Authors: Joe Buff
The
von Scheer
was so deep that the deck of the Zentrale was actually warped from the pressure squashing against the outer hull. Extra damage-control parties were stationed around the ship. Beck hoped they wouldn’t be needed. At this depth, five thousand meters—three miles—down, the slightest flooding would be catastrophic. If a single weld or valve joint failed anywhere that was exposed to full sea pressure, the ocean would blast in with a force beyond comprehension. The noise would be painfully loud, like artillery fire. The solid jet of water could instantly cut a man in half. It would ricochet everywhere, making the source of flooding impossible to find. Above the quickly rising water in the bilges and then on the decks, the air would become an atomized mist of stinging, blinding seawater. The flooding would drive the internal atmospheric pressure up very fast, making the air turn hot—burning hot—and the steaming salty mist would short out critical electric equipment. Men would die in horrible ways as the
von Scheer
herself was drowned and crushed from within.
Those thoughts were bad enough. The reality of what Ernst Beck was seeing was, in some ways, worse.
The ship was at the exact location specified in his orders, verified by the inertial navigation plot. The sonarmen and weapons technicians were all on high alert. Two remote-controlled off-board probes, designed to work at such depths, had already scouted the general area for any lurking threats.
At the moment, a kampfschwimmer chief and enlisted man were working at a console at the rear of the Zentrale, intensely focused on their task.
Video imagery was shown on the control room’s main display screens. Some of the images came from active laser line-scan cameras outside the ship. The images were crisp and sharp, at least within the effective range of the laser beams. Other pictures came from passive image-intensification cameras. Those views were murky, diffuse, even where floodlights pierced the darkness; backscatter glowed off floating silt. The live feeds all came in through fiber-optic tethers.
Ernst Beck saw the seafloor, a short distance beneath the
von Scheer
. The ship was holding perfectly steady as the pilot and copilot busily used the small auxiliary thrusters fore and aft to counteract the sluggish bottom current. The bottom at this location was a mix of clay ooze, washed down off dry land in Europe, and scattered basalt boulders. The boulders were jagged and rough, because at this depth there’d been no polishing by Ice Age glaciers, no weathering by wind or waves, no cycle of freezing and thawing. The water temperature was constant at four degrees Celsius—just above freezing. The terrain rose gradually toward the west. In the far distance soared the central peaks of the endless Mid-Atlantic Ridge, magma hardened as it emerged from the earth over eons.
On the imagery projected from outside, Beck saw bioluminescent glows and flashes from clouds of microbes and hideous fish. Over the sonar speakers, he heard the clicketyclack and popping of deep-sea shrimp.
This water was transgressed, defiled, by man. Near the
von Scheer,
settled on the bottom, sat the wreck of a U.S. Navy destroyer. Between the
von Scheer
and the wreck, divers walked—impossibly—on the bottom. Two of them turned to the cameras that other men carried. Through their faceplates, Beck recognized one as the kampfschwimmer lieutenant in command.
As Beck watched, they gave a quick thumbs-up, then continued toward the sunken destroyer, walking freely on the seafloor five kilometers down.
The six kampfschwimmer divers wore backpacks, hooked up to their intravenous ports—those implants Beck had thought of as gills. Inside their full-body diving clothes and helmets that looked like spacesuits, Beck’s briefing papers had told him, they breathed a saline solution suffused with oxygen. They breathed the liquid as if they were breathing air.
“I’m informed that once you get used to it,” von Loringhoven said, “breathing the fluid seems natural.”
“It must be strange at first,” Beck said.
“These kampfschwimmer are well trained. The reason their suits are soft is so the fluid, and their whole bodies, can equalize to ambient sea pressure. Even the best mixed-gas rigs would kill a man past the first thousand meters.”
“I know.”
“Breathing the fluid isn’t new. Lab mice, and men, did it fifty years ago. You just can’t do it for long, because there’s no way to get the carbon dioxide out of the lungs. It’s not the lack of oxygen that’s the problem. It’s the buildup of carbon dioxide in the body that would be fatal in minutes—in seconds, at this great depth.”
