by Joe Buff
“The convoy escorts picked up a few false contacts, dropped high-explosive torpedoes or depth charges, and then nothing. No confirmed contacts, no confirmed kills… They blew up biologics by mistake, or bleary-eyed observers were just seeing things, or nervous sonar techs heard sounds that weren’t there.”
Milgrom and Bell nodded again, reluctantly.
“Don’t you see what’s happening?”
“Sir?”
“Atlantic Fleet’s whole take on the shape of the battle has been all wrong. The defensive tactics, the carrier and escort dispositions, everything, they’ve been all wrong.”
Bell nodded.
Milgrom glanced at the XO. Her face turned grim. “The Axis have been one step ahead of us the entire time, haven’t they, sir?”
Jeffrey looked into space and worked his jaw. “For a solid week the carrier battle groups and escorting ships and fast-attacks have been at general quarters almost nonstop. Their antisubmarine helos and aircraft have been flying patrols on high alert around the clock. Men and women will be exhausted, close to dropping on their feet, from lack of sleep and interrupted meals. Equipment will be worn down more and more, to the point where critical failures are almost imminent, from the aggressive operational tempo. Crews on the merchant ships will be going crazy from the endless waiting game…. And nobody’s sunk one single U-boat. And I think I know exactly why.”
“Yes, sir,” Milgrom said; she obviously realized why too.
“The real battle, the battle the Axis intend to fight exclusively on their own terms, hasn’t even started yet. Their submarines are massed much farther south that we expected.”
Bell looked. “You mean—”
“Yup. In a day or so, the convoy starts to go through the Atlantic Narrows. The Axis knows we’re coming, and they know our ships can’t hide. Then, for another entire week, the convoy and escorts try to run the South Atlantic. The carrier battle groups and our available fast-attacks are mostly deployed for a fight in the North Atlantic, that was supposed to have come from the east, from Europe, already. Now they’re out of position to give good mutual support against a massed threat to the south. If they come steaming through the Narrows one at a time, they’ll get torn to pieces. Think about it.”
“Oh, God,” Bell said.
“To the west, thousands of miles away, will be the neutral, unhelpful shores of South America. To their east and then their north will loom the bulge of occupied North Africa, menacing the convoy’s left flank the whole way. To the south, against their other flank, are Boer home waters.”
“I see what you’re leading to, Captain,” Milgrom said.
“That’s where they’ll strike. That’s what they’ve been waiting for all along, sitting fat and happy and stealthy and rested and fresh. The convoy-versus-U-boat fight won’t be in the North Atlantic at all. It’ll be in the one place where the enemy holds every card, geographically, logistically, strategically…. They’ll have mobile antiship and antiaircraft cruise-missile launchers moving along the coast, shooting and scooting, working in concert with the wolf packs. The whole fight will be on the last leg of the convoy’s journey, in the South Atlantic, with the tail of support for U.S. forces stretching back six or seven thousand miles, stretched to the breaking point.”
Bell hesitated. “What should we do? Reposition the ship? Is all of this work by the Rocks just a waste?”
Jeffrey stood there in his stateroom with the door closed. “XO, I wish I knew.”
CHAPTER 17
Ernst Beck sat alone and lonely at the head of the wardroom table. Two great men looked down at him, one alive and one dead.
To his left, on the bulkhead in an expensive gilt-edged frame, hung an oil painting of the new kaiser, Wilhelm IV. To Beck’s right, on the opposite bulkhead, hung a portrait of his ship’s namesake, Admiral Reinhard von Scheer — commander in chief of the High Seas Fleet at the height of World War I.
Reinhard von Scheer wore a thin black mustache; the hair at his temples had started to gray; his eyes were dark and piercing. The artist of the portrait had captured von Scheer’s expression skillfully, and brought the man forever to life. Von Scheer’s intelligent face was poised somewhere between a dissatisfied frown and a benevolent smile. The smile looked like it was just on the verge of winning out over the frown. From history, Beck knew the admiral had been daring but prudent, inventive but cautious, a brilliant tactician under fire… and an iron-willed opportunist who at Jutland — Skagerrak to the Germans — damaged a vastly superior British force and then escaped against all odds with his own squadrons mostly intact.
