Crush Depth cjf-3

by Joe Buff

  "They're making a fence," ter Horst said. "They're pushing us this way?' He touched his finger to the chart, tracing the line of sea mounts. "They're herding us straight toward Challenger on purpose. So, which sea mount is Fuller.hiding behind?"

  "Not the top one, Captain," Van Gelder said. "It's too obvious, and we could easily outflank him to the south and still have time to cut northeast and hit the Stennis… I think he's behind the second one. And he'll have the sonar noise advantage, since he can just sit there while we have to move:'

  Ter Horst stared at the chart for what seemed a very long time. "I want to tell you a story about a spider, Gunther."

  "A spider?"

  "There's a type of spider that lives in the deserts of southwest America. It excavares a crater in the sand, then digs itself into the bottom of the crater. When an insect comes by, the beetle or whatever stumbles into the crater. It rolls to the bottom, and the spider springs forth and bites with its fangs?'

  Ter Horst moved his index finger, and caressed the sinkhole between the two sea mounts.

  "No. We won't go past either sea mount. We'll do something different, and then sit still and make this Jeffrey Fuller come to us."

  THIRTY-THREE

  On Chatham Island

  Acrid smoke from burning brush and burning cars blew across the runway. The air was thick with it, and the smoke went up Ilse's nose. Drowned sheep drifted in the lagoon. She heard the noise of countless others bleating wildly in the distance. Between her thighs, her winded, sweaty horse was nervous and skittish. Everything heightened the feeling of crisis and reminded Ilse that time was running short.

  It seemed to her that every islander stood now to stare at the northeast horizon. The Harriers were good for moral support, and they got here first because they were fast, but they were single-seat fighters — useless for rescuing people. Then another dot appeared in the sky, growing larger. The crowd murmured with expectation.

  When the plane got close there was a collective sigh of letdown. It was another large two-propeller job, not something that could land at the airstrip. Ilse turned her horse, to help the SEALS and the Harrier pilots organize the evacuees into small groups. The aircraft's engine noise changed, and Ilse looked back. As she watched, its engine nacelles rotated from horizontal to vertical. The aircraft slowed and then began to float, impossibly motionless in the air. It set down just like a helicopter, in a cloud of dust and engine fumes of its own. Ilse realized the plane was a Marine Corps tilt-rotor Osprey. She had heard of them but never seen one.

  The islanders surged onto the runway and mobbed the Osprey. But the pilot shut down the engines. No one even opened a door. Ilse spotted Chief Montgomery and waved. She used her horse to push a way to the head of the crowd, to the cockpit. Montgomery followed right bebind, walking in her horse's wake.

  "Why are you just sitting here?' someone in the crowd yelled at the pilor. The pilot spoke on his radio, and said something to the copilot sitting next to him, but he ignored the civilians.

  Someone else came up to the plane. Ilse recognized one of the ringleaders of the lynching of the Kampfschwimmer. "Get us out of here! Look at the sun, it's late!"

  Others in the crowd agreed. "This thing could hold two dozen people easy," someone shouted. Belligerent young men, whom Ilse suspected were drunk, began to bang on the aircraft's doors and on the fuselage.

  "Hey. Hey," Montgomery said. "We all agreed, the injured and women and children first."

  "Fuck that," a lynching ringleader snapped. He pointed his shotgun at Montgomery.

  In a blur Montgomery disarmed the man, then waved the shotgun's butt in his face. "I've had about enough of you."

  Constable Henga forced his way closer. "You can still be arrested for murder. I should cuff you right now for disturbing the peace!' The troublemaker backed down and slunk over to his cronies. Ilse could tell they were seething.

  Montgomery turned to the pilot. He held out his ID. "Why aren't you taking people off?"

  The pilot shrugged. "Orders, Chief. I was told to just wait:' At that the crowd became agitated again., People muttered, expressing disgust or veiled threats.

  "It's rhe military mind," Montgomery said in his loudest stage voice. "Sometimes I don't understand it myself." His joke was just enough to stave off something ugly.

