Crush Depth Read online

  JOE BUFF

  CRUSH DEPTH

  In honored memory of the crew of the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk. They may once have been our enemies, and their country might or might not now be our friend, but they were submariners.

  Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home.

  HERMAN MELVILLE,

  Moby-Dick

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  In mid-2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control in South Africa in…

  ONE

  OUTSIDE THE WINDOW, in the post-midnight pitch-blackness, the freezing wind…

  TWO

  THE MOURNFUL HOWL of the sirens pierced the wind. As…

  THREE

  EVENTUALLY, PASSENGER RAILROAD service was restored. Jeffrey and Ilse spent…

  FOUR

  JEFFREY’S DAD TURNED and noticed him, and did a double…

  FIVE

  VAN GELDER FELT his armpits grow moist as Voortrekker’s electronic-support-measures…

  SIX

  JEFFREY AND ILSE sat on the couch again, in the…

  SEVEN

  “SCHNAPPS, GUNTHER?”

  EIGHT

  STRAPPED INTO THE rear of the cockpit, Ilse heard the…

  NINE

  JEFFREY’S TRAIN ARRIVED on time in New London, and he…

  TEN

  JEFFREY WOKE UP early, after barely four hours’ sleep. The…

  ELEVEN

  JEFFREY STOOD IN the open bridge cockpit atop Challenger’s sail—the…

  TWELVE

  CHALLENGER WAS PAST the edge of the continental shelf, submerged…

  THIRTEEN

  “COMMODORE IN CONTROL,” the messenger of the watch announced.

  FOURTEEN

  GUNTHER VAN GELDER felt relaxation and inner joy, as much…

  FIFTEEN

  CHALLENGER HOVERED NEAR the bottom in four thousand feet of…

  SIXTEEN

  WILSON, SATISFIED BY the periscope photo, ordered Jeffrey to continue…

  SEVENTEEN

  GUNTHER VAN GELDER sweated and his heart was pounding, both…

  EIGHTEEN

  “HOW MANY MORE torpedoes still to be loaded, Number One?”

  NINETEEN

  IN PRIVATE, IN THE commodore’s office, Wilson looked at Jeffrey…

  TWENTY

  JEFFREY’S INJURED TORPEDOMAN was gone to a hospital. The Prima…

  TWENTY-ONE

  VAN GELDER HAD the conn. Voortrekker was back in the…

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE PRIMA LATINA was supposed to stop in Balboa harbor,…

  TWENTY-THREE

  WILSON GLARED AT Jeffrey. “How dare you come in here…

  TWENTY-FOUR

  VAN GELDER WATCHED and listened, amazed that all this was…

  TWENTY-FIVE

  JEFFREY SAT TENSE and worried at the command console in…

  TWENTY-SIX

  TO JEFFREY IT was refreshing and pleasantly different, almost a…

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  JEFFREY GINGERLY OPENED the minisub’s top hatch. It rose partway…

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  JEFFREY LAY ON his back, bewildered, staring at the sky,…

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY JOE BUFF

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PROLOGUE

  In mid-2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control in South Africa in the midst of social chaos and restored apartheid. In response to a U.N. trade embargo, the Boer regime began sinking U.S. and British merchant ships. Coalition forces mobilized, with only Germany holding back. Troops and tanks drained from the rest of Western Europe and North America, and a joint task force set sail for Africa—into a giant, coordinated trap.

  There was another coup, in Berlin, and Kaiser Wilhelm’s great-grandson was crowned, the Hohenzollern throne restored after almost a century. Ultranationalists, exploiting American unpreparedness for all-out war, would give Germany her “place in the sun” at last. A secret military-industrial conspiracy had planned it all for years, brutal opportunists who hated the mediocre silliness of the European Union as much as they resented America’s smug self-infatuation. The kaiser was their figurehead, to legitimize the New Order. Coercion by the noose won over citizens not swayed by patriotism or the sheer onrush of events.

