Crush Depth (3 page)
Authors: Joe Buff
By the time they reached the USO club it was too crowded to possibly get in. There was also a long line of teenagers outside the Armed Forces Recruiting Center next door; the draft had been reinstated, but many were volunteering.
“Good material,” Jeffrey said as he eyed the teenagers. “Better than we got in peacetime.”
Jeffrey didn’t tell Ilse what he really thought, that if these kids understood what they were in for—cannon and missile fodder in limited tactical nuclear war—they wouldn’t be so eager to get to the fighting. He and Ilse had twice set off small atom bombs on enemy soil out of necessity, obeying severely restrictive rules of engagement it had been Jeffrey’s job to enforce. The thought in retrospect horrified him, as did the ever-present risk that the Axis might escalate, even though the enemy had sworn not to be first to use more nuclear weapons in populated areas. Escalation was everyone’s worst nightmare, and the damage to the environment in combat zones was dreadful already. Ilse had been sent on that first mission, to South Africa, because her unique mix of technical skills and local knowledge was badly needed there. She did such a good job, the navy sent her on
Challenger
the second time, to Germany.
An MP with a bullhorn brought Jeffrey’s mind back to the present. The MP said there was another USO at the top of the Empire State Building. Jeffrey and Ilse decided to go there. They took an indirect route, to stretch their legs and get some air, since they had plenty of time to kill.
American flags flew everywhere, but many storefronts were vacant and drab. Glancing up at the tall apartment buildings as they strolled by, Jeffrey saw a number of units lacked any curtains or furnishings. For Rent and For Sale signs hung everywhere, looking weather-beaten, forlorn.
One auto dealership Jeffrey and Ilse walked past was converted into an equipment distribution center for home-front survival gear. Through the big showroom windows Jeffrey saw stacks of burn-treatment kits, water-purification tablets, Geiger counters and dosimeters, and piles of freeze-dried food. The original signs on the dealership were gone, but Jeffrey could see their outline against the building. Porsche, Audi, BMW. Not popular brands anymore.
The people on the streets seemed less aggressive and rude than Ilse imagined New Yorkers to be. Almost no one jaywalked. Taxi horns rarely blared, and very few drivers cursed—there were hardly any private cars around anyway, because of strict gas rationing and appalling prices per gallon.
Instead, there was a feeling of shared defiance against the Axis threat. But beneath this determined exterior Ilse sensed people were gnawed by doubt:
Was
it the right thing to do to stand up to this shocking new enemy, one the CIA as usual hadn’t seen coming till much too late? Why
couldn’t
America just turn inward, and look out for number one, and leave Europe and Africa festering on the far side of a wide ocean?
Jeffrey and Ilse passed a supermarket. Ilse was disturbed to see a large sign in the window announcing a special on horse meat. Ilse loved horses, and had ridden whenever she could in South Africa. Horses were beautiful creatures, sleek and affectionate and fast, and good ones were smarter than people gave them credit for. The thought of eating horses upset her.
Everything flooded back. Her dead family, the Boer putsch, Ilse’s own survivor guilt. Her younger brother especially, whom she loved and whom she’d always felt protective of, left unprotected when he’d needed Ilse most—because she’d been abroad, safe at a
conference.
Ilse fought hard not to cry, standing there on the sidewalk. Jeffrey tried to comfort her, but she shook him off. She said it was just the freezing wind making tears in her eyes.
The officers’ club of the USO was on the Empire State Building’s eighty-fifth floor. Jeffrey led Ilse to the cocktail lounge, large and crowded and noisy. A live band played swing music from World War II.
But Ilse didn’t seem in a mood to mingle. She worked her way to the windows. Jeffrey followed. The view was stunning. The setting sun was a cold red-orange blob, fading behind dusky clouds low over New Jersey. The city and the
harbor were spread out before them. Looking southeast, toward the ocean, Jeffrey longed wistfully to be under way on a submarine. After his training course in New London, his next assignment would be some fancy-sounding land job—those who even passed the course didn’t get a ship right away.
Gradually, the view and the music began to work on Jeffrey. They lifted his spirits and made him feel romantic. The sense of being at war, the excitement and danger of it, heightened this for him. He reached for Ilse’s hand. She pulled away.
“I’m not here as your
date,
” she said between clenched teeth. “We’re traveling on
business.
”
Jeffrey convinced Ilse to go to the open-air observation deck, one flight up. A yeoman near the elevator lent them parkas from a rack. Ilse saw armed guards by the stairway to a navy communications center on the topmost floors; she figured it used the big antenna on the building’s roof.
The yeoman lent them binoculars, for sightseeing. Jeffrey and Ilse went outside. Visibility was excellent and it was freezing—they were over a thousand feet high. By now it was dark, and the observation deck was deserted. The wind howled so strongly they took shelter on the downwind side of the building. Ilse looked straight up. The antenna needle reached another twenty or thirty stories above her head. She watched the tip of the mast sway back and forth in the wind; she got dizzy, and needed to turn away. She saw the tall art-deco Chrysler Building nearby. Its silvery spire came right up to her eye level, a fifth of a mile in the air.
