Thunder In The Deep (02) (22 page)

"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?"

"Right so far," Clayton said.

"But this lab needs inlets and outlets for cooling water and air. When we detonate the bombs, won't the blast shoot through the openings?"

"Smart question," Jeffrey said. "The utility paths, air vents or whatever, are all protected by ultrafast-acting hardened shutters. They're triggered under local battery power by sensitive seismometers. When the A-bombs go off, a tremor will arrive first through the concrete and steel of the building, which have very high rates of sound transmission. That trips the seismometers. By the time the blast itself arrives, through the inside air, or through the fluid in

the cooling pipes, or eating through the concrete, the shutters will've closed."

"It's just like our own modern hardened installations," Clayton said. "That much about the lab we know."

Jeffrey touched Clayton's shoulder. "We suspect. As the rules-of-engagement guy, that's one .thing I have to check."

Ilse made eye contact with Jeffrey. "What if you decide the atomic demolition rules of engagement aren't satisfied?"

"We do as much damage as we can by conventional means, then fight our way out."

"What if we can't escape?"

"We surrender."

Ilse's, eyes widened. She shook her head hard. "I'd be hanged."

"Everybody," Jeffrey said. "This installation must be destroyed. The orders say we have to go in. They don't say we have to come out."

"But, but, but why doesn't the U.S. Air Force or the RAF just paralyze the place, by knocking out its power supply?"

Clayton laughed. "Ilse, this isn't Iraq or Kosovo. For years, the Germans worked to protect their national power grid. A lot of trunk high-tension lines were buried underground, as part of the so-called Green movement, or at least that was the cover story. The open-air wires are heavily insulated against carbon-fiber weapons, and the power plants themselves are sealed. High-speed switches shunt power right past any point that's been disrupted, while crack emergency crews make quick repairs. Redundancy's built in."

"At this point," Jeffrey said, "Germany's practically turned electricity into a cottage industry. Every key installation has its own backup generators, just in case, a lot of them natural-gas powered. They get the natural gas from Russia, via pipeline through Eastern Europe. Like everything Russian, it's strictly off-limits to attack, by the Joint Chiefs' global ROEs. And speaking of Green, the Axis is really into alternate energy sources now, like fuel-cells, and solar and wind power, and the tides. And conservation, of course."

Ilse digested it all. "I have a different kind of question. What if ARBOR didn't get to plant the computer worm that's supposed to help us get in? What if the Germans found it and erased it? What if they're waiting for us?"

Jeffrey leaned forward. "Then the team is tasked to fight our way inside best we can, and if I say so, set off the A-bombs under fire."

PREDAWN, 0 DAY MINUS 1.

The messenger woke Jeffrey as ordered at 0320 local. Jeffrey showered and dressed, and stepped into the CACC at 0328. The messenger was waiting with a mug of hot black coffee. He guided Jeffrey's hand to the mug in the dark.

After Jeffrey had taken a few sips, Lieutenant Willey said, "Good morning, Captain." Willey had the conn.

Jeffrey took a deep gulp while his eyes adapted to the rig-for-black. As he thought about his task this morning, his drowsiness vanished, replaced by a tightness in his chest.

"Morning, Engineer. How's the leg?" Willey sat sideways to the command console, since the cast kept him from bending his left knee.

"Not slowing me down much, sir."

"Good. Good."

"I'm real glad I never got off the ship at Cape Verde, Captain. They'd've never let me come."

Jeffrey chuckled. He took the right seat at the console.

He studied the situation inside and outside the boat. On his backlit screen he read the digital log entries made since he'd turned in four hours ago. While he slept, it had begun to rain. This added some broadband noise, mostly across the 100-to-1000 hertz acoustic band, where detection ranges here were longest. This would help cloak Challenger on conventional passive sonar, but such cloaking cut both ways.

Satisfied, Jeffrey turned to Willey.

"I have the conn," Jeffrey said.

"You have the conn."

"This is the captain. I have the conn."

"Aye, aye," the watchstanders said. Jeffrey heard Ilse's voice, too. Doesn't she ever sleep? He listened to Willey hobbling aft, and called up the nav chart and the gravimeter. Challenger lurked, almost touching the bottom, in one hundred ten feet Of water, hidden from the nearby Denmark coast by Jutland Bank. The southern tip of Norway, at Kristiansand, lay sixty nautical miles due north. Halfway there, the seabed dropped off steeply, into an ancient geological feature, the Norwegian Trough, fifteen hundred feet deep or more. Jeffrey's night orders had been to make for the Bank, not the Trough, to stick to the unexpected.

