Crush Depth (21 page)

“What do you think we should do?”

“Launch your minisub again. I want you to go to the island in person, and report to me over the link.”

“Yes, sir.” Jeffrey gestured to Ensign Harrison to get the mini ready—Harrison had already made two trips to
Chatham Island and back, to ferry Ilse and the SEALs and all their gear.

“Conduct a close on-site inspection,” Wilson said. “Make sure the equipment is set up properly, the locals are cooperating, and Lieutenant Reebeck knows her business.”

Later, on
Challenger
’s minisub

T
O
J
EFFREY IT
was refreshing and pleasantly different, almost a tourist junket, to be going somewhere in the minisub outside a combat zone. It would also be the first time Jeffrey stepped ashore in a foreign country since becoming commanding officer, and he was looking forward to this small but momentous event.

Jeffrey manned the mini’s copilot seat and Harrison, sitting next to him, had the conn. The trip from
Challenger
’s hiding place to Chatham Island took a while; they shared the driving. Back in the transport compartment, one of Lieutenant Clayton’s logistics-support enlisted SEALs rested having a coffee—he alternated with Harrison as pilot every hour, so they all stayed sharp while cruising submerged to and from the island.

The battery-powered mini’s control compartment, with its low headroom and red lighting and computer icons dancing on display screens, formed an intimate setting, and Jeffrey was feeling expansive. He’d taken a shining to the earnest and eager young Harrison by now. They’d already traded life stories, with the more painful parts left out. But Harrison did say his parents went through an ugly divorce when he was twelve—he’d viewed the navy as a way to af
ford a good college, and then find order and purpose in life and gain a substitute family. Though they’d come at doing Navy ROTC from different directions, Jeffrey saw something of himself in Harrison.

The conversation paused. Jeffrey’s mind ran to his own folks, and he felt that sudden sinking feeling again: the recurrent gnawing concern for his mom. There’d been no news from Sloan-Kettering, but that was to be expected. Personal e-mail familygrams got very low priority these days.

Jeffrey had hoped that going to sea would clear his mind of such distractions. Usually when a sailor left the land beyond the horizon, and settled into the rhythm of the ship, shore-based cares fell away and he or she saw life with greater ease and clarity. This time, for Jeffrey, it hadn’t helped.

He told himself he was selfish. With all the radioactive fallout in the air worldwide from this terrible war, many thousands of people would be coming down with cancer—most of them years from now—people who would otherwise have gotten to live a full and healthy life. But that viewpoint didn’t help either—Jeffrey still felt very bad about his mother. Scenes from his early childhood with her, when life was simple and parents seemed perfect and he and his mom were on much better terms, kept flashing through his head. These images and impressions came unbidden and unwelcome, too vivid and unsettling and unreachably, painfully nostalgic, like a video recording running out of control. At times the sense of loss was almost unbearable.

Then there was Jeffrey’s biggest worry of all, everyone’s biggest worry: that the brutal fighting might escalate, that limited tactical nuclear war at sea might spread to all-out atomic devastation on land. Thank God the Axis didn’t have hydrogen bombs, but Hiroshima-sized mushroom clouds over Allied cities would be bad enough. To Jeffrey, since his trip to New York and Washington, the threat felt very personal. No longer were his mom and dad safe in America’s heartland, well away from the coast. Now his mother might
still lie in a hospital bed in Manhattan, and his father worked in D.C.—prime ground zeroes for cruise missiles tipped with fission bombs. Since Diego Garcia the risk seemed so much higher. On
Challenger
no one talked about it. It was as if the entire subject, mass destruction on land, was taboo by a silent consensus; to bring it up would just destroy morale. The best thing, the
only
thing, that Jeffrey and his crew could do was to do their best to help bring the war to a close….

Harrison, hands firmly on throttle and steering yoke, opened his mouth as if he had something to say, but he hesitated.

“What’s on your mind?” Jeffrey asked, welcoming any change of subject. “Go ahead. No one has personal secrets for long on a submarine.”

Harrison kept his eyes glued to his instruments. “I feel there’s some unfinished business, Captain…. Basically I—I wanted to apologize, for pissing my pants in our action with the
Tirpitz.
”

“Oh, that.” Jeffrey chuckled, feeling expansive once again. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen guys do that in combat. Especially their first time.” He turned to Harrison and gave him a confiding wink. “Don’t tell anybody, but I peed my pants on our last mission, and I probably would’ve twice except the second time I was much too busy to think of it.”

