by Joe Buff
"Sir." Sessions. "Advise the tide has turned."
"Sir," Meltzer said, "we're drifting backward and our stern is being swung to starboard."
"Captain," Bell urged as he pointed to his screen, "there's a British mine too close. It's right near our pump-jet."
"Helm," Jeffrey snapped, "pivot us the other way using the forward auxiliary thruster only."
Meltzer acknowledged, his voice an octave higher than before; they dared not use the aft thruster so close to the mine, and they dared not use the pump-jet. Challenger's heading changed, but she kept drifting crabwise toward the mine. Crewmen shifted nervously in their seats, and glanced at each other wide-eyed.
"There's nothing more we can do but ride it out," Jeffrey said. The forward thruster alone just wasn't strong enough to hold them against the shifting tide. Besides, any other course not blocked by wreckage would take them over a German mine.
Jeffrey watched his screens. Challenger kept drifting. Jeffrey felt everyone's blood pressure rising higher by the second. As the surface battle roared on in the distance — and downed aircraft and ejection seats and spent shell casings hit the sea — the British mine, sitting on the bottom, passed right under Jeffrey's feet. He stared down at the deck, not daring to breathe, wanting to scream. He waited for the mine to blow and snap the ship in two and kill his crew and ruin everything.
Nothing happened.
Soon Challenger was on the move again.
CHAPTER 15
IN THE NORTH SEA
Two hours later, that surface-and-air skirmish left behind and the LMRS probe recovered for a battery charge, Ilse was helping refine Challenger's plan for crossing the southern North Sea.
Bell came over and told her to go see the captain. Bell sounded grim. Ilse went aft and knocked on Jeffrey's door. What did I do now?
"Come in!"
Not for the first time lately, Ilse thought Jeffrey looked tired.
"You look tired," Jeffrey said.
It's like we just read each other's minds. "I think everybody's tired, sir." Ilse made sure to use the "sir," but she noticed Jeffrey's attitude was softer now between the two of them in private, more personal, confiding. His shoulders were less stiff, his whole posture more relaxed — she liked his strong, broad shoulders and the well-toned muscles of his forearms and his neck.
"Take a seat. I have bad news."
"What is it?" Ilse said.
"Running so shallow, we picked up a VLF radio message. It took a lot of work to clean up the signal for decryption. ARBOR has been arrested."
Ilse exhaled. "We all saw this coming, didn't we?"
"Yeah," Jeffrey said.
"Do we turn back?"
"No. Her last dead-drop signal said the jigs and dies for mass-producing the missiles are ready at the lab…. The mission goes forward. We invoke the contingency plan."
"I thought you'd said there wasn't one."
"I lied…. No, I withheld information. For security."
"Oh, God." Everything fell into place. "Don't tell me—"
"Yes. You have to go."
"Why?"
"This isn't my idea. It's in the written orders. We need someone to break cover inside, and find their way around. You're it."
"What about the SEALs? Chief Montgomery."
"Look," Jeffrey said. "Navy SpecWar language skills emphasize just talking to the locals. Not blending in as one of them."
"But my German isn't perfect, either. I could never pass."
"You won't have to, Ilse. You go as who you are, a genuine South African Boer person."
"Like a visiting technician?"
Jeffrey nodded. "There's plenty of that going on. It's one more thing this German regime learned from World War Two mistakes: close cooperation with their allies from the get-go. With Japan, the cargo U-boats they sent over were too little too late. Crated jet fighters, V-two rocket parts, uranium oxide…"
"Um, I didn't know that." Ilse shifted in her seat, and crossed her legs. "But won't the Germans be expecting us, now ARBOR's caught?"
"Not necessarily, though for sure they'll be on heightened alert. We just have to take the chance she was able to plant that computer worm. Otherwise… They've arrested a number of Mossad moles the last few months. There's no reason they'd think ARBOR at Greifswald was special, not right away."
"What if they make her talk?"
"The moles were conditioned against that. The Israelis are state-of-the-art in counterinterrogation techniques." Ilse shivered. "Short of suicide, you mean."
"You'll have to start hard workouts, and refresher training on the Draeger and the weaponry, at once. Sit in on Clayton's briefings from now on, rehearsals, all of that. You know the drill."
