Thunder In The Deep (02) (4 page)

Lieutenant Richard Sessions came over and leaned between Ilse and Kathy. He read their screens—each station had a pair, one above the other, in high-definition full color.

"Quick work," Sessions said. "I see you two won't need much help from me." This pleased Ilse; 'til yesterday he'd been sonar officer,

reporting to Weps, the weapons officer, Lieutenant Jackson Jefferson Bell. With Kathy added to the crew, as an exchange officer from the Royal Navy, Jeffrey had promoted Sessions to navigator, a department head in his own right. The old navigator, Lieutenant Monaghan, was on a hospital ship, in intensive care with a broken neck. Kathy had served on the U.K.'s ceramic sub, HMS Dreadnought, as part of the Royal Navy's initial—and highly controversial—tryout of women in fast-attack crews, something made more palatable to most naysayers by the exigencies of war, the endless demands for talented people. Sessions was in his mid-twenties, from somewhere in Nebraska. Always earnest and polite, he was the sort of person whose hair and clothes seemed a little sloppy no matter what he did.

Sessions reached past Ilse's shoulder and pushed a selector button. Her lower screen changed from computer code to a broadband waterfall display. Ilse saw the -like traces of biologics and breaking waves, and watched the merged engine noise of surface ships fleeing from that beleaguered convoy. There were also weird tight spirals on the screen that Ilse knew came from acoustic jammers and decoys, and bright swellings here and there from the nuclear blasts.

"Looks bad," Sessions said.

"Yes." Ilse wondered why Jeffrey wasn't doing something to help, but figured his focus was on Texas. He'd been reclusive since the overcrowded ASDS docked with Challenger; she'd hardly seen him, and felt abandoned. One minute he'd been trying to ask her out, on leave at the hotel in Cape Verde, and she hadn't exactly said no. The next, after his hurried mission briefing, he'd foisted her off on Kathy and disappeared; for this watch, Lieutenant Bell had the deck and the conn.

Sessions straightened and returned to the digital nav table, to confer with his senior chief, the assistant navigator. Kathy spoke with one of the sonar chiefs. Ilse knew that in a very real sense the chiefs made Challenger go—and they'd be the first ones to tell you that. Ilse drank the

dregs of her latest coffee, retrieved the computer code to her display, and went back to work.

She and Kathy discussed some further technical points. Kathy was approachable enough, but Ilse found her a bit reserved. This was probably just her needed persona as a naval officer, dealing with superiors and subordinates in the hierarchy of the ship. It could be because Kathy was new here, still testing the waters as it were. Ilse doubted it had much to do with the sex-balance on Challenger, since she'd had no trouble feeling welcome herself from the get-go: This crew was an elite, and knew no one would be assigned unless they also were very good. There was a strong sense of camaraderie on the ship, built from their shared first taste of combat two weeks ago, strengthened by this compelling new assignment, the Texas.

Well, maybe I'll get to know Kathy better, once we have a chance to unwind together alone in our stateroom.

Ilse felt Kathy stiffen abruptly. "Here we go," she muttered. The Brit put both ear cups firmly in place, and frowned. "Console five," she said into her headset mike, speaking to one of the enlisted sonar techs. "Play back the last ten seconds, starboard wide-aperture array, on bearing zero two five true. Show me the power spectrum."

"What's happening?" Ilse said.

Kathy's lower screen changed to show a jagged, squirming oscilloscope trace, a plot of sound intensity versus frequency, on bearing zero two five over time.

"That." Kathy pointed to a quick blip at about 2000 hertz that stuck out like a sore thumb. On the tape, enhanced, it sounded like a clunk. Kathy froze the picture and studied it. "Console three, give me the ray trace." Her upper screen now showed a tangle of overlapping arcs and sine curves; Ilse's detailed knowledge of ocean mechanics made this plot more precise.

"Conn, Sonar," Kathy called out. "Mechanical transient, bearing zero two five. Closer than our first convergence zone. . . . It isn't friendly."

Jeffrey finished wolfing down a stale ham sandwich alone in the wardroom. He felt Challenger shimmy for a moment, as she passed through a dying shock wave from another distant atomic explosion. He knew the second section of a huge convoy to the U. K. was under attack way up ahead, part two of a shipment of food and heating fuel on dozens of escorted merchant ships. The first section had run into trouble enough the day before, near the path of the Texas. The convoy had sailed in two sections—a day apart and on different routes past the Azores in mid-Atlantic—partly because the number of cargo ships that started out was so large, and partly as a one-two punch to try to overwhelm and blow past the Axis wolf packs. Similar tactics had been used in World War II, with mixed success—and now the U-boats had A-bombs, and silent airindependent propulsion if not nuclear power, and didn't send constant radio reports for the Allies to home on and decode.

