Thunder in the Deep cjf-2

by Joe Buff

  Jeffrey watched the hydrophones disappear under the mini.

  A light on Meltzer's console started blinking. "Incoming message. Undersea acoustic link." He brought it up on another screen. "Digital, but not encrypted. It's Swedish, sir, I think."

  The enlisted SEAL, squashed between Jeffrey and Ilse, craned to read the message.

  "It says, Identify yourselves."

  "Ignore it," Jeffrey said. "Keep going. Pilot, increase speed to six knots."

  "Aye, aye," Montgomery said. The light stopped blinking.

  "I doubt the local troops have authority to shoot," Jeffrey said. "They'll need to follow ROEs, chains of command, just like us."

  The mini kept moving south, toward the Baltic.

  "So far so good," Ilse said a minute later. "The Sound gets much wider soon." She pointed to the updated tactical plot. "Our passive sonars say there are fewer ships patrolling ahead." Suddenly Jeffrey heard a roaring, tearing noise, then a shattering explosion off the starboard bow. The minisub shivered and pitched — they'd been fired at by a shore-based naval gun.

  The message light blinked again.

  "It says, You are intruding in Swedish territorial waters. Surface and heave to for boarding or we will sink you."

  "Now what?" Montgomery said. "We're boarded, we're finished." Jeffrey ran his hand over his face. He worked his jaw back and forth. It was hard to think straight, amidst the reverb of the explosion and the vibrations from the shock. The others looked at him expectantly.

  "Answer in German," Jeffrey said. "Say we're on a training run…. Say we thought this was Rugen Island." Rugen was a German island that formed one side of Greifswald Bay.

  Montgomery typed. The answer was in German. "They say we're not even close…. Surface and leave our waters at once."

  Jeffrey heard another shell tear overhead and detonate in the water. He gripped the back of Montgomery's chair to steady himself. His ears hurt.

  "They say that one went off due west of us. Head due west now or the next shell won't miss."

  "You heard the man," Jeffrey said. "Raise the photonics mast and use image intensification. Don't surface."

  Meltzer flicked a switch and the mast came up. He activated another screen to show the picture. The fog topside had cleared, but it was overcast. Jeffrey could see tall mountains on the Swedish coast, snowcapped.

  Montgomery steered the mini due west. Meltzer adjusted the ballast and trim for the halocline — the variation in salt content which affected buoyancy.

  "So much for stealth," Ilse said. "That shore battery woke up the whole neighborhood." The message light blinked.

  "Source this time is bearing two nine five," Meltzer said. From the direction of Denmark, not Sweden.

  "Put the 'scope on two nine five," Jeffrey said.

  Meltzer reached and turned a knob. "That's a German patrol craft, Captain, approaching fast."

  They were cornered.

  The patrol craft was barely two thousand yards off, coming straight at them on the screen. Jeffrey saw a big radar dome on a pylon over her bridge, and a big gun on her foredeck. He glanced at Ilse; she looked stoic, resigned. He saw her finger the pistol on her belt.

  Montgomery said the acoustic message was in code. He couldn't decrypt it.

  "Mechanical transient bearing two nine five!" Meltzer said. Jeffrey saw it on the broadband waterfall. "Replay on speakers." The control compartment filled with a clanking, a harsh electrical whine, then a thunk. There was awful finality to that thunk.

  "That's a deck gun loading and — training," Jeffrey said. On the screen the patrol craft's gun barrel seemed aimed right between his eyes.

  "That thunk was the breach block closing, wasn't it?" Ilse said. "What do we do?"

  Jeffrey could see she was panicking. He forced himself to stay levelheaded, which wasn't easy. He had an idea. "Chief, answer them on digital using plain text. Say it's our first day." The western Baltic was a German Navy training area.

  Montgomery grinned, and typed.

  The warship answered. "They want the recognition password." Uh-oh. "Tell them, tell them you can't remember. In training they said to never write it down. That gun aimed down your throat is making you nervous…. Write with a lot of typos so they think you're flustered."

  Montgomery took a deep breath. He typed.

  There was a long, nerve-racking pause. Jeffrey waited for the gun to open fire. He'd see the flash, then hear it, then feel it, then feel nothing.

  Montgomery frowned. "They say to stop where we are.”

  Ilse pulled the pistol from her belt. Jeffrey put out his hand to stay her.

