by Joe Buff
"You don't pull punches, do you?"
"I leave it to officers to speak in tongues," COB said. "If that's their style. It isn't mine. It was never Captain Wilson's."
"Which is your clever way of getting right to the point, isn't it? About Captain Fuller."
"Look," COB said. "I know the two of you kind of, well, noticed each other, a while ago."
"Definitely make that past tense."
COB sighed. "That was then, this is now." He got formal. "Commander Fuller first and foremost must comport himself as the captain of this ship. He can't show favoritism, or allow any personal feelings whatsoever between him and someone in the crew. It's regulations, and tradition. And it's essential in combat. It has nothing to do with you."
"But that's just it. I'm not part of the crew. Refugee, partisan, mercenary. What am I, COB?"
"You're on this ship. We're going in harm's way together. That's good enough in my book for you to be part of this extended family."
"Thanks…." Ilse felt tears coming. She blinked hard. Good, no tears.
"Look," COB said, "I know it's tough. If it's any comfort, none of us here in uniform, of any rank or rate, turn off our feelings just because we're here. Everybody wants to be liked and wants to fit in…. I think you're doing just fine."
"You do?"
"You did a terrific job at Durban, and everybody knows that. People know you haven't had their kind of training in teamwork and self-assessment." Ilse stiffened. That last bit.
She saw COB read her face again. He hesitated. "What is it?" she said.
"You just need to beware of the celebrity syndrome."
"Excuse me?"
"Sometimes when we have riders, they get kind of overwhelmed. By the bigness of it all. You know, the United States Navy, an SSN at sea, and now with this war."
"What are you getting at, COB?"
"It can get a bit depersonalizing, I know. Sometimes. well, people, they react, sort of overcompensate, by acting like a prima donna."
"A what?"
"Look, Ilse. Everyone here has self-esteem, self-confidence, an ego. They're the best, or they wouldn't be here."
"COB?"
He made hard eye contact. "Look deep inside yourself, and ask if you haven't been thinking and acting like this whole show was being put on for you. That you were the most important and special person here. That the whole mission to South Africa was set up just so you could get even with some people."
"Where the hell did that come from?"
COB didn't say anything.
"I've been discussed, haven't I? There's some kind of personnel file on me, isn't there?"
"See, Ilse? There you go again. There's a file on everybody."
"So you and Jeffrey talked about me. You two think I'm a prima donna."
"You said it, not me."
"But you did say it, before. In private."
COB paused. "Yes."
"Now I feel really awful…. I'm such an idiot."
"Ilse, do a little soul-searching. You're still new. People know you're an outsider. They'll cut you slack, up to a point."
"Thanks a lot."
"Watch it." Now COB wasn't smiling. "That sort of attitude, there's no room for here at all."
* * *
Two hours later, Ilse was bent over the laptop they'd given her. She was grateful for the privacy of her cabin. She really didn't feel like seeing anyone right now. Kathy Milgrom came in without knocking, and shut the door.
"Working hard?" Kathy said.
Ilse nodded. She felt herself perk up. "This stuff is neat. Saltwater transport processes, from the North Sea into the Baltic and back."
Kathy started getting undressed.
"All quite relevant," Kathy said. "Buoyancy, sound propagation, biologics."
Ilse yawned. As Kathy stripped to her underwear, Ilse turned away to be polite. In a minute Kathy said, dramatically, "You can look now." She was wearing flannel pajamas, navy blue with little red and white submarines all over.
"Is that official issue?" Ilse said.
"No, no. I found these once in Harrods. They had them in different patterns, sailboats, dolphins, whales…. I wanted to be a submariner since I was a little girl."
"You come from a naval family?"
"Eighth generation, and proud of it."
Kathy put her eyeglasses and wristwatch in the little storage space beneath her mattress. Ilse watched as Kathy reached up, and with both hands grabbed the heavy rod that supported the curtain in front of the top sleeping rack.
Kathy's face grimaced. She scrunched her stomach muscles, took as much weight as she could on her arms, and literally walked up the bulkhead. She rolled into the top rack in one smooth motion.
