Thunder In The Deep (02)

by Joe Buff

  "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 awful 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 midNorth 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. But 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."

  "It's just like our own modern hardened installations," Clayton said. "That much about the lab we know."

  Jeffrey touched Clayton's shoulder. "We suspect. As the rules-of-engagement guy, that's one .thing I have to check."

  Ilse made eye contact with Jeffrey. "What if you decide the atomic demolition rules of engagement aren't satisfied?"

  "We do as much damage as we can by conventional means, then fight our way out."

  "What if we can't escape?"

  "We surrender."

  Ilse's, eyes widened. She shook her head hard. "I'd be hanged."

  "Everybody," Jeffrey said. "This installation must be destroyed. The orders say we have to go in. They don't say we have to come out."

  "But, but, but why doesn't the U.S. Air Force or the RAF just paralyze the place, by knocking out its power supply?"

  Clayton laughed. "Ilse, this isn't Iraq or Kosovo. For years, the Germans worked to protect their national power grid. A lot of trunk high-tension lines were buried underground, as part of the so-called Green movement, or at least that was the cover story. The open-air wires are heavily insulated against carbon-fiber weapons, and the power plants themselves are sealed. High-speed switches shunt power right past any point that's been disrupted, while crack emergency crews make quick repairs. Redundancy's built in."

  "At this point," Jeffrey said, "Germany's practically turned electricity into a cottage industry. Every key installation has its own backup generators, just in case, a lot of them natural-gas powered. They get the natural gas from Russia, via pipeline through Eastern Europe. Like everything Russian, it's strictly off-limits to attack, by the Joint Chiefs' global ROEs. And speaking of Green, the Axis is really into alternate energy sources now, like fuel-cells, and solar and wind power, and the tides. And conservation, of course."

  Ilse digested it all. "I have a different kind of question. What if ARBOR didn't get to plant the computer worm that's supposed to help us get in? What if the Germans found it and erased it? What if they're waiting for us?"

  Jeffrey leaned forward. "Then the team is tasked to fight our way inside best we can, and if I say so, set off the A-bombs under fire."

  PREDAWN, 0 DAY MINUS 1.

  The messenger woke Jeffrey as ordered at 0320 local. Jeffrey showered and dressed, and stepped into the CACC at 0328. The messenger was waiting with a mug of hot black coffee. He guided Jeffrey's hand to the mug in the dark.

  After Jeffrey had taken a few sips, Lieutenant Willey said, "Good morning, Captain." Willey had the conn.

  Jeffrey took a deep gulp while his eyes adapted to the rig-for-black. As he thought about his task this morning, his drowsiness vanished, replaced by a tightness in his chest.

  "Morning, Engineer. How's the leg?" Willey sat sideways to the command console, since the cast kept him from bending his left knee.

  "Not slowing me down much, sir."

  "Good. Good."

  "I'm real glad I never got off the ship at Cape Verde, Captain. They'd've never let me come."

  Jeffrey chuckled. He took the right seat at the console.

  He studied the situation inside and outside the boat. On his backlit screen he read the digital log entries made since he'd turned in four hours ago. While he slept, it had begun to rain. This added some broadband noise, mostly across the 100-to-1000 hertz acoustic band, where detection ranges here were longest. This w
ould help cloak Challenger on conventional passive sonar, but such cloaking cut both ways.

  Satisfied, Jeffrey turned to Willey.

  "I have the conn," Jeffrey said.

  "You have the conn."

  "This is the captain. I have the conn."

  "Aye, aye," the watchstanders said. Jeffrey heard Ilse's voice, too. Doesn't she ever sleep? He listened to Willey hobbling aft, and called up the nav chart and the gravimeter. Challenger lurked, almost touching the bottom, in one hundred ten feet Of water, hidden from the nearby Denmark coast by Jutland Bank. The southern tip of Norway, at Kristiansand, lay sixty nautical miles due north. Halfway there, the seabed dropped off steeply, into an ancient geological feature, the Norwegian Trough, fifteen hundred feet deep or more. Jeffrey's night orders had been to make for the Bank, not the Trough, to stick to the unexpected.

  The North Sea oil slick was left behind. As Ilse predicted, though, a recent gale had stirred the local bottom muck, and water turbidity was high, shielding the boat from enemy airborne LIDAR. Wave action mixing, and the slow current out of the Skaggerak mouth gaping just ahead, helped obscure Challenger's minimal thermal signature. Ilse had explained last night at dinner, in that sexy way she talked shop, that the half-knot current from the Skaggerak was the net effect of rain and snow on land: River runoff from ten countries on the landlocked Baltic had nowhere else to go. Anyway, the current helped cool Challenger's reactor

  while the ship held position on autohover. As long as she didn't move, she made scant surface wake anomaly._ The solar magnetic storm was stronger than forecast, already at G5, "extreme." No one would spot the ship's magnetic anomaly effects. Based on her success in shallow water so far, Jeffrey began to think Challenger could go anywhere, do anything.

  It was a good thing, too, because their next task seemed impossible: Penetrate the German defenses at the entrance to the Skaggerak.

  The deeper water to port was very thoroughly mined, with bottom-influence German CAPTORs. The mine field's extent was announced by the Germans, according to international law. The CAPTORs were known by U.S. Naval Intel to be switched on and off by encrypted acoustic signal and fiber-optic link, to constantly change the German submarine safety corridor. The corridor itself was patrolled by Class 212 diesel/AlPs, and Rubis SSNs. Not frontline boats against the best the U.S. and U.K. had, they were more of a submarine Home Guard, but dangerous.