Triumph (22 page)

Finally, on such an occasion, Ben had murmured to the gray-haired former butler,

"Paulus! You mustn't worry. It's an
all right thing."

Brown eyes full of sadness were lifted. "I'm pleased to have you say that, Mr.--I mean--Ben. You see, Heliconia was a wild one, a few years ago. Then she settled down.

I'd hate to have her change back. And I'd sure hate to have her shame herself with all these fine people."

"She won't, Paulus. I'm sure. We're all her chaperones, if that's needed." Relieved, the old man had smiled, and gone away wordlessly to the kitchen. It was his shift on the dishwashing squad. .

And so the days passed.

Forty-two days, at last.

The random, intermittent bombing had stopped.

In the shelter Ben and his aides had their spark set almost ready for trial sending.

CHAPTER 12

And under the mountain ranges of the U.S.S.R., in certain caverns, and in two man-made, undersea living spaces, tens of thousands of the Soviet elite were readying Phase Three of the long-planned and ruthless program for dominion of the world--or, of its surviving half.

But though the first two phases had led to the near extermination of human and animal life in the North Temperate Zone and the same massive, horrible death everywhere in the U.S.S.R. (except in special places), their heinous program was not going to be carried out as they had expected: that is, with no further act of war by the once free, now blasted world.

Certain long-range American units, briefed before the war to meet any imaginable set of enemy depredations, were still operable. Not many. And even though an iron curtain, long kept more tightly closed than ever in the past, had not leaked a word of the Soviet's ultimate schemes, the Reds had been similarly unable, even by the most effective of all espionage systems, to uncover all of the American "Last Ditch" program and destroy its implementation entirely.

Thus, at the end of the agreed forty-two-day wait, and after reports were in, from very-high-altitude and heavily-shielded drone planes that, on clear days in late September, had photographed all of Europe and the United States (in their stricken and often still-smoldering ruins), the many thousand Red people stirred. They had maintained a discipline of quiet in two concrete dwelling places set on the bottom of northern bays--

cells with intercommunicating tubes. Now they began preparations for emergence. The mountain caverns opened tenatively, too.

Such activities involved considerably more sound than the long but quiet purring of oxygen-supply machines and air converters and the soft hissing of air-filtration systems that went into use when the radiation outside made it needful--systems not unlike those in use where Vance Farr and his group lived.

When exit time approached in the submarine refuges--when the shielded boats were prepared for launching, when the pumps raised pressures in the flotation tanks, when the many motors to be used outside were given test runs; and even though the Soviet hydrophones, radiophones, and other detection equipment remained alert--a long, dark shape, deep beneath the Kara Sea, drifted to a stop. The United States nuclear submarine
Tiger Shark,
fifth of her (latest) class, and one of four still cruising the world's seas, had detected distant sounds of submarine origin but, plainly, of a mechanical, therefore human, causation.

Now, with "listening" devices far more sensitive than anything known to, or anticipated by, Soviet scientists, the
Tiger Shark
began to move again, gathering speed, but with engines and propulsion gear of such a sort that the most delicate Red instruments could not detect the deep, black approach of a hostile vessel still armed with mighty H-weapons and crewed by one hundred and eighty Americans dedicated to revenge and nothing else.

The skipper of the submarine
Tiger Shark,
like many men who take to the sea, had been born far from salt water, in Denver, Colorado. His name was Hugo Denton and his rank, commander. He was a fairly tall man, brown-haired, with piercing gray eyes; and his commonest expression was a disarming, attractive grin. An Annapolis graduate of the Class of 1962, he had distinguished himself in sports and scholarship, standing, when he received his diploma, seventeenth in his class and twice narrowly missing being chosen (because of the sheer superiority in height and weight of his opposite number on the Navy football squad) as an All-American end.

He had been given command of the new-class submarine two years before the appalling war that, in twenty-four hours, had left most of his countrymen dead and most survivors (save for those in some naval units) in mortal peril.

