his staff. 'From our tapes she sounds like the Rommel.'
'An aged ship, but deadly,' Commodore Morse said. Jeffrey thought he seemed awfully relaxed, then remembered Morse had been through this before, against Argentina's General Belgrano and her escorts, in the Falklands War.
'Captain,' Jeffrey said, 'Rommel hasn't been pinging like the other patrols. Her slow speed suggests she's retrofitted with a towed array.'
'She's still coming right for us,' Sessions said.
'Sit tight, people,' Wilson said. 'We're boxed in by the mines.' Morse actually smiled. 'There's naught to do but pray.'
In a few minutes Rommel passed close by to starboard— obviously the mines were programmed to ignore Axis shipping.
'Captain,' Jeffrey said, 'we're getting scattered blue-green laser pulses, looks like a variable-depth LIDAR projector, trailing deep.'
'Enough to paint our hull?' Wilson said.
'It's touch and go, sir,' Jeffrey said. 'If it was our own side's equipment, return signal strength would be right at the detection threshold.'
'Any change in the destroyer's behavior?' Wilson said.
'Mechanical transient!' a sonarman shouted. 'Range and bearing match Master 14!'
'What is it?' Jeffrey said. 'And lower your voice.'
'Object in the water,' Sessions called. 'Probable depth charge!…Confirmed, confirmed, depth charge coming down!'
'Phone Talker,' Wilson said, 'collision alarm. All hands rig for depth charge.'
'Gimme a status update, Sonar,' Jeffrey said. 'What's the depth charge depth? How far off is it?'
'Passing through twelve hundred feet now, sir,' Sessions said. 'It's a noisy one, it's tumbling…It's drifting right in our direction…Second depth charge coming down!'
'COB,' Wilson said, 'can we get out of the way?' 'Not by much, sir,' COB said, 'not if you want to keep quiet and stay in one piece.'
'Even if they miss,' Jeffrey said, 'we'll get sympathetic detonations from the CAPTORs all around us.' 'First one's passing through two thousand feet!' There was a bang outside the hull, then the smell of urine as a seaman peed his pants. Sessions turned to Jeffrey and grinned boyishly. 'That sounded like an empty spray can imploding.'
Jeffrey snorted. 'Rommel just threw out the garbage.' Jeffrey glanced at Ilse as she dared exhale. She looked on the verge of giggling in relief.
'All right, everybody,' Jeffrey said, 'back to work.' He turned to the embarrassed seaman. 'Go get cleaned up. I've done that in my time. It's a natural reflex, don't sweat it.'
'Man,' someone said, 'I'm wide-awake now.' 'Enough, people,' Jeffrey said. 'Sonar, what's Master 14 doing?'
'Steaming as before, sir. I think we're okay.' 'Good,' Jeffrey said. Morse smiled at Jeffrey. 'That wasn't so bad, was it?'
'The last thing the bad guys expect,' Jeffrey said, 'is an Allied sub deep in their minefield.' He chuckled. 'That's why we're here.'
Ilse was really sweating now in the odorous CACC. Fifty mines so far on their route plus two more thread- theneedle sprints. They'd practiced some of this in simulations, but that was play-pretend with made-up data. Now Challenger was utterly committed and this was partly Ilse's idea. She looked at the large-scale terrain display once more. There it was to the north, the bulge in the continental shelf, remnant of the 130-millionyear-old geological stretching that split India from Africa. Beyond the huge plateau, in deeper water, lay three seamounts, extinct underwater volcanoes, labeled by the soundings at their peaks. Each projected high from off the ocean floor, almost 1,000 meters deep around their bases. Mount 183 rose dead ahead of Challenger, Mount 146 loomed ten miles to the north, and Mount 98, the tallest, sat on a small plateau of its own ten more miles east of 146. Here, amid these seamounts, the bottom currents from the Agulhas Current were channeled, cornered, and forced to divide. Here fluid turbulence scoured the bottom, sweeping round the seamounts' flanks, then grew chaotic in their lee before resuming course. Here, Ilse had concluded, Challenger should lurk. At the base of Mount 183, amid the stones and shells and boulders, constant flow noise would conceal the vessel's presence, boundary separation round the terrain would scramble enemy Doppler, and the hull would go unnoticed.