  Then more aircraft appeared, three more Ospreys. They landed. The island's only ambulance drove up to one, and the volunteet paramedics transferred wounded from the battle. Next came two stretchers with old people who'd had heart attacks from stress.

  The other Ospreys started loading passengers. But the crew chiefs wouldn't take any luggage or pets.

  Ilse saw several children hugging their dogs or cats. The children were crying. They refused to leave the pets bebind; one girl ran away with her kitten and hid behind a tree.

  The kids and their mothers were meant to be rescued first, and this latest mess was holding up the entire operation. One crew chief seemed prepared to grab the kids and club the dogs and cats and just get the people the hell off the island.

  Ilse rode up to the crew chief. "The pets don't weigh much. Can't you make life simple, and just take them and go?"

  He looked up at Ilse. "Ma'am, we have barely enough fuel to get back to the carrier as it is, if she keeps coming right at us as fast as she can. It's touch and go if we'll make it even then. If the wind shifts against us.. " He shrugged. "We could all end up in the drink:'

  Ilse understood. The whole rescue mission was one desperate stretch. A sixty-pound dog weighed as much as or more than a youngish child. But try to explain this to the child.

  "Look, okay?" Ilse said. "What if we put all the pers in that hangar shed there? If there's mom later, could you take them?'

  "It's not up to me?'

  Ilse whispered, "Humor me for the kids."

  The crew chief turned to the mothers. He told them what to do. A lady from the paramedics used small injections of sedative to keep the animals quiet.

  The first group of refugees took to the air and headed northeast, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what they could cram in their pockets.

  Another Osprey arrived, with a heavy load in a cargo sling suspended under its belly. It put the load on the ground beside the edge of the runway and hovered. The Harrier pilots ran up and undid the sling. The Osprey set down and began loading passengers.

  That's a hundred people off so far. There are still nine hundred to go.

  The sun was low in the sky now. Ilse was getting very worried. A Harrier pilot walked by her.

  "What's in that big container?" she asked.

  "A fuel bladder. Ten thousand pounds of helicopter fuel."

  Ilse saw them now, a string of a dozen helos coming toward the airstrip. The air thudded steadily from the combined effects of their powerful rotors. Islanders cheered.

  "Sea Stallions," the Harrier pilot said. "Each can carry fifty or sixty adults…. They're flying on the vapor in their tanks right now!'

  Another man in a flight suit came up to Ilse. "Are you Lieutenant Reebeck?"

  "Yes?" She recognized the pilot from the first Osprey.

  "I got more orders. I need you and Chief Montgomery, and a Lieutenant Clayton, pronto."

  "We're going to the carrier? But I want to be last. Take other people instead:'

  "No, ma'am. Not the carrier. My orders are to take you three to the south end of the island, and land near the bomb!"

  Ilse tied her horse to a tree and patted it farewell. She knew the horse would be killed when the bomb exploded, and would suffer horribly at this distance from ground zero.

  Fighting back rears, she asked Consrable Henga to shoor it later instead. He promised.

  Ilse made her good-byes with Henga. She hardly knew the man, yet he'd swiftly become a steady, reliable presence who gave her comfort amid rhe confusion and depression all around. Henga shook Ilse's hand firmly and turned back to helping supervise the airlift.

  He trotted to the
runway, shouting something. Just like that, Henga had come into her life and left again. Ilse tried to get used ro it, the intense interactions and sudden ripping apart that impacted human relationships during war. But it was very hard to get used to.

  Ilse climbed into the Osprey through a passenger door in the side. The interior was austere; wires and cables and pipes showed everywhere. Much of the space was taken by extra internal fuel tanks, and by cable reels and equipment cases held down by straps and netting. Ilse and Clayton sat on one side at the front of the cargo compartment, with Montgomery on the other, facing them. The Osprey's crew chief sat next to Montgomery.

  Like the others, Ilse used an uncomfortable fold-down mesh seat. Everyone fastened their flight harnesses.

  The pilot and copilot started up one engine and then the other. Ilse craned her neck to look out a porthole in the door, to watch. The propeller blades became a blur, and the aircraft vibrated heavily. The engine noise deepened in pitch and grew louder. The aircraft rose off the ground, going straight up, fast. Ilse had a panoramic view of the airstrip and the lagoon.

