JOE BUFF

CRUSH DEPTH

In honored memory of the crew of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk. They may once have been our enemies, and their country might or might not now be our friend, but they were submariners.

Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home.

HERMAN MELVILLE,

Moby-Dick

CONTENTS

EPIGRAPH

PROLOGUE

In mid-2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control in South Africa in…

ONE

OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, in the post-midnight pitch-blackness, the freezing wind…

TWO

THE MOURNFUL HOWL of the sirens pierced the wind. As…

THREE

EVENTUALLY, PASSENGER RAILROAD service was restored. Jeffrey and Ilse spent…

FOUR

JEFFREY’S DAD TURNED and noticed him, and did a double…

FIVE

VAN GELDER FELT his armpits grow moist as Voortrekker’s electronic-support-measures…

SIX

JEFFREY AND ILSE sat on the couch again, in the…

SEVEN

“SCHNAPPS, GUNTHER?”

EIGHT

STRAPPED INTO THE rear of the cockpit, Ilse heard the…

NINE

JEFFREY’S TRAIN ARRIVED on time in New London, and he…

TEN

JEFFREY WOKE UP early, after barely four hours’ sleep. The…

ELEVEN

JEFFREY STOOD IN the open bridge cockpit atop Challenger’s sail—the…

TWELVE

CHALLENGER WAS PAST the edge of the continental shelf, submerged…

THIRTEEN

“COMMODORE IN CONTROL,” the messenger of the watch announced.

FOURTEEN

GUNTHER VAN GELDER felt relaxation and inner joy, as much…

FIFTEEN

CHALLENGER HOVERED NEAR the bottom in four thousand feet of…

SIXTEEN

WILSON, SATISFIED BY the periscope photo, ordered Jeffrey to continue…

SEVENTEEN

GUNTHER VAN GELDER sweated and his heart was pounding, both…

EIGHTEEN

“HOW MANY MORE torpedoes still to be loaded, Number One?”

NINETEEN

IN PRIVATE, IN THE commodore’s office, Wilson looked at Jeffrey…

TWENTY

JEFFREY’S INJURED TORPEDOMAN was gone to a hospital. The Prima…

TWENTY-ONE

VAN GELDER HAD the conn. Voortrekker was back in the…

TWENTY-TWO

THE PRIMA LATINA was supposed to stop in Balboa harbor,…

TWENTY-THREE

WILSON GLARED AT Jeffrey. “How dare you come in here…

TWENTY-FOUR

VAN GELDER WATCHED and listened, amazed that all this was…

TWENTY-FIVE

JEFFREY SAT TENSE and worried at the command console in…

TWENTY-SIX

TO JEFFREY IT was refreshing and pleasantly different, almost a…

TWENTY-SEVEN

JEFFREY GINGERLY OPENED the minisub’s top hatch. It rose partway…

TWENTY-EIGHT

JEFFREY LAY ON his back, bewildered, staring at the sky,…

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

OTHER BOOKS BY JOE BUFF

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PROLOGUE

In mid-2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control in South Africa in the midst of social chaos and restored apartheid. In response to a U.N. trade embargo, the Boer regime began sinking U.S. and British merchant ships. Coalition forces mobilized, with only Germany holding back. Troops and tanks drained from the rest of Western Europe and North America, and a joint task force set sail for Africa—into a giant, coordinated trap.

There was another coup, in Berlin, and Kaiser Wilhelm’s great-grandson was crowned, the Hohenzollern throne restored after almost a century. Ultranationalists, exploiting American unpreparedness for all-out war, would give Germany her “place in the sun” at last. A secret military-industrial conspiracy had planned it all for years, brutal opportunists who hated the mediocre silliness of the European Union as much as they resented America’s smug self-infatuation. The kaiser was their figurehead, to legitimize the New Order. Coercion by the noose won over citizens not swayed by patriotism or the sheer onrush of events.

This Berlin-Boer Axis had covertly built small tactical atomic weapons, the great equalizers in what would otherwise have been a most uneven fight—and once again America’s CIA was clueless. The Axis used these low-yield A-bombs to ambush the Allied naval task force under way, then destroyed Warsaw and Tripoli. France surrendered at once, and Continental Europe was overrun. Germany won a strong beachhead in North Africa, while the South African army drove hard toward them to link up.

Germany grabbed nuclear subs from the French, and advanced diesel submarines from other countries. Some were shared with the Boers. A financially supine Russia, supposedly neutral yet long a believer in the practicality of limited tactical nuclear war, sold weapons to the Axis for hard cash. Most of the rest of the world stayed on the sidelines, biding their time out of fear or greed or both.

American supply convoys to starving Great Britain are being decimated by the modern U-boat threat, in another bloody Battle of the Atlantic. Tens of thousands of merchant seamen died in the Second World War, and the casualty lists grow very long this time too.

America herself depends both militarily and economically on vulnerable shipping lanes across the vast Pacific Ocean, to neutral Asia and the Persian Gulf. If these shipping lanes are cut, the U.S. will have no choice but to recognize Axis gains and sue for an armistice: an Axis victory. America and Great Britain each own one state-of-the-art ceramic-hulled fast-attack sub—such as USS Challenger, capable of tremendous depths—but Germany and South Africa own such vessels too.

Now, in February 2012, high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the U.S. is on the defensive everywhere, and democracy has never been more threatened. In this terrible new war, with the midocean’s surface a killing zone, America’s last, best hope for enduring freedom rests with a special breed of fearless undersea warriors….

Ten years in the future

In the Indian Ocean, east of South Africa, aboard the Boer ceramic-hulled nuclear submarine Voortrekker

In the cramped and crowded control room, everyone was quiet. It was dark, to stay in sync with nighttime high above the ship, up on the monsoon-tossed surface. First Officer Gunther Van Gelder breathed. The air was stale—the fans were stopped for greater stealth. Jan ter Horst sat just to his left, in the center of the compartment. Van Gelder could see well enough by the glow of instruments and console screens, but he did not have the nerve to look directly at his captain now. Ter Horst’s physical presence overwhelmed him. Van Gelder knew ter Horst too well. He knew ter Horst would be gloating.

“Dead men afloat,” ter Horst said. With a finger he delicately traced the data windowed on his command workstation display, the noise signature of the enemy submarine. The line on the sonar waterfall grew gradually brighter. “Coming right at us, Gunther. They don’t even realize we’re here.”

“Yes, Captain,” Van Gelder said. At times like this it was best to just agree with the man. “Range now twenty thousand meters.” Just over ten nautical miles. Voortrekker was aimed directly at their victim, moving very slowly, to hide. “Seehecht unit in tube one is ready to fire, sir. Tube one prepared in all respects.”

The Seehecht torpedoes used conventional high-explosive warheads, nothing fancy. They were made by South Africa’s Axis partner in war, resurgent Imperial Germany. Ter Horst’s target, a Collins-class diesel sub, hardly rated one of Voortrekker’s homegrown nuclear weapons, tipped with trusty Boer uranium-235; the Royal Australian Navy’s Collins boats were homegrown too, built in the 1990s, and never quite lived up to the Aussies’ hopes. Van Gelder knew they were noisy, even on batteries, and their sensor performance was poor. Losses from eight months of limited tactical nuclear fighting on half the world’s oceans forced the Allies to put every available warship into the field.

Dead men floating, indeed, Van Gelder thought. Some of the Collins subs had coed crews. Van Gelder didn’t know if this one did. It didn’t matter.

“We’ll let them get just a little closer,” ter Horst said. “Less time for them to pull evasive maneuvers that way.” He sounded smug, not cautious.

“Understood.” Van Gelder waited. At action stations, as first officer—executive officer—his job was to oversee target tracking, done mostly by sonar, and weapons, including Voortrekker’s cruise missiles and mines. He told himself that given ter Horst’s war record so far, this Collins boat was minor prey.

But today was just a shakedown cruise. Voortrekker was fresh from underground dry dock, from two months of hurried round-the-clock repairs and upgrades. This sortie was mostly intended to check that everything worked. It was typical of ter Horst to make his battleworthiness check by plunging straight into mortal combat, against an inferior foe.

“Range now sixteen thousand meters,” Van Gelder recited.

“Very well,” ter Horst said. “Wait.”

Van Gelder went back to waiting, and to thinking. Van Gelder and ter Horst had a good relationship, as such things went. Ter Horst saw Van Gelder as his protégé, his number one in important ways. He’d been ter Horst’s senior aide for the tribunal back in Durban, South Africa—the investigation, which ter Horst chaired, of the mysterious mushroom cloud north of the city in early December. The mushroom cloud that obliterated a secret Axis biological weapons lab. The mushroom cloud in which USS Challenger was implicated, somehow, along with traitors in the Boer command infrastructure…perhaps.

The military tribunal wasn’t over yet. After this shakedown cruise, Voortrekker would return to the hardened sub pens cut into the bluff near downtown Durban. Safely inside, they’d resolve any mechanical problems remaining—there always were some, after a long stretch in the yard. Then Van Gelder’s workload would redouble, as before: endless quality control inspections on the ship, and crew refresher training—plus the lengthy interrogations of the tribunal. The final findings would undoubtedly lead to executions, grisly hangings broadcast on national TV, one more burden on Van Gelder’s troubled soul. Right now, this little stretch under way was, if anything, a respite. Van Gelder could focus on the real war effort alone, and leave the politics and infighting of the land temporarily behind. The land had never made Van Gelder happy. It was the sea, going down into the sea, being one with the sea, that he loved.

“Range to target?” ter Horst snapped.

“Er, range now ten thousand meters, Captain.” Five nautical miles.

“Very well, Number One. Tube one, target unchanged, the Collins boat. Update firing solution, and shoot.” The weapon dashed through the sea.

Van Gelder had programmed the unit to follow a dog-leg approach to the target, to sneak at the Collins from the side and disguise Voortrekker’s location. Seehechts could be used by any sub in the Axis inventory. No one would guess Voortrekker fired the shot. Van Gelder watched his data screens as the one-sided drama began to unfold.

At last the target reacted. The Collins altered course and picked up speed. She launched a decoy, and then noisemakers. Van Gelder’s fire-control technicians, arrayed at consoles along the control room’s port bulkhead, handled the wire-guided Seehecht. Voortrekker’s special passive sonars looked up through the ocean-temperature layers and pinned the real target against the monsoon’s wave action and rain noise. The Collins had nowhere to hide.

“Contact on acoustic intercept!” the sonar chief shouted.

“Target has pinged on active sonar,” Van Gelder said. “Echo suppressed by out-of-phase emissions.” With Voortrekker’s advanced acoustic masking, she was effectively invisible to such a substandard opponent.

The Collins lived long enough to fire two torpedoes in retaliation, but they were shooting blind, tearing in the wrong direction. Van Gelder knew this battle amounted to cold-blooded murder.

“Enemy torpedoes pose no threat to Voortrekker,” he stated, “even if they carry tactical nuclear warheads.” Because seawater was so rigid and dense, torpedo A-bomb warheads had to be very small—a kiloton or less—or the boat that used them could be hoist by its own petard. These yields were a fraction of the weapons America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and were a mere ten-thousandth of the multimegaton hydrogen bombs tested in the atmosphere in the worst days of the Cold War. Yet Axis tactical atom bombs were still a thousand times more powerful than any conventional high-explosive torpedo—which was why the Axis used them, and which forced the Allies in self-defense to use them too.

As if to reemphasize the Collins boat’s impotence, ter Horst ordered the helmsman to come to all stop.

“Weapon from tube one has detonated!” a fire-control technician shouted—the data came back through the guidance wire at the speed of light.

“Sonar on speakers,” ter Horst ordered.

A second later Van Gelder heard the sharp metallic whang of the torpedo hit. The blast echoed off the surface and the sea floor, mixing on the sonar speakers with a two-toned roar: air forced into the Collins’s ballast tanks as her crew desperately tried an emergency blow, plus water rushed through the gash in her hull at ambient sea pressure.

The sea pressure won. The target lost all positive buoyancy, and soon fell through her crush depth. The hull imploded hard.

The eerie rebounding pshoing of crushed metal hitting crushed metal was louder than the torpedo hit. Van Gelder knew any crew still living would have been cremated as the atmosphere compressed and heated to the ignition point of clothing and flesh.

“Excellent,” ter Horst said, almost as an anticlimax. “Helm, steer one eight zero.” Due south. “Increase speed. Make revs for top quiet speed.” Thirty knots.

The helmsman acknowledged.

Van Gelder stood and paced the line of sonarmen on his right, to make extra sure there were no threats as Voortrekker cleared the area.

“Number One,” ter Horst said a few minutes later, “we stay at battle stations. You have the deck and the conn.”

“Aye aye, sir. Maintain present course?”

“No, put us on one three five.”

“Southeast?” That was away from Durban, home base, which was southwest.

“I want to line us up with the covert message hydrophone in the Agulhas Abyssal Plain. I’m retiring to my cabin to compose a message for higher command.”

“Aye aye, Captain.” What was going on now? Well, at least Van Gelder always liked having the deck and conn. He was in almost total control of the ship, as much as anyone could be without being the captain.

Ter Horst returned a short time later with a data disk in his hand. “This requires your electronic countersignature.” He gave Van Gelder the disk.

Van Gelder placed it in the reader on his console. He eyed what came on the screen. Van Gelder was shocked, and then more shocked. Ter Horst was rendering his final verdicts as chair of the tribunal. The accused were being sentenced to death with no real regard for the evidence—or lack of evidence. The choices of guilty or not guilty seemed based more on whim or blood lust. Van Gelder noticed all of the female suspects were to be hanged. This confirmed Van Gelder’s suspicion, that ter Horst actually liked watching such executions. Since the condemned were strung up naked, the implications of erotic perversion were obvious.

But there was more. Ter Horst reported his victory over the Collins boat, and declared Voortrekker combat ready. He waived his planned return to dry dock, and insisted on permission for immediate departure on his next top-secret combat mission.

“But sir,” Van Gelder said, “we have dozens of mechanical gripes and work-order exceptions to resolve.”

“Don’t whine, Gunther. Just sign it, and have the message sent.”

Van Gelder opened his mouth to object. Ter Horst cut him short.

“Don’t spoil a good day for us both. You just countersign, and see that the message is sent.”

Van Gelder relayed it to the secure communications room.

“Thank you,” ter Horst said exaggeratedly. “I have the conn.”

“You have the conn, aye aye.” Ter Horst had taken his ship back. Voortrekker maintained course and speed, further into the Indian Ocean, and also toward Antarctica.

It took almost an hour for Van Gelder’s intercom light to flash. The junior lieutenant in charge of communications had the response from headquarters. It surprised Van Gelder. Ter Horst’s tribunal decisions were accepted as is. Obviously, within the Boer power structure, ter Horst was well connected. Van Gelder saw the entire inquest had been a travesty, a purely political show trial. And besides, the television producers in Johannesburg were always hungry for more human meat for the ever-popular gallows show.

But that wasn’t all. Higher command had news for ter Horst. USS Challenger was conclusively identified as the Allied submarine involved in an attack before Christmas on a stronghold on the German coast. Challenger was still laid up for weeks more of battle-damage repairs. And Boer freedom fighter Ilse Reebeck had been spotted as a participant in the Germany raid.

Van Gelder realized ter Horst was also reading the message when ter Horst cursed.

“That bitch.”

Van Gelder knew that for two years, up until the war, ter Horst and Ilse Reebeck had been lovers. Van Gelder had met her several times, at receptions and banquets. He thought she was sexy and smart, a suitable consort for his captain. Only now, she worked for the other side.

“I’d like to watch her squirm at the end of a rope.”

Van Gelder blanched, and was glad the red glow of instruments hid his discomfort.

“Now this is interesting,” ter Horst went on. He was calm again, so calm it scared Van Gelder. “It seems during our own running fight with Challenger, her executive officer was in command. Hmmm. Jeffrey Fuller. I don’t know him.” Ter Horst turned to face Van Gelder. “Ha! That’s as if you had been fighting me, Gunther.”

Van Gelder winced. “Why her XO?”

“Our first torpedoes gave her captain a bad concussion.”

Obviously, Van Gelder thought, Axis espionage sources were extremely well informed.

“Good,” ter Horst said as he finished reading. “They agree we can begin our next combat mission at once.”

Van Gelder hesitated. “Sir, if we’re heading into battle against main enemy forces, I do think we need more time for completing maintenance.” They’d taken a lot of damage themselves in their duel with Challenger back in early December, and not everything was fixed.

“You’ll find work-arounds, Gunther. Improvise. I have total faith in you, my friend.” Ter Horst turned to the helmsman. “Steer zero nine zero.” The helmsman acknowledged.

Ter Horst looked Van Gelder right in the eyes, and smiled his most predatory smile. “Global weather conditions are perfect at the moment. Coordinated timing, and surprise, are everything now.”

Van Gelder had to clear his throat. Zero nine zero was due east. “Sir, may I inquire, what are our orders, our next destination?”

“No, you may not.”

ONE

Later that day

Bachelor Officers Quarters, Naval Submarine Base, New London, Connecticut

OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, in the post-midnight pitch-blackness, the freezing wind howled and moaned. The wind slashed at the leafless trees on the slope that led down to the river. Now and then, sleet pattered the pane, the tail end of a strong nor’easter that had dumped a foot of snow. Inside the room, a candle glowed in one corner. The ancient steam-heat radiator hissed and dripped. Ilse Reebeck looked down at Jeffrey Fuller. “Do you want me to get off now?”

He met her gaze, with that slightly out-of-focus look in his eyes he always got right after making love. Jeffrey nodded, too sated to speak. Ilse felt him watch her intently as she left the bed. He stayed fully under the covers—she’d noticed since they’d first become intimate on New Year’s Eve that he was strangely shy with her about his body, well endowed as he was with muscles and dark curly hair and the scars of an honorable war wound. Ilse was proud of her figure—she gave Jeffrey a last quick profile view and blew out the candle.

She got back in bed in the dark and put one arm across his chest and tried to fall asleep. It was good to lose herself in sex with Jeffrey Fuller, and tune out the rest of the world, but as the immediate ardor subsided she felt sad. Her family was dead, for resisting the old-line Boer takeover, her whole country in enemy hands. She’d been in pitched battle twice behind enemy lines, during tactical nuclear war, and killed and watched teammates be killed. The war was far from over, quite possibly unwinnable. Even the escape of sleep was a mixed blessing, because sleep brought on the nightmares. Nightmares of combat flashbacks, of hurling grenades and bayonet charges and incoming main battle tank fire. Nightmares of relatives hanging. Nightmares of reunions with friends who were decomposed corpses.

If she hadn’t been at a marine biology conference in the U.S. when the war broke out, Ilse might well be dead now too, strung up with the rest of them.

The radiator stopped hissing. Jeffrey reached over Ilse for the battery-powered alarm clock on his bedstand. His elbow rubbed her left nipple. “Sorry,” he said, but she thought it an odd thing to apologize for, just after making love.

“Zero one hundred,” he said. “Right on schedule.”

Wartime energy conservation, Ilse thought. The heat was turned off in all base housing every night at one until five in the morning, along with hot water and power.

“Typical U.S. Navy,” she said out loud. “If anything, always prompt.” Ilse wasn’t sure herself whether she meant to be sarcastic. It just came out. Jeffrey didn’t respond. He rolled on his side and she rolled on her side so he could press himself against her in a hug….

“You should go back to your room now.”

Ilse stirred. She realized she’d fallen asleep like this and a few minutes must have passed.

“No,” she told Jeffrey. “I want to stay.” The bed was designed for one person, but they were both so used to sleeping on narrow racks in a submarine, the mattress seemed spacious in contrast.

“We have classes in the morning.”

Also typical Jeffrey, always thinking ahead, making his plans and his schedules. Must do this, mustn’t do that…The naval officer in him never really shut down, or turned off or whatever, to simply let him be a person. Even six weeks after they’d both been permanently detached from USS Challenger—and were rested now from the rigors of their Germany raid, when Jeffrey was acting captain—he still ran himself with military precision out of sheer habit. He was taking the Prospective Commanding Officers course, and she was going through the Basic Submarine Officers course—though she was technically a civilian, a consultant to the U.S. Navy.

“I’ll set the alarm for four-thirty,” Ilse said. “Plenty of time to get back to my room before the hallways start to liven up.”

“Someone might see you. It’s indiscreet.”

“It’s indiscreet me being here at one in the morning. I have makeup and stuff in my bag. I’ll use your bathroom, and I’ll have my briefcase, right? Anyone who sees me can think I worked the midnight shift.”

“Clever girl.”

“I’m not a girl. I’m nearly thirty.” The thought sometimes frightened her.

“I meant—”

“You don’t need to apologize.” Ilse knew Jeffrey was no sexist, and she really did care about him. It was just that, well…Jeffrey was a great lion in battle, but taken out of purely military functions-—like here right now—he wasn’t exactly always at his best, socially speaking. He was almost forty, but had spent his entire adult life in navy circles.

Ilse began to doze off again, with her head on Jeffrey’s forearm. She felt him squeeze her buttocks gently with his other hand. “Enough is enough,” she told him. “It’s very late.”

She sensed Jeffrey pausing, a pregnant pause in the dark. “Who’s better?” he finally said.

“What?”

“Who’s better? Him or me?”

“What?” Ilse bristled.

“Ter Horst. What’s he like? Hung like a horse?” Jeffrey sounded amused at his own little joke, but the amusement was forced.

“Don’t be silly.” And please don’t spoil the evening for us both.

“No, I’m serious.”

“Really, Jeffrey, there’s no comparison.” He was definitely a Jeffrey, not a Jeff; Ilse felt no impulse to give him a special nickname. “I knew Jan for more than two years, and you and I have been dating, what? Less than two months…. It was before the war and everything. It’s a completely different situation.”

Jeffrey waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, he said, “How long did you know him before, you know, you two started having sex?”

This really annoyed Ilse. He’d said “having sex,” not “making love.” Ilse had loved Jan once, so blind had she been.

“It’s after one in the morning.” She knew she sounded cross. She didn’t want to hurt Jeffrey’s feelings. He was sweet and sincere and giving and other things Ilse liked. But he was a bit reserved in bed compared to Jan. Ilse knew Jeffrey had been engaged once, years ago, and it ended badly. He was estranged from his parents too, though she hadn’t yet learned why.

“Jeffrey, do you want me to stay or not?”

His body posture stiffened. He drew a deep breath to say something. Ilse knew they were about to have a fight. The phone on the little desk rang.

“Crap,” Jeffrey said.

“Maybe you should answer it.” It had rung at midnight, but Jeffrey ignored it then. They were occupied, and he said that at that hour it was surely a wrong number. Now it was ringing again.

Jeffrey got out of bed and felt for the phone in the dark. The room was already cold. A draft got under the blanket, and Ilse shivered and pulled the covers close. Outside the window the storm blustered, but not as strong as before.

“Lieutenant Commander Fuller.” Jeffrey spoke firmly into the phone. He paused to listen. He listened for some time.

“Understood.” There was a shorter pause. “No, I’ll tell her…. Yes, I have her extension. I’ll do it. Very well.” He hung up.

“What was that all about?”

Jeffrey stayed standing, naked in the dark—as a SEAL in younger days, he was desensitized to cold that would make other people’s teeth chatter. Jeffrey cleared his throat. “They want us on the first train in the morning to Washington.”

Ilse almost groaned. “How come?”

“A debriefing at the Pentagon. More brass desire to hear of our recent adventures.”

“Again?”

“It’s an overnight trip this time. We’ll need to pack.”

“Why train? That’ll be slow.”

“No flights available on such short notice. Travel restrictions, Ilse, aviation-fuel shortages…There’s a war on.”

“Don’t we deserve a priority?”

“Last-minute changes like that raise eyebrows, draw attention, compromise security. This time we blend with the crowd on mass transit.”

“What time’s the train?”

“Six-fifteen.”

“How do you want to get over there? Shuttle van, or the water taxi?” The local railroad station was on the other side of the river.

“Water taxi. The aide said they’ll hold spaces. A messenger’ll meet us with our travel documents.”

“It’ll be freezing out on the Thames,” Ilse said.

“Yup, but at least we won’t miss the train. Have you seen the traffic on I-95?…I don’t trust the bridge. They’re still repairing the damage.” From a German high-explosive cruise missile raid, before Christmas.

“Won’t there be ice on the river, in this weather?”

“The tug can get through fine. The snow’s supposed to clear by morning. Colder, but clearing and sunny. A good day for travel.”

“Reset the alarm for four, will you? I need time to pack.” Ilse heard Jeffrey handling the alarm clock.

“Come back to bed,” Ilse said. “Gawd, less than three hours’ sleep. Barring more interruptions, that is.”

“Business as usual,” Jeffrey said. “You can nap on the train.” It was a five-hour trip, with the Acela electrified service. They’d be in the Pentagon by noon.

Jeffrey got under the blanket and held Ilse close, and this time didn’t ask her awkward questions. Soon, by his deep, steady breathing, she could tell he was asleep.

Ilse thought of the last time she’d made love to Jan, wildly and with carnal abandon, when she still thought she could trust him, before her whole world came unglued. She stared into the dark for a very long time, hating all wars and all warriors.

Next day, on the way to Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey glanced at Ilse snoozing next to him in the window seat. Then he gazed out as the New York City skyline loomed gradually larger. Their train was running late. It was already well past noon, and they were only now approaching Manhattan. Jeffrey was starving—the snack bar car had run out of everything hours ago, in large part because of food shortages nationwide.

After Jeffrey’s train entered the railroad tunnel under New York’s East River, the lights went out and the engineer braked to a halt. The powerless electric locomotive had to be pulled the rest of the way into Penn Station by a noisy, smelly diesel switching engine. Jeffrey found it strange that in the station, though the trains sitting on every track were dark and empty, the platforms were well lit.

Jeffrey looked up as a conductor came through the car. He told everybody to get off the train. Jeffrey nudged Ilse gently. She stirred.

Like all the other passengers, Jeffrey and Ilse grabbed their coats and luggage and gas-mask satchels, and took the stairs to the waiting room. It was wall-to-wall people, passing rumors and complaining, a continuous babbling din. Every train on the schedule board read DELAYED INDEFINITELY.

The stationmaster came on the loudspeakers. He said the railroad’s power and signals and switching systems in the entire northeast had suffered a massive Axis information-warfare attack. It would take hours to restore service. Computer programs had failed in a cascade, and it was complicated to find and then stamp out the viruses and test everything—and safety had to come first. He said that a USO club was in Times Square, not far. All passengers should report back to the station by 9 P.M.

Jeffrey heard a collective groan from the crowds in the station. No rail disruption this extensive, especially one triggered by the enemy, had happened in the U.S. homeland since the outbreak of the war. It was headline news, and unwelcome news. Jeffrey expected ground travel everywhere—from the nation’s capital, through Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and all the way toward Boston—would be a mess well into tomorrow.

“We need to call in again,” Jeffrey said to Ilse. He smiled and tried to sound stoic, to mask his irritation and concern. They should have been at the Pentagon by now.

Jeffrey considered the long lines at the pay phones. “We can probably do better if we find one on the street.” They’d been specifically ordered not to bring cell phones, to avoid interception by enemy signals intelligence.

“Can we get something to eat first, Jeffrey? Please?”

Jeffrey heard Ilse’s stomach rumble. They stood on line at a bagel stand, ate quickly, then agreed to walk to the USO. They were stranded in New York, by Axis hands—and Jeffrey couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding.

He was dismayed when they got to Times Square. All the colorful wide-screen TV displays—usually flashy and running all day—were dark, except for a handful of civil defense messages: Save energy. Watch out for spies. Is that e-mail really necessary? The sidewalks were half deserted, even taking into account the cold. Many people wore gas masks, though the radiation count today was normal.

A number of people’s overcoats were baggy, as if they’d lost a lot of weight since the previous, prewar winter. Now, like the rest of the population, they followed government urgings to wear what they had until it wore out. With imports squeezed to a trickle, and North American manufacturers cranking out uniforms and protective suits, civilian clothes had to take a backseat.

Jeffrey glanced around again at the dearth of people, the shops with closed doors. He turned to Ilse, and tried not to sound too glum. “This war has been death to restaurants and tourism.”

But it hadn’t dented the vehemence of the area’s curbside preachers. Repent your sins before it’s too late, the end of the world is nigh, they bellowed to whomever would listen.

“This time,” Jeffrey said under his breath, “they may have it right.”

He found an unused pay phone that actually worked. When he got off, he told Ilse they’d be expected in Washington tomorrow morning; he realized they’d have to sleep on the train.

They passed a construction site for an office tower. The site was completely quiet: no cement mixers running and no big cranes or hard hats working. The project had been abandoned months ago because of the war—materials and skilled labor were in very short supply. If things got bad enough, Jeffrey knew, the skeleton of the building would be dismantled, to reuse the valuable steel.

By the time they reached the USO club it was too crowded to possibly get in. There was also a long line of teenagers outside the Armed Forces Recruiting Center next door; the draft had been reinstated, but many were volunteering.

“Good material,” Jeffrey said as he eyed the teenagers. “Better than we got in peacetime.”

Jeffrey didn’t tell Ilse what he really thought, that if these kids understood what they were in for—cannon and missile fodder in limited tactical nuclear war—they wouldn’t be so eager to get to the fighting. He and Ilse had twice set off small atom bombs on enemy soil out of necessity, obeying severely restrictive rules of engagement it had been Jeffrey’s job to enforce. The thought in retrospect horrified him, as did the ever-present risk that the Axis might escalate, even though the enemy had sworn not to be first to use more nuclear weapons in populated areas. Escalation was everyone’s worst nightmare, and the damage to the environment in combat zones was dreadful already. Ilse had been sent on that first mission, to South Africa, because her unique mix of technical skills and local knowledge was badly needed there. She did such a good job, the navy sent her on Challenger the second time, to Germany.

An MP with a bullhorn brought Jeffrey’s mind back to the present. The MP said there was another USO at the top of the Empire State Building. Jeffrey and Ilse decided to go there. They took an indirect route, to stretch their legs and get some air, since they had plenty of time to kill.

American flags flew everywhere, but many storefronts were vacant and drab. Glancing up at the tall apartment buildings as they strolled by, Jeffrey saw a number of units lacked any curtains or furnishings. For Rent and For Sale signs hung everywhere, looking weather-beaten, forlorn.

One auto dealership Jeffrey and Ilse walked past was converted into an equipment distribution center for home-front survival gear. Through the big showroom windows Jeffrey saw stacks of burn-treatment kits, water-purification tablets, Geiger counters and dosimeters, and piles of freeze-dried food. The original signs on the dealership were gone, but Jeffrey could see their outline against the building. Porsche, Audi, BMW. Not popular brands anymore.

The people on the streets seemed less aggressive and rude than Ilse imagined New Yorkers to be. Almost no one jaywalked. Taxi horns rarely blared, and very few drivers cursed—there were hardly any private cars around anyway, because of strict gas rationing and appalling prices per gallon.

Instead, there was a feeling of shared defiance against the Axis threat. But beneath this determined exterior Ilse sensed people were gnawed by doubt: Was it the right thing to do to stand up to this shocking new enemy, one the CIA as usual hadn’t seen coming till much too late? Why couldn’t America just turn inward, and look out for number one, and leave Europe and Africa festering on the far side of a wide ocean?

Jeffrey and Ilse passed a supermarket. Ilse was disturbed to see a large sign in the window announcing a special on horse meat. Ilse loved horses, and had ridden whenever she could in South Africa. Horses were beautiful creatures, sleek and affectionate and fast, and good ones were smarter than people gave them credit for. The thought of eating horses upset her.

Everything flooded back. Her dead family, the Boer putsch, Ilse’s own survivor guilt. Her younger brother especially, whom she loved and whom she’d always felt protective of, left unprotected when he’d needed Ilse most—because she’d been abroad, safe at a conference.

Ilse fought hard not to cry, standing there on the sidewalk. Jeffrey tried to comfort her, but she shook him off. She said it was just the freezing wind making tears in her eyes.

The officers’ club of the USO was on the Empire State Building’s eighty-fifth floor. Jeffrey led Ilse to the cocktail lounge, large and crowded and noisy. A live band played swing music from World War II.

But Ilse didn’t seem in a mood to mingle. She worked her way to the windows. Jeffrey followed. The view was stunning. The setting sun was a cold red-orange blob, fading behind dusky clouds low over New Jersey. The city and the harbor were spread out before them. Looking southeast, toward the ocean, Jeffrey longed wistfully to be under way on a submarine. After his training course in New London, his next assignment would be some fancy-sounding land job—those who even passed the course didn’t get a ship right away.

Gradually, the view and the music began to work on Jeffrey. They lifted his spirits and made him feel romantic. The sense of being at war, the excitement and danger of it, heightened this for him. He reached for Ilse’s hand. She pulled away.

“I’m not here as your date,” she said between clenched teeth. “We’re traveling on business.”

Jeffrey convinced Ilse to go to the open-air observation deck, one flight up. A yeoman near the elevator lent them parkas from a rack. Ilse saw armed guards by the stairway to a navy communications center on the topmost floors; she figured it used the big antenna on the building’s roof.

The yeoman lent them binoculars, for sightseeing. Jeffrey and Ilse went outside. Visibility was excellent and it was freezing—they were over a thousand feet high. By now it was dark, and the observation deck was deserted. The wind howled so strongly they took shelter on the downwind side of the building. Ilse looked straight up. The antenna needle reached another twenty or thirty stories above her head. She watched the tip of the mast sway back and forth in the wind; she got dizzy, and needed to turn away. She saw the tall art-deco Chrysler Building nearby. Its silvery spire came right up to her eye level, a fifth of a mile in the air.

Ilse glanced downwind, toward lower Manhattan. The skyscrapers now had blackout curtains drawn in all the tiny office windows. So did the shorter buildings in the foreground, near Greenwich Village and other residential neighborhoods. All vehicles on the streets had headlights hooded to narrow slits, painted blue. Only every third streetlight was on, and the bulbs were dim red.

A sliver of moon was poised on the eastern horizon over Brooklyn; Jeffrey and Ilse looked at the moon through their binoculars. With all the white, reflective snow on the ground, the moon lit the cityscape nicely. Overhead, the sky was perfectly clear. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, Ilse saw the Milky Way.

She felt badly for snubbing Jeffrey in the cocktail lounge. She reached out for his hand. From all around them air-raid sirens went off.

TWO

THE MOURNFUL HOWL of the sirens pierced the wind. As Jeffrey watched from the observation deck, streetlights switched off borough by borough. Down below, vehicles stopped and their headlight glows vanished. From upwind, Jeffrey heard a deafening roar. On the runways of Newark Airport, bright blue-violet flames lit off. They moved, faster and faster and up into the sky—the afterburners of scrambling interceptor jets. A whole squadron, a dozen planes, took to the air and headed out to sea.

The yeoman stuck his head out of the door. “It’s real! Get down to shelter!”

“What is it?” Jeffrey shouted back.

“Cruise missiles inbound! Submarine launched! Coming this way! Mach eight!”

“Mach eight?” Ilse yelled.

“Come on!” the yeoman shouted.

“We’re staying,” Jeffrey declared.

The yeoman shook his head and disappeared.

“Mach eight, Jeffrey,” Ilse said. “I thought—”

“They had a handful left, in the supply pipeline.”

“Shouldn’t we go to the basement? They’ll get here very soon.”

“And be buried alive in the rubble? Or roasted in the firestorm, or drowned in shit when the sewer mains break?”

“How do you know they’ll be nuclear?”

“Ilse, they wouldn’t waste those missiles on high explosives. They’re Mach eight.”

“But if one gets through…”

“I know. Let’s get it up here, then. Quick and clean. Not slow and awful running down to the basement.”

Ilse nodded reluctantly as everything sank in. “This is because of us, isn’t it, Jeffrey?”

“Yes. The retaliation. The escalation. Now it comes, the Axis revenge. Because of what we did.”

Jeffrey silently walked to the very edge of the observation deck, peering through the grilled-in railing for a better view. Ilse followed, not wanting to be alone. The wind battered at them and chilled their faces numb. Jeffrey and Ilse waited to die. Sirens continued to moan like tortured souls.

“They’ll use a big one, won’t they?” Ilse said.

“Twenty kilotons, at least. Up here I doubt we’ll feel much.”

“Except guilt,” Ilse said.

“Yes,” Jeffrey said. “Except guilt. This is happening because of us.”

Ilse hesitated. “The train problems, that computer attack, this was all part of their plan?”

“Yes. A distraction, I think, and to strand more military people in New York, to add to the high-value body count….” The U-boat must have snuck through under that nor’easter, Jeffrey thought, coordinated timing with the info warfare attack.

“Do you—do you think they know we’re here? Is it all really that personal?”

Jeffrey sighed. “There’s no way we’ll ever know. It’s possible…. It doesn’t matter.”

On the horizon, in the Atlantic, Jeffrey could see flashes and streaks of light. He knew this would be the outer defenses, ships and naval aircraft, trying to knock down the inbound missiles. But nothing the Allies had could intercept Mach 8 ground-hugging cruise missiles.

Damn it, we should have been at sea on Challenger. We might have made a difference, stopped this U-boat from launching, by working defense from under the storm. But Challenger’s laid up in dry dock, because of battle damage suffered on my watch.

Ilse saw red-orange bursts pepper the dark sky low in the distance, out over the Atlantic. The bursts were frighteningly hard and sudden, military high-explosive blast and fragmentation warheads. Their eerie silence, because the sound needed many seconds to reach her, only heightened her feeling of dread. She tried to see the incoming Axis cruise missiles, but no one knew better than Ilse how stealthy they were, how hard to stop.

A long series of harsh, sharp flashes ranged from right to left, low out over the ocean, then more bursts ran from left to right, seeking targets. There was pulsing glare beyond the horizon, in three different places, then endless salvoes of defensive missiles thrust into the sky from surface ships. Each missile—dozens and dozens of them—rode a brilliant moving point of hot yellow light.

As Ilse watched and waited for the inevitable, more streaks of flame took to the air, this time land-based defensive missiles launched from Sandy Hook, at the outer roadstead of New York Harbor. Another salvo of missiles rose from a ship at sea. Continuous boiling flame marked the launch point, strobing flashes and smoke trails marking each launch. The hard, sharp detonations on the horizon continued. Noise of the explosions began to reach Ilse, a deep rumbling counterpoint to the crying of the wind. The enemy Mach 8 missiles must be drawing close by now.

Heavy antiaircraft guns began to fire from Staten Island and the Meadowlands and Brooklyn, red searing gases belching from their muzzles, their reports unforgiving thuds that pounded Ilse’s gut. The shells exploded in midair, more hard and sudden bangs and flashes. More heavy-caliber guns opened fire. Their muzzle discharges stabbed and slashed at the sky. Each shot, then each shell’s detonation, lit the scene like infernal flashbulbs. Ilse saw the whole sky fill with fluffy balls of smoke from the flak. Now she smelled the stinking, acrid fumes, brought by the wind. Her eardrums started to ache from the constant punishment.

Antiaircraft missiles launched from Newark and Kennedy airports, and these streaked into the sky. One malfunctioned immediately and crashed on Staten Island. It started a huge fire there, whipped by the unceasing wind. The fire was in an area of residential housing. It spread faster than a man could run.

Still Ilse didn’t see the Axis cruise missiles themselves. Smaller automatic weapons opened up, cannon and heavy machine guns ringing the inner harbor. Their muzzles flickered steadily. Their tracers all spewed skyward, red and green, weaving back and forth, adding to the wall of steel and gauntlet of blast that tried to save New York. But it was all for show, Ilse knew, an act of desperation, hoping against hope for a lucky hit.

Did the people working those guns and launchers know what was really in store? How did families cowering in cellars feel as shrapnel and spent bullets hit their homes, piercing shingled roofs or breaking curtained windows, chunks of red-hot metal raining from the sky?

Ilse watched in helplessness and despair. There was nothing she could do. She and Jeffrey had already done what they could to destroy these Axis hell-weapons. They’d succeeded but not well enough. Now the unstoppable enemy cruise missiles came right at them. There was so little time to feel regret or shame, to plead to God, to do anything but anguish over the death of a great city.

The missiles had to be very close now. They moved so terribly fast, and every weapon in sight, from foreground to distant horizon, was firing into the air. Defensive missiles locked onto each other by mistake and collided in double eruptions. Tracer shells of every caliber constantly crisscrossed the sky. Shell and missile bursts of every size and intensity lit up the harbor, reflecting off the water and off the land all covered with snow, bursts so constant and bright that the Milky Way and stars were drowned out by the glare. The bangs and thumps and roars of the defensive fire were endless, painfully loud.

The inbound missiles’ projected path was bombarded so thoroughly, a man-made overcast formed—a continuous blanket of smoke and fumes from all the weapons operating. This choking overcast swirled and grew thicker and thicker. It pulsated from within like strobing lightning through a thunderhead, as gun after gun kept plastering the sky. Defensive missiles would launch, disappear in the smoke layer, then break out higher and turn and look for something to destroy. By now missile trails entwined and twisted everywhere, like satanic confetti.

One defensive missile hit a friendly fighter by mistake, and the fireball of jet and missile fuel plunged earthward in New Jersey, starting a conflagration at the point of impact with the ground. That area began exploding, sending up heaving sheets of liquid flame and flying sparks and thick black smoke—a tank farm or oil refinery. The fire on Staten Island was bigger now too.

Something tore through the air above Ilse’s head with a wave of heat and a soul-tearing sonic boom. She was inside the sonic boom, deafened by it, shattered by it. A Mach 8 missile had made it through, bound for midtown. In seconds she and Jeffrey would be killed. She’d never felt so alone, felt nothing now but self-revulsion and guilt. Her face twisted into an ugly mask of rage and bitter resentment, at this war, at what she’d done behind enemy lines, at all the things she wanted to do in her life but would never get to do. She didn’t want to die feeling nothing but cold anger and such loneliness. She turned to Jeffrey, and he turned to her, and his face showed deep regret.

There was a blinding flash right over the Statue of Liberty. Ilse waited for unimaginable heat to broil her skin, to melt her eyeballs, to set her parka afire. She waited for the invisible burst of neutrons and hard gamma rays to kill every cell in her body. She waited for the blast wave to come and knock her charred corpse to dust.

Instead there was whistling and banging. Fireworks began to explode over the Statue of Liberty, and more back behind her over midtown. Decorative fireworks, pretty cloudbursts of blue and green and silver—like on the Fourth of July—as if to mock the Americans.

Things began to blow on the wind, small strips. Ilse thought they were antiradar chaff.

Jeffrey angrily tried to catch one of the floating strips. He jumped and reached, and on the third attempt he grabbed one. It was a piece of paper, one of thousands scattering everywhere now. Jeffrey looked at the strip, then handed it to Ilse.

“They’ll never be able to hush this up. It’s the end of civilian morale.”

Ilse read the slip with difficulty. There were tears in her eyes and she shivered, from the cold and fear and now from this. She knew Jeffrey was right. In large, bold, black Germanic script were printed words in English, a psychological-warfare body blow:

“If this had a nuclear warhead been, you would now be dead. Think of it.”

THREE

Next morning, at the Pentagon

EVENTUALLY, PASSENGER RAILROAD service was restored. Jeffrey and Ilse spent an uncomfortable night on the train as it crept toward Washington. They carefully folded Jeffrey’s dress uniform jacket, and the jacket of Ilse’s pantsuit, and put them neatly on the overhead rack. Then they used their coats as improvised blankets—the crowded train was chilly, to save energy, since it took power to heat the cars. Jeffrey slept fitfully; sometimes he heard Ilse moan in her sleep. He was tempted to squeeze her hand to try to comfort her, but held back; he remembered her comment in the Empire State Building cocktail lounge, that this was strictly a business trip.

At the Pentagon, at least, Jeffrey and Ilse were able to freshen up and eat breakfast: bacon, actual bacon, and omelets made from real—not powdered—eggs. Now they sat in a waiting area, on a plush leather couch outside the big floor-to-ceiling double doors of a meeting room. The door was guarded by two enlisted marines. Jeffrey eyed the marines’ crisp appearance, their mirror-hard shoeshines and the razor-sharp creases of their fatigues. He surreptitiously tried to smooth the wrinkles on his uniform.

The marines suddenly snapped to attention. Jeffrey instinctively jumped to his feet. Ilse stood up too.

An air force four-star general entered the waiting area. He was built like a football linebacker, and the way he moved made Jeffrey think of a taxiing B-52. He strode into the meeting room without even noticing Jeffrey and Ilse. The man looked very angry.

For a while that was all, and Jeffrey let his mind wander.

“What’s the matter?” Ilse said. “What were you thinking about?”

Jeffrey realized he’d been frowning. “My father…It’s not something I’m proud of.”

“Why? What did he do?”

“It’s nothing he did.”

“I’ll bet it is,” Ilse teased. “What did he do? Peeping Tom? Mafia hit man? Ran a bordello in St. Louis?” After the terrors of last night in New York, her humor sounded lame.

Jeffrey had told Ilse he was from a suburb of St. Louis. That much, he’d told her. “It’s not what he did. The last time we tried to talk, it was awful.”

“You had an argument?”

“No. It would be better if we had. It was more like hard, quiet, seething rage.”

“You or your father?”

“Him. Directed at me. And sarcasm. Biting, subtle, with surgical precision. Enough to make me bleed inside.”

“My God. Why?”

“When I was younger, growing up, I treated my family like crap.”

“How so?”

“I thought they were boring as all hell, and I did nothing to hide it.”

“Come on, Jeffrey. All kids go through that.”

“Not the way I did. I was a real asshole about it.”

“What does your father do for a living?”

“He’s a utility regulator. A career bureaucrat, basically.”

“That does sound pretty dull. Though I suppose it’s become more important nowadays.”

“Yeah. I kinda dumped my family and decided to join the navy. For college, I did Navy ROTC at Purdue. My dad, by then, didn’t try to stop me. But he resented it a lot.”

“How come? He ought to have been proud of you.”

“It was too late for that, by then. When I was a kid, I loved to read about the navy. I was so into the stuff, you know, book reports and things like that at school even, the junior-high guidance counselor once had a talk with my parents.”

“Oh.”

“Of course, that just made me more obstinate. My bedroom was all full of models of ships. Battleships, carriers, sailing ships, landing craft, and every class of sub I could find in the toy stores.”

“But that’s all good, isn’t it? It’s nice to know what you want to be when you grow up.”

“Isn’t it, though? Except I turned my back on my family the whole time. I condescended, like I was better than them. Like I’d found my calling, and it was visionary, and it put me on a higher plane than these tedious middle-class drones. Me, a kid, eight, twelve, sixteen, whenever. Then there were arguments. Sometimes it got ugly.”

“But I still don’t understand, what’s the problem now? Your father should be proud of what you’ve done. You made the right career choice, didn’t you? That’s bloody obvious. Can’t he let bygones alone?”

“Sometimes you push someone so far you kill the love and the trust. Sometimes you gall them so much with silent insolence, there’s no going back afterward.”

“What happened the last time you tried to speak to him?”

“I called him on the phone, from the base, a couple of months ago. He practically blamed me personally for starting the war, for losing the war, because of that nuclear ambush off western Africa where the navy lost all those ships.”

“That’s crazy.”

“No. He’s a smart, clearheaded man. Much more than I gave him credit for, years back. But he’s as disillusioned and scared as everybody else right now, with what’s been happening since the Double Putsch.” The coordinated takeovers in Johannesburg and Berlin. “I think it was his way of getting out his pain at me, with the thing he knew would hurt me most. He said it was like Pearl Harbor all over again, except at sea, and this time we did lose the carriers.”

“But you weren’t even there!”

“He knows that.”

“Can’t you try to talk to him again? The stuff you’ve done, since that phone call anyway, it should make a difference.”

“Right. Except it’s all highly classified. He has no idea what I’ve been up to, and he never will, will he?”

“I guess not. I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say. Just try to forget about it. It’s not something I like to talk about.”

Jeffrey looked away from Ilse. There was nothing she could do to help him anyway.

Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, in the Indian Ocean

In the control room Gunther Van Gelder gripped his armrests as Voortrekker wallowed sickeningly at periscope depth, moving very slowly, in a race against time. Minutes before, Voortrekker had launched three dozen Mach 2.5 cruise missiles at Diego Garcia, four hundred miles away, the vital Allied forward bastion in the Indian Ocean. The nuclear carrier USS Ronald Reagan’s aircraft were doggedly hunting Voortrekker now, because of the noisy launch datum Jan ter Horst made. The Reagan was much closer to Voortrekker than Voortrekker was to Diego Garcia, and Reagan’s planes were almost as fast as ter Horst’s missiles.

