Crush Depth

by Joe Buff

  At least I get to do something interesting and fun, well behind friendly lines, in a supporting role for a change. I’ve had enough of being packed off with Jeffrey Fuller and the SEALs, to get shot at with bullets and nuclear torpedoes.

  Chatham Island. A quaint English country village, lost on a tiny dot of land in the vast Pacific, in the middle of bloody nowhere. A thousand people, two hundred thousand sheep, and a minor link in the SOSUS system. Who’d ever launch atomic bombs at us?

  On Voortrekker’s minisub

  Van Gelder held the minisub at fifty meters depth, where the surface wave effects were gentler. By now he was drenched in sweat as well as the saline laced with another man’s blood. Diver Two was finishing on the bottom, packing away equipment and erasing the last traces that Kampfschwimmer had ever been there. The black boxes that hacked the Allied SOSUS were well concealed in the ooze, buried under the feeder line to which they were attached. So far, the false data seemed to be working—Van Gelder saw no immediate sign on the mini’s sonars that the enemy knew they were there.

  Van Gelder watched Diver Two on the image from the bottom camera. Van Gelder was glad that Diver Two was unable to speak from below. He didn’t want to hear the fear and grief in the man’s voice, because it would remind him of his own. The loss of a diver always traumatized the whole team. Van Gelder knew this, but to be involved firsthand was a very hard blow. When Diver Two moved close enough to the camera, Van Gelder could see his facial features, obviously distraught. At least with his head in the helmet surrounded by fluid, it wouldn’t show if he was shedding tears. It must be horribly lonely, to be so alone down there—to have no choice but keep working, following fixed procedures step by step, despite whatever emotions tore you apart inside.

  Diver Two attached the last of his things to the lift cable. He switched off the floodlight, and the scene darkened with sudden finality.

  Now the diver worked by feel. In a few moments the camera switched to active laser line-scan mode. The crisp black-and-white picture showed he’d entered the personnel-transfer pressure capsule, and brought the camera in with him. This way the minisub would maintain full communications as the lift cable brought up the man, with his equipment and the empty second capsule. The pressure capsule would keep Diver Two immersed at six hundred atmospheres, to avoid the horrible uncontrolled decompression effects that had killed his buddy. The capsule, still pressurized, would be loaded into the mini, and then brought back to Voortrekker. Once there, a proper decompression schedule would be used. Dialysis would remove metabolic wastes directly from Diver Two’s blood, since it was impossible to urinate or defecate until he could leave the transfer capsule many long hours from now.

  “Ready for lift,” Diver Two typed.

  “Lifting now,” Bauer answered. He flicked a switch. Van Gelder fought his controls as the lengthy cable began to reel in. This process started new forces, which buffeted the mini.

  “Don’t resist it,” Bauer told Van Gelder. “Let us drift when you can. Don’t overstress the winch. Just watch out for our crush depth.”

  Van Gelder concentrated hard. He could tell the storm topside was strengthening, because the surface wave effects were getting worse.

  The mini dipped unpredictably. Van Gelder shoved the throttle forward, using full speed ahead on the propeller to keep from being pulled too deep. He was sweating heavily now—this was the most difficult piloting job he’d ever faced. The steel mini had nowhere near Voortrekker’s depth capability. If he wasn’t careful, they’d all pay the same price as Diver One but in the opposite manner: an implosion. The minisub’s hull creaked.

  The drag effects of the cable began to die down, as the bulk of the line was wound around the silent hydraulic winch reel. Van Gelder tried to relax. On sonar he heard the sound of a sperm whale feeding.

  Unexpectedly, currents and drag once more took charge of the lift cable, with all the equipment and capsules—and Diver Two—dangling at its end. Van Gelder realized what must be happening. A deep-ocean storm front, an undersea current related to the surface tempest, was fast moving in.

  From the increased resistance and shearing forces, the winch cable suddenly jammed. The mini was much too deep now for Draeger divers to go out and fix it. The mini began to be pulled down even more.

  Van Gelder took drastic steps. Flank speed did no good. Pumping out the safety tank, to get more buoyancy, did no good. Van Gelder watched the depth meter as it ran into the warning zone, and then the danger zone. The mini’s hull creaked again.