"I didn't know people could do that." Ilse used the middle rack — easy to get in or out. The bottom one held stationery supplies.
"I need all the exercise I can get," Kathy said, "which is why I didn't buy the pajamas with the whales." Both of them giggled.
Ilse yawned.
"You look completely exhausted," Kathy said.
"I am."
"When was the last time you got some sleep?"
"About twenty-four hours ago." Ilse reached for her coffee, which was cold and stale.
"Don't," Kathy said. "Change and turn in. You have to rest."
"I have so much to do."
"That's an order," Kathy said, as a joke.
"Ouch," Ilse groaned.
If Kathy was surprised, she let it pass. "Look, you've got to grab sleep whenever you can. Put on your pajamas. Get in your rack. The messenger will wake you when he 'mocks for me. In about four hours."
Ilse remembered what COB had said. She realized how right he was. She wanted to resist Kathy, and she resented being told what to do — by anyone.
Instead, Ilse changed. She slept in heavy cotton p.j.'s, green-and-black plaid. She also wore thick mountain-climbing socks, and used an extra blanket. It got cold on USS Challenger.
"Mmmm," Kathy said. "Delicious beddie-bye."
"Yes," Ilse said. She got in her rack. She knew she sounded depressed.
"Jeffrey trouble?" Kathy said, from inside the top bunk.
"Crap, is it that obvious?"
"Basically, it is."
Ilse didn't say anything.
"Don't worry" Kathy said. "These little flirtations do occur. It's meaningless, mostly just displaced stress, homesickness, fear of getting killed in action…. I think guys do it aboard ship sometimes because they know it's safe."
"You mean, nothing really happens."
"Usually not. Maybe I should say, hopefully not."
But that didn't fit, Ilse told herself. Jeffrey wasn't a flirt. And I'm not sure anyone who used to be a SEAL, wounded on some secret op in Iraq back in the '90s, could possibly be considered "safe." But in a way, Jeffrey was safe.
"Still," Kathy said, "he is single, so that's all right. Love and family are natural…. Not my type at all, but I can see he might be yours."
"I'd rather not talk about it."
"Okay. My advice, which you didn't ask for, is just relax and be patient."
"I'm sure you're right," Ilse said. But she wondered what would happen if and when they did reach port. "Do you have a steady boyfriend?" Ilse said.
"We talked about getting married. He got killed."
"At sea?"
"His destroyer was vaporized."
"I'm sorry"
Kathy sighed. "I miss him a lot, but life goes on."
"You're okay about the way Captain Fuller treated you before?"
"Certainly." Kathy put on a mock upper-class accent. "One cannot take it personally when a superior officer criticizes one, justified or no." She went back to her normal voice. "If someone's landing all over you, Ilse, you just act like a helo pad. It's for the good of the ship."
"I guess that's the whole point. The ship comes first."
"Starting to feel your individuality get submerged?" Ilse didn't say anything.
&
nbsp; "That was a pun," Kathy said. "Submerged."
"Very funny."
"I know what you mean, though. It's part of being in the Navy. Everyone has a boss. Every captain has a commodore, or an admiral. The First Sea Lord has the First Lord of the Admiralty. He has the Minister of Defence, and she has the PM and the King. It's the same in the U.S. Navy, just different titles, and they spell defense with an s while we Brits use a c."
"I'm beginning to see how war is so depersonalizing."
"To me that's the worst part of it," Kathy said. "I'm not afraid to die. I've led a clean life. I say my prayers. But war-fighting is so relentless, so complicated, so huge, it can make you feel very small. You get completely gobbled up."
"It's different for you," Ilse said. "You chose this, as a profession. The Royal Navy, I mean. You knew there could be war someday; you trained for it. I got dragged into something horrible I wish never happened. It ruined my whole life."
"You and a few hundred million other people, Ilse. So far."
"There it is again. We each become a cipher, a cog in a little wheel, in a world full of wheels within wheels."
"Just do your job. Concentrate on the small things, and do them as well as possible. Take the track you're given to run on, and run it splendidly."
"Is that what you do, Kathy?"
