by Joe Buff
“Aircraft noises receding,” Milgrom said a minute later.
“Nav, relay fire-control position of Snow Tiger wreck, and location of our shut-down nuclear Mark Eighty-eights for recovery. They’re in international waters, just barely.” Jeffrey told Bell to launch a buoy with this data, encrypted by a deeper code. A U.S. decontamination and intell salvage group was sure to be mobilizing already. “And you realize, XO? This is our first combat mission where not one nuclear weapon went off.”
Epilogue
Two Weeks Later
USS Challenger was staying stealthy, submerged well outside the major naval base at Perth, in southwest Australia. Minisubs, diving from covered piers at the base, shuttled spare parts and provisions to the ship, and brought her crew ashore in batches for liberty.
Jeffrey was pleased by the state of his crew’s morale, and the condition of his ship. In this, his fifth combat mission, Challenger had taken no significant battle damage. She needed little maintenance because her propulsion plant had almost never gone anywhere near flank speed.
Jeffrey himself had been enjoying some leave on dry land, in a beautiful country where even during wartime the people were very friendly. He’d been able to briefly hold a private chat-room talk with his parents, using U.S. Navy infrastructure, including encryption and decryption at both ends, so they could have a nice typed conversation without fear of enemy eavesdropping. But Michael Fuller had said there were rumors in Washington that Ilse Reebeck had been arrested as a spy. Jeffrey was dismayed, but wasn’t sure what to do about it yet.
Klaus Mohr and his equipment, and Gamal Salih and Gerald Parker, were already on their way back to the United States by the safest possible transport: an American nuclear submarine. Felix and his men, including the wounded and the bodies of the dead, flew to the U.S. soon after Challenger arrived at Perth.
Now, after a satisfying dinner, Jeffrey was unwinding in the bachelor officers’ quarters on the Royal Australian Navy’s base at Perth. Much had happened during his covert transit of the Indian Ocean. He was sitting in the lounge of the mess, having beers with some newly made pals in the Royal Australian Navy, and the television was on. Jeffrey was watching a video recording, for the third time in a row.
The broadcast had been copied off Al Jazeera TV. The speaker was the president of Egypt. He’d held a press conference in Cairo over a week ago, while Jeffrey had been busy running silent and deep.
The president spoke in Arabic. The tape had English subtitles added by Allied translators, but Jeffrey just listened to the man’s voice.
He said that the Egyptian-Israeli counteroffensive against the Afrika Korps had taken two German generals prisoner, with their headquarter vehicles intact. Analysis of computer files and documents found in those vehicles made it clear that the original German offensive had been intended to roll right through Israel and the Palestinian Territories, and keep going and take the Persian Gulf oil fields by force. Paratroopers and other commando units were tasked to prevent the nations who owned those fields from setting fire to the wells, and death squads would brutally discourage insurgents from trying to damage pipelines or refineries.
The two German generals were paraded before the cameras. Both looked weary, frightened, and humiliated, but not mistreated. The president of Egypt then held up a captured map of the Middle East. The camera zoomed in. The words were all in German, but the intended lines of advance were clearly marked and unmistakable: Germany’s goal was to occupy not just Egypt and Israel, but Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran.
The president put down the map, and grew more impassioned. He accused the Germans of being modern Crusaders. He said their botched offensive, and their grandiose goals of conquest, proved that they were the true mortal enemies of the Muslim world, not the U.S. or Israel. He called on the leaders and the people, of all the countries marked down as planned German prizes, to join in what Egypt had already done months before — declare war on the Axis, to drive these new Crusaders back where they came from, and wipe out the hostile regime that reigned from Berlin in the name of a trumped-up puppet kaiser.
The video recording ended. “Enough gloating,” Jeffrey said. “I think watching that three times in a row is plenty for today.”
“More tomorrow,” somebody said.
“More beer now,” someone else said.
Fresh beers were passed around. Jeffrey, along with the local naval officers — men and women — drank a toast to eventual Allied victory.