  Jeffrey almost jumped when he saw flashes on the screen — but they were much too fast for a three-inch gun. A signal lamp, aimed at the minisub's periscope.

  "Morse code, plain text," Montgomery said.. "They're sending a minesweeper to escort us to the Baltic."

  Jeffrey took the pistol from Ilse and safed it and put it back in her holster. "For the last time," he told her. "This is about the mission, not about you." More lights flashed from the patrol craft, and another ship hove into view. That ship signaled.

  "She's the Konstanz," Montgomery said. "One of those Type three-fifty-one minesweeping-drone control ships. She says to fall in behind her, she'll send her drones out in front."

  "Does this periscope have-a signal light built in?"

  "Yes."

  "Then tell them thanks."

  Montgomery keyed the message.

  "They say they were going to make a routine sweep soon anyway. You never know when an Allied unmanned aerial vehicle might sneak through and drop a mine…. They also say, based on our performance the last few minutes, we might want to reconsider our career choice.. like maybe the Army."

  Ilse held on as the minisub pulled into the minesweeper's wake. The mini began to roll heavily. Ilse was glad she had taken a seasick pill before leaving Challenger.

  "Try to keep the periscope aimed at their stern," Jeffrey said.

  "Aye, aye," Montgomery said.

  Ilse studied the picture. She could see boat davits on the Konstanz's afterdeck. Then came the superstructure, with a single mast. A yellow light blinked on the masthead.

  "What's that for?" Jeffrey said.

  Montgomery riffled through the mini's on-line database. "I am escorting a friendly submarine."

  Two crewmen came to stand at the minesweeper's stern.

  "An officer and a phone-talker, I think," Ilse said. They wore battle helmets and life vests over foul-weather gear. She saw the officer look at her through big binoculars. A third man came over with a handheld signal lamp. He flashed a message.

  "They say it would be safer if we surfaced," Montgomery said.

  "No," Jeffrey said. "Tell them we're low on fuel. We get better mileage submerged."

  "They want to know how much fuel we have."

  "How much do we have?"

  "Eighty-two percent."

  "Tell them forty."

  "They want to speed up to ten knots. They have a lot of ground to cover. Can we make it to Bornholm Island at ten knots?"

  "Why Bornholm?" Jeffrey said.

  "That must be their training base for minis."

  "Can we?"

  "Yes, sir," Meltzer said, "running submerged. I memorized the speed/endurance curves."

  "Can we make it to Greifswald and back to Challenger after that?"

  "Greifswald, yes, sir, if we go slower. Back to the ship, no way, even at optimum cruising speed."

  Jeffrey worked his jaw again. "Chief, tell them Bornholm is okay but we prefer to go slower."

  "They say we can refuel when we get to barracks. They have work to do, and they're doing us a favor."

  "Blade-rate increase," Meltzer said. "They're speeding up." The signalman blinked. Montgomery translated.

  "They said if we run out of gas they'll give us a tow…. The German inflection is hard to convey in English, Skipper, but it's sarcastic:'

  "Ten knots it is."
>
  A few minutes later, on the periscope screen Ilse saw a sharp yellowish glare. There was a terrific detonation, ahead and to port of the Konstanz. She saw a mountain of water bursting skyward. It dropped back slowly, drenching one of the Troika drones. The officer on the minesweeper's stern spoke to the signalman. They waved to the mini's periscope. Ilse thought they were laughing. Cocky bastards.

  "Sir," Meltzer said. "I hate to bring it up again, but the mission. Getting back. How do we refuel?"

  Jeffrey frowned. "We'll deal with that when we have to…. How long to get to the Baltic?"

  "At this speed, Captain, six hours."

  "Those of us who can ought to get some sleep."

  "Concur, sir," Montgomery said. "The pilot and copilot reliefs will come forward soon enough." Some of the enlisted SEALs were trained in this duty. Montgomery reached for a thermos of coffee under his seat, and offered it to Meltzer.

  "Ilse?" Jeffrey said. "Let's go aft. They saved the two front seats for us." Before he left the control compartment, he glanced at the fuel gauge and the chronometer. We're falling more and more behind schedule with each new development, and lower and lower on fuel. This is starting to look like a suicide mission.

  * * *

  Jeffrey jerked awake with a start: Something had scraped the top of the hull. He looked up frantically. A tethered mine?

