by Joe Buff
His mind ran back to his skirmish with Voortrekker. The engagement so far was a seesaw battle of deadly guessing and counterguessing: Jeffrey used the sinkhole, but ter Horst figured it out. Ter Horst then hid behind the first sea mount, but Jeffrey knew it.
Jeffrey launched torpedoes around both sides of the sea mount, but Voortrekker, with her better rate of fire and her sophisticated noisemakers, escaped. Ter Horst nuked the last part of the SOSUS, then disappeared.
To himself, Jeffrey had to admit that so far ter Horst was winning.-The next time they met, there might not be a sea mount for Jeffrey to hide behind and play tricks. If Voortrekker reached the Ross Ice Shelf and Jeffrey had to go underneath it after him, with no possible means of support…
Jeffrey's mind wandered to his conversation with his father at the Pentagon. Dad, you were right. Being a war hero is something no one in their right mind should ever want to be by choice. The chances of failure are much too great. The responsibilities are almost crushing. The constant brushes with death, even if you do survive, leave permanent scars on the soul.
A messenger knocked on the door. Jeffrey, fully dressed, got up gratefully.
"Sir, Sonar heard another message buoy. They want us on the radio, smartly."
Jeffrey went to the control room. Even though Bell had the conn, only the captain had authority to expose the ship by raising a mast at periscope depth. Jeffrey took the conn and gave the orders.
CINCPACFLT was on the line again. He told Jeffrey and Commodore Wilson that the Axis bomb blast was already having serious negative diplomatic repercussions around the world. Rather than be angered by the destruction of Chatham Island, Asian neutrals were being self-protective realists. Pragmatically, they saw the big mushroom cloud, so soon after the New York raid and Diego Garcia, as exactly what it was meant to be: a sign aimed in their direction of the Berlin-Boer Axis's unstoppable momentum. Jeffrey was stunned to hear from the admiral that National Security Agency intercepts indicated Thailand — a supposed good friend of America — had decided to join the Axis if Voortrekker reached the Pacific and began to run amok.
Then came a much greater shock. Japan might have made the same eavesdropping intercept about Thai intentions, because the Japanese government formally announced to the world that they were a nuclear power. Tokyo owned homegrown tactical atomic weapons, and would use them in self-defense against any threat from any quarter. To prove it, they set off an underwater blast well east of Hokkaido.
Longstanding international nonproliferation treaties had been shattered, but Tokyo offered no apologies.
Jeffrey saw that the Pacific Rim was fast becoming destabilized. CINCPACFLT said that the president of the United States was meeting with the cabinet and the Joint Chiefs in an emergency session tight now. CINCPACFLT hinted that desperate measures were being discussed. When Jeffrey asked what he meant, the admiral darkly hinted it might be time to think the unthinkable, like back in the worst days of the Cold War — but he couldn't or wouldn't give specifics.
He was interrupted by his aide, then he came back on the line. The admiral said both Russia and China had harshly denounced the Japanese, and were putting their nuclear forces on a heightened state of alert.
Jeffrey knew now the situation was getting out of control. CINCPACFLT must be under enormous pressure from Washington to show a positive result, to sink Voortrekker once and for all as a way to get things calmed down. The admiral passed that pressure on to Jeffrey and Wilson. The admiral reminded them, coldly, that Challenger was expendable in a one-for-one exchange, if that's what it took to destroy ter Horst.
The admiral needed to put the conversation on hold to take another urgent call. It lasted for some time. During the pause, Jeffrey mulled over everything he and Wilson had just been told — it was a lot to absorb.
Jeffrey, a keen student of military history all his life, began to have a vision of the world on the brink, not just like in the Cold War, but more like in World War I: Both sides throwing more and more force into what was supposed to have been a short and simple fight. Both sides increasingly appalled by their own horrific losses, yet driven by noble emotions — or by blindness and stupidity — to fight even harder and pay an ever-mounting price in blood. Nations not involved at first being asked or pressured to choose sides. The fog of war, the onrush of snowballing events, the lack of adequate time to think through crucial decisions of awful weightiness — the need for far more wisdom than any man or woman might ever hope to have in real life — could lead to Armageddon.
