by Joe Buff
How to explain to the man that some people needed to volunteer, that preparedness for a big war couldn’t wait for the shooting to start? How to convey that there was just no substitute for experience at sea, and Jeffrey had the experience, and when your country needed it, your soul ached for you to go? How to convince his father that Jeffrey did miss his uncle too, a man he’d never known except from photographs, killed in the Tet Offensive seven years before Jeffrey was born?
“A guy your age should be settled down, raising a family already. Not gallivanting off to win another medal, and get roasted alive in some mushroom cloud.” His father turned away. “There’s enough death as it is. Way too much death…I—I just—”
Someone barged into the men’s room. “There you are, sir,” he said to Michael Fuller. The intruder—that’s how Jeffrey thought of him—was in his late twenties, handsome, smooth, and smug, in a gray pinstripe suit. “They’re ready to start again.” He seemed impatient, and glanced at Jeffrey in his uniform as if he were some kind of alien creature.
Jeffrey’s father frowned, and looked at Jeffrey, and looked at the younger man. “Tell them I’ll be along in a minute.” The younger man left.
His father sighed. “Look, I gotta go. Big meeting. I can’t keep half the Joint Chiefs waiting.”
Jeffrey glanced at his watch. “I’m late too.”
They both left the rest room. “When’s your meeting over, Dad?”
“I dunno. Runs all day. Late…” He shrugged.
Jeffrey felt awful disappointment. “I’ll be gone by then.” Michael Fuller grunted and turned away.
“How’s—how’s Mom?” Jeffrey called after him. “You bring her out from St. Louis yet?”
Michael Fuller turned. His face seemed to sag. His whole body sagged. “She’s in New York. Sloan-Kettering. Breast cancer. They think it might have spread.”
FIVE
Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, well south of Diego Garcia
VAN GELDER FELT his armpits grow moist as Voortrekker’s electronic-support-measures mast picked up more and more enemy search radars. Around him in the control room, his technicians called out each sweep. Though he’d drilled them often to always speak calmly and clearly in battle, he heard the men’s voices grow higher pitched and start to get slurred from excitement or stress.
Each radar sweep Van Gelder’s people reported was windowed on his screen, as a strobing flash in livid yellow, on a digital compass rose that showed the source’s direction. With each pulsing strobe, Van Gelder’s console also emitted a warning beep, a ragged, ugly, deep-toned sound. The strobes and beeps were growing brighter and louder, and more numerous. Soon the enemy radars would become a lethal threat, as the aircraft from USS Reagan drew close. Ter Horst didn’t seem to even care.
Both periscopes busily scanned the ocean and the sky. Their imagery showed in high-definition full color on monitors in the control room. The most advanced nuclear submarines in every navy involved in this war used photonic sensors instead of lenses on their periscope heads. The pictures from outside came through the hull on fiber-optic wires—there were no old-fashioned periscope tubes to be raised and lowered, no handles to grab, no one-eyed lady to dance with as an observer scanned the horizon. Instead, crewmen near Van Gelder used small joysticks to make the image sensors pan around.
On a main display at the front of the control room, Van Gelder watched what the periscopes showed, the surface wave crests stretching into the distance. On every side of the ship, large blue swells were topped with whitecaps. The overcast sky was brightest in the west, and slightly red there, because it was almost dusk. Van Gelder dreaded at any moment seeing an Allied aircraft dive out of the overcast in Voortrekker’s direction.
He heard and felt another depth charge go off somewhere near. Once more Voortrekker rocked. Once more the discomfort of the shock to the ship came right through the deck and hurt Van Gelder’s feet, then came through his chair and banged at his body. Mike cords jiggled, and crewmen squirmed in their seats. Van Gelder’s chiefs, most of them needing to stand in the crowded compartment, spoke to the younger men reassuringly but firmly.
Van Gelder glanced down at his uniform shirt. Despite the chill from the brisk air-conditioning required by all the electronics, the crescents of sweat in his armpits were larger and darker than before.
Van Gelder returned to the digital feed from the satellite, to study the picture from the recon drone hundreds of miles to the north. He watched Diego Garcia on his screen. At the target, the sky was crystal clear.
