Triumph (27 page)

Christmas came . . . and passed.

The adults, for the sake of the generally-ecstatic Dorothy and Richard, played at the game of Christmas with enough artifice to convince the children. But both of them, more than once, had fits of silence and even tears, as this Christmas recalled all their others, spent with their beloved, vanished "Mommy" and "Pop."

On the day after that heart-heavy festival the mining squad gratefully resumed work.

Steel baffles on the lower end of the manhole-sized tunnel had been removed and lowered into the air lock. The rest now waited while, in turns, one would creep up the endless, slanting tube to the face of the concrete "plug" at its end. There, braced against driven steel steps, the lone man, sweating, dust-strangled, half-crazed by claustrophobia and the fear of some fatal crash of a loosened chunk of the ragged concrete above, would operate a chattering drill, a jackhammer. A bare electric bulb, metal-shaded, would be his only light--till his utmost will and strength gave out. Then he would clamber and slide the long way back to the air lock, where the next-in-order would shrug and climb a ladder and vanish into a dim-lit, infinite-seeming hole that led upward on a steep, sloping angle.

Alberto, to everybody's surprise, had been able to endure such shifts three and four times longer than any of the others. And Kit was not able even to try the drilling job: far up the tunnel there was a place where some freakish effect of the blast of bombs outdoors had narrowed the shaft just enough so the athlete's shoulders would not pass. So he had said. Ben was skeptical. He felt sure it was claustrophobia, not breadth, that made Kit state he could not get through. And Ben felt no criticism of that. He merely wished that Kit--that Faith's fiancé--had admitted his true condition, not blamed the tunnel.

Claustrophobia is not a weakness.

However, Kit did take as his chore the moving and piling of huge and lesser fragments of concrete as the men drilled deep enough and dynamite was capped, thrust in the drill holes, abandoned, and detonated from below. Then a vast spew of cement fragments, which often weighed hundreds of pounds each, came thundering down the tube and burst uproariously into the chamber. Kit rolled and levered away each such cascade.

The man to go up after every blast was most threatened by loosened chunks of the concrete plug, which, if they fell, could catch him climbing toward, or standing at, the work-face. Alberto usually insisted on that trick. And in the dynamiting, as well as in the final effort of drilling a six-inch hole through the last, estimated fifty feet of the plug, Alberto won the respect--even the affection--of all the people in the group, including the women. Guts, they would say--
but guts!

Meantime, in the machine shop, on power tools and at drawing boards, Lodi.

George, and Ben developed and built what they, not surprisingly, began to call the

"package," which would be extruded from the final bore, if radiation levels in the outside air allowed.

They were checking the perfected device--a tubular, man-high assembly of glassware, circuits, transistors, aluminum, and electronic gadgets--when, one afternoon, Vance Farr burst in, dust-caked. He shouted, for his ears were ringing like the ears of everybody in the mining gang, and even a shout sounded faint to him: "Hey!
Everybody!

We're coming through! Got the monitors set to run out and measure?"

CHAPTER 13

It took time, a long time, for the emerging Soviets to do much. Even they, who had planned, prepared for, and launched the cataclysm of World War III, had not anticipated everything. In particular, the American retaliation had been greater, longer-lasting, and more destructive than expected.

Thus, for one thing, though they had launched, from "ready" caverns, drone planes, to make a search of all possible hostile territory, their expectation of keeping a constant watch on the globe was wrecked. American pilots had found and annihilated the caverns from which satellites were supposed to have been orbited-vehicles with TV

scanning apparatus. Also, the vast antennas designed before the evil day of the Red strike, to "see" what the satellites saw, were simply gone. Neither the rockets, with their TV space vehicles, nor the receivers could be replaced with on-hand materials after the war ceased to be even a random shooting by dying rocket men in the free world's last remaining silo centers.

However, early search drones had brought back mile upon mile of film showing utter desolation. No seagoing warship could be detected on that film by the experts. The seas were empty of such craft. No enemy submarines had been heard during the long confinement in the hidden Red bases. None showed on the film. None was reported by the solitary Red nuclear sub to survive.