“What happened, sir? If it’s not classified?”

“I had an unexpected meeting with some Kampfschwimmer.”

“I heard those guys are pretty wicked and fierce.”

“They are. Believe me.”

Harrison grew introspective and serious. “But the thing is, sir, plenty of people
don’t
wet themselves under fire. Right?”

“Have the guys been ribbing you?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just that it makes me wonder, why do some people panic and some people don’t? We
didn’t expect to meet the
Tirpitz
either, and no one else lost control of their bladder.”

Jeffrey saw that Harrison still blamed himself, and this wasn’t healthy. Jeffrey’s job was to do what he could to give Harrison perspective. That was one part of Jeffrey’s workload he truly enjoyed, leading and counseling juniors on their careers and on life in general. He was just barely old enough to be Harrison’s father, and people like Harrison were the closest thing that Jeffrey had to his own kids. Jeffrey, still unmarried and almost forty, had
that
worry on his mind as well—he’d begun to think his last chance had vanished when Ilse left him. He feared that he’d stay single the rest of his days and never get to raise a family, even assuming he survived and Armageddon didn’t come. Jeffrey forced his mind back to Harrison’s needs.

“I’ve had this private theory for years, Tom, that
everybody
panics, and it’s completely random who shows it first. In a good, disciplined unit like ours, that first person’s reaction, his visible reaction, triggers the others to focus on duty, and it helps them force back their fear. It just happened to be you who helped to tighten our unit cohesion. It could’ve been anyone.”

Harrison pondered. “That’s an interesting take on it, sir. The social effects of the group dynamic in battle. A sort of one for all and all for one when the first guy says, ‘I’m scared.’ It makes sense.”

“You know, animals often instinctively piss or crap when they come against that urgent fight-or-flight decision. It ties in with another theory I have, that we all should get in better touch with our inner caveman selves.”

Harrison laughed. “That’s a good one, Captain.”

“Thank you, but I mean it. I read about a study once, I think done by some anthropologists, they were looking at just this question. Why drop a load at such a critical time? Their answer was, that that was precisely the point.
You weigh less.
”

“Like, if you were a caveman you could run faster, or jump higher, or whatever?”

Jeffrey nodded. “Besides, it was your very first day at sea with us, and we
did
win the battle. You did great when we met with the
Prima Latina,
which has to be the craziest docking maneuver
I’ve
ever pulled. And I’m getting good reports on your attitude and learning curve from my XO.”
Challenger
had only eleven officers, counting Jeffrey, so every person’s role and progress mattered a great deal.

“Thank you for telling me, Captain.”

The conversation paused again. This time it was Jeffrey who hesitated. “If you don’t mind my asking, how come you’re still an ensign?” Officers were supposed to be at least lieutenant j.g.’s by the time they’d finished nuclear power school and been assigned to a ship. “What did you do, dishonor some high admiral’s comely daughter?”

Even in the red lighting, Jeffrey saw Harrison blush. Jeffrey put it together: Harrison did college in three years, at a pressure-cooker like MIT of all places. Maybe he was still a virgin.

Harrison had to clear his throat. “No, sir. Nothing like that…”

Yup, he’s a virgin.

“I didn’t want to push it, Captain, considering I’m just a tiny little cog and there’s a war, but my detailer said the paperwork for the change in rank got lost, somewhere in the bowels of the bureaucracy in Washington.”

“Well, talk about your
bowel
movements!…I’m gonna get this business deconstipated right now. I am, after all, commanding officer of USS
Challenger,
am I not? I’m giving you a battlefield promotion. Thomas Harrison, you are henceforth Lieutenant Junior Grade Harrison.”

Harrison beamed. Jeffrey too was pleased. With the right nurturing, Jeffrey felt sure, Harrison would go far.

Jeffrey was self-aware enough to know his moods were on a seesaw today, up and down and up—exhaustion and overwork did that to him. So did the pins-and-needles anticipation of imminent combat. He resolved that once he sorted things out on the island and got back to
Challenger,
he’d
make sure to get a solid block of uninterrupted sleep.
That way I’ll be fresh and alert when the big matchup comes with ter Horst.

And I better make the rounds of the ship before the fateful day. Talk to the men in small gatherings. Visit with the seasoned hands and help them steady the new guys. Bring out the group dynamic, as Harrison called it. Stiffen our unit cohesion in advance, ’cause we’ll need it when the shooting starts.

