Chief Royale readjusted his respirator helmet and checked the gauge readings. Wells’ mind was still spinning from all the high-tech cyber supremacy that was being shoved in his lap. Ke was in silent awe of the equipment; every single detail was planned for and had safety redundancies in place. It was like looking at the 1990’s Batman suits next to the 2015 Batman suits. Mixed air tanks weren’t bulky and cumbersome but small and hybrid designed with filtration units that recycled the majority of the exhaled air. Respirator helmets that were fitted to neck sockets allowing the wearers to be partially armored and turn their heads instead of their shoulders and heads as one. All the hoses were internal, a detail that Perry felt was extremely important, in fact the entire dive system looked much closer to a cross between Darth Vader and Batman. The Respirator helmets looking like something like a motorcycle helmet with small flashlights embedded on the sides. As the SEAL teams sat about, checking their equipment or listening to music or working their weapons, Ke spied Chief Royale staring at her.
“How are the rifles going to work underwater, Chief?” She said.
He blinked once, stunned the Coastguardsmen had thought of that, though he shouldn’t have been, and he silently acknowledged that in retrospect. “They aren’t rifles like you and I normally think of them. They’re Gauss Rifles.”
Perry and Wells looked up at the SEALs and then to each other. “You mean…like the new rail guns on ships? Those little M4’s are rail guns?” Wells’ day just kept getting better and better. He could remember when the Navy first test fired the rail gun, sending molten tungsten soaring over the horizon and obliterating targets with ease. Perry frowned inwardly, fingers touching the hilt of his KA-Bar fastened against his shin.
Royale nodded and drew back the charging handle, letting Ke peak into the breach of the weapon. She leaned forward and saw a tiny, light blue rod of metal resting readily at the top of a magazine. Royal clicked in a small button and dropped the box magazine, handing it to her while he released the charging handle, the springs sending the locking mechanism forward and a high pitched whistled followed. “Operates a lot like the M4 because that’s what we’re trained with, but there’s no loud explosion, really, a sort of pop of electricity when they coil off the ballistic rods. Bullets, really. All the same principles. They work great. We reduce the energy outputs with the fire-selector switch to enhance the ballistic damages on targets depending on range.”
Ke recalled the medical education classes during field trauma month. Most bullets are fairly small, measured in small parts of inches or decimals of millimeters. The damage that a bullet did was how the energy transferred to the squishy tissue of the human body, as a ship passes through water there is a wake left behind. Bullets do a similar trick, but the wake is against soft, important organs. Most ballistic damage could be attributed that that wake effect, called cavitation, but more could be because of how the bullet travelled through the body. Typically speaking, the larger the bullet, the more it would maintain shape and tumble, exiting the body sideways and carrying with it all the meat it plowed through. Exit wounds from larger bullets would be the size of softballs while the entry wound looked like less than a pea-sized hole. Smaller bullets would be even more insidious; they had a tendency to ricochet off of bones and shred more tissue, packed more puncture power against armor, and were typically fired faster, meaning more holes in casualties. The type of ballistic damage that could be caused by a semi-molten rod of tungsten was silently horrific in Ke’s mind.
She turned over the magazine a few times in her hands before handing it back, “Who are the team corpsmen?”
Royal motioned to a pair of SEALs who were both wrist deep in a backpack angled to block nosey eyes. Ke nodded a ‘thanks’ and strode over to the pair, sitting down beside one and looking into the small field hospital they wore in a pack. At once she named a few of the objects and asked what they were least prepared for and instantly the three medical members of the team were thickly in the talk of traumatic injury and patient evacuation underwater. Hochberg gave a slight laugh through his nose as the display
Kessler and Hochberg could have talked about the families and girls and women from back home, but they hadn’t been home in 70 years. Those families and women were long past. Neither man cared much for intimacy any longer; it was their one abnormality as sailors, not chasing skirts. Hochberg’s family had assumed him dead from the POW camp letter they had received from the U.S. Government, as did Kessler’s family, and both men’s families were consumed by the East German government and eventually lost to the STAZI the rose behind the Gestapo. They had learned to find new meaning in the new world, the nuclear world. They had struggled to forge their new relationship with the United States, constantly having to volunteer for harsher and harder missions to prove their loyalty. Constantly having to be underway to avoid being quarantined to labs where medical teams attempted to unlock what Burton had cursed Kessler with; what the U.S. tried and utterly failed to replicate on Hochberg. As the technology grew more wild and complex, the pair of relics grew less surprised, even jaded by it, recognizing that for all the advances the world made, 2016 looked alarmingly like 1916. International relations soured between the same or grossly similar super-powers, the same mistakes were being made by grossly incompetent statesmen and those with the right mindsets for the game of diplomacy were cast aside for being too moderate.
