Deep Sound Channel

Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Fuller looked up from his night-long labors at USS Challenger's weapons loading hatch, wiped his dripping brow, and watched in morbid fascination. The crewmen he'd been working with did too, and for once he didn't urge them back to it. They've more than earned a break, he told himself, so let them look. Let them see what this is all about, this tactical nuclear war at sea with the Berlin-Boer Axis. "Jesus," the submarine's chief of the boat said, looking east from under the lead-lined awning with its propane jets, radar and thermal antisatellite masking. "Yeah," Jeffrey said. What else was there to say? The young seamen just stared. The sun had breasted the horizon now, well past the first moment of nautical dawn, that special time of day that Jeffrey loved but rarely saw. The extra-yellow early light shone above the seventy-foot-high trees off in the distance, the long-abandoned coconut plantation on the other side of the lagoon. The light picked out the cloud-flecked sky, high scudding altocumulus over fluffy fractostratus blobs, and it illuminated the hideous procession in the foreground. "Ranger," Jeffrey whispered. The ATR(X) oceangoing salvage tug bore zero three five relative, crossing the line of bearing to the lighthouse on Leconte Point. Her charge's stem could just be seen, slowly making progress past the anchorage. Gradually, like some obscene burlesque, the hulk came into view, dragged by the tow cable whose catenary curved beneath the water and then up again. Slowly, almost teasingly, she moved out from behind the looming steel-gray side of the submarine tender, USS Frank Cable, against which Challenger lay moored. Instinctively Jeffrey did the target-motion analysis in his head. Angle on the bow starboard zero four zero, mark. Speed five knots, course one six five. Distance to the track, call it 1,200 yards. Jeffrey noticed there was comparative silence now. Work topside had ceased on all the other ships as well. Only the incessant roar of jets and turboprops and helicopters persisted, off past his right shoulder at the airfield. Overhead, birds soared, oblivious. Ranger's wake washed under Challenger, and she started pitching slightly as if in homage. The nylon mooring lines stretched, creaking softly. Thankfully the light breeze was from behind Jeffrey, from the west. Ranger's island superstructure was gone, Jeffrey saw, except for a tangled mess of wreckage, a livid stump three meters high. Her flight deck, warped and twisted, was more or less still there, except for the aircraft elevators, which all were missing. Edge-on to the enemy cruise missile blast, Jeffrey figured, the flight deck was peeled upward as the atomic shock front's ground reflection diffracted over the vessel. Stress loadings of the incident wave, severe drag and compression forces, and explosive negative pressure gradients did the rest. "My God," Jeffrey said out loud. "You can see right through her hull." He watched the sunrise glowing where the hangar deck had been, and in the other empty spaces lower down. Those once were all compartments, where her crew had worked and studied, slept and messed, written letters home. Tortured longitudinals were what remained of her first platform deck amidships, forward of engineering. Along her waterline arced the discharge from many pumps, undoubtedly P-250 portable gasoline-powered units, keeping her afloat. "They're finishing the detailed decontamination," COB said, pointing out the little figures in nuclear-biological-chemical protective suits on the hull, busy with the scrubbing and the sealing. "Aging will have happened on its own." "Iodine 131,"Buff, Joe is the author of 'Deep Sound Channel' with ISBN 9780553582390 and ISBN 0553582399.