Crush Depth cjf-3

by Joe Buff

  "Sir," Bell said, "we're pretty sure Voortrekker is down to four tubes now. Ter Horst's rate of fire, and his tactics, both point to four weapons per salvo, not eight. I conjecture he took damage from the aircraft he shot down. That's good news."

  Jeffrey considered this carefully. "It is good news. It evens the odds. But considering what's at Stake here, XO, fifty-fifty odds aren't good enough."

  "Understood, sir." Bell returned to his console. Ilse gave Kathy more help in figuring out and adjuSting for the unique acoustic conditions under the shelf. Kathy and her sonar chief and their technicians struggled toward Jeffrey's next goal: regaining contact on Voortrekker. Jeffrey very much wanted that first contact to be on ter Horst's vessel, not on more of his incoming weapons.

  Except for the noises from outside, and the clicking of keyboards, and the murmuring of the sonarmen, the control room was very quiet.

  Challenger continued more or less South, farther in under the ice. Jeffrey windowed SessionS's navigation plot. Challenger's actual course was a snaking path, for two reasons: Harrison, at the helm, needed to avoid the obstructions in the shelf roof and on the ocean floor. Also, since the terrain was too constricted to stream a towed array, the ship had to turn right or left to expose the wide-aperture arrays toward north — ter Horst was undoubtedly out there somewhere, pursuing. Hearing him, before he heard and pinned down Jeffrey, required sifting through confusing raw data with every ounce of supercomputer power, signal-processing acumen, experience, and talent that Challenger and her sonar people possessed.

  Jeffrey watched the red and green digital timers tick away each second, to the bingo point and the ultimate deadline. He reminded himself that when that red timer ran out, Jeffrey would have helped make naval history, whatever that history might say. The thought made him feel alert and alive — it was not just a cliché that he'd trained for this moment his entire adult life.

  The part of Jeffrey that went through dread or doubt was very deeply repressed. He could sometimes sense it, that weaker human element, grating against his consciousness, and he forced it down even deeper. His job was to make sure the history books of the future said something favorable about him today. Recognizing this gave him an adrenaline rush, the latest of many, and he savored the sensations for all they were worth.

  Jeffrey planned ahead, trying to project his next move, and ter Horst's next move, and Jeffrey's countermove, and ter Horst's countermove to that. Part of this is like playing chess. Whoever can see clearly the most moves ahead can win… I need a better plan than what little I've got right now.

  Jeffrey considered his options carefully. He talked with Bell, and they drew sketches on Jeffrey's console with their light pens.

  At last, Jeffrey sensed excitement among the people to his left.

  "Contact reestablished on Voortrekker," Kathy reported. "Contact is a multipath reflection contact."

  "Where is he?" Jeffrey said.

  "Somewhere north of us, sir, as expected. Beyond that, range and bearing are impoSsible to determine."

  "Show me your waterfall display."

  Kathy passed the data to Jeffrey's screen. He saw a dozen different lines, on different bearings near due north, each gradually tracing down the waterfalls of broadband noise.

  Normally, each of these lines would indicate a separate submarine contact on exactly that bearing. Now, Jeffrey knew, all of them were distortions of Voortrekker. All of the lines were faint, meaning a weak or distant contact. Some lines faded out altogether, then others would appear from somewhere else.

  Kathy clicked on each waterfall contact, then showed Jeffrey the tonals on that bearing.

  The wide-aperture arrays picked up medium-frequency sounds from some of Voortrekker's machinery, such as harmonics from the fifty-Hertz line hum of her main high-voltage electric supply. As Jeffrey watched, there were twelve, then ten, then fifteen ghost images of Voortrekker on his screen.

  Jeffrey ordered HarriSon to try making different turns, to hold ter Horst at the outer edge of detection range. Jeffrey couldn't afford another direct confrontation yet. Until he thought of some conclusive way to more than even the odds, the chance of Challenger being sunk was too great — and if she were sunk those hundreds of hydrogen bombs would fall.

  "He holds contact on uS too, sir," Bell reported. "Every time we go left, the cluster of data on him turns left with us. Whenever we jink right, he follows uS right."