His selection for command of the enormous vessel, with her near-infinite range and her world-shaking arsenal, had been made only after the Navy brass had screened thousands of promising officers and picked this one for courage, brains, endurance, ingenuity, a natural aptitude for responsibility, for popularity with sailors and brother officers, and, above all, for the imagination he had displayed not only on gridirons in situations both emotionally and physically demanding, but in his Academy themes and essays. In many other ways, both before and after his graduation, Denton had proved himself. He had earned an M.A. in electronics at the California Institute of Technology, a salient point in his favor, considering the propulsion and weapons systems of the new, shark-class sub.

His officers and men called him "Dingo"--a nickname dating from Annapolis days, probably derived from Hugo and Denton, and referring, more or less, to "wild dog."

He was actually not so much a wild dog as a shrewd, and now a very dangerous,
person.

Turning this way and that in the conning tower, to read dials and receive messages relayed by a "talking Chief," Dingo Denton eased the
Tiger Shark
south beneath the Kara Sea. This, actually, is a deep gulf in the Arctic Ocean, north of Siberia, protected from the Scandinavian Peninsula by an island that is almost a peninsula and is called Novaya Zemlya. It was for many years the site of large, Soviet nuclear tests.

The
Tiger Shark
moved ahead in that region, kept above the shoaling bottom of this sea by her electronic Fathometer and by set, automatic controls. It moved until, fearing possible Soviet subsea scanning comparable to his own, Dingo signaled for the extrusion of specially designed sound-reflecting gear. Held in position ahead of the advancing
Tiger Shark,
this apparatus would slow up, if at all, on enemy instruments as a school of large but not phenomenally-large fish, thus masking the boat.

The skipper found it difficult to believe what his outreaching wave-detectors were reporting: the existence, under waters some distance off the Siberian shore, of about two miles of installations, from behind which came, increasingly, evidence of people and machines in vigorous activity.

He called in a whisper--the order for total silence had long since been given--for the most recent Intelligence reports on this area.

These were supplied by an equally astounded communications officer.

Such intelligence, by that time, was everywhere fairly elaborate. The "open-skies"

policy of free, international surveillance, first suggested by President Eisenhower, had been rejected by Russia's then-Premier, Khrushchev. It had been followed by the U2

espionage-plane fiasco. However, by the early 1960s both nations had orbited vehicles capable of photographing all the earth and of being recovered, as well as other vehicles with the capability of sending back television pictures of the scanned globe.

From such sources the
Tiger Shark's
skipper now refreshed his memory.

Railroads had been built to the vast nuclear testing grounds on Novaya Zemlya long ago. A port had been constructed in Kara Bay at the southeastern end of the similarly-named sea. Deep-covered iron ores had been discovered at the northern terminus of the Ural Mountains in the 1960s. A year later coal deposits, similar to those in Spitsbergen, were found on Northland Island, far to the east. These resources, together with the costly but dogged Soviet effort to develop its subarctic lands and waterways, had led to a swift build-up of docks, smelters, steel mills, and many fabricating plants around the port.

Vast movements of freighters, railroad freight cars, tank cars and, with the completion of a modern road linking the port with the industrial complex east of the Urals, an enormous amount of trucking had been noted for years. It was now obvious to the skipper that under the cover of such extensive operations, the Soviets had managed, probably by working at night, especially in the long polar nights, to create, offshore and well below the sea surface, a virtual city--a honeycomb of ferroconcrete caissons, probably, sunk and interconnected, manned and equipped for some sort of post-nuclear-war emergence. The data received made that conclusion almost certain.

He shared this thought, which was being constantly more clearly revealed by the
Tiger Shark's
far-probing "search" equipment, with his Exec, Lieutenant Commander

"Bunch" Cunningham, of Atlanta, Georgia, and, also, Annapolis. The Exec, almost white-haired from birth, with a rubicund, long face and narrow, steely blue eyes, was stringy of build. His nickname thus reflected a commonplace choice of opposites, for familiar address. He gravely studied the data, both that being gathered and the details on file. His final, whispered suggestion, was, "Even if it's as broad as it is long, we could pop one Amanda-B rocket in its middle and bust the works!"

