by Joe Buff
Felix and his men had no choice but to take cover and shoot back the way they’d just come. The kampfschwimmer who’d been withdrawing saw this and got emboldened. They waded across to Northeast Rock, shooting at the SEALs on Northwest Rock, Felix’s reinforcement team. The seesaw struggle of evenly matched Allied and Axis elites grew brutal and vicious.
Hot lead continued to fly, and ricochets continued screeching. Silenced muzzles smoked and spent brass flew. The supply of full magazines steadily dwindled. Felix sweated and panted; his mouth was terribly dry. The stale taste from his Draeger told him he was hyperventilating—breathing faster than the chemicals in the rebreather could absorb his carbon dioxide and give him fresh new air.
Felix fired in one direction and then the other. Clumps of men advanced a handful of yards, then were driven back.
Then Felix had a horrible realization. He hyperventilated harder. We had the proper tactics but we picked the wrong location.
“Chief!” he shouted to get the man’s attention.
“Sir!”
“The high ground! This spot isn’t the high ground!”
The chief shook his head, then ducked as a well-aimed bullet almost took him in the face. “I don’t follow you, LT.”
“Challenger and von Scheer. They’ll use nuclear torpedoes.” Felix pointed out at the ocean.
The chief’s eyes widened; his face grew pale.
“The waves they kick up will wash right over the Rocks!” Felix had to pause to draw a breath. “When the fireballs break the surface, the heat and shock front and gamma rays, they’ll cook us alive!”
“Retreat to the minisub?”
“We can’t! Orders! We can’t abandon the Rocks!” Felix drew another breath. “If we go in the water at all, the undersea warhead concussion power will force our livers out our assholes and make shit spray from our mouths!”
“What do we do?”
Felix looked north. It had been there the entire time, staring him in the face, and he hadn’t been thinking.
That was the whole point. This wasn’t Iwo Jima. It wasn’t anything like Iwo Jima.
“The cargo-ship hulk! That’s the real high ground, Chief! From there we control the Rocks by fire! It’s the only place we stand a chance to survive the nuclear blasts!”
The chief set his jaw with new determination.
Felix clapped him on the shoulder. “We have to occupy the cargo-ship hulk!”
Felix ducked as more bullets poured in. He was forced to shift his position. In their black suits, everyone looked the same, but Felix had too visibly been acting like an officer.
So much for the joys of command.
The incoming fire died off suddenly.
Felix suspected a trap. He peeked from around a rough, charred boulder and caught fleeting glimpses of movement on Northeast Rock, black against the black there. The kampfschwimmer were pulling away from him and heading north.
“The Germans are going for the hulk! If they get there before us we’ve had it!”
Jeffrey gripped a microphone as he stared at the gravimeter readouts. We have our quarry localized. Now we need to track and target Beck.
Using one mode, the gravimeter gave Jeffrey a perfect picture of the seafloor terrain around the Rocks, like a 3-D bird’s-eye view—as if the water weren’t there—with Challenger’s position plotted as she moved along at top quiet speed. In a different mode, the imagery was like looking out the front windshield of a car—but with eerie clairvoyance, because the gradiometers could sense through solid rock. Right now Jeffrey had both modes on his command workstation screens to help him think and visualize tactics.
“Minisub, minisub,” Jeffrey called through the mike, “any more contact with Lieutenant Estabo?”
“Negative, negative,” the submariner chief in the mini responded. “Kampfschwimmer came at them from behind. I think the Germans cut the hydrophone wire by the Rocks. We have no commo signal, sir, not even acoustic carrier tone.”
“What’s the last you heard from Estabo?”
“He asked for reinforcements.”
“Who’s left in the mini?”
“SEAL chief copilot, two enlisted SEALs aft at Orpheus consoles.”
“Do you copy anything at all on radio?” The mini had her own small floating wire antenna.
“Negative, sir. Enemy jamming keeps getting heavier.”
“Okay. Okay. Don’t raise any masts. Do nothing that might make a datum.” Give their position away. “Do you have enough cable to stay hooked into the Orpheus grid but move the mini farther from the Rocks?”