Jeffrey glanced at the navigation display. He picked up the intercom mike. The enlisted SEAL in the transport compartment responded. “Come forward, please. We’re closing fast on the minefield protecting the fishing piers.”

Owenga fishing station, Chatham Island

J
EFFREY GINGERLY OPENED
the minisub’s top hatch. It rose partway and hit the planks of the pier the mini was hiding under. Jeffrey peeked outside. It was barely dawn. Jeffrey caught his first whiff of natural air in almost a week. What struck him at once were the smells. Dead fish, diesel fuel and lubricants, and tarry creosote—the odors of a working waterfront. The minisub bobbed in the swell, which was noticeable even here on the downwind side of the island.

Jeffrey listened. The swell sloshed. Rope lines creaked. The minisub scraped gently against seaweed and barnacles growing on the pilings of the pier.

Next to the pier, as Jeffrey expected, was an old fishing boat, large but wooden hulled, resting on the bottom mud, derelict. By the red light coming from down in the mini’s lockout chamber, Jeffrey spotted a stained and dirty canvas tarpaulin hanging over the side of the hulk, between the rotting fenders that still held the boat against the pier. He motioned for Harrison to follow him.

Harrison held the hatch open as far as he could, and Jeffrey clambered up. Then he helped Harrison. They dogged the hatch—the enlisted SEAL and the mini would wait for them here.

Jeffrey crawled along the cold, wet top deck of the mini. He timed the swells carefully, so he wouldn’t be crushed. At the right moment he worked his way under the tarpaulin, climbed over the side of the fishing boat, and flopped onto its greasy deck in front of the half-collapsed wheelhouse. He moved aside, concealed beneath the canvas sheet, and Harrison followed. They were already filthy.

Jeffrey waited, listening carefully again. There was nothing but the wind and waves, and the normal clanking and swishing sounds of dormant, tied-up vessels. Jeffrey glanced from under the tarpaulin. Scattered lights along the shore showed him it was very misty. Jeffrey and Harrison climbed from the derelict boat to the pier. They walked onto the land as casually as they could. More mist blew by a lamppost. Gravel crunched beneath their feet.

“Who goes there?” someone called. The accent fell between Australian and British.

“Serenity,” Jeffrey said. “Serenity One.” “Serenity” was the code name Clayton had established for the submarine on which the SEALs had come. “One” was navy talk for the captain himself.

A figure stepped from behind a parked vehicle. He advanced and offered his hand.

“Welcome to Chatham Island!” Constable Joshua Henga smiled. “Precisely halfway between the South Pole and the equator, right on the international date line. The first populated land to greet every new calendar day…That’s one of our main claims to fame, Captain. We like to say we’re quite easy to find on a map, though usually no one bothers looking.”

Given word from SEAL lieutenant Clayton, already on the island, Henga had been expecting Jeffrey, including Jeffrey’s sneaky approach to the land. Henga started up his ancient Land Rover truck and took a narrow road west. Jeffrey sat in the passenger seat, and Harrison sat behind Jeffrey—Jeffrey brought Harrison along as his aide, and also just for
fun. They’d both removed their dirty coveralls and thrown them in back. Underneath they wore low-key civilian clothes.

“Thanks, Constable,” Jeffrey said. “I hope we haven’t inconvenienced you.” Henga was tall and wiry, mid-thirties, and wore a revolver on his policeman’s equipment belt. He seemed relaxed and patient in a manner almost alien to Jeffrey.

Henga laughed, a friendly, welcoming laugh. “I’m not inconvenienced in the least. Your team coming is the most interesting thing to happen here in some time.” The Land Rover bounced along.

“That isolated, are you?”

Henga glanced at Jeffrey and made keen eye contact. “It’s a big event when the supply ship puts in from New Zealand once a month. Tourism stopped right dead with the war.”

“I imagine it would have.” Just like New York. Jeffrey knew it would take a little while to get where they were going, so he made small talk. “You used to get many tourists?”

“Ecotourism. Lots of it. We’re so far away from anywhere, we have dozens of species of birds and plants found no place else in the world. Birdwatchers came especially. Our famous endangered black robins.”

That sounded interesting. “Can you point them out to us?”

“Not here, sorry. Only on some of the outlying islets. They need virgin forest, you see, and all the forest on Chatham Island itself was cleared for pasture land. That’s why they’re endangered.”