Van Gelder watched his tactical screens warily and nervously. His sonarmen and fire-control technicians were also on edge. Van Gelder could smell their sweat, feel their inner tension, see their worried faces clearly in the control room’s daytime lighting. Eight brilliant decoys had been running in different directions for half an hour or more. Voortrekker hoped to be lost amid the distraction of the decoys, but Van Gelder had serious doubts, for a simple reason.

Voortrekker had both periscope masts up. Her satellite-communications antenna dish was also raised. This was exceedingly dangerous, despite their low-observable radar-absorbing designs, but ter Horst insisted. Jan ter Horst wanted to watch his handiwork at Diego Garcia unfold live.

“Soon now,” ter Horst said. “You can see the antiair defenses getting more intense.” He leaned closer to the full-color video feed from the satellite, monitoring the target on his main console display. Van Gelder watched identical imagery, windowed on his own screens. Sometimes large waves, outside the hull, buried Voortrekker’s antenna dish, and the picture went blank, then resumed. Even submerged, the ship rolled heavily, recovered, rolled hard the other way.

“Watch your trim,” ter Horst snapped at the helmsman and chief of the boat. “Don’t let her broach!”

The satellite was in high earth orbit, passing overhead. It belonged to a neutral Third World country, but had been built in Germany before the war. When the bird was launched its owners had no idea it carried extra circuitry they didn’t pay for, covertly embedded military data-relay links the Allies wouldn’t try to shoot down or jam, because they wouldn’t know to.

But these satellites had no spy cameras, which would have been too obvious. The uplink feed came instead from an unmanned aerial vehicle, a stealthy recon drone launched by a German class 214 modern diesel sub. The sub lurked north of ter Horst’s target, in support of his mission. The drone kept a close eye on Diego Garcia, from a few thousand meters’ altitude, sending pictures up to the satellite by a focused microwave beam. Voortrekker herself was well to the south of the enemy’s island base, hiding from visual detection beneath thin overcast. She was observing radio silence, just receiving the downlink feed.

Van Gelder forced himself to stay outwardly calm, to keep his men calm. It wasn’t easy. Visibility under the overcast was good. With little warning, low-flying aircraft armed with nuclear depth bombs might spot Voortrekker’s masts at any moment.

The Pentagon

Ilse heard voices from inside the meeting room. The voices were muffled, but Ilse knew people were arguing, shouting. She heard an especially deep, booming voice, which sounded accusing and irritated. Others answered harshly, including at least two women, as tough as the men. The marine guards stood there stoically.

Ilse turned to Jeffrey. “Not a good start to the day.”

“Last night was not a good night in New York.”

Ilse rolled her eyes and nodded when it hit her. The taunting humiliation of that Mach 8 cruise-missile raid would preempt anything else on the agenda. She glanced at the double doors. How long have they been in there? Since 5 A.M? Since last night?

The discussion quieted down. A navy captain came out. He was shorter than Ilse, maybe five foot five, balding, aloof, and arrogant. He introduced himself and curtly shook hands with Ilse and Jeffrey. He was the senior aide to the vice chief of naval operations, the four-star admiral who chaired the meeting.

“Exactly what group are we addressing?” Ilse asked.

“That’s classified, who’s on what committee. We don’t publish organization charts these days. They’re ready for you.”

Ilse took a deep breath and stood up as straight as she could. She followed Jeffrey and the captain into the meeting room. In spite of the inconvenience of the trip, she’d been looking forward to this chance to show off what she’d done. Now, still emotionally numb from those few horrible minutes atop the Empire State Building, she saw twenty very senior faces stare at her from around a huge mahogany conference table. There were more generals’ stars on their shoulder boards and admirals’ rings on their jacket cuffs than she could count.

An atmosphere of conflict lingered heavily in the room, and in the body language. Not one person smiled, and their eyes were hard and unreachable.

On Voortrekker

Voortrekker was jarred by thunder that came right through the hull, building to a harsh crescendo, dying off abruptly. Nasty vibrations sent pins and needles up Van Gelder’s arms and legs. “Loud explosion,” the sonar chief shouted, “bearing two seven zero!” West. “Range eighty thousand meters.” Forty nautical miles. “Classify as an Allied nuclear depth charge, twenty-kiloton yield!”

“Ooh, they’re using biggies.” Ter Horst tut-tutted. “They’re clueless where we really are. They’d need a lucky shot to even come close.”

“Sir,” Van Gelder said, “that must be enemy aircraft, searching for us, attacking one of the decoys.” He was doing his job, giving ter Horst a tactical assessment.

“Yes, yes. Carrier planes from the Reagan. Relax, Gunther. We’re not submerging now. We need this imagery.”

Telling Van Gelder to relax only heightened the tension in the control room—younger crewmen squirmed in their seats.

“Aye aye, Captain,” Van Gelder said. “It’s a big ocean they have to search, and our antenna mast is stealthy.” He said that for the men, sounding as cocky as he could, trying to believe it so that they would.

I knew ter Horst was aggressive, but this is cutting things really close.

The Pentagon

By the time Jeffrey’s second briefing slide came on the screen, the generals and admirals started arguing again—it was as if he and Ilse weren’t there. They argued about the missile raid on New York, and the lack of supplies to the dwindling but crucial Central Africa pocket. They argued about the whole course of the war. There were accusations thrown between the army and navy and air force, and counteraccusations. The marines and coast guard argued too. It got so ugly the vice chief of naval operations had to call a fifteen-minute break.

The VCNO’s senior aide came up to Jeffrey and Ilse. “You didn’t hear any of that. After the recess, you two go on like it never happened. Understand me?”

Ilse nodded. Jeffrey said, “Aye aye, sir.” Ilse asked directions to the ladies’ room.

Jeffrey decided to walk some distance from the conference room. He didn’t want to stand at a urinal next to someone from this crazy, trouble-filled meeting.

Jeffrey found a rest room in a hallway that seemed quiet. He entered and got the shock of his life. Standing there in a business suit, taking a leak, was his father.

FOUR

JEFFREY’S DAD TURNED and noticed him, and did a double take. “It is you,” Michael Fuller said to his son. Jeffrey felt his chest tighten. The man began to wash his hands, half ignoring Jeffrey. Testing me. Challenging me. Jeffrey knew too well he and his father both had their egos, especially with each other.

“I, um,” Jeffrey stammered. He blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “How come you’re here?”

Michael Fuller used his reflection in the mirror to look at Jeffrey. “That’s the best you can manage? ‘How come I’m here?’ Not ‘Good to see you, Pop’? Not ‘How are the nieces and nephews’?” Jeffrey had two older sisters, both married and with kids.

“Sorry. It’s been a rough couple of days.”

“Yeah.” His dad was sour. “For all of us.” He turned to face Jeffrey, and grudgingly made conversation. “You stationed in the Pentagon now?”

“No. Just came from out of town, for a meeting. You?” Conflicting emotions flooded through Jeffrey as his father grabbed some paper towels. Part of Jeffrey wanted to run, in shame. Part of him wanted to talk to his dad here forever, to beg forgiveness, to make up for lost time. Jeffrey realized he was regressing—meeting parents often does this to people. He made himself maintain his dignity.

“I work in the DOE now,” Michael Fuller stated. “That’s the Department of Energy. Well, you’d know what DOE means. You sailor boys do love your acronyms.”

Jeffrey winced.

“Right here in Washington,” his father said. “They made me a deputy assistant secretary. Energy conservation on the home front, that’s my bailiwick. The DOE’s on the cabinet, and needs to be, with this war.”

“That’s great, Dad. Sounds like a real big promotion.”

“I’m one of the top twelve people in the department.”

“It, uh, it must have happened fast.” Like in the last eight weeks.

“Yeah. There’ve been a lot of shakeups since the war’s been going so badly. Peacetime yes-men and timeservers who couldn’t hack it, they’re out on their butts.”

Jeffrey nodded. “That’s happened in the navy too.” Which was why the job as executive officer in Challenger had been vacant back in October, when Jeffrey got his transfer to the ship from a fast-track planning job at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. The war broke out in July, and Challenger’s previous XO did not meet Captain Wilson’s high demands preparing for combat.

“They liked what I’d been doing in Missouri,” Michael Fuller went on. “Somebody liked the cut of my jib, to use your lingo. Reached over there for me, and here I am.”

Jeffrey’s father finished drying his hands. He stuffed the paper towels in the trash bin harder than he needed to, almost resentfully.

“I’m supposed to be good at getting people to cut out the blame games, cut out the turf fights, get them to work together better. That’s what the secretary told me, anyhow…. I did a lot of soul-searching after you left home, asking myself where I coulda gone wrong, you turning out the way you did, all those fights and games in the house, a stranger to your own family…. Maybe I married too young…. Maybe I shoulda stopped with two kids. I always seemed better at raising daughters…. I guess it paid off, sort of, all that thinkin’ because of you, paid off at work anyhow. Me, the Great Compromiser. And here I am.”

Jeffrey studied his father. The man’s face was deeply creased with worry lines. His middle-age spread was gone. His suit looked expensive. He wore a perfectly knotted silk tie, not the polyester clip-ons Jeffrey remembered from when he was a kid. His father exuded an air of active intensity and drive that Jeffrey had never seen before. But maybe it had always been there, and he’d been too self-absorbed and immature to notice.

Michael Fuller peered at his son as if to take in every inch of him. “You look older.”

“War does that to people,” Jeffrey said.

“Tell me about it…. You look good in that uniform.”

“Thanks.” This was the closest thing to a compliment Jeffrey’s dad had ever paid his naval career. Jeffrey decided to take a chance and reciprocate. “I like your suit.”

The man’s face softened. “One has to look the part. I got a big staff now, spend time at the White House, testify before Congress…. I’ve been hearing rumors about you.”

“Sir?”

“You don’t have to call me sir. I’m your own goddamn father. I’ve heard things, whispers. Scuttlebutt, I suppose you navy types would call it. About stuff you’ve done. Recent stuff. Good, important stuff, to make a man feel proud.”

“I can’t talk about it, Dad.”

“Yeah, yeah. The walls have ears. Loose lips sink ships. It isn’t funny anymore…. But I hear you’ve been doing a fine job out there. You know, where it matters, the sharp tip of the spear?”

“I guess so.”

His father looked at Jeffrey very appraisingly. “It’s what you always wanted, isn’t it? Since you were a kid? To be a big naval hero, in a big shooting war?”

“Dad, nobody wants to be in a war. Jesus, especially not like this one.”

“So you did learn something, since reading all those books. Good for you…. How’s your old wound doing?”

“It’s okay.”

“In other words, it still hurts.”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

His father seemed lost in thought for a minute, lost in the past. “I know those were tough times. Nancy dumping you and all.” Nancy was Jeffrey’s ex-fiancée, from the mid-1990s—she’d walked out on him while he was in orthopedic rehab after being hit in the thigh by a bullet on a secret SEAL operation in Iraq. He got a Silver Star and a Purple Heart; then, while he fought the pain to learn to walk again, Nancy returned his ring. Once more on active duty, Jeffrey was rated unfit for Special Warfare missions because of that wound. He loved being underwater, in scuba gear or otherwise, so he chose to transfer to subs; he wanted to stay in a specialty where each individual could really make a difference.

“This war’s forced me to think about a lot of things, son. I—I sometimes wish I’d been there for you better, back then.”

“I didn’t make it easy, Dad. I know a lot was my fault, from way back.”

“Big killing wars make people think, son.” Michael Fuller looked off into space again, as if he hadn’t heard the last thing Jeffrey said. “You see neighbors get the telegrams…yes, they still use telegrams…. You see black ribbons in the windows. It makes you realize how much you have, how easy you can lose it, lose everything. It—it reminds you of mortality, this war does, of how very little time we really get.”

“I know. I’m almost forty.”

“Crap, I just turned sixty. Don’t rub it in.” Michael Fuller actually smiled at Jeffrey. Tears nearly came to Jeffrey’s eyes, for this small moment of closeness with his father, and for the decades of closeness he could have had but threw away. He saw his dad’s eyes moisten too, for just a second. “You got a land job now?”

Jeffrey nodded.

His father’s face grew tough.

“You don’t look happy,” Michael Fuller said, almost accusingly. His dad had seen right through him.

“A lot’s been happening….”

“Don’t lie to me. You want to get to sea again.”

Jeffrey hesitated. “Yeah.”

“Christ, haven’t you learned anything? Haven’t you done enough? Have you been to Arlington Cemetery lately?”

Jeffrey shook his head. He knew what was coming, and that only made it more painful.

His dad grew sarcastic. “It’s practically around the corner from here, damn it. Like some kind of cause and effect, the pair of them, the Pentagon and Arlington…Have you seen the daily funerals, crowds of mourning relatives, all the fresh-dug graves? No, I thought not. Well, I see the statistics, the real ones. People out there on the ocean are getting creamed! What use is a dead hero to me? You wouldn’t be my son anymore, you’d just be dead, fucking dead…forever dead.”

“Dad—”

“Didn’t you hear anything I told you when you were a kid? There ain’t no glory in war! There ain’t no honor in being a corpse! Warriors get paid to die. I lost my own brother to Vietnam, and it still hurts every day. In your line of work we’d be lucky if there was enough left of you to even bury! Think how that would make your mother feel.”

Jeffrey wondered if this was his father’s way of expressing love, this worry and anger, just like years and years before. Had it always been Michael Fuller’s way of showing love to a rebellious son—a disrespectful son, one hell-bent on military service—and Jeffrey didn’t see it?

How to explain to the man that some people needed to volunteer, that preparedness for a big war couldn’t wait for the shooting to start? How to convey that there was just no substitute for experience at sea, and Jeffrey had the experience, and when your country needed it, your soul ached for you to go? How to convince his father that Jeffrey did miss his uncle too, a man he’d never known except from photographs, killed in the Tet Offensive seven years before Jeffrey was born?

“A guy your age should be settled down, raising a family already. Not gallivanting off to win another medal, and get roasted alive in some mushroom cloud.” His father turned away. “There’s enough death as it is. Way too much death…I—I just—”

Someone barged into the men’s room. “There you are, sir,” he said to Michael Fuller. The intruder—that’s how Jeffrey thought of him—was in his late twenties, handsome, smooth, and smug, in a gray pinstripe suit. “They’re ready to start again.” He seemed impatient, and glanced at Jeffrey in his uniform as if he were some kind of alien creature.

Jeffrey’s father frowned, and looked at Jeffrey, and looked at the younger man. “Tell them I’ll be along in a minute.” The younger man left.

His father sighed. “Look, I gotta go. Big meeting. I can’t keep half the Joint Chiefs waiting.”

Jeffrey glanced at his watch. “I’m late too.”

They both left the rest room. “When’s your meeting over, Dad?”

“I dunno. Runs all day. Late…” He shrugged.

Jeffrey felt awful disappointment. “I’ll be gone by then.” Michael Fuller grunted and turned away.

“How’s—how’s Mom?” Jeffrey called after him. “You bring her out from St. Louis yet?”

Michael Fuller turned. His face seemed to sag. His whole body sagged. “She’s in New York. Sloan-Kettering. Breast cancer. They think it might have spread.”

FIVE

Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, well south of Diego Garcia

VAN GELDER FELT his armpits grow moist as Voortrekker’s electronic-support-measures mast picked up more and more enemy search radars. Around him in the control room, his technicians called out each sweep. Though he’d drilled them often to always speak calmly and clearly in battle, he heard the men’s voices grow higher pitched and start to get slurred from excitement or stress.

Each radar sweep Van Gelder’s people reported was windowed on his screen, as a strobing flash in livid yellow, on a digital compass rose that showed the source’s direction. With each pulsing strobe, Van Gelder’s console also emitted a warning beep, a ragged, ugly, deep-toned sound. The strobes and beeps were growing brighter and louder, and more numerous. Soon the enemy radars would become a lethal threat, as the aircraft from USS Reagan drew close. Ter Horst didn’t seem to even care.

Both periscopes busily scanned the ocean and the sky. Their imagery showed in high-definition full color on monitors in the control room. The most advanced nuclear submarines in every navy involved in this war used photonic sensors instead of lenses on their periscope heads. The pictures from outside came through the hull on fiber-optic wires—there were no old-fashioned periscope tubes to be raised and lowered, no handles to grab, no one-eyed lady to dance with as an observer scanned the horizon. Instead, crewmen near Van Gelder used small joysticks to make the image sensors pan around.

On a main display at the front of the control room, Van Gelder watched what the periscopes showed, the surface wave crests stretching into the distance. On every side of the ship, large blue swells were topped with whitecaps. The overcast sky was brightest in the west, and slightly red there, because it was almost dusk. Van Gelder dreaded at any moment seeing an Allied aircraft dive out of the overcast in Voortrekker’s direction.

He heard and felt another depth charge go off somewhere near. Once more Voortrekker rocked. Once more the discomfort of the shock to the ship came right through the deck and hurt Van Gelder’s feet, then came through his chair and banged at his body. Mike cords jiggled, and crewmen squirmed in their seats. Van Gelder’s chiefs, most of them needing to stand in the crowded compartment, spoke to the younger men reassuringly but firmly.

Van Gelder glanced down at his uniform shirt. Despite the chill from the brisk air-conditioning required by all the electronics, the crescents of sweat in his armpits were larger and darker than before.

Van Gelder returned to the digital feed from the satellite, to study the picture from the recon drone hundreds of miles to the north. He watched Diego Garcia on his screen. At the target, the sky was crystal clear.

The seventeen-mile-long atoll was spread before him, shaped like a giant V, with a sheltered lagoon between its two arms and small wooded islands at its mouth. Inside the lagoon was the harbor. Cargo ships and frigates were anchored there. The structures on the island all showed clearly despite their blotchy camouflage paint schemes. Van Gelder could see the long concrete runways of the air base, plus the hangars and aircraft shelters, the barracks and administrative buildings and warehouses, and the big storage tanks for gas and oil and lubricants. As he watched this world in miniature, Van Gelder saw flaming streaks of red and yellow take off into the sky, leaving smoke trails, like shooting stars in the wrong direction. These were antimissile missiles, launching from the atoll and some of the ships. More aircraft took to the runways and took to the air, either to intercept the cruise missiles coming from the south or to flee.

The picture had no sound. Everything Van Gelder saw at Diego Garcia, and would see, happened silently. He didn’t hear the air-raid sirens, the hoarse shouts of commands. Ter Horst’s thirty-six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles were converging on the atoll, tearing in at a kilometer per second, and everyone on the base must know it by now.

A third big air-dropped depth charge went off near Voortrekker, probably hitting another decoy, almost deafening through the hull. This is Russian roulette, Van Gelder told himself. Jan ter Horst just smiled. Van Gelder wanted to scream. The enemy airborne radar sweeps were stronger.

Another atomic depth bomb exploded, louder and much harder—closer than the last ones, shaking Van Gelder to his core.

Please, God, let our missiles hit and then let’s dive and get out of here. Crewmen gasped as the fireball from this latest undersea blast reared skyward from beyond the horizon, on the main screen. A periscope technician zoomed in, and everyone saw the crown of the mushroom cloud soar. It blew a hole in the overcast, then disappeared higher up.

Van Gelder had to clear his throat. “Captain, urgently recommend submerging now.”

“Negative,” ter Horst said sternly. “You know as well as I do we have no telemetry to the missiles. We must have real-time battle-damage assessment. Now is the time to attack, with the Pentagon befuddled by that psy-war air raid on New York, and the Reagan battle group too far from Diego Garcia to intervene. Once the Allies realize we’re out of dry dock so much sooner than they expected, all our strategic surprise will be lost. If the first missile salvo does not succeed, we need to know it immediately, and you’ll have to fire more missiles now.”

“Inbound visual contact!” one of Van Gelder’s fire-control technicians shouted as he monitored a periscope display. “Enemy aircraft closing fast!”

Van Gelder took over the display control and flipped to maximum magnification. “A jet, Captain. Too fast to use an antiaircraft missile.” The Polyphem high-explosive missiles Voortrekker could launch from her torpedo tubes were meant only for slow propeller planes or helicopters.

“Target bearing?” ter Horst snapped.

“Two eight five!” Van Gelder watched the distant dot of the aircraft. It gradually got larger. Suddenly the control room felt much, much too small, and Voortrekker’s hull too thin.

“It’s slowing!” the fire-control tech shouted. “It’s going to drop a parachute-retarded torpedo!”

“Snap shot,” ter Horst ordered, “tube one, maximum yield, on course two eight five! Shoot.” A snap shot was a desperation move, a quick launch with no proper firing solution to lead the target.

Van Gelder relayed commands. A nuclear torpedo raced from the tube. But the Boer torpedo was so much slower than the jet. The jet raced at Voortrekker’s conspicuous antenna, and the wire-guided torpedo churned through the water toward the jet.

“Detonate the snap shot now.”

“Too close to our own ship!” Van Gelder warned.

“Do you want him to drop? I said now!”

Van Gelder pressed the firing button. The undersea warhead blew. The water shielded Voortrekker’s masts from the instantaneous electromagnetic pulse, but the ocean could do nothing to quench the fireball and the blast force. Through the periscope image, Van Gelder saw the ocean near the aircraft heave. The full energy of the warhead broke the surface, and a tower of white water rose and spread with violent speed, higher and higher and wider and wider. The fireball thrust above the water column, blanking out the image. When the glare subsided, a mushroom cloud stood proudly and the enemy aircraft was gone.

Voortrekker whipped and shivered viciously from the force of its own underwater blast. A sonar screen imploded and caught fire; a crewman doused it with an extinguisher. Damage reports came to Van Gelder from other parts of the ship—nothing major yet.

Van Gelder watched on the periscope as the tsunami of the detonation approached Voortrekker quickly, even as the mushroom cloud grew taller in the air. The tsunami was a solid wall of foaming, boiling seawater. Spume and spray blew backward from its breaking crown, as a man-made wind was sucked in toward ground zero by the updraft of the mushroom cloud.

“Lower all masts and antennas!” ter Horst ordered.

All the imagery went blank. Van Gelder gripped his armrests, white-knuckled, waiting for what was to come.

The ship rolled and corkscrewed madly, and Van Gelder’s stomach rose toward his throat. Voortrekker dipped and heaved as the tsunami passed right overhead with a terrifying watery roaring sound.

“Raise all masts and antennas!” ter Horst shouted above the diminishing noise.

The satellite imagery came back. On Van Gelder’s display of Diego Garcia, the screen showed nothing but snow for a moment, then a lurid hot-violet glow flickered beyond the horizon on the picture.

“That blast should be them, not us,” ter Horst said. “The island’s outer defenses have gone nuclear after all.” Probably a destroyer or cruiser, Van Gelder thought, trying to smack the inbound missiles down.

A string of blinding lavender-violet fireballs bloomed, just over the southern horizon from the recon camera’s point of view.

“Oh dear. A whole wall of them, across our missiles’ line of approach. This I don’t like. I’m sure we lost some missiles there.”

Ter Horst sounded worried; Van Gelder was torn between praying for failure or success. He felt pity for the people on the atoll. Then he looked at the local periscope picture, at the fresh mushroom cloud that smashed the incoming enemy jet, standing now like a beacon marking Voortrekker’s location—he felt pity for himself and his crew.

“There.” Ter Horst pointed at his screen. “Our weapons are still in the air, a few at least.”

Conventional antiaircraft guns, shorter-range weapons, opened up from the atoll. Guns began to fire from ships stuck in the harbor too—some just couldn’t get up steam or warm their big diesel engines fast enough to leave. Van Gelder saw the gun flashes, vivid in the evening twilight. The shells invisibly flew away from Van Gelder, toward the south, and burst low over the ocean, leaving black puffs of smoke but showing no hits on incoming missiles. Van Gelder saw Allied fighters jinking to avoid the friendly fire, making less effective their own strafing runs against surviving hostile missiles. Van Gelder saw the surface of the lagoon roil from the firing concussions of heavy ack-ack guns. The surface of the sea splashed and rippled from the ack-ack’s falling shrapnel. Sometimes there were bigger splashes, when dud shells hit the water. There seemed to be a lot of duds. Ter Horst laughed.

More antimissile missiles took to the sky, or leaped from the wings of fighter jets as afterburners strained. Van Gelder followed the moving glows of the exhausts against the dusk. A few defensive missiles connected with something, in stabbing secondary blasts, and sheets of liquid fire rained to the sea.

“Shit,” ter Horst said. “Well, it’s out of our control. We may need another salvo after all.” Van Gelder’s gut tightened at the thought, with the Reagan’s planes so near. Fire-controlmen reported more airborne search radars, closing on Voortrekker fast. The warning strobes and beeps of his console seemed to set the pace for Van Gelder’s rising heartbeat.

Tracers, bright red and green, began to stitch the heavens over Diego Garcia—in the tropics, dark came quickly. The defenders still had targets, which meant Voortrekker’s cruise missiles still flew.

“You know, Number One,” ter Horst said, “it all makes a lovely light show.”

Dutifully, Van Gelder watched his screens. The last rays of the sunset cast a pink pall on the island bastion. Detonations right at sundown were part of ter Horst’s plan: it made Voortrekker’s egress easier, and medical care on the shattered atoll that much harder to provide.

Ter Horst tapped his chronometer. “The real fireworks are about to begin…now.”

Things happened fast.

All of Diego Garcia’s military assets were on the left arm of the atoll’s V. In rapid succession there blossomed six prolonged blinding flashes.

“Yes,” ter Horst exclaimed. “Some got through!”

Crewmen cheered.

“Quiet in control!” he snapped.

Van Gelder stared at his screen, transfixed.

As the glare died down, shock waves spread from four points on the atoll’s arm and two in the lagoon. Van Gelder saw gigantic domes of mist, where the moist tropical air condensed behind the spreading shock fronts. The mist domes quickly dissipated, and there they were, the atomic fireballs, six of them glowing and churning, ascending into the sky. Each was a breathtaking golden yellow, expanding as it rose: living, fulminating globes of unimaginable fire.

Pillars formed beneath the fireballs, black for the ones that hit land, white for the ones that hit water. The fireballs provided their own illumination for the nighttime scene around them; each cast livid shadows of the other mushroom clouds. At ground level, smoke and dust and fog-spray spread in fluffy, lethal disks. The shock waves of the different warheads met, rupturing the air.

Still the fireballs rose, and expanded, and cooled slightly. They sucked in more air at their bases. The pillars of the mushroom clouds grew thick, and lightning sizzled. Nothing on the ground could be seen through all the smoke and dust and steam and flying debris, no ships or planes or people. The water of the lagoon, farther off, foamed where it was punished by the shock fronts, and huge waves spread away from the two water bursts. Tall trees on the far side of the lagoon exploded into flame from the searing radiant heat of the blasts. The entire atoll seemed to burn.

Now the fireballs were more than two miles high. They broiled less fiercely. Smoke rings formed atop their crowns. They were interlaced with ethereal purple glows, the air itself fluorescing from the intense radiation. More lightning flashed from the tremendous static charges.

Ter Horst switched to the infrared feed. On Van Gelder’s screen, in this mode, the fireballs still seared frighteningly. But infrared could see through smoke and dust. At ground level, fires burned everywhere. The petroleum-products tank farm was now one huge inferno, and the inferno spread. More flaming fuel oil covered the surface of the lagoon, and in the lagoon, ships burned and broke apart. The four deep craters on the ground all glowed intensely hot; not one but two missiles had hit the runways of the airbase.

Van Gelder was awestruck in spite of himself. I helped do this. Some primitive part of his being rejoiced at the combat success. An unspeakable part of his soul soared with exhilarated joy at the sheer pleasure of such push-button mass destruction. In a sick way it was fun to unleash fission bombs, see mushroom clouds erect themselves, smash someone else’s toys and get to watch.

Am I becoming a monster, like my captain?

“Atoll denial, Gunther,” ter Horst said.

“Sir?”

“That’s what this is about. Atoll denial.”

Van Gelder nodded. He grasped ter Horst’s point. The cruise missiles all had plunging warheads, designed to bore in deep and throw up terrible local fallout—soil, vaporized wreckage, and radioactive seawater steam. From these appallingly dirty blasts, Diego Garcia would be unusable for many months, maybe years. The image jumped, then steadied, as each shock front finally reached the unmanned recon drone, the force too weak by now to knock it down.

“They think an island is an unsinkable aircraft carrier,” ter Horst said.

“I’ve heard the saying, Captain.” Ter Horst distracted Van Gelder, who was trying to make better sense of what he’d seen, and how he felt about it. I’ve helped kill thousands of people.

But it’s legal, they were military targets. This is war, and I’m doing my job.

“They need to think again,” ter Horst said. “An island is just a carrier that can’t move. We sank Diego Garcia in every way that matters.”

We did destroy the bastion. We’ve dealt the Allies a terrible blow. We’re closer to winning the war, aren’t we? We’ll save countless other lives, on both sides, if we help bring this conflict to a more rapid close…. Yes, that’s right. I should feel good about this.

So how come I don’t?

Three nuclear depth charges went off one right after the other, much too close to Voortrekker for comfort. Mike cords jiggled on the overhead again, and light fixtures squeaked in their shock-absorbing mounts.

“I think word of our success has reached the Reagan,” ter Horst said. “First Officer, we’ve seen enough. The recorders got all that?”

Van Gelder checked his console. “Yes, Captain. Good imagery.” One of the last frames, six fresh mushroom clouds towering in infrared, sat frozen on his screen.

“Visual targets!” someone screamed, pointing at the periscope pictures. “Multiple inbound aircraft!”

Van Gelder stared. The planes were converging on Voortrekker from every point of the compass, using the mushroom cloud nearby as their aiming point. The enemy was coordinating skillfully, and Voortrekker couldn’t possibly knock them all down with torpedoes. Van Gelder saw sonobuoys rain from some of the planes.

“Lower all masts and antennas!” ter Horst ordered. “Helm, flank speed ahead! Take her deep!” The bow nosed steeply down.

“Captain,” Van Gelder said, “that won’t help.” Voortrekker had been localized, to well within the kill radius of a big atomic depth charge. Enemy active sonobuoys began to ping from all around.

“Snap shots, tubes two, three, and four, onto courses due north, south, and west. Maximum yield, no depth ceiling, stand by to detonate at minimum safe range!”

Van Gelder relayed the commands. Three torpedoes will not save us. Our ceramic composite hull, our crush depth of five thousand meters will not save us either.

“Number One, run the torpedoes deep and then drive them for the surface. Detonate when they leap into the air.”

Van Gelder studied his data readouts. At the right moment he fired all three torpedo warheads simultaneously. Set off low in the atmosphere, he realized, they’d together make a big electromagnetic pulse, and throw a powerful shock wave through the air. Ter Horst is clever.

The force of the detonations was more muted this time as Voortrekker dived—air bursts didn’t pass much energy into the sea.

Everyone stared at the overhead, praying or swearing, as Voortrekker accelerated, still aiming steeply down. Her depth urgently mounted to hundreds, then thousands of meters. Ter Horst snapped out course changes to confuse the Allied aircrews, their avionics now scrambled and their weapon-arming circuits hopefully fried. But Allied aircraft were shielded against an atomic electromagnetic pulse. How badly had the planes been hurt?

An underwater detonation pounded Van Gelder fiendishly, shaking his skull against his spine; his teeth rattled and he almost bit through his tongue. Crewmen shouted in pain or fear. Light fixtures shattered and broken glass went flying, and another console screen caught fire. Everyone rushed to don their emergency air-breather masks.

Another nuclear depth charge blew. A compressed-air manifold cracked somewhere and high-pressure air blew paper around the control room like a tornado. A cooling-water pipe exploded and freezing freshwater sprayed from the overhead.

More air-dropped sonobuoys began to ping above the din.

“Snap shots, tubes five through eight, maximum warhead yields, courses due north, south, east, and west! Shoot!”

Van Gelder forced himself to concentrate, to keep his men under control, to get the weapons programmed and launched.

“Detonate all weapons at maximum depth, at minimum safe range!”

“Captain, recommend an additional safety distance, with four simultaneous blasts in every quadrant around the ship.”

“Negative,” ter Horst yelled through his breather mask. “There’s no time!” The constant pinging outside seemed to emphasize his point.

Van Gelder waited for the moment to fire. When it came, he dreaded triggering the weapons, because of what he knew they’d do to Voortrekker.

The feedback through the torpedo guidance wires showed all four warheads detonated. Seconds later the shock waves pummeled Voortrekker from all sides. TV monitors mounted on the bulkheads tore loose, fell to the deck, and smashed. Standing crewmen were knocked from their feet. A stanchion in the forward passageway snapped off from the overhead, severing a power cable. Both ends of the cable danced on the deck, throwing hot blue sparks. One end touched a crewman and his body jerked and spasmed and his hair burned and his eyes burst and his face began to steam.

“Noisemakers, Gunther,” ter Horst shouted above the ungodly racket. “I just used my own torpedoes as gigantic noisemakers! Let’s hope they hide us well enough!”

Van Gelder nodded numbly, then went back to his instruments.

Another enemy depth charge detonated somewhere close. Emergency battle-lantern lenses shattered and their lightbulbs smashed; the remaining overhead lighting dimmed as one auxiliary turbogenerator back in engineering shorted out; all intercom circuits failed. The control room phone talker said there was a bad electrical fire in engineering; he could barely pitch his voice above the reverb and the aftershocks.

“Helm,” ter Horst shouted, “take her to the bottom smartly! Steer one eight zero!” Due south.

“Sir,” Van Gelder yelled, “strongly advise caution! Bottom here is deeper than our test depth!”

“But not our crush depth! It’s getting too dicey. Do it.”

The helmsman acknowledged. Voortrekker dove deeper and deeper. The echoing rumble outside continued and sonobuoys pinged. Smoke and dust swirled through the air outside Van Gelder’s breather mask. Icy freshwater sloshed on the deck. Van Gelder began to shiver as his shoes and pants were drenched.

Everyone in the control room waited for the next atomic eruption. Would it be near or far? Would it be the one that killed them all? And when? When would it come? The nerve-ripping lull seemed to go on forever. A crewman whimpered, “What’s taking so long?”

“Easy, now,” Van Gelder ordered. This helpless expecting, this tenterhooks of life and death, is mental torture.

Van Gelder felt and heard another enemy depth charge blow much closer than the last one. His teeth hurt and his arms and legs flailed wildly from the shock. The lights went out completely.

SIX

Three hours later

JEFFREY AND ILSE sat on the couch again, in the anteroom of the meeting chamber at the Pentagon. The vice chief of naval operations was still inside with some of his key people, holding a crisis meeting on the Indian Ocean attack. Word had reached Washington quickly, cutting short Jeffrey’s presentation. Now, aides, messengers, senior officers came and went through the double doors, all of them in a hurry. Their faces betrayed their emotions, ranging from grim determination to anger to grief. Jeffrey and Ilse were ignored.

Jeffrey’s inner turmoil rolled around inside him. He didn’t mention to Ilse seeing his father, or the news about his mom. He tried not to think about this latest bad news either: the destruction of Diego Garcia, the obvious fact Voortrekker was on the loose, Jan ter Horst on the warpath. He wondered what Ilse would be thinking, being reminded of Jan.

“How much longer till someone tells us what’s going on?” Ilse said.

“I don’t know.”

“Will they want us to continue with the briefing?”

“I think so. They’ll still need the big picture. I hope they don’t get tunnel vision now.”

“But that’s what happened already, isn’t it? They got blindsided repeatedly. Now they’re reeling in shock. They just keep reacting, to things the Axis already did. You saw them in there too.”

“That’s what happens. Standard military tactics. Diversion and deception. Then strike hard and aim to overload the enemy, paralyze his brain. Both sides can play that gambit.”

“But I’d think your vaunted big shots would know that. They were acting like a bunch of children.”

“Ilse, that was uncalled for.” Jeffrey felt defensive now. He glanced at the two marines. They both blinked, staring straight ahead, carefully expressionless.

“Is this what it’s always like here?” Ilse said.

“Is what like what?”

“The Pentagon. The dirty politics. Finger-pointing, backbiting, he-said-she-said games…You used to work here.” Ilse made it sound like an accusation. “Then there’s the VCNO’s senior aide, that arrogant little bastard. I saw the way he talked to us.”

“Ilse, don’t take it so personally.”

Ilse turned to look at Jeffrey. “Don’t you talk to me about personally. What could you possibly know about personally? You don’t know how I feel. You don’t know what really matters to me. You hardly know me.”

“I—”

The VCNO’s aide came out of the double doors.

Why now of all times? Jeffrey thought.

The captain read their body language, and cleared his throat pointedly. “Is something the matter here?”

Jeffrey recovered fast. “No, sir.”

“Good.” The man turned to Ilse. “Miss Reebeck.”

“Captain?”

“Decisions have been made. We’re pulling you out of the course you’re taking.”

“But I’m not finished.”

“We have something more important for you to do. It’ll use your skills as combat oceanographer.”

“On a submarine?”

“No.” The captain looked at his watch. “There’s no time to explain, and it’s top secret. Something new, fresh, and different.”

“Where?”

“I can’t say.”

“But what about Challenger?”

“Forget about Challenger.”

Jeffrey tried to step in. “Sir—”

“Later.”

A young man in civilian clothes arrived. “Good,” the captain said to Ilse. “Your transportation’s here.”

“Where am I going?”

“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”

“What?”

The captain gave her a dirty look. “Reebeck, haven’t you learned anything about operational security by now?”

To Jeffrey, Ilse looked furious. He was afraid she’d make a scene, but she bit her feelings down.

“Go with this person,” the captain said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“What about me?” Jeffrey said.

The captain looked down his nose at Jeffrey—not an easy thing to do, since Jeffrey was inches taller. “Aren’t you taking some kind of course?”

“Yes, sir.” Jeffrey knew the man was well aware he was in the Prospective Commanding Officers course. The captain was putting Jeffrey in his place.

“You’re missing class. Get back to school.”

“How?”

“You have an open ticket to New London, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Your travel papers should get you on the next train. You might have to stand, but so it goes. There is a war on.”

The captain turned to Ilse. “Move out. Time is of the essence.” He went back into the meeting room.

Ilse looked at Jeffrey. “I guess this is how we part.”

Jeffrey’s heart was pounding. “I thought we’d have more time together.”

“Ma’am,” the young man insisted.

“I have to go,” Ilse said to Jeffrey.

“But—”

“I hate good-byes. I’ve seen too many good-byes.” Ilse hurried away.

Jeffrey stood there, alone and very lonely. He remembered he had a train to catch, and he’d missed two days of school already.

When he got to D.C.’s Union Station, he phoned Sloan-Kettering. The train passed through New York; maybe he could get off to see his mother at the hospital. They said she’d just gone into surgery, and would be in the recovery room—no visitors—for many hours after that.

Jeffrey stood in the station’s packed waiting room, leaning dejectedly against the wall between an empty vending machine and a withered potted plant. While he waited for his train to be called, he kept wondering where the navy was sending Ilse, and where Jan ter Horst and Voortrekker would strike next.

Ilse was rushed to Dulles International Airport in the back of an unmarked, windowless van. The driver was a lieutenant from Naval Intelligence. He told Ilse there were indications the Germans knew she’d been on the SEAL raid in the Baltic in December, and good indications the Axis had already tasked assassins working in the U.S. to kill her to get even. The driver wore a Super-Kevlar undershirt and had an Uzi submachine gun under the dashboard, and the van was armored. Still, Ilse didn’t feel safe.

At the airport, the van went into an underground garage. Ilse was led up through a maze of drab corridors and locked in a windowless room, for her own protection. After hours of sitting on a cracked plastic chair, at 7:30 P.M. Ilse finally heard someone outside. Keys jangled and a woman opened the door. The woman wore a military flight suit, including a pistol. She had on red-tinted goggles and carried a bulky satchel. The aviator, who was about Ilse’s height and build but maybe a few years older, put the satchel on the floor.

“Strip to your underwear and put these on.”

Ilse unzipped the satchel. It contained another flight suit. Boots, helmet, G-suit attachments, inflatable life vest, everything.

“They’re all your size. Leave your other clothes here. You won’t need them where we’re going.”

Ilse looked doubtfully at all the flight gear.

“Let me give you a hand.”

Eventually the aviator was satisfied. Wearing this getup felt strange to Ilse, but it was also exciting.

“Put the helmet on,” the woman said. “Put down the sun visor…. Don’t worry, you’ll see well enough. Follow me. From now on, no talking.”

Ilse put on the helmet and the woman helped her position the earphone cups and buckle the chin strap properly. The sun visor was shiny silver, like a one-way mirror. They left the room and the aviator locked it behind them. After a long walk down anonymous hallways, Ilse and the aviator came to a heavy metal door with security warnings. The woman punched in a number code, then opened the door.

Ilse was hit by a blast of cold air. She followed the aviator out onto the tarmac. The door slammed shut with dramatic finality. Ilse realized they were in the military section of Dulles Airport. The only lighting was dim and red. The sky had grown cloudy. Ilse’s eyes adjusted to the dark. She strained to see through her sun visor. Parked there in front of them was a two-seat fighter jet, sleek and futuristic—twin-tailed, with stealthy angles to the wings and fuselage, deadly looking.

“You ride in back,” the woman said to Ilse. Ilse watched her walk straight to the jet with a confident, possessive swagger.

We’re going to fly in this thing?

Ordnancemen finished loading wicked air-to-air missiles into side bays in the fighter’s fuselage. They shut the side-bay doors. Ilse eyed the plane more carefully. All she could read, black against the blue-gray of the fuselage, was USAF.

The woman and the crew chief helped Ilse use the ladder to the rear seat of the cockpit. Up close, Ilse noticed things painted over. But she could make out what was there, because of the layering of the paint. The pilot’s name matched the name on the woman aviator’s flight suit: Lt. Col. Rachel Barrows. Under the name, also visible from this close, were five double-headed Imperial German eagles. Barrows was a combat ace.

SEVEN

On Voortrekker, in the Indian Ocean

“SCHNAPPS, GUNTHER?”

Jan ter Horst poured Van Gelder a glass before he could refuse. Van Gelder didn’t feel like drinking. He was exhausted from hours of supervising damage-control repairs throughout the ship. The air was breathable now without respirator masks, but it smelled bad. Van Gelder heard men go by outside ter Horst’s closed cabin door, carrying tools and spare parts. Van Gelder knew the crew was still recovering, mentally and physically, from their thorough atomic depth charging by planes from the USS Reagan.

Ter Horst had said it would take a lucky shot to sink Voortrekker. But Van Gelder thought it was only luck that let Voortrekker survive.

On second thought, maybe I could use a drink.

This was the first time in a great while that ter Horst had summoned Van Gelder to a special private meeting, and Van Gelder was nervous. They sat with ter Horst’s fold-down desk between them.

Did he see my hesitation, my qualms, during the attack on Diego Garcia?…Or worse, did he sense my vicarious sadism, watching the warheads blow, and he wants to reclaim all such emotion as his exclusive right?

What ter Horst did say was completely unexpected.

“Thank you for backstopping me before, Number One, with the men, in the control room.”

“Sir?”

“When I told you to relax, while our missiles were in the air and our antenna dish was up. It had the exact opposite effect from what I intended, of course. It just made the men more nervous, and it undermined your authority as first officer. But what you said then settled everyone down quite nicely. You handled it well.”

Van Gelder thought it safest to just let ter Horst go on. He could be leading me onto very dangerous ground….

“With all the work in dry dock, and the tribunal on the nuclear sabotage at Umhlanga Rocks, I feel you and I have grown apart, Gunther, outside our official duties.”

Van Gelder hesitated. “I know you’ve been very busy, Captain.”

“As have you. As have you. The best proof of that was our successful attack today. Our ship and crew are responding well, thanks to your efforts.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Sir?” That question can be taken several ways.

“Do you know why you’re my first officer?”

Oh…uh-oh. “I was proud to be selected.” Which was safe to say, and true.

This time ter Horst let the silence linger, forcing Van Gelder to speak. Ter Horst sipped from his schnapps. He looked over the rim of the glass at Van Gelder expectantly.

“I don’t know much about the process by which you made the choice, Captain. I could only speculate.”

“A number of men wanted the job. Some pulled strings, lobbied hard, tried to curry my favor. Those men disappointed me. You, in contrast, stayed modest and discrete. Yet your record caught my eye. It told me things your own words never could. About you, your experience, your character, your abilities.”

“Again, thank you, sir.”

“There’s another reason, Gunther. You and I are different in many ways. But this is good. We complement one another ideally…. Yes, I know I love the theatrical, the grand gesture if you will. It’s my nature, these things, and I know that in some ways I’m less than perfect.”

“Sir, your combat success speaks for itself.”

“Our combat success, Gunther. Our combat success. It wasn’t lost on me that during our battle with USS Challenger, you made important contributions.”

“Sir, I—”

“No, please, let me finish. Once or twice then, you even saw something vital a split second before I did, at times when a split second meant the margin between life and death. You saved the ship, and I’ll never forget that.”

“I only did my duty, sir.” Yes, it was that plus a healthy, practical desire to not get killed.

“All true heroes will say they only did their duty, Gunther. All true heroes will say they were only helping their shipmates survive…. That’s why I want you to know, I put you in for a decoration, before we left dry dock.”

“I—”

“No, please. You deserve it. I expect it will be approved.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’re probably wondering by now why we’re having this little chat?”

Van Gelder nodded.

“More schnapps?”

“A little more, please.”

Ter Horst poured. He lifted his shot glass dramatically, then quaffed it in one gulp. Van Gelder felt he’d better do the same. The strong liquor felt good going down. It did help lift Van Gelder’s mood.

“Where we’re heading next, Gunther, and what we have to do there, may well have a decisive effect on the war.”

Again Van Gelder let ter Horst continue.

“You and I must work as one, going forward. What we do will be very risky and dangerous. I can’t afford to brook any misunderstandings between us, any frictions, even unconscious ones.”

Suddenly Van Gelder felt wary. “I didn’t think there was friction, Captain.” Was this the trap ter Horst had set and sprung?

But ter Horst waved his hand dismissively. “No, no. That’s not what I meant. We naval officers aren’t paid to be poets or philosophers. But I sense there’s more of the philosopher in you than in me. I sense you’re sometimes troubled about the rightness of our cause, I mean the need for the brutality, the mass destruction, the execution of traitors and spies.”

“Captain, I—”

“No, no. Please let me finish. This is not a criticism session. I’m not accusing you of any weakness, or—or of backsliding, God forbid.” Backsliding—a euphemism, Van Gelder knew, for cowardice and ideological doubt—was punishable by the noose. “I’m just trying to be a realist, about you and about me and about this war.”

Van Gelder was surprised now, and concerned. He’d never seen ter Horst this open and confiding, even at times in the past—at parties or dinners ashore—when he’d had plenty to drink. Could this be because ter Horst himself was worried about the difficulty of Voortrekker’s next task? Did he feel the need to talk, to have an audience, so as to reassure himself, because he now faced something overwhelming?

Ter Horst hiccupped, then said, “Excuse me.

“I’m not a man to know fear easily,” ter Horst went on. “I sometimes think I have some kind of character disorder. A fear deficit, you know?”

“Sir, the crew admire your bravery.”

“Well, some men come alive in battle and forget there’s such a thing as fear. I suppose I’m one of them. Others feel the naked vulnerability in combat all too vividly. Yet they carry on, they do their duty. I think these latter men are the ones with the true courage…. I believe you’re one of these latter type of men, Gunther. A man who feels his fear as a personal enemy from deep inside, and yet who slays that enemy time and again so he can go on and slay the true enemy, the external foe.”

“Er, thank you, Captain.” How many times have I thanked him now? What’s he trying to get me to do?

“I try to know myself, Gunther. A captain must. But I think of you as the more self-aware, the more sensitive of the two of us.”

“I think you’re probably right, sir.”

“I’ve never lied to you, have I?”

How am I supposed to answer that? “Not that I know of, Captain.”

“I pride myself that I’ve never lied to anyone. Oh, I withhold information, for security, but that’s a captain’s privilege.”

“I understand.”

“I seek to dupe the enemy, of course, but that’s valid strategy.”

“Of course.”

“Those lies aren’t sins. Killing in battle isn’t a sin. I like to think that I’ve never committed a serious sin. I say my prayers each night with a clear conscience.”

“Er, yes, sir.” Van Gelder knew that ter Horst, like many Boers, was religiously devout—Van Gelder himself believed in God, but wasn’t big on organized worship.

“So as I was saying, Gunther, I want to address—allay—any concerns you may have, before the next steps in our journey together.”

“How so?” Van Gelder felt intoxication coming on from the schnapps, and he tried to be very careful now.

“Discipline and training are your job. What I want you to do is meet with the officers and men in small groups, over the next day. But first, get some rest, a good eight hours’ rest. The schnapps will help.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” It would be nice to get a decent night’s sleep for once.

“Keep each gathering brief. Speak no more than fifteen minutes, say, and allow time for questions and open discussion.”

“On what subject, sir?”

