encounter could occur with lethal suddenness. Ilse put down her SEAL raid briefing files for a moment, and strained to listen on the bow sphere. She was depressed by what she heard. There were no biologics. The midNorth Sea, once teeming with life, host to a thriving fishing industry, instead was now a barren desert. There were no shrimp or crab or lobster, no plaice or haddock or herring or cod, at least not alive.
Above the ship was a heavy oil slick. It went on and on, for countless miles. The thick sludge was good for stealth, Jeffrey said. It blocked airborne LIDAR. It smoothed the sea to hide Challenger's surface hump. It suppressed the surface capillary effects of her internal Bernoulli wave, which might otherwise be picked up by special radar. It also suffocated life.
There was no oxygen transport by air/water wave-mixing now. There was no plankton photosynthesis, the first step in the upper ocean's food chain. There was only darkness at high noon, persistent petrotoxins, and mass death.
Right now Challenger was passing one of the drilling platforms, several miles to port. This one tapped natural gas. Before the war the gas had been brought to the U.K. by seabed pipelines. Now, the pipelines and most of the gas and oil rigs everywhere were wrecked. Some of the emergency shutdown valves had been destroyed. This particular natural gas platform still stood above the water, badly damaged. The gas burned uncontrollably. A huge flare rose hundreds of feet in the sky. Ilse could hear it hiss and roar on passive sonar; broken equipment clanked from the wind and waves and currents. The flame was virtually smokeless, Ilse knew — natural gas was clean. It burned day and night, as it had for months. She'd seen pictures of it on the news. The platform fire is like an eternal flame, she told herself. A memorial to the dead, millions and billions of sea creatures, animals and plants, invertebrates, crustaceans, fish and mammals and birds. Ilse, once more, thought about where she had to go in the Baltic, what she had to do there. Last time, Durban, it was for her brother and her family, and her rage had made her strong.
Again she felt the rage mount up. Greifswald. A searing instant of nuclear revenge. God damn the Axis for what they were doing to the world.
After dinner was cleared and his officers left, Jeffrey sat in his chair at the head of the wardroom table. Another afternoon of hard physical training and weapons drill was behind him. He'd've rather had an additional month to prepare. Ain't gonna happen. Now, Jeffrey rested.
Shajo Clayton's group filed in. Ilse returned from the head. Clayton opened the meeting. Jeffrey watched as Clayton surveyed the room.
'I know some of you aren't happy about working with a civilian,' Clayton said. 'I know this violates our basic doctrine.'
Some of the enlisted SEALS murmured. Chief Montgomery sat there stone-faced.
'Then let me disabuse you fast,' Clayton said. 'Miss Reebeck's been places, done things with me, that would've earned a man in uniform a Silver Star. She knows when to keep her head down, and when to shoot, and when she shoots she doesn't miss.' The three SEALs who survived Durban nodded.
'Besides,' Clayton said, 'there's no way we can pull this mission off without her help. Do I make myself perfectly clear?'
None of the SEALs from Texas said anything.
'You heard the lieutenant,' Montgomery bellowed. 'Did he make himself perfectly clear?'
Jeffrey had to smile inside. The SEALs left no doubt whatsoever they got the message now.
'Welcome to the team, Miss Reebeck,' Montgomery said. The crisp, lively way he said it left no doubt he was sincere.
'Thank you,' Ilse said to them all.
Jeffrey rose to get more coffee, on purpose, body language meant to get the others to relax. He sat down again.
Clayton turned to Ilse. 'There are things you need to know now, Ilse, including the unknowables. It'll be important for your situational awareness.' She nodded.
'The rest of you pay close attention,' Montgomery said in a threatening almost-whisper; Ilse thought he was even scarier when he whispered like that than when he raised his voice. Then Montgomery grinned, as if to say to his guys, No hard feelings. Ilse cleared her throat. 'I thought of some questions since Captain Fuller told me I have to go. The way my mind works and I learn, it'd be best if I could ask them first. Later, you can fill in anything else… if that's all right.'
'Perfect,' Clayton said.
'First of all, how do we really know ARBOR's been arrested? Maybe the message was a deception, sent by the Germans in our code to throw us off. You know, if they can't find the mole but they're afraid of us attacking.'
'Let me field that,' Jeffrey said. 'There are authentication keys and backstop procedures for one-way comms to U.S. Navy SSNs and SSBNs. A lot's changed since the days of the Walker spy ring…. It's all top-secret, of course, like the name ARBOR itself. Let's just say certain items have to be inserted at the flag-officer level, an admiral personally I mean, for a message of this importance. At our end, everything checked out.'
'Okay,' Ilse said, 'but there's something I don't get. If ARBOR had such high access at the lab, why didn't she just smuggle out the computer records to begin with? Why the rigmarole of handing them off to us?'
'May I, Captain?' Clayton said.
Jeffrey nodded.
'They have tight security, Ilse. People would be searched.'
'What about those new holographic cubes? You could swallow one. You know, body pack.'
'The searches are very thorough, imaging sensors that see under your clothes, others that look through your body. The critical hardware and software's heavily restricted within the installation, and completely isolated from the outside world. They use obsolescent magnetic hard-drive storage on purpose: it's bulky, hard to conceal, easy to erase by making you walk through an electromagnetic scrambler field.'
'I suspect,' Jeffrey added, 'that if they even find you with unauthorized storage media or read/write units, they string you up.'
'Then how did ARBOR manage to communicate at all?'
'Old-fashioned spy tradecraft,' Clayton said, 'from long before the microchip.'
'Think of her as a datalink with an ultralow baud rate,' Jeffrey said. 'Only minimal information could pass either way, and very slowly.'
'Okay,' Ilse said. 'That works for me. And I see why we need to sneak in covertly with the A-bombs. They wouldn't get through the front door…. Next question. I know the lab's supposed to be hardened against atomic attack. But it's tough for me to believe the U.S. doesn't have some conventional ground penetrator round that could pulverize the place.'
Clayton sighed. 'Beyond the fact that if we blew it up long distance, we'd lose the intel?'
'We lose the intel now! You can't expect me to hack their systems. I wouldn't know where to begin!'
'Calm down,' Jeffrey said. 'We didn't know ARBOR'd be arrested. You can still perform an invaluable visual recon.'
'Visual recon, okay, right,' Ilse said primly.
Again, Jeffrey had to smile inside. She's a cool one.
'Anyway, Ilse,' Clayton said, 'the roof is cleverly designed. Multiple layers of tungsten spikes, spaced composite armor, prestressed concrete and steel, explosion chambers vented to the atmosphere. Designed to break up gun-bomb fission warheads, deflect kinetic energy, set off H.E. munitions shallow so they just blow into the air, and incendiaries burn out harmlessly. The last few years, a lot of countries constructed places like that.'
'Look,' Jeffrey said. 'In World War Two, the Nazis built bomb-proof U-boat bases all along the French Atlantic coast. They used a seven-layer roof system, including a predetonator superstructure, and reinforced concrete, and voids. The subs went in and out through three-foot-thick steel blast doors…. Despite what you may have seen in old war movies, the Allies never once really damaged a single pen. They're all still standing, being used-again.'
'Sixty-five years later?' Ilse said incredulously.
'Yes, sixty-five years later. And if you're wondering why they don't use hollowed-out caverns in the Alps or Harz Mountains for their weapons work, they do. Some of that dates back to Nazi times. There just isn't space enough for everything.' Ilse hesitated. 'I have another issue, about the lab's hardening against nuclear attack. That's from the outside, correct?'
