by Joe Buff
The sonar chiefs and enlisted technicians had no trouble accepting Milgrom’s leadership as sonar officer and did everything possible to meet her very high standards of job performance. Right now every sonar console was manned. Keyboards clicked, and sonarmen listened intently on their headphones, as waterfall displays cascaded slowly down different screens. Other screens showed jagged graphs that squiggled constantly, or confettilike charts of scalloped arcs and sine curves. All this told Jeffrey that Challenger’s hydrophone arrays were working hard to pull in even the subtlest noises from outside. Advanced signal processing software gave meaning to the incoming jumbles of multitudinous sound waves that wafted past the ship from everywhere.
Occasionally something would streak diagonally across a waterfall display like a shooting star or comet. Jeffrey knew these were nearby overflying aircraft. Murmuring came from the sonarmen, and Milgrom and her senior-chief sonar supervisor spoke as new contacts were reported and then classified.
The last main player in Jeffrey’s control-room team was Challenger’s navigator, Lieutenant Richard Sessions. Jeffrey walked to the rear of the control room, where Sessions worked at the digital navigation plotting table. Sessions came from a small town in Nebraska. His hair and clothing always tended to look a little sloppy no matter what he did, but there was nothing sloppy about his work. He and his assistants precisely monitored Challenger’s position on a large-scale nautical chart. This chart, on the big horizontal main navigation computer screen, also showed the day’s top-secret Allied submarine safe corridors. From time to time, Sessions recommended course corrections to Lieutenant Willey to make sure the ship stayed well inside these corridors and thus avoided friendly fire—unstable deep-sea currents and underwater storm fronts could make the ship’s position drift. Willey would relay conning orders to Meltzer at the helm. Meltzer acknowledged and worked his split-yoke control wheel.
On the navigation display, Jeffrey eyed the trace of Challenger’s course since departing New London. He had some questions for Bell about that. Bell was busy talking to the fire-control men and weapons technicians, who manned consoles along the control room’s starboard side. Some of these consoles tracked all the different sonar contacts held by Kathy Milgrom’s people, and projected their future positions compared to Challenger’s while simultaneously feeding data to the main situation plot on Bell’s and Willey’s screens.
In actual combat Jeffrey would sit where Willey was sitting. The master plot showed estimated range and bearing to each contact, the contact’s likely course and speed, whether it was airborne or on the surface or submerged, and also marked the time and place of its closest approach to Challenger—the latter was vital to avoid any risk of collision. The plot was busy with icons for merchant ships, warships, and planes.
Bell’s weapons officer, Lieutenant Bud Torelli—called Weps for short—worked at a special console on a lower deck near the torpedo room. This separation from Bell was intended to enhance the safety and surety both of handling the atomic warheads at all times, and of launching their torpedoes properly in battle. Torelli kept in constant touch with Bell by intercom and sound-powered phone and fiber-optic LAN as needed.
Jeffrey saw Bell was drilling his weapons-systems specialists, having them practice on the friendly surface contacts by pretending to aim mock weapons at each one. This is where everything comes together, Jeffrey told himself. In the days to come, getting in the first shots and not missing will decide if I succeed or fail. The real-time linkage—between raw data from sonar and accurate knowledge of a target’s range, course, and speed—depended on powerful target-motion analysis algorithms, some of which used math so advanced it was classified. The validity of this information hinges on the skill of almost every person in the CACC. Reliable data was essential to placing warheads on a moving target quickly and unerringly—a good firing solution was the only way to score a kill.
The dependability of my ship, her stealth, her power to take damage and stay in the fight depend on every person in the crew.
Jeffrey looked around the control room one more time. He pictured the bustling activity elsewhere aboard. Junior officers, chiefs, and enlisted personnel supported the three department heads—Willey, Sessions, and Torelli—and filled places in the watch, quarter, and station bill throughout the vessel. There were 120 people in Challenger’s crew.
Speaking of my crew, and of getting under way from New London…
Jeffrey asked Bell to come with him to the captain’s stateroom.