“On why we’re fighting, on why our cause is just, on how well the war is going, and on where we’re voyaging next.”

“Where are we going next, Captain?”

“In due time. Let me take these points in order. You’ll remember what I say? You don’t want to take some notes?”

“I have a good memory, Captain.” A first officer needed one. “I’ll write things down if it becomes necessary….”

Ter Horst drew a deep breath. “We and the Germans are together fighting a police action, Gunther, against American imperialism, against outside interference in our proud national destinies, and against Anglo-American military-political atrocities of the last century or more.”

“You mean the forced end to apartheid,” Van Gelder stated. “The abuses of the Versailles Treaty after World War I.”

Ter Horst nodded. “Stripping Germany bare. Destroying her economy, and her self-esteem. Doing it again after World War II, especially in the East, under Soviet occupation for fifty years…. The Boer War, putting our forefathers’ wives and children in concentration camps, where thousands died of typhus.”

“But we fired the first shots, this time, in this war, sir.”

Ter Horst shook his head vehemently. “It’s all one long connected war, Gunther, going back decades and decades. Don’t you see? This is just the latest battle. The Americans, the British, they fired the first shots, long ago. Militarily, politically, they’re culpable for all that followed, and for all that follows now. They’re culpable morally too.”

“But the Germans nuked Warsaw and Tripoli.”

“And the U.S. nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Don’t you see the duality, the justice of it, the revenge here on a global scale? Many readings of international law say all nuclear weapons are illegal. Who invented them? Who used them first?”

“I see your point, Captain.”

“And take the collapse of apartheid. That system worked for us, for all South Africa. The Bantus, the coloreds, they had a proper place in our society, and a proper, safe place in which to work and live. The communist so-called Front Line States to our north made trouble along the border, sure, but we fought them back. We held the line against the Reds as much as America ever did, with their botch-up in Vietnam. We held it better, until the Berlin Wall came down! Then the Americans hit us with trade embargoes, sanctions. They claim we’re violating human rights. So apartheid falls, and starting in 1994 our country becomes a democracy. And what do we get, from this democracy?” Ter Horst said the word like it was obscene. “Open borders, and an inrush of AIDS decimating our black population. An open economy, freedom for all, and violent crime skyrockets. Internal terrorism, tribal strife, they explode all out of control! Look at the statistics, Gunther. Years and years of statistics. The statistics don’t lie.”

“No, sir, they don’t.” Van Gelder felt himself being won over. He felt himself relaxing, his inner concerns being salved.

Watch out, my friend. Is this burgeoning peace of mind because of ter Horst’s hard logic, or because of your own fatigue and the schnapps? Is ter Horst an inspiring leader, or is he just a manipulative, seducing bastard?

“It’s the enemy who lies, Number One. It’s the enemy who practices hypocrisy on a monumental scale. What the Brits have done to the Irish. What the U.S. did to their Native Americans, what the North did to the South in their bloody War Between the States…The joint NATO task force we and the Germans attacked at the outset of this latest conflict was a legitimate military target, Gunther. Diego Garcia was a legitimate military target. The Americans and British and the others we killed are the fools, for not thinking of the risks when they joined up, when they donned the uniform in what they thought was peacetime. There has been no peacetime, Gunther, not in a hundred, two hundred years! Only lulls between battles, and the Anglo-Americans choose to call each battle a separate war. Now do you see?”

“I think so, sir.” Ter Horst had made some very telling points.

“Good. Good. It’s all very simple, really, when you look at it the right way. The world has a new policeman, fighting against corruption, decadence, social chaos, and pandemic disease. Fighting for national self-determination, order, truth. That new policeman is us, Gunther, the Berlin-Boer Axis.”

Ter Horst offered Van Gelder more schnapps. This time Van Gelder declined, and ter Horst put away the bottle. It was from Germany, and tasted very good. Van Gelder decided to see if the schnapps had made ter Horst loosen up at all.

“The last part of the briefings I’m to conduct, Captain? Our next destination?”

“We’re going to deal the Americans the knockout blow…. The Axis doesn’t intend to occupy them. You know that’s never been our goal. Containment, diminishment, reduction to a second-rate vassal nation, those are our plans for America…. At the rate they’re going, German forces in the North Atlantic should have the British starved out soon. And Russia remains firm in her thinly disguised support for us, providing conventional arms, and raw materials and fuels, in exchange for gold and diamonds.”

“Just where do we come in?”

Ter Horst cleared his throat. “Voortrekker is tasked to open up a whole new front. We’re going to expose the United States as completely naked and vulnerable, to undermine their will and ability to continue the fight, and, especially, win Asia over to the Axis side. Secret diplomatic efforts, ones I cannot disclose a thing to you about, are under way on several continents, timed to mesh with our next strike.”

Van Gelder hesitated, very impressed. “But sir. We’re almost out of ammo.”

Ter Horst waved dismissively again. “All that will be taken care of soon.”

“How, Captain?…Excuse me, I know I must be patient.”

Van Gelder was surprised at himself for saying that. He realized ter Horst had had his desired effect. Van Gelder couldn’t help but let ter Horst continue his seduction, finish casting his spell. And by the time I run through all this five or six times with the men—each time making sure I sound as if I believe every word—he’ll have me totally brainwashed.

Ter Horst looked Van Gelder right in the eyes, very hard.

“You and I, Gunther. Together, and our crew. We’re the fulcrum, the pivot point. A supercapable nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, fully armed with tactical atomic weapons you and I are eager to use…We’re going to run the Australia–New Zealand–Antarctic Gap, break out into the Pacific Ocean, and open a whole new front against America.”

EIGHT

Simultaneously, at Dulles International Airport, Washington, D.C.

STRAPPED INTO THE rear of the cockpit, Ilse heard the purring of the fighter jet’s twin engines rise to a steady, insistent whine. The crew chief and Rachel Barrows saluted. Ilse waved, and the crew chief waved back. Barrows must know she can trust the crew chief. I’d hate it if he were a spy, and sabotaged us.

Barrows closed and sealed the cockpit canopy. Ilse breathed deeply, slightly frightened yet almost giddy in anticipation of what was to come. Her oxygen mask smelled rubbery. The oxygen tasted metallic and felt cool and dry. It helped Ilse feel more alert.

Barrows’s voice came over Ilse’s headphones. “I’ll leave the intercom mikes on so we can talk. We’ll maintain strict radio and radar silence, for obvious reasons.”

The plane taxied some distance in the pitch-dark. The plane’s suspension was stiff; Ilse felt every bump and crack and seam in the taxiway.

“How can you see? I thought the Axis was distorting the global positioning system signals.”

“I have infrared and low-light-level TV pictures, with cues on my head-up display. The cameras are in the nose.”

Barrows put on the brakes. “We’re waiting for takeoff clearance.”

Ilse glanced around and was surprised to find she had a small rearview mirror mounted inside the canopy. She saw another, identical jet waiting behind her and Barrows.

“What type of airplane is this?”

“Two-seat version of the F-22 Raptor. Best air-dominance and strike fighter in the world, in my not-so-humble opinion.”

“How come my instruments are all blacked out?”

“So you don’t see aircraft performance. Maximum speed, altitude ceiling, stuff like that’s top secret.”

Ilse, held firmly by her ejection seat harness, squirmed to try to relax in the seat—the bottom and back were firm and hard.

“These chairs aren’t very comfortable.”

“When you’re in a dogfight with the kaiser’s Luftwaffe, the last thing you want is comfortable.”

Ilse hesitated, chilled. It sank in, all at once, that these jets were personal killing machines, and sometimes the pilots who flew them died. “If it isn’t too secret, where did you score your five victories?”

“Over Denmark and the North Sea. All in one night too, right before Christmas. There was a huge air battle, you might have heard about it.”

Ilse had heard about it. She’d been right under it, in Challenger, the whole time. This woman helped save my life.

“Who is that behind us?”

“My wingman.” Ilse, her vision dark-adapted now, looked again in the rearview mirror. The other pilot was a woman.

“Who’s in the other passenger seat?”

“Someone who looks like you…And that’s the weapon systems officer’s seat, officially.”

“You don’t need one tonight?”

“Not where we’re going. We’ll be vectored to the rendezvous by an AWACS plane.”

“So what’s this all about? Can’t you tell me anything?”

“We need to get you somewhere special really quick, far away. A fighter jet’s the fastest method. We also need to keep the Axis from knowing where you’re going, on the assumption they’re trying to monitor you. The air force has a few tricks up our sleeve tonight.”

Red lights came on, in two long rows along the ground, marking the edges of a concrete runway that stretched in front of the jet for more than two miles.

“We are clear for takeoff.” Barrows kept the brakes on while she pushed the throttles to full power. The engine noise built from a whine to a roar. The whole plane shook and bucked like it was alive. Barrows released the brakes and hit the afterburners. The noise redoubled. Ilse was kicked back hard against her seat. The F-22 rolled down the runway faster and faster. The red runway lights streaked past in a blur.

The aircraft leaped into the sky. Barrows made a tight left turn, and kept climbing fast.

Ilse glanced around to spot the wingman. She noticed tiny, dim lights trailing her, not far away. Barrows waggled her wings. The dim lights waggled back. Both planes rushed into the overcast, a foggy murk that made the dark seem darker.

In seconds the murk was pierced and fell behind: the F-22s broke through the cloud cover. The view above and all around took Ilse’s breath away. The sky was perfectly clear and vast and black. A sliver of moon rose in the east. The stars were sharper and more brilliant than Ilse had ever seen. Mars glowed a solid red, and Jupiter pale yellow. The Milky Way stretched over her head across the entire sky. Using the moon and stars, Ilse could tell the Raptors were flying west.

It’s hard to believe the last time I looked at the Milky Way was on top of the Empire State Building, barely twenty-four hours ago. It feels like so much longer…. I wonder what Jeffrey Fuller is doing now. Maybe I’ll try to find him, after the war.

Ilse heard a man’s voice over the radio. She thought he must be in the airborne warning-and-control plane Barrows mentioned. He was guiding other Raptors to meet with Barrows and her wingman.

After a while, Ilse spotted the Raptors. Two came in from the right, and two from the left. They closed up on Barrows and her wingman. They all tucked into a tight arrowhead formation, with Barrows and Ilse in the lead.

I wonder if all the pilots and passengers are women.

“Now for some high-speed aerobatics,” Barrows said with obvious relish. “If it makes your head spin, imagine how the Axis satellites will feel. And yes, they’re definitely watching us now.”

Ilse’s heart began to pound, in anticipation and dread. Already this was like no airplane ride she’d ever had in her life.

The F-22 went into a steep dive. Ilse seemed to float against her harness, weightless, with her stomach in her throat. The formation of six F-22s drove back into the overcast together, then down under the clouds. When they broke through, Ilse could see lights of towns and roads below. They were well in from the Atlantic, beyond the official Coast Defense Zone; here the blackout didn’t apply so strictly.

The F-22s began to break and zigzag right and left, crossing over and under each other in a giant high-speed shell game. Raptors came so close to Ilse’s wings and tail and canopy that she was terrified. Sometimes Barrows and the other pilots all flew upside down, and Ilse hung from her shoulder straps. Her F-22 buffeted viciously, from hitting the other fighters’ vortex wakes. The lights on the ground were Ilse’s only solid point of reference, and they barely prevented her from getting completely disoriented.

On a command from the man in the AWACS, all six aircraft pulled up hard. The g-force this time pressed Ilse firmly into her seat, more and more. She began to feel faint, and her vision narrowed and darkened, even as the G-suit bladders squeezed her lower body. The F-22s stood on their tails and took off vertically on afterburner. They thrust back through the overcast and up into the sky. They broke into the clear but still kept climbing. The acceleration wasn’t as brutal now, and Ilse’s vision returned. The stars got closer and closer; she saw a meteor streak past Orion’s sword. Ilse panted inside her oxygen mask. Her ears were popping painfully, and she kept trying to clear them, but her throat was parched by the oxygen. She could hear Barrows breathing too, much more calmly. Ilse managed to form spit in her mouth, and swallowed.

The planes closed into a tighter formation, making a hollow circle as they climbed straight up, wingtips of each jet almost touching those of its neighbors, all still standing on their tails. They began to rotate slowly to the right in unison, as if to follow a giant helix spiraling into the heavens, as if they were playing ring-around-the-rosie. They began to spiral faster and faster. Ilse didn’t believe the maneuver was possible, let alone that anyone in their right mind would try it.

“Having fun yet?” Barrows said. The planes kept climbing and climbing.

“No,” Ilse said very nervously.

Their altitude was so high, Ilse saw another meteor streak actually below her. She knew some burned out at fifty or sixty thousand feet.

At last the fighters peeled off, and each plunged toward the ground in an almost vertical dive. Suddenly Ilse’s F-22 seemed to shiver, then the ride got smoother and quieter.

“We just broke the sound barrier,” Barrows said.

“How come I didn’t hear the sonic boom?”

“You never do. It’s the people on the ground who feel our shock wave passing over them.”

“Right.”

“That bit was showing off for the opposition,” Barrows said. “Here comes my favorite part, now that we have their complete attention. It’s a maneuver we call flipping them the bird.” The planes pulled out of their dives, into level flight, and lost some speed. Ilse’s Raptor shimmied again, and she realized they were subsonic.

Five of them lined up side by side, wingtip to wingtip again. Ilse was in the second Raptor from the left. Another plane took the lead, positioned in front of the middle Raptor in the line. Slowly that lead Raptor drew ahead of the others. Then all six aircraft kicked in afterburners, and held formation going supersonic in level flight.

Barrows laughed. Ilse got it. Any satellite watching, using radar or visual or infrared, would see a giant five-fingered hand, sticking out its middle finger, in a gesture impossible to miss.

The AWACS man—Ilse realized he was calling this whole dance—said something Ilse didn’t catch. Suddenly the planes broke into a dive and went through the clouds. Lost in the mist once more, Ilse couldn’t make out the dim anticollision lights of the planes around her; she did see their brilliant afterburner glows. Under the clouds the afterburners stopped.

“Last act of the play,” Barrows said.

Ilse was glad. She was sweating inside her helmet and flight suit. It wasn’t just the fear. The ride was so very rough, the maneuvers and g-forces so aggressive, it was tremendous physical labor to just stay in the seat and breathe and not black out.

The F-22s went back up through the clouds, gaining altitude again. Suddenly Ilse heard popping sounds, and felt thumps. She grew alarmed. She saw flames spewing all over, and thought her plane had hit another and they were exploding and they would die.

“Heat flares,” Barrows said. “Infrared countermeasures.” The aircraft made tight turns. They passed back under their own burning flares. There were more pops and thumps. By the light of the flares, Ilse saw thousands of thin metal streamers floating everywhere.

“Radar chaff.”

The planes all did a tight turn once again. They flew under the flares and clouds of chaff, and started another mind-numbing three-card monte shuffle, passing over and under one another with barely inches to spare. The maneuvers were so violent, Ilse’s arms were thrown around the cockpit. She almost hit one of her ejection loops.

“Just a little more of this,” Barrows grunted, “and the bad guys will have no idea which plane you’re on.”

“Then what?” Ilse grunted back. It was hard to talk as the G suit squeezed her abdomen.

“We all break away.” Grunt. “Each Raptor refuels in midair.” Grunt. “Then heads to a different installation.” Grunt. “Somewhere in the U.S.”

“Where do we go?”

“Alaska.” Grunt. “Aleutian Islands.”

The maneuvers under the screen of infrared and radar countermeasures got even more aggressive. Now it was a totally wild melee. Another F-22 came right at Ilse. She got so scared she had to close her eyes.

NINE

Same evening, New London, Connecticut

JEFFREY’S TRAIN ARRIVED on time in New London, and he did get a seat, but that was the best he could say for the ride. His mood—his morale about life in general—was at a low. It was just one thing after another the past forty-eight hours: the New York raid; him and Ilse fighting, and then her being sent God knows where; running into his father, and arguing, and separating again; the slaughter on Diego Garcia.

The worst thing for Jeffrey personally was his mother. He’d taken it for granted that she’d be around forever. He’d always just assumed that one day he would patch things up with his folks, like maybe when he got married and had kids and gave his mom and dad some grandchildren. Now Jeffrey might be running out of time, fast, to even say good-bye to his mom.

The whole trip from Washington to New London, as the sun set outside the windows and people got on and off the train at different stops, all this had swirled in Jeffrey’s mind, eating at him. The one thing he did sort out during the time on the train was that he’d put in for compassionate leave, if only for a day, to try to visit his mother in New York. If that meant missing more of the course he was taking, so be it—he’d realized at long last that his family was more important.

When the train pulled in at New London, he dismounted in the dark and started for the pier to wait for the tug back to the sub base. Someone behind him, on the platform, shouted a name. Jeffrey felt so distracted inside, it took several shouts for him to realize it was the false name on his travel papers. He turned, and was approached by a junior enlisted man.

“Sir, I’m supposed to meet you. I have a car, sir.”

“Thanks. The tug’ll be much faster, son. Look at that traffic on the bridge.”

This is the first time in my life I called someone else in the military “son.” It made Jeffrey feel very old.

“No, sir. My orders are to take you by car.”

Jeffrey shrugged to himself, and handed the enlisted man his luggage. They walked around the side of the picturesque old red-brick station building, to the parking lot. By standard naval courtesy, the younger man held open the rear right passenger door. Jeffrey got in the unmarked late-model subcompact. They drove off.

Three minutes later he said to the kid, “You missed the turn for the bridge.”

“No, sir. I’m to take you up to the pens.”

“The pens?”

“Yes, sir.”

They took a local road straight upriver. The driver dropped Jeffrey off. After a camouflaged checkpoint with heavy security, Jeffrey used the blast-door interlock. He went underground—down toward the hardened submarine pens, hurriedly cut into the rock of the bluffs after the start of the war. Just inside, he showed his real ID.

“Come with me, sir, please,” a senior chief told him. The chief took Jeffrey’s bags.

They went deeper, down a ramp to the crowded office and administration area. The chief led Jeffrey into one cubicle.

“Sir, Commander Fuller is here.” Lieutenant commanders were called commander in public.

The man at the desk looked up. It was Jeffrey’s old boss, Commander Wilson, a full commander, captain of USS Challenger.

“Sit down, Commander,” Wilson said rather dryly.

Jeffrey obeyed. He thought Wilson looked very tired. But Wilson’s chocolate-brown complexion wasn’t as ashen as back on New Year’s Eve. That was the last time Jeffrey had seen him, when Wilson was still getting over a serious concussion.

But there were other changes in the man. He wore reading glasses—that was new. And he hadn’t shaved in a week—which was startling. Captain Wilson always presented a crisp appearance. Even sitting down, even now, his posture was erect, his shoulders squared. If anything, despite the stubble on his chin, the man exuded more authority, more power, than ever.

The beard was coming in gray, though Wilson was barely forty.

Wilson took off the glasses. “I still get bad headaches. These help. The doctors said I ought to wear bifocals all the time, but I suppose I’m vain.”

Wilson hadn’t even said hello. This was typical of the man, getting right to the point, always. At least he was opening the meeting with some small talk.

Wilson saw Jeffrey staring at his almost-beard. “I went into the hospital a couple of weeks ago, for a brain scan. The medical corps types said the headaches should’ve stopped by now, and they wanted to check. Not a damn thing wrong with me, but I picked up some kind of skin infection while I was there. There’s a big word for that, iatrogenic.” Wilson pronounced it slowly and sarcastically. “Means something new you catch in the hospital, while they’re supposed to be curing you. Probably a fungus, from the Central African front…They gave me a cream, and said that cured it, but I’m not supposed to shave yet.”

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Yes. I want you to hear this from me first. I’m leaving Challenger, and you’ve been reassigned to the ship.”

Jeffrey was delighted and dismayed at the same time. He would be back in the naval front lines after all, and the thought gave him an immediate surge of adrenaline. But Wilson, as hard to please as he was, had been Jeffrey’s teacher and mentor in combat when Jeffrey was Wilson’s executive officer.

“I’ll miss working for you, sir…Where are you going?”

“They gave me DevRon Twelve.” That was Challenger’s parent squadron, Submarine Development Squadron 12.

“Sir, congratulations.” This was a huge promotion…too huge. “With respect, sir, that’s a senior four-striper’s billet.”

“I got my fourth stripe this afternoon. Been too damn busy to change my insignia.” He pointed to his collar tabs, which still showed him as a commander.

“Congratulations again, Captain…May I ask, who’s your relief?” Relief in this context meant Wilson’s replacement, the new CO of Challenger. Jeffrey could think of several good men who’d qualify.

“You don’t get it, do you?”

“Sir?”

“You still work for me.”

“Sir?”

“You are my relief.”

Jeffrey was stunned, then excited, then confused.

“But I’m a lieutenant commander.”

“You’ve been promoted, retroactive to the day before Christmas. Consider it a battlefield promotion.”

“Sir, I don’t know what to say.”

“Then don’t say it. This is for you.” Wilson handed Jeffrey a small velvet case.

Jeffrey opened it. The case held a Navy Cross, the highest decoration the navy could give, second only to the Medal of Honor, which had to be approved by Congress. There was a gold star with the medal. The gold star, Jeffrey knew, was in lieu of a second award—he’d gotten two Navy Crosses.

“Sir, I don’t know what to say.”

“You earned them. One for each mission in December. We’ll do the whole change-of-command thing, and the awards ceremony, in the morning. Right now there are more important matters to discuss.”

“Captain?”

“No. You’re a captain. I’m a commodore.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Right.” This was a lot to absorb, especially after everything else going on. Part of Jeffrey wanted to jump up and down and grin like a little boy—he was never one to be arrogant or smug or grandiose. His promotion, like Wilson’s, was early. It was the strongest possible sign of recognition from their superiors.

“You know Voortrekker hit Diego Garcia?”

“Yes, sir.” That put a stop to any grin. Jeffrey remembered what his father had said at the Pentagon, about personnel shakeups for better results. Jeffrey suspected there’d just been another shakeup, and Jeffrey and Wilson were caught at the epicenter now.

“Look at this map.” Wilson put on his reading glasses, and gestured for Jeffrey to come around to his side of the desk.

The map on Wilson’s laptop showed the huge expanse of the Indian Ocean. Africa bordered the left, the Middle East and southern Asia lay at the top, Australia and New Zealand were way on the right, and Antarctica edged the bottom. In the middle of the ocean itself was a tiny dot, Diego Garcia. What’s left of it.

The map also showed the sea-floor topography in detail.

Wilson looked Jeffrey squarely in the eyes. “Search forces have found no sign of Voortrekker since the attack, and believe me, they’re trying.”

“She’s hiding in the undersea ridge terrain. That’s what I’d do.”

“Concur. What’s good for the Boers is that the Mid-Indian Ocean Ridge is Y-shaped. See? It’s because of the layout of the tectonic plates.”

Jeffrey nodded.

“One branch of the Y leads back to Durban,” Wilson said, “Voortrekker’s home base. One branch leads toward the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the oil and natural gas fields. The third branch leads down past Australia and New Zealand, to the Pacific Ocean. Your orders, Captain Fuller, are to get under way at once and proceed at best possible speed to a position east of New Zealand, to guard the most vulnerable part of the Australia–New Zealand–Antarctic Gap. It is the consensus of those in a position to know best about these things that Voortrekker is heading for the Pacific.”

“The Diego Garcia strike was the preamble, wasn’t it?” Jeffrey said. “It cleared a major obstacle in Voortrekker’s path. While we’re reeling from the blow, and trying to rescue survivors, they keep heading east.”

“Yes,” Wilson said, “precisely. So you have to get under way, and cut Voortrekker off.”

“But Challenger still needs weeks of dry-dock work.”

“Forty-eight hours. I’m giving you forty-eight hours to square your ship away. Then anything that isn’t ready gets left behind. Ter Horst will be moving slowly, for stealth, and you can make the whole trip there through mostly friendly waters.”

“Sir, I don’t know what to say. I’m not sure the ship could be ready to sail in forty-eight hours.”

“Voortrekker did it somehow. The Yorktown did it before the Battle of Midway in World War II…. I’ve already talked to the contractors, the union shop stewards, and Challenger’s skeleton crew. Everyone’s working round the clock.”

Jeffrey could picture the frenzied activity. He intended to do his part. He knew people were busting a gut to make his ship ready for him. Not meaning to, Jeffrey exhaled from the depths of his being.

“What is it?” Wilson said.

“Sir, I just learned my mother has breast cancer. It may have metastasized. I was going to ask for compassionate leave.”

“That’s out of the question. All leaves are canceled. You have your hands full, getting Challenger battle-ready. As battle-ready as possible.”

“I understand, Commodore…. Is Miss Reebeck available, given the change of plans?” Her proven skills as combat oceanographer would be valuable.

“No. She’s been sent to the study group that helps make sure our boomers remain undetectable by the enemy. The Ohio-class Trident missile subs are getting old…. It’s not like we can drop hydrogen bombs on the heart of Europe or Africa, and kill millions of innocent civilians and hostages, just because the Axis caught us with our pants down by using tactical atomic weapons at sea. But if the Axis can threaten our Trident boats, and we lose our strategic deterrent against Russia and China, on top of everything else…”

“I understand, sir. Of course.” Jeffrey thought the Germans and Boers had been much too clever and calculating. They exploited the wide but neglected gap in weaponry effects between NATO’s conventional arms and the Armageddon-like power of NATO’s H-bombs. The Axis used small atom bombs to drive a wedge far into that gap, to weaken Allied naval forces and sever essential supply lines—and now the Axis all but owned two continents. Fortunately, French commandos had been able to evacuate or destroy their country’s hydrogen-bomb stocks before France folded to Germany. The hostages Wilson referred to included tens of thousands of touring American families and traveling businesspeople and vacationing college kids, all trapped on Axis turf when the war broke out last summer—and now interned in camps beside major enemy industrial sites.

A messenger arrived and handed Wilson a message slip. Wilson read it. His lips tightened and his jaw set.

Wilson looked at Jeffrey. “I’m sorry.”

“Sir?” Jeffrey felt a stab to the heart. He thought his mother had died on the operating table.

“Miss Reebeck has been killed.”

“Killed?” The word came out of his mouth like someone else spoke it.

“The aircraft she was riding in had a mishap. They ejected, but her ejection seat malfunctioned. The parachute failed to open.”

“Are they sure?”

“The body was recovered quickly…. I’m sorry. I know the two of you were close.”

“I…” Jeffrey just trailed off. He reminded himself he was a warship’s captain now. He had an image to maintain as commanding officer. He fought a sense of bitterness that his big move up professionally, and the massive responsibilities it brought, were keeping him from tending to his own emotional needs.

Wilson watched him, read his inner struggle, and sighed. “We all lose people we care about in war. I lost a cousin and a nephew in the initial ambush off West Africa.”

Jeffrey hesitated. “I didn’t know that, sir.”

“I don’t like to talk about it.”

Jeffrey sat there, not knowing what to say or do or feel.

“You need to get down to your ship,” Wilson said gently, “and make the preparations.”

“Yes, Commodore. Of course.”

Jeffrey stood up, still in a bit of a daze. My own command, my own command, and it has to happen like this.

“There’s more,” Wilson said.

“Sir?”

“I’m coming with you to the Pacific.”

“On Challenger, Commodore?”

“Yes. I’m detaching from DevRon Twelve, leaving things here to my deputy, to lead an undersea battle group. With such a vast area to cover, we can’t afford to take on Voortrekker alone.”

That stung, and it made Jeffrey angry. “Sir, is this a reference to my failure to sink ter Horst last time?”

Wilson’s face grew stern. “I know you’re upset, about your mother and now Miss Reebeck. But this is the wrong time and place to start getting touchy. And to answer your question, no, it’s not a reference to anything. You just got two goddamn Navy Crosses, a promotion in rank, and a ship.”

“Yes, sir…. What other vessels are in the battle group?”

“Several Royal Australian Navy diesel submarines. I don’t know how many yet. Maybe four.”

“Not Collins boats?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“But they’re death traps! They’re noisy, they can’t stay down long, their crush depth is barely a tenth of ours, and they’re slow!”

“This isn’t my decision, Captain. If Voortrekker does reach the Pacific, and gets loose in those tens of millions of square miles of very deep water…”

“Can’t we work with our own fast-attacks?”

“The ones that haven’t been sunk or badly damaged are stretched much too thin as it is. They’re busy escorting the remaining carriers and our boomers, protecting the North and South Atlantic convoys, conducting special ops or spying against the Axis or Russia or China, not to mention keeping an eye on Third World rogues that might act up. It takes time to rejuggle deployments and refits. You know how it is. We’ll get support, but not right away.”

“I get the picture, sir.”

“Challenger is by far the best platform to prosecute Voortrekker. You can handle Challenger in combat better than anyone, including me. You’ve faced Voortrekker before, and you did complete your assigned mission then.”

“Understood.”

“This is your chance for a rematch with ter Horst. Do it in Ilse Reebeck’s memory.”

Jeffrey was too worn out and beat up to feel much emotion at this point. He knew the real pain would come later.

Wilson rubbed his temples. Jeffrey suspected he was having another headache, and tried to look sympathetic.

Wilson glared at him. “Go down to your ship. We have to get to the other side of the planet, pronto.”

Jeffrey turned to leave the cubicle. He drew some comfort that Wilson was as much a hard-ass as ever. Wilson seemed to be reminding him, none too subtly, that life simply had to go on.

“Oh,” Wilson called after him. “One other thing.”

“Commodore?”

“If you expect to make rear admiral, you’d better come up with something more articulate than ‘I don’t know what to say’ when someone hands you a medal or a promotion or a command.”

TEN

Thirty-six hours later

JEFFREY WOKE UP early, after barely four hours’ sleep. The cot in the dormitory zone of the underground pens was uncomfortable. But with all the noise inside Challenger, from the contractors working frantically there, sleep on the ship was impossible.

Jeffrey put both feet on the floor, stretched to get the kinks out of his back, and it hit him. The handshakes and smiles, the flashbulbs, all the grand but hurried ceremonies of change of command and the medals, counted for little compared to the sense of loss that assaulted Jeffrey’s mind as he stood up. Ilse Reebeck was dead. All their shared experiences during battle, all their passionate times in more recent nights, were as nothing now, wiped away.

Where could the captain of a U.S. Navy warship find the time or privacy to mourn? His cabin on Challenger was being used as a blueprint room by repair crews. He slept instead on a cot in a big room full of cots, hearing other people snore.

Jeffrey dressed as quietly as he could in the dark, so as not to wake the strangers slumbering near him. Then the other thing hit him, and he felt his insides sink even more.

His mother had come through surgery all right. But there were spots on the whole-body scan they’d done at Sloan-Kettering. Abnormalities on his mother’s pancreas and liver. The doctors said the spots might just be artifacts of the imaging process itself. They might not be tumors at all, don’t worry yet, they needed to run more tests. Jeffrey pictured what his mother might become: a wraith lying in a hospice bed, tubes in her arms, skin gray, body shrunken, life force draining away. He felt more grief and gnawing concern.

He made himself bottle it up. He shook his head to clear his thoughts, to compose himself for his hectic first full day as a nuclear submarine’s commanding officer.

Jeffrey looked at his watch. There was just enough time to take a leak and grab a simple breakfast. A shower would need to wait. He’d scheduled a meeting very soon with his navigator and sonar officer.

Jeffrey sighed. He had so, so much work to do.

At least work eased the pain. Jeffrey knew the next time he’d sleep wouldn’t be till Challenger was under way at sea.

Jeffrey sat in the little cubicle that was his temporary office. He nursed his third cup of coffee of the morning. The first to arrive was his navigator, with a laptop under one arm.

Lieutenant Richard Sessions had started as Challenger’s sonar officer, under Captain Wilson, even before Jeffrey first joined the ship as XO. Because of other casualties at the same time Wilson was wounded, Jeffrey made Sessions the acting navigator. Later this move up, to department head, was formalized.

Sessions was in his mid-twenties, earnest and capable. He came from a small town in Nebraska. He was a tad overweight, the sort of person whose clothes and hair always seemed a little sloppy no matter what he did. That might not go over well in the military, but Jeffrey liked and respected Sessions. One thing the lieutenant’s work never was was sloppy, and in combat he kept his cool well. At the awards ceremony yesterday, when Jeffrey got his double Navy Cross, Sessions received a Bronze Star.

Sessions put his laptop on Jeffrey’s desk, plugged it in, and turned it on. Then Challenger’s sonar officer scurried into the cubicle, Lieutenant Kathy Milgrom of the Royal Navy. She’d been transferred from the crew of the U.K.’s ceramic-hulled nuclear submarine, HMS Dreadnought, after Challenger’s mission to South Africa. Before the war, the Royal Navy had begun to experiment with women on fast-attack crews. Kathy came to Challenger as an exchange officer, highly recommended. To some—but not all—higher-ups her presence was controversial. She fit in very well on the ship, and Jeffrey found her outstanding at her job.

Kathy was born in Liverpool; her accent was distinctive. Her family had been providing men—and more recently women—to the Royal Navy for generations. Kathy wore special submariner eyeglasses, with narrow frames to fit under an emergency air-breather mask. When she’d first joined Challenger, before the mission to Germany, she’d been plump. Two months later the love handles were gone. She was as businesslike as ever.

Kathy and Sessions took seats. There was a moment of mutual awkwardness. This was the first time they were talking serious matters since Jeffrey had formally assumed command. Having Jeffrey as acting captain in a crisis was one thing, but reporting to him as their official, ongoing commanding officer was new for all three of them.

Jeffrey hadn’t anticipated this, the need to reorient relationships and subtly alter mind-sets. He decided immediately he’d continue as before. His style with his officers was collegial and confiding. If it worked in the heat of action, it would work again now. Jeffrey maintained discipline by example, by conspicuous dedication to his work, and through his contagious love of navy tradition and pomp. He knew his combat record spoke for itself.

“I’m sorry about Miss Reebeck,” Sessions said.

Jeffrey nodded. “Thank you.”

Kathy nodded too, and had to wipe back a tear. Then Jeffrey put it together: Kathy and Ilse had been roommates, and fast friends, on the ship. Kathy must miss her terribly.

It all came roaring back to Jeffrey, the sense of loss that was still sinking in, and he couldn’t keep his eyes from moistening. He muttered to himself and reached for his handkerchief. Kathy pulled out a tissue. Then tears started in earnest. Sessions couldn’t hold back either. The three of them let themselves cry. Mourning was a team effort, Jeffrey knew. Families had to mourn as a unit, together.

My crew is a family too. So be it. Let us mourn.

In a little while everyone felt better, and also felt bound closer together.

“All right, folks,” Jeffrey said. Sessions and Kathy drew their chairs closer to his desk. Jeffrey used the laptop to bring up a map of the world.

“We have a problem,” Jeffrey said. “We need to get from the East Coast of the U.S. all the way to the South Pacific quickly. We also need to be entirely covert about it, to make the Axis keep thinking that Challenger’s still caught in dry dock. I only see two ways to head, and I don’t like either one of ’em.”

“Go north or go south for starts, sir,” Sessions said. “That’s the main question, isn’t it?”

“North means transiting under the ice cap, in the dead of winter. Very few areas of thin ice, so we’d be out of touch and possibly trapped. Russian attack subs lurking, protecting some of their boomers. Anything could happen, including an incident that triggers all-out World War Three.”

Kathy Milgrom pointed to the spot on the map where Alaska and Siberia almost touched. “If we went north we’d have no choice but to come out here, Captain. The Bering Strait. Quite a tight choke point, right past Russian hydrophone grids. The chance of our being undetected is nil, I should say, and then the Russians might alert the Boers.”

“You think they’d do that?” Sessions said.

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” Jeffrey said. “It’s a very short step from selling arms to passing intelligence.”

“Concur with that, sir,” Sessions said.

“The southern route isn’t much better,” Jeffrey said. “In that direction, the choke point that really worries me is the Drake Passage.” That was the gap between the southern tip of Argentina—Tierra del Fuego—and the northern tip of the jutting Antarctic Peninsula. “Half the neutral countries in South America are teetering on the fence, and Argentina is heavily rumored to favor the Axis side.”

“Agreed, Captain,” Kathy said. “Their navy may be cooperating with the Germans or Boers already, for all we know.”

“Which route does Commodore Wilson want us to take?” Sessions asked.

“He hasn’t decided yet, so we need to sketch out navigation and sonar counterdetection plans for both routes.”

“There are thousands and thousands of miles to cross, Captain, whichever route we take,” Sessions said.

“It’s going to be very difficult to move fast yet remain invisible ourselves,” Kathy added.

“That’s the bind we’re in, folks. Exactly. There’s nothing we can do about it. There’s another factor too, which makes the bind much worse: we’ll be sailing with half our torpedo tubes sealed off. It’s one penalty we pay for getting under way so quickly.”

“There’s nothing the yard workers can manage?” Sessions asked. “Jury-rig something so we have our full rate of fire?”

Jeffrey shook his head. “The battle damage was too serious. Four tubes is all we get.”

Kathy and Sessions looked grim.

“At least we’ll have our full complement of weapons,” Jeffrey told them. More than fifty in Challenger’s huge torpedo room, plus twelve cruise missiles in her separate vertical launch array.

“Very well,” Jeffrey said. “Thanks. Get back to me when you have some basics worked out.”

The two lieutenants took their laptops and their notes, and went off to find an unoccupied worktable somewhere. Jeffrey rose to go down to his ship. He had to check on the progress of the priority repairs. He needed to verify a million details: of equipment tests, of safety checks, of loading weapons and spare parts and food, of interfacing with the inspectors from Naval Reactors, of starting the cleanup of all the construction work so the ship would be ready for sea. There was no hope at all of time for a proper shakedown cruise, and this made Jeffrey nervous. There was hardly time to put a charge into Challenger’s refurbished battery banks, and this made Jeffrey very nervous indeed.

“Sir!” a familiar voice called.

Jeffrey turned. It was his executive officer, Lieutenant Jackson Jefferson Bell. He was back a bit earlier then expected, from leave with his in-laws in Milwaukee. The two men shook hands warmly.

“How’s the baby?” Jeffrey said. Bell’s wife had just given birth to their first, a son, and mother and child were staying with her parents.

“Terrific.” Bell grinned. “I brought pictures.”

Jeffrey couldn’t help smiling. “You look good,” he told Bell. “Fatherhood suits you.”

Bell did a double take when he saw Jeffrey’s collar tabs. He reached to shake Jeffrey’s hand again. Then Jeffrey smiled.

“I should congratulate you, Lieutenant Commander Bell.”

“What?”

“Yesterday was a big day.” Jeffrey filled Bell in on all the news, including Bell’s promotion in rank and award of two Silver Stars, Bell’s formal assignment as XO of Challenger, and the loss of Ilse Reebeck. The whole thing was bittersweet, but at least Bell was back. The two men were very close; Bell had done well as acting XO in mortal combat, twice. More to the point, as was his proper job now as official executive officer, Bell could help his captain—Jeffrey—with some of those final details of getting Challenger fit for battle in record time.

Most important of all, Bell could size up the twenty-five new crewmen, just assigned—all fresh trainees, starting the months of hard work needed to qualify on the boat and earn their dolphins. They were meant to replace an equal number of seasoned hands who’d been transferred off the ship when she went into dry dock. Twenty-five was a lot; it made Jeffrey fret. One entire fifth of his crew, when Challenger sailed in harm’s way, would be facing enemy fire for the first time in their lives. Some of them didn’t know yet which way to turn a cutoff valve to stop bad flooding, or even which end of the boat was up.

ELEVEN

Very early the next morning, on the Thames River, New London, Connecticut

JEFFREY STOOD IN the open bridge cockpit atop Challenger’s sail—the conning tower. He was crammed between the phone talker and the officer of the deck. In spite of his parka, Jeffrey shivered in the heavy, freezing sleet and freakish wintertime hail. At least the wind was from behind him and the ship, from upriver. It was in the wee hours of the night. The total dark and terrible visibility were exactly what he and Commodore Wilson wanted. They were already five hours behind schedule, just now getting out of the pens. Fortunately this unexpected squall, with the perfect concealment it gave, took some of the edge off Wilson’s displeasure at Jeffrey’s delay.

Challenger’s reactor was shut down, to suppress her infrared signature. As a consequence, the ship had no propulsion power. She was being pulled behind a big oil barge, itself pulled by a powerful civilian tugboat. The lash-up began to hurry down the river in the blinding squall.

The unladen, high-riding barge was there to mask Challenger’s already-stealthy radar cross section from prying enemy eyes. The barge also shielded Challenger from making telltale echoes off the tugboat’s busy navigation radar, echoes which a hostile passive radar receiver might hear. To further avoid any witnesses, the Interstate 95 bridge was closed by state police—supposedly because of icing due to the squall. The railroad drawbridge was up, but it was normally kept open until just before a train came.

Jeffrey knew the path ahead had been swept for enemy mines, but such sweeps were made regularly in any case. He hoped that Challenger’s departure would go totally unnoticed.

Because of the dangers of this untried maneuver, Jeffrey himself had the conn. Now and then the wind shifted, and caught the sail, and Challenger rolled. Jeffrey would give helm orders over the intercom—the phone talker was there as backup, in case the intercom failed. Even without propulsion power, Jeffrey needed the rudder constantly to keep the submarine lined up behind the barge.

Challenger’s helmsman was not the ship’s regular battle stations helmsman, Lieutenant (j.g.) David Meltzer. Meltzer was one of eight experienced men on leave who, because of travel delays nationwide and Wilson’s emergency order to sail, hadn’t made it back to the ship. Jeffrey was thus working even more shorthanded than he’d expected, and on any submarine eight missing fully qualified crewmen was a lot. Instead, Challenger brought a dozen civilian contractors along, needed to keep working away on critical repairs and upgrades. They’d all eagerly volunteered, in spite of their draft exemptions, even knowing they might never return from this cruise.

Jeffrey hoped his stand-in helmsman, a raw ensign, would do an effective job. Without her own propulsion power, Challenger had no way to stop quickly. She might ram the barge if something went wrong. If that happened, the bow cap and the sonar dome would be smashed, and the mission would end before it began. It was the railroad drawbridge that really worried Jeffrey. The gap there was infamously tight.

Jeffrey held his breath as the soaring I-95 bridge went by overhead, unseen in the pitch-dark and bad weather. Jeffrey knew that broken concrete and twisted rebars dangled somewhere up there high above, damage from the cruise missile raid before Christmas that was still undergoing repair. People feared the whole bridge might come down, because of the constant heavy trucking that used the only two of the original six lanes still open. I-95 was a vital logistics artery for the whole Northeast. If the bridge did collapse—maybe because of wind stress from this storm—that artery would be cut. The wreckage, in the shallow riverbed, would also block the only way from the New London base to the sea.

The I-95 bridge, or debris from it, didn’t fall. Jeffrey wiped the lenses of his night-vision goggles again. The constant sleet buildup made them almost useless. Jeffrey realized he couldn’t count on much help from his lookouts either. They stood behind him, in their safety harnesses, on the roof of the sail. They peered intently into the murk all around, but Jeffrey knew no night-vision gear could penetrate such thick weather.

The sleet turned into hail the size of lima beans. The hail beat against Jeffrey’s shoulders and his parka hood. It made a drumming, spattering sound against Challenger’s hull and the barge dead ahead. Sharp, cold fragments of hail punished Jeffrey’s face. He and the phone talker and the officer of the deck huddled closer together for warmth and protection. The hail went through the grating on which they stood, down through the open hatches of the bridge trunk, and into a corridor inside the hull. Hail or worse getting into the ship just had to be put up with: It was a navy safety regulation to always keep these two hatches open when the bridge was manned.

Jeffrey held his breath again as the low railroad drawbridge came up, barely outlined on his goggles, close in on both sides. Challenger was committed.

The wind veered unexpectedly, and Challenger started to yaw off track. Jeffrey snapped more helm orders. But the yaw increased and Jeffrey saw they were going to hit the bridge. He looked ahead, then looked behind him, cursing that he couldn’t see his rudder or wake in the murk. Something was very wrong.

“Helm, Bridge,” he snapped into his intercom mike. “I said right ten degrees rudder, not left.”

Silence on the intercom. The phone talker also stayed mute.

Jeffrey’s heart was in his throat. We’re going to hit the bridge. It was much too late to signal the tug to stop. It was too late even to try to maneuver on what battery charge Jeffrey had.

“Helm, hard right rudder smartly, now now now!”

Challenger began to yaw the other way, but not fast enough.

“Collision alarm!” Jeffrey could hear it blaring down inside the ship.

Jeffrey leaned over the side of the sail cockpit. He stared aft, watching helplessly, dreading the grinding thud of impact and the screaming tearing of ceramic composite and steel. The lookouts knelt and braced themselves.

The wind veered again, and caught the broad side of the barge. The barge yawed. The side force came back through the tow cables. The cables made Challenger pivot. The pivoting barely steered the sub through the opening in the drawbridge.

Jeffrey let himself breathe again. They’d made it, but only by the grace of a puff of wind, pure random luck.

“Helm, Bridge,” Jeffrey called on the intercom, “please try to remember your right from your left.”

“Bridge, Helm, sorry, Captain,” a scared young voice responded. “No excuse, sir.”

Jeffrey bit down his fright and his temper. “Helm, Bridge, no harm done.” Jeffrey knew now he and Bell had their work cut out, melding all the newcomers from a rabble into a genuine, smooth-running crew.

From here, at least, the river was more open. Jeffrey’s main concern for the moment was the big barge looming in front of him. Empty of oil, riding so high, the barge continued to catch the wind. It kept drifting right and left in the navigable channel. The tug crew did what they could to compensate, but this threesome follow-the-leader, snaking down the river at high speed to keep up with the squall, was nerve-racking. Challenger had deep draft even while surfaced. To run aground would be as bad as a collision: a permanent blot on Jeffrey’s record, never mind what it meant to Challenger and his intercepting ter Horst.

They passed the spot where off to starboard, on the land, sat the railroad station. So recently Jeffrey had stood there in the early morning sun, waiting for the train to Washington, wishing instead he was headed out to sea, dreading he’d get stuck in a rear-area land job after his training course.

I got my wish. I’d gladly give it all up in a minute, if it would restore my mother to health and bring Ilse Reebeck back.

At dawn

To get the ship concealed before morning, Commodore Wilson ordered Jeffrey to dive Challenger as soon as they reached a hundred feet of water. Jeffrey knew this was much shallower than the minimum considered safe in peacetime, but it was a very long way from New London to the edge of the continental shelf, where the water first got deep. The dive would be all the more tricky with an inexperienced man at the helm and no propulsion power—but after some sweat-filled moments they made it down all right. The tug and barge proceeded on their way, tow cables coiled, their duty to Challenger done.

Jeffrey sat in the control room uneasily. He rubbed his hands together for warmth. He was out of his sleet-covered parka, and he’d changed to a dry set of clothes, but now, underwater, it was very cold on the ship with no heat. It was also strangely quiet, and dark. Only dim emergency lighting was on. The air fans were turned off, and hardly any other equipment was running—all to conserve precious amps from the battery banks.

Jeffrey didn’t like his present tactical situation one bit. Challenger sat in such shallow water, in windswept seas, that she rolled constantly from side to side, from wave action right overhead. She was much too vulnerable like this, motionless except for the caprice of waves and currents and tide. She had no way to move on her own yet, with the reactor still shut down. If proper trim was lost, they could easily hit the bottom, only several feet beneath the keel, and suffer serious damage—or they might broach, exposing the sail or even the hull, and thus destroy their stealth, because the sun was coming up.

Passive sonar conditions here were poor. If a deep-draft merchant ship suddenly rounded Montauk Point on a collision course…Jeffrey didn’t want to begin to think about that.

Jeffrey watched the status displays on his console, one of the very few switched on. Around him, in the cramped space, stood or sat some twenty members of his crew. The tension was palpable, and no one spoke unless they needed to.

Challenger’s chief of the boat, whom everyone called COB, sat beside the helmsman at the front of the compartment; on the newest subs, the helmsman was a junior officer who himself controlled the bowplanes and sternplanes and rudder. COB was very busy, adjusting the ballast and trim. For now, the newbie helmsman had nothing to do. The contrast as they sat there with their backs to Jeffrey seemed to say so much: COB, Latino, forty-something, salty and irreverent, came from Jersey City, and was short and squat like a bulldog. The helmsman, Ensign Tom Harrison from Orlando, was barely twenty. His voice was as reedy as his build, and he would seem nerdy even in a crowd at MIT—where he finished college in three years.

Lieutenant Commander Jackson Bell sat just to Jeffrey’s right, at the two-man command workstation in the middle of the control room. He perched on the edge of his seat, sharing Jeffrey’s screens to save power. Bell was literally on the edge of his seat: as executive officer he was in charge of damage control. With the rush to get out of port on a shoestring—with hardly enough in the battery charge for one try to get the reactor restarted—no one knew when something might break, something fatal.