Jeffrey paused, then gave in to curiosity. Henga looked like a West Indies black. “If you don’t mind my asking, Constable, are you Maori, or Moriori?”

“Some of both, plus English blood. There’s been intermarriage for many decades. We’re a tight-knit community.”

“Being a constable keep you busy?”

“No. That’s why there’s just one of me. In the old days I’d mostly keep an eye out for nature conservation problems, and make sure the kids at least were discreet if they smoked marijuana. Never any real crime here. A magistrate makes a day trip from the mainland every six months. In the interim, I dish out justice with a tongue lashing or my fist.” Henga chuckled. “We don’t even have a high school. For that the older children board over in New Zealand. They fly home for holidays, if they ever come back at all.”

“They see this as a place to escape from?”

“Unless you want to fish or raise sheep or farm for the rest of your life…”

Henga made a left turn onto a rough dirt road. It was bright enough now that he could turn off his headlights. Jeffrey looked around. The land was rolling, covered by lime-green grasses or purplish moss. There was also low scrub brush, and patches of red and yellow wildflowers, and weathered volcanic rock. Jeffrey saw barbed-wire fences and low stone walls dividing grazing fields. The Land Rover went by scattered houses and outbuildings. All were one story, some ramshackle; some of them had tin roofs, like sheep-shearing sheds. Sometimes the truck passed local people on porches or in their farmyards, up with the dawn. The people waved at the constable and eyed his passengers with interest. Jeffrey saw young children playing.

“Another two or three kilometers,” Henga said. The land began to rise. Chatham Island was shaped like a giant letter I, twenty-five miles from top to bottom. Just to the east of the shaft of the I, which ran north-south, a line of sandbars enclosed a big tidal lagoon. The hamlet of Owenga, where they’d started out, was nestled in the southeast corner of the I. Ilse’s setup was near the middle of the southern edge of the island.

Jeffrey held on as the road got rougher and bumpy. In low spots, sheltered hollows, with the windows of the Land Rover open, Jeffrey smelled the manure-and-urine odor buildup of cattle. He saw many sheep and cows, and some
times a horse or two. Trees stood in lonely isolation, all bending the same way, leaning permanently eastward toward the morning sun.

“That’s from the wind?”

“The trade winds almost never stop. Hang onto your hat, Captain, or you’ll have to send to Peru to find it.” Henga laughed again. “That’s, oh, five thousand miles from here.”

The wind and rising sun had cleared the mist. The sky was a beautiful turquoise, flecked with high fluffy clouds. The road went past a stream, then took a culvert over a larger stream.

“Rained recently,” Harrison said idly as he glanced back down the road—which by now was more like a rutted, rough-hewn trail. “We aren’t kicking up dust.”

“That’s quite correct,” Henga said. “One thing about Chatham Island, the weather is unpredictable and never stays the same for very long. This afternoon could be perfectly sunny, or cloudy and cold. By tomorrow a tropical storm could hit. There’s a severe one passing New Zealand right now, you know. Drenched half of Australia on the way.”

Jeffrey nodded, then thought ahead. They were nearing Ilse and the SEALs.

“You’ve worked out rules of engagement?” Jeffrey didn’t want to take friendly fire.

“Oh yes, first thing. Your Lieutenant Clayton and I agreed, and I’ve informed my home-guard militia. Point one, no one shoots first. Point two, if you see strangers working in and around the water, leave them alone.”

“Good, good…How big is your militia?”

“One hundred twenty men and women. I put them through regular drills with vigor. Mandatory firearms practice every Saturday. We even have an old armored car.”

Harrison perked up. “What kind?”

“A Saracen. Ex–British Army. It usually stays by the airport. Fuel is short, you understand, and the thing’s transmission is rather worn, as is the barrel of its gun.”

“How large is your airport?” Harrison asked.

Henga smiled. “To call it an airport insults other airports. It’s an asphalt strip, uneven and not very long, barely adequate to take small propeller airplanes. We have one aircraft, in fact, privately owned, for short hops to the other inhabited island in the Chatham group, Pitt Island…. Before the war there were more-or-less daily flights from Wellington and Christchurch.”

Jeffrey knew those were cities on the New Zealand mainland, five hundred miles to the west. “Why do you say more-or-less?”