“Someone obviously solved that problem.”
Von Loringhoven nodded. “The new part is the backpacks. They include a form of dialysis apparatus. The carbon dioxide is removed directly from the blood, much as other wastes would be deleted for a hospital patient suffering from kidney failure.”
“It sounds rather dangerous,” Beck said.
“The descent under pressure can be done surprisingly quickly, as you saw. The decompression period is long, as you’d imagine, several days. That’s why the kampfschwimmer brought those individual pressure capsules. Once they return they’ll stay inside the capsules, breathing saline and having body wastes dialyzed for quite some time…. And that’s the other advantage of the backpacks. With the intravenous hookups they like to call gills, the men can be fed nutrients continually while they work. This gives them tremendous endurance.”
“I suppose it’s hard to eat underwater when you’re breathing through a scuba mouthpiece.”
“The thin plutonium lining of their suits keeps them nice and warm, no matter how lengthy their toils. It’s quite safe, as long as a suit doesn’t tear and someone actually ingests plutonium. That’s one reason the suits are lined with multiple layers of Kevlar.”
“I have to insist on a thorough radiological survey before the men come back into my ship.”
“Of course. It’s standard procedure.”
“How often has this been done before?”
“You mean operationally, in a war zone?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure. It’s all top secret, need-to-know. The Allies haven’t the slightest idea we possess this capability.”
“Oh, Jesus,” someone said.
“Easy,” Stissinger cautioned the man.
Beck felt repugnance too. The “dialysis divers,” trailing tethers for their cameras and other equipment, had reached the sunk destroyer. The wreck was recent. One of the line-scan cameras showed the corpse of an American sailor, his lower body trapped in mangled wreckage.
Things
like giant worms crawled on the corpse, feeding. Bone on the skull was already exposed.
“Do we have to see this?” Beck asked. “Can’t they just get on with it?”
“Feeling guilty?” von Loringhoven said. “The records show you sank this ship on your last patrol.”
“I suspected as much.” Beck saw more of the destroyer as the divers worked their way around and over the wreckage.
“You can understand now why this can’t be done by a robotic sub, using grapnels. We need human judgment, in real time, and practiced manual skills on the spot.”
The destroyer lay on her starboard side. Beck watched as the divers avoided the ragged stump of her mast. She was an
Arleigh Burke
–class vessel, and huge—as long as the
von Scheer
—and had a wide beam for a destroyer; the top of the hulk, her port side, rose almost twenty meters off the ocean floor amidships. The twisted remnants of her four exhaust stacks, in two pairs surrounded by big air intakes for the gasturbine propulsion plant, were aimed at the divers’ cameras. They seemed to be aimed at Beck, as if they were saying,
You did this to us. You
.
There was a large debris field in the foreground. Fragments of the ship’s superstructure littered the bottom. Unnamable objects spilled from fractures in her hull and cracks in her decks. As the dialysis divers searched and inspected, and their cameras panned around in the freezing blackness, Beck saw more corpses. They were much too fresh to be fully decomposed, for their bones to have dissolved from the pressure. The sight of seamen burned, mutilated, crushed, with tatters of clothing and pieces of half-eaten flesh waving at him in the bottom current, was profoundly disturbing to the captain. As loose and dangling equipment jangled in the half-knot current, noises came over the sonar speakers, like the sound of ghosts dragging chains.
Not one man in the control room said a word, except for the two kampfschwimmer at their console behind Beck. They spoke to the diver team, who responded by typing on keypads worn on their chests. Some of the men in Beck’s crew seemed grateful that their job required them to stare at their sonar screens or threat-tracking plots, forcing them to avert their eyes from the tomb, the hallowed ground, that the divers were going to plunder. Sailors were sailors, whatever their nation. Every man in the control room—and Beck assumed this included von Loringhoven—knew how easily the corpses might have been
them
.