  The engine nacelles rotated to horizontal. The ride to the SOSUS bunker on the south edge of the island was very quick. Ilse saw the road she'd taken, the town of Waitangi itself from high up, the smoke and flame of burning brush, and sheep limping or wandering aimlessly. Then she saw the burned-out hulks of the Saracen and the Land Rover.

  The pilot set down in an open spot at a safe distance from the outcropping with the bunker; this area was upwind of the wildfires. The pilot shut down the engines. The crew chief took an equipment case and gave it to Shajo Clayton. He handed another to Ilse.

  Ilse saw hers was a replacement for her console that had been destroyed when the rocket hit her tent at the start of the battle.

  Ilse glanced into the bunker. This late in the day the sun shone right through the open door. The bomb sat there in its gleaming stainless-steel casing, waiting patiently to explode. The timer said there were barely two hours left. It gave Ilse the creeps to be so close to the thing.

  Clayton opened his case and set up a portable gamma-ray spectrometer sent by the carrier's radiological-control officer. Soon Clayton confirmed that the atom bomb was real and the vial held real tritium. Clayton began to take other measurements, for intelligence purposes.

  Montgomery and Ilse gingerly worked around Clayton and the bomb, splicing the ends of cables severed in the battle. The Kampfschwimmer hadn't tampered with the undersea microphone line, but the feeder near the outcropping was cut in several places.

  Montgomery and Ilse repaired this damage next.

  Ilse ran wires from the SOSUS equipment to the nearby Osprey, and set up her portable console inside. The satellite dish by the outcropping was much too damaged to use, but she was able to estabIlsh radio contact with the SOSUS center in Sydney using the Osprey's communications gear. She received an updated report. She ran the programs on her console to optimize the microphone line for conditions in the water, and passed the report to the first of the Australian submarines. Eventually an acknowledgment returned to her, acoustically, passed back along the line of diesel subs, saying Challenger had received the report. There was no sign of Voortrekker anywhere.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  On Voortrekker

  Van Gelder leaned over the sonar chief's shoulder. The feeling in the control room was tense. This maneuver was so chancy, Van Gelder could tell through subtle body language that even Jan ter Horst was unhappy needing to try it. But Challenger's unexpected presence — she was supposed to be in dry dock a hemisphere away-was a serious complication.

  Ter Horst had had the sonar chief put the outside sounds on the speakers, amplified for clarity. Every time a Collins boat pinged from the north, all present in the control room heard it. To Van Gelder, the sound of each ping, intrusive, searching, and hostile, struck him physically, like the sting of a bee. It was only through supreme effort that he masked the outward signs of his stress. The sonar chief said the Australian boats were probably too far off to pick up Voortrekker but that was based only on models and estimates, a fact which gave Van Gelder no comfort.

  Voortrekker continued to run very shallow and slow, above the sonar layer, to hide from the enemy SOSUS. Her depth was barely thirty meters — one hundred feet. The SOSUS line now lay in the middle distance to the south. So close to the surface, even with her ceramic-composite hull,

  Voortrekker was still awfully vulnerable to magnetic-anomaly detectors on Allied aircraft because of all the steel and iron inside her. More Vikings had arrived from the nis. Based on their random but thorough search patterns, sooner or later one would come too close and spot Voortrekker. This put ter Horst under severe rime pressure, at a point when he could least afford to rush.

  From hard experience, Van Gelder knew there were different levels or stages of fear during undersea combat. At the momenr, there was that steady, wearing emotional pressure of needing to stay undetected while on the move with the enemy near — when time seemed to truly stand still, and the noise of one's own breathing felt deafeningly loud. In contrast, there was the desperate, frenzied, acrion-filled panic when enemy nuclear torpedoes tore in at the ship-when the crew responded through rote training and gut instinct and sheer grit. The worst mental torture of all, for a submariner, was knowing that the situation could change from one to the other with savage, unforgiving suddenness.