The steady movement of the water would let the sub keep up three knots to cool her reactor, ram-scooping cold seawater through her main condenser. It would also help her maintain steerageway, all while hovering stationary over the ground with auxiliary thrusters.
The drift and mix of currents would disperse the vessel's thermal plume. Upwellings of ocean nutrients, lifted along the forward face of Mount 183, would feed vertebrates and phytoplankton near the surface, increasing turbidity and so decreasing LIDAR range. The seamount's massive bulk would shield the boat from enemy sensors, and the broken contours would help cloak Challenger with confused reverb and shifting horizontal water density gradients.
Ilse knew that these same conditions foiled the use of the Boer sound surveillance system, generically called SOSUS, which was why the seamount peaks and valleys were so heavily mined. To everything else was added acoustic interference from heavy industry along the South African coast, mechanical vibrations through the earth, more noise confusing hydrophones near the bottom. A more perfect hiding place, Ilse told herself, for an SSN crew with the nerve for it, could hardly be imagined. But Rommel made one thing clear: pinned down here among the CAPTORs, beneath the constant Axis ASW patrols, if once detected Challenger would surely be destroyed.
Ilse eyed her screens again. She checked and double-checked the boat's indicated position against the charts, the gravimeter, and the data she'd brought with her. Finally she cleared her throat.
'Commander Fuller, this is the spot.'
'Very well, Oceanographer,' Jeffrey said. 'Helm, all stop. Hover on manual.'
'Maneuvering acknowledges all stop,' Meltzer said. 'Hovering on manual.'
'Captain,' Jeffrey said, 'with your permission we'll get rolling.'
'Proceed, XO,' Wilson said. 'Godspeed, and I relieve you.'
'You have the conn,' Jeffrey said.
'This is the captain, I have the conn.'
The watch standers acknowledged.
'COB,' Wilson said, 'we're safe enough for now, and the equipment and crew effectiveness require it. Reactivate the air-conditioning, please.' COB acknowledged. Jeffrey, Ilse, and Meltzer stood up. The navigator took over at Fire Control, and the relief pilot sat in as helmsman. Commodore Morse walked the departing threesome down the passageway toward the Ocean Interface Hull Module at the aft end of the accommodation spaces. On the way they stepped over supply crates, lashed to the deck and covered with floorboards. Then, there in front of them, ten paces before the beginning of the reactor compartment shielding, was a large sphere with a hatch in its side. The hatch was open, revealing a ladder.
Jeffrey stepped into the sphere, then looked up through the massive hatch of the mating collar. Shajo Clayton grinned down at him.
'Checklists are almost completed,' Clayton said.
'Best of luck,' Morse said, shaking everyone's hand. 'Remember that saying from somewhere or other: He who dares wins.' He looked Ilse right in the eye. 'And she who dares wins too.'
Ilse smiled. 'You're enjoying all this, aren't you, Commodore?'
'Busman's holiday,' Morse said. 'Old British custom, you know'
'Let's move,' Clayton said. 'We're behind schedule, we'll lose the tide.' Jeffrey let Ilse and Meltzer precede him up the ladder. He shook hands with Morse again.
'I want to hear all about it when you're back,' Morse said.
'Wish us luck,' Jeffrey said, then remembered that Morse just did that. Jeffrey climbed the ladder and went through the hatch. Now he stood in another sphere, the hyperbaric lockout chamber within Lockheed Martin's sixtyfive-foot-long, fiftyfive-ton Advanced SEAL Delivery System minisub, the ASDS. Above his head was the minisub's roof hatch. One SEAL, the senior chief of Clayton's boat team, was in the little two-man control
