by Joe Buff
“Repeat, please, more slowly.”
Von Loringhoven spoke more slowly, with fewer words.
“Understood, Baron,” Shedler said.
So did Beck. “Tell Brazilians a half-truth, Shedler. You swam from the escape trunk of a damaged German diesel U-boat. Ship unable to blow main ballast tanks to surface, and diving planes jammed, so unable to maneuver to shallow depth.”
“That’s good,” von Loringhoven said. “But keep it simple, Lieutenant. The key to a good lie is not to volunteer too much. Tell your men to stay low-key, resist the urge to blurt out things, if they aren’t good natural liars. And be careful. Some of the Brazilians might understand German and not let on.”
Again the baron, not used to the limitations of the acoustic link, needed to repeat himself.
“Yes, Baron. We’ll act shaken up, exhausted, worried, because parent submarine is in distress.”
“Say your satellite link is an emergency radio,” Beck said.
“Set it up under their noses,” von Loringhoven said. “Get the data download. Then say you have to swim back to your submarine.”
“Understood,” Shedler’s voice answered. “What about our weapons?”
“Take them with you,” Beck said. “Credible since you’re at war with Allied Powers. Also, we don’t know the people you see are neutral…. But for God’s sake don’t shoot a real Brazilian by mistake!”
Felix smoothly raised his head out of the tepid water and wiped smears of spilled fuel oil off his faceplate. He squinted in the sunlight and peeked around as a quick security check, then more carefully took stock of his position. He felt thankful for his airtight protective suit, and not just because of the lingering radiation. Everything he saw around him looked revolting, and he was sure the smell, should he be exposed to it, would be much worse.
The St. P and P Rocks had once been the home to a teeming colony of seabirds; a century before, sailing ships stopped here to harvest valuable cargoes of guano — built-up bird droppings, rich fertilizer in an age before modern chemicals raised crop yields.
But a convoy-versus-U-boat battle raged near here a few months back. Atomic weapons, detonated close to the Rocks, burned everything black. The guano, the thin scrub brush and moss, the seabirds — everything was charred. Dead fish of all sizes and species, discolored, bloated disgustingly, bobbed in the swell or washed against the base of the Rocks. Then there were the two dead whales, their sides split open from rotting, bones exposed through layers of blubber that had turned green or black in the relentless tropical sun.
Felix headed for the usable patch of more or less flat high ground, following the wires and fiber-optic cables leading out of the water. He paused to raise his dive mask onto his forehead, under his suit. Once out of the water, he felt much heavier, especially wearing a Draeger, but he was used to this, and it was good to be out in the open, after days in a sub or a minisub. Despite the eye exercises he’d done every day to maintain depth perception while cooped up, it took a little time to get used to focusing on objects at a distance.
Felix removed his swim fins and attached them to his external load-bearing harness. He donned his pistol holster, shouldering his submachine gun with its sling. He began to trudge inland — he had to laugh that anywhere here was really inland — and started to climb.
On what the map called Southeast Rock, on a saddle between two jagged volcanic formations, lay a jumble of man-made stones. This was the foundation and other remnants of a long-abandoned and toppled lighthouse. A more modern lighthouse, of less rugged construction, had been built fifteen years ago. That one had been hit by the heat and the shock waves from several atomic airbursts. All that was to be seen of it now were scattered bits of metal and melted glass.
Felix’s on-watch land-side team was busy setting up their satellite communications link on the saddle. Looking south, Felix could see the St. P and P Rocks’ highest point, a volcanic spire whose sides were almost vertical. In the other direction, in the shallows on the northeast side of the Rocks, lay the hulk of a cargo ship — one victim of the convoy-versus-U-boat fight. The hulk was some sort of old dry-cargo vessel, not a tanker or a modern container ship. It must have drifted here, ablaze, and run aground. Now the hulk was completely burned out, blackened like everything else, except for spots and streaks where sea salt had oxidized its tortured steel a matte red brown.
As Felix walked he heard a sickening crunch. He looked down and saw he’d stepped right onto the skeleton of something large, maybe an albatross. He had to shake his foot to dislodge the brittle rib cage.