  "Just brash ice, sir," Chief Montgomery said from the aisle next to Jeffrey's seat. "Time to get up anyway, Captain."

  Jeffrey looked at his borrowed dive watch: 1723 Berlin time-5:23 P.M., after dusk already this far north, so close to the shortest day of the year, the official start of winter. Jeffrey had slept more than nine hours straight, for the first time in weeks. That explained why he felt so good.

  The lighting was rigged for red. Montgomery handed him a steaming cup of coffee, then went forward. Jeffrey drank. He glanced across the narrow aisle. Ilse was wide awake.

  "Where are we?" Jeffrey said. He ran his fingers through his hair.

  "Entering Greifswald Bay," Shajo Clayton said from behind him. "Now comes the fun part."

  Jeffrey looked aft. Beyond the fourth pair of sleeper seats, at the rear of the transport compartment, one of the SEALs used the chemical head. Jeffrey felt the call of nature. The others looked away and made small talk while Ilse took her turn.

  Jeffrey and Ilse and Clayton went forward.

  "How'd you get rid of the Konstanz?"

  "Once we got to the Baltic proper," Meltzer said, "they gave us a course for Bornholm Island, then turned back north. We went east till we hit the German submarine training area, then headed south." He typed some keys. Their track, with time hacks, came on the nav chart.

  "No problems along the way?"

  "Negative, Skipper," Montgomery said. "We met a couple of two-twelves on exercise, some cargo ships serving as training targets, even heard a few practice torpedoes fired in the distance. Axis frigates screening the Swedish coast, against people like us. Some aircraft overflights. Everybody ignored us."

  "What's our fuel level?"

  "Peroxide's down to one eight percent."

  "So we're still stuck for a way back up the Sound."

  "Right now we're stuck for a way into Greifswald Bay, too."

  "We had to avoid the dredged channel into the bay, sir," Meltzer said. "It's mined, and much too obvious."

  Montgomery nodded. "We crawled over the Thiessower Bank instead." The bank was very shallow, Jeffrey knew, and salinity here was low, so the water would freeze more readily — that's why the mini scraped floating fragments of ice and slush.

  "Then," the chief went on, "we found this." He typed, and a crisp image came on screen. Jeffrey could tell it was a laser line-scan picture from the mini's chin.

  "This is live?"

  "Affirmative."

  "Give me the fine-scale nav chart."

  The mini was at one of the less-shallow spots at the mouth of Greifswald Bay, all of twenty-two feet deep right here. Four thousand yards to starboard was Sudperd Point, on Rugen Island, heavily garrisoned by enemy troops. Six thousand yards to port was the military airfield at the tip of Peenemunde. The promontories — solid, inviolable land — seemed to devour the mini like giant incisors, with the bay as their gullet.

  Jeffrey looked at the line-scan picture. Immediately ahead of the stationary minisub, underwater, lay a tangle of stainless steel concertina wire that stretched from the bottom to near the surface. The barrier was held in place and strengthened by vertical segments of railroad rail, driven into the mud and sand.

  The mini's passive sonars tracked enemy helos patrolling overhead.

  "We weren't briefed for this," Montgomery said, meaning the barrier.

  "They must have done the construction work submerged," Jeffrey said, "hiding from our recon drones. Any sign of mines or booby traps, or hydrophones?"

  "Not that we can see, but they might be buried."

  Jeffrey nodded; they had no good way to check. The mini's magnetometers were useless in the solar storm now raging at G5+, and they dared not use their active bottom-penetrating sonar.

  "Deploy the chin grapnels. Use the wire-cutter heads, and let's hope no one notices."

  Montgomery repositioned the mini between two of the barrier rails. Meltzer worked his joystick in grapnel mode, and began to cut and cut. First upward, then once he got nine feet from the bottom he sliced sideways. The cutters made noise each time they scissored another strip of concertina, but constant surface wave action from the wind made the barrier rattle and clank anyway.

  Meltzer stopped when a helo hovered and dipped a passive sonar-head nearby, then continued when the helo left. There was no change in the pattern of the local airborne patrols.

  "New contact on passive sonar," Montgomery said.

  Ilse, quiet and thoughtful up to now, craned to read the screen. "Bearing-and blade-rate indicate some kind of speedboat. Constant bearing now. It's coming this way." Meltzer stopped cutting, and turned off the laser line-scan.

  "Photonics sensors picking up a searchlight," Montgomery said.