"Think of yourself as a vital organ in a special organism. An instrument of peacerestoration and statecraft. It helps maintain your sense of self."
"It just all seems so, I don't know, so regimented, so horribly rigid."
"Have you ever tried to run a warship, my dear?"
"Of course not."
"Then don't talk. Routine and hierarchy are what hold everybody together. The rules and procedures get us back alive."
"So you enjoy the work, day to day?"
"Immensely. Sure. Don't you?"
"Yes, I do. And I am good at it." Take that, COB. Take that, Jeffrey Fuller. At least I don't have to go on the SEAL raid this time…. Best put Fuller out of my mind right now. He could easily get killed, like Kathy's boyfriend.
"Anyway, Ilse," Kathy said, "sleep well."
"Good night, Kathy. Thanks for the advice."
Just as Ilse was about to drift off, Kathy looked down from her rack.
"You know," Kathy said, "the submarine is not a penis."
Ilse was wide awake now. " What?"
"Everyone thinks it is. The shape, how it launches torpedoes. How it's so nice and long and thick and hard. But they're wrong."
"You're not a Freudian?"
"I am, I am," Kathy said. "But listen to this." She smiled. "The submarine is a womb."
"You know, you're right…. I never saw it that way before…. It's snug and cozy. It protects you from the outside world."
"It goes into the sea, which represents Mother."
"I guess it takes a woman to realize that," Ilse said. "Or at least, to admit it."
"And on that note, Ilse, good night."
THAT SAME EVENING, ON DEUTSCHLAND
Off the starboard quarter, many sea miles away, another air-dropped nuclear depth bomb detonated. The roar and reverb engulfed Deutschland. The shock wave made her pitch and buck, but Ernst Beck got no new damage reports. There was pain and a feeling of pressure in his ears, from an endless day of such punishment. Beck wondered if it'd make him go deaf in old age, assuming he lived that long.
"They're dropping them at random," Eberhard scoffed.
The temporary stalemate at the sinking troopship Button was over now. Allied carrier aircraft, and fresh destroyers and helos, were hunting Deutschland with a vengeance but she was too stealthy, especially in this rugged seafloor terrain. Another A-bomb went off, further away. A heavy manual slipped from a console top, and the crewman caught it just before it hit the deck. Eberhard gave him a withering glance.
Deutschland's bow nosed up as she climbed a canyon wall deep in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Then she nosed steeply down, to take the next in the endless series of canyons at an angle. Beck watched the gravimeter. Soon the vessel climbed once more. She topped the volcanic escarpment.
"Sir!" Haffner said. "New passive sonar contact."
It was a long-range secure acoustic communication; the message address was Deutschland. Beck knew the top-secret transmitter was in the Biscay Abyssal Plain off occupied France. Beck's intercom light flashed — the junior officer in charge of the communications room.
"Sir, incoming message is in captain's personal code."
Beck told Eberhard.
"Pass the message packet to me."
Beck saw Eberhard enter the password to access his private decryption routines. The algorithms ran. It took ten seconds for the plain-text to come onto Eberhard's screen.
"Scheisse." Shit.
"Sir?"
"We're congratulated on sinking an official total one point four million tons, based on reconnaissance satellite imagery, but we're ordered to avoid all contact with the Truman carrier group."
Beck hesitated. "Why, Captain?" They were stalking Truman now; bagging her would be a perfect capstone to Deutschland's victory against the Allies' Convoy Section One.
"I suppose it's not so bad. We're to proceed immediately to the verge of the Celtic Shelf. Just west of the U.K. To establish a barrier patrol and ambush USS Challenger. She's expected to be making for the North Sea."
"Does the message say her objective, sir?"
"Intel suspects they're headed for Norway. A commando raid against the ceramic SSGN we're building in Trondheim."
"That would be a high-priority target for them, Captain."
"The only problem for Challenger is that Trondheim is a diversion. The activity there is fake. Even I don't know where they're really hiding the new boat…. With our superior sonars, we'll pick up Challenger easily, whatever longitude she follows north. We'll turn my old friend Jeffrey Fuller into radioactive fish food."
