Crush Depth cjf-3

by Joe Buff

  "How am I supposed to get to the airport? You saw the road:'

  "Can you ride?"

  "Yes."

  "Cross country?"

  "Yes."

  "Take one of the horses tied up in back. Just stay parallel to the road, then turn right at the fork by the lake. The middle of the island's so narrow it's impossible to get lost:'

  "Is there anything else I should do?"

  "No. Just get up there. Try to prevent mass hysteria?' "How am I supposed to do that?"

  "Ilse, look. We're all in this together. If everyone has to die, let them die with hope. Tell them to sing, to pray, anything. Tell them help will get here somebow."

  Ilse went outside. An angry crowd had gathered, but people had their backs to town hall.

  Ilse realized what was going on. "Constable!"

  Henga came outside.

  A mob was manhandling the captured Kampfschwimmer chief. Chief Montgomery was trying to restore order, but people in the mob were armed.

  "Stop that at once!" Henga shouted. He fired three shots from his pistol into the air.

  "It's his fault," people yelled. "He killed our friends. If we have to die, he goes first!"

  "This lawlessness won't help anything," Henga shouted back.

  But Ilse could read the mood of the crowd. Their rage was far beyond arguing.

  The German's leg was bandaged where he'd been hit in the battle. Local men held him upright while others tied his hands bebind his back. Others held Montgomery at bay, at gunpoint.

  Someone threw a rope around a telephone pole. The mob pressed closer to watch. Ilse's heart pounded. She knew she should do something.

  "Stop it," she yelled. "He's a prisoner of war! You can't do this!"

  "He's a war criminal! we have witnesses!"

  "No. This isn't right. Don't do it."

  "Shut up, you. You aren't one of us. You brought this trouble when you came."

  Someone tied a noose. They draped it around the German's neck and drew it snug.

  Ilse wanted to look away, but an animal part of her felt the way the islanders did. Her life was as forfeit as theirs. Revenge was the only thing left.

  Men grabbed the free end of the rope and pulled.

  The German was yanked off his feet. He rose into the air. He kicked and struggled as his eyes bulged. The mob pressed even closer, standing underneath and all around to see.

  Ilse moved closer too.

  The German's face turned purple and began to swell. His tongue popped out of his mouth and turned black. He still kicked wildly. He began to sway and twist back and forth in the wind. His hands fought desperately against the ropes that bound them. The noose bit even tighter, completely crushing his windpipe, pinching shut the veins in his neck like a tourniquet.

  His brain screamed for more oxygen. His heart used its last reserves of power to try to comply, and pushed more blood up through his arteries. The German's face became a balloon, a dark purple balloon, streaked with patterns of ruptured blood vessels like tangled vines.

  It seemed to go on forever. Ilse saw his clothing bulge with a giant reflexive erection.

  She couldn't stand it, and ran to the back of the town hall.

  She chose a horse that looked relatively young and fit. It was a Ilght gray mare, already saddled. Ilse mounted and rode from Waitangi. When she glanced back, the Kampfschwimmer dangled Ilfeless from the telephone pole. The lynch mob broke up and joined the procession north to the airstrip.

  Ilse rode her horse up the narrow neck of Chatham Island at a fast canter. On her right were pristine sand dunes and beaches that led to the huge tidal lagoon. She saw a fishing boat chugging north there, its deck a microcosm of the scene of refugees and belongings along the road; another fishing boat, empty now, was heading back south for Owenga.

  On her left the surf crashed hard against the base of the bluffs, in the most open part of big Petra Bay. Mist sprayed skyward through blowholes, where the ageless seas had eroded channels through the cliffs. Ilse skirted peat bogs on low ground. Everywhere birds hopped or perched or swam or flew, well adapted to the trade winds that never ceased. Flowers and trees and bushes and vines overflowed the nature reserves she passed.

  Chatham Island had such a multitude of beautiful pocket ecosystems, and soon they would all be destroyed.

  Ilse pressed her horse onward, opening gates when she met fences too high to safely jump, and finally crossed the road through a gaggle of creeping autos. She paused to let her horse rest and drink from a stream.

  She reached the airport. It looked like the world's most insane yard sale — crowds of people and jumbles of merchandise everywhere. Here, though, the people looked distraught and terrified.

