Crush Depth cjf-3

by Joe Buff

  Jeffrey's response was automatic, instinctive. "Chief of the Watch, emergency blow!

  Helm, plane up!" Jeffrey's own voice sounded distant, disembodied, from the painful ringing in his head. COB pulled the special emergency-blow handles. Meltzer yanked back hard on his control wheel.

  Bell, as executive officer, ran aft to take charge at the flooding. Through the phone talker, Bell said they couldn't even get close until the ship reached much shallower depth.

  The sea was jetting in with such tremendous force that three crewmen had been dismembered. The spray was taking the paint right off the bulkheads; the injured being treated on nearby dining tables were injured further by flying objects thrown by the incoming sea.

  The rate of influx in tons per minute was heavy. COB did everything else he could to lighten the ship, pumping all variable ballast. At this depth the pumps sounded overstressed, asthmatic. High-pressure air continued to roar into the forward and aft main ballast tanks.

  Challenger seemed to stagger and hesitate. She wasn't coming up, even with the propulsion plant still running at flank speed and Meltzer using the sternplanes to try to drive the ship up hard.

  Jeffrey's head began to clear more. Now he heard the separate roar of the inrushing sea, even from this far forward in the control room. The air became pungent and cold. Jeffrey's eyes stung and his mouth tasted salt. Freezing seawater mist, as if from a giant atomizer, was drifting from the flooding site.

  That mist came straight from a nuclear battlefield. "COB, stop the fans! Everyone, emergency air-breather masks!"

  Jeffrey donned his mask and watched a depth gauge. He eyed the readings on COB's control panels. The constant fulminating noises from outside, coming right through the hull even with the sonar speakers off, made it difficult to concentrate. Jeffrey realized things were very bad. Challenger was getting heavier, and wasn't coming up. The breather mask badly hurt his injured scalp. Blood dripped down Jeffrey's face and puddled by his jaw inside the mask. Another aftershock hit, punishing the ship, and it tore at Jeffrey's stitches enough to make him grit his jaw. But he had much bigger problems.

  "COB, forget the air. Use hydrazine!" The compressed air blowing into the main ballast tanks, at this great depth and outside pressure, simply wasn't working fast enough.

  Meltzer's attempt to drive for the surface wasn't helping — everything he tried on the bowplanes and stemplanes just made the bow tilt steeply up, turning the deck into a hillside, making it that much harder for the damage-control parties to work.

  It was time for measures Jeffrey had hoped he'd never need. The hydrazine charges were built into the forward and aft main ballast tanks. Hydrazine was rocket fuel.

  The charges ignited with the noise of a moon shot taking off. The buildup of searing high-pressure fumes forced water out through the bottom of the tanks. Challenger lost weight at last, and started to rise. Bell said it was touch and go, whether they'd reach shallow depth before too much water came in and pulled the ship back down.

  Jeffrey stared at the depth gauge, and he prayed. From all around outside the ship, shock waves and fireballs continued to rumble and throb. They mercilessly pummeled Challenger like the raging legions of Satan. Challenger, almost helpless now as a warship, struggled for the surface, for her life. Up there, Jeffrey knew, waited many bomb-tossed tsunamis and glowering mushroom clouds, a different sort of hell.

  Simultaneously, on Voortrekker

  Atomic warheads exploded everywhere. The endless pounding and nerve-shattering noise made it impossible for Van Gelder to think. Console screens went blank as system after system crashed.

  "Update the tactical plot," ter Horst ordered. "I need to know what's happening out there!"

  The first thing to come back was the gravimeter, immune as it was to sonar conditions.

  Van Gelder could see the vertical wall of the Bounty Platform, very close and looming high above. Atomic torpedoes were going off against the wall. Parts of the wall disappeared as they gave way, since the gravimeter couldn't track moving objects.

  "Avalanches!" Van Gelder shouted.

  "I can't hear you!" ter Horst yelled above the constant noise of warhead detonations and their echoes off the surface and the bottom and the wall.

  Van Gelder tugged at his captain's sleeve and pointed at the gravimeter screen.

  "Helm, left thirty rudder, smartly!"

  The helmsman must have lost his hearing too. Van Gelder ran and grabbed the control wheel and pointed at the new course on the gyrocompass.

