Thunder In The Deep (02) (3 page)

"If they do," Clayton rejoined, "then maybe you can let me know, sir." Then he clapped Jeffrey on the shoulder, equally delighted to see his proven comrade-in-arms again.

"What did they say to you?"

"We're supposed to be, you know, some kind of armed guard. Apparently you're in need of extra muscle."

"I'm liking this less and less," Jeffrey said, shaking his head.

"I know," Ilse heard Clayton say as they reached the brow to the ASDS. "The base admiral didn't like it too much either."

Under the awning, Clayton gave Ilse a brotherly hug. She'd helped treat one of his mortally wounded men during the raid, and Clayton had brought her back alive; she felt better to know he was coming this time, too. Shajo was in his late twenties, from Atlanta, easy to talk to and even-tempered, with a very hard body. To Ilse his eyes betrayed hints of a persistent sadness that was all too common these days, from the recent loss of friends and teammates in the war, and the loss of innocence.

Jeffrey put down an equipment case and shouted through the mini's top hatch. "COB, how's your trim?" The little sub rode very low in the water, and didn't have a conning tower. With all the crewmen and now the SEALs' gear, keeping the mini stable would be tough.

Ilse heard COB's voice from inside. "Too heavy aft, Captain, and there's nothing left I can pump or counter-flood. Any more weight on board and we're gonna have to jettison the anchors."

"Do it," Jeffrey yelled, "right now. And unclip the passenger seats in the back and pass them up to the pier." This was the Jeffrey whom Ilse had quickly gotten to know, and maybe, sort of, to like; firm but informal, always improvising on the spot, and ruthlessly practical. Jeffrey was driven, coming alive under pressure, though sometimes impetuous or even reckless when in battle. Yet he was oddly hesitant with her—at least when they weren't both being shot at by the enemy. Lonely, too. Ilse had sensed that in Jeffrey quickly. He'd never once mentioned any family.

Clayton's men formed a human chain to pile the seats under the camouflage awning. Ilse couldn't help thinking that all this hubbub, the courier helo and then the taxi with the SEALs, had to get noticed by German or Boer re-con assets.

Finally everyone was aboard with their gear, the shore

power and mooring lines were stowed, the top hatch secured. Jeffrey went forward to stand behind COB's seat, in the little control room. Ilse started to follow him—she'd stood behind the copilot as they snuck in toward Durban, on the South African coast, the last time.

But Jeffrey held up one hand. "No, I need to talk with Shajo and COB about the rescue plan."

Shajo squeezed past Ilse and into the control compartment. Then Jeffrey closed the door in her face.

A FEW MINUTES LATER.

Korvettenkapitan Ernst Beck paused outside the captain's stateroom door. This would be their first private encounter since leaving port for patrol.

Beck felt the deck tilting to a fifteen-degree down bubble.

Germany's ceramic-hulled nuclear submarine Deutschland had reached the edge of the continental shelf off occupied France—the minefields, friendly and enemy, were mostly behind them now. She was descending to deeper water per the captain's orders. Beck hesitated. Even after three years of working with the man, to intrude made him feel cold. Beck dearly loved his wife and two young sons. He knew by now his Kommandant—commanding officer—loved no one but himself, and never would. Beck knocked.

"Come," that polished, precise, unreachable voice called from within. Beck slid open the door, entered, and closed it again for security.

Fregattenkapitan Kurt Eberhard sat alone at his fold-down desk. The air was filled with tobacco smoke, swirling in delicate tendrils. On the bulkhead hung the portrait in oils of the new Kaiser, Wilhelm IV, in an expensive gilded frame—Wilhelm II was Kaiser in World War One; Wilhelm III was his son, the Crown Prince, who never took the throne after 1918.

Eberhard looked up. He seemed annoyed, then softened his features; he was polite, at least superficially. `Ja, Einzvo?"

Beck was Deutschland's so-called "IWO," the Erster Wachoffizier—executive officer, pronounced phonetically "einzvo." His rank equaled lieutenant commander in the U.S. or Royal navies. Eberhard was a full commander, intent on making full captain soon.

"Sir," Beck said, "a high-priority radiogram came in." "Did you read it?"

"Yes, Captain."

"Well?"

"It's an assessment from Kaiserliche Marine Intel, sir." Imperial Naval Intelligence. " Reliable sources indicate USS Challenger is putting to sea from Cape Verde." Hard blue eyes confronted Beck.

"So they've localized our ceramic-hulled friend?" "Yes, Captain. She's heading north."

"Does the message say why?"

