by Joe Buff
Jeffrey walked over to Milgrom’s console to watch as more and more data came in. A solid carpet of sonobuoys was saturating the bottom terrain between the convoy and the Rocks, between the two old telephone cables. The leading edge of the carpet inched south steadily.
The number of sonobuoys expended was truly prodigious. Jeffrey knew that, at this rate, soon the carriers and even their underway-replenishment-support auxiliary ships would exhaust their entire inventories.
Jeffrey was very glad that he’d decided to stay shallow and not rush away farther north. Otherwise, those constant pings might’ve bounced off Challenger’s hull and given her away to the von Scheer, or—worse—might have subjected him to friendly atomic fire.
“Captain,” Bell called out. “New Orpheus contact. Positive Orpheus contact! Von Scheer is moving due east, here. Her speed is thirty knots.”
Thank you, Admiral Hodgkiss! You flushed Beck for us after all.
Jeffrey turned to COB—it was time to hunker down for the fight. “Chief of the watch, relay by phone talkers shipwide, rig for nuclear depth charge.”
COB acknowledged smartly. Jeffrey returned to Bell.
“We’ve got him, XO. We’ve got him.”
“Yes, sir.” Bell gave a feral grin.
That suddenly, the entire mood in the control room altered. The crew, which had been sensing Jeffrey’s growing despair, sensed instead his confidence, and their own confidence skyrocketed.
“Helm, right thirty degrees rudder. Make your course zero nine zero.” Due east.
“Right thirty degrees rudder, aye. Make my course zero nine zero, aye.”
Estabo and his men will have to fend for themselves for now.
Challenger banked steeply into the turn. The readings on analog compass circles, and digital gyrocompass displays, spun rapidly, then steadied. “My course is zero nine zero, sir.”
“Very well. Helm, ahead flank.”
“Ahead flank, aye!”
The ship began to accelerate. As she topped forty knots, flow turbulence began to cause a harsh hiss on the sonar speakers and a constant shaking in the control room. As Challenger topped fifty knots, the engineering plant worked very hard. Immense power was being put through the propulsion shaft to the pump jet.
The vibrations grew heavy. Consoles squeaked as they jiggled in their shock-absorbing mounts. Light fixtures in the overhead bounced on their springs. Mike cords swayed and everyone held on tight. Challenger’s speed was steady now at just over fifty-three knots.
“Sir,” Bell said, “you told us before that at this speed we’d be blind, and noisy as a freight train.”
“Except for one thing, XO. Now we know where von Scheer is. And now we use active sonar.”
CHAPTER 23
E rnst Beck watched the data on his console in disbelief as his ship fled east to escape the barrage of enemy sonobuoys. “So many SSQ-seventy-fives,” he said mostly to himself. “I didn’t know they even had that many SSQ-seventy-fives.”
Von Loringhoven looked disturbed, even irate. “Everything is going wrong. Everything. First our men on the Rocks encounter U.S. Navy SEALs. Now their carrier planes are searching bottom terrain at our crush depth. The SEALs, that could be explained in other ways. But the deep-capable active sonobuoys, in such heavy quantities, there can be only a single explanation. They suspect the von Scheer’s presence. They suspect it, or they know it.”
“Baron, I concur,” Beck said. “But there’s little good in belaboring the obvious.”
Von Loringhoven opened his mouth to say something, but to Beck’s gratitude, Stissinger smoothly cut him off. “Captain, recommend clearing baffles.” The von Scheer was moving too fast to trail a towed array. Aft of her stern, she couldn’t hear a thing.
“Very well, Einzvo. Pilot, slow to ahead one-third, turns for seven knots. Starboard ten degrees rudder.”
Von Scheer slowed and began to turn in a circle. Her sensitive side-mounted wide-aperture arrays began to listen keenly to the water outside as the arrays swung with the ship in a wide arc.
“New passive contact on the starboard wide-aperture array!” Haffner shouted. “Bearing two seven zero true.” Due west. “Range is forty thousand meters.” Twenty nautical miles. “Contact is submerged! Confirmed! Contact gaining, contact speed is over fifty knots!”