Felix spoke with some of his men. This was a difficult chore. They had to use one hand, to grab and hold their Draeger mouthpieces through their protective suits or faceplates, and then shout to one another through the muffling effect of the suits.
Radiation detectors confirmed that contamination of the Rocks was still heavy. The alpha and beta rays wouldn’t penetrate a human body’s outer layer of dead skin, let alone get through the SEALs’ heavy suits. But the radioactive particulates lingering on the Rocks — the isotopes of plutonium and uranium and lighter fission by-products — would cause multiple cancers if inhaled and allowed to lodge in the living tissue of the lungs. If a suit seal were to be broken, and a man’s skin torn, carcinogens could also enter the body through even superficial wounds.
The uncomfortable suits contained a layer of Kevlar to prevent such deadly penetration. Even so, all the SEALs worked very carefully. No one wanted to slip on the oily mess that covered the Rocks — charred guano, convoy-ship waste that had condensed from the mushroom clouds and fallen as black rain, and worse. No one wanted to take a spill and go sliding down the rough stones into the water.
And then there were the penetrating neutrons and the gamma rays. The suits would help, but the REM count — a measure of accumulating radiation exposure — said no one would want to stay in the area more than a couple of days, tops.
Felix was therefore happy that things were just about ready to start. The huge, collapsible satellite dish was unfolded and erect. Using portable consoles with keyboards — all battery-powered and hardened against radiation — his men checked the acoustic link into the water to the minisub. Challenger had belatedly launched an off-board probe to serve as a communications relay, and the men were trying to verify that it also allowed them to speak and transmit basic data directly to Jeffrey Fuller on his ship.
The minisub positioned itself above the bottom anchor and cable relay point for the Orpheus gear. Divers left the minisub and made a hardwired hookup. Now signals from a spiderweb of distant telephone cables were flowing into the consoles in the mini. Those signals were also coming ashore and being transmitted via satellite to analysts with supercomputers in Norfolk.
Felix sat down to wait. He had eaten, and drunk, and used the tiny head on the minisub before coming ashore. For most of the next twelve hours, he’d be confined in his protective suit, as were his men. His major challenge was to stay alert and support his men’s morale and spirit — despite the depression the truly hideous moonscape inspired in him — as the SEALs stood watch on the land-based equipment and suffered inside their saunalike suits. He wished it hadn’t been such a warm and sunny day. He envied the men who’d be working the night shift.
Felix glanced up at the dazzling sky. The pure white clouds and very clear air were a stark contrast to the ruin on the Rocks. He peered toward the horizon. Except for the Rocks, microscopic in their isolation, the glistening ocean stretched as far as the eye could see, vast and empty and blue. The prevailing wind, and surface current, both came from the east — the surf was slightly heavier on the eastern side of the Rocks. The unbounded vistas, breathtaking under different circumstances, only added to Felix’s melancholy; the total lack of signs of any living wildlife anywhere — no soaring seabirds or dolphins playing — made him feel even worse.
“Sir,” one of his men yelled in Felix’s ear. “Something seems to be messed up.” The SEALs spoke to
one another in Portuguese, acting as if they were Brazilian, just in case.
“What do you mean, ‘messed up’?”
“The moment we got everything up and running on Orpheus, the minisub consoles and Norfolk both came back with the same indication. It has to be a technical problem, bad data or a faulty hookup somewhere. It’s too soon to make any sense.”
“Crap,” Felix said. “Just what we need, having to recheck miles of wiring now of all times.”
“I know, LT. The minisub and Norfolk, they both say there’s a deep-running enemy sub right on top of us.” The man turned and pointed toward the northeastern horizon. “Just a few miles that way.”
“Lieutenant!” another SEAL shouted from down the far slope of the saddle. “Divers coming out of the water! One is yelling in bad Portuguese! They say they’re from a damaged German U-boat! Requesting official safe-harbor status!”
Felix turned to look through his binoculars.
His heart almost stopped. The Germans were hamming it up, but he wasn’t fooled for a minute. Their posture, their body movements in and around the water, and their equipment, including their weapons, all pointed to their true identities.