The seventeen-mile-long atoll was spread before him, shaped like a giant V, with a sheltered lagoon between its two arms and small wooded islands at its mouth. Inside the lagoon was the harbor. Cargo ships and frigates were anchored there. The structures on the island all showed clearly despite their blotchy camouflage paint schemes. Van Gelder could see the long concrete runways of the air base, plus the hangars and aircraft shelters, the barracks and administrative buildings and warehouses, and the big storage tanks for gas and oil and lubricants. As he watched this world in miniature, Van Gelder saw flaming streaks of red and yellow take off into the sky, leaving smoke trails, like shooting stars in the wrong direction. These were antimissile missiles, launching from the atoll and some of the ships. More aircraft took to the runways and took to the air, either to intercept the cruise missiles coming from the south or to flee.
The picture had no sound. Everything Van Gelder saw at Diego Garcia, and would see, happened silently. He didn’t hear the air-raid sirens, the hoarse shouts of commands. Ter Horst’s thirty-six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were converging on the atoll, tearing in at a kilometer per second, and everyone on the base must know it by now.
A third big air-dropped depth charge went off near Voortrekker, probably hitting another decoy, almost deafening through the hull. This is Russian roulette, Van Gelder told himself. Jan ter Horst just smiled. Van Gelder wanted to scream. The enemy airborne radar sweeps were stronger.
Another atomic depth bomb exploded, louder and much harder—closer than the last ones, shaking Van Gelder to his core.
Please, God, let our missiles hit and then let’s dive and get out of here. Crewmen gasped as the fireball from this latest undersea blast reared skyward from beyond the horizon, on the main screen. A periscope technician zoomed in, and everyone saw the crown of the mushroom cloud soar. It blew a hole in the overcast, then disappeared higher up.
Van Gelder had to clear his throat. “Captain, urgently recommend submerging now.”
“Negative,” ter Horst said sternly. “You know as well as I do we have no telemetry to the missiles. We must have real-time battle-damage assessment. Now is the time to attack, with the Pentagon befuddled by that psy-war air raid on New York, and the Reagan battle group too far from Diego Garcia to intervene. Once the Allies realize we’re out of dry dock so much sooner than they expected, all our strategic surprise will be lost. If the first missile salvo does not succeed, we need to know it immediately, and you’ll have to fire more missiles now.”
“Inbound visual contact!” one of Van Gelder’s fire-control technicians shouted as he monitored a periscope display. “Enemy aircraft closing fast!”
Van Gelder took over the display control and flipped to maximum magnification. “A jet, Captain. Too fast to use an antiaircraft missile.” The Polyphem high-explosive missiles Voortrekker could launch from her torpedo tubes were meant only for slow propeller planes or helicopters.
“Target bearing?” ter Horst snapped.
“Two eight five!” Van Gelder watched the distant dot of the aircraft. It gradually got larger. Suddenly the control room felt much, much too small, and Voortrekker’s hull too thin.
“It’s slowing!” the fire-control tech shouted. “It’s going to drop a parachute-retarded torpedo!”
“Snap shot,” ter Horst ordered, “tube one, maximum yield, on course two eight five! Shoot.” A snap shot was a desperation move, a quick launch with no proper fir
ing solution to lead the target.
Van Gelder relayed commands. A nuclear torpedo raced from the tube. But the Boer torpedo was so much slower than the jet. The jet raced at Voortrekker’s conspicuous antenna, and the wire-guided torpedo churned through the water toward the jet.
“Detonate the snap shot now.”
“Too close to our own ship!” Van Gelder warned.
“Do you want him to drop? I said now!”
Van Gelder pressed the firing button. The undersea warhead blew. The water shielded Voortrekker’s masts from the instantaneous electromagnetic pulse, but the ocean could do nothing to quench the fireball and the blast force. Through the periscope image, Van Gelder saw the ocean near the aircraft heave. The full energy of the warhead broke the surface, and a tower of white water rose and spread with violent speed, higher and higher and wider and wider. The fireball thrust above the water column, blanking out the image. When the glare subsided, a mushroom cloud stood proudly and the enemy aircraft was gone.