“The Connecticut?” Stissinger asked, referring to the sister ship of the USS Seawolf. According to Imperial German Naval Intelligence, the Seawolf was way up near Iceland, but the Connecticut might be escorting the convoy.
“Negative!” Haffner yelled. “Strong tonals now…Not, repeat not, a Seawolf-class.” Then the sonar officer gasped. “Contact is USS Challenger! Confirmed, definite match of flank-speed tonals to prior data in our library! Contact is USS Challenger!”
Man, this is worse than hell itself. Felix scrambled over a charred inhuman landscape beneath an absurdly clear and balmy blue sky. Other black figures swarmed on the Rocks, grappling with each other or spitting muzzle flashes, like warring parties of fire ants.
Felix cursed when he almost tripped on loose rock. He shouldered his MP-5 and fired another three-round burst at a glimpse of an enemy kampfschwimmer. He missed—the nine-millimeter rounds everyone carried weren’t meant for accurate sniping over long distances.
Felix gasped for air. He was almost drowning in his own perspiration—it couldn’t evaporate within his protective suit, because his body sweated faster than the special layered material could breathe—and Felix roasting from built-up body heat. His mouth was so dry that his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth and his lips were chapped and cracked and bleeding. He had a headache and felt nauseous—definite signs of early heatstroke.
It was so bad he was starting to seriously consider taking his suit helmet off, radioactivity be damned.
Stay focused. Don’t be stupid. You’re the man in charge.
Felix ducked as another German bullet cracked by, frighteningly close. The boulder he chose for his next bit of cover was black and slimy, like all the rest, and the outside of his suit was smeared with toxic goo.
At least he could see through his faceplate better. The inside of the plastic had started fogging up, but now heavy droplets of condensation ran down to streak the fog. It was like driving a car in the rain with no defroster.
Seeing his chiefs make frantic hand signals, he broke cover and picked up the pace.
The deadly contest for the cargo-ship hulk was down to the final sprint. Because of the place where the first and then reinforcing teams landed on each of the Rocks, SEALs and kampfschwimmer were sandwiched in the most bizarre tactical setup Felix had ever seen. The rate of fire was low because everyone on both sides was fast running out of ammo. Felix’s MP-5 was empty, and now he held his pistol in one hand, continuing to fire at fleeting targets of opportunity. It seemed that his men had a razor-thin positional edge overall—Felix’s reinforcements had landed on Northwest Rock, by chance the one closest to the hulk.
Felix dashed along a narrow shingle beach. On one side of him was a slope and on the other was the ocean. Surf broke as he panted along the beach. But around a bend too small to be called a headland, the minuscule beach petered out, ending in a sudden drop from the upslope into the water—a sheer cliff. Felix decided to run, not swim; swimming was much too slow.
Felix started up the slope toward the spine at the top of this Northeast Rock. A German carrying a pistol came over the slope, and the two of them almost collided. Felix and the German fired their weapons at the same time, aiming two shots dead-center chest by instinct—but both pistols only fired one shot, then were empty. Both men staggered backward as the bullets hit outer-suit Kevlar and thudded hard against their Draegers’ casings inside. Both men recovered instantly. They holstered their pistols and swung their MP-5s as clubs.
The German was taller, nimble and quick. But Felix was also good. Each man kept trying to smash the other’s skull, yet every thrust was parried, every blow deflected away.
Felix changed his tactics, trying not to telegraph his next move. He bent for his K-bar fighting knife, intending to rise with a slash at the enemy’s face: the clear plastic was the only vulnerable point of the suit. But the German had picked up a big piece of stone. He and Felix locked eyes for a moment, knife versus rock. There was a mix of hate and admiration in that German’s eyes, and Felix felt the same.
The man threw the rock at Felix’s head, perfectly aimed and hard enough to kill. Felix was forced to duck. By the time he got up, the German was halfway down the slope. He went right into the water and dove out of sight.
