felt this burden every second of the way, more suffocating than the stale air in the control room.

A messenger came from aft, so silent Jeffrey didn’t notice until he felt a tap on his arm. The messenger mumbled in Jeffrey’s ear. Wilson wanted to see him.

Transiting the canal, Jeffrey spent several hours with Commodore Wilson and Lieutenant Sessions in private, working further on their tactics for when they reached the South Pacific.

Then, back in the control room, Jeffrey saw on the periscope screens that Rodrigo was coming down the gangway to
Challenger
’s hull. Rodrigo’s posture was casual, and he didn’t look concerned, so Jeffrey tried to relax.

Rodrigo waved at the periscope head for Jeffrey to come up. Glad for any change of scenery, Jeffrey climbed the forward escape trunk.

“Greetings,
Capitán.
”

“How are we doing?” Jeffrey asked.

“All is well so far. Your crewman is at a good hospital. My employer has agents in-country, who will keep an eye and make sure he is not bothered by enemy operatives.”

“Good, terrific. Thank you, Rodrigo…. Was that everything?”

“By no means. I thought you might enjoy fresh air. How would you like to come on deck for a moment?”

“Is that wise?”

“You will have to be disguised, of course, lest the wrong person see you. But the crew of the
Prima Latina
are all picked men. They are very trustworthy.”

“Okay.”

Jeffrey followed Rodrigo through the crawl space. In the cargo hold, Jeffrey heard scurrying and pattering sounds. He was glad he didn’t meet the local wildlife. Rodrigo pointed to a pile of clothes: dirty rubber boots, worn dungarees, and an oil-stained tank-top shirt.

Jeffrey gingerly inspected the outfit for spiders or rats. He changed. The clothes were baggy. Rodrigo led him out of the hold and along a passageway. Jeffrey clumped in the rubber boots. They came to a storeroom. Rodrigo gave Jeffrey dark sunglasses, a large straw hat, and a paste-on beard.

“We must avoid the bridge. The canal pilot is there.”

Rodrigo and Jeffrey went out on deck.

The change from down inside the hold was stunning.

The bright sun, low in the east, was a beautiful extra-yellow. The early morning sky was cloudless, a brilliant cobalt blue. It was hot, but not too hot if Jeffrey didn’t stand in the direct sun. The air was humid, but pleasantly so.

The
Prima Latina
was going around a broad curve, between steep hills that towered hundreds of feet on either side.

“This is the Gaillard Cut,” Rodrigo said.

“I’ve heard of it.”

“It was the most difficult part of building the canal. Thousands died, you know, of many nationalities and races, from malaria and yellow fever and worse.”

“I know,” Jeffrey said.

“Yet now it is so beautiful here.”

Rodrigo was right. The jungle growth on the mountainsides was exuberantly dense and vibrantly green. The different colors of tropical flowers and bushes and vines were
breathtakingly rich. Stands of bamboo seemed to shimmer dazzlingly in the sunlight. Strange trees with smooth gray trunks towered a hundred feet in the air.

Then Jeffrey remembered these mountainsides were artificial, here in the cut. Millions of cubic yards of earth and rock had had to be removed laboriously, much of it by pickax and shovel, by wheelbarrow or mule. More than once, huge mudslides had ruined the work and killed dozens or hundreds of men. That was all a century ago or more; in modern times, the cut had been widened and stabilized.

“Cigar?” Rodrigo offered.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Cuban, of course.” Rodrigo grinned.

“Of course.”

Jeffrey rarely smoked. He drew a puff—it was delicious, and the smoke smelled very good. The tobacco made him lightheaded, so he took it slow. Slow was the best way to enjoy a fine cigar.

Rodrigo went to lean on the railing as the
Prima Latina
chugged along through the cut. The ship’s deck vibrated steadily, reassuringly. Jeffrey came to stand next to Rodrigo, and turned his face to the sun. He let its warm rays bathe his cheeks and forehead, his arms and neck, relaxing the tightness he felt inside. Then Jeffrey leaned against the dented, rusty railing beside Rodrigo.