Still the admiral was on his other call. While Jeffrey waited, he reminded himself that ongoing tactical atomic war at sea, without escalation to a thermonuclear exchange, had been a standard doctrine for the Soviet Union in the bad old days, and was also espoused in the early Cold War by the French. Many American experts, in the twentieth century, had argued for its practicability too. This was exactly the approach the Berlin-Boer Axis had been taking. But was everything coming unglued?
The admiral was back on the line; he said that other conversation was classified.
Almost at once, the aide interrupted the admiral again. The' admiral said an Orion from New Zealand heard something on a sonobuoy. The admiral wanted Jeffrey to speak directly to the aircrew. They were quickly patched into the call.
The Orion's pilot said they were near the edge of the Bounty Platform. Jeffrey knew this was a shallow plateau, south of the Bounty Trough, which plunged abruptly to thirteen. thousand feet. The edge of the Bounty Platform was ideal terrain in which Voortrekker could try to stay con, cealed if she was heading toward Antarctica.
The admiral ordered Jeffrey to proceed there immediately — two hours' flank-speed steaming time to the west-southwest. Commodore Wilson objected that it might be a false alarm, drawing Challenger out of position.
"What's that?" came over the radio from someone on the Orion.
"Missile launch!" another voice yelled. "Two, three, I see four!"
"Where? Where?" the pilot shouted; Jeffrey heard a rising whining roar, picked up by the aircraft's cockpit microphones, as its four engines strained to maximum power.
"From underwater! Closing fast in our five o'clock! Break left!"
"I can't see them! Where are they!"
"Break left! Left! Left! Harder! Left!"
"Chaff! Flares! Launch infrared flares!"
"Left! Left! Left! Left!"
"Jesus!"
There was the sound of an explosion. All contact with the Orion was lost.
Jeffrey felt like a corkscrew was twisting up his spine. "That has to be him. Polyphem antiaircraft missiles, launched in sets of four through a torpedo tube."
"Concur," CINCPACFLT said. "There's your datum, Captain. Get off the line and get over there and sink the SOB."
"Sir, I will, but I want to make a request."
"Be quick."
"We need more firepower, Admiral. I want support from other Orion aircraft. And I want the rules of engagement changed. If their sonobuoys detect two submarines in chase, they should assume the one in front is Voortrekker, and drop their weapons. Also, if I launch a radio buoy asking for torpedoes with such-and-such a firing solution, I want the Orions to drop."
The admiral hesitated only a moment. He said something to his aide. The aide responded.
There was a pause. The admiral came back. "Approved, Captain, though there'll be some delay to get more Orions on station." He gave Jeffrey a time reference, and a rendezvous point for the planes. "We'll take care of the aircraft ROEs from here… Now good luck to you. Dive and get the hell over there."
Jeffrey gave helm orders. Challenger drove to the bottom crevasses and resumed flank speed.
The only saving grace in this is that we're expendable, and Voortrekker isn't to the Axis, so I can take the greater risks.
Commodore Wilson was clearly unhappy about the tactical picture. Jeffrey knew he knew CINCPACFLT was a naval aviator by background, not a submariner. He had ad-visors who wore gold dolphi
ns, but even so he'd see things differently than Jeffrey and Wilson would.
"Why did ter Horst shoot down that airplane?" Wilson said.
"It held sonar contact on him:' Jeffrey said.
"Why was it even able to make sonar contact? At such depth, in such broken volcanic terrain, with Voortrekker so stealthy?"
"Luck?"
Wilson shook his head.
"You mean he wanted to be found?"
"He showed us where he is, for sure. He's saying, Come and get me. He knew that using those missiles, the Orion would have time to make a radio report. He could have simply blown it out of the sky in an instant, with a nuclear torpedo underneath, like he did to the Reagan's jets at Diego Garcia. But he didn't. He used slow missiles. Why?"
"But the blast from a torpedo would have given his location just as well, maybe better. Louder."
