Crush Depth

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“We need to call in again,” Jeffrey said to Ilse. He smiled and tried to sound stoic, to mask his irritation and concern. They should have been at the Pentagon by now.

Jeffrey considered the long lines at the pay phones. “We can probably do better if we find one on the street.” They’d been specifically ordered not to bring cell phones, to avoid interception by enemy signals intelligence.

“Can we get something to eat first, Jeffrey? Please?”

Jeffrey heard Ilse’s stomach rumble. They stood on line at a bagel stand, ate quickly, then agreed to walk to the USO. They were stranded in New York, by Axis hands — and Jeffrey couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding.

He was dismayed when they got to Times Square. All the colorful wide-screen TV displays — usually flashy and running all day — were dark, except for a handful of civil defense messages: Save energy. Watch out for spies. Is that e-mail really necessary? The sidewalks were half deserted, even taking into account the cold. Many people wore gas masks, though the radiation count today was normal.

A number of people’s overcoats were baggy, as if they’d lost a lot of weight since the previous, prewar winter. Now, like the rest of the population, they followed government urgings to wear what they had until it wore out. With imports squeezed to a trickle, and North American manufacturers cranking out uniforms and protective suits, civilian clothes had to take a backseat.

Jeffrey glanced around again at the dearth of people, the shops with closed doors. He turned to Ilse, and tried not to sound too glum. “This war has been death to restaurants and tourism.”

But it hadn’t dented the vehemence of the area’s curbside preachers. Repent your sins before it’s too late, the end of the world is nigh, they bellowed to whomever would listen.

“This time,” Jeffrey said under his breath, “they may have it right.”

He found an unused pay phone that actually worked. When he got off, he told Ilse they’d be expected in Washington tomorrow morning; he realized they’d have to sleep on the train.

They passed a construction site for an office tower. The site was completely quiet: no cement mixers running and no big cranes or hard hats working. The project had been abandoned months ago because of the war — materials and skilled labor were in very short supply. If things got bad enough, Jeffrey knew, the skeleton of the building would be dismantled, to reuse the valuable steel.

By the time they reached the USO club it was too crowded to possibly get in. There was also a long line of teenagers outside the Armed Forces Recruiting Center next door; the draft had been reinstated, but many were volunteering.

“Good material,” Jeffrey said as he eyed the teenagers. “Better than we got in peacetime.”

Jeffrey didn’t tell Ilse what he really thought, that if these kids understood what they were in for — cannon and missile fodder in limited tactical nuclear war — they wouldn’t be so eager to get to the fighting. He and Ilse had twice set off small atom bombs on enemy soil out of necessity, obeying severely restrictive rules of engagement it had been Jeffrey’s job to enforce. The thought in retrospect horrified him, as did the ever-present risk that the Axis might escalate, even though the enemy had sworn not to be first to use more nuclear weapons in populated areas. Escalation was everyone’s worst nightmare, and the damage to the environment in combat zones was dreadful already. Ilse had been sent on that first mission, to South Africa, because her unique mix of technical skills and local knowledge was badly needed there. She did such a good job, the navy sent her on Challenger the second time, to Germany.

An MP with a bullhorn brought Jeffrey’s mind back to the present. The MP said there was another USO at the top of the Empire State Building. Jeffrey and Ilse decided to go there. They took an indirect route, to stretch their legs and get some air, since they had plenty of time to kill.

American flags flew everywhere, but many storefronts were vacant and drab. Glancing up at the tall apartment buildings as they strolled by, Jeffrey saw a number of units lacked any curtains or furnishings. For Rent and For Sale signs hung everywhere, looking weather-beaten, forlorn.

One auto dealership Jeffrey and Ilse walked past was converted into an equipment distribution center for home-front survival gear. Through the big showroom windows Jeffrey saw stacks of burn-treatment kits, water-purification tablets, Geiger counters and dosimeters, and piles of freeze-dried food. The original signs on the dealership were gone, but Jeffrey could see their outline against the building. Porsche, Audi, BMW. Not popular brands anymore.