  The helmsman nodded, and took back the wheel. Tumbling boulders smashed against the ship. Van Gelder knew that if the sternplanes or rudder or pump-jet were hit, Voortrekker would become a helpless sitting duck.

  More boulders impacted, but the helm continued to respond. An underwater tsunami surge caught Voortrekker from starboard. It shoved her away from the escarpment wall, not a moment too soon. Van Gelder heard the crashing roar as tons of rubble rained down.

  A Mark 54 torpedo dashed through the top of a nearby bubble cloud. It began to ping, and homed from way above on Voortrekker's hull.

  "Suppress the echoes!" ter Horst shouted.

  "Unable to comply," the sonar chief yelled back. "It's in our baffles!" The inbound weapon was back bebind the stem, in the ship's blind spot for sonar out-of-phase cloaking emissions.

  Ter Horst ordered a defensive countershot.

  Another Mark 54 charged through another bubble cloud, ahead of Voortrekker. Would those Allied aviators get their revenge?

  "We're caught in the middle:' Van Gelder yelled. "Intercept them," ter Horst snapped.

  Van Gelder fired two Sea Lions. From the force of the continuing avalanche, and the energy of tortured water outside, and Voortrekker's lurching maneuvers as more shock waves hit, the fiber-optic wires to the Sea Lions broke.

  Both Sea Lions detonated awfully close, on their preprogrammed backup timers.

  Voortrekker was smashed from bow and stem.

  Damage reports piled in.

  "Port- and starboard-side torpedo autoloaders out of action!" Van Gelder said. "

  Starboard-side loading chure vital welds have cracked. All starboard-side torpedo tubes not usable!"

  Ter Horst cursed. Van Gelder realized the aviators had achieved something after all: the odds were evened up with Challenger, four torpedo tubes to four.

  Another torpedo came at Voortrekker from the stem. It was a Mark 88, from Challenger; running very deep.

  Voortrekker's four functioning torpedo tubes were empty. With the autoloader equipment broken, it would take minutes to load one tube by hand. Noisemakers were no good this deep — they'd be strangled by the outside pressure. A decoy would be just as slow to load as a torpedo, and a decoy might not work. Ter Horst ordered Van Gelder to get a tube reloaded, any way he could. Van Gelder passed urgent orders to the torpedo room, and the men began to work with block and tackle.

  "Where's Challenger?" ter Horst demanded.

  "All contact lost," the sonar chief said.

  "Even pinging would be useless:' Van Gelder yelled. "Acoustic sea state is off the scale!"

  Outside, the ocean all around them rumbled like a hundred live volcanoes.

  "Helm, steer one eight zero!" South again. "Phone Talker, tell Reactor Control to push it to one hundred twenty percent!"

  Voortrekker had no choice but to fry to outrun the incoming weapon. The Mark 88 was almost twenty knots faster than Voortrekker. Van Gelder watched his screens as Voortrekker ran toward the Antarctic at fifty-three knots herself. He wasn't sure if the enemy weapon would run out of fuel before it reached its warhead's lethal range. He wasn't sure if his men could get one tube reloaded for a countershot before it was too late. He wasn't sure where Challenger was, or what condition Jeffrey Fuller's ship was in.

  Van Gelder wasn't sure if ter Horst could avoid more enemy fire before he reached his next objective, the relative sanctuary of the immensely rhick Ross Ice Shelf.

  Van Gelder prayed
. The one thing of which he felt deeply sure was that there was an afterlife, and in the afterlife he would be judged.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Two hours later, on the Osprey

  Ilse watched through a porthole as the tilt-rotor Osprey came in for a landing at the McMurdo base in Antarctica. The base consisted of a runway made of ice and dozens of low, functional, military-looking buildings, all clustered into a natural bowl leading to rugged hills. McMurdo was on a peninsula at the south end of Ross Island, which was frozen into the western edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. Unlike the smaller ice shelf in the Antarctic's Weddell Sea, which was on the other side of the continent and also much farther north, and which broke up periodically — some said due to global warming — the Ross Ice Shelf was solid as a rock. On rare occasions the shelf did calve huge icebergs off its outer edge, but — ironically — in this part of Antarctica recent temperatures were actually trending colder.

