Deep Sound Channel (12 page)

"Sir," the crewman said, "why don't we just dive? At least we'd get below these waves."

"We'd never get back up again," Van Gelder said. "We're all out of high-pressure air and hydrazine."

A crewman brought Van Gelder a Nomex suit and he quickly dressed. He finished debriefing the senior chief on his manpower dispositions and fire-fighting tactics just as the messenger and two other men arrived, lugging the bulky steam suits. The messenger helped Van Gelder put his on over all his other gear.

"Sir," the young man shouted between breaths, "the

engineer told me to remind you. Xenon's building up in

the reactor core. It's been too long now since the scram.

If we don't restart soon, we won't be able to for hours."

"Yes," Van Gelder said, "I know." The iodine 135 from the uranium fission was breaking down to xenon, which

had a huge cross section for thermal neutron capture.

With their pre-owned ex-Russian-SSBN core, the xenon

135 would poison the chain reaction until it in turn decayed, making it dangerous to regain criticality in a hurry. Van Gelder knew that was one of the things that went wrong at Chernobyl.

"All right," Van Gelder said. "Tell Engineering and the captain we understand. Ask them to hold off as long as possible."

"You understand, hold off as long as possible, aye aye, sir." The messenger lowered the big steam suit hood over Van Gelder's head. Van Gelder peered out through the heat-resistant window. The chief fire fighter and a leading seaman finished donning theirs. They looked like men from space, garbed in the silvery reflective costumes.

Van Gelder found it hard now just to walk. With all the insulation and the built-in cooling system, each suit weighed forty kilos. The messenger and his companions checked that the suits were properly sealed, then ran aft. The others signaled they were ready.

"Let's go," Van Gelder shouted through his hood.

Using his thick gauntlets, he gripped the nozzle. His partners backed him up, shouldering the uncharged hose. Another hose team wearing simple Nomex—seeming now so vulnerable in comparison—started spraying them with water. Van Gelder moved into position.

For the first time he was close enough to see into the room. In infrared he watched the huge fans and motors, piping, ducting, cables, all sheathed in leaping flame. The steel of the bulkheads, the deck, the overhead were warped and bulging—even through his protective gear the heat drove him to the floor. He led the others forward, crawling on their bellies, sloshing through the filmy foam.

"Left!" Van Gelder shouted. "Let's go left! That near corner!" From there he saw a mass of aluminum ducting actually on fire, fallen from the overhead, piled against the back of the room, twisted and distorted. The burning sheet metal was bright white in his visors.

"There! There!" he yelled. "That's the hottest point!" Bracing himself on all fours, Van Gelder jerked back the nozzle actuator. The highvelocity water stream fought him viciously. Behind him the other men gave their support. They crawled farther into the room.

Van Gelder drenched the ducting, over and over, working his hose stream back and forth. Then he started at one end, pouring and pouring the water, until the flaming ducting in that spot died down. He manhandled the stream along, pushing the flames backward, forcing them toward the far bulkhead, denying them their metal fuel. Steam hissed so loudly he could hear it even through his hood and helmet and his respirator mask. Boiling water sprayed back at his face. He flinched instinctively, then drew courage as his steam suit did its job. He advanced another meter.

The water roared and roared and so did the fire. Gradually Van Gelder's arms grew sore, his back ached badly, but still he aimed his hose at the relentless flames. He inched farther into the room, feeling the radiant heat of a big electric motor casing close to his right thigh, its insulation and lubrication totally involved. In his peripheral vision, past the edges of his visor, he saw flames leaping toward him, yellow and vicious red. He watched their tendrils bathe his thigh, feeling a gentle warmth there, a surreal caress. The senior chief gestured with his hands to urge Van Gelder onward. Van Gelder's digitized goggles told him the same thing as his eyes: the burning motor was relatively cool compared to the burning aluminum. The motor fire would have to wait. Van Gelder shifted his hose stream yet again, aiming at the center of the aluminum, and the force of the water burst the duct's remains apart. Immediately the temperature grew less, and Van Gelder extinguished the fragments one by one.