The compartment’s phone talker, a young enlisted man wearing a bulky sound-powered rig, relayed status reports to Jeffrey and Bell from other parts of the ship. The phone talker’s throat sounded tight and dry, reflecting how everyone felt. The Thresher had been lost with all hands because of defects at the start of what was supposed to be a routine shakedown cruise.

The weapons officer, a lieutenant who in combat reported to Bell, was working at a console on a lower deck, outside the torpedo room. With the war, Weps’s station was shifted there, for positive control of special—atomic—weapons in a fast-attack submarine. At the moment, Weps, who was new to the ship, was supervising final assembly of the warheads.

Lieutenant Willey, Challenger’s engineer, was overseeing the propulsion plant restart, back in the maneuvering room, aft of the reactor compartment. His two dozen people had begun this work before the ship left dry dock, but only now could they do the important steps, the ones which involved heat. This cold startup with no outside support was a difficult endeavor. It would never have been attempted at all if there weren’t such a drastic need for secrecy and stealth. Thermal energy from the reactor had to be used in carefully measured spurts to gradually warm up every main steam plant component. If one step didn’t go right, Challenger would need to surface and radio for a tow back to the pens.

Jeffrey liked the tall and straight-talking Willey, who’d been with the ship on Challenger’s previous missions. Jeffrey understood the immense pressure Willey was under now—Jeffrey had been the engineer on a Los Angeles–class boat during his own department-head tour four years previously. There was no point in asking Willey to hurry. He was as aware as anyone else on board of the imminent danger of being run down by some civilian cargo vessel that didn’t even know Challenger was there.

After a lengthy and worry-filled wait that saw Jeffrey eye the chronometer often, the phone talker relayed briskly, “Maneuvering reports ready to answer all bells.”

Jeffrey wasn’t much of a churchgoer, but he said a heartfelt prayer. He was about to find out, all at once, if the steam pipes and the condensors, the main turbogenerators and the big electric motors attached to the shaft, and the repaired pump-jet propulsor at the back of the boat really worked. There’d been no time to test the power train the proper way, tied up at a pier.

This is one hell of a way to begin the patrol, waiting step by step for a part of the ship to fall off.

If our pump jet doesn’t turn, we go right back into dry dock…and Voortrekker goes wherever Jan ter Horst wants.

Jeffrey’s heart pounded, but he also felt a nice silvery tingling anticipation in his chest. He paused, savoring the moment. He was about to give his first engine order as USS Challenger’s official commanding officer.

“Helm, ahead one-third.” Challenger started to move.

TWELVE

A few hours later, on Challenger, under way at sea

CHALLENGER WAS PAST the edge of the continental shelf, submerged in very deep water. The crew had been sent to a hearty breakfast of nourishing hot food, with several choices of entrées, and now was settling in to the watch-keeping routines of being under way at sea.

Jeffrey sat alone at the desk in his stateroom. As usual, he kept the door open while he worked. In the control room, only a few feet up the corridor, a talented junior officer from engineering had the conn. Bell, in Jeffrey’s absence, was command duty officer, Jeffrey’s surrogate there. In a few more minutes Bell would turn in for badly needed sleep.

Jeffrey was a bit exhausted himself. His eyes burned. He knew they were bloodshot. His whole body felt wired, from lack of rest combined with too much adrenaline now growing stale.

Jeffrey was finishing paperwork, since the basic engineering tests were mostly complete. The ship had held up well enough as they gradually descended to test depth, ten thousand feet—two-thirds of their crush depth, which nominally was fifteen thousand. The problems discovered along the way were mostly small. They were resolved by isolating minor equipment, or bypassing sections of pipe.

The one potentially serious glitch was in the torpedo room. Several thousand feet down, during trials with seawater in the tubes at ambient pressure of more than a ton for each square inch, firing mechanism components failed in all four available tubes. COB and the weapons officer, aided by some of the contractors, had men working to install replacement parts from Challenger’s spares. This would take a while, but Jeffrey wasn’t overly worried. Though the weapons officer was inexperienced, COB was very good at getting things done. Besides, Jeffrey didn’t expect to need to shoot torpedoes very soon.

A messenger knocked on the doorjamb. Jeffrey looked up. The awkward youngster asked Jeffrey to go to the commodore’s office—Wilson had taken over the executive officer’s stateroom. Jeffrey’s navigator, Lieutenant Sessions, was with the messenger.

When Jeffrey and Sessions arrived, Wilson rose to greet them curtly. Jeffrey was still getting used to Wilson’s reading glasses and stubble of beard. Jeffrey thought they made Wilson look professorial. Yeah, that type of hard-hearted slave-driving prof who’d always get the best out of you, and break you if you disappointed him once.

“Sit down, both of you.”

Jeffrey took the guest chair. Sessions perched on a filing cabinet.

“Captain,” Wilson said to Jeffrey, “as commodore of a battle group I require a staff.”

“Sir?”

“I want you to double as my operations officer, and Sessions here as my executive assistant…. I don’t need a separate communications officer, I’ll borrow yours as necessary.”

“Yes, Commodore.” Jeffrey glanced at Sessions. Sessions nodded.

“I want your XO and Sessions to trade racks for the duration of this cruise. That way Sessions and I can work together in here more closely. I’ll keep to Lieutenant Sessions’s watch schedule for now, so he and I will sleep at the same time.” The XO’s stateroom had an extra rack—bunk—usually reserved for a VIP rider such as an admiral, or members of Congress.

“I’ll inform Commander Bell,” Jeffrey said. “I’m sure it won’t be a problem.”

“I’m quite sure it won’t be a problem.”

“Yes, sir.” By long naval tradition, not even the president of the United States could displace a warship’s captain from his stateroom. The captain, on his own ship, was supreme.

But I can see already having Wilson here as more than just an observer is going to be tricky, Jeffrey told himself. Where exactly does my authority end, and his begin? Where will the dividing line fall when we meet the Australian diesels days from now, and Wilson’s undersea battle group becomes an untested reality?

“If I may ask, Commodore, which route do you want us to follow to the Pacific?”

“South.”

Jeffrey glanced at Sessions, as a cue; Jeffrey let Sessions speak for himself.

“We propose to hide in the Gulf Stream, Commodore, at least until we’re past the Bahamas. Lieutenant Milgrom feels the confused sonar conditions in the stream will help conceal us.”

“Good. I leave the details to you to work out…. Captain, I want the ship to go faster.”

“How fast, Commodore?”

“Make flank speed until I say otherwise.”

“Flank speed, Commodore?” For Challenger, that was over fifty knots. Challenger was extremely quiet, but at flank speed any sub was noisy.

Wilson looked impatiently at Jeffrey. “Flank speed, Captain. I expect you to use local sonar conditions, and ship’s depth versus bottom terrain, to prevent our signature from carrying into the deep sound channel.”

“Understood.” If Challenger’s noise did leak into that acoustic superconducting layer in the deep ocean, it could be picked up on the far side of the Atlantic—the German side. Jeffrey didn’t like this, but what was his alternative?

“That’s all.”

Jeffrey and Sessions got up.

“Lieutenant, you stay here. We have things to discuss. Have your assistant navigator take over in the control room.”

Sessions acknowledged.

Jeffrey, in the doorway, turned back to Wilson. “Sir, Commodore, I have a concern.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“At flank speed we’re almost totally sonar-blind. We could get into trouble.”

“The route south has been sanitized for us by other forces, and will continue to be. You need to remind yourself that undersea warfare is a team sport, Commander Fuller…. If we stick to the safe corridors, we’re immune to attack by our own antisubmarine assets.”

“We’ll be picked up by the Sound Surveillance System hydrophone nets for sure.”

“Of course. So?” Wilson glowered at him.

Jeffrey caught himself starting to ball his fists in irritation. He made himself relax. “Sir, I apologize if I’m not expressing myself clearly. My point is that it’s risky to create a big datum on our own SOSUS, even if the East Coast is clear of enemy subs. If the Axis has a spy on the SOSUS staff, or they’re tapping our data directly somehow, they’ll know we’re at sea, and which way we’re heading.” Jeffrey wasn’t naturally paranoid, but in force-on-force submarine missions paranoia was a survival trait.

“You really think the higher-ups haven’t thought of that?”

Wilson’s annoyance was obvious, but Jeffrey thought his own objection was perfectly valid. Now he really felt pissed, but by a supreme effort kept it internal.

“Shut the door,” Wilson said. “Sit down.”

Jeffrey pulled the door closed and took the guest seat again. Sessions still perched on the filing cabinet. He looked uncomfortable, and not just physically.

“First of all,” Wilson said, “the lines are monitored constantly for eavesdropping, and the hydrophones are inspected periodically as well. That much, you should have figured out for yourself. Secondly, Atlantic Fleet has performed certain naval maneuvers near Norfolk intended to surely pique the Germans’ attention, assuming they did have a mole in the SOSUS shop. We have our own espionage resources in Europe, I’m informed, and said maneuvers were not reacted to at all. Hence, the Germans were not aware of them, and therefore do not have a mole.”

“But—” Maybe the Germans did have a well-placed spy, and knew the maneuvers were a trick and just ignored them.

“This is highly classified. You and Sessions are not to relate this to anyone else in the crew.”

“But the men, I mean Lieutenant Milgrom too…especially her, as Sonar…they’ll be very concerned to see us take such chances, going so fast. What am I supposed to tell them?”

“Tell them you’re the captain,” Wilson snapped, “and they’re supposed to obey your orders.”

Jeffrey hesitated. “Yes, sir.”

Wilson shuffled papers on his desk. “I said before, that’s all.”

Jeffrey turned to leave.

“Commander Fuller,” Wilson called after him.

“Commodore?”

“Have me informed when we draw level with the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And tell someone to bring me another guest chair. I can’t have my flagship staff sitting on filing cabinets.”

THIRTEEN

Night of the first day at sea, one hundred miles east of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay

“COMMODORE IN CONTROL,” the messenger of the watch announced.

“As you were.” Wilson came over and stood next to Jeffrey. Jeffrey, after a pleasant catnap, was expecting him. Challenger made flank speed, as ordered, vibrating steadily as the propulsion plant worked hard. Consoles squeaked gently in their shock-absorbing mounts, and mike cords near the overhead swayed back and forth. A boyish part of Jeffrey really enjoyed seeing and hearing these little signs of how fast his ship was going.

“Status, Captain?” Wilson asked.

“We’ve been following the edge of the continental shelf, sir. The north side of the Gulf Stream throws off meanders and eddies here. Horizontally, vertically, they form temperature and salinity cells that distort and attenuate sound.”

“Why did you pick eleven hundred feet as your depth?”

“In case someone does get a whiff of us, they’ll think we’re a steel-hulled sub.”

“Bring the ship to these coordinates. Slow to ahead one-third when you’re twenty minutes out.” Wilson handed Jeffrey a piece of paper.

Jeffrey raised his eyebrows. Wilson wanted a spot farther south, off North Carolina’s Cape Fear. But the location was miles more away from the land, in very deep water, since the coast here ran southwest. They’d have to cut diagonally through the whole width of the Gulf Stream.

“Why there, Commodore?”

“More eddies and meanders on the far edge of the stream. We have a rendezvous.”

Jeffrey was surprised. This was the first he’d heard of it. “With what ship?”

“No ship. A minisub.” Challenger was sailing with her in-hull hangar empty, since the Advanced SEAL Delivery System mini she’d taken with her to Germany had had to be jettisoned in combat.

“The mini’s one of ours?”

“Yes, an ASDS.”

“Purpose of rendezvous, sir?”

“Pick up the crewmen we left behind, and keep the mini.”

Jeffrey read the coordinates to his assistant navigator, a senior chief at the digital plotting table near the back of the control room. The chief recommended a course. Jeffrey gave the helm orders.

The helmsman for this watch acknowledged—Tom Harrison again. Challenger banked into the turn, still making a noisy flank speed.

Then Jeffrey started to wonder. “Commodore, do we need an ASDS where we’re going?” If the minisub was carrying eight of Jeffrey’s crew, there’d be no room in it for SEALs.

“Got your torpedo tubes working yet?”

“Not yet.”

They were nearing the rendezvous. Jeffrey gave the order to reduce speed. The vibrations died down, and the ride became very smooth. The ship felt oddly sedate, after hours of tearing through the ocean at more than fifty knots. With much reduced self-noise, it was time for a thorough sonar sweep. Jeffrey turned to Kathy Milgrom. She sat nearby with her back to him, at the head of a line of sonar consoles along the control room’s port side; thanks to advances in miniaturization and fiber-optic data fusion, Sonar no longer had a separate room.

It took some time to perform the sweep and analyze the data. Challenger turned slowly in a wide circle, to expose her hydrophone arrays on every compass bearing.

When the gradual circle was almost complete, Jeffrey drew a breath to tell the helmsman to resume course.

Kathy tensed in her seat before Jeffrey could speak. She looked his way. “New broadband contact, Captain. Ahead of us.”

“Classify it?”

“Difficult in these conditions, sir. The signal surges and fades. Designate it Master One.”

“Submerged?” Could be it’s the minisub.

“Wait one.” Kathy talked with her sonar chief. He spoke with the enlisted technicians. They studied their screens and listened on headphones.

“Master One is submerged,” the sonar chief said confidently.

“The minisub must be out of position,” Jeffrey said. “Good thing we found it.” Maybe the mini had a navigation error that brought it here. Such things do happen.

“Negative,” Kathy said. “Master One is not a minisub.”

“I got tonals!” a sonarman shouted. “No, wait, it’s gone.”

“Play it back,” Kathy ordered. She and the chief put on headphones. She typed on her keyboard, and Jeffrey saw the frequency spectrum of the contact’s noise. “Captain, it’s nuclear powered.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Must be the fast-attack that dropped off the mini, going back to Norfolk.”

“I can’t be positive, sir.”

Jeffrey waited and waited for more information. Technicians intently worked their gear. Kathy and her senior chief murmured in consultation.

Jeffrey forced himself to be patient. He knew Kathy Milgrom had been in combat on HMS Dreadnought since the very start of the war. He knew firsthand, from Challenger’s mission to Germany, that she was a more than capable officer.

“Got ’em again,” the sonarman exclaimed—with relief, and professional pride.

Jeffrey opened his mouth to offer a compliment.

The young man jolted like he’d gotten an electric shock. His voice rose two octaves. “Master One is hostile! Confirmed! Classify as a definite Amethyste II!”

Jeffrey was wide awake. Everyone sat up much straighter. The Amethyste IIs were German, captured from France. They were state-of-the-art, and deadly.

“Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey snapped, “sound silent general quarters. Man battle stations antisubmarine.” COB acknowledged.

The word passed quickly, and more men ran to the control room. The compartment became a sea of hurrying figures in blue cotton jumpsuits, squeezing past each other purposefully. Some men grabbed seats and powered up their consoles. Others stood in the aisles. The phone talker took his position, put on his rig, and did a communications check.

“COB,” Jeffrey said, “get me a torpedo tube, fast.”

“I better go down there, Captain.”

“Do it.” A senior chief took over from COB in the left seat at the ship-control station. Harrison still had the right seat as helmsman. Jeffrey saw Harrison shift in his chair. He flexed his fingers as he gripped the control wheel. Sure. He’s nervous.

I’m nervous too.

Jeffrey set his jaw in firm concentration.

Bell dashed in in his boxer shorts, barefoot and rubbing sleep from his eyes, and sat down next to Jeffrey. At battle stations, Bell was fire-control coordinator. Sonar and weapons reported to him.

Commodore Wilson came in, followed by Sessions. Wilson wore a bathrobe and slippers. Sessions stuffed his khaki shirttails into his pants by the navigation console.

“What is it?” Wilson snapped.

Jeffrey told him.

“Evade it.”

“That’s my intent.” Jeffrey turned to Bell. “Fire Control, can you give me the enemy’s course?”

Bell got an update from the fire-controlmen who sat to his right.

“Not yet, Captain. Sparse data. The contact seems to bounce around a lot because of the eddies. We’re in bad water, sir, sound paths get twisted all over the place.”

“Range? Speed? Anything?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Evade it,” Wilson repeated, coldly.

Jeffrey needed to make a decision, with very little to go on. He figured the Amethyste II was waiting for a juicy target—a big, noisy carrier—to come out of the Norfolk, Virginia, naval base, heading for the North Atlantic battle front. Jeffrey would distance himself from Norfolk and hence from the enemy sub.

“Helm, right ten degrees rudder. Make your course one three five.” Southeast.

Harrison acknowledged. He sounded calm enough, but his rudder work was still clumsy under pressure.

The new course should give Kathy better sonar data. It pointed Challenger’s port wide-aperture array directly toward Master One. The wide arrays, attached along both sides of the hull, could do powerful things with advanced signal processing.

“Fire Control,” Jeffrey urged, “get me a firing solution, just in case.”

“Still working, sir,” Bell said. It was strange to see him sitting in his underwear, taller than Jeffrey, fit but not as muscular. Bell might just as well have been wearing a formal dress-mess tuxedo, for all the difference it made to his manner and bearing.

“Fire Control, sir,” Kathy broke in. “We’ve got more detailed tonal data. Advise this Amethyste II is the von Tirpitz.”

Bell raised his eyebrows. “Captain, that’s the one that launched those Mach eight missiles at New York.”

Jeffrey had a flashback, him and Ilse atop the Empire State Building. He frowned. This is personal now.

“But what’s it doing here?” he asked pointedly, disturbed. “Intelligence said it evaded our forces that counterattacked and snuck back to Europe badly damaged.”

“No evidence of damage in the tonals, Captain,” Kathy said. “We’ve a definite match to the New York event’s datum on the von Tirpitz.”

“So much for intelligence,” Wilson said. “Why am I not surprised?”

“Phone talker,” Jeffrey said, “ask COB how they’re doing.” Jeffrey had to have the ability to defend himself.

“Torpedo room reports they need another few minutes.”

That’s not what I wanted to hear. If Master One’s captain was willing to carry liquid-hydrogen-fueled cruise missiles, then what other awful weapons does he have aboard?

Jeffrey could only wait: for his ship to put some distance between him and the Tirpitz, for Bell to figure out the Tirpitz’s depth and course and speed, and for COB to get a tube in order for Jeffrey to fight if forced to. Unfortunately, the acute need for stealth meant that Challenger had to move slowly, and the men in the torpedo room dared not bang against the hull.

Jeffrey made a conscious effort to keep from fidgeting in front of his crew. He was inherently a man of action. He disliked unavoidable idleness, this inevitable part of undersea warfare that required he hold for better data and better position before having something specific to do.

Jeffrey pictured the von Tirpitz lurking out there somewhere near, her hull containing a hundred-plus well-trained German officers and men who’d do their damnedest to sink Challenger if given the slightest chance.

Each second felt like an hour.

A sonarman shattered the edgy silence. “Hydrophone effects!” he screamed.

“Classify,” Kathy ordered, very coolly.

“Underwater missile booster engine firing!”

“Where?” Jeffrey demanded.

“Source is Master One,” Bell said.

Crap. “Put it on speakers.” A rumbling roar filled the air.

“Main missile engine firing!” The roar got deeper and louder.

“It’s a Shkval, Captain,” Kathy reported. “Constant bearing and depth, signal strength increasing. It’s aimed at Challenger!”

The Tirpitz found us. With these quirky sonar conditions, we just weren’t quiet enough.

“Helm, ahead flank.”

“Ahead flank, aye!” Harrison turned the engine order telegraph, a four-inch dial on his console. “Maneuvering answers, ahead flank!” Challenger sped up.

Jeffrey fought to keep himself from cursing aloud. The Shkval undersea missile-torpedoes were Russian, sold to the Axis. They rode through the water in a vacuum bubble caused by their own speed. They could do three hundred knots, and nothing could escape them.

Jeffrey grabbed an intercom handset.

“Get me COB…. COB, we’ve got a Shkval on our tail. We have to get a tube working so we can launch counterfire.”

“Any minute, Captain, I’ll give you tube three.”

“We don’t have minutes, COB. We barely have seconds.”

Jeffrey put down the mike. He could picture the harried activity, as men struggled with parts and tools inside the torpedo tube. The ship topped forty knots, fast on the way to fifty. The flank speed vibrations resumed. Challenger shivered and quaked, as if to somehow shake off the Shkval, as if the ship herself felt fear.

Jeffrey listened as the Shkval roared and roared on the speakers, a mindless machine that ate up the distance relentlessly. Jeffrey began to order countertactics he knew would probably fail. Shkvals were nuclear armed. It didn’t need to get close to do Challenger terrible damage. Jeffrey thought of the fallout any atomic blast would create. Thank God we’re far from the East Coast now, and the winds are blowing farther out to sea.

“Helm, make a knuckle.” The ship banked hard to port and then to starboard. It left a turbulent spot in the water, which an enemy weapon just might think was Challenger. The deep roar of the Shkval kept getting louder.

“Helm, left fifteen degrees rudder. Make your course one one zero.”

“Left fifteen degrees rudder, aye! Make my course one one zero, aye!” A turn left, east-southeast. Jeffrey would try to jink out of the weapon’s path, to force it to lead the target. This might confuse its sensors, and buy him precious time. It also led the weapon farther away from the land.

“Fire Control, launch noisemakers and acoustic jammers.”

“Noisemakers, jammers, aye!” Loud gurgling, and an undulating siren noise, were heard now on the speakers. There was also the roar of the Shkval, deeper in tone as it came up to maximum speed, plus a nasty hiss from flow noise as Challenger herself reached fifty knots. The gurgling and sirens subsided, as Challenger’s countermeasures were quickly left behind.

Jeffrey picked up the handset again. “Maneuvering, Captain. Push the reactor to one hundred fifteen percent.”

Challenger sped up slightly, and the flank-speed vibrations grew much rougher. Jeffrey bounced in his seat. The ship kept racing through the ocean, heading east-southeast at over fifty knots. The Shkval was following them around through the turn, closing by more than the length of a football field every second. It ignored the knuckle and countermeasures.

The data for weapons status on Jeffrey’s console showed torpedo tube three turn green.

“Tube three is operational,” Bell said.

“Tube three, load a nuclear Mark 48, set warhead to maximum yield.” Challenger’s Improved Advanced Capability Mark 48 torpedoes were good, but the latest version’s top speed was seventy knots—barely a quarter of the Shkval’s.

Bell and Jeffrey did the procedures to arm the atomic warhead; Challenger’s torpedo-room hydraulic autoloader, repaired in New London dry dock, seemed to be working well. It better keep working or we’re dead.

Jeffrey felt an iron determination to survive. To defeat this enemy ambush he had to strike back fast and hard. “Make tube three ready in all respects including opening outer doors!”

“Ship ready. Weapon ready. Solution ready,” Bell said.

“Tube three, Master One, match sonar bearings and shoot.”

“Tube three fired electrically.”

“Unit is running normally!” a sonarman said.

“What are you doing?” Wilson said. “You aimed at Master One, not the Shkval.”

“The unit will first pass near the Shkval. The Amethyste’s captain’ll think it’s my defensive shot at his missile, and he’ll be lulled. We have to return fire, to distract him and keep him from sending off a message. If he knows we’re Challenger…”

Wilson stayed quiet.

Good, this is my fight. Jeffrey’s ship kept driving through the sea. The enemy Shkval kept following.

“Range to incoming Shkval?”

“Ten thousand yards,” Bell said. Five nautical miles. If its warhead yield was one kiloton, standard in Axis torpedoes, the blast would be in lethal range at four thousand yards.

With these speeds and distances we have less than a minute to live.

“Fire Control, more noisemakers and jammers.”

“Noisemakers, jammers, aye.”

“Tube three, load a brilliant decoy.”

“Tube three, decoy, aye.”

“Set decoy course due north, flank speed, running depth same as ours.”

“Due north, flank speed, same depth, aye.”

“Make tube three ready in all respects including opening outer doors. Tube three, brilliant decoy, shoot.”

“Tube three fired electrically.”

“Decoy is operating properly!”

Challenger kept fleeing. The propulsion plant worked its heart out. The noise of the Shkval on the sonar speakers was almost deafening now. Jeffrey was taking an awful gamble, that the seeker head at the tip of the enemy rocket would home on the decoy and not his ship. He was taking another awful gamble, that his own atomic fish would force the Tirpitz’s captain to take defensive steps, and buy COB time to give Jeffrey another working tube.

The universe shattered in an unimaginable thunderclap, and Challenger was pummeled as if by the fists of an angry God. Mike cords, light fixtures, consoles, crewmen, everything rattled and jarred.

“Shkval has detonated!” Bell shouted. “Decoy destroyed!” The Shkval had gone for the brilliant decoy after all.

The Shkval’s nuclear blast reflected off the surface and the bottom, pounding Challenger more and more. Kathy turned off the speakers. Endless reverb sounded right through the hull. There were brutal aftershocks, as the fireball of the nuclear blast thrust upward for the surface. The fireball fell in on itself against the undersea water pressure, rebounded outward hard, fell in again and rebounded, over and over. Each rebound threw another hammer blow.

“Give me damage-control reports,” Jeffrey shouted.

“Torpedo room autoloader is out of action!”

“Load tube three manually, a nuclear Mark forty-eight.”

“Torpedo in the water!” Kathy yelled. “Assess as a defensive shot by Master One against our unit from tube three.” The Tirpitz was trying to intercept Jeffrey’s first torpedo with a nuclear countershot.

There was a huge eruption in the distance.

“Unit from tube three destroyed,” Bell said.

The enemy captain had succeeded. Jeffrey distracted his Shkval, but he smashed Jeffrey’s Mark 48. The initial exchange of fire was a draw.

“Shkval in the water,” Kathy shouted. “Master One has launched another Shkval!”

Jeffrey frowned. My decoy fooled the first Shkval, but it didn’t fool the enemy captain. He knows that we’re still out here, and he wants to sink us once and for all.

Jeffrey grabbed the handset. “COB, I need another tube, now.”

“We’re doing everything we can, sir! We got wounded down here! We got men working block and tackle loading the weapons….”

Jeffrey clicked off.

“Helm, right full rudder, make your course one five zero.” South-southeast, directly away from the Tirpitz.

Harrison acknowledged, shouting, and his voice cracked. The ship turned, banking too hard. Harrison lost control, and Challenger went into a snap roll—she’d heeled so much from the turn, her rudder began to act like sternplanes, forcing her down in a flank-speed dive. She plunged below three thousand feet before Harrison could recover.

If we had a steel hull, Jeffrey knew, we’d’ve gone right through our crush depth.

COB called on the intercom to complain about the wild maneuvers. They made it that much harder for his men to do their work.

“Get that unit loaded, COB, and load another as soon as I shoot.”

The second Shkval was louder and louder. At last tube three was reloaded. Jeffrey and Bell armed the nuclear fish. Jeffrey ordered it fired. The unit rushed at the incoming Shkval. The Shkval kept rushing at Challenger. This time the range to intercept was barely outside the Shkval warhead’s kill radius against Challenger.

Bell detonated the wire-guided torpedo as a preemptive blast to smash the Shkval. The Mark 48’s maximum yield was a tenth of the Shkval’s. But the desperate interception was so close to Challenger, the shock force was almost unbearable. The ship was slammed from astern. Challenger bucked and heaved hard. Objects broke loose and flew around the control room. Sonarmen’s headphones were knocked from their heads. The vibrations were so vicious Jeffrey’s vision was blurred.

As the reverb cleared, Kathy shouted that another Shkval was already in the water. Jeffrey waited impatiently while another nuclear Mark 48 was loaded by hand in his only working torpedo tube. He ordered it fired at the incoming Shkval, and ordered another fish loaded.

Again Bell smashed the inbound Shkval, too close, and once more Challenger rocked. Once more things broke loose and crewmen were injured.

Again torpedomen rushed to load another Mark 48. Again the Tirpitz launched another Shkval. Jeffrey reached for the handset. “COB, we need to get that tube reloaded faster.”

“We’re trying, Captain!” COB panted from exertion. In the background, over the handset, Jeffrey could hear clanks and thunking as the men struggled with block and tackle; he heard the torpedomen grunt and curse as they worked.

At last the unit was ready in the tube. Bell fired. The interception range was getting closer and closer to Challenger.

Jeffrey realized this engagement was a battle of attrition: an endurance contest trading blow for blow. But the enemy captain must see I’ve got a very slow rate of fire. How many Shkvals does the Tirpitz still have? How long can my men keep loading and firing like this, with just one tube and by hand, before they all drop from exhaustion?

How much more punishment like this can Challenger take?

Again Bell smashed the inbound Shkval, much too close to Challenger. Once again Challenger rocked, worse than before. Sweating, swearing men rushed to load another fish. Again the Tirpitz fired.

They’re shooting their Shkvals faster than we can shoot back. We lose more ground with every salvo. Our margin to intercept each inbound weapon wears thinner and thinner—soon it will be lethally small.

“Tube three ready in all respects!” Bell shouted.

“Tube three shoot!”

Another atomic fish leapt from the tube, and turned, and charged the Shkval as Challenger tore in the opposite direction.

But the German captain was smart. This time he’d set his Shkval, with its much bigger warhead, to blow before Bell’s fish could get in range.

The blast was so loud it went past Jeffrey’s real ability to hear. There was just a terrible pressure in his head and a painful dissonant ringing. The sharp force of the blast caught Challenger’s hull and pounded Jeffrey’s feet and bruised his ass. Crewmen were knocked to the deck, and some were knocked unconscious. Light fixtures shattered, console screens darkened, locked cabinets burst open. Manuals and clipboards and metal tools became projectiles. Chips of paint and particles of heat insulation, and leftover construction dirt, were thrown into the air. Jeffrey felt the grit in his eyes and he coughed as he breathed it in.

Jeffrey’s hearing came back slowly. As the numbness in his battered brain subsided, he saw Bell waving urgently to get his attention. The phone talker also was yelling something, and Jeffrey’s intercom light flashed.

“A Mark forty-eight has broken loose in the torpedo room!” Bell shouted in Jeffrey’s ear.

The noise and shaking and aftershocks of the Shkval blast went on and on. Jeffrey answered the intercom. It was COB, repeating Bell’s terrible news, telling Jeffrey there was no way they could load the one working tube. In the background, over the handset, Jeffrey heard desperate orders, and shouting, and agonized screams.

“Get more damage-control teams in there!” Jeffrey said to Bell. Jeffrey turned to the phone talker. “Medical corpsman to the torpedo room on the double!”

Jeffrey waited. He forced himself to sit and exude a sense of control and let his crew do their jobs.

Jeffrey squeezed his armrests involuntarily, and just rode the ship.

Challenger shimmied and rolled, fighting her way through troubled water, still making flank speed. Jeffrey knew each shimmy and roll would throw that errant fish in the torpedo room even more, as it darted and veered and banged around, literally like a loose cannon.

“Weapon in torpedo room is fractured!” Bell reported.

Then Jeffrey heard the thing he dreaded most. “Weapon’s fuel is leaking, Captain. Fuel leak in the torpedo room!”

“Countermeasures tubes are inoperable,” the chief at the ship-control station yelled, almost as an afterthought.

“We’re defenseless,” Wilson said. “One more Shkval and we’ve had it.”

“This can’t be happening,” a fire controlman whined.

“Cut it out,” Bell told him. “I’m too underdressed to die.” Bell was still wearing his boxer shorts.

Crewmen laughed at Bell’s remark, but Jeffrey knew the laughs verged on hysteria. The wait for the next incoming Shkval was driving everyone mad. “We’ve been in worse fixes than this,” Jeffrey said in a loud voice to Bell. Jeffrey tried to sound much more blasé than he felt, pretending to make idle conversation, to reassure and steady his men.

Bell nodded, his neck muscles visibly tight. The control-room crew grew silent.

Jeffrey listened to the ocean around them boil and roar, from all the effects of the nuclear blasts that had already taken place.

Another aftershock from the most recent Shkval hit Challenger.

The phone talker looked up, very alarmed. “Fire, fire, fire in the torpedo room. Fuel spill in torpedo room has ignited.”

Jeffrey turned to Bell, and the two men made eye contact. Bell’s face said more than words could: there were fifty weapons on the holding racks around that fire, with tons of volatile fuel, and tons more of high explosives and a lot of fissile material.

“Get down there, XO. Take charge at fighting the fire.” Jeffrey dearly wanted to rush to the torpedo room himself. But his job as captain required that he remain in the control room, to stay in overall charge of the ship and maintain the big tactical picture. He caught himself squeezing his armrests in a death grip as he sat there. He forced his fingers to lighten up by a supreme exercise of will.

Jeffrey deeply trusted Bell. But Jeffrey knew Bell’s efforts would only prolong the inevitable—any moment Tirpitz would set loose another Shkval. There was nothing Jeffrey could do now about it but make Challenger continue to flee, and the Shkval, once launched, would gain on Jeffrey’s ship at an inescapable 250 knots net closing speed. Everybody, including Commodore Wilson, knew this simple, cold-blooded fact.

At the first word of the fire, the crew had begun to grab their emergency air-breather masks. They plugged them into the air manifolds in pipes that lined the overhead. The control room filled with eerie hissing and whooshing, as people inhaled and exhaled through the valves of their masks—and waited to die. Jeffrey felt an icy emptiness in his chest—never one for denial of harsh realities around him, Jeffrey finally started to run out of hope. He caught a whiff of acrid, toxic fumes, spreading from the torpedo-room fire. Before he had his mask fully on, Jeffrey also smelled urine. Someone, in panic, had wet himself—Harrison, at the helm.

Bell doggedly fed Jeffrey progress reports through the intercom. He’d put on a flameproof suit and was supervising near the fire. Bell’s voice was hoarse from bellowing orders over the noise and pandemonium. He sounded muffled through the breather mask of a portable respirator pack. From exertion and overexcitement, Bell panted raggedly.

Bell said men were rushing to rig hoses and set up the fire-fighting foam. Meanwhile others did what they could with carbon dioxide extinguishers, with chemical powder extinguishers, with anything they had. It was difficult to work in the huge but cramped torpedo room, with clearance between the rows of holding racks barely as wide as one man’s shoulders. Down on their hands and knees, avoiding the hot spots of burning fuel, dodging the leaky Mark 48 that still ran loose, slowed the men down badly. Bell said the deck was slippery with blood. The heat was intense and the smoke was thick and a weapon would cook off soon.

Jeffrey was out of alternatives. Defeat tasted rancid and foul. It seemed to force its way down his throat, cutting like broken glass.

Jeffrey heard another roar outside the hull. Here it comes.

“Shkval in the water!” Kathy screamed.

This is it, Jeffrey told himself. All we can do is keep running, and that thing is six times faster than we are. The only question is, will the Shkval kill us before our own torpedo room blows up?

Jeffrey looked around him. Most of the crewmen were barely half his age. They were much too young for their lives to end like this. He saw some of them holding their heads in despair, others pounding their consoles in impotent rage, others piously crossing themselves. He wished he could think of a way to somehow offer them final comfort.

“Captain,” Kathy shouted through her mask, “Shkval signal strength is not increasing!…Captain, assess Master One’s Shkval is on a hot run in the tube! Assess the Shkval on von Tirpitz is malfunctioning!”

“On speakers!”

There was a rumbling explosion in the distance, then a louder, heaving blast, then a whole series of sharp detonations.

“Assess weapons in Master One’s torpedo room have cooked off!”

Jeffrey listened to the horrible sounds as Tirpitz died. He heard a last dull boom as the enemy sub sank through her crush depth, when the unflooded parts at the back of the German submarine caved in.

“XO reports fire in our torpedo room is extinguished!” the phone talker yelled. “Fire relight watch is set!…Corpsman states no fatal injuries! No radiological leakage from damaged weapons!”

Jeffrey felt the weight of a thousand worlds lift from his shoulders. Challenger and her people would survive, at least until the next fight.

But he’d never felt so small, so inconsequential. Jeffrey hadn’t won this battle. It was the enemy who’d lost. Over a hundred men on Tirpitz paid the ultimate price for playing with undersea fire, using such high-risk weapons as the Shkval. There could be little satisfaction in this sort of victory, only a humbling realization of the role of sheer luck in war, and a recognition of one’s own personal insignificance.

Kathy, and Commodore Wilson, and the rest of Jeffrey’s crew all felt it too. There was no jubilation at the destruction of Master One, no cheering, no celebrating the kill. Just the noise of twenty air-breather masks, overly rapid hiss-whooshing, as everyone hyperventilated from fear and now giddy relief. Everybody was very quiet, turned inward, as each person in their own way tried to deal with having faced their own mortality, having really thought, having known, that they would die.

FOURTEEN

Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, in the eastern Indian Ocean

GUNTHER VAN GELDER felt relaxation and inner joy, as much as this was possible for a sailor at sea in a war. He had the conn in Voortrekker’s control room, and Jan ter Horst was asleep.

Voortrekker was doing what she did best, moving quietly near the ocean floor in water three kilometers deep—snaking through the massifs and fissures of the Mid–Indian Ocean Ridge. These endless undersea volcanic mountains and valleys formed the ideal landscape in which Voortrekker could hide. To Van Gelder, watching the stark, razor-sharp faults and escarpments go by on the ship’s gravimeter display, it was the ideal place for him to sightsee.

The ship made only seven knots, for safety as well as for stealth. A remote-controlled off-board probe was deployed well ahead of Voortrekker, scouting for enemy mines and hydrophone grids. The probe used special cameras to study the bottom in Voortrekker’s path, and Van Gelder watched the images raptly.

Starfish in large groupings waved their arms on the ground. Huge jellyfish rippled by in the slow and steady bottom current. Other deep-sea creatures, with hideous black faces or bodies too weird to describe, came to examine or challenge Voortrekker’s probe. Diffuse glows, bright swirling starbursts, stabbing flashes of sheet lightning, all lit up the scene, in shades of otherworldly blue and electric white and vivid yellow. This was bioluminescence, Van Gelder knew. The ocean all around him, even this deep, was alive.

Voortrekker passed another black-smoker hydrothermal vent field. Van Gelder heard it rumbling and gurgling on sonar, and sent the probe closer to look. Again, here was life. Primordial microbes fed a teeming community of albino crabs and giant clams and thick red-blooded tube worms.

Until recently, only a handful of scientists had visited places like this. Few men and women had ever seen firsthand what Van Gelder was seeing. To be here now, to witness such things with his own eyes, made Gunther Van Gelder feel himself a very privileged man.

On Challenger, after the rendezvous with the minisub

The ASDS minisub was safely stowed in Challenger’s in-hull hangar bay. The mini’s passengers were shaken up by the nearby Challenger-versus-Tirpitz fight, but they were otherwise unharmed. Once again, Challenger rushed along at flank speed, heading south-southwest inside the Gulf Stream. Jeffrey sat in his stateroom, pecking away at his laptop—commanders who neglected admin and paperwork might not get their fourth stripe. Jeffrey paused, agonized, typed another sentence, shook his head, deleted it, and sat there. His heart sank. The more he thought about his tactics against the von Tirpitz, the more he thought he’d never get that fourth stripe in any case, because he didn’t deserve it.

Maybe the higher-ups were right, sending Commodore Wilson along as a nursemaid. Idly, and forlornly, Jeffrey wondered how many more millions of innocent fish and whales and dolphins he’d helped kill in this latest battle. Challenger’s crew was shielded from radiation sickness by all the water between her and the bursting warheads, and by the thickness of her hull, and the ship could quickly leave the contaminated area. The local sea life was stuck, and the effect of the war on the seafood industry and beachside resorts was devastating already.

Someone knocked. It was Bell, there to present his regular evening report.

“Sorry, XO, I lost track of the time.”

“No problem, Skipper.”

“Come on in. Sit.”

Bell made himself comfortable quickly; he seemed matured, more well-anchored internally, and more outwardly positive about life since becoming a father. Jeffrey envied him these things.

Bell filled Jeffrey in on the status of the cleanup and repairs in the torpedo room. It would take a lot of work to custom-machine replacement parts to get the torpedo autoloader functioning again. The countermeasures launchers—which took up half the space in the medical corpsman’s cubicle back near the enlisted mess—also needed more time to be made serviceable after the battle damage.

Jeffrey got up and shut the door and sat down again. “How are the wounded doing?”

“Our one potential crisis, sir, is the man whose arm was crushed by that loose torpedo. Circulation past the shoulder is not good. With what little more the corpsman can do for him here, he might lose the arm.”

“Amputate?”

Bell nodded.

“Then we need to get the guy to a proper hospital…. With a minisub in our hangar now, maybe we can drop him off, covertly. I’ll talk to the commodore.”

“It would be important for morale for you to do something, Captain. Nobody wants to see the guy get gangrene and get sent home to his family maimed.”

Jeffrey hesitated. “XO, what’s your read on morale in general?” Jeffrey knew morale in war was a very volatile thing. Submarine crews, living in such close quarters, felt a strong sense of community and reacted emotionally as a group. To be at their best, they needed steady support and constant input of encouragement and good news. Jeffrey already intended to tour the ship again this evening, for exactly that purpose.

“Actually, sir,” Bell said, “morale went from somewhat bad to rather good in a hurry, because of the Tirpitz.” Bell smiled. “The men think you’re a lucky captain, Captain. They’re happy to be sailing with you now.”

Jeffrey frowned. “What’s the emphasis on the ‘now’ part?”

Bell took a deep breath. “The guys were troubled to see us ordered to leave dry dock before we were ready, missing qualified men and stuck with two dozen clueless replacements. They thought we were taking too many chances, and we wouldn’t come back.”

Jeffrey grunted. He couldn’t entirely disagree with their reasoning. “But you say morale is up?”

Bell nodded.

Jeffrey didn’t want to come across to Bell as insecure, but he was puzzled. “Explain the mechanics of this to me.”

“Our meeting the Tirpitz at all was a sheer coincidence, one-in-a-million odds. The fact the score came out Challenger one, Tirpitz nothing, when Tirpitz had us dead to rights, was also pure random chance.”

“But that was the enemy’s bad luck, not our good luck. I don’t get it.”

“If you put the whole thing together, Captain, we’ve had our shakedown cruise and our working-up period now, in that battle. Everybody feels much better there. Plus, it’s like it was destiny or something, an act of God, us meeting the Tirpitz—”

Jeffrey held up one hand. “I’m not sure about that last part, XO. I want to talk to you more about that in a minute.”

“Well, the final thing I wanted to say is that we got to score a kill, a big one. We got even for the New York raid. Us, sir, USS Challenger, on our very first day at sea. That makes us a lucky ship, and you a lucky captain.”

Jeffrey worked his jaw pondering this. Then he grinned. “I did think your crack about being too underdressed to die was pretty good.” Both men laughed. Then Jeffrey glanced at his laptop, and felt a sinking feeling again.

Bell read Jeffrey’s face and was confused. He thought Jeffrey was signaling that the meeting was over.

“You wanted to talk to me more about meeting the Tirpitz, sir?”

Jeffrey debated whether to confide in Bell or keep it to himself. My XO is supposed to be my sounding board. But a captain is a superior being, all-knowing and infallible….

Hell, if I try to stay arms-length from my key people all the time, I’ll wind up with ulcers for sure.

“I’m writing my after-action report on the battle with Tirpitz. I’m thinking about my turn away when we first made contact. I think I blew it, and endangered the ship and our crew and our mission.”

“Sir?” Bell looked flabbergasted. “From where I sit, the men worship you now, even more than after the Germany raid. You always stay clearheaded in battle, and kept us fighting until the bitter end. You’ve got the best sort of credibility that any sub skipper could ask for. You produce results in combat, time after time.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “Turning beam-on to the Tirpitz, showing them our full side-profile noise signature, with erratic sound-propagation conditions at the time, was just too risky. Tirpitz got a datum off us, and it let them shoot. If they hadn’t blown up from their own weapon failure, we’d’ve definitely been sunk.”

“Hmmm…You had to evade, Captain. That was in the Commodore’s standing orders from above. We couldn’t get Master One’s course or speed, exactly because of said bad sonar conditions. For all you knew, she was coming right at us fast. You had to turn well away.”

“I’m not sure you’re right.”

“What were you going to do? Put the ship into reverse? We’re unstable enough going backward with a seasoned guy at the helm. It seems to me your turn away, a simple maneuver for Harrison, was the safer decision, given all the circumstances.”

Jeffrey absorbed that. “Thanks, XO. I suppose needing to think about it again, to write out a formal report, it’s got me second-guessing myself.”

Bell smiled. “Nobody said it was easy being CO. That’s what they pay you the big money for.”

Both men laughed again. Jeffrey was glad he’d confided in Bell. The man’s perspective had cheered Jeffrey up.

But then Bell frowned, which was rare for him. “Maybe you’ve got me second-guessing too now, Captain, but something’s starting to not smell right, about meeting the Tirpitz the way we did…. Either it really was just one humongous coincidence, or the Tirpitz knew we were coming.”

This was someplace Jeffrey didn’t want to go. “How could they know we were coming?”

“Compromised our sound surveillance system data, maybe?”

“The good commodore insists that’s not the case.”

“You believe him?”

“I think I believe him. The Tirpitz is—was—a lot slower than us. How could she have been vectored into position so soon? She was right there in front of us, a perfect setup.”

“Maybe they didn’t tap our hydrophone grids. Maybe they’ve planted their own along our coast, or have some new secret weapon we don’t know about.”

“I think you’ve been watching too many old Cold War movies, XO.”

Bell pursed his lips. “They might still have known in advance that we were coming, from a spy.”

“The commodore told me he didn’t decide which way to go, north or south, until we submerged. So it’s not like anyone off the ship knew…. We’re probably okay, about there being a leak.”

Bell didn’t relax. “The Germans didn’t need to know we were heading south, Captain. All they needed to know was that we were sailing. Anybody can look at a map of the globe…. Maybe they sent Tirpitz south, and they sent another submarine north, to hit us near Newfoundland, say, in case we took the Arctic route. Tirpitz was the one that got lucky, or unlucky.”

Jeffrey nodded slowly, reluctantly. “Don’t tell anyone else about this, XO. If we’ve been compromised, I want the crew to stay in blissful ignorance…. I’m going to talk to Commodore Wilson.”

Jeffrey knocked on Wilson’s stateroom door. Lieutenant Sessions’s voice called from inside, “Who’s there?”

Jeffrey was annoyed. “Captain Fuller.”

Sessions unlocked the door, and Jeffrey went in.

Wilson glanced up at Jeffrey. Wilson’s eyes were sunken and red. He didn’t look good. Wilson waited for Jeffrey to speak. On top of the filing cabinet, a computer printer was running.

“Commodore, I have some matters we need to discuss.”

“Lieutenant,” Wilson said, “stay, but close and lock the door.”

Sessions and Jeffrey sat in the two guest chairs. Again Wilson waited for Jeffrey to speak.

“Sir, you’re aware one of the men has a serious injury.”

Wilson nodded. “His arm.”

“We need to get him to a hospital.”

“How do you propose to accomplish that?”

“Drop him off in the ASDS.”

“And just where would you drop him off in the ASDS?”

“When we pass through the Yucatán Strait, sir, we’ll have Cuba to port and Mexico to starboard.” Mexico was one of the Allies, and Cuba was rabidly anti-Axis.

“And what will you do? Leave him at somebody’s beach cottage, or a fishing village pier in the dead of night? With a note in Spanish, ‘Please get me to a hospital’?”

Jeffrey was taken aback. “Sessions and I could work out the details, but yes, something like that.”

Sessions’s face brightened, but Wilson’s did not.

“I need you to think more as my operations officer, Commander Fuller, not just as captain of your ship. You have to put the mission of my battle group above the fate of one man’s arm.”

Jeffrey, thunderstruck, shook his head. “Sir, that’s much too harsh.”

“No, it’s not…. What else? Sessions and I are busy.”

“I’ve just had a discussion with my XO. We believe that, after all, the Axis may know that we’ve sailed.”

“From circumstantial evidence, like meeting Tirpitz? From making a nuclear datum off Cape Fear that surely carried through the deep sound channel clear across to Europe?”

Wilson was obviously ahead of Jeffrey on this, and not pleased. He’d told Jeffrey to keep Challenger’s signature out of the deep sound channel.

“Exactly, sir. What also concerns me, both as ops officer and as captain, is that we can’t be sure either way. It’s a key parameter of our strategy and tactics, Commodore, knowing whether or not we’ll really catch Voortrekker by surprise.”

“One always seeks the element of surprise,” Wilson said pedantically. “But one must never assume that one retains it.”

“Yes, Commodore.” Jeffrey’s mind was racing now, about Wilson’s mood and attitude and intent.

“Have you eaten?”

The sudden change of tack surprised Jeffrey. “No, sir. Not yet.”

“Go grab some fruit or something in the wardroom, and make it snappy. My flag lieutenant and I need several hours of your time. I was about to send Sessions to get you when you came in.”

