Deep Sound Channel (2 page)

The wingman felt the shock wave lift his fighter-bomber bodily, flung forward and yet almost in a stall. His moving map display, his head-up display, his helmet-mounted cueing system all went dead. Both artificial horizons failed, and he looked up to see the ocean, not the sky. He fought for control as more cautions and warnings lighted on his panels. From upside down he saw the Aegis cruiser take a tidal wave bows-on, pitching like a roller coaster, yawing frighteningly, white water thrown up higher than her masts, green water burying her weather decks.

Suddenly the wingman's port turbojet flamed out,

from the negative static pressure pulse of the nuclear detonation. Fighting the torsion of unbalanced angular momentum on a single turbine, the twisting from uneven thrust, he went through the relighting sequence on pure instinct. Blessedly it worked. He leveled off.

The wingman blinked repeatedly, the dazzling spots before his eyes now mixed with angry tears. He glanced at the DI-60P/D dosimeter clipped to his flight harness, w ondering if he'd gotten lethal rads, whole-body penetrating gamma rays and neutrons. You needed a computer to read the thing, but he'd find out soon enough if symptoms showed—nausea would be first. Off his left shoulder the horizon flickered lavender, violet, pink, then new suns rose in mockery of Sol. In the cockpit his upfront digital touchscreen died.

The aviator reviewed the little clipboard strapped to his right thigh, then did the calculation in his head. He came to zero five five true—his inertial nav and GPS were fried, his radars and his forward-looking infrared were useless, but at least his backup mechanical gyrocompass worked. Some sixty miles away an Australian Collins-class diesel sub patrolled on lifeguard duty for emergencies like this, courtesy of America's wartime British Commonwealth allies.

The wingman read his fuel gauge one more time: just four hundred pounds of JP-5. He throttled back yet further, to a mere three hundred knots. His hydraulic system automatically switched into low-pressure mode, 3,000 psi, but then began to drop. He numbly tried to focus on just staying in the air. He'd barely make it. A FEW DAYS LATER, AT DIEGO GARCIA,

Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Fuller looked up from his night-long labors at USS

Challenger's weapons loading hatch, wiped his dripping brow, and watched in morbid fascination. The crewmen he'd been working with did too, and for once he didn't urge them back to it. They've more than earned a break, he told himself, so let them look. Let them see what this is all about, this tactical nuclear war at sea with the Berlin-Boer Axis.

"Jesus," the submarine's chief of the boat said, looking east from under the lead-lined awning with its propane jets, radar and thermal antisatellite masking.

"Yeah," Jeffrey said. What else was there to say? The young seamen just stared. The sun had breasted the horizon now, well past the first moment of nautical dawn, that special time of day that Jeffrey loved but rarely saw. The extra-yellow early light shone above the seventy-foot-high trees off in the distance, the long-abandoned coconut plantation on the other side of the lagoon. The light picked out the cloud-flecked sky, high scudding altocumulus over fluffy fractostratus blobs, and it illuminated the hideous procession in the foreground.

"Ranger," Jeffrey whispered.

The ATR(X) oceangoing salvage tug bore zero three

five relative, crossing the line of bearing to the lighthouse on Leconte Point. Her charge'

s stem could just be seen, slowly making progress past the anchorage. Gradually, like some obscene burlesque, the hulk came into view, dragged by the tow cable whose catenary curved beneath the water and then up again. Slowly, almost teasingly, she moved out from behind the looming steel-gray side of the submarine tender, USS Frank Cable, against which Challenger lay moored.

Instinctively Jeffrey did the target-motion analysis in his head. Angle on the bow starboard zero four zero, mark. Speed five knots, course one six five. Distance to the track, call it 1,200 yards.

Jeffrey noticed there was comparative silence now. Work topside had ceased on all the other ships as well. Only the incessant roar of jets and turboprops and helicopters persisted, off past his right shoulder at the airfield. Overhead, birds soared, oblivious. Ranger's wake washed under Challenger, and she started pitching slightly as if in homage. The nylon mooring lines stretched, creaking softly. Thankfully the light breeze was from behind Jeffrey, from the west.