Ilse glanced downwind, toward lower Manhattan. The skyscrapers now had blackout curtains drawn in all the tiny office windows. So did the shorter buildings in the foreground, near Greenwich Village and other residential neighborhoods. All vehicles on the streets had headlights hooded to narrow slits, painted blue. Only every third streetlight was on, and the bulbs were dim red.
A sliver of moon was poised on the eastern horizon over Brooklyn; Jeffrey and Ilse looked at the moon through their binoculars. With all the white, reflective snow on the ground, the moon lit the cityscape nicely. Overhead, the sky was perfectly clear. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, Ilse saw the Milky Way.
She felt badly for snubbing Jeffrey in the cocktail lounge. She reached out for his hand. From all around them air-raid sirens went off.
T
HE MOURNFUL HOWL
of the sirens pierced the wind. As Jeffrey watched from the observation deck, streetlights switched off borough by borough. Down below, vehicles stopped and their headlight glows vanished. From upwind, Jeffrey heard a deafening roar. On the runways of Newark Airport, bright blue-violet flames lit off. They moved, faster and faster and up into the sky—the afterburners of scrambling interceptor jets. A whole squadron, a dozen planes, took to the air and headed out to sea.
The yeoman stuck his head out of the door. “It’s real! Get down to shelter!”
“What is it?” Jeffrey shouted back.
“Cruise missiles inbound! Submarine launched! Coming this way! Mach eight!”
“Mach
eight?
” Ilse yelled.
“Come
on!
” the yeoman shouted.
“We’re staying,” Jeffrey declared.
The yeoman shook his head and disappeared.
“Mach
eight,
Jeffrey,” Ilse said. “I thought—”
“They had a handful left, in the supply pipeline.”
“Shouldn’t we go to the basement? They’ll get here very soon.”
“And be buried alive in the rubble? Or roasted in the firestorm, or drowned in shit when the sewer mains break?”
“How do you know they’ll be nuclear?”
“Ilse, they wouldn’t waste those missiles on high explosives. They’re Mach
eight.
”
“But if one gets through…”
“I know. Let’s get it up here, then. Quick and clean. Not slow and awful running down to the basement.”
Ilse nodded reluctantly as everything sank in. “This is because of us, isn’t it, Jeffrey?”
“Yes. The retaliation. The escalation. Now it comes, the Axis revenge. Because of what we did.”
Jeffrey silently walked to the very edge of the observation deck, peering through the grilled-in railing for a better view. Ilse followed, not wanting to be alone. The wind battered at them and chilled their faces numb. Jeffrey and Ilse waited to die. Sirens continued to moan like tortured souls.
“They’ll use a big one, won’t they?” Ilse said.
“Twenty kilotons, at least. Up here I doubt we’ll feel much.”
“Except guilt,” Ilse said.
“Yes,” Jeffrey said. “Except guilt. This is happening because of
us.
”
Ilse hesitated. “The train problems, that computer attack, this was all part of their plan?”
“Yes. A distraction, I think, and to strand more military people in New York, to add to the high-value body count….” The U-boat must have snuck through under that nor’easter, Jeffrey thought, coordinated timing with the info warfare attack.
“Do you—do you think they know we’re here? Is it all really
that
personal?”
Jeffrey sighed. “There’s no way we’ll ever know. It’s possible…. It doesn’t matter.”
On the horizon, in the Atlantic, Jeffrey could see flashes and streaks of light. He knew this would be the outer defenses, ships and naval aircraft, trying to knock down the inbound missiles. But nothing the Allies had could intercept Mach 8 ground-hugging cruise missiles.
Damn it, we should have been at sea on
Challenger.
We
might have made a difference, stopped this U-boat from launching, by working defense from under the storm. But
Challenger
’s laid up in dry dock, because of battle damage suffered on my watch.
Ilse saw red-orange bursts pepper the dark sky low in the distance, out over the Atlantic. The bursts were frighteningly hard and sudden, military high-explosive blast and fragmentation warheads. Their eerie silence, because the sound needed many seconds to reach her, only heightened her feeling of dread. She tried to see the incoming Axis cruise missiles, but no one knew better than Ilse how stealthy they were, how hard to stop.
A long series of harsh, sharp flashes ranged from right to left, low out over the ocean, then more bursts ran from left to right, seeking targets. There was pulsing glare beyond the horizon, in three different places, then endless salvoes of defensive missiles thrust into the sky from surface ships. Each missile—dozens and dozens of them—rode a brilliant moving point of hot yellow light.
As Ilse watched and waited for the inevitable, more streaks of flame took to the air, this time land-based defensive missiles launched from Sandy Hook, at the outer roadstead of New York Harbor. Another salvo of missiles rose from a ship at sea. Continuous boiling flame marked the launch point, strobing flashes and smoke trails marking each launch. The hard, sharp detonations on the horizon continued. Noise of the explosions began to reach Ilse, a deep rumbling counterpoint to the crying of the wind. The enemy Mach 8 missiles must be drawing close by now.