  This Berlin-Boer Axis had covertly built small tactical atomic weapons, the great equalizers in what would otherwise have been a most uneven fight—and once again America’s CIA was clueless. The Axis used these low-yield A-bombs to ambush the Allied naval task force under way, then destroyed Warsaw and Tripoli. France surrendered at once, and Continental Europe was overrun. Germany won a strong beachhead in North Africa, while the South African army drove hard toward them to link up.

  Germany grabbed nuclear subs from the French, and advanced diesel submarines from other countries. Some were shared with the Boers. A financially supine Russia, supposedly neutral yet long a believer in the practicality of limited tactical nuclear war, sold weapons to the Axis for hard cash. Most of the rest of the world stayed on the sidelines, biding their time out of fear or greed or both.

  American supply convoys to starving Great Britain are being decimated by the modern U-boat threat, in another bloody Battle of the Atlantic. Tens of thousands of merchant seamen died in the Second World War, and the casualty lists grow very long this time too.

  America herself depends both militarily and economically on vulnerable shipping lanes across the vast Pacific Ocean, to neutral Asia and the Persian Gulf. If these shipping lanes are cut, the U.S. will have no choice but to recognize Axis gains and sue for an armistice: an Axis victory. America and Great Britain each own one state-of-the-art ceramic-hulled fast-attack sub—such as USS Challenger, capable of tremendous depths—but Germany and South Africa own such vessels too.

  Now, in February 2012, high summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the U.S. is on the defensive everywhere, and democracy has never been more threatened. In this terrible new war, with the midocean’s surface a killing zone, America’s last, best hope for enduring freedom rests with a special breed of fearless undersea warriors….

  Ten years in the future

  In the Indian Ocean, east of South Africa, aboard the Boer ceramic-hulled nuclear submarine Voortrekker

  In the cramped and crowded control room, everyone was quiet. It was dark, to stay in sync with nighttime high above the ship, up on the monsoon-tossed surface. First Officer Gunther Van Gelder breathed. The air was stale—the fans were stopped for greater stealth. Jan ter Horst sat just to his left, in the center of the compartment. Van Gelder could see well enough by the glow of instruments and console screens, but he did not have the nerve to look directly at his captain now. Ter Horst’s physical presence overwhelmed him. Van Gelder knew ter Horst too well. He knew ter Horst would be gloating.

  “Dead men afloat,” ter Horst said. With a finger he delicately traced the data windowed on his command workstation display, the noise signature of the enemy submarine. The line on the sonar waterfall grew gradually brighter. “Coming right at us, Gunther. They don’t even realize we’re here.”

  “Yes, Captain,” Van Gelder said. At times like this it was best to just agree with the man. “Range now twenty thousand meters.” Just over ten nautical miles. Voortrekker was aimed directly at their victim, moving very slowly, to hide. “Seehecht unit in tube one is ready to fire, sir. Tube one prepared in all respects.”

  T
he Seehecht torpedoes used conventional high-explosive warheads, nothing fancy. They were made by South Africa’s Axis partner in war, resurgent Imperial Germany. Ter Horst’s target, a Collins-class diesel sub, hardly rated one of Voortrekker’s homegrown nuclear weapons, tipped with trusty Boer uranium-235; the Royal Australian Navy’s Collins boats were homegrown too, built in the 1990s, and never quite lived up to the Aussies’ hopes. Van Gelder knew they were noisy, even on batteries, and their sensor performance was poor. Losses from eight months of limited tactical nuclear fighting on half the world’s oceans forced the Allies to put every available warship into the field.

  Dead men floating, indeed, Van Gelder thought. Some of the Collins subs had coed crews. Van Gelder didn’t know if this one did. It didn’t matter.

  “We’ll let them get just a little closer,” ter Horst said. “Less time for them to pull evasive maneuvers that way.” He sounded smug, not cautious.

  “Understood.” Van Gelder waited. At action stations, as first officer—executive officer—his job was to oversee target tracking, done mostly by sonar, and weapons, including Voortrekker’s cruise missiles and mines. He told himself that given ter Horst’s war record so far, this Collins boat was minor prey.

