"Good," Van Gelder said. "I'll tell the captain we can do a restart soon."
"We'll lay some dams to keep this foam from spreading, sir, then leave what's there in place. It'll protect against a flare-up, and we can clean the mess in a few more hours." Van Gelder felt a dreadful weariness set in. He trudged aft along the passageway, leaving the damage control parties to their work. At a safe distance from the remnants of the fire he pulled off his steam suit hood, just as the cooling system's battery ran down. He borrowed the microphone from a talker in the next compartment, then lifted his breather mask long enough to report to the captain. He refastened the mask, but lingering fumes had gotten in. They made him choke and cough. He still felt awfully hot but for some reason couldn't sweat. As a medical corpsman approached, obviously concerned, Van Gelder sagged against the bulkhead and slowly slid down to the deck. He wanted nothing more than a nice cold glass of water and a breath of natural air. The corpsman bent over to say something, but Van Gelder only heard a rushing in his ears as he passed out.
CHAPTER 4
Jeffrey knocked on the CO's state-room door. The clean uniform he'd put on after a thorough decontamination washdown was already stained with sweat and grease from his walk-around inspection of the boat.
"Come in, XO," Captain Wilson called.
Jeffrey wondered how the CO always knew when it was him. "Sir," he said after entering, "I have the after-action battle damage overview report." Wilson looked up from his little fold-down desk, covered with files and naval publications. His laptop was open too, a map of Africa on the screen. Enemy territory was in red, Allied-controlled in blue, the vast cruisemissile-dominated no-man's-land in amber.
"Let's hear it," Wilson said.
"Aside from the three fatalities, sir, personnel injuries were light and the rem exposures are pretty trivial."
"Good. What about equipment casualties?"
"Sir, the foreplanes are inoperative."
"Not too serious," Wilson said. "We can manage depth-keeping with the afterplanes at anything over dead-slow speed."
Jeffrey nodded. "Sonar's finished with an autocheck. Sessions says the wide-aperture array's fine after all. That enemy torpedo's pinging must have picked up the stators at the back end of our pump-jet."
"I'm impressed," Wilson said. "It's not easy getting echoes off the edges of those blades."
"Agreed, Captain. The other side's technology outdoes ours in some respects."
"Their signal processing algorithms are supposed to be the best. Those math guys at Frankfurt scared me even before the war."
"Our bow dome took a beating, sir," Jeffrey said. "Sessions says the cover's cracked and dimpled."
"Not just at the tip?"
Jeffrey shook his head.
"So we're getting additional flow noise?" Wilson said.
"Yes, sir. Any chance we can stop back at the tender? For emergency repairs?"
"Out of the question, XO. We've got an awfully tight window to bring this SEAL mission off, and we're behind schedule already. Not to mention we're trying to play dead."
"Understood, Captain … About the torpedo room … we have to load the weapons manually, and we're down to just four tubes."
"The other outer doors won't open?"
"No, sir. All the port-side ones were belled in badly."
"The starboard ones are working?"
"The blast was asymmetric, Captain. At fine scales of reference they always are … It's a dry-dock job."
"Mmph." Wilson's tone was sour. "I'm not happy at our weapons expenditure."
"The ones we lost to damage?" Jeffrey said.
"The nuclear torpedoes. Those things are scarce. There're tons of fissile metal in the arsenals of democracy, just not enough goddamn delivery systems to go around."
"We still have four, sir."
"We've barely started our patrol. We wasted two just stopping a pair of diesel boats."
"Did we have a choice, Captain?"
"No. That's what bothers me. The Axis claims the initiative too often, in big things and in small. This is no way to fight a war."
"It's not that bad, sir, is it? Look at the latest fleet action in this theater, off Madagascar and the African coast."
"Sure, we control the Comoro Islands for now," Wilson said, "what's left of 'em, so the German and Boer armies won't be linking up by the east coast route any time soon, but at what price? Ten thousand KIAs, half of them on Ranger."
"Sir, D Day cost twenty thousand Allied casualties."
"We're a hell of a long way from another D Day, XO, in Africa let alone in Europe. The other side claims this one as a victory themselves."
"That's ridiculous," Jeffrey said.
"Not to some nonaligned countries it's not. They're better at propaganda than us, this Berlin-Boer Axis. They know many developing nations are secretly glad to have them break the back of American unipolarism. And since they intimidated the Russians into a false neutrality, they're still getting arms shipments courtesy of Moscow across the safe land bridge of eastern Europe."
"I know," Jeffrey said. "It's like back in the 1920s, sir, the Wehrmacht in bed with the Soviet Union, even long before Hitler."
"The deutsche mark is stronger than the dollar," Wilson said, "and entire continents are waiting to choose sides. So fine, the Germans didn't get to grab any of France's H-bomb stocks. But a few Hiroshima-sized cruise missiles aimed at London and New York are proving a pretty equal deterrent against our megaton-sized MIRVs … And lately there've been rumors the Germans are working up a Mach 8 liquid-H2-powered cruise missile. A Mach 8 ground hugger's basically unstoppable."
"I didn't realize things were that serious, Captain."
"And keep it to yourself. Maybe I'm just bellyaching … Miss Reebeck told me you know you're going with her."
"Yes, sir," Jeffrey said. "What's going on?"
"It's a nuclear demolition raid against a Boer biological weapons lab. She'll cover that part at the briefing. Since the mission's in a populated area, with hostage camps and innocent minority civilians, as my XO you're it. The independent command authority, on site, required for lower formations to use atomic munitions on land."
"So I'm supposed to be the sober head," Jeffrey said, "along for the ride to validate the rules of engagement in real time, since SEALs do so love blowing up things … How long do we have to prepare?"
"The time it takes to sneak over there and get in position. Five days, roughly."
"Jesus, sir."
"Look, I understand your feelings. But I can't send the other officers, I need them here. You're my backup, my alter ego on policy and doctrine."
"And I'm expendable."
Wilson sighed. "Jeffrey, I was an XO too. You need to be there. These guys can't just phone home for instructions like in Desert Storm. The enemy homeland has continual surveillance for clandestine comms, extremely sophisticated defensive signal intelligence and jamming."
"I'm sorry, sir. I must sound unprofessional."
"Any other questions?"
"Why is Ilse Reebeck going?"
"She knows the territory, and her expertise will be of use."
"How do we know we can trust her, sir? She's one of them." Wilson tossed Jeffrey an unlabeled videocassette. "What's this, sir?"
"Since the war broke out six months ago, the Axis have been staging executions of their own dissenters. Her brother's part of the third batch in, next to his girlfriend. They made them take their clothes off first. Play it on your state-room VCR."
"No thanks, Captain." Jeffrey tried to hand it back.
"No, I insist. It's in color, with dramatic close-ups while they hang. Good camera work, anatomically explicit."
Jeffrey blanched.