  The Osprey quickly refueled, then took off again, heading east along the outer edge of the ice shelf. Now, in the strange perpetual late-summer twilight here at latitude seventy-seven south, by looking backward llse could see Mount Erebus, more than twelve thousand feet high. Mount Erebus loomed in the very cenrer of Ross Island. Erebus was an active volcano, with a lake of molten lava in the crater at its peak; smoke drifted from the crater. The north face of the mountain glowed a lovely scarlet, lit by the low sun. The south face hid in shadow.

  To northward, as the Osprey followed the ice shelf, stretched the Ross Sea, leading to the endless open water of the Great Southern Ocean that circled Antarctica. Ilse watched as the Ross Sea was tossed by wind that came from the south, from the frigid high ground at the geographic south pole itself, a thousand miles inland. She noticed occasional icebergs in the water, and large flat floes. She saw brash ice — broken fragments — at the base of the edge of the shelf, where the freezing water rose and fell with the tides.

  The edge of the shelf was a rugged cliff two hundred feet high in most places. The cliff plunged straight into the sea, and Ilse knew the ice of the shelf stretched hundreds of feet farther down — unlike the north pole ice cap, which averaged only twenty feet thick in wintertime, the Ross Ice Shelf varied in thickness from six hundred to two thousand feet or more, year round. The body of the shelf — larger than Texas, California, and New York combined-was formed by the merging of giant ageless glaciers, flowing down constantly from the massive mountains hundreds of miles farther south. The shelf was a hybrid, because it also grew by the freezing of seawater on its underside, and by the steady compacting of snow by wind and gravity on its upper surface. It was so-called fast ice, because it was anchored fast to the shore on all but its outer, north-facing, edge. Yet it floated, just like an iceberg, supported by buoyancy. It took up the entire inner part of the huge Ross Sea.

  The ice and snow of the top of the shelf were stark and beautiful. There were strange optical effects, from the coldness of the air and from its dryness away from rhe sea. By a peculiar mirage, which Ilse knew was common here, she could see the tops of the first mountain range which rose far inland. The mountaintops looked hard and black, and much too close.

  The ice shelf glistened in breathtaking shades of aquamarine, turquoise, and teal. Some parts were blindingly white, others translucent green. Ilse sometimes saw fissures and crevices, or small slush lakes atop the ice where the sun warmed snow on its surface. In some places the ceaseless wind had polished the surface smooth; in others the ice was grooved and channeled. But mostly the top of the shelf was featureless. It simply went on, mile after mile, massive, solid, dehumanizing in its size and its loneliness, and ending always in that sharp cliff face that just kept stretching farther and farther east.

  The sea beyond the ice shelf wasn't so lonely. Often Ilse saw seals and penguins. They swam between the bergs and floes to feed on teeming schools of fish, or climbed up on the ice to rest. Overhead, Antarctic birds — petrels of different types, and albatrosses — flew and swooped. In the open Water between the multishaped fragments of ice, Ilse saw the huge, fast forms of orcas — killer whales, glossy black with white markings. The killer whales hunted in organized groups, using strategy, and baby seals and penguins were their prey. This was the natural order, since long before the human species even knew Antarctica existed.

  Now mankind had come to make war, Ilse reflected, defiling this wild and virginal landscape. Ilse and Clayton and Montgomery were hunters too, like the orcas. A machine of war, Voortrekker, and the men inside, were Ilse's prey.

  "We're here," the crew chief yelled above the engine noise. They were somewhere near the middle of the shelf edge, almost an hour's flight from McMurdo. Ilse heard the now-familiar change in pitch as the nacelles rotated to point straight up, and the Osprey shifted to vertical landing mode. The aircraft put down gently in a cloud of prop-blown snow. The cliff face, and the sea below it, were just a few hundred yards away.

  Ilse was wearing extreme-cold-weather clothing that they'd given her at McMurdo. She was glad, because the heating in the passenger compartment was weak, and sitting still she got chilled. She and Clayton and Montgomery unbuckled their flight harnesses. The crew chief opened the door. A blast of very dry, very cold air blew in.

  Ilse stepped outside, into a different world. The sky was surprisingly clear. At first she couldn't distinguish anything. Then her eyes adjusted to the lighting, and to the environment. She saw Sno-Cats, half concealed behind small manmade ice hillocks. The SnoCats — these were older models with the engine compartment in front — had four articulated half-track treads instead of wheels, and big, heated passenger compartments.