The important thing was that the Egyptian president’s broadcast had worked, supported by hectic back-channel moves between heads of state and ambassadors and influential clerics. The Muslim and mostly Muslim countries ranging from Turkey and Syria all the way to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Indonesia — each with their own forms of government and their rivalries and internal ethnic strife — put their differences aside and one by one did join the Allied cause. Though tough negotiations would be needed to create lines of reporting and to agree on effective decision-making hierarchies, vast new quantities of manpower, wealth, and natural resources were arrayed on America’s and the British Commonwealth’s side. Not wanting to be left out, India joined the Allies too. A wide land route, from the western Pacific through southern Asia and then the Middle East, up Turkey and into Europe’s underbelly, was open at last.
“Now we just have to find a way to march on Berlin and Johannesburg without mass destruction on two or three continents,” one of the Australians said, a bit less drunk than everyone else.
“And without body counts in the millions,” Jeffrey said.
People nodded, as soberly as they could under the circumstances. Jeffrey was worldly wise enough to know that the Muslim states each acted for purely selfish reasons. The ominous vision of an Iron Crescent ascending into the heart of Europe began to encroach on his pleasant buzz of euphoria.
“Russia has to stop selling the Germans arms,” someone else blurted out as Jeffrey listened. “Those ekranoplan things were bad enough. That bloody Snow Tiger was simply too over the top. It’s the damn Russians we put the pressure on next, I say. Undercut Germany.” The man belched. “Make Russia be really neutral, is the key to it all from here. The bloody Boers are a bloody sideshow now. We beat ’em a hundred years ago, we’ll beat ’em again, nukes or no nukes.”
Jeffrey had to excuse himself when an enlisted messenger found him and gave him an envelope. As he got up from the couch, he was handed another beer by a rather attractive female commander.
“One for the road, you Yanks always say? Take it back to your room. Maybe I’ll stop by later and knock, make sure you didn’t get bad news from home. Cheer you up.”
“Cheers indeed, all,” Jeffrey said, holding up the beer bottle and gesturing around the lounge.
Waves of alcohol-lubricated comradeship washed over him in return.
Jeffrey went to his room and put the beer on the desk. The sealed envelope had nothing but his name typed on the outside and a red rubber stamp, PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL. He opened it clumsily, from being tipsy now for several good reasons.
The envelope contained a single sheet of paper in plain text. The sender was Admiral Hodgkiss, Commander, U.S. Atlantic Fleet. Jeffrey swallowed hard. He’d written a formal patrol report while crossing the Indian Ocean, telling everything, trying to explain his reasons for doing what he had done. That report would by now be in Hodgkiss’s quite unforgiving hands.
Jeffrey skimmed the page. The gist was simple: Well done, proper judgment and initiative shown at all stages of extremely difficult task-group mission. Medals pending, further details and new operational orders to follow in several days.
Jeffrey felt very happy, and for once also felt at peace with himself. He was sure the beer was part of it — he hadn’t had any alcohol for weeks.
That last sentence from Hodgkiss began to tickle his brain. New operational orders? There was still Ernst Beck’s von Scheer to deal with.
Then Jeffrey began to wonde
r about something else, what one of the Australians had said in the lounge. That Russia had to be made to stop selling arms to Germany. Jeffrey knew the Snow Tiger — amply confirmed by a salvage survey as having been built in Russia, but commissioned as Grand Admiral Doenitz and operated by German officers and crew — set a dangerous precedent. Missiles and torpedoes without their warheads, even ekranoplans, were one thing. Entire state-of-the-art nuclear submarines, with fueled reactor cores, were an entirely separate and very provocative step in support of the Axis while claiming neutrality. Also, Russia’s geographic placement let her threaten the flank of the new Allied land route to Europe.
Why can’t I do something up in Russia like I did in Istanbul and Zichron Yaakov, with SEALs or other special forces? Make a clandestine penetration that produces results but, in addition, this time, sends a message. Something sneaky and really nasty, with plausible deniability, yet unmistakable meaning on the receiving end, saying to back off….
Well, it’s not for me to decide.
Jeffrey took another swig of his beer.
There was a knock on the door. “You in there, Yank?” It was a woman’s voice, Australian — the commander with the bedroom eyes from the lounge.