From the way her mast stump and stacks were bent, and the destruction of the bridge superstructure, Beck judged that the destroyer had taken a near miss from an airburst off her port bow, caused by an atomic cruise missile. She seemed to have burned while sinking, but must have sunk quickly, because the fires were snuffed before her main magazines could explode. The fires topside had been fierce while they lasted: Beck saw aluminum melted and fused. Paint was blistered or totally charred. She probably tumbled underwater before striking the bottom—the hard impact had made a crater in the seafloor muck. It strewed debris in a wide area, splitting her seams along many frames.
This was fortunate, because the antisubmarine torpedo launchers on her external decks were all smashed. To find what they were looking for, the divers had to go inside the hulk. The pictures on the Zentrale screens seemed to jiggle and jump around; the imagery would spin, then focus on something, then spin or bounce to focus on something else.
Beck watched in morbid fascination as the divers began to search the ordnance-handling areas, ammunition hoists, and magazines. Much was twisted beyond recognition, and space to work in was tight. Shapeless tangles of multicolrored pipes and wires and ladders, and sheet steel crumpled like cardboard, formed jagged obstructions. Some voids were filled with viscous pockets of buoyant, sticky engine fuel, caught there after the hull tanks ruptured apart. Some watertight doors were jammed hopelessly shut; others stood gaping, burst wide open, with dogging bars sheared from their bracket mounts by brutally destructive forces. Everywhere mud and silt drifted, along with flecks of insulation and plastic, and the divers’ helmet lights cast haunting shadows. To enter this terrible place, Beck thought, took great courage.
Clearly the divers had reviewed the plans of this destroyer class very thoroughly. They showed an impressive ability to make sense of the mess that seemed to Beck incomprehensible. He wondered if the divers had practiced by studying video of the damage to the USS
Cole,
a sister ship of this destroyer. Maybe their training had also included a briefing by the Russians on how to work around and inside the carcass of the
Kursk
—and her severed torpedo room.
At last the divers found what they were looking for: intact, or mostly intact, American-made atomic torpedo warheads. The cameras showed the team of divers working far inside the hull, within what was left of one of the magazines. Two divers stayed outside the wreck with one camera, as safety monitors, and to make sure the cable feeds running into the hulk weren’t snagged. Using special tools, working slowly and carefully, the four inside divers dismantled the American torpedoes, removing the warheads and placing them in special, shielded carrying cases.
“They’re looking for the ones in the best condition,” von Loringhoven said. “They’re taking three, just in case.”
“Just in case what?” Beck knew the wrecked ship’s magazine was full of self-oxidizing weapon propellants, and damaged high explosives too. The divers could potentially set something off, causing a massive detonation that would damage the
von Scheer
.
“We need samples, for intelligence purposes.”
“Why aren’t the divers going after crypto gear?”
“It’s doubtful any survived in usable form.”
“Our side hasn’t salvaged Allied atomic warheads before?”
“We have, but I’m not privy to details. And I assume the Allies have salvaged some of ours.”
Beck grunted. He hadn’t thought of that. “So why are we grabbing more, with a relief convoy to Africa on the move? We seem to be taking considerable, and unnecessary, risks, at a most inappropriate moment. And we’re wasting precious time by doing so.”
“We need at least one warhead, of specifically American manufacture. It has to come from an antisubmarine torpedo so it’s pressure-proof enough.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough to use the physics package…Ah, I see the divers are finished. They’re starting back to the
von Scheer
’s air lock.” One special air lock opened downward, through the bottom of the SSGN’s hull, and had a winch for lifting personnel and cargo.
Beck didn’t like the way von Loringhoven had just changed the subject. “To use the physics package for
what?
”
“Like I said, intelligence. Research. Berlin doesn’t tell me everything.”
Beck decided to play along, for now. The one thing he did know was that von Loringhoven was lying.
The kampfschwimmer dialysis divers were back inside the
von Scheer,
safely ensconced in their decompression capsules. Their plutonium-lined diving suits hadn’t sprung any leaks. The three atomic torpedo warheads were now in the radiological containment area, within the kampfschwimmer working space in the missile compartment.
Beck sat in his cabin, feeling utterly exhausted. Von Loringhoven knocked from inside the bathroom they shared.
Beck rolled his eyes. “Come.”
Von Loringhoven entered.