“We can manage a mile from the feed-in anchor. That’s all.”
“Good. Stay shallow, but get out to deeper water.” Jeffrey glanced at his screens. “Head two five zero.” West-southwest. “That’ll give you six hundred feet of water. I don’t want you right by the Rocks when tactical nukes start going off. The tsunami effects, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t want German combat swimmers finding you. They might be looking for an Allied mini already.”
“Understood.”
“Keep the bottom hatch dogged. Be careful who you let in…. Be careful who you let get near you. They might plant limpet mines, even drop them on you like bombs if you try going deep.”
There was a thoughtful, pregnant silence on the line for a minute. “Acknowledged.”
“Good luck. Out.”
Jeffrey turned and looked at Bell. “Estabo’s on his own. At least the mini can hide underwater, watch for threats with her cameras and sonars.”
Bell nodded. “Estabo seems like a man who knows how to take care of himself, Captain.”
“I hope so. I hate abandoning people.”
“Sir, what the chief on the mini told us—that the radio jamming is worse. It seems like more confirmation.”
“I think I see where you’re going, XO, but say it.”
“Electronic countermeasures support from other German forces, all of a sudden? From land, from space, from U-boats, I don’t know. But I think it’s another sign von Scheer is preparing to launch.”
“Bring up the map of all the old phone cables Orpheus uses. Put it on your console, XO, my displays are swamped.”
Bell typed on his keyboard. “We do have a bit of an information explosion going, don’t we, Captain?”
Jeffrey ignored the remark. He did not want to think about his ship exploding.
The large-scale map came up on Bell’s screen. The two men studied it together, elbow to elbow.
“So this is the cable the von Scheer crossed when Orpheus first picked her up.” Jeffrey pointed to a jiggly line that ran north, past the east side of the local rise capped by the Rocks.
“She came from east to west.” Bell moved his hand from right to left on the map. “Just about here.” He pointed to a spot on the map. “She must have been moving in to deploy her minisub with the kampfschwimmer.”
“This one other cable is real important to us now,” Jeffrey said. It also ran north, but on the west, the left side of the Rocks. “Orpheus hasn’t sensed von Scheer cross over that cable, yet.”
“So she has to be somewhere between the two, Skipper.”
“Yup. The question is whether she’s still north of this rise here by the Rocks. Or has she been moving southward, sneaking east of the Rocks running deep, while we’ve been moving north, going shallow and to the west?” Jeffrey moved his hands while he talked, as if the von Scheer and Challenger were twirling past each other with the Rocks stuck in the middle, screening them both.
“Why would she move south, Captain?”
“To look for us? Beck has to know there’s another sub in the area.”
“But he’s not a fast-attack, Captain. It’s not his job to go hunting for an enemy and offer combat.”
“You’re right, XO. And that’s our other trump card, in addition to Orpheus. We are a fast-attack. We get paid every day to go looking for trouble and mix it up with our adve
rsary.”
“I admit that’s an important observation, sir, but very dangerous if we’re wrong. Remember, Beck used to be XO on a fast-attack. And he knows you, sir.”
Jeffrey frowned. “Our problem is that the Rocks split this whole area between the two phone cables into separate playing fields. North, and south. Which one do we play in?”
Uncertainty piled on uncertainty.
“Go north, sir,” Bell said decisively.
Jeffrey smiled. “Why so sure?”
“Our priority is protecting the convoy. The convoy is north. Beck’s priority is attacking the convoy. The convoy is north.”
“North it is.” Jeffrey knew everyone in the control room who wasn’t wearing sonar headphones heard snatches of this talk. For clarity, he said, “Helm, steady as you go.”
“Aye aye,” Meltzer said. “My course is zero one five, sir.” A bit east of due north.
“Until Orpheus tells us otherwise, XO, we assume von Scheer is north of the Rocks, somewhere between these two cables.”
This give-and-take between a submarine’s senior officers, in the control room before and during an attack, was an old and valued Silent Service tradition. Brainstorming approaches and tactics, thinking things through out loud, was essential to survival and success.