Jeffrey folded the paper and locked it away in the desk. He got up and opened the door.
“It’s not healthy to drink alone,” she told him very assertively. “Much less fun, anyway.” She held a beer in one hand. She sidled past Jeffrey into the room, then glanced back over her shoulder. “I never told you, my first name is Melanie.”
Late June, 2012
War isn’t hell, it’s worse than hell, Commander Jeffrey Fuller told himself. He sat alone in his captain’s stateroom on USS Challenger, whose ceramic composite hull helped make her America’s most capable nuclear powered fast-attack submarine. But Jeffrey was not a happy camper. Despite his many successes in tactical atomic combat at sea in a war that the Berlin-Boer Axis started a year ago — and despite his repeated brilliant achievements in special operations raids against hostile territory — very recently, for complicated reasons, Jeffrey had felt like a has-been. His two Navy Crosses, his Medal of Honor, his Defense Distinguished Service Medal, and his whole crew’s receipt of a Presidential Unit Citation some months ago, all put together couldn’t dispel his present dark mood.
Challenger was five days out from Pearl Harbor, deeply submerged and steaming due north, already past the Aleutian Islands chain that stretched between Alaska and Siberia. She was bound for the New London submarine base, on Connecticut’s Thames River, having been sent by the shortest but most frigid possible route: through the narrow Bering Strait choke point looming a few hundred miles ahead, separating the easternmost tip of pseudo-neutral Russia from mainland Alaska’s desolate Cape Prince of Wales. Jeffrey would sail way up and past Alaska and Arctic Canada. Then he’d sneak through the shallow waters between Canada and Greenland, into the Atlantic, to arrive at home port in two weeks for a reception that he already dreaded.
No one from Challenger—including Jeffrey — had even been allowed ashore at Pearl. Taking on minimal supplies and spare parts, and embarking five somber, tight-lipped passengers — an inspection team maybe, or investigators from JAG? — had occurred entirely by minisub. Challenger hid underwater, off the coast from Honolulu, frustratingly near its enticing beaches, bars, nightclubs, and more. No fresh fruit or vegetables were provided by the Pearl Harbor Base, to replenish what had already run out since the ship’s last port of call. This was supposed to be for security, but Jeffrey thought that was just an excuse; it felt much more like punishment. It was as if, after his most recent mission, despite his major contributions to the Allied cause, he’d become a pariah, shunted out of sight and out of mind by the powers-that-be.
Forget about me, it’s an insult to my crew’s dedication and courage.
Jeffrey was smart and self-aware. He knew his unpleasant mood wasn’t due to exhaustion, usually a chronic problem the way he drove himself. He and his men had had ten days of wonderful leave in Australia, including much consumption of the excellent local beer — cut short by sudden orders to proceed with greatest possible stealth to Hawaii. Also cut short, alas, was his newly made contact with a Royal Australian Navy commander named Melanie, of whom he carried deliciously vivid memories…but missing her wasn’t the cause of his funk. He’d been gone from her now for a longer stretch than he’d known her.
He wasn’t morose either, after the fact, for the adversaries he’d killed; his soul adjusted better than most to this dehumanizing cost of war. Nor was his mood caused by concern for his crew’s survival, for the outcome of an impending battle that Jeffrey might well lose — he’d long since mastered these stresses and strains of command through brutal experience. The cruise home should be a milk run.
But there were no new medals awaiting Jeffrey at Pearl Harbor for the latest tremendous things he’d accomplished, despite an earlier message implying there would be. No admirals came to shake his hand, no squadron commodore gave him a pat on the back. And Jeffrey was sure he knew why.
He’d broken too many unwritten rules — too many even for him — on that fateful mission spanning half the globe. He’d stepped on too many toes, made too many new and wellplaced political enemies in Washington, while exercising initiative that had seemed to make sense at the time: He’d won a vehement shouting match quashing a civilian expert whose advice he was supposed to respect. On his own accord he’d clandestinely violated a crucial ally’s sovereignty, leaving the seeds for what could still become a disastrous diplomatic incident. Worst, while obeying orders he knew he could have chosen to ignore, he and everyone else on Challenger had had to listen, horrified, doing nothing but flee while dozens of good men — friends and colleagues — died under Axis attack in the Med.
