Thunder In The Deep (02) Read Online Free PDF Page A

machine? Was Eberhard a patriot, or was he simply using this war for predatory self-advancement, the same way he used everyone and everything else?
    ON CHALLENGER, ONE DAY LATER.
    Ilse sat elbow to elbow with Kathy Milgrom, at the forward end of the sonar consoles lining the crowded Command and Control Center's port bulkhead. Although they'd both been there a while, the watch had just changed, and fresh crewmen were settling in all around them. Ilse sensed the mood of heightened urgency—they were halfway to the Texas now. Everyone put on a bright face, and fought to stay optimistic, but the relentless tension was taking its toll. The enlisted mess was turned into a war room for the rescue: stacked emergency tools and oxygen canisters, nonstop first-aid drills, constant damage control rehearsals; the men ate standing up. Jeffrey briefed his officers—and Ilse—as soon as Challenger got underway. His words about what they might find when they reached Texas had been pithy, graphic, chilling. Ilse regretted there was nothing she could do to help those poor waiting men, except help get there as quickly as possible.
    The CACC, Challenger's control room, was rigged for red, despite the broad daylight twelve hundred feet above
    the ship, over the storm-tossed waves and distant mushroom clouds. The subdued lighting had little to do with preserving night vision. In the midst of tactical nuclear war at sea there was no way a submarine would raise a periscope mast by choice, let alone surface and man the bridge cockpit on the sail—the conning tower—even at night. The red fluorescents were used instead to make the computer screens easy on watchstanders'
    eyes.
    "I'm about done with this module of code," Ilse said—an enhanced model of water temperature versus salinity dynamics.
    "I'll be ready for your data bridge in a minute," Kathy said; she was the acting sonar officer. Ilse was the ship's on-board combat oceanographer, formalized now. She'd been teaching and doing research at the University of Cape Town, and was caught in the U.S. at a marine biology conference when the Double Putsch cost her her country—and cost her family their lives for resisting the old-line Boer takeover.
    Ilse sat with headphones on, the left ear cup over her left ear, the right one on her cheekbone. This way she could hear the raw signals from outside, and still talk with Kathy. Intermittent thunder on the headphones formed a counterpoint: atom bombs going off, more than fifty miles away, in the latest battle between a supply convoy and the U-boats.
    "This American combat systems software is splendid," Kathy said; she was crisp, but expressive, and clearly loved her work. A full-fledged Royal Navy submariner, Kathy was supposed to have had a quiet trip into dry dock to qualify on Challenger, before further combat duty after that. Now, like Ilse, she had been pulled willy-nilly into this rescue mission to Texas; she needed to master her new job very quickly. The two women had already compared their life stories, so Ilse knew Kathy had grown up in Liverpool, then done the Royal Navy Academy at Dartmouth, followed by Oxford and active service in the surface fleet. Kathy's Liverpool accent, its edges softened now, sounded to Ilse's ear
    like Irish; she often talked with her hands, to the degree there was room at the consoles. Ilse glanced at Kathy in profile, backlit in red, lit from in front by the blues and greens on her monitors. Kathy was a few inches shorter than Ilse, a few kilos overweight, and wore special submariner eyeglasses. These had narrow frames and small lenses, to fit under an emergency air breather mask. The glasses made Kathy look particularly owlish.
    "Agreed," Ilse said. "The fiber-optic network's amazing." Each console did sonar or weapons or target tracking, depending which menu you picked—all three functions were vital in undersea warfare. Ilse typed on her keyboard, massaged the trackmarble with her palm, and touched her screen.