“Doctor Swamphen. I would like you to meet Commander Fox of Xena. He'll be taking you out on your next trip, Robert, Doctor Swamphen from the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Research Establishment.”
“Doctor, pleased to meet you. Will you be bringing much in the way of equipment?” Fox's voice was so plaintive that his companions were hard put to stop laughing.
“Just that.” Swamphen pointed to a small carpet bag sitting on one of the stools. “And some equipment for taking water and bottom samples. Nothing that won't fit into a standard suitcase. Sorry about that, I've been spoiled I'm afraid. My last trip was on an American fleet boat. Harrowing trip, the ice cream machine only served six flavors. Crew nearly mutinied.” This time everybody in the room did laugh. The luxuries of the big American submarines were notorious. Still, the way things had worked out, it was the small U and V class boats that had done the really vital stuff. So much so, the Americans had bought V class boats from Canadian Vickers to replace their old S class. Fox felt himself warming to this strange scientist.
“You are familiar with these of course?” 'These' were charts of the North Sea. Fox wasn't just familiar with them, he could have drawn them in his sleep and the Admiralty cartographer wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between the original and Fox's rendition. Swamphen looked rueful. ''Well, they're pretty good, the Navy's spent a lot of time drawing them and keeping them up to date. Inshore, they're fine and the coverage of the North Sea is pretty good. Outside those limits, we hardly know what is out there. The soundings are tens, perhaps hundreds of miles apart and we have no idea what's between them. Submarines are getting faster every year now, you mark my words, one day, somebody's going to plow straight into an underwater mountain nobody even guessed was there. That's one thing we've got to look at. We need better charts.
“That's one thing we're going to be doing. We need to know in detail what the seabed looks like and we need to know how the sea behaves. We've made a start, and to be honest, the answers are frightening. We know far less than we thought and most of what we did know is wrong. Commander Fox, everybody is talking about the next great step in ASW. They Type XXIs gave us a scare but we coped with it. Just. Mostly because we knew what the XXI was like and what it could do long before it entered service.”
And there, Swamphen thought to himself, we have to leave that little subject. Most of the Type XXI data had come via an organization called “The Red Orchestra” in Geneva and their activities had been very secret indeed. “We mined the Type XXIs into their ports, we nailed them as they came out of port, we nailed them when they tried to make their attacks, we harassed them on the way home and the mines were still there when they reached their home ports. Aircraft, helicopters, the fast destroyers fitted with ahead-throwing mortars, they kept the XXIs in check. Few of them managed to get to make a third patrol. Only you and I know the XXI is already obsolete. It did 17.5 knots underwater, your Xena does, what, 20? And the XXI was noisy, once we knew what to listen for; we could hear it coming a long way off. The next generation of boats will address that; we've already got some design ideas in that direction.
“So we've got to find ways of picking up the boats between leaving port and the time they reach a convoy. And we've got to find a way of detecting boats that are a lot quieter than the ones we have now.” Again, Swamphen decided this was a good time to keep quiet. There were rumors the Americans had some really innovative ideas coming up, ones being developed by a man called Rickover. Ones that could flush everything down the pan. He picked up again smoothly. “To do that, we need to know much, much more about the how the sea works, how the water and current patterns interact. We started to study that and in doing so we learned something rather worrying. Charles, old fellow, could you pull back that cover please.”
Fox was charmed to hear the august Flag Officer Submarines being addressed as 'Charles, old fellow.’ He was definitely beginning to like this scientist. Then he caught his breath. What had once been a flat operations display was now a contoured map of the countryside somewhere. It was vaguely familiar despite being painted an odd shade of blue. The moors behind Dartmouth perhaps? Then it clicked. He wasn't looking at the countryside at all; he was looking at a model of the seabed at the southern end of the North Sea. Somebody had painstakingly cut plywood sheets to the shape of the depth contour lines and assembled them into this model. It was fascinating, for all his familiarity with the charts, this model expressed the information in a revolutionary way,
“Great isn't it? We got the idea from a rather creepy bunch of Americans. They make three-dimensional models of everything, you should see the ones they made of German cities. Before they flattened the originals of course. One of the things we'll be doing. Commander Fox....”
“Robert” said Fox, his eyes glued on the model.
“Thank you Robert. One of the things we'll be doing is taking extra measurements to fill in the gaps here and refine this model. However, in getting this far we've discovered something rather worrying. You see this valley coming up the middle of the model? Well, a few thousand years ago, when the North Sea was still a flat plain between Britain and the Netherlands, that was the river Rhine. The Thames comes in here, it was a tributary of the Rhine back then and the river reached the sea up between Scotland and the Orkneys. Well, guess what. We think, we're pretty certain, there's still fresh water flowing down there. Fresh water doesn't mix with the salt water as much as you might think, the densities prevent it. That water is flowing from the Rhine's source, all the way under the North Sea, all the way to the Atlantic. At least, we think it is.”
“Uh-oh” FOSM was quick on the uptake. “All the way through Germany.”
“Exactly Charles. When the Americans, uhh 'took out; Germany to use their rather delightful phrase, they dropped radioactive contamination all over the place. The worst hit was the water. The fallout fell into it and formed a slimy skin on the surface. A skin that was severely radioactive, chemically poisonous and corrosive. Anybody who got it on their skin found nothing could wash it off and it burned them alive, from the outside in by chemicals, poison and radiation. If anybody swallowed it, they burned from the inside out as well as the outside in. That alone killed tens of thousands, the ones who thought the water would shelter them from the fires.
“We never thought it was a problem; the radiation from that scum is severe but it was short-lived. More than 90 percent of it had gone within 12 hours. What we didn't realize was how chemically poisonous it was. It degraded alright but it was collected in the mud of the river bed. A mixture of heavy metals and long-lived radioactive fallout combined with the mud to make a contaminated sludge.”
“And that river mud is now being swept towards the sea?” Fox was beginning to appreciate the problem as well.
“Exactly. The light stuff comes down first, the heavy stuff follows more slowly, but it’s all coming down the rivers. Not just the Rhine but that's the one that worries us. Look at this.” Swamphen took an overlay out of his case and put it on the model. “You remember last year, there was some contaminated Herring from the North Sea sold on the black market, A dozen people died, lot more got sick? That was heavy metal poisoning, so we decided to have a look. We took water and seabed samples and found this area was being contaminated.”