Crush Depth cjf-3

by Joe Buff

  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.

  TWO

  The 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 sm
elled 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.”

  THREE

  Next morning, at the Pentagon

  Eventually, passenger railroad service was restored. Jeffrey and Ilse spent an uncomfortable night on the train as it crept toward Washington. They carefully folded Jeffrey’s dress uniform jacket, and the jacket of Ilse’s pantsuit, and put them neatly on the overhead rack. Then they used their coats as improvised blankets — the crowded train was chilly, to save energy, since it took power to heat the cars. Jeffrey slept fitfully; sometimes he heard Ilse moan in her sleep. He was tempted to squeeze her hand to try to comfort her, but held back; he remembered her comment in the Empire State Building cocktail lounge, that this was strictly a business trip.

  At the Pentagon, at least, Jeffrey and Ilse were able to freshen up and eat breakfast: bacon, actual bacon, and omelets made from real — not powdered — eggs. Now they sat in a waiting area, on a plush leather couch outside the big floor-to-ceiling double doors of a meeting room. The door was guarded by two enlisted marines. Jeffrey eyed the marines’ crisp appearance, their mirror-hard shoeshines and the razor-sharp creases of their fatigues. He surreptitiously tried to smooth the wrinkles on his uniform.

  The marines suddenly snapped to attention. Jeffrey instinctively jumped to his feet. Ilse stood up too.

  An air force four-star general entered the waiting area. He was built like a football linebacker, and the way he moved made Jeffrey think of a taxiing B-52. He strode into the meeting room without even noticing Jeffrey and Ilse. The man looked very angry.

  For a while that was all, and Jeffrey let his mind wander.

  “What’s the matter?” Ilse said. “What were you thinking about?”

  Jeffrey realized he’d been frowning. “My father… It’s not something I’m proud of.”

  “Why? What did he do?”

  “It’s nothing he did.”

  “I’ll bet it is,” Ilse teased. “What did he do? Peeping Tom? Mafia hit man? Ran a bordello in St. Louis?” After the terrors of last night in New York, her humor sounded lame.

  Jeffrey had told Ilse he was from a suburb of St. Louis. That much, he’d told her. “It’s not what he did. The last time we tried to talk, it was awful.”

  “You had an argument?”

  “No. It would be better if we had. It was more like hard, quiet, seething rage.”

  “You or your father?”

  “Him. Directed at me. And sarcasm. Biting, subtle, with surgical precision. Enough to make me bleed inside.”

  “My God. Why?”

  “When I was younger, growing up, I treated my family like crap.”

  “How so?”

  “I thought they were boring as all hell, and I did nothing to hide it.”

  “Come on, Jeffrey. All kids go through that.”

  “Not the way I did. I was a real asshole about it.”

  “What does your father do for a living?”

  “He’s a utility regulator. A career bureaucrat, basically.”

  “That does sound pretty dull. Though I suppose it’s become more important nowadays.”

  “Yeah. I kinda dumped my family and decided to join the navy. For college, I did Navy ROTC at Purdue. My dad, by then, didn’t try to stop me.
But he resented it a lot.”

  “How come? He ought to have been proud of you.”

  “It was too late for that, by then. When I was a kid, I loved to read about the navy. I was so into the stuff, you know, book reports and things like that at school even, the junior-high guidance counselor once had a talk with my parents.”

  “Oh.”

  “Of course, that just made me more obstinate. My bedroom was all full of models of ships. Battleships, carriers, sailing ships, landing craft, and every class of sub I could find in the toy stores.”

  “But that’s all good, isn’t it? It’s nice to know what you want to be when you grow up.”

  “Isn’t it, though? Except I turned my back on my family the whole time. I condescended, like I was better than them. Like I’d found my calling, and it was visionary, and it put me on a higher plane than these tedious middle-class drones. Me, a kid, eight, twelve, sixteen, whenever. Then there were arguments. Sometimes it got ugly.”

  “But I still don’t understand, what’s the problem now? Your father should be proud of what you’ve done. You made the right career choice, didn’t you? That’s bloody obvious. Can’t he let bygones alone?”

  “Sometimes you push someone so far you kill the love and the trust. Sometimes you gall them so much with silent insolence, there’s no going back afterward.”

  “What happened the last time you tried to speak to him?”

  “I called him on the phone, from the base, a couple of months ago. He practically blamed me personally for starting the war, for losing the war, because of that nuclear ambush off western Africa where the navy lost all those ships.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “No. He’s a smart, clearheaded man. Much more than I gave him credit for, years back. But he’s as disillusioned and scared as everybody else right now, with what’s been happening since the Double Putsch.” The coordinated takeovers in Johannesburg and Berlin. “I think it was his way of getting out his pain at me, with the thing he knew would hurt me most. He said it was like Pearl Harbor all over again, except at sea, and this time we did lose the carriers.”