For a long while, neither man spoke. Jeffrey just enjoyed the ride and the cigar, and savored the air and the sun and the view. It was remarkable how totally refreshed he felt.

Then Jeffrey saw the bow of a freighter up ahead, coming around the curve in the cut from the opposite direction.

“I think perhaps,
Capitán,
that soon you should go below.”

Jeffrey nodded.

Rodrigo sighed, and raised his cigar to the mountains. “To the fallen, to all those who made this great canal possible.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, raising his cigar, “to the fallen.”

“And to the fallen who fought to make my Cuba free.”

“Cuba Libre,” Jeffrey said, then hoped it wasn’t in bad taste.

Rodrigo looked at Jeffrey and his eyes were moist with joy and sorrow. “Thank you, my friend.” Rodrigo raised his cigar once more. “To success in your journey, wherever you are bound.”

“Thank you, Rodrigo,” Jeffrey said from the heart. “Thank you.”

Rodrigo paused. “And to the most recent fallen,
Capitán,
now in this latest fight we share to make the whole world free.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, thinking of Ilse. “To the fallen.”

On
Voortrekker

V
AN
G
ELDER HAD
the conn.
Voortrekker
was back in the all-concealing bottom terrain of the Mid–Indian Ocean Ridge. She continued on her journey toward the Australia–New Zealand–Antarctic Gap and the wide Pacific beyond. As before,
Voortrekker
moved slowly, scouting ahead with an off-board probe. Van Gelder looked up from the imagery feed when a messenger came to his console.

“The captain’s compliments, sir, and he requests your presence in his cabin.”

“Very well…Navigator, take the conn.”

Van Gelder stepped aft to ter Horst’s cabin.

“Come in, Gunther, come in.” Ter Horst switched from Afrikaans—the Boer tongue—to German. “I believe you already know Commander Bauer.”

Van Gelder nodded. Bauer was the head of the Kampfschwimmer team. He was tall and blond and handsome, slim-waisted, and seemed like a real tight-ass. Van Gelder disliked him on sight.

“I enjoyed our little swim together, First Officer,” Bauer said. “It is good we rescued your crewman from the water,
ja
? It is not so good about the killed Australians.” Bauer shot ter Horst an almost dirty look, as if to say, Be glad my
marksmanship is better than yours,
mein Kapitan.
Van Gelder was taken aback. Although Bauer outranked Van Gelder—a mere lieutenant commander—and was equal in rank to ter Horst—a full commander—it still was customary to show respect for a warship’s senior officers.

Seated beside Bauer was one of the enlisted Kampfschwimmer, who didn’t say anything.

Ter Horst waved dismissively. “We can’t worry about that now.” Van Gelder thought ter Horst still looked sad, shaken, aged a bit, by the intelligence Bauer had brought with him, that Ilse Reebeck had died in an accident in America. Van Gelder was surprised to see this human side of his captain. He realized ter Horst’s relationship with Ilse Reebeck had been complex.

“Gunther, pull your chair over here, and let’s look at a chart.”

Van Gelder and Bauer sat where ter Horst showed them. Ter Horst typed on his laptop. A nautical chart appeared on the flat-screen TV on the wall of ter Horst’s cabin. It showed the South Pacific.

“This is the problem we face,” ter Horst said. “Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica. The so-called ANZA Gap…The waters north of Australia are much too shallow and constricted, butting up against Indonesia and New Guinea. That leaves us the Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand, as one choice. The alternative is the part of the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica.”

This much was obvious, and Van Gelder had already been thinking about which route
Voortrekker
might take. He knew ter Horst was leading up to something…and maybe testing him. “Captain, I think the Tasman Sea is the poorer choice. The sea-floor terrain is nicely broken, but the Tasman route is much narrower than the Southern Ocean portion of the gap.”