Bell called up a larger-scale chart. “Check this out, Captain. The two cables are almost parallel, but not quite. They slowly draw closer together, as they run north away from the Rocks.”
Jeffrey saw what Bell was getting at. “They intersect here.” He touched a spot on the map near the Azores and used Bell’s joystick to move a cursor. He clicked on the Rocks, then clicked again when the cursor hit where the two cables met. He read off the distance that popped on the screen. “One thousand one hundred nautical miles.”
“That’s a long way off.”
“I know. At flank speed that would take us over twenty hours…. And at flank speed our best sonars would be half deaf, and von Scheer might hear us coming from a hundred miles away or more.”
“It’s an awfully big area to search,” Bell said.
“The convoy forward elements are closer than that already. That cuts down the area somewhat. It’ll keep on shrinking even if we don’t do anything more ourselves.”
Bell nodded. The convoy was moving south, generally toward the Rocks and away from the Azores.
Jeffrey pondered. “The closer the convoy gets, the more the search area narrows. But the closer the convoy gets, the more it moves in easy range of von Scheer’s missiles.”
“Use our active sonar, sir? While there’s still time?”
“Without knowing who’s winning or losing on the Rocks, the SEALs or the kampfschwimmer, we don’t know how much time we really have. Active sonar used too soon might hurt us more than it helps…. It’s time to commit to another strategy step.”
“Sir?”
“Helm, slow to ahead one-third, make turns for seven knots.”
Meltzer acknowledged.
“Sir?” Bell asked again.
“If we can’t be rushing all over the place, we go for the other extreme. We lurk in one spot until the situation clarifies.”
“Should I show you the large-scale bottom terrain?”
“You just read my mind, XO.”
Bell typed again. He windowed a map of the seafloor, in that key slice of ocean between the two old phone cables.
Jeffrey and Bell studied the nautical chart—its area reached far beyond the maximum range of their gravimeter, which could see out only thirty-five or forty miles from Challenger.
“The eastern foothills of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” Jeffrey said. “Rugged and rolling terrain, all the way from here to the convoy and past. All deep, but well within a ceramic-hulled submarine’s operating envelope.”
“Yes, Captain. For both us and for the von Scheer.”
“I can think of several things we might do next, XO. But I don’t like any one of them.”
“Sir?”
“Von Scheer has to come shallow to launch her missiles. We know it, and Beck knows we know. That’s his one real weakness.”
“That’s why I suggested active sonar, Captain. If he rises out of the bottom terrain, we’ll make contact. He’ll use outof-phase acoustic masking, but our arrays and signal processors are probably smart enough to not be fooled. Especially if we get an echo off the slats at the back of his pump jet.”
“Or, he’ll hear us prematurely and not come up from the bottom terrain. He’ll either shoot nuclear torpedoes at us, which is bad enough, or he’ll sneak quietly away. If he shoots, we get some idea of where he is, and we shoot back and maybe at least we damage his ship. But if Beck sneaks away, we’re left empty-handed. Until he launches…He’ll be thinking what we’re thinking. So he’ll know his best choice is to sneak away, once he either gets what he wants from the kampfschwimmer or knows they lost on the Rocks. Time is on his side, not ours.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Sonar,” Jeffrey called.
Kathy Milgrom turned her head. “Captain?”
“Anything at all of von Scheer on passive sonar?”
“No contact on von Scheer whatsoever. My men would have reported it instantly, sir.” Milgrom gave the captain just enough of a look, as if to say, And you know they would have too.
“Very well, Sonar.” Jeffrey stared into space.
“But there’s Orpheus, Captain,” Bell said.
“Two hours or so from now, XO, unless we slow down even more or change our course, we’ll be too far north of the Rocks and we’ll lose the acoustic link with the minisub. From there we’ll be on our own. No more help from Orpheus on getting von Scheer’s location and course and speed so we can move to intercept her smartly, whatever her actual distance from us right now. It all hinges on that fixed anchor station…. But if Beck does sneak off north, he’ll unwittingly lie masked between those two cables until he’s too far off for us to put a stop to him, and we won’t even know it. In that case, us lingering here and depending on Orpheus will have done more harm than good.” It’s like we can’t win either way.