  Bauer, tight-lipped, said, “Do something.” An implosion would be so noisy it could be heard easily on the next line of the Allied SOSUS grid, which still received real data.

  Van Gelder tilted the mini’s nose steeply toward the surface, and used his propeller and all his side thrusters to get the greatest force possible aimed straight up. His own weight fell against the back of his seat. His legs were higher than his head, and blood rushed to his brain. He began to have a red-out.

  The mini was pulled down more, by the slow but powerful storm current. The hull creaked even louder. Van Gelder reached for his last resort, the emergency blow handles. Even these might not be enough. Even if they were, the noise would be deafening, and the mini would bob to the surface like a cork, in plain view of enemy lookouts and radar. He began to think the unthinkable—that he would have to dump the cable winch and abandon Diver Two.

  At the last second the propeller began to bite against the down-force, and the mini started to drive toward shallower depth. Van Gelder leveled off. But the winch reel still was jammed. The end of the line, with Diver Two in his capsule, was stuck down at a crushing one thousand meters.

  “We have to get the cable freed,” Bauer said. The chief and his man prepared to make another diving sortie. Van Gelder forced the minisub as shallow as he dared to go, without broaching in the heavy seas. The two Kampfschwimmer locked out through the sphere. They went to work on the winch towed behind the minisub. On sonar, the sperm whale was much closer now. The clicking noises the whale made sounded angry.

  There was a hard jerk against the cable, jarring the minisub badly. Abruptly, the jerking stopped.

  “You’ve got to hold us level and still,” Bauer said.

  “I know.” If the chief and his assistant couldn’t fix the winch, and they couldn’t improvise a different way to lift Diver Two that last kilometer against the strong deep undertow, Two might yet need to be abandoned to his fate—a slow and horrible death.

  “What’s wrong?” Diver Two typed.

  “Just a surface storm,” Bauer said. “We’ll have you up in a moment.” He eyed the diver’s vital signs—Van Gelder could see the man was alarmed. “Let me look at you,” Bauer said into the mike.

  Diver Two held the camera toward his face. Van Gelder watched him open and close his mouth, breathing fluid instead of air, more rapidly than he should.

  The cable jerked again, and the camera was jostled from Diver Two’s hands.

  “Something out there,” Diver Two typed. He retrieved the camera and aimed it out the viewport of his capsule, still in laser line-scan mode. Van Gelder saw a huge tentacle wave by, covered with suction pads larger than a man’s head. Then Van Gelder caught a glimpse of a very large fin.

  It’s a giant squid, Van Gelder realized, attracted or confused by the commotion. They live here, south of New Zealand, in very deep water. Sperm whales eat them. That fin was the sperm whale’s fin. The squid and the whale were fighting, and both were as long and heavy as the minisub itself. Diver Two was caught in the middle, defenseless.

  Bauer signaled to the chief outside to hurry fixing the winch. The mini jerked again. Turbulence thrown by the squid and whale in mortal combat was jarring against the lift cable, and shaking all the gear at its end. Sometimes the squid or the whale crashed into the cable with their bodies.

  “Two’s panicking,” Bauer said between clenched teeth. Van Gelder saw he was right. Two’s vital signs, the tremoring as
he held the camera, his garbled words on his keyboard, all made this clear. Bauer grabbed the mike and tried to calm Diver Two down.

  A fragment of tentacle flew by the viewport, vivid on Van Gelder’s picture—the whale was biting the squid. The huge whale flashed by the capsule with its lower jaw gaping wide open. Van Gelder saw an endless row of large teeth, and then a giant, intelligent eye. The whole bulk of the sperm whale drove past the capsule. The force of its tail flukes thrashing the water made the capsule spin in dizzying circles.

  Diver Two switched on his floodlight and shined it out the viewport, to try to scare away the battling, maddened undersea creatures. This was a big mistake. Before Bauer could order him to stop, the squid and the whale both noticed the light, and attacked.

  The last thing Van Gelder saw on the picture was a close-up blur of tentacles and hard, sharp, beaklike squid mouth parts, of gnashing whale teeth and smashing fins. On the sonar he heard a crunching noise, and the picture went totally blank. Bauer cursed.