First, Bell spoke to the CACC phone talker and modified the drill. “XO is a casualty. Continue targeting exercise.”
The phone talker spoke into his bulky sound-powered mike without missing a beat. “Fire-control coordinator is down.” The youngster listened on his headphones as a phone talker on a lower deck responded.
The CACC phone talker repeated what he’d heard. “Weapons officer reporting to CACC smartly. Assistant weapons officer is manning special-weapons console.”
“Not bad,” Bell said half to himself. He followed Jeffrey aft, the few paces to the only stateroom on the ship that only had one rack.
Jeffrey and Bell sat in Jeffrey’s stateroom. The door was closed.
“You hid under a garbage barge?”
“Well,” Bell said, “more like half under it, half inside it. It was very big.”
Jeffrey laughed. “That’s great. I’d love to meet whoever comes up with these things.”
Bell smiled. “So would I.” He took a pad and pen from Jeffrey’s desk and sketched out the shape of the special barge. “I guess, Skipper, from the thing’s layout, the way there was good headroom for us to hide tied up and surfaced, it was sort of like a catamaran more than a barge.”
“So you snuck in through the stern under a smoke screen, hid under this arcade running down the middle of the hull, and the tugs pushed you and this big trash scow merrily down the river and through Long Island Sound.”
“Pretty much. They lay infrared-proof smoke screens all the time, you know, when ships go in or out and just to keep the Axis guessing. The tricky parts were squeezing in to begin with, without breaking something, and then getting through Hell Gate in one piece so we could use the East River.” Hell Gate was the portal from the west end of Long Island Sound, near La Guardia Airport and the Triborough Bridge, into the East River, which ran down one side of Manhattan—tidal currents in the narrow Hell Gate were infamously treacherous.
Jeffrey looked at Bell’s drawing of the special barge again and shook his head in amazement. He knew that a major dredging operation in the early 2000s had greatly improved the depth and clearances of shipping channels in the Inland Waterway around New York Harbor and Long Island Sound. This work, which took years and cost a fortune, was proving invaluable now.
“So where did they toss out the garbage?”
“Way beyond Sandy Hook, past the edge of the continental shelf. I’m told it was all nontoxic stuff not suitable for landfill. We untied first, and dived, and steamed away real quick. But I gotta tell you, Captain, the noise of all that refuse pouring overboard and falling through the water, and then smashing into the bottom mud, was really something over the sonar speakers.”
“And you’ve been using the Gulf Stream for concealment as you came south?”
“That was Lieutenant Milgrom’s idea, based on things she and Reebeck worked on in the past.” Sonar conditions in the Gulf Stream were very confusing because of chaotic temperature mixing and unpredictable side eddies.
“Okay. Great. Chalk one up to SubGru Two for supporting us as effectively as ever…. A garbage barge. The Axis probably don’t even know we’ve sailed.”
Bell looked a little worried. “Let’s hope so, anyway. They must suspect something, sir.”
“Yeah. The Germans probably know we know the von Scheer is on the way. They know we won’t just sit on our backsides. If anything, their failed attempt to have me and Ilse killed in Washington will put them even more on their toes.”<
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Bell sat there thoughtfully.
Jeffrey leaned forward to dispel the beginnings of a negative mood about what the future might bring. “So how’s my ship?” Challenger had received some hasty repairs and upgrades since returning from her previous deployment.
“The new fiber-optic acoustic towed array is just terrific, Captain. Milgrom and her people are very turned on about what it can do.”
“Good. We’ll need it.”
“And we finally have all eight torpedo tubes in working order again.”
“This I’m real glad to hear. What kind of weapons load-out could they give us? Was that inventory page I saw on your status display for the exercise, or a wish list, or was it real?”
“It was real. High-explosive Tactical Tomahawks in all twelve vertical launching-system tubes. A mix of warheads, like ground penetrator and cluster minelet. And a well-balanced, full load in the torpedo room. High-explosive ADCAP fish, a few more Tomahawks, and improved versions of our newer toys.”
“Improved how?”
