Crush Depth

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.”