Seas of Crisis

“Captain? Commodore?” Meltzer called from the navigation plotting table.

Jeffrey and Bell turned to face Meltzer, from opposite directions, Bell seated in front of him and Jeffrey behind.

“Sirs, five minutes to revised rendezvous point.”

“Very well, Nav,” Bell acknowledged. “Commodore, shall we get ready?”

“Affirmative,” Jeffrey said with a smile. This would be the first full coming together of his strike group’s key people.

A junior officer relieved Meltzer at the navigation plot. Bell made Bud Torelli, Weps, command duty officer, acting captain. Torelli told one of his own lieutenants (j.g.) to take the fire control coordinator’s seat that Sessions vacated.

COB told Lieutenant Torelli that Challenger’s pressure-proof hangar’s water, surrounding the minisub’s hull, was equalized to the ocean outside at present depth, eight hundred fifty feet. COB would activate the silent hydraulics to open the hangar doors when Meltzer told him via intercom that he was ready to depart.

Jeffrey, Bell, Sessions, Meltzer, and Finch walked aft.

“I’ll catch up in one minute,” Jeffrey told them, ducking into the stateroom he shared with Sessions. The others continued down the red-lit passageway, only wide enough to go single file, toward the airlock trunk that connected to Challenger’s minisub. The high-test hydrogen-peroxide-powered mini, housed in the in-hull hangar amidships, was German and had been captured in a battle six months earlier. Using it instead of a standard battery-powered U.S.-made Advanced SEAL Delivery System minisub had proved to be a valuable subterfuge more than once. Meltzer was very adept as its pilot. The co-pilot, a chief from what was now Meltzer’s navigating department, was already up in the mini, going through prelaunch checklists. Commander Nyurba and his four men had also boarded and taken seats in the transport compartment, aft of the mini’s multi- diver lock-in/lockout hyperbaric chamber.

Alone in Challenger’s XO state room, Jeffrey opened the safe. He removed the orders pouch that he wasn’t supposed to read until he’d boarded USS Jimmy Carter. With the thick pouch under an arm, he headed aft.

The mini was eight feet high on the outside and had no sail. Because it was so crowded, Jeffrey crammed behind Meltzer in the two-seat control compartment, forward of the central diver-sortie chamber that doubled as a personnel entry and exit vestibule. The forward compartment resembled a tiny version of Challenger’s control room, with high-definition flat-screen displays on the bulkheads, joysticks, and keyboards, but no periscope; a photonics mast and antenna mast folded flat on top of the mini.

The ride from Challenger to Carter was short. The minisub docked onto the mating hatch and lockdown clamps behind Carter’s sail, while both full-size submarines, at all stop, drifted with the gentle under-ice current. Look-down photonics sensors in passive image-intensification mode helped keep the docking safe but stealthy; tiny lights on Carter’s hull showed where to aim, and let Meltzer judge his angle and rate of approach.

Since Carter’s special in-hull garage space — for oversized weapons and off-board probes — wasn’t designed for a sixty-foot-long minisub, Carter hadn’t brought one of her own. Jeffrey knew that she might easily have carried one on her back as she snuck out of port on the U.S. East Coast, but the external load would have caused much louder flow noise than usual, compromising her stealth. Bearing an outside mini would also have forced Carter to keep to speeds far below the optimal for her five-thousand-mile transit from New London to Alaska: otherwise, the water drag of a mini load, streamlined as it was, would have torn it from its fastenings and hurled it sternward, smashing Carter’s rudder or sternplanes or pump-jet propulsor — or all three.

But Jeffrey couldn’t help wondering how eighty Special Operations Squadron commandos and all their gear were going to get ashore quickly, clandestinely, with only one mini available. The north coast of eastern Russia had the widest, shallowest continental shelf in the world. Almost everywhere, the water didn’t reach a depth of even one hundred feet until more than a hundred miles offshore. A single round trip in the German mini at such range would take an entire day and run the fuel tanks dry; Challenger carried no refill of the extremely corrosive, explosive peroxide. The only exceptions to this unhelpful seabed geography led right toward heavily protected Russian naval bases.

Captain Charles Harley, tall, slim, clean-shaven, with piercing blue eyes and neatly combed blond hair, was waiting at the bottom of Carter’s airlock trunk as the minisub’s passengers climbed down the ladder. “Welcome aboard, Commodore Fuller,” Harley said. They shook hands; Harley had a firm, confident grip. He struck Jeffrey as rather handsome, even debonair, but stiff and distant. Other introductions were quickly done.

First things first. “I need to use your XO’s stateroom.”

Harley noticed the pouch under Jeffrey’s arm. “Come this way. The rest of us will be in the special ops battle management center. When you’re ready, a messenger can show you how to get there on the first try. The Seawolf boats were a bit of a rabbit warren even before Carter’s extra hull section was added.”

Jeffrey followed Harley forward through red-lit passageways, indicating modified battle stations for the lengthy rendezvous.

“Care for a quick look at our control room?”

“By all means.” Jeffrey couldn’t be an inconsiderate guest to one of his captains. This was also a chance to begin assessing Harley and his crew.

“Let’s take the longer way, stretch our legs, and you can see more of my ship.”

Jeffrey noted that Harley conducted himself as if giving a tour to a visitor — not being inspected by his boss. He led Jeffrey down a ladder, walked on, then climbed up another ladder. They entered Carter’s control room from forward, facing aft. Harley lowered his voice. “This part must seem old-fashioned.”

“The four-man ship control station,” Jeffrey stated.

“Yep. Enlisted ratings at helm and sternplanes, diving officer, chief of the watch. Separate sonar room. Periscope tubes.” Both were retracted, deep into their wells within the ship, but their bulky tubes and hydraulic piping, and the big red-and-white overhead rings for raising and lowering them, were visible and took up room. “No vertical launching system for Tomahawks, either. Have to shoot ’em through our torpedo tubes.”

Jeffrey peeked at console readouts. This required standing behind technicians and looking over their shoulders; there were no widescreen vertical bulkhead displays here, as on Challenger.

His strike group maintained their rendezvous formation using occasional gentle pushes from their auxiliary maneuvering thrusters; the acoustic link was working well; no threats had been detected; the gale was stronger.

Done with the instrumentation, Jeffrey took in the people themselves while they interacted by issuing and acknowledging orders or status reports. Harley’s officers and enlisted men reflected his own personality, as was typically the situation on any well-run submarine. They were formal, polished, disciplined, and competent — not exactly unfriendly, but lacking the chummy swagger of Challenger’s crew. As a group, they seemed well trained and cohesive. Jeffrey liked what he saw.

“Right in here.” Harley left Jeffrey alone and went aft.

Jeffrey locked the stateroom’s doors to the corridor, and to the head that was shared with the captain’s stateroom. He sat at the little desk, cleared the XO’s odds and ends to

one side, and switched on the reading lamp. He disarmed the security device on the inner sealed pouch, removing his mission orders.

They took more than two hours just to gain a broad overview. By the time he got that far, he felt he’d aged ten years.