Voortrekker whipped and shivered viciously from the force of its own underwater blast. A sonar screen imploded and caught fire; a crewman doused it with an extinguisher. Damage reports came to Van Gelder from other parts of the ship—nothing major yet.
Van Gelder watched on the periscope as the tsunami of the detonation approached Voortrekker quickly, even as the mushroom cloud grew taller in the air. The tsunami was a solid wall of foaming, boiling seawater. Spume and spray blew backward from its breaking crown, as a man-made wind was sucked in toward ground zero by the updraft of the mushroom cloud.
“Lower all masts and antennas!” ter Horst ordered.
All the imagery went blank. Van Gelder gripped his armrests, white-knuckled, waiting for what was to come.
The ship rolled and corkscrewed madly, and Van Gelder’s stomach rose toward his throat. Voortrekker dipped and heaved as the tsunami passed right overhead with a terrifying watery roaring sound.
“Raise all masts and antennas!” ter Horst shouted above the diminishing noise.
The satellite imagery came back. On Van Gelder’s display of Diego Garcia, the screen showed nothing but snow for a moment, then a lurid hot-violet glow flickered beyond the horizon on the picture.
“That blast should be them, not us,” ter Horst said. “The island’s outer defenses have gone nuclear after all.” Probably a destroyer or cruiser, Van Gelder thought, trying to smack the inbound missiles down.
A string of blinding lavender-violet fireballs bloomed, just over the southern horizon from the recon camera’s point of view.
“Oh dear. A whole wall of them, across our missiles’ line of approach. This I don’t like. I’m sure we lost some missiles there.”
Ter Horst sounded worried; Van Gelder was torn between praying for failure or success. He felt pity for the people on the atoll. Then he looked at the local periscope picture, at the fresh mushroom cloud that smashed the incoming enemy jet, standing now like a beacon marking Voortrekker’s location—he felt pity for himself and his crew.
“There.” Ter Horst pointed at his screen. “Our weapons are still in the air, a few at least.”
Conventional antiaircraft guns, shorter-range weapons, opened up from the atoll. Guns began to fire from ships stuck in the harbor too—some just couldn’t get up steam or warm their big diesel engines fast enough to leave. Van Gelder saw the gun flashes, vivid in the evening twilight. The shells invisibly flew away from Van Gelder, toward the south, and burst low over the ocean, leaving black puffs of smoke but showing no hits on incoming missiles. Van Gelder saw Allied fighters jinking to avoid the friendly fire, making less effective their own strafing runs against surviving hostile missiles. Van Gelder saw the surface of the lagoon roil from the firing concussions of heavy ack-ack guns. The surface of the sea splashed and rippled from the ack-ack’s falling shrapnel. Sometimes there were bigger splashes, when dud shells hit the water. There seemed to be a lot of duds. Ter Horst laughed.
More antimissile missiles took to the sky, or leaped from the wings of fighter jets as afterburners strained. Van Gelder followed the moving glows of the exhausts against the dusk. A few defensive missiles connected with something, in stabbing secondary blasts, and sheets of liquid fire rained to the sea.
“Shit,” ter Horst said. “Well, it’s out of our control. We may need another salvo after all.” Van Gelder’s gut tightened at the thought, with the Reagan’s planes so near. Fire-controlmen reported more airborne search radars, closing on Voortrekker fast. The warning strobes and beeps of his console seemed to set the pace for Van Gelder’s rising heartbeat.
Tracers, bright red and green, began to stitch the heavens over Diego Garcia—in the tropics, dark came quickly. The defenders still had targets, which meant Voortrekker’s cruise missiles still flew.
“You know, Number One,” ter Horst said, “it all makes a lovely light show.”
Dutifully, Van Gelder watched his screens. The last rays of the sunset cast a pink pall on the island bastion. Detonations right at sundown were part of ter Horst’s plan: it made Voortrekker’s egress easier, and medical care on the shattered atoll that much harder to provide.
Ter Horst tapped his chronometer. “The real fireworks are about to begin…now.”
Things happened fast.
All of Diego Garcia’s military assets were on the left arm of the atoll’s V. In rapid succession there blossomed six prolonged blinding flashes.