  But today was just a shakedown cruise. Voortrekker was fresh from underground dry dock, from two months of hurried round-the-clock repairs and upgrades. This sortie was mostly intended to check that everything worked. It was typical of ter Horst to make his battleworthiness check by plunging straight into mortal combat, against an inferior foe.

  “Range now sixteen thousand meters,” Van Gelder recited.

  “Very well,” ter Horst said. “Wait.”

  Van Gelder went back to waiting, and to thinking. Van Gelder and ter Horst had a good relationship, as such things went. Ter Horst saw Van Gelder as his protégé, his number one in important ways. He’d been ter Horst’s senior aide for the tribunal back in Durban, South Africa—the investigation, which ter Horst chaired, of the mysterious mushroom cloud north of the city in early December. The mushroom cloud that obliterated a secret Axis biological weapons lab. The mushroom cloud in which USS Challenger was implicated, somehow, along with traitors in the Boer command infrastructure…perhaps.

  The military tribunal wasn’t over yet. After this shakedown cruise, Voortrekker would return to the hardened sub pens cut into the bluff near downtown Durban. Safely inside, they’d resolve any mechanical problems remaining—there always were some, after a long stretch in the yard. Then Van Gelder’s workload would redouble, as before: endless quality control inspections on the ship, and crew refresher training—plus the lengthy interrogations of the tribunal. The final findings would undoubtedly lead to executions, grisly hangings broadcast on national TV, one more burden on Van Gelder’s troubled soul. Right now, this little stretch under way was, if anything, a respite. Van Gelder could focus on the real war effort alone, and leave the politics and infighting of the land temporarily behind. The land had never made Van Gelder happy. It was the sea, going down into the sea, being one with the sea, that he loved.

  “Range to target?” ter Horst snapped.

  “Er, range now ten thousand meters, Captain.” Five nautical miles.

  “Very well, Number One. Tube one, target unchanged, the Collins boat. Update firing solution, and shoot.” The weapon dashed through the sea.

  Van Gelder had programmed the unit to follow a dog-leg approach to the target, to sneak at the Collins from the side and disguise Voortrekker’s location. Seehechts could be used by any sub in the Axis inventory. No one would guess Voortrekker fired the shot. Van Gelder watched his data screens as the one-sided drama began to unfold.

  At last the target reacted. The Collins altered course and picked up speed. She launched a decoy, and then noisemakers. Van Gelder’s fire-control technicians, arrayed at consoles along the control room’s port bulkhead, handled the wire-guided Seehecht. Voortrekker’s special passive sonars looked up through the ocean-temperature layers and pinned the real target against the monsoon’s wave action and rain noise. The Collins had nowhere to hide.

  “Contact on acoustic intercept!” the sonar chief shouted.

  “Target has pinged on active sonar,” Van Gelder said. “Echo suppressed by out-of-phase emissions.” With Voortrekker’s advanced acoustic masking, she was effectively invisible to such a substandard opponent.

  The Collins lived long enough to fire two torpedoes in retaliation, but they were shooting blind, tearing in the wrong direction. Van Gelder knew this battle amounted to cold-blooded murder.

  “Enemy torpedoes pose no threat to Voortrekker,” he stated, “even if they carry tactical nuclear warheads.” Because seawater was so rigid and dense, torpedo A-bomb warheads had to be very small—a kiloton or less—or the boat that used them could be hoist by its own petard. These yields were a fraction of the weapons America dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and were a mere ten-thousandth of the multimegaton hydrogen bombs tested in the atmosphere in the worst days of the Cold War. Yet Axis tactical atom bombs were still a thousand times more powerful than any conventional high-explosive torpedo—which was why the Axis used them, and which forced the Allies in self-defense to use them too.

  As if to reemphasize the Collins boat’s impotence, ter Horst ordered the helmsman to come to all stop.