Jeffrey heard and felt another detonation. He wished there was something he could do to help those merchant mariners. Half a year into the war, Great Britain was already starving, the initial six-month surge capacity of the Allies' submarine fleets was nearing exhaustion, and the killing North Atlantic storms had barely begun. But the convoy action was too far off for Challenger to make much difference. Besides, she had a pressing engagement elsewhere, Jeffrey's preoccupation: Texas, Texas, Texas. Her hundred or so combat-experienced American submariners—or as many as would actually live and recover from their injuries—were a priceless war-fighting asset, even with their ship herself lost. They were also an invaluable prize, if the enemy got to them first. Jeffrey rubbed sleep-deprived eyes. Spread before him on the wardroom table were hard copies of Virginia-class blueprints and subsystem diagrams. Just as he had for most of the past twenty-four hours—often in conference with his engineer, Lieutenant Willey, and with COB Jeffrey was

trying to understand what the men aboard Texas might do to survive, and what Challenger might best do to aid them once she reached the scene. It would take several hours to evacuate the survivors, shuttling them from Texas to Challenger in Jeffrey's ASDS. It would be tragic indeed if some succumbed to wounds or oxygen deprivation while waiting their turn, when salvation was so near.

One of the wardroom intercoms barked. To Jeffrey the signal, the growler, always sounded like a shih tzu puppy. More stressed-out than usual, Jeffrey winced at this mental connection: His family had had a shih tzu when he was growing up, in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. In a sick way, he was here now because of that dog. He'd found the shih tzu, his family, his playmates, the town, all excruciatingly ordinary, and he didn't try to hide it. His father was a local utility regulator—a career bureaucrat—

his mother a nondescript housewife, his two older sisters—and their husbands—painfully bourgeois. He had always felt a burning need to escape from there and achieve something really special. Jeffrey sometimes wondered if this was a genetic quirk, or if he'd been mixed up with another baby at the hospital. In fifth grade, by accident, he discovered the naval history section at his local library, and quickly became addicted to the stuff—it soothed that savage, painful craving in his breast. As soon as he could, in a rather heavy-handed way, he left home for Purdue with a Navy scholarship, and after that joined the SEALs, till bad scar tissue in a leg required he be transferred; he picked submarines. Basically, Jeffrey'd run away to sea and hadn't looked back, and his family, not nearly as dull as Jeffrey had judged them to be, resented it. Jeffrey sighed. They had little contact with him now, and vice versa, and much of that was his fault. In fact, Jeffrey's father—deeply involved in America's desperate energyconservation program these days—seemed to blame Jeffrey somehow for the war. After all, Jeffrey was Navy. The Navy should have known, should have done something sooner,

not been suckered into that nuclear ambush off western Africa that cost three carriers. Jeffrey forced himself back to the present: the growler. Its ringer was hand-powered from the other end by turning a little crank, which everyone had their own way of doing, their "fist." Jeffrey could tell this call was from his acting XO, Lieutenant Bell, who this watch was officer of the deck.

Jeffrey gulped the last of his iced tea, wiped his lips with a white cloth napkin, then lifted the handset. "Captain."

"Sir," Bell said, "Sonar just picked up a mechanical transient. Submerged, left of the bearing to the convoy, and much closer to Challenger."

Closer? Jeffrey's heart quickened. "What's Milgrom's best guess of the range?"

"Maybe fifty thousand yards." Twenty-five nautical miles. Hmmm . . . "What's her assessment?"

"She thinks it was an underwater probe and drogue connecting, trying to hide in the reverb from that latest detonation."

"Some kind of undersea replenishment," Jeffrey said. "Probably pulled back for a breather from the running fight northeast of us."

"Yes, sir. Milgrom says she heard something like it once before, on Dreadnought, but that time the targets evaded. It's definitely Axis."

Good. That's why Kathy was here, a bit of cross-pollination between American and Royal Navy ceramic-hulled submarine crews. Jeffrey stood up decisively, from the sacrosanct captain's place at the head of the wardroom table. Captain Wilson's place.

"I'll be right there, XO. Rig for ultraquiet and deep submergence. Sound silent general quarters, man battle stations antisubmarine."

Jeffrey quickly piled the Texas work papers onto the sideboard. He ducked into the pantry to bus his dirty dishes.