"Switch to foam now," the chief shouted. "There's too much oil and grease!" Van Gelder handed off the straight-stream nozzle, then took the foam applicator attached to another line. Two freshwater hose teams assumed position in the door, one to cool Van Gelder's group and protect their path of egress, the other to drench both overhead and burning equipment to help put out the fire. Working from the back of the room slowly toward the front, Van Gelder applied the penetrating detergent-soapy foam. It wasn't recommended for use on electrical equipment—it ruined what it touched—but by now the fan room was a total loss.

Van Gelder aimed the applicator into every nook and cranny, blanketing the burning apparatus, cutting off the conflagration's air. His faceplate now was stained with yellow soot. Inside his gear he dripped with sweat, and his breath came fast and ragged. After what seemed endless minutes of brutal toil Van Gelder realized the teams were working at cross-purposes. "The water from the doorway crews is forcing back my foam!

"

The chief ordered the other teams to change their tactics. One nozzleman concentrated on wetting Van Gelder's line so it wouldn't burn right through. The other aimed at the overhead to cool the superheated gases. But that just meant less water on the fire, making Van Gelder's job much harder. He started feeling dizzy, and his mouth was very dry.

"Look out!" the chief shouted, pulling Van Gelder to the side. In slow motion a big fan housing toppled to the deck. Immediately more flames reared up as the housing's innards broke wide open. Unburned aluminum threatened to reignite. Van Gelder's team was losing ground.

"Now!" Van Gelder shouted, and he stood up, bending low. His partners saw his intent and joined him, and they all rushed in among the flames, pouring forth their foam. Shimmering sheets of ignited gases danced and beckoned all around, leaping up from crinkling debris that dwindled as Van Gelder watched. Plastic melted, dripping, running, and bubbling, then disappeared. Jagged wires wilted, twisted, sagged. Compressors and air circulators slumped within their mountings, cracking and distorting from heat stress and failed supports. Corkscrewed pipes and cable fragments hung down from the overhead, swaying weirdly in the thermal drafts. Air filters quickly carbonized, and their remnants then collapsed.

More soot began to build up on Van Gelder's faceplate, now brownish black, making it almost impossible to see. Everywhere equipment was consumed and everywhere he sprayed.

Once more Van Gelder's foam stopped for a moment, turning to plain water, then resumed as someone changed the foam concentrate cans. Onward Van Gelder worked, blind to his companions, hypnotized by the inferno, battling with it endlessly, all sense of past and future gone.

Another quick pause in the foam, another can, then all at once the heart went out of the blaze. Piles of rubble still burned here and there and cremated wreckage smoked and steamed, but the contest had been won.

Van Gelder handed off the applicator, not even seeing who took it, and he staggered from the fan room. A crewman played some water on the outside of his suit. The senior chief followed. "We did it, sir! We saved the ship!" Van Gelder tried to smile, but his parched lips cracked. He simply nodded. The chief leaned closer. "We'll send more men to the

bilge space now, to start hosing down the buses. We'll have to draw from the reactor's secondary coolant loop main holding tank, but distilled water's a decent insulator."

"Good," Van Gelder said. "I'll tell the captain we can do a restart soon."

"We'll lay some dams to keep this foam from spreading, sir, then leave what's there in place. It'll protect against a flare-up, and we can clean the mess in a few more hours." Van Gelder felt a dreadful weariness set in. He trudged aft along the passageway, leaving the damage control parties to their work. At a safe distance from the remnants of the fire he pulled off his steam suit hood, just as the cooling system's battery ran down. He borrowed the microphone from a talker in the next compartment, then lifted his breather mask long enough to report to the captain. He refastened the mask, but lingering fumes had gotten in. They made him choke and cough. He still felt awfully hot but for some reason couldn't sweat. As a medical corpsman approached, obviously concerned, Van Gelder sagged against the bulkhead and slowly slid down to the deck. He wanted nothing more than a nice cold glass of water and a breath of natural air. The corpsman bent over to say something, but Van Gelder only heard a rushing in his ears as he passed out.

Jeffrey knocked on the CO's state-room door. The clean uniform he'd put on after a thorough decontamination washdown was already stained with sweat and grease from his walk-around inspection of the boat.

"Come in, XO," Captain Wilson called.

