by Joe Buff
Jeffrey held his breath as the soaring I-95 bridge went by overhead, unseen in the pitch-dark and bad weather. Jeffrey knew that broken concrete and twisted rebars dangled somewhere up there high above, damage from the cruise missile raid before Christmas that was still undergoing repair. People feared the whole bridge might come down, because of the constant heavy trucking that used the only two of the original six lanes still open. I-95 was a vital logistics artery for the whole Northeast. If the bridge did collapse—maybe because of wind stress from this storm—that artery would be cut. The wreckage, in the shallow riverbed, would also block the only way from the New London base to the sea.
The I-95 bridge, or debris from it, didn’t fall. Jeffrey wiped the lenses of his night-vision goggles again. The constant sleet buildup made them almost useless. Jeffrey realized he couldn’t count on much help from his lookouts either. They stood behind him, in their safety harnesses, on the roof of the sail. They peered intently into the murk all around, but Jeffrey knew no night-vision gear could penetrate such thick weather.
The sleet turned into hail the size of lima beans. The hail beat against Jeffrey’s shoulders and his parka hood. It made a drumming, spattering sound against Challenger’s hull and the barge dead ahead. Sharp, cold fragments of hail punished Jeffrey’s face. He and the phone talker and the officer of the deck huddled closer together for warmth and protection. The hail went through the grating on which they stood, down through the open hatches of the bridge trunk, and into a corridor inside the hull. Hail or worse getting into the ship just had to be put up with: It was a navy safety regulation to always keep these two hatches open when the bridge was manned.
Jeffrey held his breath again as the low railroad drawbridge came up, barely outlined on his goggles, close in on both sides. Challenger was committed.
The wind veered unexpectedly, and Challenger started to yaw off track. Jeffrey snapped more helm orders. But the yaw increased and Jeffrey saw they were going to hit the bridge. He looked ahead, then looked behind him, cursing that he couldn’t see his rudder or wake in the murk. Something was very wrong.
“Helm, Bridge,” he snapped into his intercom mike. “I said right ten degrees rudder, not left.”
Silence on the intercom. The phone talker also stayed mute.
Jeffrey’s heart was in his throat. We’re going to hit the bridge. It was much too late to signal the tug to stop. It was too late even to try to maneuver on what battery charge Jeffrey had.
“Helm, hard right rudder smartly, now now now!”
Challenger began to yaw the other way, but not fast enough.
“Collision alarm!” Jeffrey could hear it blaring down inside the ship.
Jeffrey leaned over the side of the sail cockpit. He stared aft, watching helplessly, dreading the grinding thud of impact and the screaming tearing of ceramic composite and steel. The lookouts knelt and braced themselves.
The wind veered again, and caught the broad side of the barge. The barge yawed. The side force came back through the tow cables. The cables made Challenger pivot. The pivoting barely steered the sub through the opening in the drawbridge.
Jeffrey let himself breathe again. They’d made it, but only by the grace of a puff of wind, pure random luck.
“Helm, Bridge,” Jeffrey called on the intercom, “please try to remember your right from your left.”
“Bridge, Helm, sorry, Captain,” a scared young voice responded. “No excuse, sir.”
Jeffrey bit down his fright and his temper. “Helm, Bridge, no harm done.” Jeffrey knew now he and Bell had their work cut out, melding all the newcomers from a rabble into a genuine, smooth-running crew.
From here, at least, the river was more open. Jeffrey’s main concern for the moment was the big barge looming in front of him. Empty of oil, riding so high, the barge continued to catch the wind. It kept drifting right and left in the navigable channel. The tug crew did what they could to compensate, but this threesome follow-the-leader, snaking down the river at high speed to keep up with the squall, was nerve-racking. Challenger had deep draft even while surfaced. To run aground would be as bad as a collision: a permanent blot on Jeffrey’s record, never mind what it meant to Challenger and his intercepting ter Horst.
They passed the spot where off to starboard, on the land, sat the railroad station. So recently Jeffrey had stood there in the early morning sun, waiting for the train to Washington, wishing instead he was headed out to sea, dreading he’d get stuck in a rear-area land job after his training course.