The people on the streets seemed less aggressive and rude than Ilse imagined New Yorkers to be. Almost no one jaywalked. Taxi horns rarely blared, and very few drivers cursed — there were hardly any private cars around anyway, because of strict gas rationing and appalling prices per gallon.

Instead, there was a feeling of shared defiance against the Axis threat. But beneath this determined exterior Ilse sensed people were gnawed by doubt: Was it the right thing to do to stand up to this shocking new enemy, one the CIA as usual hadn’t seen coming till much too late? Why couldn’t America just turn inward, and look out for number one, and leave Europe and Africa festering on the far side of a wide ocean?

Jeffrey and Ilse passed a supermarket. Ilse was disturbed to see a large sign in the window announcing a special on horse meat. Ilse loved horses, and had ridden whenever she could in South Africa. Horses were beautiful creatures, sleek and affectionate and fast, and good ones were smarter than people gave them credit for. The thought of eating horses upset her.

Everything flooded back. Her dead family, the Boer putsch, Ilse’s own survivor guilt. Her younger brother especially, whom she loved and whom she’d always felt protective of, left unprotected when he’d needed Ilse most — because she’d been abroad, safe at a conference.

Ilse fought hard not to cry, standing there on the sidewalk. Jeffrey tried to comfort her, but she shook him off. She said it was just the freezing wind making tears in her eyes.

The officers’ club of the USO was on the Empire State Building’s eighty-fifth floor. Jeffrey led Ilse to the cocktail lounge, large and crowded and noisy. A live band played swing music from World War II.

But Ilse didn’t seem in a mood to mingle. She worked her way to the windows. Jeffrey followed. The view was stunning. The setting sun was a cold red-orange blob, fading behind dusky clouds low over New Jersey. The city and the harbor were spread out before them. Looking southeast, toward the ocean, Jeffrey longed wistfully to be under way on a submarine. After his training course in New London, his next assignment would be some fancy-sounding land job — those who even passed the course didn’t get a ship right away.

Gradually, the view and the music began to work on Jeffrey. They lifted his spirits and made him feel romantic. The sense of being at war, the excitement and danger of it, heightened this for him. He reached for Ilse’s hand. She pulled away.

“I’m not here as your date,” she said between clenched teeth. “We’re traveling on business.”

Jeffrey convinced Ilse to go to the open-air observation deck, one flight up. A yeoman near the elevator lent them parkas from a rack. Ilse saw armed guards by the stairway to a navy communications center on the topmost floors; she figured it used the big antenna on the building’s roof.

The yeoman lent them binoculars, for sightseeing. Jeffrey and Ilse went outside. Visibility was excellent and it was freezing — they were over a thousand feet high. By now it was dark, and the observation deck was deserted. The wind howled so strongly they took shelter on the downwind side of the building. Ilse looked straight up. The antenna needle reached another twenty or thirty stories above her head. She watched the tip of the mast sway back and forth in the wind; she got dizzy, and needed to turn away. She saw the tall art-deco Chrysler Building nearby. Its silvery spire came right up to her eye level, a fifth of a mile in the air.

Ilse glanced downwind, toward lower Manhattan. The skyscrapers now had blackout curtains drawn in all the tiny office windows. So did the shorter buildings in the foreground, near Greenwich Village and other residential neighborhoods. All vehicles on the streets had headlights hooded to narrow slits, painted blue. Only every third streetlight was on, and the bulbs were dim red.

A sliver of moon was poised on the eastern horizon over Brooklyn; Jeffrey and Ilse looked at the moon through their binoculars. With all the white, reflective snow on the ground, the moon lit the cityscape nicely. Overhead, the sky was perfectly clear. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, Ilse saw the Milky Way.

She felt badly for snubbing Jeffrey in the cocktail lounge. She reached out for his hand. From all around them air-raid sirens went off.

TWO

The mournful howl of the sirens pierced the wind. As Jeffrey watched from the observation deck, streetlights switched off borough by borough. Down below, vehicles stopped and their headlight glows vanished. From upwind, Jeffrey heard a deafening roar. On the runways of Newark Airport, bright blue-violet flames lit off. They moved, faster and faster and up into the sky — the afterburners of scrambling interceptor jets. A whole squadron, a dozen planes, took to the air and headed out to sea.