"She might be tasked to assist a crippled American sub near the Azores, but that could be a deception, sir, a feint for some more important mission. . . . The odd thing is, it says combat swimmers were taken aboard, but not Challenger's captain. Her XO's in command."

Eberhard stubbed out his cigarette. "I know Jeffrey Fuller all too well. A peasant." Beck was careful not to react. The Coronation had done more than restore the glitter of Court, of which Eberhard was so fond: It had strengthened class differences in German society. Beck was the youngest son of a farmer himself, from outside Munich; his family was Catholic in the traditional Bavarian way. He'd joined the peacetime German Navy as a cadet in '91, right after Reunification. He did it to get a broader education than he could at the local

technical school, and to help make the nation whole again with respect in the eyes of the world.

Also—as he put it to his trusted friends—by his late teens, Beck was tired of smelling manure and wearing lederhosen.

"Fuller and I once worked together," Eberhard said. He seemed distant for a moment, even more than usual. "Combined duty at the Pentagon, before the war."

"Is he good, sir?" Given the possibility of a contest with Fuller and crew, Beck had to ask. Eberhard waved dismissively.

"He displeased me with 'his rebellious ways and casual style. I outranked him, of course, then as now, but the Americans put up with his antics."

Beck wondered what he was supposed to say to that. His job as executive officer was to meld himself to Eberhard's will, regardless of what he thought of the man.

"We're ordered to be on alert, sir. In case Challenger enters our operational area."

"Good. Let me see."

Beck gave him the message slip.

Beck glanced at Eberhard's desk. He recognized a file copy of Deutschland's last war patrol report—he'd drafted it himself for Eberhard's signature three weeks ago. It was open to the final page, showing the vessel's cumulative totals since the start of the fighting.

Eberhard noticed him reading.

"Nine hundred fifty thousand tons of Allied shipping sunk," Eberhard said. "Already twice the previous world record, set by one of our submarine captains in World War One. Four times as good as Hitler's top-scoring U-boat ace." He went back to the message slip.

This damage wrought by Deutschland had earned Eberhard the Ritterkreuz, the Knight's Cross, one of Germany's highest military honors. It was deserved; Beck had no question of Eberhard's tactical skill. Beck himself got the Iron Cross First Class, prestigious enough, though he cared nothing for medals.

But he did want his own command someday. Beck did want his own command. Eberhard put the message in his safe.

"How are the crew?"

"Getting back their sea legs quickly, Captain." They'd all been on leave in Bordeaux. Submariner skills were perishable—the ,men grew rusty away from the ship—but Beck was taking care of that with drills and refresher training.

"And the new hands?"

"I think they'll be ready."

"You think or you know?"

"They'll be ready, Captain."

"Good. I look forward to dueling with Fuller again."

"Captain, some of the seasoned men have been holding up an index finger to one another, when they think I'm not looking."

"An index finger, Einzvo?"

"Yes. For one million tons."

"This patrol we'll do it. A record for the ages."

As usual, Beck was torn by Germany's culpability in this war. But they had a right to their God-given place in the world, didn't they? Versailles, post-Nazi occupation by the Allies, endless, dreary Soviet domination in the East—all were made up for now. This was good, wasn't it?

"Sink one million tons, and then sink Challenger," Eberhard said. "What a Christmas gift for our monarch that would make!"

Beck figured Eberhard would be made a baron for sure.

Eberhard would like that: the nobleman's title itself. The validation independent of Eberhard's father, a crass, nouveau-riche investment banker in Stettin, in the Protestant north. The grant of a private estate in occupied French wine country. The long train of beautiful Frenchwomen warming his bed.

Yes, Eberhard would like that a lot.

"Destroy Challenger," Eberhard said, "and the self-infatuated Americans will be one big step closer to having to sue for an armistice."

Deutschland leveled off. Beck and Eberhard read the depth gauge on the captain's instrument display: eleven hundred meters. With her alumina-casing hull and sea pipes, the ship was capable of three or four times that—about fifteen thousand feet. Eberhard lit up again. He sat for a minute, savoring the cigarette and thinking. Beck waited.

"They have no sense of history, the Americans," Eberhard said. "None of what's happening ought to have surprised them. But it did. They're like children, thinking the world should be a nice place, and everyone else should agree with them."

"Unipolarism, they called it, sir, after the end of the Cold War."