  Convinced that the sonar chief knew his job, Van Gelder patted his shoulder for encouragement, then returned to the command console. He scanned the tactical plot: combined with the SOSUS hydrophones, the Vikings and the Collins boats had Voortrekker sandwiched; Van Gelder was sure that this was exactly the Allied high command's intent. Keeping Voortrekker poised above the layer, far enough away from both the SOSUS and the enemy diesels, was like trying to balance a nine-thousand-ton nuclear sub on the head of a pin. Ter Horst was exactly the sort of captain who would try.

  Van Gelder knew his crewmen and junior officers well. He knew each man's strengths and weaknesses. He knew the different way that each reacted to such stress, and they all showed it now. Some were sweating more copiously as every Australian ping seemed louder than the last in the oppressive silence of the control room. Others felt cold, especially in their limbs, and had to keep rubbing their hands to stay warm as Voortrekker made her slow progress. Others developed facial twitches, or cricks in their necks, as they sat there dreading the first word of enemy weapons in the water. Some suffered that impulse to turn into nonstop talkers, but they had to keep their mouths shut, and instead they'd shift uncomfortably in their seats and fidget.

  Van Gelder was yet a different type. In moments of supreme danger, he felt tight from head to toe, so puckered up inside he would be constipated for days. He also felt a silvery tingling in his stomach and chest. The tingling, he always thought, was adrenaline.

  Sometimes Van Gelder believed this sensation was habit forming: it wasn't entirely unpleasant, because he felt eagerness as well as dread. Eagerness to carry on with his duties, in spite of the knowledge of closeness of death. Eagerness to prosecute the battle, to lead his men, to survive by doing smart, aggressive things… and above all eagerness to win.

  This was one trait Van Gelder felt he shared with Jan ter Horst, however different the two might be in other ways. In a revenge match with USS Challenger; well away from populated land, Van Gelder had no moral qualms. To sink the enemy vessel would bring the war to a more rapid close.

  When ter Horst judged he was far enough north of the final SOSUS hydrophone line, he ordered Voortrekker back to the bottom. But first, for even greater stealth, he told the helmsman to turn due south — to show both the SOSUS and the diesel subs the narrowest possible profiles — and then come to all stop. Voortrekker dived straight down while staying level — on an even keel — by taking in seawater ballast to make her heavy. This tricky task fell to the ship's chief of the watch, and Van Gelder maintained a careful eye.

  Voortrekker dropped throug
h the sonar layer, losing her cloak against the distant but still-potent SOSUS, and the tension in the control room became an almost solid entity.

  The Collins boats continued to ping, rhrearening in Van Gelder's ears Ilke swarming, hungry mosquitoes.

  The suspense rose even more, because as Voortrekker descended further, the weight of the water above her squeezed her hull. At depth, from this immense compression coming from all around, the hull would groan or pop — a dead giveaway of her presence, if someone were close enough to hear.

  The sonarmen were kept very busy. The fire-control technicians hunched over their consoles, concentrating for their lives. Everyone waited on pins and needles for the first hull pop, and for whatever enemy response it might bring. The crew stayed absolutely still. The twitchers let their faces twitch. The neck-crampers suffered in motionless silence. The sweaters stopped dabbing. their sweat.

  Down the ship went, down. The control room seemed quieter than quiet. No one even dared to clear their throat. Van Gelder saw one new crewman, very young and scared, let himself drool rather than risk making noise by swallowing the saliva — his Adam's apple must be spasmed like a knot. Van Gelder understood, and wouldn't criticize the youth later. The air in and out of Van Gelder's own nostrils seemed louder than a hurricane.

  The hull popped several times before Voortrekker reached the sea floor, in water three kilometers deep. Each pop, over the sonar speakers, made several crewmen jump in their seats. Van Gelder would have jumped too, had not his role as first officer demanded he repress his visible human side.

  At last Voortrekker reached the bottom. Van Gelder watched, waited, Ilstened, then reported to ter Horst: no reaction by the enemy. But Van Gelder felt compelled to warn that it was impossible to be sure Voortrekker truly remained unheard.