There was a knock on the door. Jeffrey looked annoyed.
"Come in!"
It was the messenger of the watch.
"Sir, the XO's compliments. He reports the shocks from our battle with the two-twelve and two-fourteen, and running repairs since then, appear to have freed the jammed foreplanes. He requests permission to deploy them, for enhanced maneuverability."
"Tell him negative. I'm afraid they may jam again while deployed. Keep them retracted."
The messenger, for confirmation, repeated the response. He left.
Jeffrey turned to Ilse. "The foreplanes deployed could make us unstable at very high speed."
"Oh." Ilse liked it when Jeffrey explained things to her.
"Sorry," Jeffrey said. For the interruption, or for getting irritated by it?
"There's something else, Ilse. Your Government-in-Exile talked with the Pentagon…. I know it's small compensation for having to risk your neck. You've been granted the assimilated rank of lieutenant in the Free South African Navy."
Ilse smiled. "What's that mean, exactly?"
"Pay and privileges equal to a naval officer of said rank."
"Have I been drafted?"
"No. Technically you're still a civilian."
"Can I eat in the wardroom again?"
"You need to ask the XO. I can't overrule him. I mean, I could but I won't."
"Um, okay."
Jeffrey laughed. "I'm sure it'll be just fine. Bell knew the contingency plan all along."
Aha. "That's why he was hard on me, wasn't it? To harden, condition me."
"Bell's in charge of training, and I sure know he likes to seize the initiative there." Jeffrey grew distant for a moment, and Ilse sensed things between him and Bell she didn't understand — things in the recent past that were resolved now. But then, she realized, some of the things between her and Jeffrey were resolved now too, the censure for her bloopers, his stand-offishness before.
"Look at it this way," Jeffrey said. "If we make it back from Greifswald, you can even have unlimited seconds on dessert."
The two of them made eye contact, and held it. Ilse fought down a grin. Jeffrey fought down a grin. Finally Jeffrey glanced at the bulkhead, then shuffled papers on his desk. Ilse sensed the meeting was over. She stood up.
Jeffrey hesitated. He grew serious. "Please don't go, Ilse…. There's something else I want to talk to you about."
"What?" He seemed almost… needful?
"The message said Deutschland's been spotted in the North Atlantic."
Ilse had to sit down again. "I thought she was headed for Canada. The briefing papers you got at Cape Verde, they said so." That courier package.
"That's what I was told…. And to think I felt relieved that Deutschland was so far away, after worrying about meeting her any moment when we stalked those U-boats." Jeffrey shook his head, annoyed with himself.
"Deutschland's supposed attack on Canada was a ruse, which our side fell for. By now she could be almost anywhere. Including through the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap, into the Norwegian Sea. She may be damaged, heading home for repairs. Maybe."
"You seem worried," Ilse said. Jeffrey clearly wanted to share his concern with her. Ilse was worried enough herself. She came to better understand the aw
ful pressure Jeffrey must be under constantly.
"I know Deutschland's captain. Kurt Eberhard." Jeffrey said the name with disgust.
"He's good?" In spite of the tension, she could see another barrier between her and Jeffrey was being lowered; he was speaking to her now as Jeffrey, not as Captain Fuller. And soon they'd be off the ship together, on another SEAL raid….
"Yeah, he's good. It seems he trained on Russian SSNs for several years before the war. Up under the ice cap, off of U.S. naval bases, trailing our boomers, you name it…. We worked together, three or four years back." Ilse listened, letting Jeffrey talk, unburden himself. "He was an up-and-corner in the Bundesmarine, the peacetime German Navy. A real charmer when he wants to be. This combined assignment in Washington, he had free rein in our group…. He hates my guts."
"Sounds like it's mutual."
"Well…" Jeffrey looked right at her. "Let's just say, we both had our egos, and in the case of him and me, opposites did not attract."
* * *
After lunch, Ilse sat at her console with sonar headphones on. Kathy and her techs were busy. The active wide arrays were working hard to cloak Challenger, suppressing ambient echoes and plugging holes in the ocean to whichever flank seemed most threatening.