I got my wish. I’d gladly give it all up in a minute, if it would restore my mother to health and bring Ilse Reebeck back.
At dawn
To get the ship concealed before morning, Commodore Wilson ordered Jeffrey to dive Challenger as soon as they reached a hundred feet of water. Jeffrey knew this was much shallower than the minimum considered safe in peacetime, but it was a very long way from New London to the edge of the continental shelf, where the water first got deep. The dive would be all the more tricky with an inexperienced man at the helm and no propulsion power—but after some sweat-filled moments they made it down all right. The tug and barge proceeded on their way, tow cables coiled, their duty to Challenger done.
Jeffrey sat in the control room uneasily. He rubbed his hands together for warmth. He was out of his sleet-covered parka, and he’d changed to a dry set of clothes, but now, underwater, it was very cold on the ship with no heat. It was also strangely quiet, and dark. Only dim emergency lighting was on. The air fans were turned off, and hardly any other equipment was running—all to conserve precious amps from the battery banks.
Jeffrey didn’t like his present tactical situation one bit. Challenger sat in such shallow water, in windswept seas, that she rolled constantly from side to side, from wave action right overhead. She was much too vulnerable like this, motionless except for the caprice of waves and currents and tide. She had no way to move on her own yet, with the reactor still shut down. If proper trim was lost, they could easily hit the bottom, only several feet beneath the keel, and suffer serious damage—or they might broach, exposing the sail or even the hull, and thus destroy their stealth, because the sun was coming up.
Passive sonar conditions here were poor. If a deep-draft merchant ship suddenly rounded Montauk Point on a collision course…Jeffrey didn’t want to begin to think about that.
Jeffrey watched the status displays on his console, one of the very few switched on. Around him, in the cramped space, stood or sat some twenty members of his crew. The tension was palpable, and no one spoke unless they needed to.
Challenger’s chief of the boat, whom everyone called COB, sat beside the helmsman at the front of the compartment; on the newest subs, the helmsman was a junior officer who himself controlled the bowplanes and sternplanes and rudder. COB was very busy, adjusting the ballast and trim. For now, the newbie helmsman had nothing to do. The contrast as they sat there with their backs to Jeffrey seemed to say so much: COB, Latino, forty-something, salty and irreverent, came from Jersey City, and was short and squat like a bulldog. The helmsman, Ensign Tom Harrison from Orlando, was barely twenty. His voice was as reedy as his build, and he would seem nerdy even in a crowd at MIT—where he finished college in three years.
Lieutenant Commander Jackson Bell sat just to Jeffrey’s right, at the two-man command workstation in the middle of the control room. He perched on the edge of his seat, sharing Jeffrey’s screens to save power. Bell was literally on the edge of his seat: as executive officer he was in charge of damage control. With the rush to get out of port on a shoestring—with hardly enough in the battery charge for one try to get the reactor restarted—no one knew when something might break, something fatal.
The compartment’s phone talker, a young enlisted man wearing a bulky sound-powered rig, relayed status reports to Jeffrey and Bell from other parts of the ship. The phone talker’s throat sounded tight and dry, reflecting how everyone felt. The Thresher had been lost with all hands beca
use of defects at the start of what was supposed to be a routine shakedown cruise.
The weapons officer, a lieutenant who in combat reported to Bell, was working at a console on a lower deck, outside the torpedo room. With the war, Weps’s station was shifted there, for positive control of special—atomic—weapons in a fast-attack submarine. At the moment, Weps, who was new to the ship, was supervising final assembly of the warheads.
Lieutenant Willey, Challenger’s engineer, was overseeing the propulsion plant restart, back in the maneuvering room, aft of the reactor compartment. His two dozen people had begun this work before the ship left dry dock, but only now could they do the important steps, the ones which involved heat. This cold startup with no outside support was a difficult endeavor. It would never have been attempted at all if there weren’t such a drastic need for secrecy and stealth. Thermal energy from the reactor had to be used in carefully measured spurts to gradually warm up every main steam plant component. If one step didn’t go right, Challenger would need to surface and radio for a tow back to the pens.