Ranger's island superstructure was gone, Jeffrey saw, except for a tangled mess of wreckage, a livid stump three meters high. Her flight deck, warped and twisted, was more or less still there, except for the aircraft elevators, which all were missing. Edgeon to the enemy cruise missile blast, Jeffrey figured, the flight deck was peeled upward as the atomic shock front's ground reflection diffracted over the vessel. Stress loadings of the incident wave, severe drag and compression forces, and explosive negative pressure gradients did the rest.

"My God," Jeffrey said out loud. "You can see right through her hull." He watched the sunrise glowing where the hangar deck had been, and in the other empty spaces lower down. Those once were all compartments, where her crew had worked and studied, slept and

messed, written letters home. Tortured longitudinals were what remained of her first platform deck amidships, forward of engineering. Along her waterline arced the discharge from many pumps, undoubtedly P-250 portable gasoline-powered units, keeping her afloat.

"They're finishing the detailed decontamination," COB said, pointing out the little figures in nuclear-biological-chemical protective suits on the hull, busy with the scrubbing and the sealing. "Aging will have happened on its own."

"Iodine 131," Jeffrey said, continuing the idle shop talk in spite of himself, "radon 222, the shortest half-lived stuff."

COB nodded. "The gross washdown would have been completed after putting out the fires."

"The naval architects will claim her now, I think," Jeffrey said. "To improve their damageability models."

"It isn't right," COB said. "She's a tomb, not a pile of data." Here and there patches of hull plating still clung to Ranger's side. The plates were pressed inward against the frame members, whose outlines stood out clearly. The plates seemed plastered to her flank like sheets of canvas in the wind, a devil's wind. Everything was black, deep coal-mine black, except for splotches where the fires and ocean salt had oxidized her steel a matte pastel red-brown.

"She fought hard," a junior officer said with awe.

"A Presidential Unit Citation for sure," a senior chief said.

"Awarded posthumously," COB said, an obvious tightness in his throat.

"The larger battle won," Jeffrey said, "but at such cost." It was better if they talked, he told himself. It eased the pain.

Jeffrey saw two seamen wipe their eyes—maybe they'd had friends aboard, or maybe not. He watched as

Ranger moved on through the lagoon, toward its closed end at the south point of the atoll'

s miles-long V, toward shallow water and foul ground.

"Message from Frank Cable, sir," COB said when there seemed no point in watching further, being formal for the benefit of the enlisted men, all petty officers themselves. " Captain's due back in fifteen minutes."

A group of crewmen had been standing close together at the bow, huddling like at a funeral, near the dozen hatches for the Tactical Tomahawk cruise missile vertical launch system. The men got back to work, unbidden, at the torpedo loading gear.

"Last one, correct?" Jeffrey said, eyeing the lethal cylinder.

"Confirmed, last nuclear torpedo," COB said carefully.

Jeffrey initialed the checklist, then held out his clipboard for COB to countersign. The old chief would have his thirty years in soon, Jeffrey knew, but with this war the navy wouldn't let him go. Not that he would want to, and victory was much too tenuous to plan that far ahead. COB, whose given name was never used aboard, came from a clan of Latino Jersey City truckers. Black sheep of the family, he instead had gone to sea. At least COB had a family who cared. Jeffrey sighed to himself, then stood up straighter.

"Let me give you guys a hand."

They positioned the crane's long burden carefully, then eased the two-metric-ton weapon onto the loading cradle and secured it. Jeffrey watched the cradle first elevate to line up with the channel through the hull, then trundle down toward the transit rack in the torpedo room three decks below.

A variable-yield warhead, the cryptic markings on the fish's glossy green side said 0.01

to 0.1 kilotons. Maybe that didn't sound like much, till you remembered these were meant to go off underwater. "Up to almost one percent of Hiroshima," Jeffrey said, mostly to himself. The casing at the back for the fiberoptic guidance wire was labeled NO STEP.

COB cleared his throat. "The message said we have two guests. Passengers. No honors to be rendered."

"Very well," Jeffrey said. He shrugged. "Security, I guess."

"Gripes," COB groaned. "Please, no."

"Watch that," Jeffrey said, but smiling. He'd seen why COB had cursed. Captain Wilson was coming down the gangway from the tender, accompanied by two uniformed figures. One had a beard and one was female.

Jeffrey went to meet them at the brow, the portable aluminum stepway that led onto the hull. The brow was positioned at Challenger's so-called quarterdeck, a flat space behind the sail.