Felix turned. His tunnel vision from that man-to-man contest cleared. Then it registered on him that the German had been wearing a tactical radio headset under his protective hood. He’d shouted something as he threw the rock, something authoritative, into his mike. The other surviving kampfschwimmer were withdrawing into the sea.
That guy was their leader, their officer. They’re conceding the Rocks, for now. They’ll retreat into their minisub while there’s still time…. They know we came by submarine, just as they did. They know what’s coming next, too: atomic-torpedo warhead blasts.
Felix ran down the opposite slope and splashed through the filthy shallows. His two chiefs and their teams already had climbing ropes set up, reaching to what was left of the main deck of the cargo hulk.
Felix realized that most of his men were dropping on their feet by now. They helped one another as much as they could as they climbed. Two men were wounded; the dead had to be left where they fell, until later—if there was a later.
Both wounded SEALs had broken limbs, where German bullets had hit arms or legs and only the Kevlar had kept the slugs from penetrating—but the impacts weren’t cushioned by any trauma pads like a flak vest. The other SEALs used one rope with a double bowline tied at the end to lift these two men onto the hulk.
Felix helped from below; he insisted on being last. He took a running jump and climbed the rope hand over hand. He used his aching, trembling leg muscles too, because his arms burned and felt rubbery—his body had very little left. Clambering over the rusty, pitted gunnel onto the even more corroded, crumpled deck, he took stock of the hulk.
His men held the viable high ground. The only problem was, they had barely any ammo left to repulse another kampfschwimmer attack—and the kampfschwimmer might reload from stocks in their minisub.
First problem first. This hulk needs to become our bomb shelter, against close-by bursts in a tactical nuclear undersea duel.
The cargo ship was a mess. Blast and heat had wrecked the steel of her superstructure. Massive cargo-hold covers and cranes had simply vanished, blown off or blown apart, and the hold contents were burned to ashes and heaps of twisted metal.
One hold held what once had been dried meat products. The ashes were soaked with seawater sloshing and slapping through cracks and tears in the hull. The mess was revolting to look at. Then Felix reminded himself that outside his suit there was also a smell.
The deck was perfectly steady in the moderate surf on the east side of the Rocks—the hulk was hard aground.
Felix told his exhausted men to move into the dented and mangled superstructure. Inside was better protection, and also shade, which gave some relief from the dangers of heatstroke. Even so, now that the immediate struggle had died down, several of Felix’s men passed out. Their fellows had to hold their Draeger regulators in their mouths and prop their jaws shut, by reaching through the softness of their hoods. Other SEALs just lay on their sides, staring into space numbly, to relieve their chests of the weight of their front-worn Draegers.
I must maintain team discipline, even now.
Felix posted lookouts to cover every quarter of approach to the Rocks and the hulk. In dark corners, by the sunlight that streamed in through cracked and sooty portholes, he could make out human remains.
During his disaster-diver recovery training, earlier in his career, he’d been told never to look at the faces. But Felix had superb peripheral vision. He could see that most of these remains didn’t even have faces.
He spoke to the wounded SEALs. Both were in great pain, but they coped bravely. Their broken limbs were dressed with field-expedient splints, made from MP-5s and rope.
Felix glanced out a porthole, east. He wondered how high the tidal waves would be when they arrived here. He wondered if they’d wash right over the top of the hulk. He wondered if the hulk would capsize or shatter when the airborne shock fronts struck, after the undersea fireballs broke the surface. He wondered how much hard radiation those fireballs would still give off, in the seconds and minutes after the warheads’ initial detonation, as mushroom clouds exploded into the air.
Jeffrey bounced against his seat belt as Challenger tore after von Scheer at flank speed…. Or at least after the place where Orpheus said the von Scheer should be.
She’s down there somewhere, on the bottom, heading east. We’re looking down at the seafloor terrain from thousands of feet higher up. The ridgelines here all run east-west, so von Scheer won’t be screened from us by bumps or cracks in the bottom…. Right now Ernst Beck can’t hide.
“Sonar, go active!” Jeffrey ordered. “Maximum intensity, ping.”