Jeffrey wondered how the CO always knew when it was him. "Sir," he said after entering, "I have the after-action battle damage overview report." Wilson looked up from his little fold-down desk, covered with files and naval publications. His laptop was open too, a map of Africa on the screen. Enemy territory was in red, Allied-controlled in blue, the vast cruisemissile-dominated no-man's-land in amber.

"Let's hear it," Wilson said.

"Aside from the three fatalities, sir, personnel injuries were light and the rem exposures are pretty trivial." "Good. What about equipment casualties?"

"Sir, the foreplanes are inoperative."

"Not too serious," Wilson said. "We can manage depth-keeping with the afterplanes at anything over dead-slow speed."

Jeffrey nodded. "Sonar's finished with an autocheck. Sessions says the wide-aperture array's fine after all.

That enemy torpedo's pinging must have picked up the stators at the back end of our pump-jet."

"I'm impressed," Wilson said. "It's not easy getting echoes off the edges of those blades."

"Agreed, Captain. The other side's technology outdoes ours in some respects."

"Their signal processing algorithms are supposed to be the best. Those math guys at Frankfurt scared me even before the war."

"Our bow dome took a beating, sir," Jeffrey said. "Sessions says the cover's cracked and dimpled." "Not just at the tip?"

Jeffrey shook his head.

"So we're getting additional flow noise?" Wilson said. "Yes, sir. Any chance we can stop back at the tender? For emergency repairs?"

"Out of the question, XO. We've got an awfully tight window to bring this SEAL mission off, and we're behind schedule already. Not to mention we're trying to play dead."

"Understood, Captain. ... About the torpedo room ... we have to load the weapons manually, and we're down to just four tubes."

"The other outer doors won't open?"

"No, sir. All the port-side ones were belled in badly." "The starboard ones are working?"

"The blast was asymmetric, Captain. At fine scales of reference they always are. . . . It's a dry-dock job."

"Mmph." Wilson's tone was sour. "I'm not happy at our weapons expenditure."

"The ones we lost to damage?" Jeffrey said.

"The nuclear torpedoes. Those things are scarce. There're tons of fissile metal in the arsenals of democracy, just not enough goddamn delivery systems to go around."

"We still have four, sir."

"We've barely started our patrol. We wasted two just stopping a pair of diesel boats."

"Did we have a choice, Captain?"

"No. That's what bothers me. The Axis claims the initiative too often, in big things and in small. This is no way to fight a war."

"It's not that bad, sir, is it? Look at the latest fleet action in this theater, off Madagascar and the African coast."

"Sure, we control the Comoro Islands for now," Wilson said, "what's left of 'em, so the German and Boer armies won't be linking up by the east coast route any time soon, but at what price? Ten thousand KIAs, half of them on Ranger."

"Sir, D Day cost twenty thousand Allied casualties." "We're a hell of a long way from another D Day, XO,

in Africa let alone in Europe. The other side claims this

one as a victory themselves."

"That's ridiculous," Jeffrey said.

"Not to some nonaligned countries it's not. They're better at propaganda than us, this Berlin-Boer Axis. They know many developing nations are secretly glad to have them break the back of American unipolarism. And since they intimidated the Russians into a false neutrality, they're still getting arms shipments courtesy of Moscow across the safe land bridge of eastern Europe."

"I know," Jeffrey said. "It's like back in the 1920s, sir, the Wehrmacht in bed with the Soviet Union, even long before Hitler."

"The deutsche mark is stronger than the dollar," Wilson said, "and entire continents are waiting to choose sides. So fine, the Germans didn't get to grab any of France's H-bomb stocks. But a few Hiroshima-sized cruise missiles aimed at London and New York are proving a pretty equal deterrent against our megaton-sized MIRVs. . . . And lately there'

ve been rumors the

Germans are working up a Mach 8 liquid-H2-powered cruise missile. A Mach 8 ground hugger's basically unstoppable."

"I didn't realize things were that serious, Captain."

"And keep it to yourself. Maybe I'm just bellyaching. . . . Miss Reebeck told me you know you're going with her."

"Yes, sir," Jeffrey said. "What's going on?"

"It's a nuclear demolition raid against a Boer biological weapons lab. She'll cover that part at the briefing. Since the mission's in a populated area, with hostage camps and innocent minority civilians, as my XO you're it. The independent command authority, on site, required for lower formations to use atomic munitions on land."