“Ja,”
Bauer said. “Besides, the Tasman is flanked by hundreds of miles of enemy coast on both sides. Australia and New Zealand are strong with surface and airborne antisubmarine defenses.”

“Now we come to the Southern Ocean route,” ter Horst said. “Antarctica is nonmilitarized, by international treaty. That’s good for
us.
The weather there will be more severe than the Tasman Sea, which is
bad
for Allied antisubmarine ships and aircraft. The bottom terrain there also is good for us. Lots of fracture zones in which to hide.”

Ter Horst obviously wasn’t finished, so Van Gelder nodded. Van Gelder was starting to think, by the barely repressed smug grin on Bauer’s face, that Bauer knew more than Van Gelder did.

Ter Horst stood and touched the nautical chart. “One thing to bear in mind is that the waters south of New Zealand are protected by this chain of islands running northeast, the same direction
we
want to go.” Ter Horst reeled them off on his fingers. “Macquarie Island, Campbell Island, Antipodes Island, Bounty Island. The last of them is the little Chatham Island group, some five hundred nautical miles due east of New Zealand…. Now, south of them hereon the chart, in the Southwest Pacific Basin, the water is close to six thousand meters deep.”

“That’s deeper than our crush depth,” Van Gelder said.

“It is,” ter Horst said. Bauer smirked.

“The Allies aren’t dumb,” ter Horst went on. “See these red arcs marked on the map? These are their bottom-moored hydrophone lines, part of their vaunted worldwide SOSUS system. The Southwest Pacific Basin is wired for sound, and most of the hydrophones are down in water much too deep for
Voortrekker
to get at them.”

“And in such deep water,” Van Gelder said, “the deep sound channel will function perfectly.”

“Yes,” ter Horst said. “We’d need to pass right over three of the hydrophone lines to get fully through the gap.”

Van Gelder glanced at Bauer, then said, “I suppose we can’t just nuke a segment of the SOSUS here, like the Germans did in the North Atlantic right at the start of the war.” Bauer blinked.

“That’s quite true, Gunther. With such ideal sound prop
agation, quiet as we are, they’d hear us coming before one of our torpedoes could be in range of the hydrophones. The detonation of the warhead would reveal
Voortrekker
’s presence, within a circle much too tight for comfort.”

Van Gelder remembered the plastering the
Ronald Reagan
gave
Voortrekker
after Diego Garcia—running repairs were still going on in many parts of the ship. “So what do we do, Captain?”

Ter Horst turned to Bauer. Bauer turned to his enlisted man. “Stand up. Take off your shirt. Turn around.”

Van Gelder was surprised to see two white plugs embedded in the skin in the small of the Kampfschwimmer’s back. Each had a small valve, now sealed off.

“What are they?” Van Gelder said.
“Gills?”
He was half joking.

“Look more closely, please,” Bauer said.

Van Gelder realized the plugs were intravenous ports—the things used in hospitals for chronically ill patients who needed repeated blood transfusions or constant chemotherapy drips.

“What are they for?”

“With these,” Bauer said, “a man may dive to six thousand meters or more.” Twenty thousand feet.

“You can’t be serious. Not even mixed gases work below about six
hundred
meters. Six
thousand?
The pressure alone so deep…”

“We are not speaking of gases. We are speaking of breathing oxygenated saline solution, directly into the lungs, a fluid which self-equalizes to the metric tons of outside pressure.”

“I’ve heard of that idea,” Van Gelder said. “It’s an old idea. Getting the oxygen
in
was never the problem. The problem was getting the carbon dioxide
out.
Once the carbon dioxide level in the blood builds up, the person dies!”

“Yes, they die. They die if the carbon dioxide level builds up in the diver’s blood.
We
do not let the carbon dioxide build up.”

Van Gelder hesitated. “That’s what these implants are for?”

