'This groove runs slightly downhill,' COB said. 'Present probe depth seventeen hundred twenty feet.'
'That's too deep for Texas, sir,' Bell said. 'It's too deep.'
'Keep praying,' Jeffrey said. 'At least it's in the right direction. Their last course would've been west.'
'More debris,' COB said. 'Starboard towed array fairing, broken from the stern…. What's that mess?'
'Crumpled part of a wide aperture array?' Bell said. 'Probably torn off by a boulder.'
'They had some residual control,' Jeffrey said. 'She made a fairly gentle landing, from the looks of this groove…. The torn-off pieces are encouraging, actually. They'd've helped her slow down.'
'Groove widening.' COB. 'Looks like she started clewing sideways…. More wreckage now.'
'That's the starboard bowplane,' Jeffrey said.
'Groove narrowing again. Depth seventeen hundred sixty feet.' Bell exhaled deeply. 'We're almost at the edge now, Captain.' Jeffrey began to lose hope.
'There!' Ilse said.
Jeffrey saw it, too, upright, suspended several feet above the silt. Big slats, at the back of a cowling. The slats were twisted and bent, and the cowling was badly dented. To the cowling's right was the ragged stump of a stern plane. Just past the cowling, in the murk, loomed a huge cylindrical mass that took Jeffrey's breath away.
'We found her,' he said quietly. 'That cowling's a Virginia-class pump jet propulsor, for sure.' Jeffrey eyed the probe's depth gauge once more. It was too far down for a Virginia-class hull to survive.
Jeffrey watched the latest grim picture coming from the probe. COB had already done a quick inspection of most of the disabled sub's exterior. For a moment, for a respite, Jeffrey glanced to the rear of the control room.
Lieutenant Willey and a junior officer from Engineering caucused there now, using a spare console behind the nav table. They carefully replayed earlier video from the probe. Willey and his j.o. were trying to tell exactly what sank Texas, and exactly what shape her forward compartment was in.
Jeffrey wasn't happy. From the outside, like this, there seemed no way to know if the front of the boat was filled with air, and the living, or with water and the dead. COB kept working his joystick. The LMRS reached the bow.
'Look at that;' Jeffrey said. 'The streamlined cover for the bow sphere got knocked off.
Not surprising; it's mostly fiberglass.'
'Where do you think it went?' Bell said.
'Pushed ahead of the ship, I guess. Kept going, tumbled off the cliff.'
'We still can't tell what flooded her aft,' Willey said.
'From what we see, sir, and what their captain said in his two buoy messages, I suspect a main steam condensor shifted in its mount, from the A-bomb shock.' Jeffrey thought for a moment. 'Yup.' That could strain a cooling seawater intake or outlet pipe, and break a weld at the hull.
'We're still analyzing the forward section,' Willey said. 'No sign of cracks or implosion. or explosion, either.'
'Very well,' Jeffrey said. 'COB, bring the LMRS to the Texas's forward escape hatch again.'
Soon the LMRS moved back behind Texas's sail, to over the accommodation spaces.
'There's the hatch,' COB said. 'Her ASDS docking collar looks intact. No debris fouling the hatch.'
'No sign an enemy minisub has been there?' Jeffrey asked.
'I'd need to go to active laser line-scan, sir.'
'What do you think, XO?'
'We need to risk it, Captain. We'd radiate to send the recognition code anyway.'
'COB, switch to active line-scan.'
The picture got much clearer and sharper.
'Ilse,' COB said, 'from that little amount of silt and sea snow, can you tell if the collar's been disturbed?'
'I can't say,' Ilse said. 'If German commandos were here, or are here, wouldn't they cover their tracks?'
'Messenger of the Watch,' Jeffrey said, 'have Lieutenant Clayton come to the CACC.
Shajo ought be here for this. I should've thought of that before.' Clayton arrived a minute later.
'Oh, boy,' he said when he looked at the screens. 'You found her, didn't you?' Jeffrey nodded. 'It's humbling to see something so powerful lying there like that.'
'Looks like her crash-landing ground to a halt just in time.' Clayton was right. From her bow to the edge of the cliff was less than the length of a football field.
'See the escape hatch and the collar?' Jeffrey asked. 'Any way to know if the Germans were here?'
Clayton stared at the picture. 'Sorry, no can say' 'Sonar,' Jeffrey said, 'anything now?'
'Still no sign of the enemy, sir, and no signs of life.'
'Send it again,' Jeffrey said.
'Recognition sign transmitted,' Kathy said. 'Anything?' Kathy paused. 'Nothing, sir.'
'Captain,' Bell said, 'we've been trying for twenty minutes now, with the highest signal power we dare. We aimed the LMRS transducer right at her port wide-aperture array, and what's left of the starboard wide array, and then her bow sphere. Nothing.'
'They'd still have plenty of air reserve,' Willey said, 'assuming the compressed air banks in the forward ballast tanks survived the crash….'
'It could be their hydrophones failed,' Kathy said, 'and they can't hear our signal. Or their transducers failed, and they can't answer back.'
'Or their forward battery went flat,' COB said. 'Maybe it couldn't hold a charge after the crash. Or they drained it, running equipment to survive.'
'Or they sprung a leak they couldn't stop,' Jeffrey said. 'Something small we can't see.'
'Or German Kampftchwimmer are in control,' Bell said, 'waiting for us.'
'You could always just bang on the hull,' Clayton said. 'Not literally' Jeffrey said. 'You heard the XO. We need stealth.'
'What now, then, sir?' Bell said.
'COB, exactly what angle is Texas sitting at?'
'Down eleven degrees by the bow, listing twenty degrees to starboard.'
'And the docking collar looks good?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Can our ASDS mate properly, with those angles?' 'Tricky, Captain. Maybe.'
'All right,' Jeffrey said. 'There's no choice. Shajo, get your men with their rifles. Messenger of the Watch, summon the medical corpsman. We're going to try to board her.'
ABOARD THE ASDS
Jeffrey stood, squeezed behind the pilot's seat in the mini-sub's cramped control compartment. David Meltzer was acting as pilot, and next to him sat COB as copilot. They all watched the imagery on one of the monitor screens, as the ASDS ultrahighfrequency sonars built a picture of what lay outside. There was Texas, listing to one side near the edge of the spur. There was the LMRS, hovering beyond the submarine's forward escape hatch.
Jeffrey reached past COB for the mike for the lowprobability-of-intercept secure gertrude. 'COB, lowest power, please, and keep the emitter aimed at the LMRS.' COB turned a knob, flipped a switch, worked his joystick, and flipped the switch again.
'Challenger, ASDS,' Jeffrey called. 'Challenger, ASDS. Communications check, over.' Jeffrey was calling his ship through the LMRS, using it and its fiber-optic tether as an audio link back to Challenger.
'ASDS, Challenger,' Bell's voice answered. 'Read you five-by-five. How you me? Over.'
'Same-same,' Jeffrey said. 'We're about to attempt the docking, over.'
'Understood,' Bell said. 'Will monitor your approach through the probe's passive imagery, over.' Bell talked to Jeffrey the same way, using the probe's active sonar as a stealthy underwater telephone.
'ASDS out,' Jeffrey said. 'COB, give me the transport compartment.' Jeffrey keyed the mike again. 'Shajo,