Challenger’s bow sphere emitted an earsplitting screech, a burst of sonic power so loud it came back through the hull and nearly deafened most of the crew. The screech began to rise and fall in tone, like a whale call. It ended abruptly, with a sudden silence that seemed a portent of doom. Milgrom’s people hunched over their sonar consoles.
The ping was on its way, a spreading blast front of pure acoustic power—a mix of changing frequencies to cut through ocean reverb, optimized by the most advanced signal processors known. Designed to pick out a target whether it was moving or still, to sense its speed and even give its size and shape and which way it was heading…Impossible for the stealthiest sub in the world to cloak itself entirely or suppress a telling echo.
Sound traveled through seawater at almost a mile every second, five times as fast as through air. Even so, it would take half a minute for any real target return to come back.
Jeffrey forced himself to keep breathing evenly. Next to him, as fire-control coordinator, Lieutenant Commander Bell looked prepared and eager to unleash the forces trapped within tiny atoms, and give birth to brand-new underwater suns, to destroy the von Scheer with unspeakable violence and kill every person aboard her.
The Axis started this, Jeffrey told himself. Now it’s our turn to help finish it.
“New active sonar contact!” Milgrom shouted. “Bearing zero eight five, range thirty thousand yards! Course zero nine zero, speed thirty knots!…Depth eleven thousand feet, hugging the bottom!”
“Identify!” Jeffrey ordered.
“Contact consistent with Orpheus datum. I merge and designate the contact Master One. Master One identified as the SMS Admiral von Scheer.”
“Fire Control,” Jeffrey snapped. “Firing point procedures, Mark Eighty-eights in tubes one through eight, target Master One.”
“Solution ready,” Bell recited. “Ship ready…Weapons ready.”
“At five-second intervals, match generated bearings and shoot.”
“Unit from tube one fired electrically,” Bell said. “Good wire to the weapon.” The Mark 88s were wire guided.
“Unit is running normally,” Milgrom reported. Sonar, by listening, made doubly sure the torpedo was running true.
“Unit from tube two fired electrically. Good wire.”
“Unit is running normally.”
And on and on the litany went as Challenger launched eight wide-body, deep-capable nuclear fish at the Admiral von Scheer.
“Reload all tubes, Mark Eighty-eights Mod Twos. Set warhead yields to maximum.” One full kiloton each.
Bell, Weps, and their people got busy.
Jeffrey studied the tactical plot. Challenger had gained on the von Scheer’s projected position, but Challenger’s torpedoes were dashing a
head and gaining on the von Scheer much faster.
Without needing to be told, Bell had his weapons technicians spread the charging, fully armed weapons apart—to catch the von Scheer in a pincers and make it harder for her to evade or destroy Jeffrey’s fish.
Jeffrey’s eight reloads were all positioned by the tube breach doors, for him and Bell to enter their special weapons arming codes. Soon all tubes were ready to shoot another massive salvo. It was high time to update the firing solution. At flank speed, with von Scheer so quiet, Milgrom still held no passive contact on Master One.
“Sonar, go active.”
The overpowering bow-sphere blast this time was like a shout from an angry dolphin. The undulating whistles and clicks were designed to look past Challenger’s own noisy Mark 88s in the water and pound the von Scheer’s hull and sail and control planes and pump jet with an inescapable fist of pure sound.
Once more Jeffrey waited for the data to come back. While he fidgeted impatiently he brought up that picture he had of Ernst Beck and windowed it onto his now-crowded console.
You know I’ve got you cold, Herr Korvettenkapitan Beck. Watcha gonna do next?
Ernst Beck listened on the sonar speakers. The all-too-familiar engine noise of eight inbound enemy torpedoes bounced off ridges and escarpments and came in through his ship’s hydrophone arrays. The other bounces of increasing, gaining noise, of Challenger herself tearing after von Scheer, emphasized the energy of Jeffrey Fuller’s pursuit. The time for sneaking and guessing was over. There was nothing subtle about what was going on now, nor anything the least bit quiet or stealthy about what would happen quite soon.