  Ilse saw why Henga had sent her. The handful of town council members and clergy were swamped by an ocean of distressed humanity. No one was really in charge. Islanders crowded willy-nilly into the few buildings by rhe airstrip, to get out of the wind. The others milled about aimlessly, or sat in isolation in their cars, or squatted abjectly on the ground.

  Thete were no arrangements for public sanitation. Stragglers continued to pour in from north and south. More boats arrived, with the handful of families from the other inhabited island in the Chatham group, Pitt Island. A few citizens with some presence of mind were making sure the others left the runway clear. People kept scanning the sky.

  Ilse knew there was really no point.

  She did not feel like singing or praying — some of the islanders had already thought to do that anyway. She started back down the road to Waitangi.

  Near the fork by the lake, she noticed a big cloud of dust approaching from the south.

  She urged her horse to go faster, to investigate. Then she reined up short. She heard a strange noise, like thundering and bleating. She saw them: tens of thousands of sheep, stampeding north to escape the wildfires raging out of control.

  The old farm truck she'd ridden in before, its transmission failing now, was keeping barely ahead of the sheep. It stopped near her for a moment. Henga and Clayton and Montgomery rode in the cab. In the back were several body bags, the losses from the firelight, including Clayton's three enlisted men.

  "Get back?' Clayton told her. "You'll be trampled?'

  Montgomery fired several rifle shots at the sheep. He felled a few, but the others kept coming relentlessly. Ilse saw some sheep were partly burned, wild with pain, or bled where they'd crashed through fence railings or been torn by leaping barbed-wire enclosures.

  "We have to divert them from the airport!" Henga said. "How?" Ilse said. Once sheep and people met there would be many deaths.

  "A barricade of cars!" Henga shouted. "Across the road by the fork! We'll divert them right up the island! Come on!"

  The truck took off again. Ilse spurred her mount to a full gallop, dangerous for a casual rider and a partly trained horse. But time was now of the essence.

  They reached the tail end of the refugee convoy, halted in a tangle of gridlock. The islanders, many of them sheep herders, understood the problem at once. They started their cars and trucks and rearranged them in a line, straddling the road and stretching well into the sands on either side. The front edge of the sheep stampede was getting closer. The ground actually shook. There were almost a quarter-million sheep on the island, and half of them were bearing down on the batricade.

  The stampede reached the barricade. The air was thick with dusr, and with the profoundly disturbing waiIlng of some hundred thousand crazed sheep. They began to press against each other and batter against the vehicles. They churned everywhere, and some sheep were trampled and crushed. The vehicles rocked and began to be shoved aside. llse's horse reared and she almost fell off; she tried to talk to it soothingly.

  "Set them on fire!" Henga shouted.

  "The sheep?" Ilse yelled.

  "The cars. Quickly!"

  Islanders wanted to save their things from the cars, but Henga said it was too late for that. He and Clayton and Montgomery went to wor
k on the cars with their weapons.

  Everyone fled on foot, toward the airstrip. The line of cars burned fiercely as gas tanks exploded one by one. A wall of flame blocked the road; the sheep stampede was turned away. Choking smoke began to drift in the direction of the airstrip. Ilse turned her horse and started back that way.

  When she got there the smoke kept up with her, and billowing sooty puffs sometimes blotted the clear blue sky. It added a surreal note to the situation at the airstrip, which resembled now a giant displaced-persons camp. As Ilse passed clumps of civilians, and even above the aromas of her horse, she smelled the islanders' fear — a sharply unpleasant, pungent, sour body odor. Many islanders were crying ar the loss of rheir herds. The stampede of their beloved creatures, their liveIlhood of breeding stock and wool and mutton for export, brought home the ultimate scale of the disaster.

  Then Ilse heard another strange noise. It came from the northeast. She turned to look.

  She saw two black dots low above the water, and thought they were seabirds. Then she saw several more, much higher. The sun glinted off metal or cockpit glass.

  Aircraft.

  But there's no airbase in that direction for seven thousand miles.