Heavy antiaircraft guns began to fire from Staten Island and the Meadowlands and Brooklyn, red searing gases belching from their muzzles, their reports unforgiving thuds that pounded Ilse’s gut. The shells exploded in midair, more hard and sudden bangs and flashes. More heavy-caliber guns opened fire. Their muzzle discharges stabbed and slashed at the sky. Each shot, then each shell’s detonation, lit
the scene like infernal flashbulbs. Ilse saw the whole sky fill with fluffy balls of smoke from the flak. Now she smelled the stinking, acrid fumes, brought by the wind. Her eardrums started to ache from the constant punishment.
Antiaircraft missiles launched from Newark and Kennedy airports, and these streaked into the sky. One malfunctioned immediately and crashed on Staten Island. It started a huge fire there, whipped by the unceasing wind. The fire was in an area of residential housing. It spread faster than a man could run.
Still Ilse didn’t see the Axis cruise missiles themselves. Smaller automatic weapons opened up, cannon and heavy machine guns ringing the inner harbor. Their muzzles flickered steadily. Their tracers all spewed skyward, red and green, weaving back and forth, adding to the wall of steel and gauntlet of blast that tried to save New York. But it was all for show, Ilse knew, an act of desperation, hoping against hope for a lucky hit.
Did the people working those guns and launchers know what was really in store? How did families cowering in cellars feel as shrapnel and spent bullets hit their homes, piercing shingled roofs or breaking curtained windows, chunks of red-hot metal raining from the sky?
Ilse watched in helplessness and despair. There was nothing she could do. She and Jeffrey had already done what they could to destroy these Axis hell-weapons. They’d succeeded but not well enough. Now the unstoppable enemy cruise missiles came right at them. There was so little time to feel regret or shame, to plead to God, to do anything but anguish over the death of a great city.
The missiles had to be very close now. They moved so terribly fast, and every weapon in sight, from foreground to distant horizon, was firing into the air. Defensive missiles locked onto each other by mistake and collided in double eruptions. Tracer shells of every caliber constantly crisscrossed the sky. Shell and missile bursts of every size and intensity lit up the harbor, reflecting off the water and off the
land all covered with snow, bursts so constant and bright that the Milky Way and stars were drowned out by the glare. The bangs and thumps and roars of the defensive fire were endless, painfully loud.
The inbound missiles’ projected path was bombarded so thoroughly, a man-made overcast formed—a continuous blanket of smoke and fumes from all the weapons operating. This choking overcast swirled and grew thicker and thicker. It pulsated from within like strobing lightning through a thunderhead, as gun after gun kept plastering the sky. Defensive missiles would launch, disappear in the smoke layer, then break out higher and turn and look for something to destroy. By now missile trails entwined and twisted everywhere, like satanic confetti.
One defensive missile hit a friendly fighter by mistake, and the fireball of jet and missile fuel plunged earthward in New Jersey, starting a conflagration at the point of impact with the ground. That area began exploding, sending up heaving sheets of liquid flame and flying sparks and thick black smoke—a tank farm or oil refinery. The fire on Staten Island was bigger now too.
Something tore through the air above Ilse’s head with a wave of heat and a soul-tearing sonic boom. She was
inside
the sonic boom, deafened by it, shattered by it. A Mach 8 missile had made it through, bound for midtown. In seconds she and Jeffrey would be killed. She’d never felt so alone, felt nothing now but self-revulsion and guilt. Her face twisted into an ugly mask of rage and bitter resentment, at this war, at what she’d done behind enemy lines, at all the things she wanted to do in her life but would never get to do. She didn’t want to die feeling nothing but cold anger and such loneliness. She turned to Jeffrey, and he turned to her, and his face showed deep regret.
There was a blinding flash right over the Statue of Liberty. Ilse waited for unimaginable heat to broil her skin, to melt her eyeballs, to set her parka afire. She waited for the invisible burst of neutrons and hard gamma rays to kill every
cell in her body. She waited for the blast wave to come and knock her charred corpse to dust.
Instead there was whistling and banging. Fireworks began to explode over the Statue of Liberty, and more back behind her over midtown. Decorative fireworks, pretty cloudbursts of blue and green and silver—like on the Fourth of July—as if to mock the Americans.
Things
began to blow on the wind, small strips. Ilse thought they were antiradar chaff.
Jeffrey angrily tried to catch one of the floating strips. He jumped and reached, and on the third attempt he grabbed one. It was a piece of paper, one of thousands scattering everywhere now. Jeffrey looked at the strip, then handed it to Ilse.
“They’ll never be able to hush this up. It’s the end of civilian morale.”
Ilse read the slip with difficulty. There were tears in her eyes and she shivered, from the cold and fear and now from
this.
She knew Jeffrey was right. In large, bold, black Germanic script were printed words in English, a psychological-warfare body blow:
“If this had a nuclear warhead been, you would now be dead. Think of it.”