Crush Depth

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