Those naval officers who had managed to reach, later, via that single submarine, the arctic base (where, as planned, they were admitted under the sea to the vast, submerged "city") reported "absolute and total" destruction of all European, American, and other, even potential, enemy craft, surface or sub-surface. Their certainty was, doubtless, based in part on their well-founded fear of what would be done to them if they reported anything less than complete elimination of all enemy naval craft. They were sent out to make sure, anyway.

Listening attentively from their wait-areas under two seas and three mountainous regions, the Reds heard the world, both below and near the equator, talk--but never a sound or signal that could be attributed to an enemy vessel, and, in time, none from any enemy land base, however deep-driven in rock; no hostile sound in the United States, or Europe, Canada, or Japan.

The ingenious apparatus that had been extended forward of the silently probing
Tiger Shark
had not even been indicated by Red equipment as a "school of fish."

Therefore, in time, the first Soviet men emerged from the mighty portals of their tremendous forts--emerged through a series of huge "locks," wearing radiation-shielding garments, and later in radiation-shielded vehicles: especially bulldozers. No plane ever flew within range of their now circling radars, either of enemy origin or any military sort.

A few forays were noted by unarmed planes--no bombs were dropped--and these planes were apparently shielded. All were civilian in type and of non-enemy origin. Hurriedly, they shot across the U.S.S.R. at high altitudes--plainly, to observe. Some were shot down.

Those that were not, never came within optical or radar view of the emerged and moving men and machines, so far as could be ascertained. And if they did--and if they got back to base (Africa, probably, and only Africa, and only south of the Sahara)--their reports would certainly show a U.S.S.R. in ruins and without menacing life.

Little by little, then, as better radar facilities were set up, the work parties grew more bold. In time they had made ready some three-quarters of the rockets set, before the war, in remote, unlikely spots, deep-buried, and uncovered now at great cost in labor and life. These rockets carried heavy-megaton H-bombs as warheads, and were so designed that with the rise anywhere on earth of any rocket aimed at the U.S.S.R., they would track such a rocket or rockets, lock in on their source or, serially, their sources, and destroy with absolute certainty the point-of-launch of such an unanticipated weapon or weapons.

The satellite system which operated those defense weapons had been put in orbit years before the war, and checked out to the mile and millisecond. Unfortunately, those orbiting vehicles had not been equipped for any other type of TV scanning and reporting.

Moreover (and in this the Reds were again luckless, though measurelessly less so than any of the nations they had attacked), a secondary system, by which the "reports"

from the orbiting vehicles could be used to intercept and destroy any missiles or rockets on course toward the U.S.S.R., proved useless. The very violence and extent of the British, French, and (multiplied by a factor of thousands) American assault had wrecked irreparably the delicate mechanisms of the rocket-destruct apparatus. Thus the Soviets, on emerging, found they could still destroy--after a very large theoretical salvo, or perhaps two--any five-mile-square area, anywhere on earth. But they could not, as they had planned, intercept incoming missiles. There was no evidence, however, that men with such weapons, or even such weapons unmanned, existed any longer in all the world except for the Soviet Union.

It was not a grave matter, the Reds were certain. And, consequently, they went ahead with their next phase.

They were mistaken, as are all men at times, both individually and in groups the size of the greatest nations.

For now, at a point remote from the cratered nothing that had been Moscow--and the similar, lunar leavings of Tillis, too, and Vladivostok, and all the rest--a plan, made by the United States Navy and never ferreted out by Red espionage agents, was put into effect by at least one unit of those designated to take part in "Operation Last Ditch." The unit was a submarine, the
Tiger Shark.

The point where she commenced that operation was not far from eighty degrees east longitude and fairly close to twenty-five degrees south latitude--the exact position determined long before the war. Therefore, it lay in the emptiest and least-cruised reaches of the warm Indian Ocean, between Africa and distant Australia, and more than a thousand miles below Ceylon.