On the bridge of the Pennsylvania, Captain White stood with his arms folded, eyes scanning every read-out displayed around him. Miller leaned idly against the bulkhead and tried to remain interested in the hunt, but the game was what it was: a waiting game. White spoke aloud, gaze never stopping on any one screen for more than a few moments.
“You spend much time in surface warfare, captain, or are you with SOCOM all the time?”
Miller couldn’t answer the question; he also didn’t want to appear too prickly. “It’s been a long while since my SWO days, skipper.”
White nodded, silently acknowledging the dodged question, “Submarine hunting is not what this vessel is supposed to do, but hiding and hunting have a wonderful gift. When you’re so completely polar opposite of something, you typically run in parallel.”
“Surface Warfare Operations must have been your calling, skipper. You must be quite the chess player.” Miller spied a blip on the radar screen but the sailor wiped away a fleck of dust that had settled on the screen.
“Chess is a great game. All games have to be complex enough to have near limitless strategies and capabilities. Warfare is a shitty game. The goal is to make it as unfair as possible, to make the game favor one side so completely that the other players don’t want to play it.” White turned and flashed his ivory grin at Miller, “Fighting fair will only give you an equal opportunity to lose. Life isn’t fair for most black men back home. For whatever reasons we want to attribute that, it’s simply a fact. But here in the military? I’m a unicorn. In the navy? As a Surface Warfare Officer? I’m fucking Pegasus.”
Miller returned the grin with a wide smile, some of the other sailors smirked at their stations. White turned back to face the numerous screens feeding him a constant stream of information about the ocean around him. He continued, “Those SME’s you’ve got with you,” White was careful not to say ‘Germans’, instead using the abbreviation for ‘subject matter experts’, “they’re worth trusting I hope.”
There was a brief pause in the response and White turned to look at Millers expression. The special forces officer was standing with his arms folded, staring into the inside of White’s skull with an expression the skipper hadn’t seen since the drill instructors at officer candidate school. “Those men have more at stake in this than you or I could grasp, skipper. I trust them implicitly. One of them endured BUDS.”
White boggled for a moment, “Was it the ugly one? Did he scare his way through the course?”
Miller silently laughed, “Yes. Master Chief Hochberg made it through, got the nickname ‘Iceberg’ out of his graduating class.”
“And the talker?” White probed, testing his luck.
“You know the story of the Gato?” Miller said, leaning back against the bulkhead.
White looked to the corner of his eye, recalling an old report with the name Gato attached to it. Something about a collision at sea between a Soviet submarine and an American submarine. “The name rings a bell.”
“Do your homework, skipper. Kessler was second mate for that. If he wore all the awards and rating badges he’s ever earned while wearing our uniform he’d look foolish. He only ever wears one combat badge.”
White smirked to himself, letting the moment grow. “Fine, I’ll bite. What award does your SME wear?”
“A golden submarine with six silver stars on the scroll.”
One of the sailors did a bit of quick math in his head before slowly turning around in his seat, eyeing Miller over. Miller looked back and nodded, “That’s right, you. He’s spent more time underwater than you have outside the womb.”
The sailors eyebrows rose and his expression blanked as he turned back to the screen of seabed readings. White nodded to himself, “Let’s hope he hates who we’re looking for as much as he hated Soviets.”
Deep inside the Pennsylvania Kessler double checked his Gauss Rifle, racking back the charging handle and listening to the capacitors charge. He glanced across the bay to Hochberg who remained motionless against the mini-submarine, the glasses and mask making it impossible to read any expressions. Kessler knew what Hochberg was thinking about. Hidden under Hochberg’s armor plating and combat rigging, carefully positioned within the underwater load bearing vest designed for boarding and seizing enemy vessels, was a World War One luger, stamped from the Kaisers Navy.