Jeffrey liked the tall and straight-talking Willey, who’d been with the ship on Challenger’s previous missions. Jeffrey understood the immense pressure Willey was under now—Jeffrey had been the engineer on a Los Angeles–class boat during his own department-head tour four years previously. There was no point in asking Willey to hurry. He was as aware as anyone else on board of the imminent danger of being run down by some civilian cargo vessel that didn’t even know Challenger was there.
After a lengthy and worry-filled wait that saw Jeffrey eye the chronometer often, the phone talker relayed briskly, “Maneuvering reports ready to answer all bells.”
Jeffrey wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but he said a heartfelt prayer. He was about to find out, all at once, if the steam pipes and the condensors, the main turbogenerators and the big electric motors attached to the shaft, and the repaired pump-jet propulsor at the back of the boat really worked. There’d been no time to test the power train the proper way, tied up at a pier.
This is one hell of a way to begin the patrol, waiting step by step for a part of the ship to fall off.
If our pump jet doesn’t turn, we go right back into dry dock…and Voortrekker goes wherever Jan ter Horst wants.
Jeffrey’s heart pounded, but he also felt a nice silvery tingling anticipation in his chest. He paused, savoring the moment. He was about to give his first engine order as USS Challenger’s official commanding officer.
“Helm, ahead one-third.” Challenger started to move.
TWELVE
A few hours later, on Challenger, under way at sea
CHALLENGER WAS PAST the edge of the continental shelf, submerged in very deep water. The crew had been sent to a hearty breakfast of nourishing hot food, with several choices of entrées, and now was settling in to the watch-keeping routines of being under way at sea.
Jeffrey sat alone at the desk in his stateroom. As usual, he kept the door open while he worked. In the control room, only a few feet up the corridor, a talented junior officer from engineering had the conn. Bell, in Jeffrey’s absence, was command duty officer, Jeffrey’s surrogate there. In a few more minutes Bell would turn in for badly needed sleep.
Jeffrey was a bit exhausted himself. His eyes burned. He knew they were bloodshot. His whole body felt wired, from lack of rest combined with too much adrenaline now growing stale.
Jeffrey was finishing paperwork, since the basic engineering tests were mostly complete. The ship had held up well enough as they gradually descended to test depth, ten thousand feet—two-thirds of their crush depth, which nominally was fifteen thousand. The problems discovered along the way were mostly small. They were resolved by isolating minor equipment, or bypassing sections of pipe.
The one potentially serious glitch was in the torpedo room. Several thousand feet down, during trials with seawater in the tubes at ambient pressure of more than a ton for each square inch, firing mechanism components failed in all four available tubes. COB and the weapons officer, aided by some of the contractors, had men working to install replacement parts from Challenger’s spares. This would take a while, but Jeffrey wasn’t overly worried. Though the weapons officer was inexperienced, COB was very good at getting things done. Besides, Jeffrey didn’t expect to need to shoot torpedoes very soon.
A messenger knocked on the doorjamb. Jeffrey looked up. The awkward youngster asked Jeffrey to go to the commodore’s office—Wilson had taken over the executive officer’s stateroom. Jeffrey’s navigator, Lieutenant Sessions, was with the messenger.
When Jeffrey and Sessions arrived, Wilson rose to greet them curtly. Jeffrey was still getting used to Wilson’s reading glasses and stubble of beard. Jeffrey thought they made Wilson look professorial. Yeah, that type of hard-hearted slave-driving prof who’d always get the best out of you, and break you if you disappointed him once.
“Sit down, both of you.”
Jeffrey took the guest chair. Sessions perched on a filing cabinet.
“Captain,” Wilson said to Jeffrey, “as commodore of a battle group I require a staff.”
“Sir?”
“I want you to double as my operations officer, and Sessions here as my executive assistant…. I don’t need a separate communications officer, I’ll borrow yours as necessary.”
“Yes, Commodore.” Jeffrey glanced at Sessions. Sessions nodded.
