by Joe Buff
“We simply must convince da Gama of our sincerity. We simply must convince him that atomic war in his front yard is very imminent. And at the same time we must convince him we have a strong resource in place, able to intervene to help him. You.”
“And all the talk-talk and pictures of a sunken destroyer could be empty promises and simple fakes. But me speaking to da Gama, there in the flesh as he watches my eyes, would do the trick?”
“Vital national interests are at stake…. It’s the best the State Department and the national security adviser and everybody else here can come up with, given the deadlines and the distances and travel times involved.”
Jeffrey took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Sir, with respect, how am I supposed to get into Brazil, and keep Challenger meaningfully in the fight? How do I maintain stealth with Axis agents lurking everywhere and von Scheer on the prowl? How do I know there isn’t a car bomb waiting for me?”
“Our communications between here and there have been spotty the last few hours, they’re being tampered with or jammed…. We need to wrap this up quick, before some Axis hacker puts a cork in this conversation, Captain…. We have a plan that makes sense to me from the technical perspective, and da Gama is willing to go along, covertly. It keeps Challenger heading south, with your XO in acting command. You show your face to Getulio da Gama. Bond with the guy as much as you can. He’s supposed to be an excellent judge of character. Your orders are to win him over. Convince him we’re the good guys in this. Get him to perceive the actual threat, in real-time today, so he can take steps to try to fend off a nuclear holocaust. Get him to accept our help, and give us all of his help, to stop the maniacs in Berlin and Buenos Aires before it’s too late.”
“What sort of help from Brazil would make any difference? I’d much prefer to work on my own in international waters.”
“No, no, no. Because of those stolen warheads, everything is changed. American involvement crosses the coasts. This thing is way too big to sneak in just a small commando team covertly. We need outright permission for staging recon drones, deploying Special Forces, getting logistics support, and we need it fast. Your trip had been given the code name Operation Mercury. This also comes from the very top. If you need something from us yesterday, help or backup of any kind while you’re ashore, stick Mercury in the message header.”
“Mercury, like the planet?”
“The swift messenger of the gods from ancient mythology. Mercury. Invoke his name and the bureaucratic Red Sea of tape will part before your eyes.”
Jeffrey hesitated. “Sir, will I be asked to even the score, to give Brazil some of my nuclear weapons?”
“Negative. You will neither give any such weapons to Brazil, nor will you use atomic devices within the two-hundred-mile limit of the continent, under any circumstances whatsoever.”
This complicated things by reducing the options, but even so, Jeffrey felt immense relief. “Yes, sir.”
“I’m having my people here switch into digital mode. Details on how you get from points A to B to C will come through at your end in a text message once I sign off. We don’t know where the von Scheer is, but we do know where she isn’t. The routing instructions you’ll get make use of that to play things safe. And the Brazilians promise to get you back to Challenger as rapidly as they can.”
“Understood.”
“Cheer up,” Hodgkiss said. “I know about your private chat with the president. You did well, Captain. He’s very impressed. Now’s your chance to make it two for two.”
“Yes, sir.” Jeffrey felt doubtful inside. It seemed much more like double or nothing, a game he’d rather not play.
“It’s just like the good old days. When ships’ captains had to go ashore and act as diplomats. When the United States Navy was young, and the ink on the Monroe Doctrine was barely dry. Commodore Perry opening Japan. Teddy Roosevelt sending his Great White Fleet around the world…”
“That was a very long time ago, Admiral.” Hodgkiss is either supremely shrewd or exceedingly desperate.
“Besides,” Hodgkiss added as if he’d read Jeffrey’s mind through the radio, “ever been to Rio de Janeiro?”
“No.” Jeffrey’s head was spinning.
“It’s beautiful. You’ll love it…. And this could be your last chance for a visit before the place gets nuked.”
CHAPTER 28
Ernst Beck had the conn in the von Scheer’s hushed and crowded Zentrale. The steady rhythm of normal changes of watch, submerged in a pressure hull that hadn’t seen the open air in days, gave him a feeling of intimate and cozy timelessness. The rising and setting of the sun, high affairs of state, trivial matters of human beings scurrying about on land in their teeming billions on different continents, all slipped into unreality. It was only the ship’s chronometer set to Berlin time, plus some mental juggling, that let Beck know what hour, what date it might be up on the surface.
It was only the thought of his orders that prevented him from having complete peace of mind.
He eyed his console screens. The ship’s depth was steady at 275 meters — 900 feet. Her speed was thirty knots. She was over very deep water, drawing toward the South American coast. Conflicting ocean currents in what was called the Subtropical Convergence, where warm seas from the equator clashed with cold from frigid Antarctica, garbled local sonar conditions and greatly aided stealth.
Beck was pleased with his crew and with himself. There were no signs at all of enemy pursuit. The only sonar contacts were biologics, as von Scheer carefully stayed far outside civilian shipping lanes. Schools of shrimp, sardines, and tuna clicked and splashed and digested food in this less despoiled part of the ocean. Humpback whales sang hauntingly, evocatively as they migrated south — their normal seasonal movements rendered perhaps more urgent by the human battle erupting far behind.