Challenger hid along the chaotic boundary between two major currents: the warm vestiges of the Gulf Stream, flowing east through the Dover Straits, and the frigid Nordic Current coming south from the Arctic Circle. In the confused sonar conditions where the currents met and fought, a sub-on-sub encounter could occur with lethal suddenness.
Ilse put down her SEAL raid briefing files for a moment, and strained to listen on the bow sphere. She was depressed by what she heard. There were no biologics. The mid-North Sea, once teeming with life, host to a thriving fishing industry, instead was now a barren desert. There were no shrimp or crab or lobster, no plaice or haddock or herring or cod, at least not alive.
Above the ship was a heavy oil slick. It went on and on, for countless miles. The thick sludge was good for stealth, Jeffrey said. It blocked airborne LIDAR. It smoothed the sea to hide Challenger's surface hump. It suppressed the surface capillary effects of her internal Bernoulli wave, which might otherwise be picked up by special radar. It also suffocated life.
There was no oxygen transport by air/water wave-mixing now. There was no plankton photosynthesis, the first step in the upper ocean's food chain. There was only darkness at high noon, persistent petrotoxins, and mass death.
Right now Challenger was passing one of the drilling platforms, several miles to port. This one tapped natural gas. Before the war the gas had been brought to the U.K. by seabed pipelines. Now, the pipelines and most of the gas and oil rigs everywhere were wrecked. Some of the emergency shutdown valves had been destroyed. This particular natural gas platform still stood above the water, badly damaged. The gas burned uncontrollably. A huge flare rose hundreds of feet in the sky. Ilse could hear it hiss and roar on passive sonar; broken equipment clanked from the wind and waves and currents. The flame was virtually smokeless, Ilse knew — natural gas was clean. It burned day and night, as it had for months. She'd seen pictures of it on the news. The platform fire is like an eternal flame, she told herself. A memorial to the dead, millions and billions of sea creatures, animals and plants, invertebrates, crustaceans, fish and mammals and birds.
Ilse, once more, thought about where she had to go in the Baltic, what she had to do there. Last time, Durban, it was for her brother and her family, and her rage had made her strong.
Again she felt the rage mount up. Greifswald. A searing instant of nuclear revenge. God damn the Axis for what they were doing to the world.
* * *
After dinner was cleared and his officers left, Jeffrey sat in his chair at the head of the wardroom table. Another afternoon of hard physical training and weapons drill was behind him. He'd've rather had an additional month to prepare. Ain't gonna happen. Now, Jeffrey rested.
Shajo Clayton's group filed in. Ilse returned from the head. Clayton opened the meeting. Jeffrey watched as Clayton surveyed the room.
"I know some of you aren't happy about working with a civilian," Clayton said. "I know this violates our basic doctrine."
Some of the enlisted SEALS murmured. Chief Montgomery sat there stone-faced.
"Then let me disabuse you fast," Clayton said. "Miss Reebeck's been places, done things with me, that would've earned a man in uniform a Silver Star. She knows when to keep her head down, and when to shoot, and when she shoots she doesn't miss." The three SEALs who survived Durban nodded.
"Besides," Clayton said, "there's no way we can pull this mission off without her help. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"
None of the SEALs from Texas said anything.
"You heard the lieutenant," Montgomery bellowed. "Did he make himself perfectly clear?"
Jeffrey had to smile inside. The SEALs left no doubt whatsoever they got the message now.
"Welcome to the team, Miss Reebeck," Montgomery said. The crisp, lively way he said it left no doubt he was sincere.
"Thank you," Ilse said to them all.
Jeffrey rose to get more coffee, on purpose, body language meant to get the others to relax. He sat down again.
Clayton turned to Ilse. "There are things you need to know now, Ilse, including the unknowables. It'll be important for your situational awareness."
She nodded.
"The rest of you pay close attention," Montgomery said in a threatening almost-whisper; Ilse thought he was even scarier when he whispered like that than when he raised his voice. Then Montgomery grinned, as if to say to his guys, No hard feelings.
Ilse cleared her throat. "I thought of some questions since Captain Fuller told me I have to go. The way my mind works and I learn, it'd be best if I could ask them first. Later, you can fill in anything else… if that's all right."
