Crush Depth

Van Gelder was surprised to see two white plugs embedded in the skin in the small of the Kampfschwimmer’s back. Each had a small valve, now sealed off.

“What are they?” Van Gelder said. “Gills?” He was half joking.

“Look more closely, please,” Bauer said.

Van Gelder realized the plugs were intravenous ports — the things used in hospitals for chronically ill patients who needed repeated blood transfusions or constant chemotherapy drips.

“What are they for?”

“With these,” Bauer said, “a man may dive to six thousand meters or more.” Twenty thousand feet.

“You can’t be serious. Not even mixed gases work below about six hundred meters. Six thousand? The pressure alone so deep…”

“We are not speaking of gases. We are speaking of breathing oxygenated saline solution, directly into the lungs, a fluid which self-equalizes to the metric tons of outside pressure.”

“I’ve heard of that idea,” Van Gelder said. “It’s an old idea. Getting the oxygen in was never the problem. The problem was getting the carbon dioxide out. Once the carbon dioxide level in the blood builds up, the person dies!”

“Yes, they die. They die if the carbon dioxide level builds up in the diver’s blood. We do not let the carbon dioxide build up.”

Van Gelder hesitated. “That’s what these implants are for?”

“Ja. The diver wears a backpack, which hooks up to the ports. Instead of tanks of gas, the backpack contains dialysis apparatus. There is, of course, also a form of rebreather oxygen supply. But the key, the great breakthrough by German science, is the perfection of the carbon dioxide dialysis process.”

Van Gelder turned to the enlisted man. “Have you really done this? In actual field trials, at such great depths?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“And how many others have died so far, doing this?”

The enlisted man looked at the floor.

“Decompression takes many, many hours,” Bauer continued firmly. “That is why we brought our portable one-man pressure chambers.”

“Those coffin-shaped crates?”

“Ja. A good disguise for the chambers, don’t you agree? To ship them through Sri Lanka, and load them on the Trincomalee Tiger, crated to look like coffins?”

Coffins is right, Van Gelder thought.

Ter Horst smiled. “Now you see our plan, Gunther.”

Van Gelder thought for a moment. “I do, and I don’t, Captain. If one of these divers goes down and cuts the SOSUS fiber optic with a pair of scissors instead of an atom bomb, the Allies will still know right away there’s a break in the line. Their equipment will tell them where. They’ll investigate. We’ll be found out.”

“Who said anything about a break?” Bauer interrupted. “A diver is useless unless he performs useful work. Four of my men, in total, bear these port implants. They work in teams of two.”

“They work in teams doing what?”

Ter Horst leaned over and touched Van Gelder on the knee. “This is the beautiful part.”

“We have a device which taps into the fiber-optic line,” Bauer said.

“I thought fiber optics can’t be tapped without detection.”

“No, they can. Even the Allies have been doing this for several years. But what good would it do your ship to listen on the Allied sound surveillance grid?”

“None! We don’t want the SOSUS to listen to us.”

“Ha!” Bauer was obviously very pleased with himself. “Our device does not listen. It replaces. It penetrates and intercepts the optic signals, and cancels them and substitutes signals we supply, from the device, using microlasers and a built-in high-speed computer. All without breaking the cable or interrupting the signal for even one moment.”

“But—”

“Yes, it involves extremely fine work, which is why men must be down there on site and use their hands…. And incase you’re concerned about the cold at six thousand meters, the men wear special dry suits lined with shielded plutonium. This gives a diver the manual dexterity of a brain surgeon, even spending hours in seawater near the freezing point.”

“You’re not serious. Plutonium?”

“The idea was tried by the Americans in the 1950s, you should know. Plutonium gives off constant heat, and keeps the divers toasty warm without an external power source that might be drained prematurely. The Americans abandoned the idea because they were afraid of nuclear-waste pollution.” Bauer laughed sarcastically. “We’re giving them plenty of such pollution every day, now, are we not?”

Van Gelder sensed that even ter Horst found Bauer overbearing.

Ter Horst cleared his throat. “So, Gunther, that’s how we’ll get through…. Terrific, don’t you think?”

“It’s amazing, Captain.”

“We send the Kampfschwimmer team ahead of us in our minisub. It’s small enough and quiet enough to escape detection, and also has plenty of range. In fact, Gunther, I would like you to go as copilot on the minisub, to monitor their efforts.”

That sounded interesting, and frightening. “Yes, Captain.”

“The divers leave the steel-hulled mini, with its shallow crush depth,” ter Horst said. “They descend on a lengthy cable, bringing with them a low-light camera with feed up to the minisub, so you can watch as the divers work. The device they attach to the hydrophone line overlays a false signal, background ocean noise and such, while we sneak past.”

“For years,” Bauer said, “the Americans have depended too much on the SOSUS to track other submarines. When we defeat their system this way, it will deal them quite a shock.”

“But eventually the enemy will suspect their incoming data is bad, Captain.”

“By then we’ll be long gone, sinking their tankers and carriers right and left…. Isn’t science a wonderful thing?”

TWENTY-TWO

On Challenger

THE PRIMA LATINA was supposed to stop in Balboa harbor, at the Pacific Ocean end of the Panama Canal, to let the canal pilot off. By strange coincidence, just then, the Prima Latina’s throttles jammed at full power. Rodrigo, sent below by the master to shut the main fuel-cutoff valves, took forever as he pretended to fumble all around the engine room in search of the proper controls. While harbor-traffic authorities warned other shipping by radio to stay clear, Prima Latina ran at full speed the whole length of the Gulf of Panama. The launch meant to pick up the harbor pilot had no choice but to chase in the freighter’s wake.

At last, at the very outlet of the gulf, the throttles were forced shut. The Prima Latina came to a halt. The pilot departed, cursing, swearing he would have the ship’s canal toll doubled for wasting so much of his valuable time.

All this Jeffrey knew because Rodrigo told him about it with a chuckle once the canal pilot was gone. The mechanical failure was faked, all part of the CIA’s plan — to get Challenger through the shallow gulf much faster, and then let the Prima Latina stop at sea without suspicion. Conveniently, the Gulf of Panama became the Pacific proper right at the edge of Central America’s continental shelf.

Standing on Challenger’s hull, inside the Prima Latina, Rodrigo gave Jeffrey a farewell gift packed with fresh fruit, Havana cigars, and several up-to-the-minute intelligence data disks. The two men made their warm good-byes, and Rodrigo took the crawl space out of the submarine hold.