Beck looked Admiral von Scheer in the eyes very thoughtfully. He remembered that he himself sat in a different dead man’s place — the von Scheer’s original captain, his former commanding officer, had until recently used this sacrosanct chair at the head of the wardroom table. Did he feel Reinhard von Scheer gazing down at him, testing him, challenging him, as I do?
Beck had lost track of the time when the einzvo, Karl Stissinger, walked into the wardroom, right on schedule. Always empathetic and perceptive, Stissinger saw his captain locked in a staring match with the long-deceased admiral.
“That’s one contest you can’t win, sir,” he joked. “I tell myself it’s just dabs of oil paint on canvas; he isn’t really here, but those eyes, those eyes… Even a century later you don’t want to let that man down.”
Beck turned to Stissinger and smiled wanly. “I know. It’s like he’s our conscience, watching us from that wall…. I try to imagine the weight on his shoulders, that fateful day and night, with fifteen-inch enemy battleship shells pounding at him incessantly. Armor-piercing shells the weight of small autos, smashing at him and his ships and his men. The noise, the smoke, the fear, and the tension. The drenching bursts of near misses, the bone-breaking shudder of hits, and the fires.”
Stissinger shivered and glanced at the other painting, as if to change the subject. “Our new kaiser, on the other hand, is what one might call an enigma.”
Beck let out a deep sigh. “Before the war, I used to think the people who wanted a kaiser again were all hobbyists or hotheads. Sure, Wilhelm the Second abdicated and fled to royal relatives in Holland in 1918, but he always assumed he’d come back once Versailles died down. In the thirties, General von Hindenberg wanted to restore him to power, you know, but Hitler had other ideas. Wilhelm must have died a bitter man.”
“As I recall, Captain, he spent the last twenty years of his life in exile in the Netherlands, chopping down trees for exercise. He chopped down something like fifty thousand trees. He must have gone mad, if he wasn’t half mad to begin with.”
“Some people said, and still say, the Versailles Treaty itself was a major war crime. Enslaving and plundering our nation just to satisfy French and British vindictiveness and greed… And Wilhelm had good reason to go mad. He abdicates voluntarily, for the good of the nation, right? Then he watches from refuge in Holland as Edward the Eighth abdicates in the thirties over that scandal with Mrs. Simpson. That didn’t end the British monarchy at all. The next in line stepped in…. It must have all seemed so unfair….”
Beck looked at the picture of the new kaiser. Wilhelm III, crown prince in World War I, had never gotten to assume the throne. After the coup last year in Berlin, when the ultranationalists restored the crown to have a figurehead, the sudden-kaiser chose the name Wilhelm IV, for tradition and continuity — or because he was told to.
Stissinger looked at the picture. “I frankly wonder, sir, how happy he was to get the title.”
“No one knows. He puts on a good-enough face in public. Maybe they threatened his family. ‘Take the job, or else.’”
“Wouldn’t surprise me, sir.”
“He’s an ornament, pure and simple,” Beck said. “Willing or unwilling, he has no real power at all…. Sometimes I feel bad for him.”
“It’s a weird contrast, the two paintings. Don’t you agree, Captain? Two men, one a proven combat leader, maybe
even a genius, in a major war Germany lost, and the other a ceremonial hostage in a war that it looks like we’ll win.”
“Yes,” Beck said. “A very strange contrast.”
“Anyway, Captain, Haffner reports we’re just beginning to pick up traces of the convoy and escort ships on sonar.”
“Already? They’re still very far.”
“Screw cavitation, propulsion-plant noises, hulls as they pitch through the swells. It’s a really huge contact, sir. Noise leaks into the deep sound channel,” he said, referring to a layer in the open ocean that acts as an acoustic superconductor, in which sounds can travel for hundreds of miles with little signal loss.
“They’re still a day or two away from running right over us, I should expect.”
“That’s the navigator’s estimate also, Captain, based on his best guess of the cargo ships’ speed. Twenty knots sustained, if they’re lucky. A slower actual rate of advance, from course doglegs and zigzagging to try to confuse our forces.”
