suppose the Germans could booby-trap the hatch, burn off the ends of the dogs as a nasty surprise with thermite lances, then flood the trunk on purpose.'
'Oh, boy,' Clayton said.
'We can't turn back,' Jeffrey said. 'The Greifswald mission is too important — we need those briefcase A- bombs bad. We say our prayers, and open the hatch.' Jeffrey knelt over the bottom hatch of the minisub. All ASDS lights, inside and out, were turned off. He wore his combined passive-infrared/image-intensification goggles. The image switched back and forth between modes every half second. He also wore his battle helmet now, and he had a K-Bar fighting knife strapped to one leg and his special.50caliber pistol in a belt holster. Around Jeffrey stood Clayton and his five SEALs, similarly garbed, gripping.50-caliber machine pistols — shortbarreled assault rifles that fired subsonic bullets. The fully silenced, electric ignition weapons were turned on, with caseless rounds in the chamber. Black tape covered the digital round-count diodes and the tritium backup night sights; this way, they wouldn't give obvious targets to an enemy wearing night-vision goggles, too.
The men relied on the sighting reticle integral to their visor images, based on low-energy laser interferometers that always knew where their weapons were pointed. Jeffrey turned the wheel of the ASDS lock-out hatch until it opened. He let it drop down on its hydraulically dampened hinges.
Below him was the hatch into Texas. On the other side of that hatch, Jeffrey knew, was the air lock of her forward escape trunk. There was another escape trunk — with another air lock — near Texas's stern, for use from the engineering spaces. That part of the boat, Jeffrey knew for sure, was flooded.
The forward compartment might or might not be flooded. The men from Texas might or might not all be dead. There might or might not be Kampfschwimmer waiting on the other side of this hatch, or further into the ship.
Even as an ex-SEAL himself, Jeffrey was frightened by Kampfschwimmer. After all, the Draeger scuba combat re-breather was a German invention. Images came to his mind from old war movies, and captured Nazi documentaries, of relentless, merciless warriors in those ballistically-optimized coal-scuttle helmets. Picturing such men in wetsuits and swim flippers made it even worse.
Jeffrey climbed down into the space enclosed by the docking collar. It was damp and very cold — confirmed by the blue tinge of the image in infrared. Challenger's medical corpsman — who, like the other men, appeared a multicolored aura when Jeffrey viewed him in IR — handed Jeffrey a stethoscope. The corpsman retreated to the transport compartment and dogged the door.
Jeffrey squatted by the hatch — it and Texas's hull were much too thick, and too well insulated, to see through with wearable passive infrared. Jeffrey used his handkerchief to wipe away the slime. The steel hull was freezing, from immersion in seawater at 34° Fahrenheit. He put the stethoscope to the hull, next to the hatch, and he listened. He heard a disembodied rushing sound: current flow noise transmitted by the hull. He heard occasional creaking, and metallic moaning: Texas's hull as she complained about the outside pressure, or settled more on the uneven spur. Once he heard a sharp pop, as some item of equipment back aft — or maybe forward — could no longer hold out, and it imploded. He also heard steady clicking, which he guessed was the scrammed reactor as it continued to cool. There were no voices, and no machinery running that he recognized. Jeffrey looked up at Clayton and shook his head. 'Can't tell, or all flooded?' Clayton whispered. 'Can't tell,' Jeffrey mouthed.
'How's the dogging mechanism?'
'Can't tell, without opening it.'
Jeffrey saw COB watching through the door into the mini's control compartment — he and Meltzer now wore vision goggles, too. COB disappeared. He came back a minute later.
'Challenger says good luck, sir.' In Jeffrey's crisp blackand-white LLTV image mode, COB looked worried, and suddenly seemed very old.
'It's now or never,' Jeffrey said.
Clayton and his five SEALs looked at each other and shrugged, carefully expressionless.
'Ready?' Jeffrey whispered.
Clayton cleared his throat. 'Will we feel anything?'
'Pressure, heat, wetness. Agony, then blackest death.' Jeffrey was immensely satisfied to see that his hands weren't shaking.
With both hands, Jeffrey gripped the special wrench that would open the watertight hatch from outside. Through a fitting in the hatch, the wrench turned the inside locking wheel. Clayton and his men aimed their weapons at the hatch, safeties off. Jeffrey dreaded a firefight — ricochets could kill them all and wreck the minisub.
Jeffrey turned the wheel. He waited for it to explode at him, propelled by a killing water cannon. He wondered if he would feel anything, if his brain would even have time to register before his skull was smashed. He turned the wheel more. The hatch emitted a terrible ssssss — he'd forgotten there might be air before the water, if there was a bubble of it trapped inside Texas's hull. His brain formed the words 'poison gas.' He tried to crank the hatch shut, but it fought him and did burst open. A blinding light pierced Jeffrey's eyes and bore into his soul — was this death?
'Hande hoch!' a deep voice shouted, German for 'put up your hands.' Five heavycaliber muzzles stared through the hatch at Jeffrey and the SEALs.
'Drop your weapons!' Clayton bellowed.
There was a pause, then a tentative, 'Shajo, is that you?'
'Cripes on a pita with margarine,' Clayton answered. 'Chief Montgomery, you son of a goat! I could've killed you!'
As Jeffrey's eyes adjusted, the. SEAL chief standing down inside the nine-man Virginiaclass Special Warfare escape trunk looked up at Jeffrey and Clayton and smiled. His men put their weapons on safe.
'Commander Fuller, sir,' Montgomery said. 'I'm honored.' Montgomery was just over six feet tall, and had a very powerful chest. 'Welcome to the United States Submarine Texas.'
'Permission to come aboard?' Jeffrey said. Montgomery nodded. Then he winked at Clayton. 'Nah, LT, I would've killed you first.'
ABOARD USS TEXAS
'I'd already told the men not to expect to be home for Christmas,' Captain Taylor said.
'I'm sorry there isn't more we can do,' Jeffrey said. Texas's captain, a full commander, looked exhausted but determined. He'd shaved recently, but clearly needed a shower — no dice, with the water rationing. One arm was in a sling, and it obviously hurt when Taylor breathed. The air in the disabled sub was cold and damp and stale. There wasn't much smell of sewage or rotting garbage, at least not yet, but this deep Texas couldn't jettison waste or blow sanitary. The freezer was being kept running — they needed the food — so there wasn't a smell from there.
The lighting was very dim, to conserve the battery. The coffee was strong and hot. Near the sleeping spaces there was a smell: like a hospital, of disinfectant, wounds, pain, and of unbathed men, of sweat.
'The Greifswald thing has to come first,' Taylor said. 'We all know that. I'm just grateful it was you, and not some Germans.'
'You didn't trust the recognition codes?'
'Frankly, no,' Taylor said. 'We've no idea what the Axis has been able to compromise. I decided to lie doggo, and find out. Chief Montgomery concurred.' Jeffrey nodded. 'Captain Wilson said the same thing to me, before he was wounded. He said remember Ultra, when we read the German Enigma codes in World War Two. He said Lord knows what the Germans are reading now.'
'It smarts, doesn't it, when the shoe is on the other foot?' Taylor continued giving Jeffrey a quick tour of the unflooded part of Texas. The hardest thing was walking, with the ship tilted downhill and leaning sharply to the right as they faced forward. The whole place was strangely quiet, without the usual reassuring sound of air circulation fans, and with so little physical activity by the crew, to help save oxygen.
'Morale seems high, all things considered, sir,' Jeffrey said. He was impressed that everything was clean. Broken glass had been swept up, blood and vomit mopped, smashed equipment tidied as much as practical, and