  The two dots resolved themselves into a pair of Harrier jump jets. The other aircraft lost altitude, and made a fly-by of the island in plain view of the crowd. One of them had a big propeller on each wing and a saucer over the fuselage; the others had a jet engine under each wing, plus two airdropped torpedoes. Ilse knew the saucer held a special radar, for surveillance and air-traffic control. The others looked Ilke S-3B Vikings, long-endurance antisubmarine patrol planes. Ilse and the islanders could read the markings on their sides. Big black letters said NAVY. They cIlmbed again, and the Vikings proceeded east.

  The two Harrier jump jets approached the airstrip, slowed, and hovered briefly. With a deafening whine they settled down in a cloud of flying dirt and smelly jet exhaust. On their sides were the letters USMC. United States Marine Corps.

  Ilse knew they had to have come from a carrier, a big American aircraft carrier. It would have heIlcopters too, lots of them. The islanders weren't alone.

  THIRTY-TWO

  On Challenger

  Bell still had the conn, and Jeffrey and Wilson studied a large-scale navigation plot. Challenger continued east, four thousand feet down, in the sweet spot of the deep sound channel. The ship was trailing a sonar-towed array, for the best possible detection of enemy subs. Everyone in the control room was at a very high state of alert. Jeffrey could see it in his people's necks and shoulders, and in their eyes and the set of their jaws. He needed them on their toes, but too much tension would drain them too quickly.

  He reminded his crew they could be at battle stations for many hours. "Keep on the ball, folks, but don't gives yourselves an ulcer or a migraine." Jeffrey watched some of the crewmen try to loosen up a little. They resumed their silent vigils at their stations.

  "Overflights," Kathy Milgrom reported. "They sound like S-3B Vikings, Captain…. They' re turning back west."

  "Very well, Sonar:' Jeffrey said. He knew from the conversation with the admiral at Pearl Harbor that the Vikings came from the USS John C. Stennis. The Stennis was one of the U.S. Navy's newest nuclear-powered supercarriers. She'd been rushed out of the naval base at San Diego days ago, because of Voortrekker's approach, to help guard another portion of the Australia — New Zealand — Antarctic Gap. When word reached Pearl Harbor of the bomb on Chatham Island, the Stennis was ordered to make flank speed, and charge ahead of her slower, conventionally powered escorts, to try to organize an airlift. Soon, Jeffrey knew, she would even outdistance the nuclear subs that always scouted ahead of the rest of the carrier group, because the Stennis was many knots faster than those subs, faster than anything but the Seawolf class and Challenger — and Voortrekker.

  By doing this the Stennis left herself very badly exposed.

  "The Vikings will guard the shallower waters toward Chatham Island," Wilson stated.

  The Vikings had sonobuoys and magnetic anomaly detectors, plus their torpedoes. "I want the Collins boats to remain covering the main part of the line from Chatham Island to the north end of the sea-mount range:'

  Jeffrey nodded. The procession of sea mounts stretching south, to his mind, still defined the far edge of the theater of battle.

  Wilson looked at the chart. "I want my Collins boats to move closer to each other, like this." He made a grouping gesture with his hands.

  "Why closer, Commodore?"

  "Voortrekker has eight torpedo tubes. Each of the diesels has six. I want their arcs of fire, the maximum range of their fish, to overlap. Ter Horst will be outgunned if he tries to push past them… Once rhe diesels are repositioned, have them start to ping. With the Vikings and the minefields, they'll form a solid wall and force Voortrekker east:'

  Jeffrey understood. As operations officer, he filled in some practical details and relayed Wilson's orders to the secure communications room, next to the control room. Soon the lieutenant (j.g.) in charge there called back on the intercom to say the four Australian subs had acknowledged.

  "Now look at these sea mounts: " Wilson said.

  Jeffrey studied the chart. The sea-mount peaks, extinct undersea volcanoes, were very deep. But each soared four or five thousand feet above the abyssal plain of the Southwest Pacific Basin. The sea mounts were significant terrain, the local high ground.

  "Voortrekker almost certainly waited for her minisub in the Bounty Trough somewhere,"

  Wilson said. The gigantic undersea amphitheater, well west of the sea mounts.

  "I concur, sir," Jeffrey said; he'd concluded that back in the minisub.

  'The sea mounts give us good places to hide. We can ambush him, as he comes east to avoid our other forces:' "Can we really be sure he'll come east?"