The captain's male guest was a Royal Navy four-striper in summer whites, a full captain, not like Jeffrey's CO, who was actually a commander. The woman wore a khaki shortsleeved shirt and slacks, but from a distance Jeffrey couldn't make out her collar tabs. He watched the arriving threesome honor the national ensign at Challenger's stern, then exchange salutes with the in-port duty officer.

"Commodore Morse," Wilson said, "let me introduce my executive officer, Jeffrey Fuller. . . . Jeffrey, meet Richard Morse." They shook hands. A commodore was a senior captain acting in the role of rear admiral, commanding more than a single ship. Jeffrey saw that Morse was qualified in subs—between the dolphins on his badge was a crown with inlaid rubies.

"Welcome to our island," Morse said, smiling. Then he added puckishly, "Of course, hardly anyone here's British." Diego Garcia was a U.K. dependent territory, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, in the middle of

nowhere. Its strategic value lay in being on the way to or from so many other places.

"The commodore's with us as an observer," Wilson said. "He'll take command of a new undersea battle group when we get to the Cape Verdes."

"HMS Dreadnought will be my flagship to escort the Allied buildup," Morse said, "so I'm quite interested in how you people go about things. You know our troopship and tank transport convoys to Central Africa will be crucial. German and Boer land forces are still hell-bent on linking up there."

Morse's frame was compact, like Captain Wilson's, and his wan complexion seemed more so next to the CO's deep chocolate brown. Morse had erect posture by submariner standards, with slightly rounded shoulders that spoke of quiet power. Wilson's shoulders were squared off, always, conveying toughness and a not-soquiet power.

"XO," Wilson said, "this is Ilse Reebeck. Miss Reebeck, Commander Fuller." A lieutenant commander was called "Commander" publicly, and as XO Jeffrey would have gotten the title in any case, a military courtesy. Now he could see Ilse was a civilian—

no one had told her civilians don't salute.

"How do you do," Jeffrey said. Ilse was slim, close to Jeffrey's height. She had a good figure and a good firm handshake, but her eyes were angry, or maybe sad.

"Pleased to meet you," Reebeck said officiously in a not-quite-British accent.

"Anything vital still not loaded?" Wilson said to Jeffrey, never one to waste his time or words.

"How vital do you mean, sir?" Jeffrey said.

"We've got mission orders," Wilson said, holding up his bulging briefcase, "but first things first. An Israeli Type 800 diesel boat just reported an inbound hostile PROBSUB

contact, then didn't have the signal processing power to hold on to it."

"The hostile's not nuclear-powered?" Jeffrey said.

"No, it's too quiet, that's the problem. Helos are being vectored now to help confirm and localize. We're tasked to make the intercept before the bastard gets too close."

"Understood, Captain."

"Tell Maneuvering I want to get under way in fifteen minutes. You take the bridge until we dive."

"Aye aye, sir," Jeffrey said. He knew Challenger's reactor had been kept critical. With her steam throttles cranked open and proper control rod adjustments, the ship would answer all bells almost instantly.

"Weapons load-out completed?" Wilson said. "Yes, sir," Jeffrey said.

"Everyone aboard? SEAL team squared away?" "We struck their gear below first thing."

"Good," Wilson said, eyeing the flexible conveyor passing boxes from the tender. " Anything still waiting when we single up gets left behind. And once we're submerged, I want your recommendation on what goes in the torpedo tubes. So use your head."

"Understood, sir," Jeffrey said.

"You got grease on your good uniform."

"Sorry, sir," Jeffrey said, didn't have time to change after the meeting with Admiral Cook."

Wilson nodded. "Call me when we're ready to cast off." Wilson let the Brit precede him down the hatch behind the sail. COB followed, presumably to help Morse get settled in. Ilse Reebeck lingered. She glared at the armed enlisted man who stood guard by the brow. He instinctively stepped back. "I'm South African," she told Jeffrey, making it a dare, not an explanation.

"I'm sorry," Jeffrey said. He thought she had nice hair. Light brown, like her eyes, straight and shoulder-length.

"You were with the SEALs," Ilse said, pointing to his Special Warfare qualification badge.

"Long ago," Jeffrey said. "I transferred to the SubForce. It's been more than fifteen years now." "Miss it?"

"Excuse me?"

"Do you miss being in the SEALs?" Ilse pronounced each word distinctly, as if Jeffrey were retarded or Tightly deaf.