Jeffrey turned to the door.

“Wait, Captain. This is for you. Give them to your assistant navigator.” Wilson handed Jeffrey a piece of paper. They were coordinates in the Caribbean Sea.

Jeffrey glanced at Sessions.

“Southwest of Jamaica, Captain.”

“Another way point, Commodore?”

“No. Another rendezvous.”

FIFTEEN

The next day, midafternoon, in the Caribbean Sea

CHALLENGER HOVERED NEAR the bottom in four thousand feet of water. The ship was at battle stations, rigged for ultraquiet. Around Jeffrey in the control room, his people talked in hushed tones, conveying information on shipping and aircraft contacts overhead or in the distance. The general feeling was tense, with Commodore Wilson grimly leaning over crewmen’s shoulders, peering at various console screens.

Wilson stood up straight and turned to Jeffrey. “They’re late.”

“I thought we were running late,” Jeffrey said.

“We are. Hold your position, and hope they catch up. If they don’t appear we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Sir, with respect, would you please inform me whom they are?”

“I’ll know it when they get here.”

Jeffrey was exasperated. How was his crew supposed to watch for something with which to rendezvous, when none of them knew what that something was?

“Is this secrecy really needed, Commodore?”

“We can’t afford to ruin their cover.”

“But—”

“You’ll understand when we meet them…. Challenger left dry dock too soon, and too large a part of her crew is inexperienced.”

“I—”

“That wasn’t meant as a criticism of you or your people. We’ve been lucky so far, Captain. The ship could still suffer a bad equipment casualty at any time. At any moment we might need to do an emergency blow. Bobbing like a cork to the surface, in distress, would be bad enough for us. We can’t risk them too.”

“Then—”

“We don’t know who might come to our ‘aid’ if we’re stricken. Whatever you and your crew don’t know, you can’t reveal by mistake or under torture. Russian spy trawlers work these waters, and most of Central America is riddled with German espionage operatives.”

“But Commodore…”

Wilson shook his head vehemently. “I simply can’t take the chance. Far too much is at stake here. Too much, in dollars and years, was invested getting ready for an emergency like this.”

Two hours later

“Our friend is here,” Wilson said.

“Which friend?”

Wilson tapped Jeffrey’s screen. “This one. Master Seventy-seven. The Prima Latina, out of Havana, bound for Lima, Peru.”

“Through the Panama Canal?” Jeffrey knew that according to international neutrality law, the canal would be banned to all warships of belligerents—and Panama was neutral.

“Affirmative,” Wilson said sharply. “Through the canal.”

Using it would shorten Challenger’s trip by thousands of miles. The Joint Chiefs of Staff must feel under awful pressure, to have us take this risky, illegal shortcut to save a few days…. But wait a minute.

“Sir, we can’t hide under a merchant ship through the canal. It’s much too shallow for that sort of gimmick.”

“Who said we’re going under her?”

Jeffrey read the database summary on his screen. Prima Latina was just the latest of many names she’d worn over the years. She was almost five hundred feet long, big for a coastal steamer, and had deep draft. But her engine plant was so old, and her hull so worn by metal fatigue, that the company which ran her now dared not send her on the high seas.

“Her speed is nine knots, course due south,” Bell reported. “Advise her closest point of approach will be four miles from our location.”

“Good,” Wilson said. “Meet her.”

“Navigator,” Jeffrey said, “give me an intercept course at eleven knots.”

If Wilson had told Lieutenant Sessions in private what this was about, Sessions showed no sign of it.

Jeffrey studied the gravimeter display and the digital nautical charts. There were shallow areas—banks and shoals—in almost every direction. Jeffrey would have to be careful, conning Challenger in such restricted waters. At least—thanks to the rendezvous off Cape Fear with the minisub—Jeffrey’s battle-seasoned helmsman, Lieutenant (j.g.) David Meltzer, was back aboard. Meltzer was a tough kid from the Bronx, and a Naval Academy graduate, and Jeffrey liked him.

“Captain,” Wilson said, “before you move, secure all active sonars. Listen on passive systems only.”

“Commodore, we need the mine-avoidance sonars.” There was always the chance another U-boat had snuck into the Caribbean and planted more naval mines.

“Overruled. Mines are a lesser risk for now than breaking stealth with sonar noise.”

Jeffrey opened his mouth to object, but Wilson gave him a dirty look. Jeffrey closed his mouth so fast his teeth clicked.

Sessions relayed the rendezvous information to Jeffrey’s console. Jeffrey issued helm orders. Meltzer acknowledged; Meltzer’s enjoyment of having something unusual to do vanished at the thought of hitting a mine. Ensign Harrison, sitting near Meltzer, leaned closer, watching carefully—Bell had chosen Harrison as the battle-stations relief pilot. Harrison was more nervous, too, since Wilson mentioned mines.

COB kept a keen eye on the buoyancy and trim. Sometimes he made adjustments, using the pumps and valves he controlled. One hand stayed near the emergency blow handles, just in case.

Meltzer sang out when Challenger was directly under the proper spot, which was a moving target since the Prima Latina was moving too. Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to reduce speed from eleven knots to nine, to keep station with the merchant ship.

“Captain,” Wilson said, “bring the ship to periscope depth. Be careful. The waters are crystal clear here, and it’s almost always sunny this time of year.”

What next?

“Helm, five degrees up bubble. Make your depth one five zero feet.” Jeffrey would do this in stages, for caution. Meltzer pulled his control wheel back, and Challenger’s nose came up. Her depth decreased gradually, as she and the Prima Latina steamed south. The merchant ship’s noises could be heard right through the hull: throbbing and humming and swishing, plus the odd clank or rattle.

“Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey said, “raise the search periscope mast.” COB flipped a switch.

A picture appeared on several screens—the digital feed from the periscope. Jeffrey looked around outside the ship with a small joystick, which controlled the sensor head on the periscope mast. With Challenger’s depth at 150 feet, the periscope head was still tens of feet underwater.

“Master Seventy-seven in sight,” Jeffrey announced, even though the others, including Wilson, could easily see it on the screens. Wilson was right—it was very sunny topside.

The merchant steamer’s hull was a long dark shape above Challenger. It plowed through the water steadily. Jeffrey, looking up from below, could see Prima Latina’s creaming white bow wave, and her wake. Her twin propeller shafts, and big screws and rudder, were hard to make out. Though Jeffrey could hear the screws well enough, he wanted to avoid them at all costs.

The surface of the sea was a rippling, sparkling, endless translucent curtain. The sun cast green-blue streaks down through the water. Sometimes Jeffrey saw schools of fish, clouds of them swimming and darting. Jeffrey looked for bobbing mines, but so far there were none.

“Come to periscope depth,” Wilson repeated. “I need to take a good look at her. There will be subtle signs, like ropes on lifeboats coiled a particular way, to indicate if she’s still in friendly hands.”

“Sir, if you’re so concerned over stealth, we can’t afford to make a periscope feather on the surface.”

“Do it for a split second, to snap a picture. I must know if she’s still in friendly hands.”

On his screen, as the periscope head broke the surface, Jeffrey caught a glimpse of a scruffy bearded seaman leaning on one of Prima Latina’s railings, smoking a fat cigar. The seaman noticed the periscope at once, tossed his cigar in the water, and started for a ladder to the Prima Latina’s bridge. The freighter was flying a Cuban flag. Jeffrey cursed and ordered Meltzer deep.

Simultaneously, aboard Voortrekker, southwest of Perth, Australia

The sheer audacity of what they were doing was what impressed Van Gelder the most. Far above them on the surface bobbed an old Sri Lankan freighter, the Trincomalee Tiger.

Everything that could go wrong for the freighter had gone wrong. First her rudder jammed, then her engines failed. At fifty degrees south latitude, the furious fifties, she rose and plunged sickeningly. The Trincomalee Tiger was already well inside the extreme limit of Antarctic icebergs for this time of year: February, high summer in the Southern Hemisphere.

The wind, from the north at twenty-five knots, was forcing the now-crippled freighter ever further into the iceberg zone, and the southeast-running surface current wasn’t helping either. To make things even worse, a severe tropical storm was brewing off the west coast of Australia—in the hours to come the winds and seas around the freighter would strengthen. With no engines or steering control, the worn, tired Trincomalee Tiger might hit an iceberg and sink. Or she could simply crack her seams and founder, overstressed by gale-force winds and massive, breaking waves.

The freighter, a neutral, wallowed several hundred miles southwest of Perth, Australia. She’d already radioed a mayday on the international distress frequency. A Royal Australian Navy destroyer was kindly rushing to her aid, but with the distances involved it would be hours before the Aussies could reach the scene. An Australian long-range maritime patrol aircraft was orbiting overhead, but that was mostly for moral support; the plane was designed for antisubmarine work, not search and rescue.

It was dark, and the sun wouldn’t rise for some time, but floodlights on the freighter’s decks shone brightly. Crewmen from the freighter kept waving and gesturing for the plane to somehow land and help them, or lower a rope and lift them off, before it was too late—this was a sure sign of panic. On top of everything else, the freighter’s radar failed. In the night they wouldn’t even see an iceberg bearing down upon them in time to man the lifeboats, and the crew knew that in this rising weather the ancient lifeboats were a death trap.

It was one more part of Jan ter Horst’s master plan.

SIXTEEN

WILSON, SATISFIED BY the periscope photo, ordered Jeffrey to continue with the rendezvous. As shown by live periscope imagery, Challenger was directly under the Prima Latina now.

Jeffrey watched in amazement and then horror as the merchant ship split apart at the keel. A mine? Kathy reported new sonar transients—machinery noise, not breaking-up sounds. Jeffrey saw that this was supposed to happen: the ship’s bottom was a giant double door.

“Here’s your ride through the canal, Captain,” Wilson said. “This wasn’t my idea. It goes way above a mere commodore’s pay grade, I assure you. I’m just following orders, as well as giving them.”

“Understood.”

“Surface your ship into the covert hold.”

I was afraid he was going to say that.

“Can’t we have her go any slower?”

“No. If she slows or stops it’ll look suspicious. She’s being painted by dozens of radars we know about, and watched by God knows how many spy satellites we don’t know about.”

Jeffrey thought hard how to do this. Challenger would lose speed as she surfaced, because of the power wasted when her hull began to make waves and the pump-jet propulsor’s loss of suction at very shallow depth. Meltzer would have to speed up to compensate, but by how much? An impact by the bow or stern, between Challenger and the Prima Latina, seemed unavoidable. Jeffrey felt his blood pressure shoot up fast. His first priority as captain was the welfare of his ship.

“Commodore, we need to make some practice approaches first.”

“Don’t worry overly much. There are large rubber bumpers up there in case the two ships touch.”

“We’ve never performed an evolution like this.”

“The computer simulations said it could be done.”

“Simulations aren’t real life, Commodore. A bad collision could sink both ships.”

“Get yourself up in there quickly. We’re passing the shoals already. Once through we’ll be in open water again, and the seas will be much higher. This will get even more dangerous than it already is.”

Jeffrey and Meltzer talked it over, discussing tactics. Jeffrey called Lieutenant Willey on the intercom, and they talked it over too. Then COB and Bell offered their advice.

Finally, as Jeffrey snapped out orders, Meltzer brought Challenger shallower. The first try was to get the hang of matching speeds as the two vessels closed, to get the feel of the buffeting and suction effects of trapped water coursing between the two hulls. The first try didn’t go well.

On Voortrekker

“Very well, Number One,” ter Horst said. “You have the conn. I’ll backstop you. Bring us up, and prepare to put us into the Trincomalee Tiger’s belly.”

The freighter in distress, ter Horst had told Van Gelder, was a clandestine submarine tender. Her engines and rudder were perfectly fine. She was faking the equipment casualties as an excuse to stop on the high seas, to make Voortrekker’s docking easier without arousing suspicion. The orbiting maritime patrol aircraft and the approaching Australian destroyer were all part of the double bluff.

Van Gelder had to admire ter Horst’s cunning and his guts. Not every submarine captain would willfully call down upon himself front-line enemy forces while he rendezvoused with a covert milch cow hiding in plain sight.

Van Gelder issued orders to the helmsman and chief of the watch. Voortrekker rose from the depths, and Van Gelder raised the digital periscope mast. The picture appeared on screens in the control room, looking straight up. The underwater keel doors of the freighter were already open, and the well-lit secret hold beckoned invitingly. Blue-green lights flashed steadily, outlining the hold. These let Van Gelder judge the surface ship’s roll and drift, giving him his aiming point. Van Gelder could make out the bulk of the vessel’s massive buoyancy tanks, lining the inside of the hull, surrounding the secret hold. The Trincomalee Tiger was, in effect, a camouflaged floating dry dock.

“Surface impacts, sir,” the sonar chief warned.

“Sonobuoys?” Van Gelder demanded. Are the Allies on to us so soon?

“Uh…no, sir. Sounded like an air-dropped life raft package and survival gear.”

Good, the enemy plane’s still falling for the playacted desperation on the freighter. Van Gelder relaxed, but only slightly. Voortrekker was nearing the freighter’s bottom.

A rogue wave’s surge and suction threw Voortrekker bodily toward the freighter’s hull. Van Gelder snapped out helm orders, fearful of a collision. The rogue wave passed. Van Gelder hesitated to close the distance further lest another rogue wave hit.

“Surface impacts! Air-dropped torpedoes!”

Van Gelder jolted. Jan ter Horst cursed.

“Torpedoes are inert!…Confirmed, torpedoes are sinking!”

“Ha!” ter Horst exclaimed. “You see, Gunther? They dumped their weapons to give themselves longer on-station time over the freighter. That aircraft’s no danger to us at all now.”

“Sir,” the sonar chief said uncomfortably, “I only counted two torpedoes dropped. That type of aircraft holds four.”

On Challenger

Jeffrey had Meltzer return to a depth of 150 feet, and then try again. This time as Challenger rose she lined up better with the hole in the Prima Latina. But when the ships drew closer, Challenger kept yawing from side to side, way too much.

“Captain,” Meltzer said, “we need to use the auxiliary propulsors for better lateral control.”

“Concur,” COB said, “but I have my hands full. When we do a blow and surface for real, if you can call this business surfacing, I’ll be even busier.”

“All right. Relief Pilot, I want you to handle the auxiliary thrusters.”

“Yes, Captain,” Harrison said. He did it the only way he could—he knelt on the deck next to Meltzer’s seat, and reached in past Meltzer for the joysticks that worked the thrusters. Meltzer was totally occupied using the main control surfaces—bowplanes and sternplanes and rudder—to manage Challenger’s basic depth and course. The use of junior enlisted men to separately work sternplanes and rudder went out with the Virginia class, the first of which had entered service in 2004.

“Let’s try this again,” Jeffrey said. “The key seems to be to anticipate the jostling as we get closer, but not overcompensate.”

Jeffrey told COB to activate Challenger’s hull-mounted photonics sensors, so the ship-control team and Jeffrey could get better close-range visual cues than with just the periscope. COB punched buttons. More pictures were windowed onto the console screens, viewpoints from the bow and stern and looking downward too.

Jeffrey grabbed the mike for the maneuvering room. “Engineer, do whatever you have to do to keep us moving at exactly nine knots as COB does a main ballast blow.”

“Understood, Skipper,” Willey said. “But what happens when we’re partway into the hold and the freighter pulls the surrounding water right along with her? Our speed logs will give false readings, saying we’ve slowed down. Then if we speed up, we’ll crash.”

“I know, that’s the hard part.”

“Sir,” Harrison said, “we can judge real speed over the bottom based on our inertial navigation system.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Hey, that’s using your head, shipmate!” Meltzer, impressed, slapped the ensign on the back, rather roughly, congratulating him but working in a little hazing too.

Jeffrey repeated the ensign’s idea over the intercom to Willey.

“Sounds great,” Willey said. “Only problem is, if you’ll recall, Captain, we don’t have navigation readouts back here.”

A disappointed Jeffrey repeated what Willey said to the control room at large.

“Sir,” Harrison said, “feed him data through the ship’s local area network, and Lieutenant Willey can read it off his laptop. They can manage ship’s speed under local control that way, reacting instantly, from back in the maneuvering room.”

Geez, Jeffrey thought, this kid’s smarter than I thought.

The arrangements were quickly made. This was an all-or-nothing effort now.

On Voortrekker

Van Gelder went back to the docking attempt.

“We must do this quickly,” ter Horst urged. “The enemy destroyer that’s coming may get nosy when the Tiger’s engines and rudder miraculously repair themselves…. They may board the freighter for a close inspection, as is their right by international law.”

“Understood, sir.” Van Gelder tried not to be distracted as he studied his screens and issued more helm orders.

“The Aussies may dig their way through her dummy cargo, discover her false bottom, and find the hidden catwalk down to the submarine hold.”

“I understand, Captain. I understand.”

“We need to have been and gone by the time the destroyer gets here, and we have a lot of work to do before then.”

On Challenger

Once more Challenger approached the Prima Latina from below. Jeffrey had Meltzer use the control surfaces and propulsion power to hold the ship as shallow as was safe until he felt satisfied the two vessels were lined up properly.

It was time to commit. On the live periscope image, Jeffrey saw Wilson was right—the surface swells outside were already stronger, as the nearby shallow banks and shoals fell astern. Prima Latina was rolling side to side noticeably now, making the docking maneuver even harder.

“Blow all main ballast!” Jeffrey shouted. COB’s fingers danced on his panels. There was a roaring sound, as compressed air forced water out through the bottom of the ballast tanks. Meltzer and Harrison handled their controls in grim concentration.

But as Challenger rose into the Prima Latina’s hold, Challenger’s bulk interfered with the freighter’s propellers biting the water. The freighter began to slow. Relative to the surface ship, Challenger seemed to speed up. Willey’s laptop was useless now—Jeffrey would have to do it by eye. Meltzer reported that Challenger was surfaced.

“Helm back one-third!”

Meltzer acknowledged at once, but Challenger still surged forward in the hold. They were going to hit, and smash the bow dome and the sonar sphere, and maybe rupture the ballast tanks and detonate the missiles in the forward vertical launch array.

This was getting too tough. Jeffrey seriously considered diving and giving it up, in spite of Wilson’s order.

“Contact on acoustic intercept!” Kathy shouted. This broke Jeffrey’s focus badly—Challenger and the Prima Latina were being pinged by another sub. “Contact has an active towed array! Contact is a surface ship. Contact’s sonar is Russian!” Not a submarine, a spy trawler, just as Wilson had warned.

Challenger was trapped: If Jeffrey dived, the trawler would surely catch her as a separate sonar contact. He simply had to make this docking work.

“Helm back two-thirds!”

Meltzer and Harrison walked a tightrope now—reversing on the pump-jet made Challenger’s stern slew sideways unpredictably. A bow collision was barely avoided, but then Challenger started drifting backward in the pool of water in the hold. They were going to hit at the stern, and smash their delicate pump-jet—and Russians were snooping somewhere near.

“Helm, ahead two-thirds!” Jeffrey could see the water around him churning and swirling wildly as he checked the sternway. He ordered, “Helm, ahead one-third,” so as not to gain too much headway.

Kathy announced more Russian pinging, getting closer.

Jeffrey saw the bottom doors start to swing closed underneath him; Challenger shivered from violent new buffeting and turbulence, which also affected the Prima Latina’s speed. Jeffrey kept having to throw the pump-jet into forward and then reverse. He and Meltzer and Harrison juggled like madmen.

The Russians pinged again. Do they know we’re here? Are they getting suspicious? Will they try to ram the Prima Latina, the way the Soviets played chicken with our navy in the old days?

The hold doors closed securely. “Helm, all stop. We’re in.”

Jeffrey had to sit down, then was surprised he’d been standing—he must have jumped up without realizing it as he issued his engine commands.

“Chief of the Watch, rig for reduced electrical.” COB acknowledged, and everyone switched things off. Jeffrey called Lieutenant Willey, and told him to shut down the reactor.

Jeffrey used the periscope to explore their cramped and secret hiding place, which looked more high tech on the inside than the tramp steamer did from the outside.

But Jeffrey dreaded what he might see at any moment. If the freighter hit a mine, her hull would burst inward with sudden flame and blasting water. Her flotation tanks would be ruptured and she’d take Challenger with her to the grave. If the Russian trawler rammed them, the freighter’s hull would burst inward with slicing steel and gushing water. Challenger would die. The Russians could always claim it was an accident, just another maritime collision.

Strange, urgent vibrations began, though Challenger’s pump-jet wasn’t moving. The periscope image showed the water in the hold was slapping around.

“Prima Latina engine noise increasing, Captain,” Kathy said.

Jeffrey turned to Wilson. “Is this supposed to happen?”

Wilson, frowning, responded, “I don’t know.”

Jeffrey felt the deck heeling under his feet. Challenger creaked against the rubber blocks holding her firmly in the hold. The heeling grew much steeper, to port—the Prima Latina was turning hard to starboard.

The vibrations and heeling grew stronger; the water in the hold all rushed to Challenger’s port side, slopping over the submarine’s hull, gurgling and roaring.

“She’s making an emergency turn,” Wilson said.

Above the other racket, Jeffrey could hear a warning bong begin to sound somewhere in the Prima Latina. He put two and two together fast.

“Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey snapped. “Collision alarm.” The raucous siren blared. Crewmen tried to brace themselves.

The Russians are going to ram. Now Jeffrey heard a deep mechanical moan from outside the hull. Kathy said the freighter was sounding its horn, a lengthy, insistent blast.

The collision alarm kept blaring inside Challenger. Jeffrey watched through the periscopes, helpless, waiting to see the Prima Latina cut in half.

The Prima Latina turned sharply the other way. The heeling reversed. The maddened shaking and sloshing continued. Jeffrey gripped his armrests, hating having nothing to do. She’s trying to evade the trawler’s charging bow. All eyes were glued to the periscope pictures now, each person dreading to see what Jeffrey dreaded—an insider’s view of a freighter being skewered on the high seas.

The freighter sounded her horn again, an endless series of angry staccato blasts. She turned sharply back toward starboard. The shaking went on and on.

Then the vibrations died down. Challenger’s deck righted itself. By gyrocompass, Jeffrey saw the freighter was resuming her course south.

In a little while, a crane on a catwalk in the hold lowered a gangplank onto Challenger’s hull. Jeffrey watched a man swagger down the ramp and knock on Challenger’s forward hatch with a pipe wrench. Jeffrey recognized the scruffy seaman who’d been smoking the cigar

SEVENTEEN

On Voortrekker, inside the Trincomalee Tiger

GUNTHER VAN GELDER sweated and his heart was pounding, both from exertion and from fear. He was truly caught between a rock and a hard place. Hurry up. But be quiet. Work faster. Not so loud.

Van Gelder and his men needed to maintain absolute silence, because the enemy was so near. But they also had to work quickly. The cruise missile vertical launch array was already reloaded, but there was so much still to be done. Van Gelder stood on Voortrekker’s hull behind the sail, next to the open weapons-loading hatch which led down to the torpedo room. He paused for just a moment, to wipe his dripping brow. He eyed his wristwatch and frowned. He glanced up from his labors and looked about the secret hold to take stock of the situation. The feeling of being on tenterhooks wouldn’t subside.

The Trincomalee Tiger was well equipped—with the special cranes needed to transfer weapons to a nuclear submarine, and with the nuclear weapons themselves. The German Kampfschwimmer commando team that ter Horst had told Van Gelder to expect was already below with their gear.

But the loading of torpedoes—Van Gelder’s major remaining task to supervise—was taking much longer than planned, in part because the seas around the Tiger had gotten so rough. Van Gelder thought the tropical storm off Australia must be stronger than forecast. Or maybe a different storm had formed unexpectedly off Antarctica; Antarctic weather often changed suddenly, violently.

The worse the weather outside, the longer the last of the loading would take. The longer the loading took, the worse the weather. Van Gelder just couldn’t win.

The biggest problem was that, because of these delays, the Australian destroyer arrived. With typical British Commonwealth seamanship and flair, the Aussies sent over a motorized launch with a well-equipped repair party. They were aboard the Trincomalee Tiger right now. Sometimes Van Gelder could hear banging beyond the aft end of the submarine hold, where Royal Australian Navy sailors were trying to help fix machinery that wasn’t really broken. Voortrekker’s weapons reloading was supposed to have been completed, and the fake mechanical problems on Tiger solved, well before the destroyer ever got there.

Outwardly, Van Gelder maintained the appearance of calm and confidence. He didn’t allow crew discipline to slacken in the least. Inwardly, the thought of enemy forces so close, with Voortrekker so defenseless, sent chills right up his spine. Van Gelder’s hands felt like ice cubes, yet he sweated all the more. He listened to his men whispering urgently while they worked.

Van Gelder glanced aft apprehensively. How much longer will our luck hold out? The maritime patrol plane was still orbiting overhead, and the destroyer would be well armed with nuclear antisubmarine weapons. This meant that Voortrekker dared not leave until the destroyer was gone—to even have the freighter open the secret hold’s bottom doors, with the destroyer’s sonars listening nearby, was an appalling risk.

Worst thought of all, if the enemy realized what the Trincomalee Tiger really was, her neutrality would be forfeit. She could be sunk quite legally, with Voortrekker still inside. There might be no advance warning down here in the hold, and a stream of five-inch armor-piercing shells might come through the Tiger’s sides at any time.

Van Gelder wiped his dripping forehead on his uniform sleeve yet again. Yet again he urged his loading crew to work faster, without making noise. Any strange thuds or clanking forward of the Tiger’s engine room might easily trigger suspicion, and cause an investigation by an armed Australian boarding party. If the freighter’s crew were lax in their acting skills, or seemed nervous in the wrong way face to face with Royal Australian Navy officers and chiefs, the game would be up that much sooner. The Australians might even disable the tender’s bottom doors, and capture the Tiger with Voortrekker trapped inside.

A crewman dropped a wrench. It made a dull thunk against the soft anechoic tiles that covered Voortrekker’s hull. Van Gelder almost jumped at the sound. He turned to the man and scolded him under his breath. The loading work went on.

A few minutes later Jan ter Horst climbed up on deck through the open forward escape trunk. Van Gelder was surprised to see he wore a pistol belt. Two Kampfschwimmer followed, the commander and the chief, lugging scratched-up, old Russian AK-47 rifles. Ter Horst must be as worried at this point as I am.

On Challenger, inside the Prima Latina

“Buenos días, Señor Capitán.”

Jeffrey, standing outside the open weapons-loading hatch of Challenger, shook hands with the bearded seaman. Up close, now, the man looked not so much scruffy as authoritative and shrewd. He smelled strongly of cigar smoke and stale sweat.

“Yes, buenos días,” Jeffrey replied. That much Spanish he knew.

“I am sorry for the rough ride before, Capitán. The Russians, since the war, they do not like Cuba so much, you know. Sometimes they try to scare us with the hazardous maneuvers. Their trawlers make our freighters get out of the way, and we file protests. Sometimes they even throw garbage, and we throw garbage back.” The man laughed from deep in his belly, like it was all some great sailor’s joke.

“Exactly who are you?”

The man touched the side of his nose. “My real name does not matter. The important thing is that I am a friend. You may, I suppose, call me Rodrigo if you wish.”

Jeffrey looked him square in the eyes. “Who do you work for?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“I couldn’t begin to.”

“But surely you can guess. Don’t you enjoy guessing games, Señor Capitán?”

“You’re not American,” Jeffrey stated.

“But I am, or should I say, I was. I was born in Miami. My family returned to Habana, our ancestral home, after the Great Reconciliation, when our former enemy Castro retired. As Fidel himself was able to foresee, socialism and democracy are not so contradictory after all. Now I only use my Cuban passport.”

That was all well and good, but Commodore Wilson expected Jeffrey to trust his command to this guy, and to whomever he represented. “So who do you work for?”

“Why, the CIA of course!…Please, Capitán, please, come with me.”

Jeffrey followed the man up the catwalk inside the Prima Latina’s clandestine hold. They came to a small hatch.

“I apologize that we must go now on our hands and knees. The secret passages must be small, you understand, so as not to be discovered by an adversary.”

Jeffrey nodded. Wilson had told him to go with the man, but told him nothing more.

“And please do not mind the rats.”

“Rats?”

“Every aged tramp steamer must have rats, no? They discourage customs inspectors from inspecting us too closely.” Rodrigo laughed again, a hearty, confiding laugh. “But do not worry, they are our pets.”

“You keep rats as pets?”

“Sí. These are all former laboratory rats. How do you say? Pedigreed. Please, Capitán, after you.” Rodrigo gestured at the entry into the crawl space.

Jeffrey hesitated.

“The rats are tame, and had their shots. I assure you they do not bite.”

Jeffrey climbed into the tight companionway, followed a bend, then took the ladder up. He didn’t see any rats. On Rodrigo’s urging, he undogged the hatch at the other end of the crawl space.

He came out in a dark and dingy cargo hold, filled with stacks of large cardboard cartons on pallets. The deck he walked on was a solid floor of wooden packing crates. The hold reeked of stinking bilgewater. Jeffrey jumped when something on the deck, brownish and ugly, hissed and scurried out of his way.

“My apologies,” Rodrigo rushed to say. “I forgot to mention we also have the spiders.”

“That thing was a spider?” It was the size of a dinner plate.

“Sí. From the swamps of Venezuela. They are called bird-eating spiders, because they sometimes eat birds.”

Oh God. Jeffrey almost vomited. “Don’t tell me,” he said sarcastically. “They’ve been defanged, and they’re also pets, to keep your pet rats company.”

Rodrigo smiled. “You understand almost perfectly, Capitán! But these are not defanged. Their venom is not poisonous to humans. They keep down the cockroaches nicely…. Many customs officials detest big spiders, you know.”

Bright lights snapped on and seven deep male voices yelled, “Surprise!”

Jeffrey almost jumped out of his shoes. All around him, standing in tight corridors between the tall stacks of cargo, stood eight heavily armed men. Jeffrey recognized U.S. Navy SEAL Lieutenant Shajo Clayton, and his second in command, Chief Montgomery. The enlisted SEALs with them were all new to Jeffrey, but Shajo and Montgomery were old friends.

Hands were shaken with bone-crushing strength, backs were pounded hard enough to knock the wind from a large man’s chest. Shajo Clayton had been with Jeffrey on Challenger’s South African raid, and then Montgomery joined them for the mission to northern Germany. They’d braved Axis fire together, seen comrades mortally wounded and die, and set off nuclear devices in the enemy’s lap. Jeffrey was very glad to see them, given where Challenger was going next.

“Gentlemen, please,” Rodrigo offered. “This is no place for a proper reunion. Come with me. Come, we have some delightful refreshments prepared.”

But Jeffrey’s face grew grim. “Shajo, Chief, don’t toy with me.”

“Sir?” Shajo Clayton was in his late twenties, from Atlanta; he possessed a trim build and a perfect swimmer’s body. He had a good sense of humor, was even-tempered and easy to talk to. Chief Montgomery, in his thirties, was built like a football linebacker: over six feet tall, immensely broad and strong. His humor was very biting at times, especially in the stress of combat. If he had a first name other than “Chief,” Jeffrey didn’t know yet what it was.

Like many SEALs, both men loved practical jokes.

“No more surprises,” Jeffrey said. “I have to ask. Is Ilse Reebeck here?”

Shajo Clayton looked confused and glanced at Chief Montgomery. The chief was just as confused.

“We thought she’d be with you,” Clayton said.

Jeffrey’s heart sank. He realized he finally had to give up hope. All this time, in his heart of hearts, he’d been daydreaming that Ilse’s death was faked, a subterfuge to fool the Axis. “She was killed,” Jeffrey said.

Clayton’s and Montgomery’s faces fell.

“What the hell happened?” Montgomery said. He sounded angry. “An enemy hit? Her ex-boyfriend’s goons get even?”

“No, nothing like that. An accident. A freak accident.”

“I’m really sorry,” Clayton said. “You two were dating, last I heard through the grapevine, weren’t you?…I’m—I’m sorry. How recent was it?”

“Just before we sailed.”

“She was a good person, and a good fighter,” Montgomery said. “We’ll miss her where we’re going. Wherever that might be?”

Jeffrey shrugged. “Commodore Wilson fills me in one step at a time.”

“Commodore Wilson?” Clayton said.

Jeffrey nodded. “I made full commander. Challenger’s mine now.” He’d removed his rank insignia, for security.

Clayton and Montgomery, all too experienced at coping with the loss of friends in war, congratulated Jeffrey with obvious relish. Jeffrey donned his mask of command, forgot about Ilse, and accepted their congratulations with warmest thanks.

Jeffrey turned to the Cuban, who’d been standing there stroking his beard. “Rodrigo, with all gratitude for your kind hospitality, I think we should just get to work.”

Shajo and Montgomery and the enlisted SEALs agreed. They had a lot of equipment to load aboard Challenger, and all of it had to go through the crawl space.

“I understand,” Rodrigo said. “Work first, refreshments perhaps later. There is no hurry, gentlemen. We will be several hours to reach and then go through the canal…. And Capitán, my sincerest condolences for your tragic loss.”

EIGHTEEN

On Voortrekker

“HOW MANY MORE torpedoes still to be loaded, Number One?”

“Six, Captain, not counting the one on the loading chute.”

“Make it quick,” ter Horst said. “The enemy’s so close I can almost smell that destroyer through Tiger’s hull.”

“I know, sir.” Van Gelder glanced again to the rear of the hold, where there’d just been more Australian clanking and hammering.

On Voortrekker’s deck, someone shouted.

Van Gelder turned to censure the man. Instead he watched his worst nightmare of all unfold.

The Tiger’s overworked loading crane failed. A big two-metric-ton nuclear torpedo, a German Sea Lion, teetered on a single length of fraying metal cable. The cable snapped and the Sea Lion landed nosefirst on Voortrekker’s deck, then fell over. It instantly crushed one crewman to bloody pulp, maimed another, and knocked two more off the deck and into the water. The torpedo rolled into the water with a heavy splash. It began to hit Voortrekker in the side, as the Tiger rolled and the water inside the hold sloshed.

The maimed crewman on deck was screaming in agony, both legs from the knees down flattened like pancakes. The crewmen in the water also screamed, as the loose torpedo chased them in the demonic swimming pool the Tiger’s hold had become. One of the swimmers was caught and crushed against Voortrekker’s side. He screamed loudly before he went under in a cloud of blood, and didn’t come up. The other man in the water splashed his arms desperately—he wasn’t wearing a life jacket.

Van Gelder was first to react. He dived into the water, and both Kampfschwimmer followed immediately. Van Gelder dimly heard ter Horst shout orders, to silence the screaming crewman on deck and get him first aid, to rig lines to try to snag and hold the floating errant torpedo, and to rig more lines to pull Van Gelder and the others from the enclosed but vicious water.

Van Gelder plunged headfirst, rose to the surface, and gasped for breath. The salt water filled his ears and went up his nose. It tasted sharply brackish and made his eyes sting. He blinked and looked up and saw Voortrekker from an angle he’d dearly hoped never to see—the view by a man fallen overboard. Van Gelder reached the surviving crewman in the water, who grimaced and said he’d injured his thigh. Both Kampfschwimmer helped hold the man’s head above the water.

The Tiger took a nasty roll to starboard, then righted herself. The Sea Lion was thrown against the side of the hold, and caromed off the Tiger’s hull with a deafening crash. The Tiger rolled to port.

The Kampfschwimmer shouted and Van Gelder turned, seeing the Sea Lion coming right at them. They had nowhere to go. It was impossible to climb the smooth, curved, slimy side of the submarine, and the crewmen on deck, caught by surprise and exhausted from hours of loading, were too slow with their man-overboard drill.

Both Kampfschwimmer gestured frantically. Van Gelder realized they only had one choice. They held their breaths and grabbed the injured man and swam down. The Sea Lion rushed right over their heads and slammed into Voortrekker’s side. At this rate, even her thick ceramic-composite hull might be damaged fatally. With the endless banging and screaming, the Australians were bound to investigate.

Finally ter Horst directed men to corral the torpedo and hold it firmly against Voortrekker’s side using a hastily rigged rubber bumper. Others helped Van Gelder and the crewman and Kampfschwimmer back on deck. The deck was covered in blood, thick and gumming up the antiskid coating.

Then Voortrekker jolted hard against the rubber blocks that held her, and Van Gelder was almost knocked from his feet. The Trincomalee Tiger was getting under way—the faked mechanical problems to engines and rudder must have been solved, and her crew couldn’t delay the Australians any further.

Soon someone came through the hatch that led from the rest of the ship to the catwalk. He was dark-skinned and wore a turban. He said in heavily accented German that he was the master of the Tiger. He wanted to know what was going on, then took in the scene on Voortrekker’s deck and gasped.

Ter Horst and Van Gelder turned to speak to him. Behind the ship’s master, smiling and obviously pleased with themselves, suddenly appeared two Australian navy chiefs. They’d followed the master without him realizing it, drawn by all the noise, and now they were obviously expecting another mechanical problem to fix.

They took in the clandestine hold, the nuclear submarine sitting there, and their jaws dropped. Ter Horst drew his pistol and aimed at them and fired. He missed. Each report echoed harshly, and pistol bullets zinged as they ricocheted. Everyone on Voortrekker’s deck ducked for what cover there was. The Australians ducked, realized they had no cover at all, and dashed for the hatch from the hold.

Ter Horst shouted to the Kampfschwimmer. They grabbed their AK-47s. Both fired well-aimed shots on semiautomatic fire. The muzzles flashed hot gases; the staccato reports were deafening. The Australians flopped on the catwalk, dead, and spent brass flew and clinked. Gunsmoke filled the air; crewmen coughed. More bright blood dripped to stain the water in the hold.

Ter Horst stared at the bodies. “Now that’s just great.”

Van Gelder considered their options. It was hard to think straight soaking wet, shivering from the coldness of the seawater and from the closeness of his brush with death.

The ship’s master still stood on the catwalk, unharmed.

“Come down here, you,” Van Gelder shouted in his best German. “Quickly!”

The master obeyed. He seemed an unsavory sort, someone you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, and this gave Van Gelder a desperate idea.

“Your crew,” Van Gelder demanded. “What are their nationalities?”

“Most are Malaysians. They work cheap, and know how to keep their mouths shut.”

“We have to do something to explain two dead Australians to the others on that destroyer.”

“I know,” the master said. He stroked his thick beard, thinking.

“Pirates,” Van Gelder said.

“What?” ter Horst said.

“Some of your crew,” Van Gelder said to the master. “They were pirates.”

“Pirates?”

“Yes. That’s what you must say…. Say that it was hard for you to hire experienced hands willing to sail through the war zone. Say you hired men you didn’t know were criminals with weapons smuggled in their seabags. Say they must have reverted to their old ways—”

“Maddened when they thought my ship was sinking?”

“Yes, precisely. They ambushed the Australians in the cargo hold, intending to rob them.”

“Yes, yes,” ter Horst said. “You sensed something was wrong, you took your pistol, and went to investigate. You saw the crewmen, saw what they’d done, and had to shoot them in self-defense.”

“But I don’t have a pistol.”

“Take mine,” ter Horst said. “It’s already been fired.”

The master examined the pistol. “It’s Czech.”

“Yes, not German or Boer.”

The master looked from ter Horst to Van Gelder. His eyes narrowed to mean slits. “I’ll need to trick two of my men into coming down to the cargo hold.”

“Kill them with the pistol,” Van Gelder said. “Then put the AK-47s in their hands. If you have liquor, put some in their mouths and on their clothes. Try to force some down into their stomachs.”

The master’s eyes grew very hard. Slowly, he nodded. He understood what had to be done. The master took one AK-47 in each hand and started up the gantryway. The Kampfschwimmer went to help the master handle the enemy corpses on the catwalk.

“The spent brass!” Van Gelder yelled after them. “This has to look good. It has to look perfect!”

Crewmen on Voortrekker’s deck began to pick up the expended shell casings from the two automatic rifles; some brass had fallen in the water, but the collection off the deck was large enough to be convincing.

The Kampfschwimmer chief returned, dirtied with gore from dragging the dead Australians through the crawl space leading to the real cargo hold. Someone gave him a bucket of water and towels, to clean the blood trails. He put the spent shell casings in his pocket, and went back into the crawl space.

Crewmen, under Van Gelder’s direction, hoisted the damaged, dripping Sea Lion back aboard and positioned it on the loading chute. A chief with a radiometer verified there was no leakage from the fissionable core inside. They sent the weapon down to the torpedo room. It was useless with its nose sensors smashed and its tail fins cracked and twisted, but it had to be put somewhere, somewhere safe and out of the way.

Van Gelder thought he heard distant pops, like pistol fire somewhere above.

Soon the two Kampfschwimmer and the Tiger’s master returned.

“It is done,” the master said. “You must depart at once.”

“But the destroyer’s sonar,” Van Gelder objected. “They’ll hear the hold doors opening.”

“Not with us moving like this. Our engine noise and pounding hull should cover your escape…. It was cold-blooded murder, sacrificing two of my own men to disguise your presence. Allah forgive me, we had no choice.”

NINETEEN

On Challenger

IN PRIVATE, IN THE commodore’s office, Wilson looked at Jeffrey harshly. “That’s exactly what I intended you to do all along. Did you really think I’d let one of your crewmen lose an arm or die?”

“Sorry, Commodore,” Jeffrey said. “It is an obvious thing to do, now that I know that you knew we’d be going through Panama.”

Challenger, inside the Prima Latina, was nearing the entrance to the canal. Challenger was just a huge passenger for now—a strange kind of cargo, as unusual as the sunken Russian Golf-class sub that Howard Hughes’s Glomar Explorer had tried to salvage from the ocean floor back in the 1960s. Jeffrey had ordered Challenger’s reactor be shut down, partly for stealth and partly because there was no supply of cooling water. Challenger was therefore rigged for reduced electrical, and also for a modified form of ultraquiet.

“So talk to your CIA liaison,” Wilson said. “This Rodrigo person. Work up some kind of story, that the injured man was part of the Prima Latina’s crew and was hurt in an accident. Cargo shifted, whatever.”

“We can drop him off in a harbor boat at Cristobal, as we enter the canal. They must have decent hospital facilities there, or maybe even they’ll fly him to Panama City.”

“Yes, yes. You’re going to have a problem with his lack of proper papers. If they find out he’s American, he’ll be interned for the duration of the war.”

“Maybe Rodrigo can say the documents were soaked in blood and destroyed.”

“You don’t have to feed me all the details, Captain. A commodore rarely appreciates his operations officer thinking out loud in front of him when said commodore has more important work to do.” Wilson gestured to all the notes and diagrams and computer disks on his desk, where he was developing battle doctrine for working with the Collins boats in the South Pacific.

Jeffrey excused himself, and left Wilson alone. Jeffrey was grateful they’d be able to get the torpedoman with the mangled arm proper medical attention soon, after all. He went into the control room, to have the officer of the deck talk to the corpsman and then make preparations to transport the injured man. This was dealt with quickly, and word passed, and the mood of the crew lifted visibly.

With Jeffrey’s ship so inert, cocooned inside the Prima Latina, he had relatively little to do to keep himself occupied—except worry about all the things that might go wrong. He decided to stop in the wardroom for a coffee, to try to forget about naval mines and aggressive Russian trawlers for a minute.

Jeffrey shook his head to himself as he walked down the passageway, thinking. He didn’t like Wilson’s constant irritability.

But is it really irritability? He’s always been hard and demanding. Even when he was captain of Challenger and I was executive officer, he wouldn’t hesitate to roast me in front of the crew…. Maybe he thinks he’s building my character.

And maybe he’s right. If I flinch or lose my cool in front of him, what showing am I going to make against Voortrekker?

In the wardroom, Ensign Harrison sat hunched at the table, under the dimmed lighting. He was using some spare time to study for his submarine qualification. Jeffrey complimented Harrison again on his help while they docked with the Prima Latina. Then Jeffrey looked over his shoulder, kibitzing as Harrison memorized charts of Challenger’s hydraulic systems. It brought back memories of Jeffrey’s own early days in subs, cramming to earn his gold dolphins in every free moment.

That’s really what the Silent Service community is all about. Everybody needs to keep on qualifying at a higher and higher professional level. Everyone needs to help their shipmates get better and better at their jobs. The difference between me and Commodore Wilson is in our approach, our personal styles. What he does works for him, and what I do works for me.

Jeffrey poured himself a mug of coffee and took a sip. It was cold, since the coffeemaker was off to help save power. It was nice to drink it cold—the air in the ship was already warm with no air conditioning, given the tropical weather outside. Jeffrey let the caffeine flow through his system. He took a deep breath, to unwind.

Then Jeffrey had second thoughts about the commodore.

Wilson didn’t talk to Lieutenant Sessions at all the way he talked to Jeffrey. Actually, Jeffrey wasn’t sure if Wilson talked to anybody the way he talked to Jeffrey. Jeffrey wondered if it was himself, then, and not Wilson. Something about himself that made Wilson be this rough.

Jeffrey thought of his father, Michael Fuller, and the relationship he had with his dad, the way his father talked to him. Rough.

Jeffrey almost blushed. Was it something Jeffrey was doing in front of both men, something in his own attitude toward authority figures? It certainly was his way to question everything and second-guess, and bristle if he felt he was being pushed around. He’d done it to Wilson already over working with the Australians, over making flank speed through the Gulf Stream, over the secrecy of the Prima Latina, and now about the crewman’s arm. What drives this in me? Pridefulness? Rebelliousness? Resentment, even?

“Is something the matter, Captain?” Harrison asked.

That tore Jeffrey from his preoccupation fast. “I think I just made a useful connection, between two separate problems. They’re not as separate as I thought.”

“Is that good, sir?”

Jeffrey smiled at Harrison’s earnest innocence. “I think it might be.”

Jeffrey finished his coffee in one gulp, and departed the wardroom. He walked down the corridor with a lighter step. He’d gained an important insight about his own personality. He wasn’t sure what to do about it, or where it might lead, but at least his approach to authority figures was something he could try to control. Jeffrey was always biased toward action over inaction. Now he had a clue about where there was room in himself to take positive action.

He decided next to visit the enlisted mess. Between mealtimes, some men off watch would be viewing a movie, or playing checkers or cards. Jeffrey knew he ought to put in another brief appearance, and thank them once more for all their hard work getting Challenger ready for sea and repaired again after battle. It always gave Jeffrey a special pleasure to show his face and mingle with the crew—within proper bounds of hierarchy and discipline, of course.

On his way to the mess he passed outside a packed and narrow enlisted berthing compartment. Jeffrey thought of the men who’d be sleeping in there, or trying to—each man stood watches six hours on, twelve off. With constant maintenance and training duties after standing watch, they were lucky to get four or five hours sleep in a day. Some men in the berthing space would be awake now, Jeffrey knew, studying for their silver dolphins, or writing letters home that might never be delivered, or simply enjoying privacy in the only place they could: their curtained-off, coffin-size racks.

Jeffrey smiled to himself to think what wonderful people his crewmen were, so carefully selected. He smiled again, more soberly, reminding himself with pride that now—as their captain—it was his ultimate, inescapable task to oversee their welfare, ensure their morale, and protect their very lives. This relentless and immense responsibility was, to Jeffrey, deeply gratifying. It was what he had sought for, fought for, craved, for his entire naval career.

His warm inner glow was eclipsed by a troubling realization. Thinking of his crew made Jeffrey think of the man with the injured arm.

A wounded American submariner kicking around in a neutral foreign country, sedated and on painkillers…How well can my torpedoman keep up the act of being someone he’s not, and for how long? What if the Axis gets wind? Dropping him off is like us making a datum, a ticking time bomb, leaving a sign that Challenger was here….

Simultaneously, on Voortrekker

Van Gelder thought Voortrekker must be the luckiest ship in the world. Right after the Trincomalee Tiger opened the submarine hold’s bottom doors—while traveling at a dicey eleven knots—the Australian destroyer ordered her to stop because of the shootings. This gave ter Horst the best of both worlds: undetected access to the sea with the destroyer right there, and a Tiger that was stationary except for rolling and pitching. The bulk of the Tiger’s hull around them masked the noise as ter Horst gently flooded his ballast tanks. Voortrekker dived away carefully, just as another motor launch started from the destroyer to the freighter.

An hour later both launches returned to the destroyer; the destroyer and the freighter got under way; Voortrekker’s sonar showed the two surface ships were on diverging courses. The destroyer was heading back toward Perth, Australia, while the freighter was continuing with her real cargo to South America.

The Aussies must have believed the Tiger’s story, that her master’s two dead crewmen had reverted to piracy—muggers at sea might be a better term. Real pirates were a serious problem up in the South China Sea. Tragic, and senseless, though minor against the ongoing backdrop of tactical nuclear war.

But the more Van Gelder thought about the shooting incident, the less he liked it.