CHAPTER 10
ONE DAY LATER, ON CHALLENGER
The CACC was hushed. Jeffrey took a deep breath — and regretted it; the air still stung as it went up his nose.
The final search for the USS Texas was about to begin. However it ended, it wouldn't take long. For the umpteenth time Jeffrey wondered if the enemy had gotten here first, and was waiting for him. He hoped the long-term mine reconnaissance system (LMRS) — a remote-controlled probe vehicle — wouldn't give Challenger away.
"Captain," COB said, "LMRS approaching next-to-final way-point. Now on the southern flank of Seamount 458, hovering at depth twenty-seven hundred feet as ordered."
The fiber-optic feed was working properly.
"Very well," Jeffrey said. Each seamount here was named by the depth at its peak in meters, based on British Admiralty nautical charts. Though Challenger's charts were online, easily converted to feet or fathoms, the metric reference persisted.
"Sir," COB said, "advise that the tether is now strung out for twenty-four nautical miles, nearing the end of both the torpedo tube's and on-probe reels."
Jeffrey frowned. "If it breaks or isn't long enough, we'll have to go on with autonomous link."
"For that we'd need to shift Challenger, sir," Bell said. For a good acoustic line of sight to the probe. "We'd make a datum by moving, and another by signaling the LMRS."
Jeffrey thought hard for a moment. "No, I like our hiding place here…. COB, just be careful with the probe."
"Understood," COB said.
"Helm, any trouble maintaining ship's position?"
"Negative, sir," David Meltzer said, in the seat on COB's right. "Challenger holding well against the bottom crosscurrent." Their depth was ninety-one hundred feet, at the base of the southeast slope of a different seamount, labeled 960.
Jeffrey eyed the gravimeter again. The huge bulk of the seamount completely masked Challenger — that was the idea.
"A dozen seamounts all together in this cluster," Jeffrey said. "The Olympus Knoll." The cluster formed a rough oval, with its long axis running north-south. The
formation lay some three hundred nautical miles due north of Graciosa, a small island in the wesiern Azores.
"Collectively," Ilse said, "they mark an ancient hot spot in Earth's mantle, like the Azores or Hawaii."
The Knoll's peaks loomed high above the local sea-floor, an undulating plain ten thousand feet deep.
"And only one of them," Jeffrey said, "Mount 458, is tall enough near its summit, shallow enough, for a Virginia-class sub to survive…. The Axis has to know that, too."
"Sir," Ilse said, "why don't we search for Texas with our gravimeter?"
"At this range the resolution is much too coarse to see it," Bell said.
"Sonar," Jeffrey said, "any new contacts?"
"Nothing but biologics, sir," Kathy said. "But advise that surrounding terrain blocks our arrays on many bearings."
"I'm not comfortable with how thorough' our area search really was," Bell said.
"Me, neither," Jeffrey said. "But we can't dawdle and play things safe. There are badly injured people on Texas…. We don't know what shape any of them are in by now, and we have another pressing engagement ourselves."
Bell nodded glumly. "It would be difficult to try to hit Greifswald with just Clayton and his men."
"I've been thinking that if we need to, we could try to rig the warhead from one of our own torpedoes, and somehow carry it into the lab."
"Wouldn't work, sir," Bell said. "Security. They're very specifically designed to not be removable from the unit in the field."
"In extremis? Clayton's good at that sort of thing."
Bell shook his head. "Once, on a bet, a special weapons surety guy from Johns Hopkins and I tried to figure out how"
"And?"
"We spent a solid week on it — we were bachelors then, on leave. No can do, sir. Period. Without the right tools and electronic preauthorization, which they didn't give us at Cape Verde, you'd disable the arming suite permanently, and damage the physics package, too."
"Yeah," Jeffrey said. "I'm sure you're right." There was an uncomfortable pause.
"My biggest worry right now would be Deutschland," Jeffrey said. "She could dig us out of this bottom terrain, with her hull and her sensors and weapons."
"The briefing papers said she's under the ice cap, far from here." The assessment supplied before Challenger left Cape Verde said that Deutschland was sneaking toward Canada, for a raid against Halifax or the St. Lawrence Seaway.