  "The bomb, Captain, the timing of the bomb. The weather, the geography, it's all part of the Axis plan. It has to be."

  Jeffrey nodded. "Their ocean-surveillance satellites let them track the progress of the tropical storm, and told them when Stennis would get here."

  'The Stennis is their next objective. Ter Horst intends to sink the Stennis."

  "And the islanders were made into bait for the carrier," Jeffrey said angrily, "by planting the bomb:' That's typical ter Horst thinking.

  "But Vow-trekker needs to move quickly, Captain, before the evacuation airlift is complete, or before the tritium warhead blows, whichever comes first."

  Jeffrey nodded grimly. After that, the Stennis could withdraw and regroup with her escorts. Yes, Voortrekker has to come east.

  Wilson looked again at the chart. "The northernmost sea mount is too obvious. If we hide ourselves there, ter Horsr would expect it. He'll make a counterambush, and we're dead."

  "You think we should hover behind the second sea mount south?"

  "It's less obvious. Always do the unexpected."

  Jeffrey hesitated. "But ter Horst will be thinking this too. He has similar charts. He'll outpsych us, sir, and know we're really behind the second sea mount, because the first one is so obvious."

  Wilson frowned. "You mean we should use the first sea mount after all? Outpsych him?"

  Wilson thought, then shook his head. "I don't like this. It's too much of a gamble.

  Whichever sea mount we choose, the odds of getting it right are only fifty-fifty?'

  "Sir, with respect, maybe we should choose neither." Jeffrey pointed at the chart. "This spot of low terrain between the rwo sea mounts. It's almost like a sinkhole in the basin floor?'

  "Lurk there? It's deeper than our crush depth." Challenger's official crush depth was fifteen thousand feet.

  "Sir, when you were unconscious on the South Africa raid, we were forced down to sixteen thousand five hundred."

  "I read your report, Captain. But that was before you took more battle damage, and before the New London refit." Wilson looked at Jeffrey over the top of his reading glasses. "Need I remind y
ou that the repairs were hasty? And that we haven't taken the ship below ten thousand feet since leaving dry dock?"

  "Sir, we have to do the unexpected. It's bad enough ter Horst found out we're here. We only have four tubes to Voortrekker's eight" The closest Collins boat could never reach the scene in time to help. "Without regaining the element of surprise, we'll lose the one-on-one melee for sute."

  "We could have a serious flooding casualty before we even meet him. We might have a hull implosion that deep, or be forced to do an emergency blow and make a racket and give ourselves away and be desrroyed. CINCPACFLT said we're expendable in an equal exchange of losses with Voortrekker: He didn't tell us to go and commit sheer suicide."

  "I know, sir. But I really think we need to use the sink hole, exactly because ter Horst won't expect it… It's a calculated risk."

  On Voortrekker

  Van Gelder and ter Horst leaned over the digital navigation plot. The control-room air was cold and stale, and it was very quiet, with as much equipment as possible throughout the ship shut down for stealth. Voortrekker moved very slowly, at shallow depth — much speed would make a surface wake that might be seen from the air. For now Voortrekker mostly drifted with the surface currents, which in this area ran east. She used the sonar layer right beneath her to shield her minimal noise from the still-intact Chatham Island SOSUS line on the ocean floor so far below.

  "Overlay the tactical plot," ter Horst said, almost whispering.

  The navigator punched some keys. Van Gelder saw the icons now for the passive sonar contacts. Viking aircraft patrolled in the distance, their flight paths varying unpredictably. Four nuclear-armed Collins-class diesel submarines pinged in a line further east, as if to advertise their presence, as a dare. The line they formed was miles north of the SOSUS, and made a last but formidable enemy barrier to Voortrekker's advance.

  If one of the Vikings turned and came this way, Van Gelder knew, ter Horst would have to make an ugly choice: stay shallow, and risk being spotted by magnetic anomaly and bombed by atomic torpedoes, or else dive the ship through the layer, and be picked up by the SOSUS instead, with the same unpleasant end result. There was no way to know what the Vikings might do next. Voortrekker's situation was very dangerous. Yet Van Gelder felt more at peace, back now on the vessel he loved — his home. He was doing a job he'd been well trained for, an undersea warship's first officer — a job he knew he was good at and he enjoyed.