"Thought of that! But,
look.
All the dope we've gotten from our own people, so far, makes them sure almost every Soviet citizen, soldier, and sailor is kaput.
You
know!

When our retaliatory stuff was launched and airborne, word went out that the Reds were hitting all our cities, and every dam' missile and plane of ours was redirected that needed to be. So--and
no wonder!
--
the
Pentagon assumed-the dispersed brass, I mean--the U.S.S.R. was a slag heap, like home. Only, here's a
colony
of the so-and-so's alive! Under this dam' ocean! Suppose there are
more?
In
other
seas? Under the mountains? Dug in deep, anyplace? Suppose we are absolutely right not only in the assumption they picked their ideal day and hour for starting the massacre, but that enough of them, and enough thermonuclear stuff, were by then snugly stowed, so that they could come out, by-and-by, and take over what's left? That, and only that, would explain perfectly why the Soviets deliberately knocked off everybody, including the entire nuclear-weapons cache that Red China was building up. Which the Soviets must have done, judging from
that
series of blasts. I merely mean, would they, in such a case, just have this
one
safe spot?"

"We can pop it, and go look for the others."

"And warn 'em--so, maybe, not locate them? And maybe get sunk
ourselves,
by a Red nuclear boat still cruising. Or by still-ready land-based rockets?"

Bunch Cunningham nodded. "Could be:' His long face was crosshatched with wrinkles of concentration. "Wouldn't be a bad idea, yours, Dingo! With the United States and Europe totally out, with nobody else, anywhere, having even a few leftover H-weapons! And blast and damn the Aussies, incidentally, for finally refusing to let England test there any more, and for making the poor dam' British take their stuff back home! I mean, if a nation arranged to wipe out
all
nuclear danger, though it got rooked by doing it, and if it
then
poked out its pre-saved heads, even a few thousand Reds who still had some stashed H-stuff would be a cinch to take over. Take over all hands still on deck-

-all the folks below the equator, and a few more."

Dingo said, "Yeah."

"Maybe we better stick our nose out and break radio silence?"

"Maybe." The skipper turned to the Chief, who stood near, wearing headphones and a throat mike. "Tell 'em to back away, maintaining silence, maintaining the screen, and using the silent propulsion gear only."

"Aye aye, sir."

"You going to start talking?" Bunch Cunningham's eyes glittered with excitement.

Great excitement, since the
Tiger Shark,
like certain other American nuclear subs, and one ship had maintained complete radio silence for six weeks now. At first they had waited orders to carry out "Operation Last Ditch," which involved errands of horrifying redestruction. But such orders had never come.

Commanding officers in the ultrahard, land-based missile silos had, however, finally fired, as their endurance-time grew short and as Soviet missiles continued to hit the United States in random patterns of, apparently, mere savage vengeance. Having hurled at the enemy such missiles as they still could, they left their deep-buried posts with their command and returned to the barren surface, of necessity.

Some aircraft carriers had done the same thing early in the war. They had paid for their independent plane-launches and assaults; they were located and destroyed by submarines or from remaining Soviet bases. But several shark-class subs, on standing, secret orders, stayed silent and "alive" as did one aircraft carrier, which had been refused permission to berth, by Australia, some while after the holocaust and had since presumably cruised aimlessly in antarctic waters. Even these were unable to carry out the secret plans to the letter: receiving no orders, they had simply maintained their instructed silence and listened to such reports as they could intercept, from any and all stations in operation, in their movable places on vacant areas of open sea.

The Exec's enthusiastic hope that at last the
Tiger Shark,
one of the few undestroyed, long-silent, but still-deadly American units, might announce its continuing existence and its ready state (not to mention the cold and ruthless fury of its crew!) was understandable enough to the skipper: the announcement might get a reply--an American reply, or even replies. But after some thought he shook his head regretfully:

"Nope, Bunch! We're going to back out of here, going deeper as the Fathometer permits, till it's safe to turn around and whip due north. Then--"