Waterproofed, silenced Heckler & Koch MP-5s, carried by crewmen from a sinking German submarine? And Draeger rebreathers inside rubberized black full-body suits, instead of escape lungs and orange life vests and open-water exposure suits?…
Kampfschwimmer.
As casually as he could, Felix ducked behind a ledge of rock. He gestured for his men to take cover as well — subtly, not abruptly. He grabbed the microphone for the acoustic link to Challenger and the minisub in one hand, and the mike for the satellite voice link to Norfolk in the other.
“Enemy contact, contact, contact! Kampfschwimmer on the Rocks! Positive submarine contact on Orpheus, bearing northeast. Repeat, northeast! At practically point-blank range!”
Stone chips flew and ricochets whined — the kampfschwimmer weren’t fooled either. The battle for the Rocks was joined.
CHAPTER 20
Felix Estabo’s shouting came over the sonar speakers on Challenger. Everyone in the control room looked as if they’d suddenly been jolted by cattle prods, but Jeffrey never felt more alive in his life.
At last the waiting is over. The combat begins.
“Minisub, minisub,” Jeffrey shouted into his mike for the acoustic link. “Maintain your position! Maintain your position! Keep feeding me Orpheus data as long as you can!”
“Minisub, acknowledged,” came the reply over the sonar speakers.
“Ground station, ground station, hold your position! Hold the Rocks at all cost!”
Something garbled and breathless came back.
“Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey ordered COB, “sound silent battle stations antisubmarine.”
COB acknowledged. Phone talkers spread the word throughout the ship — the general-quarters alarm, and the 1MC loudspeakers, made too much noise when stealth was vital. In seconds, more enlisted men and chiefs dashed into control from aft, some still pulling on clothing or shoes. They manned and powered up empty consoles or stood in the aisles to help or learn or supervise.
Next to Jeffrey, Bell quickly reconfigured their screen displays. At battle stations, as usual, Bell was fire-control coordinator.
“Sonar, threat status?” Jeffrey snapped.
“No new contacts,” Milgrom reported coolly.
She always is a cool one under fire. Milgrom’s even tone helped get the others settled and focused.
Jeffrey stared at the gravimeter, at the large-scale nautical chart: the saw-toothed peaks of the local part of the soaring Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the jutting and dwarfish Rocks with the mini nearby. Terrain all around them was jumbled and jagged…. South-southeast of the St. P and P Rocks, and just a few hours distant at flank speed, the Romanche Gap plunged twenty-five thousand feet deep — almost as deep as Mount Everest was high.
And the SMS Admiral von Scheer could be anywhere.
Except for Orpheus. Beautiful, beautiful Orpheus. I’m sorry I ever doubted you. Admiral Hodgkiss was right all along.
“Helm,” Jeffrey rapped out, “ahead two-thirds, make turns for twenty-six knots. Make your course zero four five. Napof-seafloor cruising mode.”
“Ahead two-thirds, turns for twenty-six knots, aye, sir,” Meltzer acknowledged at the helm. “Make my course zero four five, aye. Nap of seafloor, aye.” Meltzer turned his engine-order telegraph, a four-inch dial on his console. He worked his control wheel. “Maneuvering answers, ahead two-thirds twenty-six knots! My course is zero four five, sir!” The helmsman’s burly Bronx accent sounded tough and determined.
“Northeast, Captain?” Bell asked. His job was to play devil’s advocate as Jeffrey led the attack against what seemed the devil himself.
“It’s the last thing they’ll expect. They’re on the other side of the mountain. We know where they are, but they don’t know where we are, if they even know we’re here at all.”
“But going so shallow?”
“This way we’ll maintain contact with the mini and the Rocks as long as possible. And it’s the shortest route to the von Scheer’s position.”
“The kampfschwimmer must have reported resistance from the SEALs by now. Von Scheer will guess Estabo’s men got there by submarine.”
“Yes, but they won’t know which submarine. They’re supposed to think we’re in dry dock.”
“There are a dozen other passes we could take across the ridge, Captain. A straight line is too obvious.”
“We need to do the unexpected.”
Bell nodded reluctantly. “Understood, sir.”