“The unmanned undersea vehicles are mission reconfigurable now. We have a decent supply of the plug-in black boxes so the vehicles can probe for us in different sortie profiles.”
“And we really got the Mark Eighty-eight Mod Twos they promised?” Mark 88s were Challenger’s custom-made deep-diving nuclear torpedoes. They were vital to take on a ceramic-hulled opponent, since conventional Mark 48 Improved ADCAPs had a crush depth of about three thousand feet—and ceramic fast-attacks subs could dive maybe five times deeper.
“We sure did, Skipper. A bit faster, a bit longer range, and the variable-yield warhead is booped up to a maximum of one kiloton.”
Jeffrey nodded. “Finally we have parity with the Axis torpedo-warhead punch.”
“I’ve already started reviewing how that can alter our tactics,” Bell said. In the past, the Mark 88 warheads went up only to a tenth of a kiloton. But the higher yield could be a mixed blessing, Jeffrey knew. Extremely quiet submarines tended to detect one another at very short range. The whole point of using tactical nukes was they had a kill radius vastly larger than any conventional warhead—large enough to defeat most noisemakers and evasive maneuvers. But there was real danger, in a close-quarters melee, that a submarine would be damaged or even sunk by its own atomic warhead going off near its enemy’s hull.
“Okay,” Jeffrey said. “Ship’s material condition is otherwise in good shape?”
“Affirmative.” Bell gave him a rundown of items out of commission or on reduced status; the list was short. “Though of course we won’t know for sure until we shock-test everything, Captain.”
Jeffrey knew what his XO really meant. The shock test would come when they engaged the Admiral von Scheer.
“How’s the crew?”
Bell sighed, his face clouding enough for Jeffrey to be instantly concerned. “Going out again with so little rest is hard on people.”
“What else is new? We’re at war…. What are you bobbing and weaving about, XO?”
Bell shifted in his chair uncomfortably. “A few of the guys came back from leave, well…Let’s say, they were visibly three sheets to the wind.”
Jeffrey was shocked, and angry. “Drunk? Some of my people reported back drunk?”
Bell looked down at the floor.
“Who are they?”
Bell reluctantly told him.
“Crap,” Jeffrey said. “Older men. Married. This isn’t good, XO. You putting them on report?”
“Well, the corpsman had them diagnosed with nonspecific flulike symptomology and confined them to their racks till they sobered up. COB and I decided their hangovers would be sufficient penance. We can dodge any formal paperwork till after this patrol…. The option to push it further’s reallyyour decision, sir.”
Jeffrey looked at his hands. “Why, XO?”
“You mean why did it happen?”
Jeffrey nodded.
Bell took a deep breath. “I think it’s obvious. They’re scared.”
“We’re fighting for national survival. Who isn’t scared?”
“It’s just that, well…Even if the ship has nine lives, each time we head out into the blue we use up a handful more. Ditto for your narrow escape in Washington yesterday, sir. The men know all about it, and in their eyes you are the ship. The guys pretty much feel like we’re playing Russian roulette. Sooner or later, Captain, the bullet with Challenger’s name on it has to come up. It’s just a matter of statistics.”
“But they all got the Presidential Unit Citation last time!”
“I know.”
“That ought to have been good for morale.”
“That’s the problem, I think. It created this artificial emotional high.”
“You mean, a false sense of closure, and escape.”
“Yup. Then having to turn around so fast for another deployment, it just meant more of a group mental crash.”
Jeffrey sat there, pondering. “I’ll have to go around and talk to the men.”
“I think that would help a lot,” Bell said. “You might not realize quite how much they worship you.”
“Without us both getting sacrilegious, XO, I hope their faith in me isn’t misplaced.”
Bell hesitated. “There’s something else. Well, two things.”
“What?”
“The guys were all kind of attached to having Lieutenant Reebeck around. They knew she had rather special talents, and they thought she brought the ship good luck.”
“You mean they thought she was some sort of mascot?”
“I don’t know if anybody would put it that way, Skipper. But they think this leaving her behind, now, suddenly, is bad luck.”