  “Weapon from tube one has detonated!” a fire-control technician shouted—the data came back through the guidance wire at the speed of light.

  “Sonar on speakers,” ter Horst ordered.

  A second later Van Gelder heard the sharp metallic whang of the torpedo hit. The blast echoed off the surface and the sea floor, mixing on the sonar speakers with a two-toned roar: air forced into the Collins’s ballast tanks as her crew desperately tried an emergency blow, plus water rushed through the gash in her hull at ambient sea pressure.

  The sea pressure won. The target lost all positive buoyancy, and soon fell through her crush depth. The hull imploded hard.

  The eerie rebounding pshoing of crushed metal hitting crushed metal was louder than the torpedo hit. Van Gelder knew any crew still living would have been cremated as the atmosphere compressed and heated to the ignition point of clothing and flesh.

  “Excellent,” ter Horst said, almost as an anticlimax. “Helm, steer one eight zero.” Due south. “Increase speed. Make revs for top quiet speed.” Thirty knots.

  The helmsman acknowledged.

  Van Gelder stood and paced the line of sonarmen on his right, to make extra sure there were no threats as Voortrekker cleared the area.

  “Number One,” ter Horst said a few minutes later, “we stay at battle stations. You have the deck and the conn.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Maintain present course?”

  “No, put us on one three five.”

  “Southeast?” That was away from Durban, home base, which was southwest.

  “I want to line us up with the covert message hydrophone in the Agulhas Abyssal Plain. I’m retiring to my cabin to compose a message for higher command.”

  “Aye aye, Captain.” What was going on now? Well, at least Van Gelder always liked having the deck and conn. He was in almost total control of the ship, as much as anyone could be without being the captain.

  Ter Horst returned a short time later with a data disk in his hand. “This requires your electronic countersignature.” He gave Van Gelder the disk.

  Van Gelder placed it in the reader on his console. He eyed what came on the screen. Van Gelder was shocked, and then more shocked. Ter Horst was rendering his final verdicts as chair of the tribunal. The accused were being sentenced to death with no real regard for the evidence—or lack of evidence. The choices of guilty or not guilty seemed based more on whim or blood lust. Van Gelder noticed all of the female suspects were to be hanged. This confirmed Van Gelder’s suspicion, that ter Horst actually liked watching such executions. Since the condemned were strung up naked, the implications of erotic perversion were obvious.

  But there
was more. Ter Horst reported his victory over the Collins boat, and declared Voortrekker combat ready. He waived his planned return to dry dock, and insisted on permission for immediate departure on his next top-secret combat mission.

  “But sir,” Van Gelder said, “we have dozens of mechanical gripes and work-order exceptions to resolve.”

  “Don’t whine, Gunther. Just sign it, and have the message sent.”

  Van Gelder opened his mouth to object. Ter Horst cut him short.

  “Don’t spoil a good day for us both. You just countersign, and see that the message is sent.”

  Van Gelder relayed it to the secure communications room.

  “Thank you,” ter Horst said exaggeratedly. “I have the conn.”

  “You have the conn, aye aye.” Ter Horst had taken his ship back. Voortrekker maintained course and speed, further into the Indian Ocean, and also toward Antarctica.

  It took almost an hour for Van Gelder’s intercom light to flash. The junior lieutenant in charge of communications had the response from headquarters. It surprised Van Gelder. Ter Horst’s tribunal decisions were accepted as is. Obviously, within the Boer power structure, ter Horst was well connected. Van Gelder saw the entire inquest had been a travesty, a purely political show trial. And besides, the television producers in Johannesburg were always hungry for more human meat for the ever-popular gallows show.

  But that wasn’t all. Higher command had news for ter Horst. USS Challenger was conclusively identified as the Allied submarine involved in an attack before Christmas on a stronghold on the German coast. Challenger was still laid up for weeks more of battle-damage repairs. And Boer freedom fighter Ilse Reebeck had been spotted as a participant in the Germany raid.