“The airplanes are what you Americans would call puddle jumpers. If they don’t have good weather, they can’t fly, as simple as that. As I mentioned, the weather here is very unpredictable.”

The road took a turn to the left and topped a rise. In front of Jeffrey loomed a big satellite dish. Near it was an equipment bunker dug into jutting bedrock. The door of the bunker stood open, and cables ran in and out. By the downwind side of the rock outcropping, Jeffrey saw a pair of khaki tents.

Chief Montgomery stepped from behind a stunted tree, one that was barely wide enough to hide his bulk. He’d obviously been waiting for them. He didn’t smile.

Jeffrey followed Ilse’s lead and glanced carefully over the edge of the jagged cliff on the rugged headland. A hundred feet below, strong white surf creamed endlessly against the base of the tan-yellow stone. The wind howled, the air was filled with seabirds and their cries, and further out seals and dolphins fed and played.

Jeffrey saw the cable Ilse was pointing to, draped over the edge of the cliff, leading down into the water. The main part of the lengthy cable, the acoustic link to
Challenger,
had been strung along the sea floor using the minisub.

“You know as well as I do,” Ilse said, “the microphone line has sensors that let me adjust for hydrographic conditions. I’m not doing this by the seat of my pants.”

“You’ve made communications checks with Sydney?”

“Repeatedly. And also with…Serenity. You heard me loud and clear, didn’t you? You didn’t miss a single one of my reports. Or do you want to run through the entire list
again?
”

“But the whole thing’s so theoretical.”

Ilse bristled. “I’ve seen you use weird tactical tricks in combat based on theories far crazier than this downlink. And I didn’t invent it, I just use it.”

“But—”

“I
do
know how to use it. It worked fine in the Aleutians, which is a harsher environment than here. It’s working just fine now.”

“So what’s wrong?”

“Maybe
nothing’s
wrong. Maybe he isn’t coming. Maybe he was sunk after all, or damaged and went back to Durban, and this whole thing is one giant fucking wild-goose chase.”

“Ilse, you shouldn’t use foul language.”

“Honest to God, Jeffrey, sometimes you’re too much.”

“It’s Captain to you, Lieutenant. Watch out, you’re on the verge of insubordination.”

“And you’re way past the verge of pompousness. I’m an officer in a foreign navy, and we’re on foreign soil. Off the ship you can’t push me around like you tried to on the last mission.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I’m still your commanding officer. I deserve, I insist on, your respect.”

“Well excuse me,
Captain
Fuller.”

“Why are you so irritable?”

“Because you’re irritating. You’re second-guessing me, just like you used to. It’s insulting. I’m an expert at this work and you know it.”

“So like I said, what’s wrong?”

“Like
I
said, maybe nothing’s wrong.”

“No, we know for sure he’s coming.”

“How? How do you know? He’s the most unpredictable bastard you or I ever met.”

“The Australians intercepted a neutral merchant ship. They got tipped off by some kind of shooting, during a rescue when the ship broke down. The ship was hollow inside, Ilse, like the one we took through the canal. The boarding party found a handful of Axis nuclear torpedoes in the secret hold.”

“You mean he got fresh ammo?”

“Yes. But something happened. Maybe the Aussies surprised him, blundering into the hold, and they had to be killed. The merchant master tried to tell some cockamamie story about pirates. It didn’t hold up. So ter Horst is definitely coming, and we definitely should have heard by now.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Let’s go back to the tent. You can get the SOSUS center for me live on voice?”

“Yes. I told you, didn’t I? I’ve talked to them myself.”

“Let’s go. And in front of the others, Ilse, act with decorum. What happened between us is private.”

“I had no idea we’d be assigned together again, on the ship. If I thought that would possibly happen, I’d never have let what went on between us get started to begin with.”

“So you blew it, because it
did
get started, and here we are. At least be discreet. I cannot let you argue with me in front of Clayton and Montgomery.”

Ilse balled her fists. “Stop lecturing me. This is exactly why I knew you and I would never work out. You’ve got some kind of complex. You don’t treat women with respect.”

“That’s
it,
Lieutenant!
You’re
the one with the complex. You don’t know how to take orders and play on a team.”

Jeffrey and Ilse trudged back the three hundred yards or so from the edge of the cliff to where the tents were set up. Out of the corner of his eye, Jeffrey spotted movement in the dense bushes, on the edge of a nature reserve that bordered the satellite ground-station site.
A wild pig, probably.