Jeffrey grunted. This was one subject he did not want to push any further. “What was the other thing?”
Again Bell shifted uncomfortably. “When we were in the hardened underground dry dock.” Cut into the rock bluffs opposite the New London base, on Connecticut’s Thames River.
“Yes?”
“Jimmy Carter limped home.” The USS Jimmy Carter was the third and final Seawolf-class boat. She’d been specially modified during construction to have a stretched hull, with extra space for carrying SEALs, their equipment, and commando warfare planning and communication facilities. The Carter had been commissioned in 2004; the first of the four modified Ohio ex-boomers wasn’t fully ready until 2007.
“Damaged?”
“Damaged. Her XO wouldn’t tell me much at first. Secrecy, the usual. But I saw several body bags come off.”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
“I gather they’d tried to raid the German underground U-boat pens at Trondheim.” Trondheim was on the coast of central Norway. “Somebody senior thought that’s where the von Scheer must’ve been hiding. But apparently all the activity there was fake, a big deception, to draw us off from where von Scheer really was, far up in the nether reaches by North Cape, hard on the border with Russia.”
“So what happened?”
“The Germans were waiting for the SEALs. They took heavy losses and failed to penetrate the base. The Carter was badly banged up getting away.”
“Any word on Clayton and Montgomery?” They were two SEALs, a lieutenant and a senior chief, who’d been with Challenger on recent missions. Jeffrey and Bell—and a lot of Challenger’s crew—had gotten to like Clayton and Montgomery a lot, living so tightly together and sharing the dangers of war. Clayton was very even-tempered and easy to talk to. Montgomery had a dry sense of humor and an extremely sharp tongue, but people tended to trust him and he exuded strong natural charisma.
Bell looked at Jeffrey. “It seems likely from their previous experience that they both would have been on that raid. Now we don’t know if they’re alive or dead, and nobody in New London would tell us.”
Jeffrey frowned. “It doesn’t bode well that we’re picking up a different team this time.”
“I know, Captain. That’s what the whole crew’s thinki
ng. New SEALs are not a good sign. The idea Clayton and Montgomery might be dead is getting our people down. Uncertainty is even worse than knowing for sure. It gnaws at you.”
“All right. Once you and I go over one more thing, I’ll make the rounds and get everybody cheered up. We can’t have them thinking dark thoughts based on hearsay and guesswork. And this business about us playing Russian roulette is bullcrap. This ship’s crew are all professionals. They’re not supposed to mope and feel sorry for themselves when we’re fighting for our country’s whole way of life. Their job is to make the enemy be the one to get the willies and have self-doubt.”
“It’ll make a difference, sir, them hearing that from you.”
“I’ll fill them in on the big picture, this relief convoy to Africa and everything. I know you already did that. But getting it again, from me, should boost their sense of purpose.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“We have the consoles for this Orpheus gizmo?”
“Affirmative. Installed and tested. My understanding is the off-hull equipment will come when we rendezvous with Ohio.”
“So Admiral Hodgkiss told me…And so I will tell each member of my crew. Next stop, the Caribbean Sea. Then we head for the one place where the Orpheus setup will work, and do the most good…. Orpheus. Is that a code name, oran acronym for something tongue-twisting, do you think?”
“I believe it’s a code name, Captain. I doubt they’d use an acronym, sir, on the off chance an Axis agent or mole could figure out what the letters stood for.”
Jeffrey rose to signal he was ending the meeting. “It’s good to know, XO, given what we’ll be facing against the von Scheer, that just for once it’s the Allies who’ve come up with a secret weapon that could turn the tide.”
CHAPTER 10
T wo days later, nearing the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, Ernst Beck sat alone at his desk in his tiny, austere cabin. To one side of his laptop lay the heavy packet of remaining unopened envelopes within envelopes that Rudiger von Loringhoven had given him. Since the von Scheer left Norway, the packet had already been stripped of its two outermost layers: the rendezvous with the pair of Russian submarines in the Barents Sea and then details for piercing the G-I-UK Gap. Some of those latter details were displayed right now on Beck’s laptop screen.