Lying loose they might become dangerous projectiles—and the wardroom doubled as Challenger's operating theater. On the way, for the umpteenth time, he glanced at the wardroom data repeaters. The ship was approaching latitude 29° 28' north. Jeffrey was glad he hadn't opened that "RECURVE ARBOR" courier envelope. Some kind of secret orders? Which base to head for in the U.S.? Updated recognition codes for when they reached home waters?

Well, taking the fine print literally, he hadn't crossed 30 north yet—and there might be something in the package to limit his tactical discretion. For him, all the lives on the convoy—and the vital cargoes they carried—had to outweigh a single stranded crew on an already sunken submarine . . . didn't they?

Besides, here was a chance for Jeffrey's first independent kill. He was half afraid he wouldn't see combat before the East Coast and dry dock. Once hard and demanding Captain Wilson recovered, Jeffrey would revert to XO, taking orders in battle, not giving them.

Jeffrey climbed the ladder up one deck. He strode to the command workstation in the center of the CACC.

It occurred to Jeffrey that it hadn't occurred to him to be nervous making his first deliberate attack as acting captain, a big step in any naval officer's career. But as he'd discovered as a much younger lieutenant ( j.g.), badly wounded on a black op in Iraq in '

96, he didn't mind dying half so much as he minded being bored. The intense comradeship of people being shot at dispelled his gnawing sense of inner emptiness. The difference this time, though, was Jeffrey was almost forty, with everything that implied. And the burden of command was not one ounce diminished since his first taste of enemy fire; the unforgiving trade-offs of life-versus-life, that soul-wrenching calculus of war, only got harder, more wearing with age. He had never felt so lonely as in the past day, with no one, no one, to relieve the ultimate pressures of his responsibility as captain, or to share the blame in case he failed.

"Sir," Bell said, talking fast, "the ship's closed up at battle stations antisubmarine. We are rigged for ultraquiet. Our depth is twelve hundred feet, and we are rigged for deep submergence. Our course is due north, speed is top quiet speed, twenty-six knots." Unlike other American submarines, Challenger had in-hull hangar space for her minisub; the ASDS didn't slow her down. Jeffrey repeated Bell's info per standard procedure, then took the conn. Bell slid over to the right seat of the desk-high console. Bell was an inch taller than Jeffrey, four years younger, and fit but not as muscular. Bell was a Navy brat, like his father before him, and had grown up all over the world.

Jeffrey announced in a loud clear voice, "This is the captain. I have the conn." The watchstanders acknowledged.

"What do we know?" Jeffrey said impatiently.

Bell relayed him the large-scale tactical plot. "Submerged hostile contact designated Master One, bearing zero two five true." Off the starboard bow, given Challenger's course.

"Sonar, any further data since that transient?"

"Negative, sir," Kathy said. "Recommend splitting contact designation as Master One and Master Two, since I'm certain there are two vessels involved."

"Do it. Contact identification?"

"Speculation, sir. One Class two-twelve attack sub and one modified Class two-fourteen long-endurance milch cow"

"Makes sense," Jeffrey said. The 212 must be replenishing its liquid oxygen and hydrogen supplies, for its air-independent fuel cells (AIP). "The German boats won't be making more than three knots, cruising in close proximity, linked by fueling hose. A juicy target, if we can get near enough for a decent shot." An easy target, too.

"Sir," Bell said, "if our priority is helping the Texas, shouldn't we decline an engagement here? The closer we get to these U-boats, the more likely they'll pick us up."

"They'll have twenty or thirty nuclear torpedoes between them. We put 'em on the bottom in little pieces, more of our ships get through."

"Er, yes, sir."

Jeffrey turned to the phone talker. "Give me your rig." Jeffrey put on the bulky headphones and pressed the switch for the sound-powered mike.

"This is the captain." It got easier each time he said it. He made eye contact around the control room as he spoke. "Men . . . and women of Challenger. You all know we have somewhere important to get to, to help our friends on Texas." He paused to let the phone talkers stationed around the ship catch up, relaying his words to the other crewmen in earshot in each compartment. "Now we have a chance to do some good on the way. We are going to destroy two hypermodern Axis diesel submarines and neutralize their atomic weapons. Our actions will allow more ships to reach the U.K., on this convoy and future convoys. We must act quickly while they're still linked up for refueling and they're slow and vulnerable. Those AIPs are fast enough to be a threat to us and god-awful quiet on their fuel-cell electric drives. There's some risk, but it's worth it and we're taking it." Jeffrey paused again. "That's all." He took off the rig. There was tense silence in the compartment. Jeffrey imagined some of the men chafed at this delay in the rescue mission. He decided to pretend he didn't notice: He was in charge now.