The real price of that ambivalent inaction under fire only began to show on the transit across the vast Pacific from Australia to Hawaii. Challenger should have steered in the opposite direction, toward Boer-controlled South Africa, to engage and eliminate front-line Axis naval units there; eager to clear their names via further mortal combat against a hated foe, the crew grew restive at being banished toward a safe rear area.
It was then that some of Jeffrey’s men began to have nightmares so bad that they’d wake up screaming, reliving the deafening battle from which Jeffrey ran. Tragic, yes, but unacceptable on a warship that needed to maintain ultraquiet. There was little that Challenger’s medical corpsman, a rotund and normally jolly chief, could do for them. Six of Jeffrey’s people were offloaded, also by minisub, at Pearl as psychiatric cases. Not one new crewman transferred on, odd in itself since rotation of U.S. Navy personnel was a common procedure — and in this situation another bad sign.
Jeffrey was working more short-handed even than that. One of his star performers, Lieutenant Kathy Milgrom of the UK’s Royal Navy, who’d served as Challenger’s sonar officer on the ship’s most vital missions, had been summarily detached. Jumped two ranks to Commander, she was now an influential advisor on the Aussie naval staff in Sydney. This was terrific for Milgrom, and Jeffrey was very glad for her, but he’d been miffed that he found out about it only when she got the orders directly and then told him; the way it was handled violated correct protocol. Now, that incident seemed like the first harbinger of Jeffrey’s abruptly downgraded status in the eyes of his superiors.
Also during his Australian leave, Jeffrey found out from his father — who’d rocketed from dull bureaucrat to a very senior position in wartime homeland resource conservation at the Department of Energy — that Jeffrey’s ex-girlfriend, edgy and self-reliant Boer freedom fighter Ilse Reebeck, was under arrest for treason, an alleged double agent for the Axis. Before deploying to the Med, Jeffrey was grilled about their relationship by the Director of the FBI in front of the President of the United States, with the director slinging rhetoric that made Jeffrey look pretty bad. The president had taken a shining to Jeffrey at the Medal of Honor presentation, followed by a private
chat, earlier in the year. He had no idea where he stood with his commander in chief these days. The rumors of Ilse being held in solitary confinement, leaked to him by his dad but neither confirmed nor denied through normal channels, were another contributor to Jeffrey’s mounting sense of trouble. His tentative moves intervening on Ilse’s behalf had been curtly rebuffed, with sharp instructions for him to stay within his proper sphere — undersea warfare, not domestic counterespionage.
So Challenger was back to having an all-male crew, which should have simplified his leadership problems, but the effect on morale wasn’t positive when word got around. The men admired Milgrom’s talent, and Ilse’s as a combat oceanographer, and they believed — with the strength of sailors’ superstition — that Ilse’s being on board in the past had brought the ship good luck.
Privacy was scarce-to-nonexistent on a sub; scuttlebutt and gossip — and wild speculation, too — traveled fast. His crew, each a hand-picked volunteer who’d passed the toughest imaginable screening, were seeing the same tea leaves that Jeffrey was trying to read. They could sense what he was feeling, no matter how hard he bottled it up to do his duty as their captain and carry on as if all were routine. When he offered quick words of greeting or encouragement, as he moved around his ship that bustled like a snug beehive — with everyone as familiar to him as if they were part of his family — the words rang hollow.
Jeffrey was easy to read; deceit in face-to-face interactions simply wasn’t in him. He’d found out the expensive way, early in his Navy career, that he was awful at poker. In stark contrast, the personal anonymity from the opaqueness of the ocean — combined with getting inside an enemy sub captain’s mind through a sixth sense that Jeffrey possessed in uncanny abundance — posed the sort of contest, the winnertake-all blood sport, that he excelled at and most craved. The higher the stakes the better, at this type of game, and Jeffrey never felt so alive as when nuclear torpedo engines screamed and their warheads erupted, while he snapped helm orders to maneuver Challenger like a fighter jet under the sea.