“Cheer up, XO. We can’t be in two places at once, but neither can the von Scheer. Let Beck be the one to keep guessing.”
Challenger’s bow nosed up steeply as she began to climb the flank of the ridge by the Rocks. Her depth would go from eleven thousand feet to just a few hundred in less than ten miles.
“Sir,” Bell said, sounding worried all over again, “why are kampfschwimmer on the Rocks to begin with?”
“To keep the Rocks from us.”
“But they have to have planned this for days. How did they know our guys would be there?”
Jeffrey ignored Bell in favor of something more urgent. “Fire Control, arm and load nuclear Mark Eight-eight Mod Twos, torpedo tubes one through eight.”
Bell relayed commands to his weapons officer below. Jeffrey and Bell entered the warhead-arming passwords on their consoles.
“Preset all warhead yields to maximum, one kiloton.”
“Maximum, one kiloton, aye,” Bell repeated for absolute clarity. He typed commands on his keyboard.
The torpedo tubes were loaded one by one. The main work was done by hydraulic assists, but the warhead-arming hookups had to be connected and then passworded by hand.
“Make tubes one through eight ready in all respects including opening outer doors.”
Jeffrey would proceed with fish wet, ready to charge on their way to his opponent in an instant. He preferred to make the mechanical transients of loading and flooding the tubes, and opening the outer doors, while the intervening terrain still masked him from his enemy.
This task done, Bell glanced at Jeffrey again insistently. “The kampfschwimmer, the Rocks. We’re missing something, Captain. Something important.”
In a flash of insight, Jeffrey saw it. He blanched.
A satellite dish to an Axis sea-surveillance bird in space, and an acoustic link into the water, would give von Scheer all the firing-solution data against the convoy that Ernst Beck could ever want…. And from way outside the longest reach of the escorts’ radar pickets… I came here to look for Beck using phone cables under the ocean. He came here to look for the convoy with sensors outside the atmosphere.
Jeffrey grabbed for a microphone. “Ground station, ground station, I repeat. Estabo, Estabo, hold the Rocks at all costs!”
Felix Estabo’s voice came back, reverbed and sc
ratchy over the undersea acoustic link. He sounded muffled too, from speaking through his protective suit helmet. “We’re trying! I—” There was a noise on the link like that of men shouting and scrambling. There was a screech like a bullet ricochet. There was a fast puff-puff-puff as a silenced weapon close to Estabo’s open mike fired on full auto. Then the mike clicked off.
“Targeting data, XO,” Jeffrey said. “The Germans want the Rocks to set up a link to get long-range targeting data.”
“Yes, sir, that has to be it.”
Jeffrey’s heart raced. “Data for Ernst Beck to launch his missiles at the Allied convoy, unmolested by the escorts… If the Germans seize control of the Rocks for just a few minutes, our first detect on the von Scheer will be the sound of dozens of Mach-Two-plus missiles salvoing into the air.”
Once her missiles are away, the von Scheer is spent, an empty shell…. To sink her after she launches against the convoy will be no victory.
Jeffrey knew that every second counted badly now, both underwater and on land.
Felix cursed doubly when one of his men was hit by a bullet through his helmet’s soft plastic faceplate. The man began to scream, in English, before he bled out inside his suit from a severed main artery. My first killed-in-action as leader… And so much for our Brazilian disguise.
The kampfschwimmer heard it too. The energy of their assault redoubled.
“Dig in?” one of Felix’s chiefs shouted.
Felix looked at the ground on the slope where they were taking cover. Two inches down it was solid basalt. “We’d need jackhammers!”
More bullets whizzed overhead. The protective suits kept Felix and his men from hearing them well, from feeling their passage disrupting the air — and this added to the danger. The chief was trying to control his team using hand signals alone because they hadn’t taken radios — whose signals would be blocked whenever basalt outcroppings stood in the way, and whose electronics would be damaged by fallout gamma rays. With the SEALs’ fields of vision impaired by the helmets of their radiation suits, near-chaos reigned. Felix heard another SEAL scream in agony. Then one of his people bellowed in triumphant rage — he’d just shot a kampfschwimmer dead.
