Crush Depth

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.”