“
Ja.
The diver wears a backpack, which hooks up to the ports. Instead of tanks of gas, the backpack contains dialysis apparatus. There is, of course, also a form of rebreather oxygen supply. But the key, the great breakthrough by German science, is the perfection of the carbon dioxide dialysis process.”

Van Gelder turned to the enlisted man. “Have you really done this? In actual field trials, at such great depths?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“And how many others have died so far, doing this?”

The enlisted man looked at the floor.

“Decompression takes many, many hours,” Bauer continued firmly. “That is why we brought our portable one-man pressure chambers.”

“Those coffin-shaped crates?”

“
Ja.
A good disguise for the chambers, don’t you agree? To ship them through Sri Lanka, and load them on the
Trincomalee Tiger,
crated to look like coffins?”

Coffins is right,
Van Gelder thought.

Ter Horst smiled. “Now you see our plan, Gunther.”

Van Gelder thought for a moment. “I do, and I don’t, Captain. If one of these divers goes down and cuts the SOSUS fiber optic with a pair of scissors instead of an atom bomb, the Allies will still know right away there’s a break in the line. Their equipment will tell them where. They’ll investigate. We’ll be found out.”

“Who said anything about a break?” Bauer interrupted. “A diver is useless unless he performs useful work. Four of my men, in total, bear these port implants. They work in teams of two.”

“They work in teams doing
what?”

Ter Horst leaned over and touched Van Gelder on the knee. “This is the beautiful part.”

“We have a device which taps into the fiber-optic line,” Bauer said.

“I thought fiber optics can’t be tapped without detection.”

“No, they can. Even the Allies have been doing this for several years. But what good would it do your ship to listen on the Allied sound surveillance grid?”

“None! We don’t want the SOSUS to listen to
us.
”

“Ha!” Bauer was obviously very pleased with himself. “Our device does not listen. It
replaces.
It penetrates and intercepts the optic signals, and cancels them and substitutes signals
we
supply, from the device, using microlasers and a built-in high-speed computer. All without breaking the cable or interrupting the signal for even one moment.”

“But—”

“Yes, it involves extremely fine work, which is why men must be down there on site and use their hands…. And incase you’re concerned about the cold at six thousand meters, the men wear special dry suits lined with shielded plutonium. This gives a diver the manual dexterity of a brain surgeon, even spending hours in seawater near the freezing point.”

“You’re not serious.
Plutonium?
”

“The idea was tried by the Americans in the 1950s, you should know. Plutonium gives off constant heat, and keeps the divers toasty warm without an external power source that might be drained prematurely. The Americans abandoned the idea because they were afraid of nuclear-waste
pollution.
” Bauer laughed sarcastically. “We’re giving them plenty of such pollution every day, now, are we not?”

Van Gelder sensed that even ter Horst found Bauer overbearing.

Ter Horst cleared his throat. “So, Gunther, that’s how we’ll get through…. Terrific, don’t you think?”

“It’s amazing, Captain.”

“We send the Kampfschwimmer team ahead of us in our minisub. It’s small enough and quiet enough to escape detection, and also has plenty of range. In fact, Gunther, I would like you to go as copilot on the minisub, to monitor their efforts.”

That sounded interesting, and frightening. “Yes, Captain.”

“The divers leave the steel-hulled mini, with its shallow crush depth,” ter Horst said. “They descend on a lengthy cable, bringing with them a low-light camera with feed up to the minisub, so you can watch as the divers work. The device they attach to the hydrophone line overlays a false signal, background ocean noise and such, while we sneak past.”

“For years,” Bauer said, “the Americans have depended too much on the SOSUS to track other submarines. When we defeat their system this way, it will deal them quite a shock.”

“But eventually the enemy will suspect their incoming data is bad, Captain.”

“By then we’ll be long gone, sinking their tankers and carriers right and left…. Isn’t science a wonderful thing?”