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.