“Yes,” ter Horst exclaimed. “Some got through!”
Crewmen cheered.
“Quiet in control!” he snapped.
Van Gelder stared at his screen, transfixed.
As the glare died down, shock waves spread from four points on the atoll’s arm and two in the lagoon. Van Gelder saw gigantic domes of mist, where the moist tropical air condensed behind the spreading shock fronts. The mist domes quickly dissipated, and there they were, the atomic fireballs, six of them glowing and churning, ascending into the sky. Each was a breathtaking golden yellow, expanding as it rose: living, fulminating globes of unimaginable fire.
Pillars formed beneath the fireballs, black for the ones that hit land, white for the ones that hit water. The fireballs provided their own illumination for the nighttime scene around them; each cast livid shadows of the other mushroom clouds. At ground level, smoke and dust and fog-spray spread in fluffy, lethal disks. The shock waves of the different warheads met, rupturing the air.
Still the fireballs rose, and expanded, and cooled slightly. They sucked in more air at their bases. The pillars of the mushroom clouds grew thick, and lightning sizzled. Nothing on the ground could be seen through all the smoke and dust and steam and flying debris, no ships or planes or people. The water of the lagoon, farther off, foamed where it was punished by the shock fronts, and huge waves spread away from the two water bursts. Tall trees on the far side of the lagoon exploded into flame from the searing radiant heat of the blasts. The entire atoll seemed to burn.
Now the fireballs were more than two miles high. They broiled less fiercely. Smoke rings formed atop their crowns. They were interlaced with ethereal purple glows, the air itself fluorescing from the intense radiation. More lightning flashed from the tremendous static charges.
Ter Horst switched to the infrared feed. On Van Gelder’s screen, in this mode, the fireballs still seared frighteningly. But infrared could see through smoke and dust. At ground level, fires burned everywhere. The petroleum-products tank farm was now one huge inferno, and the inferno spread. More flaming fuel oil covered the surface of the lagoon, and in the lagoon, ships burned and broke apart. The four deep craters on the ground all glowed intensely hot; not one but two missiles had hit the runways of the airbase.
Van Gelder was awestruck in spite of himself. I helped do this. Some primitive part of his being rejoiced at the combat success. An unspeakable part of his soul soared with exhilarated joy at the sheer pleasure of such push-button mass destruction. In a sick way it was fun to unleash fission bombs, see mushroom clou
ds erect themselves, smash someone else’s toys and get to watch.
Am I becoming a monster, like my captain?
“Atoll denial, Gunther,” ter Horst said.
“Sir?”
“That’s what this is about. Atoll denial.”
Van Gelder nodded. He grasped ter Horst’s point. The cruise missiles all had plunging warheads, designed to bore in deep and throw up terrible local fallout—soil, vaporized wreckage, and radioactive seawater steam. From these appallingly dirty blasts, Diego Garcia would be unusable for many months, maybe years. The image jumped, then steadied, as each shock front finally reached the unmanned recon drone, the force too weak by now to knock it down.
“They think an island is an unsinkable aircraft carrier,” ter Horst said.
“I’ve heard the saying, Captain.” Ter Horst distracted Van Gelder, who was trying to make better sense of what he’d seen, and how he felt about it. I’ve helped kill thousands of people.
But it’s legal, they were military targets. This is war, and I’m doing my job.
“They need to think again,” ter Horst said. “An island is just a carrier that can’t move. We sank Diego Garcia in every way that matters.”
We did destroy the bastion. We’ve dealt the Allies a terrible blow. We’re closer to winning the war, aren’t we? We’ll save countless other lives, on both sides, if we help bring this conflict to a more rapid close…. Yes, that’s right. I should feel good about this.
So how come I don’t?
Three nuclear depth charges went off one right after the other, much too close to Voortrekker for comfort. Mike cords jiggled on the overhead again, and light fixtures squeaked in their shock-absorbing mounts.
“I think word of our success has reached the Reagan,” ter Horst said. “First Officer, we’ve seen enough. The recorders got all that?”
Van Gelder checked his console. “Yes, Captain. Good imagery.” One of the last frames, six fresh mushroom clouds towering in infrared, sat frozen on his screen.