  The load on the cable was instantly lighter. On sonar, Van Gelder could hear the squid and the whale still fighting. The sperm whale won, and Van Gelder heard more crunching, tearing, chewing sounds that made him sick.

  The winch at last unjammed. The cable reeled in quickly. But the end was a ragged stump. There was no sign of any pressure capsule, no sign of Diver Two. The chief and his man hurried back into the mini before the sperm whale could decide to come shallow and hunt for more rivals or prey. Bauer went aft to assist them. Van Gelder, hands trembling, steered the minisub back to Voortrekker.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The next day

  JEFFREY SAT TENSE and worried at the command console in Challenger’s control room. Outwardly, in order to do his duty and show good leadership to his crew, he made sure he exuded nothing but calm and confidence. The cost of this internal-versus-external conflict was a tight knot in Jeffrey’s stomach, and gradually increasing fatigue. He hoped to grab another catnap soon.

  But not right now. Commodore Wilson stood sternly in the aisle, supervising as the diesel boats reported in. The Royal Australian Navy submarines Farncomb, Rankin, Sheean, and Waller were holding for now to the east of Chatham Island, arrayed in a line.

  Each vessel was thirty-five miles from the next. The four Collins-class subs created a scouting and search line a hundred miles across, under Wilson’s control. Orders and reports would be passed up and down the line using covert acoustic communication bursts. At least that was the plan.

  The Australians would listen on passive sonar, ping on active when needed, launch atomic torpedoes, and also serve as decoys and lures—all while Challenger lurked very deep, to catch ter Horst unawares and destroy Voortrekker in a pincers.

  But the most iffy part of the plan was that the diesel boats couldn’t cover great distances quickly. To cruise very far at all they had to snorkel and run their main engines, which would ruin strategic stealth. Specific targeting data—ter Horst’s route of approach, Voortrekker’s course and speed—had to come well in advance, from the SOSUS network. The first of the three SOSUS lines guarding the ANZA Gap lay several hundred miles to the south, hopefully far enough away to give Wilson and his squadron adequate warning to get into proper position for the attack. A real-time downlink to the squadron from the main SOSUS land-based processing center, while Challenger stayed concealed and mobile, was Ilse Reebeck’s job. This downlink was new, and experimental.

  Diego Garcia had proved to the Pentagon that when facing Jan ter Horst, surface ships and planes and depth bombs simply weren’t enough. Jeffrey knew full well that the best platforms to use against any sub were other submarines. But Voortrekker was so quiet that the SOSUS data would be vague and soft. There’d also be a lag between when the raw jumble of the ocean’s innumerable sound waves hit the hydrophones and when the center’s supercomputers could sniff out Voortrekker’s signature. Wilson’s squadron would have to work very hard to hunt ter Horst once he was localized.

  All this was why Jeffrey was inwardly tense. As self-disciplined as he was, he couldn’t make himself forget how awfully dependent they were on the SOSUS. As always in naval combat, everything hinged on making the first detection of the adversary, on being able to fire effectively first.

  On Voortrekker’s minisub

  After the first line of the SOSUS grid was hacked, the minisub rendezvoused with Voortrekker and docked. Then Voortrekker spent hours sneaking farther north along the bottom. Van Gelder got some fitful sleep, his head filled with images of swelling, bursting men and gnashing sea monsters. Maintenance technicians looked over the mini, and topped off its tanks with more hydrogen peroxide air-independent fuel. Then ter Horst released the mini again, in range of the second SOSUS line.

  That was yesterday and earlier today. Now, Van Gelder drove the minisub while Bauer relaxed in the pilot’s seat. The second pair of dialysis divers had already done their jobs and were safely retrieved. They lay now, cocooned in their pressurized transfer capsules, in the passenger compartment aft of the mini’s lockout chamber. The Kampfschwimmer chief and his assistant tended them there.

  Van Gelder tried to unwind, and sought to make conversation with this inscrutable German, Bauer. Sitting practically in his lap, it was difficult to ignore the man. “Everything went well this time,” Van Gelder said.