The North Sea oil slick was left behind. As Ilse predicted, though, a recent gale had stirred the local bottom muck, and water turbidity was high, shielding the boat from enemy airborne LIDAR. Wave action mixing, and the slow current out of the Skaggerak mouth gaping just ahead, helped obscure Challenger's minimal thermal signature. Ilse had explained last night at dinner, in that sexy way she talked shop, that the half-knot current from the Skaggerak was the net effect of rain and snow on land: River runoff from ten countries on the landlocked Baltic had nowhere else to go. Anyway, the current helped cool Challenger's reactor

while the ship held position on autohover. As long as she didn't move, she made scant surface wake anomaly._ The solar magnetic storm was stronger than forecast, already at G5, "extreme." No one would spot the ship's magnetic anomaly effects. Based on her success in shallow water so far, Jeffrey began to think Challenger could go anywhere, do anything.

It was a good thing, too, because their next task seemed impossible: Penetrate the German defenses at the entrance to the Skaggerak.

The deeper water to port was very thoroughly mined, with bottom-influence German CAPTORs. The mine field's extent was announced by the Germans, according to international law. The CAPTORs were known by U.S. Naval Intel to be switched on and off by encrypted acoustic signal and fiber-optic link, to constantly change the German submarine safety corridor. The corridor itself was patrolled by Class 212 diesel/AlPs, and Rubis SSNs. Not frontline boats against the best the U.S. and U.K. had, they were more of a submarine Home Guard, but dangerous.

The shallow water directly ahead of Challenger was blocked by a long line of sunken merchant-ship hulks, put there by the Germans, backed by high-tensile-strength antisubmarine nets. The nets were laced with shaped-charge contact mines that could do Challenger terrible harm. Jeffrey knew all about them, because he could see them, through the link from the LMRS. The picture was virtual, built up by low probability of intercept, frequency agile, superhigh-frequency mine-hunting sonar. COB controlled the LMRS; he and Meltzer had the watch.

There was one narrow lane left open into the Baltic, along the forty-meter curve, for German and neutral ships to pass in and out, safe from underwater mines. This lane was thoroughly protected, by German patrol craft, and by naval guns on concrete caissons in the water, backed by antiship cruise missiles and antisubmarine aircraft based on land in hardened revetments.

Jeffrey knew there was no point in sinking the patrol

craft, though it'd be easy. They were expendable to begin with, trip wires to give main forces warning of any intruder. The three-hundred-ton craft lacked sonar, but Jeffrey was sure the area was wired with sensitive hydro-phones, ones that would test Challenger's quieting to the hilt. There would be no way to know if Jeffrey's command had been detected and localized, till the ship came suddenly under attack; maybe they were being watched right now.

No, Jeffrey wasn't happy. Challenger was already three hours behind schedule. Jeffrey ordered battle stations. Almost instantly, Bell arrived. Kathy Milgrom arrived, too, to supervise the sonar supervisor, a senior chief. Kathy looked chipper, but thinner, maybe from overwork.

"Sir," Bell said, "all stations ready for action."

"Very well, Fire Control. Helm, make your course zero four five." Northeast. "Ahead one third, make turns for four knots."

"Make my course zero four five, aye, sir," Meltzer said. "Ahead one third, turns for four knots, aye."

Jeffrey worked best under pressure. Aiming right at the Germans, something would come to him.

"Captain," Kathy said, "new passive contact on the port wide-aperture array."

"Classification?"

"Appears to be a convoy of merchant ships. Estimate seven in number. Escorts too, sound like Goteborg-class Swedish guided-missile patrol craft. Two of them, sir."

"They're small," Bell said, "three hundred eighty tons, but well armed, including four deck-mounted ASW torpedo tubes."

"More military screw-counts," Kathy called out, "same bearing and range. . . . A pair of Landsort-class mine hunters, sweeping in front of the convoy."

"Not a direct threat," Bell said, "but they can plant mines as well as sweep them."

"Faint contacts on acoustic intercept," Kathy said. "Picking up scattered mine-hunting sonar now, five hundred

twenty-five kilohertz, consistent with Landsort-class Thomson-CSF hull-mounted systems."

"Very well, Sonar and Fire Control," Jeffrey said. "The Swedish Navy must have met their merchies in the Norwegian Sea, in international waters. Now they're making sure they get through unmolested. The Skagerrak's the only access Sweden has in and out of the Baltic." The minesweeping escort was needed. A German mine might break loose, or the Brits may have secretly planted their own.

"Sir," Bell said, "recommend we try to follow the convoy through the Axis defenses."

"I was thinking that," Jeffrey said.

Over the CACC speakers, Jeffrey listened to the sonar broadband in quadraphonic: throbbing, churning, pinging, plus creaking and clanking from sunken hulks. There was also a clattering, beating roar: helicopters.