Crush Depth

“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