One night the
Tiger Shark
surfaced, after a cautious survey by radar and periscope of sea and remotest sky. A tall spar then was raised, briefly, above the sub's mast. At exactly twenty-three minutes past midnight, that first time, a powerful radio transmitted from that height, three short dashes. At once the
Tiger Shark
dove and cruised rapidly away.

The next night, at another, predetermined position, and at a different, prearranged time, she sent, from the reaches of the Indian Ocean, one dash. On a third night the position and signals were again different. But always, both signals and new position would be of a sort already known to a few American commanders of various, specific vessels--if any such still existed.

And this went on for days, a week, then more days.

No sea-bursting enemy weapon ever followed the signals. No enemy, or other, plane or vessel appeared in the ever-shifted area. It was therefore evident that the surviving Soviets lacked the equipment for detecting the boat, or the signals--or else, and even likelier, the brief radio signals at their seemingly random times, if heard, had no meaning in a world full of scrambled radio chatter.

Ten nights of taut effort and then all-day hiding.
Twelve.

Hope ebbed. The officers and men on the
Tiger Shark
had been intensely optimistic at first. Though she could set up, at will, on sixteen places of choice, anywhere, a volcano, followed by a splash as from a gob of the sun, with an aftermath of wide death in fallout, the
Tiger Shark
was hardly capable of exterminating the number of bases, at their distances from each other, now known to exist. And in two days more it would be time, by the plan, to remove to the central Pacific and try again. With less hope.

The men were in perfect shape; the boat was hardly less immaculate than when she'd left Norfolk, long ago. More than six months of provisions remained in her lockers.

It wasn't that diminishing future which lowered morale, but only the failure of any friend to show up and the consequent lessening of any chance of demolishing so evil a foe that men in all times had probably never hated other men with as much ferocity as blazed aboard that submarine.

The long trek of the
Tiger Shark
above the mid-Atlantic deep-sunken mountain range (where convection currents and even volcanic noise furnish some concealment) and round the Horn, submerged, then across the vast Pacific and south of Australia to the present position--all that had merely whetted vengeful hopes. Daily, now, they dwindled.

But on the night of their twelfth vigil, before they surfaced, Dingo, trotting in a circle as he swung the periscope, suddenly went stone-rigid. For a while, he fiddled with the handles that focused the scope. In the moonlit, warm night he'd seen an object.

Cautiously, he ordered the
Tiger Shark
to close, and finally his tenseness changed so suddenly, the Exec and Chief nearby almost panicked.

Dingo straightened and let out a yell which the wincing auditors below decks first thought meant someone gone nuts. "Yoweeeee! One of us!" Dingo bellowed. Then:

"Take her up!"

It was the
White Shark.

In darkness, with muffled flashlights, the skipper of the
White Shark,
his Exec, and three submarine chiefs rowed across the starlit sea to the
Tiger Shark.
They were welcomed aboard with whoops of joy. But those whoops faded when the arrivals went below and could be seen clearly. They were gaunt and sick-looking. Their captain, Randy Bleek, known well to Dingo Denton, told the story in one word:
"Starving."

"Lord!" Dingo was amazed.
"We're
not even halfway
through."

The other skipper sat down on a handy bench, below the mast and conning tower, in the control room. "We ran across a carrier--oh--long ago. Out of grub. The
Conner.

Nuclear."

"Know her!" Dingo grinned. "Skippered by the toughest admiral in the seven seas!" His men were already bringing coffee and sandwiches, with mountains of food on the way.

The
White Shark's
captain talked as he ate: "The
Conner
hardly got in the war.

Afterward, some days, she put in at Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. Those people got scared of her presence, finally, and shooed her away. Her captain--your admiral--thought Australia would be safer, anyhow. But the Aussies refused to let the
Conner
even approach. When
we
met the carrier, we gave her two-thirds of our grub. Over a thousand guys aboard her, after all. And that's about it." He grabbed another sandwich.

"Where have you been since?"

"Around." Commander Bleek chuckled weakly. Then he fainted.