"Perfect," Clayton said.
"First of all, how do we really know ARBOR's been arrested? Maybe the message was a deception, sent by the Germans in our code to throw us off. You know, if they can't find the mole but they're afraid of us attacking."
"Let me field that," Jeffrey said. "There are authentication keys and backstop procedures for one-way comms to U.S. Navy SSNs and SSBNs. A lot's changed since the days of the Walker spy ring…. It's all top-secret, of course, like the name ARBOR itself. Let's just say certain items have to be inserted at the flag-officer level, an admiral personally I mean, for a message of this importance. At our end, everything checked out."
"Okay," Ilse said, "but there's something I don't get. If ARBOR had such high access at the lab, why didn't she just smuggle out the computer records to begin with? Why the rigmarole of handing them off to us?"
"May I, Captain?" Clayton said.
Jeffrey nodded.
"They have tight security, Ilse. People would be searched."
"What about those new holographic cubes? You could swallow one. You know, body pack."
"The searches are very thorough, imaging sensors that see under your clothes, others that look through your body. The critical hardware and software's heavily restricted within the installation, and completely isolated from the outside world. They use obsolescent magnetic hard-drive storage on purpose: it's bulky, hard to conceal, easy to erase by making you walk through an electromagnetic scrambler field."
"I suspect," Jeffrey added, "that if they even find you with unauthorized storage media or read/write units, they string you up."
"Then how did ARBOR manage to communicate at all?"
"Old-fashioned spy tradecraft," Clayton said, "from long before the microchip."
"Think of her as a datalink with an ultralow baud rate," Jeffrey said. "Only minimal information could pass either way, and very slowly."
"Okay," Ilse said. "That works for me. And I see why we need to sneak in covertly with the A-bombs. They wouldn't get through the front door…. Next question. I know the lab's supposed to be hardened against atomic attack. Bu
t it's tough for me to believe the U.S. doesn't have some conventional ground penetrator round that could pulverize the place."
Clayton sighed. "Beyond the fact that if we blew it up long distance, we'd lose the intel?"
"We lose the intel now! You can't expect me to hack their systems. I wouldn't know where to begin!"
"Calm down," Jeffrey said. "We didn't know ARBOR'd be arrested. You can still perform an invaluable visual recon."
"Visual recon, okay, right," Ilse said primly.
Again, Jeffrey had to smile inside. She's a cool one.
"Anyway, Ilse," Clayton said, "the roof is cleverly designed. Multiple layers of tungsten spikes, spaced composite armor, prestressed concrete and steel, explosion chambers vented to the atmosphere. Designed to break up gun-bomb fission warheads, deflect kinetic energy, set off H.E. munitions shallow so they just blow into the air, and incendiaries burn out harmlessly. The last few years, a lot of countries constructed places like that."
"Look," Jeffrey said. "In World War Two, the Nazis built bomb-proof U-boat bases all along the French Atlantic coast. They used a seven-layer roof system, including a predetonator superstructure, and reinforced concrete, and voids. The subs went in and out through three-foot-thick steel blast doors…. Despite what you may have seen in old war movies, the Allies never once really damaged a single pen. They're all still standing, being used-again."
"Sixty-five years later?" Ilse said incredulously.
"Yes, sixty-five years later. And if you're wondering why they don't use hollowed-out caverns in the Alps or Harz Mountains for their weapons work, they do. Some of that dates back to Nazi times. There just isn't space enough for everything."
Ilse hesitated. "I have another issue, about the lab's hardening against nuclear attack. That's from the outside, correct?"
"Right so far," Clayton said.
"But this lab needs inlets and outlets for cooling water and air. When we detonate the bombs, won't the blast shoot through the openings?"
"Smart question," Jeffrey said. "The utility paths, air vents or whatever, are all protected by ultrafast-acting hardened shutters. They're triggered under local battery power by sensitive seismometers. When the A-bombs go off, a tremor will arrive first through the concrete and steel of the building, which have very high rates of sound transmission. That trips the seismometers. By the time the blast itself arrives, through the inside air, or through the fluid in the cooling pipes, or eating through the concrete, the shutters will've closed."