"We're giving the world a new unipolarism, aren't we? Once we starve out the U.K., and link up with the Boers in central Africa, we'll control two continents. . . . You have to admit the Boers come in handy." They'd helped spring the giant two-step trap at the start of the war, and they were giving the Allies a two-theater conflict now. Again Beck tried not to react to Eberhard's haughty attitude. He went to his common ground with the captain, as a fellow naval officer: patriotism and duty. But did Eberhard—Germany's greatest U-boat commander—love the sea and his ship as Beck did, or was the ocean to him just water, and Deutschland just a machine? Was Eberhard a patriot, or was he simply using this war for predatory self-advancement, the same way he used everyone and everything else?

ON CHALLENGER, ONE DAY LATER.

Ilse sat elbow to elbow with Kathy Milgrom, at the forward end of the sonar consoles lining the crowded Command and Control Center's port bulkhead. Although they'd both been there a while, the watch had just changed, and fresh crewmen were settling in all around them. Ilse sensed the mood of heightened urgency—they were halfway to the Texas now. Everyone put on a bright face, and fought to stay optimistic, but the relentless tension was taking its toll. The enlisted mess was turned into a war room for the rescue: stacked emergency tools and oxygen canisters, nonstop first-aid drills, constant damage control rehearsals; the men ate standing up. Jeffrey briefed his officers—and Ilse—as soon as Challenger got underway. His words about what they might find when they reached Texas had been pithy, graphic, chilling. Ilse regretted there was nothing she could do to help those poor waiting men, except help get there as quickly as possible.

The CACC, Challenger's control room, was rigged for red, despite the broad daylight twelve hundred feet above

the ship, over the storm-tossed waves and distant mushroom clouds. The subdued lighting had little to do with preserving night vision. In the midst of tactical nuclear war at sea there was no way a submarine would raise a periscope mast by choice, let alone surface and man the bridge cockpit on the sail—the conning tower—even at night. The red fluorescents were used instead to make the computer screens easy on watchstanders'

eyes.

"I'm about done with this module of code," Ilse said—an enhanced model of water temperature versus salinity dynamics.

"I'll be ready for your data bridge in a minute," Kathy said; she was the acting sonar officer. Ilse was the ship's on-board combat oceanographer, formalized now. She'd been teaching and doing research at the University of Cape Town, and was caught in the U.S. at a marine biology conference when the Double Putsch cost her her country—and cost her family their lives for resisting the old-line Boer takeover.

Ilse sat with headphones on, the left ear cup over her left ear, the right one on her cheekbone. This way she could hear the raw signals from outside, and still talk with Kathy. Intermittent thunder on the headphones formed a counterpoint: atom bombs going off, more than fifty miles away, in the latest battle between a supply convoy and the U-boats.

"This American combat systems software is splendid," Kathy said; she was crisp, but expressive, and clearly loved her work. A full-fledged Royal Navy submariner, Kathy was supposed to have had a quiet trip into dry dock to qualify on Challenger, before further combat duty after that. Now, like Ilse, she had been pulled willy-nilly into this rescue mission to Texas; she needed to master her new job very quickly. The two women had already compared their life stories, so Ilse knew Kathy had grown up in Liverpool, then done the Royal Navy Academy at Dartmouth, followed by Oxford and active service in the surface fleet. Kathy's Liverpool accent, its edges softened now, sounded to Ilse's ear

like Irish; she often talked with her hands, to the degree there was room at the consoles. Ilse glanced at Kathy in profile, backlit in red, lit from in front by the blues and greens on her monitors. Kathy was a few inches shorter than Ilse, a few kilos overweight, and wore special submariner eyeglasses. These had narrow frames and small lenses, to fit under an emergency air breather mask. The glasses made Kathy look particularly owlish.

"Agreed," Ilse said. "The fiber-optic network's amazing." Each console did sonar or weapons or target tracking, depending which menu you picked—all three functions were vital in undersea warfare. Ilse typed on her keyboard, massaged the trackmarble with her palm, and touched her screen. It was possible to access the programs for quick enhancements using software tool kits, as she was doing now. . . . Ilse was getting her sea legs back. She lived in a giant machine, with a soul of its own she felt bound to already; the snug control room was its heart. Sonar was its eyes and ears, very dependent on how the sea transmitted and distorted sound—a topic she knew a lot about. Ilse had grown up in urban Johannesburg, the oldest child of a media executive father and a city politician mother, and spoke English with a South African accent; she was also fluent in Afrikaans, the Boer tongue, related to German and Dutch. She'd always loved nature and scuba diving and had wanderlust in her soul—traits that took her to Scripps in San Diego for a Ph.D. in ocean science. During those four years she picked up American slang. She also, in those happier days, dated more than one American male naval officer from the bases around Coronado.