  “Compared to yesterday, ja.” Bauer laughed roughly.

  “But you knew you might suffer losses, didn’t you?”

  “It comes with the work.” Bauer seemed very pleased with himself.

  “Then I don’t understand something. If there are three SOSUS lines we need to disable, and we have to do all this one more time tomorrow, why didn’t you bring three pairs of men fitted with ports for the backpacks?”

  “The whole point of the pressure capsules is we can send the same men down to make repeated dives. We just hold them inside the capsules after the first excursion, and lower them to the sea floor when needed again, and avoid the whole decompression and recompression cycle.”

  “But what if something bad had happened today? We’d be really stuck, wouldn’t we?”

  Bauer cleared his throat in an ominous way. “We’re taking a different approach for the last part of the SOSUS.”

  Van Gelder didn’t like the tone of this. “What exactly?”

  “It’s just as well you brought it up. In the interest of time, Captain ter Horst had asked me to brief you here, while we make the trip back to Voortrekker.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You’re aware of the ostentatious rules of engagement for nuclear demolitions on land used by the so-called Allies?”

  “Yes.”

  “A responsible naval officer not part of the commando team must accompany the team,” Bauer recited, “to independently affirm that the blast will not cause undue collateral damage among enemy civilians.”

  “That’s right. They make a big deal that their SEALs don’t ever set off an atomic weapon without an objective second opinion rendered on site.”

  Bauer glanced at Van Gelder and smiled. “Now it’s your turn.”

  “My turn for what?”

  “We’re taking out the third SOSUS line with a tactical nuclear device.”

  “I thought the whole point was stealth!”

  “Mind your depth, Copilot,” Bauer snapped.

  Van Gelder was so distracted he’d let the mini’s bow nose up. He corrected, and Bauer sneered.

  “Stealth so far, yes, out of necessity. But the whole point is the last line is the last line. Once we cut it we’re through the ANZA Gap, into the Pacific and free, where more clandestine tenders wait for Voortrekker.”

  “More reloads, you mean, more missiles and torpedoes?”

  Bauer nodded. “The problem of submarines is that when properly used they stay invisible. Yet High Command wants to send an unmistakable message to Asia and the rest of the globe. The Axis is winning, the Axis is on the march, look at our chain of mushroom clouds, the self-infatuated
U.S. is puny and finished…. Thus, the last step tomorrow will be to make some noise.”

  “How? Where?” Van Gelder was horrified, and angry.

  Bauer read his face and chuckled. “Ah. You figured it out. You come with us as the rules-of-engagement man. The Americans have sent a submarine’s first officer more than once. We can’t let ourselves be viewed by world opinion as lagging any in our humanitarian care and concern for native populations.”

  “You mean I have to go with you and help set off an atom bomb.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  Van Gelder knew he looked distressed. Bauer had cynically ambushed him with a terrible but unspoken moral dilemma: Up to now, every target Voortrekker attacked had been purely military. But Bauer kept referring to civilian casualties.

  Bauer fingered the butt of the pistol he always wore on a belt holster. Seated shoulder to shoulder, Van Gelder saw Bauer’s pupils narrow—a physical sign of aggressive intent impossible to fake.

  “I’m sure I needn’t remind you, First Officer, that cowardice in the face of the enemy is punished by death.”

  Damn you to hell, you high-ranking German thug. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Good, good. You’re supposed to be the contrite one. That’s the whole idea. We Kampfschwimmer do all the real work, exploding things.” Bauer eyed Van Gelder up and down. “I’d prefer a man of sterner stuff, but you’ll do.”

  “Don’t push me, Commander, sir. I’ve seen plenty of nuclear combat.”

  “Yes. I heard. And Challenger got away.” Bauer tut-tutted sarcastically.

  Now Van Gelder was truly livid…. He realized this was Bauer’s goal: anger displaced Van Gelder’s natural fear of the upcoming mission.

  But Van Gelder still had serious doubts. “Is this thing really authorized? Or are you some kind of rogue?”

  “A rogue? No. I’m working under written orders from Berlin, with enthusiastic concurrence from your government in Johannesburg. The whole thing’s a joint operation. Your captain has seen the orders, I assure you.”