  "Signal strength increasing!" Kathy said.

  Bell looked at Jeffrey meaningfully. "He's making a lunge at us, sir."

  "Does he know where we are, Fire Control?"

  "I doubt he's tracking us well enough for a firing solution, yet."

  "Helm, head south more."

  "South, aye aye," Harrison said.

  "Signal strength of contact on Voortrekker decreasing," Kathy said. Ter Horst was falling behind.

  Jeffrey pondered. "Fire Control, what if he puts another weapon in the water, and lets it rely on its onboard homing sonar?"

  "He'd probably just waste ammo, Captain, and he has to be running low. Its software would be swamped with contacts seeming to come from a dozen different places at once. If the weapon pinged, it'd be blinded by returns from projections and boulders everywhere, each one of them looking like a submarine hull."

  Jeffrey nodded. He'd thought exactly that himself — based on what he was seeing on Challenger's own sonar screens — but he wanted Bell to check his reasoning. Bell used to be Challenger's weapons officer, and Jeffrey trusted his knowledge and instincts on torpedo performance in extreme environmental conditions like this.

  "Signal strength increasing!" Kathy reported.

  "Another lunge," Bell said. "He likes to play cat and mouse."

  "He's getting on my nerves. Helm, increase speed two knots."

  "Aye aye." Harrison sounded uptight. He concentrated intensely on his displays and steering cues. COB and Meltzer watched, giving him advice and moral support.

  "Signal strength of contact on Voortrekker dropping," Kathy said. In a little while she added, "Signal strength now holding steady. Assess the range is constant again."

  "He's matching our speed," Bell said. "He's feeling his way, just like we are."

  "He wants to push us farther in under the ice," Jeffrey said. "And I think I see why."

  "Sir?"

  "He knows about our time limit. He knows we have a bingo point. He's trying to frighten us by making us think we'll never get out alive."

  "Understood."

  "But we do have one advantage. We know he's aware of our deadline."

  "How does that help uS, Captain? It means he knows a double kill down here would be a disastrous defeat for the Allies. It puts uS completely on the defensive, which isn't the way to win against ter Horst."

  "Let him push us farther in, XO, if that's what he wants. It gives us at least one tactical edge. We get to scout our way ahead of him. That gives us superior knowledge of local acoustic and terrain conditions."

  "Understood," Bell said. "But how does that help us, sir?" "I'm not sure yet…

  Oceanographer."

  "Captain?" Ilse said.

  "I want to talk to you about Jan ter Horst."

  On Voortrekker

  On the sonar speakers, Van Gelder heard the lingering effects of the high-explosive skirmish, left well behind to the north. Challenger's noisemakers gurgled weakly, making their last dying gasps. There were scraping and crunching sounds as loosened pieces of ice, all of them buoyant, jostled each other. They floated up and settled against the bottom of the shelf, making distant bangs and thuds. There was a sharp concussion, then throbbing echoes that went on for minutes, as the last wayward Series 65 torpedo homed on something it thought was a target.

  Looking forward of Voortrekker, using the bow sphere and both side-mounted wide-aperture arrays, the sonar chief held vague contact on Challenger. The signals surged and faded as Voortrekker and Challenger moved. Sound rays took different paths at different times
in different places — splitting and rejoining, bouncing off the sides of pressure ridges, reflecting off hard but irregular boulders in the roof or on the floor. Data from Challenger would carom first off the ice of the shelf and then off the mud on the bottom, bending and zigzagging up and down, over and over, confusingly. It was impossible to have more than the vaguest idea where Challenger was.

  The chemical and temperature sensors were of little tactical use now, since Challenger's real path twisted and turned so much. To try to follow it exactly would only waste time, and also risk losing the primary contact. Worse, such delay, or such predictable maneuvering by ter Horst, might set Voortrekker up for a trap exactly like the one Challenger herself had just barely escaped.

  Ter Horst interrupted Van Gelder's thoughts. It's as if he reads my mind.