  Sno-Cats were the transport vehicle of choice here on the White Continent. Ilse noticed that these ones had their high-visibility orange paint jobs hidden under a hasty coat of whitewash, for camouflage. Peering around, she noticed troops, garbed all in white.

  Even their rifles were completely white. Then she saw that some of the soldiers had huskies with them, on leads. Even the K-9 dogs were white.

  A soldier came out of a hole in the ground. No, a hole in the ice — there was no ground in the normal sense for hundreds of miles in any direction. He smiled and introduced himself. He was a tough, wiry gunnery sergeant in the U.S. Marines. Marine Recon to be specific, an elite within an elite. He obviously expected Ilse. She realized the marine encampment had been set up here to support her.

  Ilse's conscience still bothered her. "Isn't all this illegal?"

  "Weapons are allowed by treaty for law-enforcement purposes, ma'am. Technically, I'm here as a United States marshal. You three," he said to Ilse and Clayton and Montgomery, "raise your right hands, and say, 'I swear.' " They did. "Congratulations.

  You're deputy U.S. marshals."

  Ilse wasn't even an American citizen, but she didn't say anything.

  A corporal came over and handed each of them white M-16s and ammo magazines. "You know how to operate this?" the corporal asked Ilse. She nodded impatiently.

  "It's lubricated by powdered graphite," the corporal said, "so the mechanism won't freeze?"

  "Thanks." For so-called summer, it is horribly cold.

  "Okay," the gunnery sergeant yelled above the wind and the noise of the Osprey. "It's time you people get to work"

  Clayton and Montgomery helped Ilse carry her underwater listening gear into the sergeant's hole in the ice. She saw that it was the entrance to an ice shelter, an underground bunker cut using axes and chain saws. There was a heater, electric lighting, some tables and chairs, piles of rations and sleeping bags, and a chemical toilet behind a canvas screen.

  All the comforts of home.

  Electrical cables were quickly strung from the Osprey, anchored snugly to stakes driven into the ice, and then their free ends with the plugs and jacks were fed into the bunker.

  The Osprey took off, heading out to sea in helicopter mode, stringing a hydrophone line into the water, off of the reels in its cargo bay and through the open rear ramp. As Ilse watched, t
he Osprey flew some miles due north, then turned northwest and eventually disappeared beyond the horizon. Another Osprey arrived from McMurdo. It also deposited cable ends for Ilse's gear. It took off and flew out to sea, also trailing a hydrophone line. This one turned northeast.

  Ilse reaIlzed the two Ospreys had laid a listening grid in the water-which was about two thousand feet deep — in the shape of a giant Y. Ilse went back into the ice bunker and connected all the cable ends to her portable console, the one supplied by the Stennis to its Osprey that had brought her here. She hooked up the console to the fuel cells the marines had brought from McMurdo as a low-observable power supply.

  It was warm enough in the shelter that Ilse could lower her hood and open the front of her parka. In short order her improvised listening post — like a nonmoving double sonar towed array — was in business. With the cables strung out into deeper water in their Y arrangement, she should get good targeting data on Voortrekker if ter Horst came anywhere near the middle part of the shelf.

  Clayton and Montgomery operated portable satellite communications gear. They quickly established a Ilnk to the radio grid which included the SOSUS center in Sydney and the air-wing commander on Stennis, plus McMurdo, McMurdo's supporting air base at Christchurch, New Zealand, and CINCPACFLT himself in distant Pearl Harbor.

  The gunnery sergeant came down the steps cut in the ice, and he pushed past the white canvas windscreen. "All set, ma' am?"

  "Yes," Ilse replied. "What are all your troops here for?" "The Germans. Their base isn't far from McMurdo. They have Sno-Cats too, and we know they're on the move."

  "You mean you think they'd attack us? Here?"

  FORTY

  One day later, on Challenger

  Once more, in his stateroom on Wilson's orders, Jeffrey tried to get some rest. This time he'd undressed for proper sleep, but sleep mostly eluded him. His bunk shook steadily as Challenger drove southward, running deep at flank speed. The race against Voortrekker the final race to the Ross Ice Shelf, was on.