"No. We might have all thought the Orion set off its own weapon by mistake. Misread the ROEs, maybe, and dropped on a false contact, say a large biologic, then got knocked down in the blast. This way, ter Horst left no doubt whatsoever. He taunted us."
Jeffrey saw Wilson's point. "He's laying a trap again. He sits still, on ground of his own choosing. We go charging once more into the breach, and get it on the chin."
THIRTY-EIGHT
On the Osprey
Ilse woke up in dim red lighting, very stiff and sore. The solid whining drone of the aircraft's engines, the steady vibrations they made in the fuselage bulkhead and mesh seat and deck, were reassuring. In the back of Ilse's mind was still the fear of crashing into the sea.
She looked at her watch: a few more hours to go to reach Antarctica. Outside the nearest porthole was only darkness. It was the middle of the night, Chatham Island time. Clayton and Montgomery were sleeping, but Ilse felt wide awake. The crew chief also was awake. He and Ilse shared coffee from a thermos and ate cold rations right from the khaki plastic packages.
Which meal is this? Breakfast? Dinner? From her wide-ranging travels through latitude and longitude, from north to south and east to west, on airplanes and in submarines, she was horribly jet-lagged.
When they finished eating, the crew chief collected the trash.
Ilse was troubled by something. She whispered so as not to awaken Clayton and Montgomery. "Chief, I know it's not for me to say, but there's an international treaty that officially demilitarized all of Antarctica. The U.S. and a bunch of other countries signed it. Aren't we violating that?"
"Lieutenant, ma'am, the Axis has broken treaties left and right?'
"But that doesn't mean we should do it too."
"Of course not." The chief touched the side of his nose. "You're an oceanographer, right?
We're on an oceanographic research expedition. Nothing illegal in that."
"But you — I mean we — we're carrying weapons:' Pistols and M-16s.
The chief touched his nose again. "That's just for self-defense. You know, like if we're attacked by polar bears:'
"You know as well as I do there aren't polar bears at the south pole. And I hardly think we'd be mauled by a pack of mutant killer penguins."
The chief shrugged. "The minute that Axis sub you're after crosses the sixtieth parallel south, they violate the treaty outright. After that, all bets are off. Till then, you're just a scientist, and we're just driving the bus."
Ilse was very unhappy. She did not like the idea of personally defiling one of the last truly pristine places on the planet. To bring war down here, to the bottom of the world, was an appalling thought, even if she could tell herself that Voortrekker was the reason, the cause, the excuse.
The crew chief read her mind. "Cheer up, Lieutenant. Want to see something you don't see every day?"
"Sure. I guess. Okay."
She followed the crew chief into the cockpit. She looked out through the front windscreen. The sun was coming up, or so it seemed. The horizon was a beautiful violet-pink. The only problem was, sunrise was directly ahead of the plane, and the plane was heading south, and sunrise always came from the east. The eastern horizon was dark
"Antarctic summer," the pilot said. "Pardon the contradiction in terms." He smiled. "The land of the midnight sun. The more south we get now, the higher the sun will be in the sky. At McMurdo, this time of year, the sun never sets, you know, all twenty-four hours."
Ilse nodded. It was one thing to understand the theory, but quite another to be observing it firsthand, especially in the middle of a war.
"Want to see something else really cool?" the pilot said. "Again, pardon my pun. Look down at the water." "I can't see anything. It's still pitch-dark."
The pilot flicked a switch. One of the cockpit displays showed a video image looking down at the ocean. "Lowlight-level television. The camera's in the nose."
Ilse studied the picture. "Those are all icebergs?"
"It's the consolidated pack-ice barrier. Warmer weather, icebergs calve off the edge of the shelves. Sometimes the sea itself will freeze, then break up from wave action in a storm. That's where the flat stuff comes from."
Ilse saw an almost solid mass of pieces of ice, stretching ahead of the plane. Some were large and very flat, others were iceberg pinnacles the size of houses or small mountains, and some were innumerable jagged fragments pushed and piled together. As she watched, Ilse could see everything was in constant motion up and down from the sea swells. Some icebergs tumbled end over end, because their irregular shapes made them unstable. The view on the display shifted constantly; the plane was moving fast. Ilse peeked at the pilot's air-speed indicator. They were doing 275 knots. After a few minutes the ice fragments petered out, and the water was mostly open.