When forensic experts in Perth examined all the corpses and physical evidence carefully—as they surely would—flaws might well be found in the cover story. Ships or aircraft would then be sent to intercept the Trincomalee Tiger. A thorough search would reveal the submarine hold with its loading crane.

Those Australian corpses are like us making a datum, a ticking time bomb, leaving a sign that Voortrekker was here.

TWENTY

On Challenger

JEFFREY’S INJURED TORPEDOMAN was gone to a hospital. The Prima Latina was slowly being towed through the entry locks, at the beginning of the Panama Canal, by electric locomotives running on tracks along the bank. Sitting at his console in the control room, Jeffrey had to take this mostly on faith. He couldn’t exactly go up on the freighter’s bridge to greet the canal pilot and customs officials at Cristobal. All Challenger’s periscope showed him was the inside of the submarine hold. He had to take Rodrigo’s word for what was going on.

The feeling in the control room was stuffy and tense. There was nowhere to go, trapped inside the tramp steamer, herself imprisoned inside the shallow canal locks. Jeffrey had set Challenger at battle stations hours ago, as a precaution, but the crew had no real way to defend themselves—except for last-ditch small arms.

Silence was their best, their only protection. Even though the decks all rode on sound-isolation gear, Jeffrey’s crew walked gingerly on tiptoe. They spoke in whispers and sign language, if they spoke at all. Now and then someone would grab a wad of toilet paper, kept handy to clean the console touch screens. Instead they’d mop their brow. With the fans stopped the air was warm, and getting warmer all the time.

Doubts and worries kept running through Jeffrey’s mind. From the looks on the faces around him, he wasn’t alone. Jeffrey hated this feeling of loss of control. The helpless wait was excruciating—and the trip of half a day through the canal had barely begun.

What if the Prima Latina had engine failure? What if she collided with another ship crossing big Gatun Lake in the middle of the canal? What if one of the locks got jammed, or the submarine-hold doors malfunctioned and dropped wide open and snagged the canal bottom? What if there was an earthquake here, or a landslide in the narrow Gaillard Cut through the high southern mountains? A dozen things could go horribly wrong.

COB and Meltzer manned the ship controls gamely, though there was nothing at all for them to do. COB, exhausted from days of nonstop repair work, began to nod off. He started to snore, and Meltzer immediately nudged him. COB roused, and Harrison offered a cup of stale coffee. COB gulped it gratefully.

Jeffrey himself had to stifle a yawn. He’d already had so much coffee he was getting acid stomach, so he resisted asking for another cup. He was sure he wouldn’t sleep until his command was through the canal, and out of the freighter and out of this waking nightmare, safely submerged and free in the Pacific Ocean at last.

A nervous fire-controlman began to cough—he’d choked on his own saliva, his throat was so tight. He desperately covered his mouth with both hands to suppress the hacking noises. A friend pounded his back, firmly but quietly. The fire-controlman eventually stopped choking.

For the moment, it was so quiet Jeffrey could hear the sound of his own circulating blood, an unnerving rush in his ears. Jeffrey drew a deep breath. The ship’s chronometer seemed to move so slowly, he thought it must be broken. But the chronometer and his wristwatch agreed, as did Bell’s.

The same awful thoughts plagued Jeffrey again and again. Trapped within the Prima Latina, cornered in the canal, Challenger was a clay pigeon. Panama’s armed forces, bitter since America’s anti-Noriega sanctions wrecked the local economy years ago, would act violently. Challenger’s too-thin cloak, this secret hold, could easily become a secret execution chamber.

Worst thing of all, if found out—USS Challenger, a belligerent’s nuclear submarine bearing many nuclear arms—she’d provoke a diplomatic incident of monumental proportions. The scandal and outrage as word spread fast might well push teetering Latin American countries to spurn the U.S. altogether and join the Axis cause. The impact on the outcome of the war would be disastrous.

Jeffrey felt this burden every second of the way, more suffocating than the stale air in the control room.

A messenger came from aft, so silent Jeffrey didn’t notice until he felt a tap on his arm. The messenger mumbled in Jeffrey’s ear. Wilson wanted to see him.

Transiting the canal, Jeffrey spent several hours with Commodore Wilson and Lieutenant Sessions in private, working further on their tactics for when they reached the South Pacific.

Then, back in the control room, Jeffrey saw on the periscope screens that Rodrigo was coming down the gangway to Challenger’s hull. Rodrigo’s posture was casual, and he didn’t look concerned, so Jeffrey tried to relax.

Rodrigo waved at the periscope head for Jeffrey to come up. Glad for any change of scenery, Jeffrey climbed the forward escape trunk.

“Greetings, Capitán.”

“How are we doing?” Jeffrey asked.

“All is well so far. Your crewman is at a good hospital. My employer has agents in-country, who will keep an eye and make sure he is not bothered by enemy operatives.”

“Good, terrific. Thank you, Rodrigo…. Was that everything?”

“By no means. I thought you might enjoy fresh air. How would you like to come on deck for a moment?”

“Is that wise?”

“You will have to be disguised, of course, lest the wrong person see you. But the crew of the Prima Latina are all picked men. They are very trustworthy.”

“Okay.”

Jeffrey followed Rodrigo through the crawl space. In the cargo hold, Jeffrey heard scurrying and pattering sounds. He was glad he didn’t meet the local wildlife. Rodrigo pointed to a pile of clothes: dirty rubber boots, worn dungarees, and an oil-stained tank-top shirt.

Jeffrey gingerly inspected the outfit for spiders or rats. He changed. The clothes were baggy. Rodrigo led him out of the hold and along a passageway. Jeffrey clumped in the rubber boots. They came to a storeroom. Rodrigo gave Jeffrey dark sunglasses, a large straw hat, and a paste-on beard.

“We must avoid the bridge. The canal pilot is there.”

Rodrigo and Jeffrey went out on deck.

The change from down inside the hold was stunning.

The bright sun, low in the east, was a beautiful extra-yellow. The early morning sky was cloudless, a brilliant cobalt blue. It was hot, but not too hot if Jeffrey didn’t stand in the direct sun. The air was humid, but pleasantly so.

The Prima Latina was going around a broad curve, between steep hills that towered hundreds of feet on either side.

“This is the Gaillard Cut,” Rodrigo said.

“I’ve heard of it.”

“It was the most difficult part of building the canal. Thousands died, you know, of many nationalities and races, from malaria and yellow fever and worse.”

“I know,” Jeffrey said.

“Yet now it is so beautiful here.”

Rodrigo was right. The jungle growth on the mountainsides was exuberantly dense and vibrantly green. The different colors of tropical flowers and bushes and vines were breathtakingly rich. Stands of bamboo seemed to shimmer dazzlingly in the sunlight. Strange trees with smooth gray trunks towered a hundred feet in the air.

Then Jeffrey remembered these mountainsides were artificial, here in the cut. Millions of cubic yards of earth and rock had had to be removed laboriously, much of it by pickax and shovel, by wheelbarrow or mule. More than once, huge mudslides had ruined the work and killed dozens or hundreds of men. That was all a century ago or more; in modern times, the cut had been widened and stabilized.

“Cigar?” Rodrigo offered.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Cuban, of course.” Rodrigo grinned.

“Of course.”

Jeffrey rarely smoked. He drew a puff—it was delicious, and the smoke smelled very good. The tobacco made him lightheaded, so he took it slow. Slow was the best way to enjoy a fine cigar.

Rodrigo went to lean on the railing as the Prima Latina chugged along through the cut. The ship’s deck vibrated steadily, reassuringly. Jeffrey came to stand next to Rodrigo, and turned his face to the sun. He let its warm rays bathe his cheeks and forehead, his arms and neck, relaxing the tightness he felt inside. Then Jeffrey leaned against the dented, rusty railing beside Rodrigo.

For a long while, neither man spoke. Jeffrey just enjoyed the ride and the cigar, and savored the air and the sun and the view. It was remarkable how totally refreshed he felt.

Then Jeffrey saw the bow of a freighter up ahead, coming around the curve in the cut from the opposite direction.

“I think perhaps, Capitán, that soon you should go below.”

Jeffrey nodded.

Rodrigo sighed, and raised his cigar to the mountains. “To the fallen, to all those who made this great canal possible.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, raising his cigar, “to the fallen.”

“And to the fallen who fought to make my Cuba free.”

“Cuba Libre,” Jeffrey said, then hoped it wasn’t in bad taste.

Rodrigo looked at Jeffrey and his eyes were moist with joy and sorrow. “Thank you, my friend.” Rodrigo raised his cigar once more. “To success in your journey, wherever you are bound.”

“Thank you, Rodrigo,” Jeffrey said from the heart. “Thank you.”

Rodrigo paused. “And to the most recent fallen, Capitán, now in this latest fight we share to make the whole world free.”

“Yes,” Jeffrey said, thinking of Ilse. “To the fallen.”

TWENTY-ONE

On Voortrekker

VAN GELDER HAD the conn. Voortrekker was back in the all-concealing bottom terrain of the Mid–Indian Ocean Ridge. She continued on her journey toward the Australia–New Zealand–Antarctic Gap and the wide Pacific beyond. As before, Voortrekker moved slowly, scouting ahead with an off-board probe. Van Gelder looked up from the imagery feed when a messenger came to his console.

“The captain’s compliments, sir, and he requests your presence in his cabin.”

“Very well…Navigator, take the conn.”

Van Gelder stepped aft to ter Horst’s cabin.

“Come in, Gunther, come in.” Ter Horst switched from Afrikaans—the Boer tongue—to German. “I believe you already know Commander Bauer.”

Van Gelder nodded. Bauer was the head of the Kampfschwimmer team. He was tall and blond and handsome, slim-waisted, and seemed like a real tight-ass. Van Gelder disliked him on sight.

“I enjoyed our little swim together, First Officer,” Bauer said. “It is good we rescued your crewman from the water, ja? It is not so good about the killed Australians.” Bauer shot ter Horst an almost dirty look, as if to say, Be glad my marksmanship is better than yours, mein Kapitan. Van Gelder was taken aback. Although Bauer outranked Van Gelder—a mere lieutenant commander—and was equal in rank to ter Horst—a full commander—it still was customary to show respect for a warship’s senior officers.

Seated beside Bauer was one of the enlisted Kampfschwimmer, who didn’t say anything.

Ter Horst waved dismissively. “We can’t worry about that now.” Van Gelder thought ter Horst still looked sad, shaken, aged a bit, by the intelligence Bauer had brought with him, that Ilse Reebeck had died in an accident in America. Van Gelder was surprised to see this human side of his captain. He realized ter Horst’s relationship with Ilse Reebeck had been complex.

“Gunther, pull your chair over here, and let’s look at a chart.”

Van Gelder and Bauer sat where ter Horst showed them. Ter Horst typed on his laptop. A nautical chart appeared on the flat-screen TV on the wall of ter Horst’s cabin. It showed the South Pacific.

“This is the problem we face,” ter Horst said. “Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica. The so-called ANZA Gap…The waters north of Australia are much too shallow and constricted, butting up against Indonesia and New Guinea. That leaves us the Tasman Sea, between Australia and New Zealand, as one choice. The alternative is the part of the Southern Ocean between New Zealand and Antarctica.”

This much was obvious, and Van Gelder had already been thinking about which route Voortrekker might take. He knew ter Horst was leading up to something…and maybe testing him. “Captain, I think the Tasman Sea is the poorer choice. The sea-floor terrain is nicely broken, but the Tasman route is much narrower than the Southern Ocean portion of the gap.”

“Ja,” Bauer said. “Besides, the Tasman is flanked by hundreds of miles of enemy coast on both sides. Australia and New Zealand are strong with surface and airborne antisubmarine defenses.”

“Now we come to the Southern Ocean route,” ter Horst said. “Antarctica is nonmilitarized, by international treaty. That’s good for us. The weather there will be more severe than the Tasman Sea, which is bad for Allied antisubmarine ships and aircraft. The bottom terrain there also is good for us. Lots of fracture zones in which to hide.”

Ter Horst obviously wasn’t finished, so Van Gelder nodded. Van Gelder was starting to think, by the barely repressed smug grin on Bauer’s face, that Bauer knew more than Van Gelder did.

Ter Horst stood and touched the nautical chart. “One thing to bear in mind is that the waters south of New Zealand are protected by this chain of islands running northeast, the same direction we want to go.” Ter Horst reeled them off on his fingers. “Macquarie Island, Campbell Island, Antipodes Island, Bounty Island. The last of them is the little Chatham Island group, some five hundred nautical miles due east of New Zealand…. Now, south of them hereon the chart, in the Southwest Pacific Basin, the water is close to six thousand meters deep.”

“That’s deeper than our crush depth,” Van Gelder said.

“It is,” ter Horst said. Bauer smirked.

“The Allies aren’t dumb,” ter Horst went on. “See these red arcs marked on the map? These are their bottom-moored hydrophone lines, part of their vaunted worldwide SOSUS system. The Southwest Pacific Basin is wired for sound, and most of the hydrophones are down in water much too deep for Voortrekker to get at them.”

“And in such deep water,” Van Gelder said, “the deep sound channel will function perfectly.”

“Yes,” ter Horst said. “We’d need to pass right over three of the hydrophone lines to get fully through the gap.”

Van Gelder glanced at Bauer, then said, “I suppose we can’t just nuke a segment of the SOSUS here, like the Germans did in the North Atlantic right at the start of the war.” Bauer blinked.

“That’s quite true, Gunther. With such ideal sound propagation, quiet as we are, they’d hear us coming before one of our torpedoes could be in range of the hydrophones. The detonation of the warhead would reveal Voortrekker’s presence, within a circle much too tight for comfort.”

Van Gelder remembered the plastering the Ronald Reagan gave Voortrekker after Diego Garcia—running repairs were still going on in many parts of the ship. “So what do we do, Captain?”

Ter Horst turned to Bauer. Bauer turned to his enlisted man. “Stand up. Take off your shirt. Turn around.”

Van Gelder was surprised to see two white plugs embedded in the skin in the small of the Kampfschwimmer’s back. Each had a small valve, now sealed off.

“What are they?” Van Gelder said. “Gills?” He was half joking.

“Look more closely, please,” Bauer said.

Van Gelder realized the plugs were intravenous ports—the things used in hospitals for chronically ill patients who needed repeated blood transfusions or constant chemotherapy drips.

“What are they for?”

“With these,” Bauer said, “a man may dive to six thousand meters or more.” Twenty thousand feet.

“You can’t be serious. Not even mixed gases work below about six hundred meters. Six thousand? The pressure alone so deep…”

“We are not speaking of gases. We are speaking of breathing oxygenated saline solution, directly into the lungs, a fluid which self-equalizes to the metric tons of outside pressure.”

“I’ve heard of that idea,” Van Gelder said. “It’s an old idea. Getting the oxygen in was never the problem. The problem was getting the carbon dioxide out. Once the carbon dioxide level in the blood builds up, the person dies!”

“Yes, they die. They die if the carbon dioxide level builds up in the diver’s blood. We do not let the carbon dioxide build up.”

Van Gelder hesitated. “That’s what these implants are for?”

“Ja. The diver wears a backpack, which hooks up to the ports. Instead of tanks of gas, the backpack contains dialysis apparatus. There is, of course, also a form of rebreather oxygen supply. But the key, the great breakthrough by German science, is the perfection of the carbon dioxide dialysis process.”

Van Gelder turned to the enlisted man. “Have you really done this? In actual field trials, at such great depths?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“And how many others have died so far, doing this?”

The enlisted man looked at the floor.

“Decompression takes many, many hours,” Bauer continued firmly. “That is why we brought our portable one-man pressure chambers.”

“Those coffin-shaped crates?”

“Ja. A good disguise for the chambers, don’t you agree? To ship them through Sri Lanka, and load them on the Trincomalee Tiger, crated to look like coffins?”

Coffins is right, Van Gelder thought.

Ter Horst smiled. “Now you see our plan, Gunther.”

Van Gelder thought for a moment. “I do, and I don’t, Captain. If one of these divers goes down and cuts the SOSUS fiber optic with a pair of scissors instead of an atom bomb, the Allies will still know right away there’s a break in the line. Their equipment will tell them where. They’ll investigate. We’ll be found out.”

“Who said anything about a break?” Bauer interrupted. “A diver is useless unless he performs useful work. Four of my men, in total, bear these port implants. They work in teams of two.”

“They work in teams doing what?”

Ter Horst leaned over and touched Van Gelder on the knee. “This is the beautiful part.”

“We have a device which taps into the fiber-optic line,” Bauer said.

“I thought fiber optics can’t be tapped without detection.”

“No, they can. Even the Allies have been doing this for several years. But what good would it do your ship to listen on the Allied sound surveillance grid?”

“None! We don’t want the SOSUS to listen to us.”

“Ha!” Bauer was obviously very pleased with himself. “Our device does not listen. It replaces. It penetrates and intercepts the optic signals, and cancels them and substitutes signals we supply, from the device, using microlasers and a built-in high-speed computer. All without breaking the cable or interrupting the signal for even one moment.”

“But—”

“Yes, it involves extremely fine work, which is why men must be down there on site and use their hands…. And incase you’re concerned about the cold at six thousand meters, the men wear special dry suits lined with shielded plutonium. This gives a diver the manual dexterity of a brain surgeon, even spending hours in seawater near the freezing point.”

“You’re not serious. Plutonium?”

“The idea was tried by the Americans in the 1950s, you should know. Plutonium gives off constant heat, and keeps the divers toasty warm without an external power source that might be drained prematurely. The Americans abandoned the idea because they were afraid of nuclear-waste pollution.” Bauer laughed sarcastically. “We’re giving them plenty of such pollution every day, now, are we not?”

Van Gelder sensed that even ter Horst found Bauer overbearing.

Ter Horst cleared his throat. “So, Gunther, that’s how we’ll get through…. Terrific, don’t you think?”

“It’s amazing, Captain.”

“We send the Kampfschwimmer team ahead of us in our minisub. It’s small enough and quiet enough to escape detection, and also has plenty of range. In fact, Gunther, I would like you to go as copilot on the minisub, to monitor their efforts.”

That sounded interesting, and frightening. “Yes, Captain.”

“The divers leave the steel-hulled mini, with its shallow crush depth,” ter Horst said. “They descend on a lengthy cable, bringing with them a low-light camera with feed up to the minisub, so you can watch as the divers work. The device they attach to the hydrophone line overlays a false signal, background ocean noise and such, while we sneak past.”

“For years,” Bauer said, “the Americans have depended too much on the SOSUS to track other submarines. When we defeat their system this way, it will deal them quite a shock.”

“But eventually the enemy will suspect their incoming data is bad, Captain.”

“By then we’ll be long gone, sinking their tankers and carriers right and left…. Isn’t science a wonderful thing?”

TWENTY-TWO

On Challenger

THE PRIMA LATINA was supposed to stop in Balboa harbor, at the Pacific Ocean end of the Panama Canal, to let the canal pilot off. By strange coincidence, just then, the Prima Latina’s throttles jammed at full power. Rodrigo, sent below by the master to shut the main fuel-cutoff valves, took forever as he pretended to fumble all around the engine room in search of the proper controls. While harbor-traffic authorities warned other shipping by radio to stay clear, Prima Latina ran at full speed the whole length of the Gulf of Panama. The launch meant to pick up the harbor pilot had no choice but to chase in the freighter’s wake.

At last, at the very outlet of the gulf, the throttles were forced shut. The Prima Latina came to a halt. The pilot departed, cursing, swearing he would have the ship’s canal toll doubled for wasting so much of his valuable time.

All this Jeffrey knew because Rodrigo told him about it with a chuckle once the canal pilot was gone. The mechanical failure was faked, all part of the CIA’s plan—to get Challenger through the shallow gulf much faster, and then let the Prima Latina stop at sea without suspicion. Conveniently, the Gulf of Panama became the Pacific proper right at the edge of Central America’s continental shelf.

Standing on Challenger’s hull, inside the Prima Latina, Rodrigo gave Jeffrey a farewell gift packed with fresh fruit, Havana cigars, and several up-to-the-minute intelligence data disks. The two men made their warm good-byes, and Rodrigo took the crawl space out of the submarine hold. Soon the secret bottom hold doors swung open.

The continental-shelf edge here was steep. Challenger immediately dived. She was on her way, following the bottom in water ten thousand feet deep. The Prima Latina started up again, on course for her destination in Peru, her throttles restored by her engine-room crew to proper working order.

Jeffrey wondered if he would ever meet Rodrigo again, during or after the war. He was a very likable man, and Jeffrey found his sincerity rather touching.

Several hours later

Jeffrey had the conn. The ship was at battle stations. The control room was hushed. Bell, as fire-control coordinator, sat right next to Jeffrey. Kathy Milgrom’s technicians worked their sonar consoles, as she and her senior chief spoke. Lieutenant Sessions and Commodore Wilson stood at the navigation plot. COB and Meltzer manned the ship-control station; Harrison had the relief pilot’s seat. Every position in the control room was occupied, and other men stood in the aisles, to help or to watch and learn.

Challenger made flank speed again. The deck vibrated, consoles squeaked, and spring-loaded light fixtures jiggled.

Deep underwater, the volcanic rise of the Coiba Ridge loomed just to Challenger’s starboard. The mass of the Malpelo Ridge lay just to port. Challenger was about to exit the valley between the two ridges, into the flat, wide-open depths of the Panama Basin. Crossing the basin would be risky—it was like a vast undersea plain, or a drowned plateau; there were no terrain features there to mask the ship. Even moving slowly for stealth, Jeffrey’s vessel would be very exposed, almost naked.

But Jeffrey had no choice. The basin was the only possible route to the next long, rugged tectonic feature on the ocean floor, the Colon Ridge. The comfortably wide and jagged Colon Ridge ran southwest for a thousand miles, right into the all-concealing Galapagos Fracture Zone.

“Helm,” Jeffrey ordered, “slow to ahead one-third, make turns for four knots.”

Meltzer acknowledged. Jeffrey wanted to do a thorough sound search before they left the safe ridge valley to venture into the dangerous basin plain. Jeffrey’s immediate tactical problem was crossing the Panama Basin unnoticed but quickly. Using the Panama Canal might have cut several crucial days from his trip to the South Pacific, but there still was a long way to go.

The passive sonar search began. More cargo shipping quickly appeared on the plot.

“New passive sonar contact,” one of Kathy’s people announced. “Contact is submerged.”

A submarine. Is it one of ours? Is it hostile, and waiting for us?

“Contact classification?” Jeffrey demanded.

“A diesel running on batteries, Captain,” Kathy said. “Multiple screws, heavy cavitation and blade-rate effects.”

Jeffrey relaxed. He told Kathy to put the contact on the speakers. New sound filled the control room, a rhythmic churning with an underlying constant hiss.

Bell listened, then turned to Jeffrey. “It sure isn’t trying to hide, sir. Not making that kind of noise.”

This diesel boat was an old one. It was running so shallow that the suction of its screws created tiny vacuum bubbles which popped as they collapsed—cavitation hiss. The revolving screws were swishing distinctly as each blade cut through the wake turbulence from the diesel sub’s rudder and sternplanes. This caused a steady, throbbing, syncopated beat—blade rate.

“Can you identify it?” Jeffrey said.

“Contact appears to be a Peruvian Foxtrot,” Kathy said.

“No threat,” Bell said. “A thirdhand, third-rate, Third World neutral vessel. Obsolete sonars and fire control.”

“Obsolete is the word for it,” Jeffrey said. Foxtrot was the old NATO code name for a class of Russian diesel sub. A handful still traded on the global arms market. “Maybe it’s here on a training cruise.”

“Sir,” Kathy reported, “the Foxtrot is emitting now on superhigh-frequency active sonar.”

“Curious,” Jeffrey said. “They retrofitted something fancy.” Only the latest equipment could handle the one-thousand-kilohertz band, forty times above the top range of human hearing.

“Sir, the signal reads as a frequency-agile encrypted communications burst.” The digitized tones changed frequency thousands of times per second, to avoid detection by unwelcome guests.

“Who’s he talking to?” Bell said. The fact that Challenger heard the message burst at all suggested the Foxtrot was using an Allied frequency-hopping format routine. Those protocols were highly classified.

Jeffrey’s intercom light blinked. It was the lieutenant junior grade in charge of the secure communications room. The lieutenant asked for Commodore Wilson. Jeffrey was miffed.

“Commodore, it’s for you.”

Wilson took the handset and listened. “Very well.” He hung up.

“Captain, bring your ship to one-five-hundred feet.” Fifteen hundred feet. “Prepare to send your minisub to rendezvous underwater with the Foxtrot.”

Jeffrey and Bell had decided to send SEAL Chief Montgomery to pilot the minisub, with Ensign Harrison along as copilot-under-instruction. This would get Harrison started on qualifying as a minisub pilot that much sooner. David Meltzer was already a combat veteran in the ASDS mini, but he couldn’t be in two places at once, and Jeffrey needed Meltzer at the helm on Challenger.

Wilson had ordered that no one else go in the minisub, to allow for the weight of cargo being brought back from the Foxtrot. It appeared that Peru, like Cuba, was willing to quietly violate its own neutrality to aid the Allied cause.

Now, Jeffrey stood impatiently under the lockout trunk to Challenger’s streamlined in-hull minisub hangar. The mini had returned, and the docking procedures were almost complete.

Finally the lockout hatch swung open.

Jeffrey had a sudden awful feeling of hopeless longing and bitter regret. He realized he was dreaming, and was self-aware he was in the dream but couldn’t make it stop.

It was a dream he’d had once before, a dream that left him drained and depressed. It was a wish-fulfillment dream, and he knew it, and the dream went on and he couldn’t make it stop.

Standing in front of him, returned from the dead, was Ilse Reebeck. Not the real person, but a memory of her made real in his mind because of the weight of her loss.

Ilse Reebeck, in actuality cremated to ashes, was standing in front of him, whole, seeming alive. It was all a sick illusion, and Jeffrey knew it.

“What’s the matter?” the false shade of Ilse Reebeck said. “I thought you’d be glad to see me.”

Oh God, please make this stop. Jeffrey knew he’d wake up any moment in his stateroom, bathed in sweat.

“Jeffrey Fuller, what is wrong with you?”

This time, Chief Montgomery also appeared in the dream. He was smiling, as if to rub it in. Jeffrey resented this intrusion, even knowing Montgomery too wasn’t real. Jeffrey wanted to be alone with the shade of Ilse Reebeck, and not have someone else there. He wanted the dream to go on forever, for Ilse to be there standing near him, alive and breathing and warm. He wanted this as badly as he wanted the nightmare to end.

“Captain,” Montgomery said. “Captain!” The chief grabbed Jeffrey’s shoulders and shook him, and Jeffrey realized it wasn’t a dream.

Jeffrey opened and closed his mouth but words wouldn’t form. He leaned back against the corridor wall, and punched the bulkhead with his knuckles to make sure the metal was real and the pain in his fingers was real.

Jeffrey stared at Ilse. “I…Jesus, I thought you were dead.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“They told me you were dead.”

“That’s ridiculous. Who’s they?”

“Commodore Wilson.”

“Commodore Wilson?”

“Ilse, I think you better come to my stateroom.”

They walked down the passage together, leaving Montgomery to supervise unloading the cargo from the minisub. It seems he decided to leave it to me to tell Ilse she was “dead.” Montgomery’s warped sense of humor hasn’t mellowed any.

They came to Jeffrey’s cabin and went inside. Jeffrey was slightly embarrassed that he hadn’t made the bed.

“Why are you in the captain’s stateroom?”

Everything began to sink in. Jeffrey felt delight and affection and other emotions he couldn’t name. He also felt anger—no, rage, real rage that he’d been lied to by Wilson.

“I’m captain of Challenger now.”

“That’s wonderful!” Ilse gave Jeffrey a hug, a friendly hug of congratulations. Jeffrey pressed Ilse close and soaked in her body heat and felt her softness and smelled her hair—he also noticed the unmistakable reek of diesel, lingering on her from being in the Foxtrot. Ilse broke away.

“Why would they say I was dead? Oh…I think I know why. Jeffrey, after you and I were split up at the Pentagon, someone from Naval Intelligence told me the Axis is after me.”

“And your death was staged,” Jeffrey stated, explaining it to himself out loud. “It was all an act, to get the enemy off your tail.”

“Nobody told me a thing about it,” Ilse said. “I sure hope it works.”

“Lord, it’s good to see you again.”

Ilse gave Jeffrey a light kiss on the lips, but there was something too sisterly about it. There was nothing erotic, no inviting passion.

“How do you like my uniform?” she said.

“You’re passing as a lieutenant?”

Ilse looked insulted. “I am a lieutenant. I have a commission in the Free South African Navy.”

Jeffrey hesitated, pleased and happy for her, but also disturbed by her distance. “You always wanted something like this, didn’t you, Ilse? Official recognition, being a genuine part of things in other people’s eyes?”

“Obviously the admirals had a bunch of stuff in motion that they didn’t tell us about.”

“That puts it mildly.”

“I’m sorry I was cross with you at the Pentagon. I had time to think things over while I was training in the Aleutians.”

The Aleutians? Jeffrey didn’t like Ilse’s tone and the look on her face. His heart began to pound and he felt crestfallen.

“Jeffrey, I decided things between us weren’t working.”

“But—”

“No. Let me speak. I can’t get serious with someone unless I think that I could love them permanently. Not now, not anymore, not with this war. I’ve had too much hurt already, and my own feelings need to come first.”

“But I thought—”

“No. Just listen. You and I are from completely different worlds, on different continents. If we ever do win this war, I’ll go home to South Africa, to help rebuild. You’re a U.S. naval officer first and foremost. You’ll want to continue your career, as an American.…You’re good at what you do, Jeffrey. I’ve seen the way you come alive under fire, how there’s a drive and purpose in you when the bullets and torpedoes fly, and it keeps you from inner peace in quieter times…. I want to have children someday. I want, I need, the father of my children to be someone stable and sensible, not a man who loves the smell of gunsmoke and has something close to a death wish in him in battle.”

Jeffrey stood there, living a different sort of waking nightmare. Ilse had come back, only to reject him. The worst of it was, everything she said made sense.

“Now I need to go. I need to hit the head and freshen up. We shouldn’t even be in here alone together like this. People could talk. I’m a naval officer too now, for the duration of the war, and I’m a member of this crew, and you’re my captain…. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”

TWENTY-THREE

WILSON GLARED AT Jeffrey. “How dare you come in here and speak to me like this?”

“Sir, you lied to me. You told me someone whom you knew I cared about was dead. You let me suffer for days, and you knew all along that Ilse Reebeck was alive.”

“Yes, I knew. And no, I didn’t tell you. Your behavior right now is perfect proof of why.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“See that dressing mirror? Look at yourself.”

Jeffrey’s face was red and his fists were balled and his posture was antagonistic.

“What do you see?”

“I’m angry. I have every right to be. You violated the code of honor between naval officers, sir. You lied to me.”

Wilson took off his reading glasses. “Do you want to know what I see when I look at you right now, Captain Fuller? I see someone who can’t control his emotions when he needs to. I see someone who cannot grasp the larger picture. I see a commander who if he keeps this up is going to stay in that rank for however much longer he survives.”

Jeffrey balled his fists tighter, and dug in his feet. Anger helped—it filled the hollow aching in his heart. He knew it wasn’t smart, showing such anger to Commodore Wilson, and Jeffrey fought to calm down. He saw it was too late—he’d really set off Wilson this time.

Wilson lectured him sternly. “For once, will you please look at things from the whole navy’s point of view? Do you think I’m some kind of sadist? Do you think I kept the truth from you for the fun of it? And goddamn it to hell, do you think it was easy for me to see your grief and have to keep quiet?”

“No, Commodore, I’m sorry. I just don’t get it.”

“Captain, Captain, Captain. The Axis had to believe that Ilse Reebeck was dead. We owe that much to her for what she’s done for us already. We owe it to ourselves because her skills have become irreplaceable to this vessel, including her intimate knowledge of Jan ter Horst’s mind.”

This hurt Jeffrey a lot, hearing ter Horst’s name, Ilse Reebeck’s lover for two years. Jeffrey remembered that that love affair had ended only because of the war, when ter Horst betrayed Ilse’s family. The same Ilse dumped Jeffrey, after barely two months, of her own accord. The worst of it was, Wilson had no idea what Ilse had just said to Jeffrey. “So you set me up.”

“Yes, if you want to be that crude about it, I did. Commander Fuller, you have the world’s worst poker face and you’re an absolutely terrible liar. These traits make you an ideal leader in undersea combat, because the crew respects and trusts you implicitly, and inside our own hull the enemy cannot read your face. But if you had known while we were still in New London that Miss Reebeck was really alive, there is no way you could have behaved convincingly as if she were dead.”

“But—”

“Be quiet. We have no idea how badly New London is penetrated by spies.”

“Okay. Okay…Then why didn’t you tell me after we’d sailed?”

“Christ, do I have to spell it out for you at every step? I already told you there was the constant danger we might suffer a mechanical casualty, or be damaged in combat, and need to do an emergency blow and abandon ship and be picked up by God knows what neutral ship or Russian spy trawler.”

“I—”

“Miss Reebeck would still have been safe, and she could’ve done for another American submarine what she will do for us.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. What about you, sir? What if you’d been picked up by the Russians or Germans and tortured? You’re most senior, they’d single you out.”

“If I deemed the situation warranted it, I was to make sure I wasn’t taken alive, because of all the things I know, not just about Miss Reebeck…Unlike you, Captain, I have a wife and three young children. So how do you think I felt about that part of my orders?”

Jeffrey took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly. “I feel pretty dumb, Commodore.”

“You should. And that’s the other reason I didn’t tell you Ilse was okay. You needed to learn the hard way that you simply must get a better handle on your emotions. Just because an enemy like Jan ter Horst can’t see your face underwater doesn’t mean he cannot read your mind. He’s met you in combat before, and I’ll guarantee you he’s read a full report on your action against the Germans.”

“But how—”

“A few men got off in their minisub.”

“I didn’t realize that, Commodore.”

“You didn’t need to know, and now you do. In your very aggressiveness your battle tactics are becoming predictable. You’re so predictable I knew before we left New London you’d storm in here the minute you found out Ilse Reebeck was alive.”

Jeffrey felt himself blushing.

“Get predictable in battle and you’re going to get yourself and me and this ship and your whole crew killed. Worse, such continued impulsiveness will keep you from being a proper team player. My flagship captain had better be a team player!”

Jeffrey stared at the overhead. After I made the connection between my relationships with Wilson and my father, I swore I’d take the chip off my shoulder and stop second-guessing authority figures. I swore I’d be a good subordinate and show them proper deference.

Now I’ve gone and made a total mess of it.

“I take it you have nothing further to say?”

“No, sir, except to apologize.”

“Good. And if there is the slightest feeling in you that this is some kind of macho contest between you and ter Horst over Ilse Reebeck, push that far down in the back of your mind and put a huge mental boulder over it and leave it there forever, because otherwise such thoughts will cloud your judgment fatally.”

“Understood, Commodore.” If Wilson only knew.

Wilson looked Jeffrey right in the eyes. “I’m not sure you really do understand…. How do you think the Allies are going to win this war?”

Jeffrey was taken aback. “Sir, that’s much too open-ended a question to respond to meaningfully.”

“Commanders who think that way don’t make full captain. How are we going to strike at the seat of German power, in the heart of Europe?”

“We need to send in ground troops. I suppose another landing eventually, like D-Day.”

“With nuclear-powered U-boats exercising sea denial against us in the North Atlantic? With enemy tactical nukes poised to wipe out any amphibious force that tries to cross the English Channel?”

“It’s a very difficult question to answer, sir.”

“The answer, Captain, is that we do not go across the Atlantic, and do not attempt a force buildup in the U.K. that would be a sitting duck. Our only prayer of bringing the Germans to their knees without risking mutual nuclear annihilation is to come at Berlin from the opposite direction.”

“Another eastern front? But Russia’s pro-Axis, Commodore. They’d never come in on our side. We’ll be lucky if they stick to the phony neutrality they’re practicing so far.”

“Did I say Russia?…Think about coming in under Russia, well south of Russia. The old Spice Trade route. Stage troops first to Australia, then send land armies through Malaysia, India, Pakistan, the Middle East, then Turkey. Advance with well-dispersed divisions, along a very broad front, with Allied navies protecting the flank on the Indian Ocean coast. Use tanks and personnel carriers equipped with bulldozer blades, so they can dig themselves giant foxholes quickly and escape the heat and blast of battlefield atom bombs…. Drive up into Imperial Germany that way.”

“But most of those countries are neutral, or hate us, or are at each other’s throats.”

“Now you see what’s really at stake here. Now you see what Voortrekker’s push really means. If she cuts America’s shipping lines of communication to Asia, then the Hindu and Moslem nations along the Spice Trade route will not be very inclined to help us, and may well be tempted to join the Axis to share in the spoils of our defeat…and we’ll have no way to ship our troops and vehicles over there anyway.”

“But won’t Voortrekker just run out of ammo? Ter Horst will be declawed.”

“Once again Commander Fuller does not use his head. How did we cross the canal?”

“Okay…. If we can do it in Prima Latina, the Axis may have clandestine tenders too.”

“If we had forever to work with, Voortrekker’s thrust wouldn’t be such a decisive threat. But time, the initiative, the psychological edge, are all on the enemy side here. Building on their recent string of military successes, Axis attachés and sympathizers will press Asian countries to get off the fence very soon, before we can recover any strategic equilibrium. If they penetrate the SOSUS net in the ANZA Gap somehow, and then outflank my undersea battle group, all may be lost at the outset. Just one more grand gesture by ter Horst, say an attack on Pearl Harbor, might be all it takes…. Now do you see what I mean, Captain, that you need to do a better job of grasping the big picture and keeping your cool?”

“Yes, Commodore.”

Wilson rubbed his eyes, then looked at Jeffrey very sternly. “Remember, I too have a boss, and he has a boss, and he has a boss, all the way up the ladder. You need to have more faith in the system. You ought to know by now that things always happen for reasons, as obscure as the reasons may seem.” Wilson paused, then got nasty. “Have I gotten through to you this time?”

Jeffrey nodded.

“Good. Then kindly leave my office.”

Jeffrey turned and opened the door.

“Oh, and Captain.” Wilson’s tone was suddenly perfectly normal, as if the whole conversation had never taken place.

I wish I had his self-control…. Aha. Again he’s trying to teach me—by example—provided I’m willing to learn.

“Sir?” Jeffrey said in as even and polite a tone of voice as he could muster.

Wilson actually smiled, fleetingly, as if a grin from him were precious coin and he tightly held the purse strings.

“Captain, there are other things I know that now you also need to know. Arrange a mission briefing in your wardroom in one hour, please. Invite the SEAL team leaders Clayton and Montgomery, and your key officers, including Lieutenant Reebeck.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Several days later, south of New Zealand, aboard Voortrekker’s minisub

VAN GELDER WATCHED and listened, amazed that all this was happening and that he was here to see.

“I repeat,” the Kampfschwimmer chief ordered into the mike with some impatience. “Confirm you are on the bottom.”

The German chief, squashed in standing up, looked past Van Gelder’s shoulder as Van Gelder sat in the minisub’s copilot seat. Commander Bauer was the pilot, elbow to elbow on Van Gelder’s left.

The chief read the display screens in the mini’s cramped and dimly lit control compartment. They showed the data feed from his divers now fully six kilometers deep under the mini. The fiber-optic data line and the strong lift cable to which it was braided were the only links to the pair of men in the unimaginable depths below. The mini itself hovered submerged at only fifty meters. It was Van Gelder’s job as copilot to hold it at that depth, rigged for ultraquiet.

Van Gelder saw an acknowledgment appear from the divers, typed letter by letter on one of the screens.

“As you notice,” Bauer whispered to Van Gelder, “the normal initial reaction of someone on the bottom is a slowing of responses, both mental and physical. This is caused by the disorienting environment as much as by the seawater pressure. It passes quickly as the men adjust.”

The divers could receive speech over the fiber-optic line. But because their helmets and lungs were filled with the oxygen-bearing fluid, they could only respond by typing on small keyboards among their equipment. The men seemed cocky enough to Van Gelder when they suited up in the mini, but Bauer’s stiff, clipped manner betrayed his anxiety for their safety.

Van Gelder felt fear too, and not just for the human-fish divers. Divers and minisub both were literally on top of an enemy hydrophone sound-surveillance line.

Another screen activated in front of Van Gelder, but at first showed nothing from below. Then an eerie image appeared: glows and flashes reaching into the middle distance in the picture. Bioluminescence, even that far down.

“Confirmed your camera working in low-light-level mode,” the German chief stated.

All the way down there, a bright floodlight suddenly lit a section of the sea floor.

“Still good feed from the camera,” the chief said into the mike. Again a painstakingly typed acknowledgment came back.

“We require constant visual contact,” Bauer said. “As their topside support, we must see to help resolve any problems they face.” One of the mini’s screens gave vital-sign telemetry from each diver’s body. Bauer kept a careful eye on his men.

Van Gelder studied the picture. The water was clear out to only ten meters or so; anything beyond was obscured by murk and by back-glare from the floodlight. Particles of organic detritus from high above drifted past the camera slowly. The sea floor itself was uneven but mostly flat, covered with muddy ooze that looked gray-tan on the full-color image.

“Bottom anchor positioned” appeared on the screen. “Pressure capsules in place for return to minisub.” The camera swiveled to show the special anchor at the far end of the strength cable. Clipped to the cable were the two one-man transfer capsules—they still reminded Van Gelder of coffins.

“Very well,” the chief responded. “Remember, work quietly.”

Van Gelder used his throttle and his joystick more frequently now, gingerly holding the minisub over the divers so the cable wouldn’t be overstressed, or too slack, or worst of all get dragged along the bottom. The neutrally buoyant cable floated weightlessly through the water, but ocean currents tugged at it constantly. The currents were not very strong, but their speed and direction varied at different depths—Van Gelder had his hands full, even with help from the navigation computer. Given more than six thousand meters of cable played out, the moving water’s drag force was considerable.

There are several crewmen on Voortrekker who could do this as well as or better than I. Why did ter Horst send me? Am I here because he only trusts Bauer so far? Why do I keep feeling Bauer still hasn’t told me everything yet?

A new message came on the screen. “Deploying tools and equipment.”

Van Gelder saw an arm move in front of the camera for a moment, as one of the divers did something. The arm was swathed in silvery material like a space-suit sleeve, and Van Gelder reminded himself the suit was lined with plutonium. The image shifted as the first diver repositioned the camera. The other diver walked by, into the distance, his back to the lens. The man moved slowly against the resistance of the water. Van Gelder saw the backpack which fed oxygen to the man’s lungs, and which also removed waste gases by diverting and processing blood through the implanted surgical ports.

The diver carried heavy equipment cases with both hands. His backpack and his cases all trailed tethers back to the cable anchor, so nothing and no one could get lost in the mud or the murk. The man stepped very carefully, to keep silent and not spoil visibility. Each footprint stirred up ooze, making a small cloud. The mild bottom current carried the puffs of ooze away.

Van Gelder felt as if he were watching men walk on the moon. The world these divers had entered was so alien and dangerous, they might as well be on the far side of the moon. They worked in seawater under pressure at a staggering six hundred atmospheres—enough to crush Voortrekker’s hull in an instant. Tons and tons of icy ocean squeezed their bodies from every side, and squeezed their body tissues from inside too.

“Enemy SOSUS feed line located” came on the screen.

Simultaneously, on Challenger East of New Zealand

Challenger made her mostly-flank-speed crossing of the Pacific unmolested. She hugged crags in the rugged bottom terrain along the way for stealth. For even better concealment, and in consultation with Ilse, Jeffrey had the ship stay under the complex thermal and salinity layers of the El Niño current as much as he could. During the days-long transit to reach the area of operations, Jeffrey made sure constant drills and training and maintenance kept the crew on their toes and prepared the ship for battle.

Then, based on specific directions from Wilson, Challenger made her rendezvous with the four Australian Collins-class diesel subs.

That rendezvous had taken place a few hours ago. Now, Jeffrey glanced around the wardroom—his wardroom, the wardroom of the squadron flagship, Challenger. Commodore Wilson was about to adjourn the formal commanding officers’ conference.

The captains’ conference at the start of a squadron’s working together was a time-honored naval tradition. The only difference today was that the warships were all submarines, submerged for stealth, and the captains came to the flagship riding Challenger’s minisub.

The captains of the Australian boats seemed confident and determined. They’d just spent a good deal of time reviewing Wilson’s basic combat doctrine. They critiqued his system of signals to control the undersea battle group, and went over his scheme for exploiting vital early warning data from the SOSUS grid. These were the topics Wilson, Lieutenant Sessions, and Jeffrey had sweated over for days.

Everything looked great on paper, and all the major questions by the diesel skippers were answered. They appeared to understand Wilson’s intentions very clearly. The meeting began to break up.

But Jeffrey kept remembering the weaknesses of the Collins boats. He knew that in the impending clash with Voortrekker they were expendable. As Jeffrey looked around the room, he wondered how many of the visiting captains and their crews would still be alive at the end of the week. He liked them, these open, expressive, capable Australians, and he wondered if at the end of the week he would be alive to mourn their loss.

On Voortrekker’s minisub

“Diver Two,” the Kampfschwimmer chief said, “your reaction time is slowing. Increase your nutrient flow.”

Van Gelder saw Diver Two turn toward the camera and make a quick hand signal for agreement. Then he touched the controls on the front of his suit.

“One great advantage of these dialysis backpacks,” Bauer said, “is since we’re already hooked up into their veins, we can feed the divers intravenously while they work. This gives them tremendous endurance.” He looked Van Gelder arrogantly in the eyes. “Have you ever tried to eat underwater wearing scuba gear?”

“No. I’ve rarely skin-dived at all.”

Bauer looked contemptuous…or displeased. Van Gelder thought best to ignore it—this was the worst possible time to rise to Bauer’s baiting. Bauer seemed to read his mind, and seemed satisfied.

“Diver One,” the chief said into the mike, “why have you stopped working?”

Diver One didn’t respond. Van Gelder saw him adjusting his suit controls.

Bauer checked the diver’s vital signs. He frowned. He grabbed the mike from the chief. “Diver One, your oxygen mix is too high. Reduce your oxygen mix.”

Diver One awkwardly waved an acknowledgment. He kept bending forward, fiddling with his chest-mounted controls.

“Diver One, your oxygen mix is still rising. Reduce your oxygen mix.”

Van Gelder worried that something was going wrong. He knew that for any diver, however and whatever they breathed, too much oxygen under pressure caused convulsions. At six thousand meters, the margin between life and death was very thin.

“Diver Two,” Bauer said, “assist Diver One. Check his backpack for him.”

Diver Two moved closer to Diver One. They talked using hand signals Van Gelder didn’t understand. Diver One’s movements were getting jerky.

“Diver One, calm down,” Bauer ordered.

Diver One’s arms and legs started shaking.

“Two, get One calmed down. Lower his oxygen level, fast.”

Two grabbed One and worked the controls on One’s chest.

The chief leaned past Van Gelder and pointed at the bio-data screen. “Level still rising, Commander.”

Bauer took a deep breath. “We have an equipment problem.”

Diver Two turned to the camera and shrugged.

“This is what I was afraid of,” Bauer said to Van Gelder. “With backpacks we can’t buddy-breathe, like sharing an air tank mouthpiece. Diver One is in trouble.”

Diver One began to shake uncontrollably. He typed something on his keyboard but it was gibberish.

“Two,” Bauer urged, “get One into his pressure capsule. We have to bring him up.”

But Two began to fight with One, a weird wrestling match in slow motion shown starkly in the floodlights.

“He’s become irrational, sir,” the chief stated, belaboring the obvious.

Suddenly Diver One broke away from Two and unclipped his tether. He jettisoned his weight belt and started for the surface.

“One, One!” Bauer ordered. “Return to the bottom now.”

Diver One was out of the camera picture already, on his way up, propelled by too much positive buoyancy that would just get worse as he rose. Diver Two pointed upward and held out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“Two, stay on the bottom.”

“He’ll die,” Two typed on his keyboard.

“Two, stay on the bottom.” Bauer spoke soothingly now, but Van Gelder could tell his effort was forced. “Finish the job yourself…. You’re almost done, you can do it,” Bauer coaxed.

“But my buddy?” Two typed poignantly.

“Leave him to us.”

Two shook his head. “No.”

“I said leave him to us. There’s nothing more you can do for him. Finish the job you both started.”

Diver Two hesitated, then acknowledged reluctantly. He trudged away from the camera and went back to work, installing the equipment that fed false data into the Allied SOSUS net.