Beck glanced at a clock. “Our guests are late.” He reached for the intercom near the captain’s place, but the wardroom door opened. In walked the lieutenant in command of the kampfschwimmer group, Johan Shedler. Since the salvage of the American warheads from that sunken destroyer, Beck had begun to look at Shedler with respect, even awe — the man appeared refreshed, returned to normal by now, after his long decompression from his deep dialysis dive.
“Sorry I’m late, Captain. I needed to oversee a few things. My men are almost ready.”
“Good, good,” Beck said. “Sit. Please.” Shedler’s full team was sixteen men — only half of whom had been fitted out with and trained to use the dialysis packs.
Shedler glanced with curiosity at the thick envelope of sealed orders by Beck’s place on the table, then stood up again almost immediately, at attention, as Rudiger von Loringhoven entered the wardroom.
“Ach,” von Loringhoven said with evident self-satisfaction. “I see we’re all here.” He held a sheaf of notes and papers under one arm.
“Let’s begin the briefing,” Beck said. “We’re running out of time.”
Stissinger and Shedler paid careful attention. Portions of what they were about to hear were unfamiliar to them, Beck knew, and they both had important parts to play in the details. The purpose of this briefing was to lay out all the pieces for ample study, minimize the chance of ambiguity or miscommunications, even belabor the obvious in order to assure foolproof implementing of the whole complex attack plan.
Beck started. “The entire arrangement is designed to provide us with supremely accurate, real-time targeting data on the Allied convoy and escorts while von Scheer herself stays stealthy and at a safe distance. Stealthy, that is, at least until we salvo-launch our missiles from near the Rocks, at the limit of their fuel supplies, five hundred sea miles south of their targets.”
“Perfect firing solutions,” von Loringhoven emphasized, “against the most high-value enemy targets, from far beyond the range of von Scheer’s sonars. Perfect firing solutions, from well beyond the outer screens of the carrier battle groups’ submarine and surface escorts and airborne protection. We’ll even be outside the longest over-the-horizon detection range of their AWACS radar planes, with your cruise missiles hugging the wave tops.”
Stissinger nodded.
“Berlin has sea-surveillance satellites in geosynchronous orbit,” Beck said. “The hardware was disguised in German-built vehicles belonging to Third World neutrals lofted by the ArianeSpace consortium before the war. So the Allies have no idea of our actual space-based targeting capabilities.”
Stissinger smiled. Beck addressed his next remarks to Shedler. “Your team’s role is so important because the data we need has to come in via radio, and radio at such frequencies can’t penetrate the sea.”
“Understood,” Shedler replied.
“The land installation you erect amounts to an interface between the open air and the deep ocean. The two mediums admit two different methods of communicating, radio waves versus sound. Your portable satellite dish is one-half of the link. The transducer line you’ll lay underwater forms the other half. The black boxes you brought in your equipment from Norway contain electronics for the interface, and they in turn feed proper signals into the transducers. Digitized acoustic-message bursts will then be picked up by von Scheer’s passive sonar arrays. In short, those bursts will take the information that comes down from space via radio, and send it on to us to use while we remain concealed and tactically mobile. You’ll be stuck in the open, Lieutenant, working on the Rocks, but you buy us important time and a vital safety margin. The only alternative to a land-based interface relay of this type would be for us to raise an antenna mast above the surface ourselves, and revealing von Scheer too soon that way is simply out of the question.”
“I understand, Captain.”
“You and your men will have to work very quickly to get set up. Remember, the Allies have sea-surveillance assets too. Once you’re spotted, the danger for all of us mounts.”
“The Allies may assume,” Stissinger offered, “that the kampfschwimmer presence, their data uplink even if it’s seen, doesn’t relate to us, Captain. There are many other Axis submarines. Besides, it’s natural our side would want control of the Rocks. They’re the only land in the whole Atlantic Narrows. They represent a military high ground of sorts. There are lots of things the Axis might use them for. Signals intelligence, visual surveillance, even occupy them briefly just to deny them to the Allies at a crucial moment in the battle.” He shrugged.
