Crush Depth

Chatham Island and back, to ferry Ilse and the SEALs and all their gear.

“Conduct a close on-site inspection,” Wilson said. “Make sure the equipment is set up properly, the locals are cooperating, and Lieutenant Reebeck knows her business.”

TWENTY-SIX

Later, on Challenger’s minisub

To Jeffrey it was refreshing and pleasantly different, almost a tourist junket, to be going somewhere in the minisub outside a combat zone. It would also be the first time Jeffrey stepped ashore in a foreign country since becoming commanding officer, and he was looking forward to this small but momentous event.

Jeffrey manned the mini’s copilot seat and Harrison, sitting next to him, had the conn. The trip from Challenger’s hiding place to Chatham Island took a while; they shared the driving. Back in the transport compartment, one of Lieutenant Clayton’s logistics-support enlisted SEALs rested having a coffee — he alternated with Harrison as pilot every hour, so they all stayed sharp while cruising submerged to and from the island.

The battery-powered mini’s control compartment, with its low headroom and red lighting and computer icons dancing on display screens, formed an intimate setting, and Jeffrey was feeling expansive. He’d taken a shining to the earnest and eager young Harrison by now. They’d already traded life stories, with the more painful parts left out. But Harrison did say his parents went through an ugly divorce when he was twelve — he’d viewed the navy as a way to afford a good college, and then find order and purpose in life and gain a substitute family. Though they’d come at doing Navy ROTC from different directions, Jeffrey saw something of himself in Harrison.

The conversation paused. Jeffrey’s mind ran to his own folks, and he felt that sudden sinking feeling again: the recurrent gnawing concern for his mom. There’d been no news from Sloan-Kettering, but that was to be expected. Personal e-mail familygrams got very low priority these days.

Jeffrey had hoped that going to sea would clear his mind of such distractions. Usually when a sailor left the land beyond the horizon, and settled into the rhythm of the ship, shore-based cares fell away and he or she saw life with greater ease and clarity. This time, for Jeffrey, it hadn’t helped.

He told himself he was selfish. With all the radioactive fallout in the air worldwide from this terrible war, many thousands of people would be coming down with cancer — most of them years from now — people who would otherwise have gotten to live a full and healthy life. But that viewpoint didn’t help either — Jeffrey still felt very bad about his mother. Scenes from his early childhood with her, when life was simple and parents seemed perfect and he and his mom were on much better terms, kept flashing through his head. These images and impressions came unbidden and unwelcome, too vivid and unsettling and unreachably, painfully nostalgic, like a video recording running out of control. At times the sense of loss was almost unbearable.

Then there was Jeffrey’s biggest worry of all, everyone’s biggest worry: that the brutal fighting might escalate, that limited tactical nuclear war at sea might spread to all-out atomic devastation on land. Thank God the Axis didn’t have hydrogen bombs, but Hiroshima-sized mushroom clouds over Allied cities would be bad enough. To Jeffrey, since his trip to New York and Washington, the threat felt very personal. No longer were his mom and dad safe in America’s heartland, well away from the coast. Now his mother might still lie in a hospital bed in Manhattan, and his father worked in D.C. — prime ground zeroes for cruise missiles tipped with fission bombs. Since Diego Garcia the risk seemed so much higher. On Challenger no one talked about it. It was as if the entire subject, mass destruction on land, was taboo by a silent consensus; to bring it up would just destroy morale. The best thing, the only thing, that Jeffrey and his crew could do was to do their best to help bring the war to a close….

Harrison, hands firmly on throttle and steering yoke, opened his mouth as if he had something to say, but he hesitated.

“What’s on your mind?” Jeffrey asked, welcoming any change of subject. “Go ahead. No one has personal secrets for long on a submarine.”

Harrison kept his eyes glued to his instruments. “I feel there’s some unfinished business, Captain…. Basically I–I wanted to apologize, for pissing my pants in our action with the Tirpitz.”

“Oh, that.” Jeffrey chuckled, feeling expansive once again. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen guys do that in combat. Especially their first time.” He turned to Harrison and gave him a confiding wink. “Don’t tell anybody, but I peed my pants on our last mission, and I probably would’ve twice except the second time I was much too busy to think of it.”

“What happened, sir? If it’s not classified?”

“I had an unexpected meeting with some Kampfschwimmer.”

“I heard those guys are pretty wicked and fierce.”

“They are. Believe me.”

Harrison grew introspective and serious. “But the thing is, sir, plenty of people don’t wet themselves under fire. Right?”

“Have the guys been ribbing you?”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just that it makes me wonder, why do some people panic and some people don’t? We didn’t expect to meet the Tirpitz either, and no one else lost control of their bladder.”

Jeffrey saw that Harrison still blamed himself, and this wasn’t healthy. Jeffrey’s job was to do what he could to give Harrison perspective. That was one part of Jeffrey’s workload he truly enjoyed, leading and counseling juniors on their careers and on life in general. He was just barely old enough to be Harrison’s father, and people like Harrison were the closest thing that Jeffrey had to his own kids. Jeffrey, still unmarried and almost forty, had that worry on his mind as well — he’d begun to think his last chance had vanished when Ilse left him. He feared that he’d stay single the rest of his days and never get to raise a family, even assuming he survived and Armageddon didn’t come. Jeffrey forced his mind back to Harrison’s needs.

“I’ve had this private theory for years, Tom, that everybody panics, and it’s completely random who shows it first. In a good, disciplined unit like ours, that first person’s reaction, his visible reaction, triggers the others to focus on duty, and it helps them force back their fear. It just happened to be you who helped to tighten our unit cohesion. It could’ve been anyone.”

Harrison pondered. “That’s an interesting take on it, sir. The social effects of the group dynamic in battle. A sort of one for all and all for one when the first guy says, ‘I’m scared.’ It makes sense.”

“You know, animals often instinctively piss or crap when they come against that urgent fight-or-flight decision. It ties in with another theory I have, that we all should get in better touch with our inner caveman selves.”

Harrison laughed. “That’s a good one, Captain.”

“Thank you, but I mean it. I read about a study once, I think done by some anthropologists, they were looking at just this question. Why drop a load at such a critical time? Their answer was, that that was precisely the point. You weigh less.”

“Like, if you were a caveman you could run faster, or jump higher, or whatever?”

Jeffrey nodded. “Besides, it was your very first day at sea with us, and we did win the battle. You did great when we met with the Prima Latina, which has to be the craziest docking maneuver I’ve ever pulled. And I’m getting good reports on your attitude and learning curve from my XO.” Challenger had only eleven officers, counting Jeffrey, so every person’s role and progress mattered a great deal.

“Thank you for telling me, Captain.”

The conversation paused again. This time it was Jeffrey who hesitated. “If you don’t mind my asking, how come you’re still an ensign?” Officers were supposed to be at least lieutenant j.g.’s by the time they’d finished nuclear power school and been assigned to a ship. “What did you do, dishonor some high admiral’s comely daughter?”

Even in the red lighting, Jeffrey saw Harrison blush. Jeffrey put it together: Harrison did college in three years, at a pressure-cooker like MIT of all places. Maybe he was still a virgin.