The chief made sure the mike to the bottom was off. “If One’s body reaches the surface, sir,” the chief said to Bauer, “we’ll leave a sign for the enemy that we’re here.”

“I know,” Bauer said. “You and your dive buddy get suited up.” An enlisted Kampfschwimmer tended equipment in the back of the minisub. He and the chief donned their Draeger rebreather scuba rigs. They went into the mini’s central swimmer lockout sphere and dogged the heavy hatches. Van Gelder did not envy them their task.

“Copilot,” Bauer ordered, “come to ten meters depth.”

“Ten meters, aye aye.” Van Gelder was glad to have something to do, yet he dreaded what would happen next. As he went shallow, the minisub pitched and rolled heavily. The outside seas were rising as a major storm approached. The mini’s motion was much rougher than usual, and the trim was unstable, because of the drag load against the stern-mounted winch reel caused by the long cable played out below. The cable yanked against the back of the minisub each time a passing wave surged and heaved. Van Gelder prayed the noise wouldn’t give them away.

Holding as close to ten meters depth as he could, Van Gelder worked his control panel. He raised the air pressure in the lockout sphere to a mild two atmospheres, to equalize it with the outside water. Before the chief and his dive buddy could exit through the bottom hatch to search for Diver One, Van Gelder heard a desperate banging against the minisub’s hull.

Bauer used the intercom into the lockout sphere. “For God’s sake get him inside and get him quiet.” If Diver Two hadn’t completed the main part of his work, any noise One made would reveal their presence to enemy forces. “Copilot,” Bauer snapped, “you have the conn.” Van Gelder acknowledged. Bauer stood up.

When Diver One was in the sphere and the bottom hatch was shut, Van Gelder dropped the pressure back to one atmosphere. Bauer opened the hatch from the control compartment into the sphere. Van Gelder, both hands on the helm controls, glanced aft through the hatchway.

Diver One was lying on his back, twitching and jerking. His space suit had inflated like a balloon. It failed at the helmet joint, and saline solution sprayed explosively. Some of it squirted forward and drenched Van Gelder. He looked at himself and saw his clothes were tinged with mucus and blood—from Diver One’s rupturing lungs. Diver One wheezed on the deck, struggling for breath like a drowning asthmatic. To Van Gelder the sound was oppressive, sickening.

“Get him into the spare capsule,” Bauer snapped. “If we can re-equalize him to six thousand meters—”

“He’ll die anyway,” the chief snapped back. “His backpack’s wrecked. He’s had it.” Diver One gave a strangled burbling moan. Van Gelder had no choice but to listen as he worked his helm controls. He glanced aft again, in spite of himself.

Diver One spit out more saline solution and blood. His eyes bulged and his face began to swell. At six kilometers down, water was compressible, by about three percent. Now all that water infused throughout One’s body expanded back relentlessly. Even his nose and ears seemed much too big.

Van Gelder heard a crackling, crunching sound.

“Jesus,” the chief said. “His bones. They’re shattering from inside.” One rolled onto his stomach, in agony, then rolled again, flat on his back. The crackling noise went on.

Diver One writhed and tried to scream, but only a choking gurgle came out now. His tongue became horribly swollen, protruding from his mouth. His jaw worked spastically, and he chewed right through his tongue. The end of it plopped to the deck—Van Gelder could no longer watch. He wished he could release the controls and cover his ears.

He heard One’s joints begin to pop apart, with a ripping as tendons gave way; the water in One’s tissue compartments continued to force its way out. One’s limbs flailed more insanely. His gasping, hacking cough grew weak.

Soon there was stillness and quiet, except for the survivors’ heavy breathing, and the sound of bloody water dripping from the bulkheads. The smell of it, and of body waste, made Van Gelder nauseous.

“Be careful with the backpack,” Bauer said. “We’ll need to take it apart and see what went wrong.”

The chief and the enlisted Kampfschwimmer nodded.

“Put him in the spare pressure capsule,” Bauer said very coldly. “We’ll use it as a body bag…. His suit looks mostly intact, but check for plutonium leakage.”

Simultaneously, on Challenger

Gentle snoring came from the topmost bunk in the little stateroom, but Ilse tried to ignore it. She was too busy cramming manuals and schematics at the small fold-down desk.

Yes, Kathy Milgrom snored—but she was Ilse’s best friend and confidante, so it was hard to feel annoyed. Besides, Kathy said that Ilse often cried or moaned when she was sleeping. Ilse had a lot, maybe too much, on her mind.

Ilse paused to rub her tired eyes. She stood for a minute and stretched, to get the kinks out of her back. She glanced longingly at her neatly made bunk, the middle one, under Kathy’s—the bottom one in the three-man stateroom was crammed with boxed supplies for the ship’s office, since every cubic inch of spare space inside Challenger’s hull was needed for storage.

Ilse sat down again. She knew she really ought to turn in and get some rest. But late-night hard work disguised her chronic insomnia…and insomnia held back the awful dreams. Ilse tried to look on the bright side.

Only another day and I’m off. It’ll be good to get away from Jeffrey and the ship. I never expected that being here would be so awkward for me now.

At least I get to do something interesting and fun, well behind friendly lines, in a supporting role for a change. I’ve had enough of being packed off with Jeffrey Fuller and the SEALs, to get shot at with bullets and nuclear torpedoes.

Chatham Island. A quaint English country village, lost on a tiny dot of land in the vast Pacific, in the middle of bloody nowhere. A thousand people, two hundred thousand sheep, and a minor link in the SOSUS system. Who’d ever launch atomic bombs at us?

On Voortrekker’s minisub

Van Gelder held the minisub at fifty meters depth, where the surface wave effects were gentler. By now he was drenched in sweat as well as the saline laced with another man’s blood. Diver Two was finishing on the bottom, packing away equipment and erasing the last traces that Kampfschwimmer had ever been there. The black boxes that hacked the Allied SOSUS were well concealed in the ooze, buried under the feeder line to which they were attached. So far, the false data seemed to be working—Van Gelder saw no immediate sign on the mini’s sonars that the enemy knew they were there.

Van Gelder watched Diver Two on the image from the bottom camera. Van Gelder was glad that Diver Two was unable to speak from below. He didn’t want to hear the fear and grief in the man’s voice, because it would remind him of his own. The loss of a diver always traumatized the whole team. Van Gelder knew this, but to be involved firsthand was a very hard blow. When Diver Two moved close enough to the camera, Van Gelder could see his facial features, obviously distraught. At least with his head in the helmet surrounded by fluid, it wouldn’t show if he was shedding tears. It must be horribly lonely, to be so alone down there—to have no choice but keep working, following fixed procedures step by step, despite whatever emotions tore you apart inside.

Diver Two attached the last of his things to the lift cable. He switched off the floodlight, and the scene darkened with sudden finality.

Now the diver worked by feel. In a few moments the camera switched to active laser line-scan mode. The crisp black-and-white picture showed he’d entered the personnel-transfer pressure capsule, and brought the camera in with him. This way the minisub would maintain full communications as the lift cable brought up the man, with his equipment and the empty second capsule. The pressure capsule would keep Diver Two immersed at six hundred atmospheres, to avoid the horrible uncontrolled decompression effects that had killed his buddy. The capsule, still pressurized, would be loaded into the mini, and then brought back to Voortrekker. Once there, a proper decompression schedule would be used. Dialysis would remove metabolic wastes directly from Diver Two’s blood, since it was impossible to urinate or defecate until he could leave the transfer capsule many long hours from now.

“Ready for lift,” Diver Two typed.

“Lifting now,” Bauer answered. He flicked a switch. Van Gelder fought his controls as the lengthy cable began to reel in. This process started new forces, which buffeted the mini.

“Don’t resist it,” Bauer told Van Gelder. “Let us drift when you can. Don’t overstress the winch. Just watch out for our crush depth.”

Van Gelder concentrated hard. He could tell the storm topside was strengthening, because the surface wave effects were getting worse.

The mini dipped unpredictably. Van Gelder shoved the throttle forward, using full speed ahead on the propeller to keep from being pulled too deep. He was sweating heavily now—this was the most difficult piloting job he’d ever faced. The steel mini had nowhere near Voortrekker’s depth capability. If he wasn’t careful, they’d all pay the same price as Diver One but in the opposite manner: an implosion. The minisub’s hull creaked.

The drag effects of the cable began to die down, as the bulk of the line was wound around the silent hydraulic winch reel. Van Gelder tried to relax. On sonar he heard the sound of a sperm whale feeding.

Unexpectedly, currents and drag once more took charge of the lift cable, with all the equipment and capsules—and Diver Two—dangling at its end. Van Gelder realized what must be happening. A deep-ocean storm front, an undersea current related to the surface tempest, was fast moving in.

From the increased resistance and shearing forces, the winch cable suddenly jammed. The mini was much too deep now for Draeger divers to go out and fix it. The mini began to be pulled down even more.

Van Gelder took drastic steps. Flank speed did no good. Pumping out the safety tank, to get more buoyancy, did no good. Van Gelder watched the depth meter as it ran into the warning zone, and then the danger zone. The mini’s hull creaked again.

Bauer, tight-lipped, said, “Do something.” An implosion would be so noisy it could be heard easily on the next line of the Allied SOSUS grid, which still received real data.

Van Gelder tilted the mini’s nose steeply toward the surface, and used his propeller and all his side thrusters to get the greatest force possible aimed straight up. His own weight fell against the back of his seat. His legs were higher than his head, and blood rushed to his brain. He began to have a red-out.

The mini was pulled down more, by the slow but powerful storm current. The hull creaked even louder. Van Gelder reached for his last resort, the emergency blow handles. Even these might not be enough. Even if they were, the noise would be deafening, and the mini would bob to the surface like a cork, in plain view of enemy lookouts and radar. He began to think the unthinkable—that he would have to dump the cable winch and abandon Diver Two.

At the last second the propeller began to bite against the down-force, and the mini started to drive toward shallower depth. Van Gelder leveled off. But the winch reel still was jammed. The end of the line, with Diver Two in his capsule, was stuck down at a crushing one thousand meters.

“We have to get the cable freed,” Bauer said. The chief and his man prepared to make another diving sortie. Van Gelder forced the minisub as shallow as he dared to go, without broaching in the heavy seas. The two Kampfschwimmer locked out through the sphere. They went to work on the winch towed behind the minisub. On sonar, the sperm whale was much closer now. The clicking noises the whale made sounded angry.

There was a hard jerk against the cable, jarring the minisub badly. Abruptly, the jerking stopped.

“You’ve got to hold us level and still,” Bauer said.

“I know.” If the chief and his assistant couldn’t fix the winch, and they couldn’t improvise a different way to lift Diver Two that last kilometer against the strong deep undertow, Two might yet need to be abandoned to his fate—a slow and horrible death.

“What’s wrong?” Diver Two typed.

“Just a surface storm,” Bauer said. “We’ll have you up in a moment.” He eyed the diver’s vital signs—Van Gelder could see the man was alarmed. “Let me look at you,” Bauer said into the mike.

Diver Two held the camera toward his face. Van Gelder watched him open and close his mouth, breathing fluid instead of air, more rapidly than he should.

The cable jerked again, and the camera was jostled from Diver Two’s hands.

“Something out there,” Diver Two typed. He retrieved the camera and aimed it out the viewport of his capsule, still in laser line-scan mode. Van Gelder saw a huge tentacle wave by, covered with suction pads larger than a man’s head. Then Van Gelder caught a glimpse of a very large fin.

It’s a giant squid, Van Gelder realized, attracted or confused by the commotion. They live here, south of New Zealand, in very deep water. Sperm whales eat them. That fin was the sperm whale’s fin. The squid and the whale were fighting, and both were as long and heavy as the minisub itself. Diver Two was caught in the middle, defenseless.

Bauer signaled to the chief outside to hurry fixing the winch. The mini jerked again. Turbulence thrown by the squid and whale in mortal combat was jarring against the lift cable, and shaking all the gear at its end. Sometimes the squid or the whale crashed into the cable with their bodies.

“Two’s panicking,” Bauer said between clenched teeth. Van Gelder saw he was right. Two’s vital signs, the tremoring as he held the camera, his garbled words on his keyboard, all made this clear. Bauer grabbed the mike and tried to calm Diver Two down.

A fragment of tentacle flew by the viewport, vivid on Van Gelder’s picture—the whale was biting the squid. The huge whale flashed by the capsule with its lower jaw gaping wide open. Van Gelder saw an endless row of large teeth, and then a giant, intelligent eye. The whole bulk of the sperm whale drove past the capsule. The force of its tail flukes thrashing the water made the capsule spin in dizzying circles.

Diver Two switched on his floodlight and shined it out the viewport, to try to scare away the battling, maddened undersea creatures. This was a big mistake. Before Bauer could order him to stop, the squid and the whale both noticed the light, and attacked.

The last thing Van Gelder saw on the picture was a close-up blur of tentacles and hard, sharp, beaklike squid mouth parts, of gnashing whale teeth and smashing fins. On the sonar he heard a crunching noise, and the picture went totally blank. Bauer cursed.

The load on the cable was instantly lighter. On sonar, Van Gelder could hear the squid and the whale still fighting. The sperm whale won, and Van Gelder heard more crunching, tearing, chewing sounds that made him sick.

The winch at last unjammed. The cable reeled in quickly. But the end was a ragged stump. There was no sign of any pressure capsule, no sign of Diver Two. The chief and his man hurried back into the mini before the sperm whale could decide to come shallow and hunt for more rivals or prey. Bauer went aft to assist them. Van Gelder, hands trembling, steered the minisub back to Voortrekker.

TWENTY-FIVE

The next day

JEFFREY SAT TENSE and worried at the command console in Challenger’s control room. Outwardly, in order to do his duty and show good leadership to his crew, he made sure he exuded nothing but calm and confidence. The cost of this internal-versus-external conflict was a tight knot in Jeffrey’s stomach, and gradually increasing fatigue. He hoped to grab another catnap soon.

But not right now. Commodore Wilson stood sternly in the aisle, supervising as the diesel boats reported in. The Royal Australian Navy submarines Farncomb, Rankin, Sheean, and Waller were holding for now to the east of Chatham Island, arrayed in a line.

Each vessel was thirty-five miles from the next. The four Collins-class subs created a scouting and search line a hundred miles across, under Wilson’s control. Orders and reports would be passed up and down the line using covert acoustic communication bursts. At least that was the plan.

The Australians would listen on passive sonar, ping on active when needed, launch atomic torpedoes, and also serve as decoys and lures—all while Challenger lurked very deep, to catch ter Horst unawares and destroy Voortrekker in a pincers.

But the most iffy part of the plan was that the diesel boats couldn’t cover great distances quickly. To cruise very far at all they had to snorkel and run their main engines, which would ruin strategic stealth. Specific targeting data—ter Horst’s route of approach, Voortrekker’s course and speed—had to come well in advance, from the SOSUS network. The first of the three SOSUS lines guarding the ANZA Gap lay several hundred miles to the south, hopefully far enough away to give Wilson and his squadron adequate warning to get into proper position for the attack. A real-time downlink to the squadron from the main SOSUS land-based processing center, while Challenger stayed concealed and mobile, was Ilse Reebeck’s job. This downlink was new, and experimental.

Diego Garcia had proved to the Pentagon that when facing Jan ter Horst, surface ships and planes and depth bombs simply weren’t enough. Jeffrey knew full well that the best platforms to use against any sub were other submarines. But Voortrekker was so quiet that the SOSUS data would be vague and soft. There’d also be a lag between when the raw jumble of the ocean’s innumerable sound waves hit the hydrophones and when the center’s supercomputers could sniff out Voortrekker’s signature. Wilson’s squadron would have to work very hard to hunt ter Horst once he was localized.

All this was why Jeffrey was inwardly tense. As self-disciplined as he was, he couldn’t make himself forget how awfully dependent they were on the SOSUS. As always in naval combat, everything hinged on making the first detection of the adversary, on being able to fire effectively first.

On Voortrekker’s minisub

After the first line of the SOSUS grid was hacked, the minisub rendezvoused with Voortrekker and docked. Then Voortrekker spent hours sneaking farther north along the bottom. Van Gelder got some fitful sleep, his head filled with images of swelling, bursting men and gnashing sea monsters. Maintenance technicians looked over the mini, and topped off its tanks with more hydrogen peroxide air-independent fuel. Then ter Horst released the mini again, in range of the second SOSUS line.

That was yesterday and earlier today. Now, Van Gelder drove the minisub while Bauer relaxed in the pilot’s seat. The second pair of dialysis divers had already done their jobs and were safely retrieved. They lay now, cocooned in their pressurized transfer capsules, in the passenger compartment aft of the mini’s lockout chamber. The Kampfschwimmer chief and his assistant tended them there.

Van Gelder tried to unwind, and sought to make conversation with this inscrutable German, Bauer. Sitting practically in his lap, it was difficult to ignore the man. “Everything went well this time,” Van Gelder said.

“Compared to yesterday, ja.” Bauer laughed roughly.

“But you knew you might suffer losses, didn’t you?”

“It comes with the work.” Bauer seemed very pleased with himself.

“Then I don’t understand something. If there are three SOSUS lines we need to disable, and we have to do all this one more time tomorrow, why didn’t you bring three pairs of men fitted with ports for the backpacks?”

“The whole point of the pressure capsules is we can send the same men down to make repeated dives. We just hold them inside the capsules after the first excursion, and lower them to the sea floor when needed again, and avoid the whole decompression and recompression cycle.”

“But what if something bad had happened today? We’d be really stuck, wouldn’t we?”

Bauer cleared his throat in an ominous way. “We’re taking a different approach for the last part of the SOSUS.”

Van Gelder didn’t like the tone of this. “What exactly?”

“It’s just as well you brought it up. In the interest of time, Captain ter Horst had asked me to brief you here, while we make the trip back to Voortrekker.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re aware of the ostentatious rules of engagement for nuclear demolitions on land used by the so-called Allies?”

“Yes.”

“A responsible naval officer not part of the commando team must accompany the team,” Bauer recited, “to independently affirm that the blast will not cause undue collateral damage among enemy civilians.”

“That’s right. They make a big deal that their SEALs don’t ever set off an atomic weapon without an objective second opinion rendered on site.”

Bauer glanced at Van Gelder and smiled. “Now it’s your turn.”

“My turn for what?”

“We’re taking out the third SOSUS line with a tactical nuclear device.”

“I thought the whole point was stealth!”

“Mind your depth, Copilot,” Bauer snapped.

Van Gelder was so distracted he’d let the mini’s bow nose up. He corrected, and Bauer sneered.

“Stealth so far, yes, out of necessity. But the whole point is the last line is the last line. Once we cut it we’re through the ANZA Gap, into the Pacific and free, where more clandestine tenders wait for Voortrekker.”

“More reloads, you mean, more missiles and torpedoes?”

Bauer nodded. “The problem of submarines is that when properly used they stay invisible. Yet High Command wants to send an unmistakable message to Asia and the rest of the globe. The Axis is winning, the Axis is on the march, look at our chain of mushroom clouds, the self-infatuated U.S. is puny and finished…. Thus, the last step tomorrow will be to make some noise.”

“How? Where?” Van Gelder was horrified, and angry.

Bauer read his face and chuckled. “Ah. You figured it out. You come with us as the rules-of-engagement man. The Americans have sent a submarine’s first officer more than once. We can’t let ourselves be viewed by world opinion as lagging any in our humanitarian care and concern for native populations.”

“You mean I have to go with you and help set off an atom bomb.”

“That’s exactly right.”

Van Gelder knew he looked distressed. Bauer had cynically ambushed him with a terrible but unspoken moral dilemma: Up to now, every target Voortrekker attacked had been purely military. But Bauer kept referring to civilian casualties.

Bauer fingered the butt of the pistol he always wore on a belt holster. Seated shoulder to shoulder, Van Gelder saw Bauer’s pupils narrow—a physical sign of aggressive intent impossible to fake.

“I’m sure I needn’t remind you, First Officer, that cowardice in the face of the enemy is punished by death.”

Damn you to hell, you high-ranking German thug. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it.”

“Good, good. You’re supposed to be the contrite one. That’s the whole idea. We Kampfschwimmer do all the real work, exploding things.” Bauer eyed Van Gelder up and down. “I’d prefer a man of sterner stuff, but you’ll do.”

“Don’t push me, Commander, sir. I’ve seen plenty of nuclear combat.”

“Yes. I heard. And Challenger got away.” Bauer tut-tutted sarcastically.

Now Van Gelder was truly livid…. He realized this was Bauer’s goal: anger displaced Van Gelder’s natural fear of the upcoming mission.

But Van Gelder still had serious doubts. “Is this thing really authorized? Or are you some kind of rogue?”

“A rogue? No. I’m working under written orders from Berlin, with enthusiastic concurrence from your government in Johannesburg. The whole thing’s a joint operation. Your captain has seen the orders, I assure you.”

“And I was kept in the dark.”

“Now you’re in the bright shining light with the rest of us. And don’t think I’m dragging you along just to assure your skipper won’t abandon us if something goes wrong.”

“You seem to be too good at reading my mind.”

Bauer gave a conciliatory shrug. “We’re both naval officers, you and I, and professionals. Remember, this is all grand strategy, high planning to win the war. You’ll be a hero, Van Gelder. You’ll win medals, you’ll personally help cement the bond between South Africa and Germany.”

Van Gelder grunted. This son of a bitch is using my own devotion to duty and love of country against me. The worst of it is, from a patriotic perspective he’s right.

“Besides,” Bauer said, “Jan ter Horst won’t command Voortrekker forever. He has his eyes on much bigger game, in the Boer regime in Johannesburg. Do a good job on this special mission tomorrow, and you’re one step closer to getting promoted. You do want Voortrekker yourself, don’t you, some day soon?”

Van Gelder nodded grudgingly. Bauer sure knows how to push my buttons.

“Timing is very important, to keep up the psychological pressure on the enemy and on neutrals after the New York and Diego Garcia raids. So don’t shit yourself. Adjust to it fast. The device we’ll use is tiny, less than half a kiloton. Just enough to destroy a hardened land node in the last leg of the SOSUS.”

“All right. You’ve made your point…. Will we face much opposition?”

“No trained troops, just local militia, and a lot of them are aborigine coloreds…. A godforsaken place called Chatham Island. A pushover.”

Twenty-four hours later, on Challenger

As Jeffrey watched in the control room, Commodore Wilson read the latest data assessment relayed to Challenger from the central SOSUS processing center via Ilse’s land-to-sea communications downlink. The live feed from sound-surveillance lines went first to the processing center, for detailed interpretation. Reports from there were radioed to Ilse on Chatham Island. Then she worked an acoustic array that sent the reports on to Challenger, deeply submerged. Ilse’s local sonar-based downlink was needed because no radio waves—not even extremely low-frequency ones—could penetrate thousands of feet of seawater and have any useful bandwidth or baud rate.

Not for the first time, Wilson frowned as he read the report. Jeffrey felt frustrated too. Jeffrey knew that a lot of this local SOSUS infrastructure had been cobbled together hastily since the outbreak of the war—maybe too hastily. Jeffrey ran the different steps of the process through his head, picturing what could go wrong at each stage.

The supercomputers outside Sydney, Australia, manned by U.S. Navy specialists, were busy digesting raw inputs from all the lines of SOSUS hydrophones. Jeffrey knew the inputs from the more distant lines were passed along to Sydney by satellite link, for redundancy in case of equipment failure or attack. Breaks in the undersea feed lines weren’t unknown—sharks sometimes tried to bite right through them, so they had to be buried and armored.

One ground station for this satellite relay network was built at a point where the northernmost hydrophone line’s main fiber-optic cable made landfall, on Chatham Island. The satellite loomed high overhead in geosynchronous orbit, a tenth of the way to the moon—which should be beyond the range of Axis antisatellite rockets and lasers. To try to tune out enemy jamming from off to the sides—based in Axis-held territory away from the ANZA Gap—the antennas that sent the radio beams back and forth through space were tightly focused.

Ilse was secretly using that same satellite link in reverse, to get key information covertly from Sydney. She passed the intelligence—radioed via the satellite—down through the ocean for Wilson’s consumption, using a line of special microphones strung into the deep by Clayton’s SEALs. But for good effective range and proper data reliability, Ilse had to constantly adjust for oceanographic conditions. Temperature and salinity at different depths, currents and tides and wind and waves and background noise, all varied over time. They’d degrade her signal badly if ignored. This was what she’d been trained for in the Aleutians off Alaska.

Jeffrey thought the whole thing sounded great, in theory. He wondered whether in practice it was functioning at all.

“We should have heard something by now,” Wilson stated.

“Concur, sir,” Jeffrey said. “Unless ter Horst is traveling a lot more slowly than we thought.”

“No. Sessions and I went over all the routes he could have taken. You saw our calculations, our time-and-motion estimates.”

“Maybe he wants to wait, so our side lets our guard down.”

“Emphatically negative, Captain. Think about it. The longer he hangs back from the SOSUS gauntlet in the ANZA Gap, the more nuclear subs we could free up from other duty and vector in, and the more Australia and New Zealand can strengthen their minefields and other defenses. The more time ter Horst allows to pass before his next attack, the more our embassies abroad can reclaim the initiative against the diplomatic repercussions of the Diego Garcia catastrophe. As far as ter Horst’s supposed to know, if he gives enough time, we could be here standing in his path.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“Launch your minisub again. I want you to go to the island in person, and report to me over the link.”

“Yes, sir.” Jeffrey gestured to Ensign Harrison to get the mini ready—Harrison had already made two trips to Chatham Island and back, to ferry Ilse and the SEALs and all their gear.

“Conduct a close on-site inspection,” Wilson said. “Make sure the equipment is set up properly, the locals are cooperating, and Lieutenant Reebeck knows her business.”

TWENTY-SIX

Later, on Challenger’s minisub

TO JEFFREY IT was refreshing and pleasantly different, almost a tourist junket, to be going somewhere in the minisub outside a combat zone. It would also be the first time Jeffrey stepped ashore in a foreign country since becoming commanding officer, and he was looking forward to this small but momentous event.

Jeffrey manned the mini’s copilot seat and Harrison, sitting next to him, had the conn. The trip from Challenger’s hiding place to Chatham Island took a while; they shared the driving. Back in the transport compartment, one of Lieutenant Clayton’s logistics-support enlisted SEALs rested having a coffee—he alternated with Harrison as pilot every hour, so they all stayed sharp while cruising submerged to and from the island.

The battery-powered mini’s control compartment, with its low headroom and red lighting and computer icons dancing on display screens, formed an intimate setting, and Jeffrey was feeling expansive. He’d taken a shining to the earnest and eager young Harrison by now. They’d already traded life stories, with the more painful parts left out. But Harrison did say his parents went through an ugly divorce when he was twelve—he’d viewed the navy as a way to afford a good college, and then find order and purpose in life and gain a substitute family. Though they’d come at doing Navy ROTC from different directions, Jeffrey saw something of himself in Harrison.

The conversation paused. Jeffrey’s mind ran to his own folks, and he felt that sudden sinking feeling again: the recurrent gnawing concern for his mom. There’d been no news from Sloan-Kettering, but that was to be expected. Personal e-mail familygrams got very low priority these days.

Jeffrey had hoped that going to sea would clear his mind of such distractions. Usually when a sailor left the land beyond the horizon, and settled into the rhythm of the ship, shore-based cares fell away and he or she saw life with greater ease and clarity. This time, for Jeffrey, it hadn’t helped.

He told himself he was selfish. With all the radioactive fallout in the air worldwide from this terrible war, many thousands of people would be coming down with cancer—most of them years from now—people who would otherwise have gotten to live a full and healthy life. But that viewpoint didn’t help either—Jeffrey still felt very bad about his mother. Scenes from his early childhood with her, when life was simple and parents seemed perfect and he and his mom were on much better terms, kept flashing through his head. These images and impressions came unbidden and unwelcome, too vivid and unsettling and unreachably, painfully nostalgic, like a video recording running out of control. At times the sense of loss was almost unbearable.

Then there was Jeffrey’s biggest worry of all, everyone’s biggest worry: that the brutal fighting might escalate, that limited tactical nuclear war at sea might spread to all-out atomic devastation on land. Thank God the Axis didn’t have hydrogen bombs, but Hiroshima-sized mushroom clouds over Allied cities would be bad enough. To Jeffrey, since his trip to New York and Washington, the threat felt very personal. No longer were his mom and dad safe in America’s heartland, well away from the coast. Now his mother might still lie in a hospital bed in Manhattan, and his father worked in D.C.—prime ground zeroes for cruise missiles tipped with fission bombs. Since Diego Garcia the risk seemed so much higher. On Challenger no one talked about it. It was as if the entire subject, mass destruction on land, was taboo by a silent consensus; to bring it up would just destroy morale. The best thing, the only thing, that Jeffrey and his crew could do was to do their best to help bring the war to a close….

Harrison, hands firmly on throttle and steering yoke, opened his mouth as if he had something to say, but he hesitated.

“What’s on your mind?” Jeffrey asked, welcoming any change of subject. “Go ahead. No one has personal secrets for long on a submarine.”

Harrison kept his eyes glued to his instruments. “I feel there’s some unfinished business, Captain…. Basically I—I wanted to apologize, for pissing my pants in our action with the Tirpitz.”

“Oh, that.” Jeffrey chuckled, feeling expansive once again. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen guys do that in combat. Especially their first time.” He turned to Harrison and gave him a confiding wink. “Don’t tell anybody, but I peed my pants on our last mission, and I probably would’ve twice except the second time I was much too busy to think of it.”

“What happened, sir? If it’s not classified?”

“I had an unexpected meeting with some Kampfschwimmer.”

“I heard those guys are pretty wicked and fierce.”

“They are. Believe me.”

Harrison grew introspective and serious. “But the thing is, sir, plenty of people don’t wet themselves under fire. Right?”

“Have the guys been ribbing you?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just that it makes me wonder, why do some people panic and some people don’t? We didn’t expect to meet the Tirpitz either, and no one else lost control of their bladder.”

Jeffrey saw that Harrison still blamed himself, and this wasn’t healthy. Jeffrey’s job was to do what he could to give Harrison perspective. That was one part of Jeffrey’s workload he truly enjoyed, leading and counseling juniors on their careers and on life in general. He was just barely old enough to be Harrison’s father, and people like Harrison were the closest thing that Jeffrey had to his own kids. Jeffrey, still unmarried and almost forty, had that worry on his mind as well—he’d begun to think his last chance had vanished when Ilse left him. He feared that he’d stay single the rest of his days and never get to raise a family, even assuming he survived and Armageddon didn’t come. Jeffrey forced his mind back to Harrison’s needs.

“I’ve had this private theory for years, Tom, that everybody panics, and it’s completely random who shows it first. In a good, disciplined unit like ours, that first person’s reaction, his visible reaction, triggers the others to focus on duty, and it helps them force back their fear. It just happened to be you who helped to tighten our unit cohesion. It could’ve been anyone.”

Harrison pondered. “That’s an interesting take on it, sir. The social effects of the group dynamic in battle. A sort of one for all and all for one when the first guy says, ‘I’m scared.’ It makes sense.”

“You know, animals often instinctively piss or crap when they come against that urgent fight-or-flight decision. It ties in with another theory I have, that we all should get in better touch with our inner caveman selves.”

Harrison laughed. “That’s a good one, Captain.”

“Thank you, but I mean it. I read about a study once, I think done by some anthropologists, they were looking at just this question. Why drop a load at such a critical time? Their answer was, that that was precisely the point. You weigh less.”

“Like, if you were a caveman you could run faster, or jump higher, or whatever?”

Jeffrey nodded. “Besides, it was your very first day at sea with us, and we did win the battle. You did great when we met with the Prima Latina, which has to be the craziest docking maneuver I’ve ever pulled. And I’m getting good reports on your attitude and learning curve from my XO.” Challenger had only eleven officers, counting Jeffrey, so every person’s role and progress mattered a great deal.

“Thank you for telling me, Captain.”

The conversation paused again. This time it was Jeffrey who hesitated. “If you don’t mind my asking, how come you’re still an ensign?” Officers were supposed to be at least lieutenant j.g.’s by the time they’d finished nuclear power school and been assigned to a ship. “What did you do, dishonor some high admiral’s comely daughter?”

Even in the red lighting, Jeffrey saw Harrison blush. Jeffrey put it together: Harrison did college in three years, at a pressure-cooker like MIT of all places. Maybe he was still a virgin.

Harrison had to clear his throat. “No, sir. Nothing like that…”

Yup, he’s a virgin.

“I didn’t want to push it, Captain, considering I’m just a tiny little cog and there’s a war, but my detailer said the paperwork for the change in rank got lost, somewhere in the bowels of the bureaucracy in Washington.”

“Well, talk about your bowel movements!…I’m gonna get this business deconstipated right now. I am, after all, commanding officer of USS Challenger, am I not? I’m giving you a battlefield promotion. Thomas Harrison, you are henceforth Lieutenant Junior Grade Harrison.”

Harrison beamed. Jeffrey too was pleased. With the right nurturing, Jeffrey felt sure, Harrison would go far.

Jeffrey was self-aware enough to know his moods were on a seesaw today, up and down and up—exhaustion and overwork did that to him. So did the pins-and-needles anticipation of imminent combat. He resolved that once he sorted things out on the island and got back to Challenger, he’d make sure to get a solid block of uninterrupted sleep. That way I’ll be fresh and alert when the big matchup comes with ter Horst.

And I better make the rounds of the ship before the fateful day. Talk to the men in small gatherings. Visit with the seasoned hands and help them steady the new guys. Bring out the group dynamic, as Harrison called it. Stiffen our unit cohesion in advance, ’cause we’ll need it when the shooting starts.

Jeffrey glanced at the navigation display. He picked up the intercom mike. The enlisted SEAL in the transport compartment responded. “Come forward, please. We’re closing fast on the minefield protecting the fishing piers.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Owenga fishing station, Chatham Island

JEFFREY GINGERLY OPENED the minisub’s top hatch. It rose partway and hit the planks of the pier the mini was hiding under. Jeffrey peeked outside. It was barely dawn. Jeffrey caught his first whiff of natural air in almost a week. What struck him at once were the smells. Dead fish, diesel fuel and lubricants, and tarry creosote—the odors of a working waterfront. The minisub bobbed in the swell, which was noticeable even here on the downwind side of the island.

Jeffrey listened. The swell sloshed. Rope lines creaked. The minisub scraped gently against seaweed and barnacles growing on the pilings of the pier.

Next to the pier, as Jeffrey expected, was an old fishing boat, large but wooden hulled, resting on the bottom mud, derelict. By the red light coming from down in the mini’s lockout chamber, Jeffrey spotted a stained and dirty canvas tarpaulin hanging over the side of the hulk, between the rotting fenders that still held the boat against the pier. He motioned for Harrison to follow him.

Harrison held the hatch open as far as he could, and Jeffrey clambered up. Then he helped Harrison. They dogged the hatch—the enlisted SEAL and the mini would wait for them here.

Jeffrey crawled along the cold, wet top deck of the mini. He timed the swells carefully, so he wouldn’t be crushed. At the right moment he worked his way under the tarpaulin, climbed over the side of the fishing boat, and flopped onto its greasy deck in front of the half-collapsed wheelhouse. He moved aside, concealed beneath the canvas sheet, and Harrison followed. They were already filthy.

Jeffrey waited, listening carefully again. There was nothing but the wind and waves, and the normal clanking and swishing sounds of dormant, tied-up vessels. Jeffrey glanced from under the tarpaulin. Scattered lights along the shore showed him it was very misty. Jeffrey and Harrison climbed from the derelict boat to the pier. They walked onto the land as casually as they could. More mist blew by a lamppost. Gravel crunched beneath their feet.

“Who goes there?” someone called. The accent fell between Australian and British.

“Serenity,” Jeffrey said. “Serenity One.” “Serenity” was the code name Clayton had established for the submarine on which the SEALs had come. “One” was navy talk for the captain himself.

A figure stepped from behind a parked vehicle. He advanced and offered his hand.

“Welcome to Chatham Island!” Constable Joshua Henga smiled. “Precisely halfway between the South Pole and the equator, right on the international date line. The first populated land to greet every new calendar day…That’s one of our main claims to fame, Captain. We like to say we’re quite easy to find on a map, though usually no one bothers looking.”

Given word from SEAL lieutenant Clayton, already on the island, Henga had been expecting Jeffrey, including Jeffrey’s sneaky approach to the land. Henga started up his ancient Land Rover truck and took a narrow road west. Jeffrey sat in the passenger seat, and Harrison sat behind Jeffrey—Jeffrey brought Harrison along as his aide, and also just for fun. They’d both removed their dirty coveralls and thrown them in back. Underneath they wore low-key civilian clothes.

“Thanks, Constable,” Jeffrey said. “I hope we haven’t inconvenienced you.” Henga was tall and wiry, mid-thirties, and wore a revolver on his policeman’s equipment belt. He seemed relaxed and patient in a manner almost alien to Jeffrey.

Henga laughed, a friendly, welcoming laugh. “I’m not inconvenienced in the least. Your team coming is the most interesting thing to happen here in some time.” The Land Rover bounced along.

“That isolated, are you?”

Henga glanced at Jeffrey and made keen eye contact. “It’s a big event when the supply ship puts in from New Zealand once a month. Tourism stopped right dead with the war.”

“I imagine it would have.” Just like New York. Jeffrey knew it would take a little while to get where they were going, so he made small talk. “You used to get many tourists?”

“Ecotourism. Lots of it. We’re so far away from anywhere, we have dozens of species of birds and plants found no place else in the world. Birdwatchers came especially. Our famous endangered black robins.”

That sounded interesting. “Can you point them out to us?”

“Not here, sorry. Only on some of the outlying islets. They need virgin forest, you see, and all the forest on Chatham Island itself was cleared for pasture land. That’s why they’re endangered.”

Jeffrey paused, then gave in to curiosity. Henga looked like a West Indies black. “If you don’t mind my asking, Constable, are you Maori, or Moriori?”

“Some of both, plus English blood. There’s been intermarriage for many decades. We’re a tight-knit community.”

“Being a constable keep you busy?”

“No. That’s why there’s just one of me. In the old days I’d mostly keep an eye out for nature conservation problems, and make sure the kids at least were discreet if they smoked marijuana. Never any real crime here. A magistrate makes a day trip from the mainland every six months. In the interim, I dish out justice with a tongue lashing or my fist.” Henga chuckled. “We don’t even have a high school. For that the older children board over in New Zealand. They fly home for holidays, if they ever come back at all.”

“They see this as a place to escape from?”

“Unless you want to fish or raise sheep or farm for the rest of your life…”

Henga made a left turn onto a rough dirt road. It was bright enough now that he could turn off his headlights. Jeffrey looked around. The land was rolling, covered by lime-green grasses or purplish moss. There was also low scrub brush, and patches of red and yellow wildflowers, and weathered volcanic rock. Jeffrey saw barbed-wire fences and low stone walls dividing grazing fields. The Land Rover went by scattered houses and outbuildings. All were one story, some ramshackle; some of them had tin roofs, like sheep-shearing sheds. Sometimes the truck passed local people on porches or in their farmyards, up with the dawn. The people waved at the constable and eyed his passengers with interest. Jeffrey saw young children playing.

“Another two or three kilometers,” Henga said. The land began to rise. Chatham Island was shaped like a giant letter I, twenty-five miles from top to bottom. Just to the east of the shaft of the I, which ran north-south, a line of sandbars enclosed a big tidal lagoon. The hamlet of Owenga, where they’d started out, was nestled in the southeast corner of the I. Ilse’s setup was near the middle of the southern edge of the island.

Jeffrey held on as the road got rougher and bumpy. In low spots, sheltered hollows, with the windows of the Land Rover open, Jeffrey smelled the manure-and-urine odor buildup of cattle. He saw many sheep and cows, and sometimes a horse or two. Trees stood in lonely isolation, all bending the same way, leaning permanently eastward toward the morning sun.

“That’s from the wind?”

“The trade winds almost never stop. Hang onto your hat, Captain, or you’ll have to send to Peru to find it.” Henga laughed again. “That’s, oh, five thousand miles from here.”

The wind and rising sun had cleared the mist. The sky was a beautiful turquoise, flecked with high fluffy clouds. The road went past a stream, then took a culvert over a larger stream.

“Rained recently,” Harrison said idly as he glanced back down the road—which by now was more like a rutted, rough-hewn trail. “We aren’t kicking up dust.”

“That’s quite correct,” Henga said. “One thing about Chatham Island, the weather is unpredictable and never stays the same for very long. This afternoon could be perfectly sunny, or cloudy and cold. By tomorrow a tropical storm could hit. There’s a severe one passing New Zealand right now, you know. Drenched half of Australia on the way.”

Jeffrey nodded, then thought ahead. They were nearing Ilse and the SEALs.

“You’ve worked out rules of engagement?” Jeffrey didn’t want to take friendly fire.

“Oh yes, first thing. Your Lieutenant Clayton and I agreed, and I’ve informed my home-guard militia. Point one, no one shoots first. Point two, if you see strangers working in and around the water, leave them alone.”

“Good, good…How big is your militia?”

“One hundred twenty men and women. I put them through regular drills with vigor. Mandatory firearms practice every Saturday. We even have an old armored car.”

Harrison perked up. “What kind?”

“A Saracen. Ex–British Army. It usually stays by the airport. Fuel is short, you understand, and the thing’s transmission is rather worn, as is the barrel of its gun.”

“How large is your airport?” Harrison asked.

Henga smiled. “To call it an airport insults other airports. It’s an asphalt strip, uneven and not very long, barely adequate to take small propeller airplanes. We have one aircraft, in fact, privately owned, for short hops to the other inhabited island in the Chatham group, Pitt Island…. Before the war there were more-or-less daily flights from Wellington and Christchurch.”

Jeffrey knew those were cities on the New Zealand mainland, five hundred miles to the west. “Why do you say more-or-less?”

“The airplanes are what you Americans would call puddle jumpers. If they don’t have good weather, they can’t fly, as simple as that. As I mentioned, the weather here is very unpredictable.”

The road took a turn to the left and topped a rise. In front of Jeffrey loomed a big satellite dish. Near it was an equipment bunker dug into jutting bedrock. The door of the bunker stood open, and cables ran in and out. By the downwind side of the rock outcropping, Jeffrey saw a pair of khaki tents.

Chief Montgomery stepped from behind a stunted tree, one that was barely wide enough to hide his bulk. He’d obviously been waiting for them. He didn’t smile.

Jeffrey followed Ilse’s lead and glanced carefully over the edge of the jagged cliff on the rugged headland. A hundred feet below, strong white surf creamed endlessly against the base of the tan-yellow stone. The wind howled, the air was filled with seabirds and their cries, and further out seals and dolphins fed and played.

Jeffrey saw the cable Ilse was pointing to, draped over the edge of the cliff, leading down into the water. The main part of the lengthy cable, the acoustic link to Challenger, had been strung along the sea floor using the minisub.

“You know as well as I do,” Ilse said, “the microphone line has sensors that let me adjust for hydrographic conditions. I’m not doing this by the seat of my pants.”

“You’ve made communications checks with Sydney?”

“Repeatedly. And also with…Serenity. You heard me loud and clear, didn’t you? You didn’t miss a single one of my reports. Or do you want to run through the entire list again?”

“But the whole thing’s so theoretical.”

Ilse bristled. “I’ve seen you use weird tactical tricks in combat based on theories far crazier than this downlink. And I didn’t invent it, I just use it.”

“But—”

“I do know how to use it. It worked fine in the Aleutians, which is a harsher environment than here. It’s working just fine now.”

“So what’s wrong?”

“Maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe he isn’t coming. Maybe he was sunk after all, or damaged and went back to Durban, and this whole thing is one giant fucking wild-goose chase.”

“Ilse, you shouldn’t use foul language.”

“Honest to God, Jeffrey, sometimes you’re too much.”

“It’s Captain to you, Lieutenant. Watch out, you’re on the verge of insubordination.”

“And you’re way past the verge of pompousness. I’m an officer in a foreign navy, and we’re on foreign soil. Off the ship you can’t push me around like you tried to on the last mission.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I’m still your commanding officer. I deserve, I insist on, your respect.”

“Well excuse me, Captain Fuller.”

“Why are you so irritable?”

“Because you’re irritating. You’re second-guessing me, just like you used to. It’s insulting. I’m an expert at this work and you know it.”

“So like I said, what’s wrong?”

“Like I said, maybe nothing’s wrong.”

“No, we know for sure he’s coming.”

“How? How do you know? He’s the most unpredictable bastard you or I ever met.”

“The Australians intercepted a neutral merchant ship. They got tipped off by some kind of shooting, during a rescue when the ship broke down. The ship was hollow inside, Ilse, like the one we took through the canal. The boarding party found a handful of Axis nuclear torpedoes in the secret hold.”

“You mean he got fresh ammo?”

“Yes. But something happened. Maybe the Aussies surprised him, blundering into the hold, and they had to be killed. The merchant master tried to tell some cockamamie story about pirates. It didn’t hold up. So ter Horst is definitely coming, and we definitely should have heard by now.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Let’s go back to the tent. You can get the SOSUS center for me live on voice?”

“Yes. I told you, didn’t I? I’ve talked to them myself.”

“Let’s go. And in front of the others, Ilse, act with decorum. What happened between us is private.”

“I had no idea we’d be assigned together again, on the ship. If I thought that would possibly happen, I’d never have let what went on between us get started to begin with.”

“So you blew it, because it did get started, and here we are. At least be discreet. I cannot let you argue with me in front of Clayton and Montgomery.”

Ilse balled her fists. “Stop lecturing me. This is exactly why I knew you and I would never work out. You’ve got some kind of complex. You don’t treat women with respect.”

“That’s it, Lieutenant! You’re the one with the complex. You don’t know how to take orders and play on a team.”

Jeffrey and Ilse trudged back the three hundred yards or so from the edge of the cliff to where the tents were set up. Out of the corner of his eye, Jeffrey spotted movement in the dense bushes, on the edge of a nature reserve that bordered the satellite ground-station site. A wild pig, probably.

When Jeffrey and Ilse got back to the others, Clayton and Montgomery and some of their men were standing or sitting and eating rations, and chatting with Harrison and Constable Henga. The SEALs were posing as rear-area security troops, sent along by the U.S. Navy with Ilse and Jeffrey and Harrison, who were supposed to be SOSUS maintenance workers. That was the cover story Henga fed to curious islanders who’d asked, and it would lull enemy recon sensors too.

Ilse entered her tent, to establish the voice link with Sydney using her portable console. Jeffrey left her alone so she could cool off.

Jeffrey stood there catching his breath, winded from climbing and walking in rough terrain. I’ve been so busy with all the duties as Challenger’s captain plus Wilson’s operations officer, I neglected my need for exercise. I’m really out of shape. Jeffrey idly took a closer look at the rock outcropping that held the equipment bunker for the local satellite ground station. The rock was volcanic, old, weathered, but strong and hard. The parts Jeffrey could see from where he stood were rough matte black, with veins of dark gray. The outcropping formed a big hump jutting out of the soil. The portion that held the bunker showed fresh marks from blasting and jackhammers, presumably done by U.S. Navy Seabees or New Zealand military engineers.

Jeffrey heard a strange crack as a hot angry bee rushed past his ear. One of the enlisted SEALs caved in on himself and fell forward. There was another crack and someone plucked Jeffrey’s sleeve. He turned in confusion since nobody was next to him. Montgomery came running at Jeffrey as fast as he could.

“Wha—”

“Sniper!” Montgomery bellowed as he knocked Jeffrey off his feet.

TWENTY-EIGHT

JEFFREY LAY ON his back, bewildered, staring at the sky, in mental shock as his heart pounded. Around him he sensed a disordered swirl of frantic motion and raised voices. Montgomery was already some distance away. Everyone was scrambling for cover and grabbing their weapons. Jeffrey’s former SEAL training came back from his younger days. He rolled onto his stomach and belly-crawled to a better position. Where’s the sniper? And who the hell is shooting at us?

There was a bang in the distance, and a tearing sound.

“Incoming!” Clayton shouted. Everyone squashed flat.

Jeffrey caressed the damp soil with urgent intimacy, and tried to become one with the moss. The initial surprise of it all was wearing off, and now stark terror sank in. Jeffrey badly wished he had a helmet. A glowing ball was tearing toward him low over the ground, leaving a trail of dirty smoke. The rocket slammed into Ilse’s tent and exploded inside. The canvas billowed outward and ripped, riddled with white-hot shrapnel. The tent burst into flame at once. It collapsed, roaring and crackling.

Ilse glanced from around the rock outcropping; she’d had the sense to abandon the tent at the first sign of trouble. The tent burned merrily, fanned by the wind—and that ended their only link with Challenger. There was no way to sound a warning, no way to call quickly for help.