  "Pass the word," Jeffrey whispered. "Rig for ultra-quiet." Clayton turned aft and made hand signals to his men. "Speedboat's drawing away," Ilse whispered. "No change in blade-rate."

  Meltzer went back to work. "Ready, Captain." His cutting was done.

  "Push through."

  "Retract the side thrusters," Montgomery said. Meltzer worked some switches. The mini began to slide sideways in the gentle current; Jeffrey knew there was almost no tide in Greifswald Bay. Montgomery worked the rudder and throttle, and the mini moved into the gap. When they were almost through, there was a scraping noise, then a strange boing from the stern. The mini stopped. Montgomery increased the screw-prop turns, but the mini was trapped.

  "We're tangled," Montgomery said. "Damn. Someone has to go out and cut us free."

  "I'll do it," Jeffrey said. "Shaj, you be my swim buddy." Jeffrey and Clayton donned their gear. First, their digital dive-computer chest packs, linked to heads-up displays in their masks, and the analog backups, strapped to their left forearms. Then came neutrally buoyant flak vests, just in case. Next, an adjustable buoyancy compensator, which doubled as flotation vest. Draeger closed-cycle rebreathers, worn over their chests. Weight belts, custom calibrated for each man. Titanium dive knives; the dive masks themselves with fiber-optic hookup wires; and big Special Warfare swim fins. They activated chem-glow cyalume hoops; each put one on his right arm.

  They went into the lock-out sphere and dogged the hatches. They checked each other's rigs, then tested their two-stage regulators. On the intercom they told Meltzer to equalize the sphere. This took but a moment, the mini was so shallow. Clayton opened the bottom hatch and let it drop down.

  In the hatchway Jeffrey saw a pool of black water. He knew the bottom was very close beneath the mini. Clayton sat on the hatch coaming, held his mask in place, and rolled forward, making hardly a ripple. Jeffrey sat, positioned his mouthpiece, held his mas
k, and rolled forward.

  Jesus. His mask display said the water was 31° Fahrenheit — only salt content kept it from freezing solid. The water here was brackish, because of river runoff into the bay mixing with seawater from the Baltic.

  Jeffrey moved around to warm up. His dry suit and long underwear did their job. He and Clayton clipped themselves together with a six-foot lanyard so they wouldn't be separated in the darkness and murk. Then they adjusted their flotation vests, admitting a little air; brackish water gave less buoyancy than seawater. They activated small flashlights fastened to their right forearms, and worked aft.

  They saw the problem. A tangle of concertina snagged the main propeller's housing. Clayton reached for his compressed-air-powered wire cutters, and began to snip away. The compressed air bottle ran low, and it got harder for Clayton to cut. He used brute force — Jeffrey knew Clayton, like all active-duty SEALs, had terrific upper-body strength. But eventually Clayton tired. He signaled for Jeffrey to take over, and handed him the cutters.

  Jeffrey heard a buzzing in his ears. He checked his regulator, fearing an equipment problem. It was too shallow for nitrogen narcosis, or oxygen toxemia, or baro-trauma. The noise got louder, seeming to come from everywhere at once. Underwater, at five times the normal speed of sound, it was hard for humans to judge direction to a sound source. But Jeffrey's dive computer had crude acoustic-intercept sonar. The speedboat. It was coming this way. Jeffrey and-Clayton turned off their pressureproof flashlights. The buzzing got louder still. Jeffrey saw a diffuse glow penetrating the water. The searchlight. The boat slowed. Jeffrey waited for the anti-swimmer charges to come down. At this range, in the water, the blasts would rupture his organs. He and Clayton would die in slow agony, forced to the surface to be captured as blood oozed into their lungs.

  The boat sped up again. It roared by almost directly overhead. Its prop wash jostled him and Clayton, and the mini bucked and the concertina jangled. No explosions. But Jeffrey had dropped the wire cutters, and he'd forgotten to clip their lanyard — the cold was harming his judgment. He turned on his light, but didn't see the tool. He groped in the bottom muck, afraid he'd set off a mine. He found the cutters. He had to use both hands, and forced himself not to grunt from exertion. Clayton held each ribbon of concertina steady, and Jeffrey held himself in place by treading water. Bottom mines or not, they took care to avoid leaving marks in the sand from their swim fins, though at this point Jeffrey thought it made little difference.