Bell looked at the map for a very long time. Jeffrey let him think; he knew there were many moving parts to this tactical problem, and he didn’t want to rush Bell. Undersea warfare was in some ways like a grand-master chess tournament. You had to think several moves ahead. You had to consider a lot of different strategy choices and trade-offs. And you had to try to take account of what your opponent would think and feel and do.
But unlike chess, the stakes here aren’t prestige or money. The stakes are life and death for hundreds, even thousands of people.
Bell looked up abruptly. He seemed emotionally unsettled, but he’d clearly made up his mind. “We have to nuke the Rocks ourselves, Captain, now.”
Jeffrey raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
“We can’t afford for Estabo to loose his battle. If the kampfschwimmer win, and we guessed right about their purpose, they’ll send good targeting data to von Scheer.”
“And if we nuke the Rocks we kill everybody, so that way the Germans can’t win?”
Bell nodded, but seemed doubtful when he heard Jeffrey put it so bluntly out loud.
Jeffrey shook his head. “First of all, I’m not intentionally killing friendly troops. Second, the blasts would cause so much noise and aftershocks we’d lose the acoustic link to Orpheus, assuming the mini even survived.”
“I agree, sir. I just felt I had to offer the option.”
“Good. Keep it up.” But Jeffrey felt halfhearted when he said it. The von Scheer was out there, somewhere tantalizingly close—unseen but real. She must weigh something like twenty thousand tons submerged, and have well over a hundred men in her crew, but even so she’d vanished. For all the brainstorming with Bell, Ernst Beck’s mind remained opaque to Jeffrey. The German captain held the initiative, and Beck’s ship remained invisible.
Jeffrey felt frustration. The taste of failure began to rise inside his g
ut like bile.
“Captain!” Kathy Milgrom called.
Jeffrey turned, his train of thought broken. “What is it?”
Milgrom didn’t flinch. “New contact on acoustic intercept…Multiple contacts on acoustic intercept.” The acoustic intercept array was specifically designed to detect another active sonar pinging.
“Range? Bearing? Classification? Come on, give me a proper report.”
I’m starting to lose my grip here. Chill out, buddy. Your people don’t need such abuse.
“Contact rough bearing is north, sir, picked up through the deep sound channel. Range approximately four hundred miles. Contact classification, tentative, is airdropped active sonobuoys.”
Jeffrey brightened.
“Another cluster of sonobuoys, Captain. Closer to us, by maybe fifty miles.”
“Can you identify the sonobuoys?”
“Definite American and British manufacture, sir. Some are SSQ-seventy-fives.” That model of sonobuoy could descend to sixteen thousand feet or more.
“Okay, Sonar. Good. Thanks. Keep the info coming…. XO, plot these contacts on the large-scale nautical chart.”
Marks for the rough location of the sonobuoys began to appear on the chart on Bell’s console.
“What do you think, XO? Antisubmarine search by the convoy’s forward aircraft screens?”
“There’s a trend to the patterns they’re dropping,” Bell said. “They’re not probing along the relief convoy’s base course through the Narrows, Captain.”
“Hmm…Let’s just watch for a minute…. Helm, steadyas you go.”
“Aye aye, sir. My course is zero one five.”
“Captain,” Bell said, “something strange is happening here.” He pointed at the map.
Jeffrey looked at the map. Minutes ticked by. Precious minutes. Then he saw it, and in a flash all his second-guessing and worries vanished.
“That brilliant son of a bitch,” Jeffrey exclaimed. “He figured it out!”
“Captain?” Bell said.
“The sonobuoys, XO! They’re all being dropped between the two phone cables. Admiral Hodgkiss figured it out! Our radios are jammed so we can’t talk to him, but still he sees the same things we’ve been seeing, thinks the same things we’ve been thinking…. He sent us air support, XO. Thoseplanes are coming at us at almost five hundred knots. Unless Ernst Beck has stronger nerves than I do, he’ll have to move out of the way, east or west, or an SSQ-seventy-five will hit him on the nose and then a big nuclear depth bomb’ll hit him hard right in the head.”