"What happened?"
"The inner edge of the barrier. The wind and currents tend to push the smaller icebergs north, away from the Antarctic coast. You get this giant ring around the whole continent.
That's the summer pack-ice barrier."
The pilot turned a knob. "Now it's passive infrared." He made the camera look down and backward.
Ilse could see the ice and the water were very cold, but the infrared imagery was sensitive enough that she could see slight differences between the temperature of the water and the ice. Parts of the larger icebergs were also slightly warmer, where they'd caught the sun during the previous daylight hours at this latitude.
"Pretty amazing," Ilse said.
"That's nothing. Wait till you get to McMurdo, and on from there."
On Challenger
After the conversation with CINCPACFLT, and then the discussion with Wilson, Jeffrey was faced once again with the quandary common in undersea warfare: how to get from A to B quietly but quickly. It was always made much harder when the enemy could be waiting for you somewhere along the route.
Wilson went to his stateroom — whether to work or rest he didn't say.
Bell and Jeffrey looked at each other. Sometimes it almost seemed to Jeffrey the two of them communicated telepathically.
"Sprint and drift, Captain?" Bell said.
Jeffrey nodded. "Sprint and drift. You have the conn. Send a messenger for me in ninety minutes… sooner, of course, if anything untoward happens."
"This is the XO," Bell announced. "I have the conn." "Aye aye," the watch-standers responded.
Jeffrey went to his stateroom. He didn't bother turning off the lights, and lay down on his rack, above the covers, fully dressed. He put an arm across his eyes to keep out the light.
He needed to rest, and to think. At times like this he gave thanks for his position as captain. On a nuclear submarine, only the captain slept in privacy.
Jeffrey felt Challenger pick up to flank speed. After a few minutes of this, the ship slowed to bare steerageway. Jeffrey knew Kathy's people would be searching all around for any sign of Voortrekker or other threats. Then the ship sped up again. Jeffrey pictured Bell giving commands and Meltzer reacting. He pictured everyone back in Engineering, responding to each new engine order. Jeffrey pictured the sonarmen, working their eq
uipment hard every time the ship stopped.
This was sprint and drift in action: a burst of speed to cover some distance, then a halt just long enough to listen for new sonar contacts without distracting self-noise — and if nothing dangerous was detected, then another burst of speed.
Jeffrey felt the ship slow down again for the next thorough sonar search. It would take some time to reach their destination, the edge of the Bounty Platform where the Orion had been shot down. Jeffrey wondered if anyone had survived; he hoped a combat search-and-rescue operation was under way.
Challenger sped up. Jeffrey realized he wouldn't get any sleep like this. He let his mind wander, to the bigger situation. Regrettably, as captain, there were things he couldn't discuss with others, even with his XO.
From what CINCPACFLT said or implied, Allied diplomacy was failing in many foreign capitals, and people might be losing their cool in Washington as well. Thanks to the Axis upping the ante of aggression to a new level, premeditated opportunism and selfish greed — or simple hysteria — were gripping Asia and much of the rest of the world.
Orders had come from the top: Sink Voortrekker at all costs. Ter Horst and his ship now were symbols, and a symbol — by working in the realm of human ideas — could have more cmcial influence than any person or weapon system.
It seemed sadly ironic to Jeffrey that, though it was the Berlin-Boer Axis that had obliterated innocent Chatham Island, many neutrals saw this not as something abhorrent but as a sign of Axis strength.
Jeffrey sighed. Ironic, yes, he told himself, but it was all too consistent with long-term history, armed and economic conflict between nations. The myth that big wars were over forever had been exactly that: a dangerous myth. Promises between embassies sometimes melted away under stress. International coalitions came and went like the tides, or shifted treacherously like sandbars in a hurricane. A country might act like your friend in one confrontation or crisis, and then become an obstruction, or your mortal enemy, in the next.
At last the messenger knocked. Jeffrey walked to the control room. He studied the navigation plot and the sonar data, then took the conn.