Jeffrey fought hard to regain mental balance. They had to respond to this sudden emergency with speed and focused violence, or they’d be overwhelmed and defeated both individually and as a group—defeated emotionally and then physically. Jeffrey’s mind registered scattered rifle shots from the enlisted SEALs. He could tell they were uncoordinated, shooting wild, to try to suppress the enemy fire. But who was the enemy?

Jeffrey heard Shajo Clayton’s voice, tough and commanding amid the din. The SEAL lieutenant was calling orders to his team, to stop wasting ammo and organize a meaningful hasty defense. Jeffrey drew comfort from Clayton’s leadership as Clayton rallied and prodded his men. Jeffrey’s own combat instincts clicked in more and more, and some of his fear began to give way to excitement and rising purposefulness. The key was not to stay passive, but do something useful immediately. Yet tactically, in this situation, Clayton was in charge.

Clayton crawled up next to Jeffrey. His closeness made Jeffrey feel better. Jeffrey felt less lost and alone, no longer quite so isolated as everyone else near him sought concealment or dug themselves in.

Both men gained scant cover using a small dip in the ground. Clayton showed Jeffrey a grin. The two had been here several times before, this special, taxing, mystical place where courageous people braved death together with righteousness on their side.

Another bullet crazed the soil, too near Jeffrey’s head. Clayton and Jeffrey were forced to move apart. Their separation made Jeffrey feel more anxious. He forced himself to get a grip.

“They’re after you, Captain. They know you’re senior.”

“Yeah, but who’s they?”

Gunther Van Gelder lay in the bushes beside Commander Bauer. Bauer studied their objective with his binoculars.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Bauer whispered. “They haven’t broken and run.”

“Maybe they’re too scared to move.”

Bauer made hand signals for his sniper to fire again.

“I got targets,” Chief Montgomery shouted. “Two groups, three or four men each, heading right and left! They’re trying to outflank us!”

“Hold your fire,” Clayton ordered. “They might be friendly troops!”

“Constable,” Jeffrey yelled. “Are they yours? Some kind of mix-up?”

“No!” Henga yelled back. “Nobody dresses like that.”

“Like what?” Jeffrey couldn’t get a clear view. He was pinned down as the enemy sniper learned the feel of the wind—his shots were closer and closer.

“Black body stockings,” Henga yelled.

“Kampfschwimmer,” Jeffrey said. There was a moment of shocked silence. Then the SEALs visibly braced themselves. Clayton licked his lips, as if he welcomed this one-on-one contest of champion teams. Jeffrey thought fast. “They’re after the bunker.”

“Return fire!” Clayton ordered. “Weapons free!”

The SEALs resumed firing the time-worn M-16s they’d brought with them, part of their disguise as rear-area troops. The outflanking Kampfschwimmer went to ground. M-16s crackled and spent brass flew as each SEAL took carefully aimed shots. They needed to make every round count: they hadn’t brought heavy weapons, or much of an ammo supply.

The flanking Kampfschwimmer fired back. Their rifles made a deeper booming noise than the M-16s. Jeffrey knew those telltale reports from the old days: AK-47s, also aged, but lethal. Their bullets were much heavier than the ones from an M-16. Both Kampfschwimmer flanking teams advanced, using fire and movement skillfully. Jeffrey felt the pressure mount as the enemy pincers advanced.

Clayton raised his head, just long enough to squeeze off a round. Burnt powder went up Jeffrey’s nose and stirred his adrenaline more, but he was unarmed and they were in serious danger of being surrounded. Jeffrey began to choke on thin but acrid smoke—the fire in Ilse’s tent had spread and the second tent was burning.

“There’s a radio in my truck!” Henga yelled.

Harrison was the only one close enough to stand a chance of reaching Henga’s Land Rover alive. He broke cover without hesitation, and dashed behind the truck. The German sniper loosed a round that smashed the windshield to bits. Jeffrey judged the sniper had changed his firing position. He’s good.

Jeffrey saw the Land Rover’s far-side door swing open. Jeffrey knew that if Harrison failed, they might all be killed or captured where they lay. A sniper round pierced the sheet-metal side of the driver’s door.

“Tom!” Jeffrey shouted in concern.

“I’m okay!” Harrison shouted.

Bullets flew in both directions viciously now. The Land Rover bounced and sagged as its tires were hit and exploded. All the different noises hurt Jeffrey’s ears.

Henga fired his revolver twice at a distant clump of bushes. Jeffrey knew the weapon was useless at such range—and Kampfschwimmer wouldn’t be slowed by ineffective fire. But then Jeffrey had an idea. He turned to Clayton. “We don’t want the Kampfschwimmer knowing we’re SEALs.”

“Concur, Skipper. Let’s show ’em some sloppy fire discipline.” With difficulty, since the slightest movement drew more fire, Clayton tossed Jeffrey his pistol. It landed on the ground halfway between them. As Jeffrey reached, a sniper bullet almost took his hand off at the wrist.

Jeffrey grabbed the pistol and checked that the muzzle was clear of dirt. Like Henga, he fired two rounds. The AK-47s boomed, and the M-16s responded, but the outflanking enemy men advanced again. Soon the line of retreat would be cut off.

“Who do I call?” Harrison yelled from down inside the driver’s compartment. His voice sounded deep and confident; Jeffrey was very glad they’d had that talk in the minisub.

“Waitangi!” Henga shouted. That was the only town, in the middle of the island. “Tell the council duty clerk to sound the invasion alarm.”

Jeffrey waited impatiently—Harrison seemed to take forever. If that radio is busted we’re in very serious trouble. This was an uninhabited part of the island. Anyone who heard the firing from farther off might just think Henga was holding an exercise.

“I’ve got him,” Harrison yelled.

Henga shouted his orders. “Waitangi platoon to head here by the Tuku Road. Owenga platoon to come the way we came, and Saracen to follow the Naim River trail! Others to muster in place and hold the rest of the island!”

“Okay!”

Jeffrey and Clayton looked at each other. Henga sounded like he knew what he was doing. Reinforcements from Owenga would strengthen their hold on the satellite site. From Tuku, the militia could threaten the enemy from the rear. The Saracen, with its cannon and machine gun raking the Germans from off to the side, could tip the balance decisively.

But this would all take precious time, and the time factor favored the Germans. The SOSUS bunker itself would have made a beautiful defensive stronghold, but the path there was much too exposed for Clayton’s men to get inside—the door faced right at the enemy’s center.

Bullets continued to fly. One of Clayton’s spent shell casings burned the back of Jeffrey’s hand. There was a loud clang, then a screeching whine, as an incoming bullet ricocheted off the Land Rover’s engine block. In the far distance, carried on the wind, Jeffrey could hear air-raid sirens now.

“Tom,” Jeffrey yelled. “Get out of there before they hit the fuel tank!”

“Tom,” Henga yelled, “take my shotgun, under the dashboard! Shells are in the glove box!”

Jeffrey saw Harrison roll out of the Land Rover. As enemy rounds chewed the dirt near his feet, Harrison bobbed and weaved and dashed behind the outcropping next to Ilse. He was smart enough to hold his fire—a shotgun was a close-in weapon. Jeffrey urged him to fire a couple of rounds—again, the deception plan that they were rear-area troops.

The shotgun blasts were deafening crashes. Another sniper bullet barely missed Jeffrey’s head. He crawled and shifted position again. The firefight had been raging long enough for him to take stock of what was happening and why.

How did the Germans get here? Dropped from a secret compartment of a pseudoneutral airliner? High-altitude-low-opening parachute tactics at sea, then move inshore with the wind and tide, using rubber boats or even underwater scooters? Do they want to commandeer the SOSUS site to eavesdrop on the data? Use it to locate Allied subs, and then use that to help Voortrekker?…

So that’s what ter Horst is waiting for, our undersea fleet dispositions, before he tackles the Gap.

Yeah, that’s what the Germans are after. Even with all this shooting they’re leaving the satellite bunker untouched.

They’re clever, I’ll give them that.

Clayton fired another round from his smoking rifle, then ejected the empty magazine, his last. “Captain, we have to withdraw. We’re outnumbered and outgunned.”

“We can’t,” Jeffrey said. “We have to destroy the equipment bunker.” Jeffrey told Clayton why: the whole outcome of the battle between Challenger and Voortrekker could hinge around this little bunker.

Clayton told his man nearest the bunker to throw in fragmentation grenades.

As the man rose off the ground he screamed, hit in the neck by the sniper. Bright red arterial blood arced into the air and soaked the grass. Montgomery dashed to help the wounded man, dodging incoming rounds, and the chief was quickly soaked by the blood. From behind a boulder he looked at Clayton and shook his head.

That’s two dead, Jeffrey told himself, counting the SEAL killed by the sniper at the very start of the action.

Another enlisted SEAL made a try for the bunker. The distant sniper fired but missed.

A German light machine gun, held in reserve, opened up immediately. The SEAL was almost cut in half. He dropped both live grenades. They exploded next to his body. The double concussion through the ground made Jeffrey hurt. Intestines and body parts flew, but the bunker was undamaged. The corpse began to burn. The stink was unbearable. The dead SEAL’s ammunition cooked off like strings of firecrackers.

That’s three dead, one-fourth of our manpower, and it confirms they really want the bunker intact. The Kampfschwimmer flanking units were swinging wide now. Soon they’d surround Clayton’s team and hit the SEALs with fire from every direction at once.

Clayton lobbed a grenade, to try to cut Ilse’s cable that ran to the sea. The concussion flashed and pounded the earth and more shrapnel whizzed through the air. Jeffrey aimed at the satellite dish, and kept firing rounds from his pistol to try to knock the dish out. At this distance, he couldn’t tell if he’d done anything. He ran out of ammo, and Clayton threw him another clip for the pistol, his last.

“We have to withdraw!” Clayton repeated.

Jeffrey shook his head. “They’ll pick us all off if we move.” As if to emphasize, the German light machine gun fired again, peppering the SEALs and Jeffrey with dirt and fragments of rock. “We need a smokescreen or we’re finished.”

“We don’t have that many smoke grenades. Not with this wind, it’s too strong!”

“The truck’s fuel tank. We can use that.”

Clayton nodded. Jeffrey crawled flat on his stomach until he had a good line of fire. He shot at the underside of the truck. The bullet found its mark, and diesel fuel leaked in a widening puddle. Jeffrey fired again, at a stone under the vehicle, to make a spark. The diesel refused to ignite. Jeffrey signaled for Clayton to pass him his other grenade. Jeffrey set the timer to “Long,” seven seconds.

“Grenade!” Jeffrey shouted. He rolled it beneath the truck and scrambled away.

A split second after the grenade went off, the whole fuel tank exploded with a gut-pounding whump. Parts of the Land Rover flew through the air. Jeffrey felt a wave of blistering heat that didn’t diminish. The truck was giving off heavy gray-black smoke. It grew even thicker when all four punctured tires began to burn. The combined odors at this point were revolting.

“Pop what smoke you got,” Montgomery ordered at the top of his lungs. The chief was hoarse from shouting and breathing the smoke, and Jeffrey’s eardrums ached so badly it was hard for him to hear.

The surviving SEALs tossed the few smoke grenades they had. Clouds of chemical smoke puffed out in green and orange and purple. The different colors blended oddly with the oily, choking smoke from the burning truck.

Montgomery shouldered the nearest dead SEAL’s body. Henga was closest to the enlisted SEAL who’d been killed first—Henga crawled and grabbed the body and started to drag it along. Ilse, with nothing to do up to now, darted through the smokescreen and snatched the corpses’ intact M-16s. She threw one rifle to Jeffrey, then with the other began to send short bursts blindly through the smoke, toward the Germans.

The third SEAL, killed by the machine-gun fire, had to be left behind. The corpse had been shattered by the SEAL’s own grenades, and was self-cremating anyway.

“Back!” Clayton shouted. “Fall back!”

Minutes later

Van Gelder looked away from the smoldering broken skeleton near the rock outcropping. The other two large pools of blood were congealed now, sticky and brown. The stench of burning rubber and flesh made Van Gelder nauseous, and the lingering smoke from the tents and the truck made him cough. The ground was littered with brass shell casings and empty smoke grenades. Sharp bits of shrapnel poked out from the grass. The wind blew scattered bits of paper and unwound streamers of white field-dressing gauze. To Van Gelder the small abandoned battlefield was depressing. The bright sunny sky and twittering birds made it worse.

The enemy was fleeing to a low stone wall a thousand meters away. Bauer had his sniper and his machine gunner hold their fire. He told them to let the defeated men run, to save ammo for the militia’s counterattack—the Kampfschwimmer radioman had been monitoring communications on the island all along. Some of Bauer’s men spread wide to form a defensive perimeter, and blended into terrain and disappeared.

At intervals one of the enemy fired a round from a pistol or shotgun. To show his contempt, Bauer paraded around in plain sight, forcing Van Gelder to do so as well. The Kampfschwimmer chief crept off north, inland toward the Naim River, lugging two antitank rockets to ambush the armored car when it came.

The SEALs retreated over the long stone wall, then piled rocks and logs on top for better protection. Jeffrey flopped behind the wall and sat in the dirt with Clayton’s pistol warm in his hand. He leaned back against the stones and fought to catch his breath. He tried not to look at the dead SEALs laid out neatly by the wall. He felt their unseeing eyes stare at him, and he blamed himself for their deaths.

I distracted Clayton’s team by coming here when I did, to no good purpose. If it wasn’t for me they might’ve been more alert.

Ilse knelt behind the wall, clutching a dead man’s M-16. She glanced at Jeffrey; he thought she did it accusingly. Her face was streaked with sweat, and stained with black soot and green moss. Jeffrey knew he looked the same. He had a powerful thirst but lacked a canteen. He’d lost his sunglasses somewhere, and he squinted in the glaring sun. There was no shade here at all, but the endless wind prevented the sun from giving him any warmth.

Henga fired his revolver toward the enemy, then Harrison quickly fired another shotgun round. Each report made Jeffrey jump.

Apprehensive, he peered over the wall. The Kampfschwimmer weren’t pursuing.

Way up there, next to the rock outcropping, Jeffrey spotted the whip antenna for a German tactical radio. He knew they’d also have longer-range communications gear. They want the bunker, not us.

“It’s coming,” the radioman said. “There it is.”

Van Gelder heard a puttering, droning sound in the sky. He saw a black dot approaching, growing larger fast, a small airplane. The island militia had sent it up for reconnaissance and spotting.

Bauer reached for an equipment pack and pulled out an antiaircraft missile. He waved for Van Gelder to get out of the way of the back blast.

Bauer crouched and hefted the missile launcher to his shoulder. He armed it, aimed, then pressed the trigger.

With a loud bang and a gush of flame the missile left the launcher; Bauer jolted, then regained his balance and put the empty launcher down. The missile rose into the sky, homing crabwise on the aircraft as its flight was caught by the crosswind.

The plane began to bank away. The missile impacted. There was a red-orange flash, followed seconds later by the sound of a sharp detonation. Pieces of aircraft, and burning fuel, fell to the ground in the distance. The earth shook slightly when the pieces hit. A pillar of smoke rose from the impact sight.

“So much for him,” Bauer said.

The two demolition specialists left their concealment and brought up the atom bomb, a heavy box in a waterproof black outer casing. In shoulder satchels they carried their tools and supplies.

Van Gelder eyed the satellite-equipment bunker. It seemed such a flimsy thing.

“They left the door wide open,” he said to Bauer.

“So?”

“I don’t think you need to use an atom bomb.”

Bauer walked to the bunker, kicked the severed ends of wires and cables out of the way, and swung the armored door closed. He snapped the padlock onto the hasp, and jiggled it pointedly to show the door was locked now. “Satisfied?”

“No, I’m not. If this bunker is hardened at all, it’s against conventional bombs. Look at it. We do not need a fission weapon here.” Van Gelder was doing his job, to enforce the rules of engagement for using a nuclear weapon near civilians.

“We need to destroy this bunker,” Bauer said. “It’s a military target. We didn’t bring high-explosive charges. My hands are tied.”

“But this is just a backup relay site. Look at it. They’ll have spare links and nodes in other places, and cables underwater, too, for redundancy. Destroying this little bunker will hardly hurt the SOSUS at all!”

“We use the device.”

Van Gelder felt his blood pressure rise. There was an uncomfortable silence, punctuated by the rushing of the wind. “Can I speak to you in private?”

Bauer made a face and led Van Gelder to the side.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” Van Gelder said.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Following my orders.” Van Gelder held up the thick binder Bauer had made him bring, detailing the ROEs at great length in German. “The rules of engagement aren’t satisfied. You can’t set off the atom bomb.”

“You’re so naive, Van Gelder.”

“I’m doing what you told me to do. There’re a dozen ways a nuclear blast here would break international law. The principle of just cause, proportionality of collateral damage, protection of the environment…No such conditions have been met.”

“They were never meant to be, you idiot.”

Acknowledgments

The research and professional assistance which form the nonfiction technical underpinnings of Crush Depth are a direct outgrowth and continuation of those for Thunder in the Deep and Deep Sound Channel. First, I want to thank my formal manuscript readers: Melville Lyman, commanding officer of several SSBN strategic missile submarines, and now director for special weapons safety and surety at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory; Commander Jonathan Powis, Royal Navy, who was navigator on the fast-attack submarine HMS Conqueror during the Falklands crisis; Lieutenant Commander Jules Steinhauer, USNR (Ret.), World War II diesel boat veteran, and carrier battle group submarine liaison in the early Cold War; retired senior chief Bill Begin, veteran of many “boomer” strategic deterrent patrols; and Peter Petersen, who served on the German navy’s U-518 in World War II. I also want to thank two navy SEALs, Warrant Officer Bill Pozzi and Commander Jim Ostach, for their feedback, support, and friendship.

A number of other navy people gave valuable guidance: George Graveson, Jim Hay, and Ray Woolrich, all retired U.S. Navy captains, former submarine skippers, and active in the Naval Submarine League; Ralph Slane, vice president of the New York Council of the Navy League of the United States, and docent of the Intrepid Museum; Ann Hassinger, research librarian at the U.S. Naval Institute; Richard Rosenblatt, M.D., formerly a medical consultant to the U.S. Navy; and Commander Rick Dau, USN (Ret.), Operations Director of the Naval Submarine League.

Additional submariners and military contractors deserve acknowledgment. They are too many to name here, but standing out in my mind are pivotal conversations with Commander Mike Connor, at the time C.O. of USS Seawolf, and with Captain Ned Beach, USN (Ret.), a brilliant writer and one of the greatest submariners of all time. I also want to thank, for the guided tours of their fine submarines, the officers and men of USS Alexandria, USS Connecticut, USS Dallas, USS Hartford, USS Memphis, USS Salt Lake City, USS Seawolf, USS Springfield, USS Topeka, and the modern German diesel submarine U-15. I owe “deep” appreciation to everyone aboard the USS Miami, SSN 755, for four wonderful days on and under the sea.

Similar thanks go to the instructors and students of the New London Submarine School and the Coronado BUD/SEAL training facilities, and to all the people who demonstrated their weapons, equipment, attack vessels, and aircraft at the amphibious warfare bases in Coronado and Norfolk. Appreciation also goes to the men and women of the aircraft carrier USS Constellation, the Aegis guided missile cruiser USS Vella Gulf, the fleet-replenishment oiler USNS Pecos, the deep-submergence rescue vehicle Avalon, and its chartered tender the Kellie Chouest.

First among the publishing professionals who influenced my work is my wife, Sheila Buff, a nonfiction author with more than two dozen titles in birdwatching and nature, wellness and nutrition. Then comes my literary agent, John Talbot, who lets me know exactly what he likes or doesn’t like in no uncertain terms. Equally crucial is my editor at William Morrow, Jennifer Fisher, always very accessible and remarkably perceptive on how to improve my manuscript drafts. Lastly, appreciation goes to my friend and fellow author Captain David E. Meadows, USN; and to Lee Glick, second lieutenant in the Civil Air Patrol and volunteer firefighter.

Note from the Author

World events of the last century or more have proven one thing repeatedly: It is very difficult to predict the nature of the next big war to embroil America and our Allies. But from World War I to World War II to the Cold War and beyond, the tremendous importance of submarines has always been clear.

Since their inception, in every era, submarines rank among the most advanced weapons systems, and the most advanced benchmarks of technology and engineering achieved by the human race. Stunning feats of courage by their crews, of sacrifice and endurance, loom large on the pages of history.

The tools and techniques of undersea warfare are constantly evolving. Development will continue, rendered more urgent by the Anti-Terrorist War. With the U.S. Navy’s Seawolf class, new sonar systems, called wide-aperture arrays, have revolutionized target searching and fire control. Advanced SEAL Delivery System minisubs, to covertly deploy Special Warfare commandos in the forward battle area, are operational. Remote controlled Unmanned Undersea Vehicles and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, operated from parent nuclear subs, form an essential part of the Pentagon’s acquisition plans.

Equipment for scuba diving in very deep water, for combat and salvage and espionage, is always pushing the envelope. Actual capabilities are closely guarded by the military, but it is known that people have walked on the bottom at three thousand feet.

Ever improved quieting, and highly secret ways to reduce a submarine’s nonacoustic signature (thermal and chemical traces, wake turbulence, etc.), transform the meaning of stealth. All these forces of change drastically reshape how undersea warfare will be fought—and whoever controls the ocean’s depths controls its surface, and thus controls much of the world.

Studies are underway on using exotic hull materials to increase submarine operating depth. Alumina casing, a ceramic composite much stronger than steel, was declassified by the Navy after the Cold War. Someday, when the need grows compelling enough, vast areas of the ocean’s floor will become a high-tech battleground for front-line manned fast attack subs and boomers, and for their smaller robotic proxies.

To some questions about the future of national defense, obtaining correct answers will be crucial to the fate of democracy and freedom: Which gaps in our security posture could be exploited in years to come, by some shrewd, aggressive new Evil Empire or Axis? From what quarter might the next surprise attack fall? What sacrifices and feats of courage will America need, to prevail in the Next Big War? Perhaps the only certain thing is that submarines, and their heroic crews, will play a vital part.

Joe Buff

February 14, 2002

Dutchess County, New York

About the Author

JOE BUFF is a member of the U.S. Naval Institute and a Life Member of the Naval Submarine League, the Navy League of the United States, and the Fellows of the Naval War College. Highly regarded for his technical knowledge, he is considered an expert in the field of submarines, and two of his nonfiction articles about future submarine technology have won Annual Literary Awards from the Naval Submarine League. In addition to Crush Depth and his newest novel of submarine warfare, Tidal Rip, he is the author of the highly regarded adventure novels Thunder in the Deep and Deep Sound Channel. Mr. Buff lives with his wife in Dutchess County, New York. Visit his website at www.joebuff.com.

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Enthusiastic praise for the novels of

JOE BUFF

“A SUPERB high-water mark in naval fiction.”

Michael DiMercurio, author of Threat Vector

“BREATHLESSLY PACED…satisfying action for battle lovers…[Buff’s] meticulous attention to details of life aboard the Challenger and the obstacles it faces help heighten the drama.”

Publishers Weekly

“LOTS OF ACTION, LOTS OF GRIT.”

Dick Couch, Capt., USN (ret.), author of

The Warrior Elite: The Forging of SEAL Class 228

“NONSTOP AND EXHILARATING…chilling and fascinating. Joe Buff takes the reader on a frightening ride in harm’s way.”

Eric L. Harry, author of Arc Light

“A WILD, HAIR-RAISING rocket sled of a ride!”

Baton Rouge Advocate

“[BUFF] WILL KEEP TECHNOTHRILLER FANS AT SEA MOST OF THE NIGHT.”

Booklist

Also by Joe Buff

THUNDER IN THE DEEP

DEEP SOUND CHANNEL

Copyright

Illustrations excluded from e-book edition.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CRUSH DEPTH. Copyright © 2002 by Joe Buff. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Table of Contents

PROLOGUE

ONE Later that day Bachelor Officers Quarters, Naval Submarine Base, New London, Connecticut OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, in the post-midnight pitch-blackness, the freezing wind howled and moaned. The wind slashed at the leafless trees on the slope that led down to the river. Now and then, sleet pattered the pane, the tail end of a strong nor’easter that had dumped a foot of snow. Inside the room, a candle glowed in one corner. The ancient steam-heat radiator hissed and dripped. Ilse Reebeck looked down at Jeffrey Fuller. “Do you want me to get off now?” He met her gaze, with that slightly out-of-focus look in his eyes he always got right after making love. Jeffrey nodded, too sated to speak. Ilse felt him watch her intently as she left the bed. He stayed fully under the covers—she’d noticed since they’d first become intimate on New Year’s Eve that he was strangely shy with her about his body, well endowed as he was with muscles and dark curly hair and the scars of an honorable war wound. Ilse

TWO THE MOURNFUL HOWL of the sirens pierced the wind. As Jeffrey watched from the observation deck, streetlights switched off borough by borough. Down below, vehicles stopped and their headlight glows vanished. From upwind, Jeffrey heard a deafening roar. On the runways of Newark Airport, bright blue-violet flames lit off. They moved, faster and faster and up into the sky—the afterburners of scrambling interceptor jets. A whole squadron, a dozen planes, took to the air and headed out to sea. The yeoman stuck his head out of the door. “It’s real! Get down to shelter!” “What is it?” Jeffrey shouted back. “Cruise missiles inbound! Submarine launched! Coming this way! Mach eight!” “Mach eight?” Ilse yelled. “Come on!” the yeoman shouted. “We’re staying,” Jeffrey declared. The yeoman shook his head and disappeared. “Mach eight, Jeffrey,” Ilse said. “I thought—” “They had a handful left, in the supply pipeline.” “Shouldn’t we go to the basement? They’ll get here very soon.” “And be buried al

THREE Next morning, at the Pentagon EVENTUALLY, PASSENGER RAILROAD service was restored. Jeffrey and Ilse spent an uncomfortable night on the train as it crept toward Washington. They carefully folded Jeffrey’s dress uniform jacket, and the jacket of Ilse’s pantsuit, and put them neatly on the overhead rack. Then they used their coats as improvised blankets—the crowded train was chilly, to save energy, since it took power to heat the cars. Jeffrey slept fitfully; sometimes he heard Ilse moan in her sleep. He was tempted to squeeze her hand to try to comfort her, but held back; he remembered her comment in the Empire State Building cocktail lounge, that this was strictly a business trip. At the Pentagon, at least, Jeffrey and Ilse were able to freshen up and eat breakfast: bacon, actual bacon, and omelets made from real—not powdered—eggs. Now they sat in a waiting area, on a plush leather couch outside the big floor-to-ceiling double doors of a meeting room. The door was guarded by two

FOUR JEFFREY’S DAD TURNED and noticed him, and did a double take. “It is you,” Michael Fuller said to his son. Jeffrey felt his chest tighten. The man began to wash his hands, half ignoring Jeffrey. Testing me. Challenging me. Jeffrey knew too well he and his father both had their egos, especially with each other. “I, um,” Jeffrey stammered. He blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “How come you’re here?” Michael Fuller used his reflection in the mirror to look at Jeffrey. “That’s the best you can manage? ‘How come I’m here?’ Not ‘Good to see you, Pop’? Not ‘How are the nieces and nephews’?” Jeffrey had two older sisters, both married and with kids. “Sorry. It’s been a rough couple of days.” “Yeah.” His dad was sour. “For all of us.” He turned to face Jeffrey, and grudgingly made conversation. “You stationed in the Pentagon now?” “No. Just came from out of town, for a meeting. You?” Conflicting emotions flooded through Jeffrey as his father grabbed some paper towels. Part of J

FIVE Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, well south of Diego Garcia VAN GELDER FELT his armpits grow moist as Voortrekker’s electronic-support-measures mast picked up more and more enemy search radars. Around him in the control room, his technicians called out each sweep. Though he’d drilled them often to always speak calmly and clearly in battle, he heard the men’s voices grow higher pitched and start to get slurred from excitement or stress. Each radar sweep Van Gelder’s people reported was windowed on his screen, as a strobing flash in livid yellow, on a digital compass rose that showed the source’s direction. With each pulsing strobe, Van Gelder’s console also emitted a warning beep, a ragged, ugly, deep-toned sound. The strobes and beeps were growing brighter and louder, and more numerous. Soon the enemy radars would become a lethal threat, as the aircraft from USS Reagan drew close. Ter Horst didn’t seem to even care. Both periscopes busily scanned the ocean and the sky. Their imager

SIX Three hours later JEFFREY AND ILSE sat on the couch again, in the anteroom of the meeting chamber at the Pentagon. The vice chief of naval operations was still inside with some of his key people, holding a crisis meeting on the Indian Ocean attack. Word had reached Washington quickly, cutting short Jeffrey’s presentation. Now, aides, messengers, senior officers came and went through the double doors, all of them in a hurry. Their faces betrayed their emotions, ranging from grim determination to anger to grief. Jeffrey and Ilse were ignored. Jeffrey’s inner turmoil rolled around inside him. He didn’t mention to Ilse seeing his father, or the news about his mom. He tried not to think about this latest bad news either: the destruction of Diego Garcia, the obvious fact Voortrekker was on the loose, Jan ter Horst on the warpath. He wondered what Ilse would be thinking, being reminded of Jan. “How much longer till someone tells us what’s going on?” Ilse said. “I don’t know.” “Will they w

SEVEN On Voortrekker, in the Indian Ocean “SCHNAPPS, GUNTHER?” Jan ter Horst poured Van Gelder a glass before he could refuse. Van Gelder didn’t feel like drinking. He was exhausted from hours of supervising damage-control repairs throughout the ship. The air was breathable now without respirator masks, but it smelled bad. Van Gelder heard men go by outside ter Horst’s closed cabin door, carrying tools and spare parts. Van Gelder knew the crew was still recovering, mentally and physically, from their thorough atomic depth charging by planes from the USS Reagan. Ter Horst had said it would take a lucky shot to sink Voortrekker. But Van Gelder thought it was only luck that let Voortrekker survive. On second thought, maybe I could use a drink. This was the first time in a great while that ter Horst had summoned Van Gelder to a special private meeting, and Van Gelder was nervous. They sat with ter Horst’s fold-down desk between them. Did he see my hesitation, my qualms, during the attack o

EIGHT Simultaneously, at Dulles International Airport, Washington, D.C. STRAPPED INTO THE rear of the cockpit, Ilse heard the purring of the fighter jet’s twin engines rise to a steady, insistent whine. The crew chief and Rachel Barrows saluted. Ilse waved, and the crew chief waved back. Barrows must know she can trust the crew chief. I’d hate it if he were a spy, and sabotaged us. Barrows closed and sealed the cockpit canopy. Ilse breathed deeply, slightly frightened yet almost giddy in anticipation of what was to come. Her oxygen mask smelled rubbery. The oxygen tasted metallic and felt cool and dry. It helped Ilse feel more alert. Barrows’s voice came over Ilse’s headphones. “I’ll leave the intercom mikes on so we can talk. We’ll maintain strict radio and radar silence, for obvious reasons.” The plane taxied some distance in the pitch-dark. The plane’s suspension was stiff; Ilse felt every bump and crack and seam in the taxiway. “How can you see? I thought the Axis was distorting th

NINE Same evening, New London, Connecticut JEFFREY’S TRAIN ARRIVED on time in New London, and he did get a seat, but that was the best he could say for the ride. His mood—his morale about life in general—was at a low. It was just one thing after another the past forty-eight hours: the New York raid; him and Ilse fighting, and then her being sent God knows where; running into his father, and arguing, and separating again; the slaughter on Diego Garcia. The worst thing for Jeffrey personally was his mother. He’d taken it for granted that she’d be around forever. He’d always just assumed that one day he would patch things up with his folks, like maybe when he got married and had kids and gave his mom and dad some grandchildren. Now Jeffrey might be running out of time, fast, to even say good-bye to his mom. The whole trip from Washington to New London, as the sun set outside the windows and people got on and off the train at different stops, all this had swirled in Jeffrey’s mind, eating

TEN Thirty-six hours later JEFFREY WOKE UP early, after barely four hours’ sleep. The cot in the dormitory zone of the underground pens was uncomfortable. But with all the noise inside Challenger, from the contractors working frantically there, sleep on the ship was impossible. Jeffrey put both feet on the floor, stretched to get the kinks out of his back, and it hit him. The handshakes and smiles, the flashbulbs, all the grand but hurried ceremonies of change of command and the medals, counted for little compared to the sense of loss that assaulted Jeffrey’s mind as he stood up. Ilse Reebeck was dead. All their shared experiences during battle, all their passionate times in more recent nights, were as nothing now, wiped away. Where could the captain of a U.S. Navy warship find the time or privacy to mourn? His cabin on Challenger was being used as a blueprint room by repair crews. He slept instead on a cot in a big room full of cots, hearing other people snore. Jeffrey dressed as quie

ELEVEN Very early the next morning, on the Thames River, New London, Connecticut JEFFREY STOOD IN the open bridge cockpit atop Challenger’s sail—the conning tower. He was crammed between the phone talker and the officer of the deck. In spite of his parka, Jeffrey shivered in the heavy, freezing sleet and freakish wintertime hail. At least the wind was from behind him and the ship, from upriver. It was in the wee hours of the night. The total dark and terrible visibility were exactly what he and Commodore Wilson wanted. They were already five hours behind schedule, just now getting out of the pens. Fortunately this unexpected squall, with the perfect concealment it gave, took some of the edge off Wilson’s displeasure at Jeffrey’s delay. Challenger’s reactor was shut down, to suppress her infrared signature. As a consequence, the ship had no propulsion power. She was being pulled behind a big oil barge, itself pulled by a powerful civilian tugboat. The lash-up began to hurry down the riv

TWELVE A few hours later, on Challenger, under way at sea CHALLENGER WAS PAST the edge of the continental shelf, submerged in very deep water. The crew had been sent to a hearty breakfast of nourishing hot food, with several choices of entrées, and now was settling in to the watch-keeping routines of being under way at sea. Jeffrey sat alone at the desk in his stateroom. As usual, he kept the door open while he worked. In the control room, only a few feet up the corridor, a talented junior officer from engineering had the conn. Bell, in Jeffrey’s absence, was command duty officer, Jeffrey’s surrogate there. In a few more minutes Bell would turn in for badly needed sleep. Jeffrey was a bit exhausted himself. His eyes burned. He knew they were bloodshot. His whole body felt wired, from lack of rest combined with too much adrenaline now growing stale. Jeffrey was finishing paperwork, since the basic engineering tests were mostly complete. The ship had held up well enough as they gradually

THIRTEEN Night of the first day at sea, one hundred miles east of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay “COMMODORE IN CONTROL,” the messenger of the watch announced. “As you were.” Wilson came over and stood next to Jeffrey. Jeffrey, after a pleasant catnap, was expecting him. Challenger made flank speed, as ordered, vibrating steadily as the propulsion plant worked hard. Consoles squeaked gently in their shock-absorbing mounts, and mike cords near the overhead swayed back and forth. A boyish part of Jeffrey really enjoyed seeing and hearing these little signs of how fast his ship was going. “Status, Captain?” Wilson asked. “We’ve been following the edge of the continental shelf, sir. The north side of the Gulf Stream throws off meanders and eddies here. Horizontally, vertically, they form temperature and salinity cells that distort and attenuate sound.” “Why did you pick eleven hundred feet as your depth?” “In case someone does get a whiff of us, they’ll think we’re a steel-hulled sub.” “Bring

FOURTEEN Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, in the eastern Indian Ocean GUNTHER VAN GELDER felt relaxation and inner joy, as much as this was possible for a sailor at sea in a war. He had the conn in Voortrekker’s control room, and Jan ter Horst was asleep. Voortrekker was doing what she did best, moving quietly near the ocean floor in water three kilometers deep—snaking through the massifs and fissures of the Mid–Indian Ocean Ridge. These endless undersea volcanic mountains and valleys formed the ideal landscape in which Voortrekker could hide. To Van Gelder, watching the stark, razor-sharp faults and escarpments go by on the ship’s gravimeter display, it was the ideal place for him to sightsee. The ship made only seven knots, for safety as well as for stealth. A remote-controlled off-board probe was deployed well ahead of Voortrekker, scouting for enemy mines and hydrophone grids. The probe used special cameras to study the bottom in Voortrekker’s path, and Van Gelder watched the images

FIFTEEN The next day, midafternoon, in the Caribbean Sea CHALLENGER HOVERED NEAR the bottom in four thousand feet of water. The ship was at battle stations, rigged for ultraquiet. Around Jeffrey in the control room, his people talked in hushed tones, conveying information on shipping and aircraft contacts overhead or in the distance. The general feeling was tense, with Commodore Wilson grimly leaning over crewmen’s shoulders, peering at various console screens. Wilson stood up straight and turned to Jeffrey. “They’re late.” “I thought we were running late,” Jeffrey said. “We are. Hold your position, and hope they catch up. If they don’t appear we’re in a lot of trouble.” “Sir, with respect, would you please inform me whom they are?” “I’ll know it when they get here.” Jeffrey was exasperated. How was his crew supposed to watch for something with which to rendezvous, when none of them knew what that something was? “Is this secrecy really needed, Commodore?” “We can’t afford to ruin their

SIXTEEN WILSON, SATISFIED BY the periscope photo, ordered Jeffrey to continue with the rendezvous. As shown by live periscope imagery, Challenger was directly under the Prima Latina now. Jeffrey watched in amazement and then horror as the merchant ship split apart at the keel. A mine? Kathy reported new sonar transients—machinery noise, not breaking-up sounds. Jeffrey saw that this was supposed to happen: the ship’s bottom was a giant double door. “Here’s your ride through the canal, Captain,” Wilson said. “This wasn’t my idea. It goes way above a mere commodore’s pay grade, I assure you. I’m just following orders, as well as giving them.” “Understood.” “Surface your ship into the covert hold.” I was afraid he was going to say that. “Can’t we have her go any slower?” “No. If she slows or stops it’ll look suspicious. She’s being painted by dozens of radars we know about, and watched by God knows how many spy satellites we don’t know about.” Jeffrey thought hard how to do this. Challenge

SEVENTEEN On Voortrekker, inside the Trincomalee Tiger GUNTHER VAN GELDER sweated and his heart was pounding, both from exertion and from fear. He was truly caught between a rock and a hard place. Hurry up. But be quiet. Work faster. Not so loud. Van Gelder and his men needed to maintain absolute silence, because the enemy was so near. But they also had to work quickly. The cruise missile vertical launch array was already reloaded, but there was so much still to be done. Van Gelder stood on Voortrekker’s hull behind the sail, next to the open weapons-loading hatch which led down to the torpedo room. He paused for just a moment, to wipe his dripping brow. He eyed his wristwatch and frowned. He glanced up from his labors and looked about the secret hold to take stock of the situation. The feeling of being on tenterhooks wouldn’t subside. The Trincomalee Tiger was well equipped—with the special cranes needed to transfer weapons to a nuclear submarine, and with the nuclear weapons themselv

EIGHTEEN On Voortrekker “HOW MANY MORE torpedoes still to be loaded, Number One?” “Six, Captain, not counting the one on the loading chute.” “Make it quick,” ter Horst said. “The enemy’s so close I can almost smell that destroyer through Tiger’s hull.” “I know, sir.” Van Gelder glanced again to the rear of the hold, where there’d just been more Australian clanking and hammering. On Voortrekker’s deck, someone shouted. Van Gelder turned to censure the man. Instead he watched his worst nightmare of all unfold. The Tiger’s overworked loading crane failed. A big two-metric-ton nuclear torpedo, a German Sea Lion, teetered on a single length of fraying metal cable. The cable snapped and the Sea Lion landed nosefirst on Voortrekker’s deck, then fell over. It instantly crushed one crewman to bloody pulp, maimed another, and knocked two more off the deck and into the water. The torpedo rolled into the water with a heavy splash. It began to hit Voortrekker in the side, as the Tiger rolled and th

NINETEEN On Challenger IN PRIVATE, IN THE commodore’s office, Wilson looked at Jeffrey harshly. “That’s exactly what I intended you to do all along. Did you really think I’d let one of your crewmen lose an arm or die?” “Sorry, Commodore,” Jeffrey said. “It is an obvious thing to do, now that I know that you knew we’d be going through Panama.” Challenger, inside the Prima Latina, was nearing the entrance to the canal. Challenger was just a huge passenger for now—a strange kind of cargo, as unusual as the sunken Russian Golf-class sub that Howard Hughes’s Glomar Explorer had tried to salvage from the ocean floor back in the 1960s. Jeffrey had ordered Challenger’s reactor be shut down, partly for stealth and partly because there was no supply of cooling water. Challenger was therefore rigged for reduced electrical, and also for a modified form of ultraquiet. “So talk to your CIA liaison,” Wilson said. “This Rodrigo person. Work up some kind of story, that the injured man was part of the P

TWENTY On Challenger JEFFREY’S INJURED TORPEDOMAN was gone to a hospital. The Prima Latina was slowly being towed through the entry locks, at the beginning of the Panama Canal, by electric locomotives running on tracks along the bank. Sitting at his console in the control room, Jeffrey had to take this mostly on faith. He couldn’t exactly go up on the freighter’s bridge to greet the canal pilot and customs officials at Cristobal. All Challenger’s periscope showed him was the inside of the submarine hold. He had to take Rodrigo’s word for what was going on. The feeling in the control room was stuffy and tense. There was nowhere to go, trapped inside the tramp steamer, herself imprisoned inside the shallow canal locks. Jeffrey had set Challenger at battle stations hours ago, as a precaution, but the crew had no real way to defend themselves—except for last-ditch small arms. Silence was their best, their only protection. Even though the decks all rode on sound-isolation gear, Jeffrey’s cr

TWENTY-ONE On Voortrekker VAN GELDER HAD the conn. Voortrekker was back in the all-concealing bottom terrain of the Mid–Indian Ocean Ridge. She continued on her journey toward the Australia–New Zealand–Antarctic Gap and the wide Pacific beyond. As before, Voortrekker moved slowly, scouting ahead with an off-board probe. Van Gelder looked up from the imagery feed when a messenger came to his console. “The captain’s compliments, sir, and he requests your presence in his cabin.” “Very well…Navigator, take the conn.” Van Gelder stepped aft to ter Horst’s cabin. “Come in, Gunther, come in.” Ter Horst switched from Afrikaans—the Boer tongue—to German. “I believe you already know Commander Bauer.” Van Gelder nodded. Bauer was the head of the Kampfschwimmer team. He was tall and blond and handsome, slim-waisted, and seemed like a real tight-ass. Van Gelder disliked him on sight. “I enjoyed our little swim together, First Officer,” Bauer said. “It is good we rescued your crewman from the water,

TWENTY-TWO On Challenger THE PRIMA LATINA was supposed to stop in Balboa harbor, at the Pacific Ocean end of the Panama Canal, to let the canal pilot off. By strange coincidence, just then, the Prima Latina’s throttles jammed at full power. Rodrigo, sent below by the master to shut the main fuel-cutoff valves, took forever as he pretended to fumble all around the engine room in search of the proper controls. While harbor-traffic authorities warned other shipping by radio to stay clear, Prima Latina ran at full speed the whole length of the Gulf of Panama. The launch meant to pick up the harbor pilot had no choice but to chase in the freighter’s wake. At last, at the very outlet of the gulf, the throttles were forced shut. The Prima Latina came to a halt. The pilot departed, cursing, swearing he would have the ship’s canal toll doubled for wasting so much of his valuable time. All this Jeffrey knew because Rodrigo told him about it with a chuckle once the canal pilot was gone. The mecha

TWENTY-THREE WILSON GLARED AT Jeffrey. “How dare you come in here and speak to me like this?” “Sir, you lied to me. You told me someone whom you knew I cared about was dead. You let me suffer for days, and you knew all along that Ilse Reebeck was alive.” “Yes, I knew. And no, I didn’t tell you. Your behavior right now is perfect proof of why.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “See that dressing mirror? Look at yourself.” Jeffrey’s face was red and his fists were balled and his posture was antagonistic. “What do you see?” “I’m angry. I have every right to be. You violated the code of honor between naval officers, sir. You lied to me.” Wilson took off his reading glasses. “Do you want to know what I see when I look at you right now, Captain Fuller? I see someone who can’t control his emotions when he needs to. I see someone who cannot grasp the larger picture. I see a commander who if he keeps this up is going to stay in that rank for however much longer he survives.” Jeffrey balled his f

TWENTY-FOUR Several days later, south of New Zealand, aboard Voortrekker’s minisub VAN GELDER WATCHED and listened, amazed that all this was happening and that he was here to see. “I repeat,” the Kampfschwimmer chief ordered into the mike with some impatience. “Confirm you are on the bottom.” The German chief, squashed in standing up, looked past Van Gelder’s shoulder as Van Gelder sat in the minisub’s copilot seat. Commander Bauer was the pilot, elbow to elbow on Van Gelder’s left. The chief read the display screens in the mini’s cramped and dimly lit control compartment. They showed the data feed from his divers now fully six kilometers deep under the mini. The fiber-optic data line and the strong lift cable to which it was braided were the only links to the pair of men in the unimaginable depths below. The mini itself hovered submerged at only fifty meters. It was Van Gelder’s job as copilot to hold it at that depth, rigged for ultraquiet. Van Gelder saw an acknowledgment appear fro

TWENTY-FIVE The next day JEFFREY SAT TENSE and worried at the command console in Challenger’s control room. Outwardly, in order to do his duty and show good leadership to his crew, he made sure he exuded nothing but calm and confidence. The cost of this internal-versus-external conflict was a tight knot in Jeffrey’s stomach, and gradually increasing fatigue. He hoped to grab another catnap soon. But not right now. Commodore Wilson stood sternly in the aisle, supervising as the diesel boats reported in. The Royal Australian Navy submarines Farncomb, Rankin, Sheean, and Waller were holding for now to the east of Chatham Island, arrayed in a line. Each vessel was thirty-five miles from the next. The four Collins-class subs created a scouting and search line a hundred miles across, under Wilson’s control. Orders and reports would be passed up and down the line using covert acoustic communication bursts. At least that was the plan. The Australians would listen on passive sonar, ping on acti

TWENTY-SIX Later, on Challenger’s minisub TO JEFFREY IT was refreshing and pleasantly different, almost a tourist junket, to be going somewhere in the minisub outside a combat zone. It would also be the first time Jeffrey stepped ashore in a foreign country since becoming commanding officer, and he was looking forward to this small but momentous event. Jeffrey manned the mini’s copilot seat and Harrison, sitting next to him, had the conn. The trip from Challenger’s hiding place to Chatham Island took a while; they shared the driving. Back in the transport compartment, one of Lieutenant Clayton’s logistics-support enlisted SEALs rested having a coffee—he alternated with Harrison as pilot every hour, so they all stayed sharp while cruising submerged to and from the island. The battery-powered mini’s control compartment, with its low headroom and red lighting and computer icons dancing on display screens, formed an intimate setting, and Jeffrey was feeling expansive. He’d taken a shining

TWENTY-SEVEN Owenga fishing station, Chatham Island JEFFREY GINGERLY OPENED the minisub’s top hatch. It rose partway and hit the planks of the pier the mini was hiding under. Jeffrey peeked outside. It was barely dawn. Jeffrey caught his first whiff of natural air in almost a week. What struck him at once were the smells. Dead fish, diesel fuel and lubricants, and tarry creosote—the odors of a working waterfront. The minisub bobbed in the swell, which was noticeable even here on the downwind side of the island. Jeffrey listened. The swell sloshed. Rope lines creaked. The minisub scraped gently against seaweed and barnacles growing on the pilings of the pier. Next to the pier, as Jeffrey expected, was an old fishing boat, large but wooden hulled, resting on the bottom mud, derelict. By the red light coming from down in the mini’s lockout chamber, Jeffrey spotted a stained and dirty canvas tarpaulin hanging over the side of the hulk, between the rotting fenders that still held the boat a

TWENTY-EIGHT JEFFREY LAY ON his back, bewildered, staring at the sky, in mental shock as his heart pounded. Around him he sensed a disordered swirl of frantic motion and raised voices. Montgomery was already some distance away. Everyone was scrambling for cover and grabbing their weapons. Jeffrey’s former SEAL training came back from his younger days. He rolled onto his stomach and belly-crawled to a better position. Where’s the sniper? And who the hell is shooting at us? There was a bang in the distance, and a tearing sound. “Incoming!” Clayton shouted. Everyone squashed flat. Jeffrey caressed the damp soil with urgent intimacy, and tried to become one with the moss. The initial surprise of it all was wearing off, and now stark terror sank in. Jeffrey badly wished he had a helmet. A glowing ball was tearing toward him low over the ground, leaving a trail of dirty smoke. The rocket slammed into Ilse’s tent and exploded inside. The canvas billowed outward and ripped, riddled with white-