  "Patience, Gunther. For now we simply keep herding him toward his doom. When he thinks it's becoming too late to ever get out in time, and he and his crew start to buckle, then we strike. With a broad spread of Sea Lions set on maximum yield, we'll smash his hull wide open with what targeting data we've built up by then."

  "What if he turns and fights?"

  "We'll hear it right away. We fire at him then, that much sooner."

  "Sir, as your first officer I feel compelled to state a devil's-advocate argument."

  "I'm listening."

  "Wouldn't it be safer if we just tried to sneak away now? We're closer to the shelf edge than Fuller. We may already have him scared enough he'd willingly break contact."

  "Don't be silly. If we do that, we give up the protection of the shelf, the whole positional advantage we worked so hard for, and we expose ourselves to Allied forces with Fuller still in our rear. I dearly want to sink Challenger by my own hand, Gunther, here. I suppose you could call it an ego thing."

  "Yes, sir." Ter Horst is more self-aware than I sometimes give him credit for

  "Besides, if we let Challenger survive, and Fuller gets out a warning, the boomer launch is called off. I really, really want those boomers to launch."

  On Challenger, one hour later

  "Tell me again about Jan," Jeffrey said.

  "I already did ten times."

  Jeffrey ignored Ilse's impatient tone. "Do it again. We need to sweat every detail…

  Tell me what he's like, from a submariner's point of view."

  "I'm not sure I'm the right person to answer that."

  "Come on, Lieutenant. This is your third mission with my ship. You were with us every step of the way last time we faced ter Horst. Talk to me."

  Jeffrey sat at the command console. Ilse stood, leaning against the corner of his console so she could face him easily. This way, she didn't have to crane her neck from her seat at a sonar workstation, and her wounded ear would hurt her less.

  Ilse sighed, then took a deep breath. "He's clever, aggressive, inventive. He's outgoing, charming, a very good liar. He's ruthless, shrewd, and brave. He's religiously devout, and really thinks God's on his side."

  "The old-line Boer theology?" Bell broke in.

  Ilse nodded, gingerly, to protect her ear. "They think a passage in the Bible gives them the right to enSlave all blacks."

  Bell made a face — he was African American. "So where does this get us with ter Horst, Captain?"

  "We need to understand his tactical personality better, to have a chance of beating him.

  We need to see how he might become predictable, if we take a close enough look at his psyche."

  "That's another thing about Jan," Ilse said. "He's cornpletely unpredictable. He does it on purpose. He flaunts it."

  "Then let's see what we know about him lately," Jeffrey said. "Maybe we can spot a pattern… First, there was Diego Garcia, an unquestionable success for him, and one he accomplished at high personal risk. Then he nukes a helpless civilian island. He sinks a virtually defenseless Collins boat. He takes more risks to shoot down half a dozen Allied aircraft he could've simply tried to avoid. He sinks two old, slow, noisy Los Angeles — class boats, taking both on at once. Then, he exposes himself to even more risk by revealing his position, to fire that salvo of cruise missiles at us the last time we went to periscope depth."

  "You make him sound like a bully, Captain," Bell said.

  "Does that mean then that on some level he's a coward?" Jeffrey asked. "I'm not saying his tactics were wrong or distorted or reckless. They worked. I'm saying that in each instance, another commander might've done something different, an equally good alternative approach in each scenario. What ter Horst did tells us something specific about ter Horst."

  Ilse shook her head. "He may act like a bully, but there's no way Jan's a coward."

  "No, you're right, coward's not the right word. But is he on some level insecure, overcompensating, pushing people around for fun or sadism?"

  "Jan may be a sadist at times, but he sees it as justified by serving a higher cause. And I can tell you unequivocally, he is in no way whatsoever insecure." Ilse gave Jeffrey a meaningful look. He got the impression she was reminding him, pointedly, exactly how intimately she knew the man.

  "But is he a show-off?"

  "Lord, is Jan a show-off."

  "So he's human, he does have needs. He needs constant achievement, right? And he needs an appreciative audience." "Um, definitely."

  "If we wanted to get him to snap, how would we do it?"

  "I don't think Jan is someone you could get to snap. He's a born predator. Snapping other people is what he does for a living."