“I want your XO and Sessions to trade racks for the duration of this cruise. That way Sessions and I can work together in here more closely. I’ll keep to Lieutenant Sessions’s watch schedule for now, so he and I will sleep at the same time.” The XO’s stateroom had an extra rack—bunk—usually reserved for a VIP rider such as an admiral, or members of Congress.
“I’ll inform Commander Bell,” Jeffrey said. “I’m sure it won’t be a problem.”
“I’m quite sure it won’t be a problem.”
“Yes, sir.” By long naval tradition, not even the president of the United States could displace a warship’s captain from his stateroom. The captain, on his own ship, was supreme.
But I can see already having Wilson here as more than just an observer is going to be tricky, Jeffrey told himself. Where exactly does my authority end, and his begin? Where will the dividing line fall when we meet the Australian diesels days from now, and Wilson’s undersea battle group becomes an untested reality?
“If I may ask, Commodore, which route do you want us to follow to the Pacific?”
“South.”
Jeffrey glanced at Sessions, as a cue; Jeffrey let Sessions speak for himself.
“We propose to hide in the Gulf Stream, Commodore, at least until we’re past the Bahamas. Lieutenant Milgrom feels the confused sonar conditions in the stream will help conceal us.”
“Good. I leave the details to you to work out…. Captain, I want the ship to go faster.”
“How fast, Commodore?”
“Make flank speed until I say otherwise.”
“Flank speed, Commodore?” For Challenger, that was over fifty knots. Challenger was extremely quiet, but at flank speed any sub was noisy.
Wilson looked impatiently at Jeffrey. “Flank speed, Captain. I expect you to use local sonar conditions, and ship’s depth versus bottom terrain, to prevent our signature from carrying into the deep sound channel.”
“Understood.” If Challenger’s noise did leak into that acoustic superconducting layer in the deep ocean, it could be picked up on the far side of the Atlantic—the German side. Jeffrey didn’t like this, but what was his alternative?
“That’s all.”
Jeffrey and Sessions got up.
“Lieutenant, you stay here. We have things to discuss. Have your assistant navigator take over in the control room.”
Sessions acknowledged.
Jeffrey, in the doorway, turned back to Wilson. “Sir, Commodore, I have a concern.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“At flank speed we’re almost totally sonar-b
lind. We could get into trouble.”
“The route south has been sanitized for us by other forces, and will continue to be. You need to remind yourself that undersea warfare is a team sport, Commander Fuller…. If we stick to the safe corridors, we’re immune to attack by our own antisubmarine assets.”
“We’ll be picked up by the Sound Surveillance System hydrophone nets for sure.”
“Of course. So?” Wilson glowered at him.
Jeffrey caught himself starting to ball his fists in irritation. He made himself relax. “Sir, I apologize if I’m not expressing myself clearly. My point is that it’s risky to create a big datum on our own SOSUS, even if the East Coast is clear of enemy subs. If the Axis has a spy on the SOSUS staff, or they’re tapping our data directly somehow, they’ll know we’re at sea, and which way we’re heading.” Jeffrey wasn’t naturally paranoid, but in force-on-force submarine missions paranoia was a survival trait.
“You really think the higher-ups haven’t thought of that?”
Wilson’s annoyance was obvious, but Jeffrey thought his own objection was perfectly valid. Now he really felt pissed, but by a supreme effort kept it internal.
“Shut the door,” Wilson said. “Sit down.”
Jeffrey pulled the door closed and took the guest seat again. Sessions still perched on the filing cabinet. He looked uncomfortable, and not just physically.
“First of all,” Wilson said, “the lines are monitored constantly for eavesdropping, and the hydrophones are inspected periodically as well. That much, you should have figured out for yourself. Secondly, Atlantic Fleet has performed certain naval maneuvers near Norfolk intended to surely pique the Germans’ attention, assuming they did have a mole in the SOSUS shop. We have our own espionage resources in Europe, I’m informed, and said maneuvers were not reacted to at all. Hence, the Germans were not aware of them, and therefore do not have a mole.”