“Timing is everything,” Beck said. “The faster we all move, obtaining the targeting data and then getting rid of our missiles, the better our chance to keep the Allies guessing until it’s too late. Then we all make our escape while they’re still reeling, reacting, confused. That’s where your role comes in, Einzvo. You’ll be supporting me in an engagement like none you’ve ever seen. Discipline and teamwork among the crew must be precise in order to program each missile and then execute each step of every launch in such rapid succession. There is no margin for error. None.”
“I’ll see that all goes well, Captain.”
“And as soon as our first missiles broach the surface,” Beck said, “we give von Scheer’s exact position away. Once our last missile is launched, prompt recovery of the kampfschwimmer and evasive maneuvers by von Scheer against incoming retaliatory fire become a matter of life and death. Sonar, Ship Control, Engineering, every department and every station must put out a maximum effort for me.”
“Understood, sir. The men will perform.”
“The whole point,” von Loringhoven said, “is that setting up this ground station, getting the data from such long range by satellite, maximizes that other crucial factor, the distance from us to the escorts and thus the duration until such return fire via missile or aircraft can even reach us. And besides, jamming and spoofing the Allied surveillance and communication circuits is an essential part of the plan. Information warfare experts elsewhere will trigger prearranged virus attacks, just as you ripple your missile salvos, Captain.”
“Well…” Beck was perhaps the only man at the briefing who fully understood the uncertainties and risks of what was proposed.
“It certainly gives us the best way to lay down accurate fire and live to tell about it,” Stissinger said. He was warming more and more to the overall plan. “Since the Allies use random formations for their carrier groups, and they shift the formation shapes constantly, we won’t know which ship in a clump of warships is which. They’ll use heavy passive and active electronic countermeasures too. If Berlin tells us exactly where the high-value targets are, sir, and their course and speed and zigzag habits, we shoot fan spreads of missiles with a very high kill probability.”
Beck frowned. “Launching our missiles from extreme range maximizes their transit time, and gives the enemy the greatest margin for evasive maneuvers too. That’s the one thing that bothers me.”
Von
Loringhoven shook his head. “Your missiles go Mach two point five. From five hundred sea miles away, they’ll reach their target coordinates in less than fifteen minutes…. That’s why you carry so many missiles, Captain. You saturate each target coordinate zone. The Americans will have no escape.”
“The Americans call that overkill,” Beck said with irony, mostly to himself. “You shoot enough weapons to nuke your opponent several times over.”
“And what’s wrong,” von Loringhoven said, “with destroying our enemy several times over? With the carriers and marine amphibious warfare ships and escorts out of the way, our wolf packs can then close in and savage the cargo ships at will. Even were there no Axis interference, it would take those merchant vessels a solid week to steam from the Atlantic Narrows to the Congo-basin coast. With such a long gauntlet to run, subjected to coordinated and merciless U-boat attacks, and not one friendly nation in sight for thousands and thousands of miles, a worthless trickle at most will ever get through to the Allied pocket.”
CHAPTER 18
Jeffrey and Milgrom and Bell were still sequestered in Jeffrey’s stateroom. Jeffrey had moved the discussion to a different question. They were once again, hurriedly, going over what little they knew about the von Scheer, to try to work out more specific tactics for when the fateful confrontation came — if it ever did. Jeffrey and his key people had been doing this often since leaving Norfolk. It became their daily mantra, a benediction almost, but unlike meditation or prayer, this convocation gave no peace of mind. And as Jeffrey said, pointedly, now could well be their final opportunity to brainstorm before the maelstrom of battle began. Then there’d be no pause button, no calling time-outs, no do-overs.
They knew the von Scheer was a very big ship, much bigger than Challenger. She was almost certainly slower than Challenger if both made flank speed. How much slower, Jeffrey didn’t know — and knowing could be the difference between life and death in a stern chase or dogfight. Running at the same speed, Milgrom suspected, knot for knot, von Scheer would be even quieter than Challenger: bigger meant more room for quieting gear, more room to isolate noisy machines from the hull.