  "Everyone has their breaking point," Jeffrey said. "What are ter Horst's hot buttons?"

  "I'm not Sure what you mean."

  "What things bother him? What does he really dislike?"

  Ilse thought a while. "Well, in the context of the war, I can see three things. He would hate to be outsmarted. He would hate a nasty surprise. And he would hate to ever be thwarted."

  "We've already hit him with a little of all three, Captain," Bell said. "At the first sea mount, you outsmarted him by sending our fish around both sides of the mountain. He did get a nasty surprise, too, us being in this theater at all so soon, not stuck in dry dock.

  And he's been partly thwarted, at least, by you driving him back from the Stennis and forcing him to flee here."

  "Is ter Horst afraid to die?"

  "No," Ilse said. "He doesn't feel fear of anything in any normal sense."

  "Let me put that differently. Wouldn't he mind dying, if he had any choice? Doesn't he really, really want to live?"

  "Um, yes. I think I follow you now. If he's dead, he can't enjoy his own big ego anymore, and he loses his earthly audience of admirers for his greatness… Even with his ego, and his fanatic religiouS beliefs, he has to know that in heaven, assuming there is such a place, he'd be way down the totem pole compared to God and the attending angels."

  Bell couldn't help grinning at how Ilse put that.

  "If we had to hit him with more of the things he dislikes," Jeffrey went on, "would a constant stream of them be better over time, or should we go for one big avalanche at once?"

  "The avalanche. Definitely. He's much too tough to be bothered by continual smaller upsets." Ilse turned to Bell. "He's had enough small upsets already, just like you said, XO. He's still very much in the fight, and seems to have the advantage of us right now."

  Jeffrey frowned. He didn't like defeatist talk from subordinates. "That's not for you to say, Lieutenant:'

  Ilse apologized.

  Jeffrey accepted. "What I'm hearing in all this is that maybe we could use ter Horst's own ego against him.". "You mean, sir," Bell said, "that he's so Self-impressed he may be brittle?"

  "You beat me to the punch line, XO." Jeffrey was pleased: Bell was sharp, and was thinking what Jeffrey was thinking. "Ter Horst must be flying high at the moment, from a string of big succeSses. Even his being here under the shelf, he can give himself the credit for. It was his idea, and it is the perfect place for him to kill Challenger one-on-one:'

  Ilse
and Bell waited for Jeffrey to say more.

  "We have to make the final battle be more than a question of technical insights and gadgets. We fought him to a draw that way last time, off South Africa. If we try something like that again, he'll be expecting it, and we'll be too predictable ourselves.

  Down here there won't be a draw." Jeffrey pointed at the big red timer.

  "So just what are you suggesting?' Ilse asked.

  "We become unpredictable, by adding another level to the conflict, a sort of guerrilla-warfare mentality on top of the tactical contest. If we surprise and outsmart and thwart ter Horst badly enough, and get the timing of it right, we can flood him as a person with negative emotional inputs. That works on his brittleness, maybe just enough to give us an edge."

  Ilse looked skeptical.

  "Say it," Jeffrey told her.

  "What you're suggesting is an awfully speculative proposition."

  „"It's constructive risk taking," Jeffrey said coldly.

  "So what's the plan?" Bell asked. He seemed to be stepping in to break up the tension between Ilse and Jeffrey.

  Good. That's what XOs are for.

  Jeffrey debated with himself how much more to tell them. He did need his people as sounding boards, and he didn't want to stifle anyone's initiative.

  "Frankly, I'm not sure yet. I feel things starting to jell up here." Jeffrey pointed to his head. "But one or two big pieces of the puzzle — are still missing." Jeffrey surreptitiously glanced at Harrison and Meltzer and knew he'd have to make a fateful choice. Inside, he felt regret.

  Jeffrey made eye contact with Ilse and Bell. "I can tell you now, you aren't going to like what I come up with… We have to start to act the opposite of what ter Horst expects, and I'll have to be even more ruthless than he is, as hard as that may be."

  "How?" Ilse said.

  "To begin with, from now on, as far as we're concerned, there's no deadline and we're-happy if we die."

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Several hours later, on Voortrekker