Beck had even been able to sneak back to the Rocks in the initial acoustic confusion of the atomic skirmish with Challenger to quickly recover von Scheer’s minisub with all the surviving kampfschwimmer. Shedler and his men were vital for what von Scheer needed to do next.
As the German captain scanned through other screen pages using his console menu, track marble, and keyboard, he was surprised to see Stissinger enter the Zentrale from aft, accompanied by a messenger.
“The baron requests a meeting with you in your cabin, sir. At your convenience, he said.” Stissinger rolled his eyes meaningfully. He obviously found the diplomat as tough to take as Beck did.
Beck sighed. “Very well, Einzvo. Now’s as good a time as any. You take over here.” Von Loringhoven was quite an annoyance.
“I have the conn,” Stissinger said. He shot the captain a barely suppressed grin.
“You have the conn.” Beck smiled too; he appreciated Stissinger’s backstopping and support.
“This is the first officer,” Stissinger announced formally. “I have the conn.”
“Aye aye,” the watchstanders acknowledged.
Beck followed the messenger aft toward his own cabin.
Beck saw von Loringhoven waiting for him in the passageway. He opened the door and let the baron precede him, as the guest, then locked the door behind them.
“I suggest we sit first,” von Loringhoven said.
Beck sat, leaving von Loringhoven to take the other chair, the one with its back to the door.
A small ploy, but let him feel slightly vulnerable. I have the power position, facing the door.
Von Loringhoven leaned forward and gave Beck one of his piercing eye-lock gazes.
Typical. Beck returned the gaze, impassive, not blinking. He waited for the other man to speak.
“I think this phase of our relationship has gone on long enough.”
“Baron?”
“We will open the next envelope with your orders soon. But much of what it says, I prefer now to anticipate and tell you in my own words.”
“As you wish.”
“We will have the kampfsc
hwimmer leader Shedler join us when the orders are opened.”
“Fine. I suppose it’s his job to deliver our cargo?” The crated atom bombs, which Beck, while in Norway, had naively thought were bound for Boer South Africa. The bombs I learned at the Rocks, to my horror, are destined for Argentina instead. The bombs to which he gradually reconciled himself by falling back on his unfailing concept of duty and discipline.
“No. I see you do not fully understand.”
Beck tensed. Then he saw it, all of it.
A even worse atrocity. More innocent blood on my hands.
Beck felt his face turn purple with rage — at himself for his prior stupidity, at fate for putting him in such an insanely repugnant role, and at von Loringhoven for being the instrument of his moral self-destruction.
“That American warhead. It was never meant for intelligence purposes! You, you…”
Von Loringhoven held up both hands. “Captain, please. I did not make these decisions. I am under orders as much as you. Do you think I enjoy implementing the necessities of war any more than you do?”
“Frankly, yes! I think you enjoy it a great deal. I think you love power, and you find murder and destruction almost erotic. I’ve met your kind before.”
“Your previous captain?”
“Among others.”
“You hated him.”
Beck looked back within his mind. The memories were unpleasant. “I suppose I thoroughly hated him.”
“Yet you did your job very well.”
“Of course!”
“You’ve no need to raise your voice. I read your formal patrol report. The one you filed after your rescue… The most brilliant tactical gambits played by your last ship were your ideas as einzvo, not your commander’s.”
“Please get to the point.”
“You and I are tools of our government. We have our instructions, distasteful though they may be. We’re participants, both of us, in the continuum of history. Our task is not to make value judgments. The distinction between military and civilian targets is specious. The distinction between war at sea and war on land is a fallacy. The whole purpose of seapower is to influence events on land. Even American naval officers study and memorize that overwhelming, inescapable fact.”
“Then what exactly is our job, if we’re indeed amoral instruments as you say?”
“While Shedler and his men emplace the American warhead, equipped with new timer and arming equipment, you hold von Scheer ready with the cargo of German atom bombs. I leave with the kampfschwimmer, to show my face to old friends and strengthen relationships with the faction that supports us in Argentina.”
“And meanwhile I just linger offshore? Under combat conditions? With atomic war about to erupt between adjacent countries hard on our bow?”
“We’ll be in friendly waters. The Argentine Navy commanders are already behind us in secret. And as you know, there are no hostile contacts for thousands of miles, thanks to your subterfuge verging on genius in the Atlantic Narrows…. Since this is in large part a military operation, all the crucial orders must be issued by you yourself, as commanding officer of the kaiser’s most powerful modern capital ship.”
Beck felt heartsick. “What about our attachés right there?”
“We can’t have divided command on such a crucial and ticklish venture. That’s textbook military science, and it would be the road to disaster for Germany here…. Only you have been briefed on everything. For security. On a submarine at sea observing radio silence, there can’t be careless talk or enemy spies…. And we dare not have our people based in Buenos Aires try to contact Berlin, to verify shocking instructions or shift the blame.”
Beck thought it over, then nodded. Besides the risk of enemy signals intercept, he could easily picture embassy bureaucrats, when confronted with such aggressive escalation of the war, calling home to Germany for help, or stalling… or both. “You seem to know consulate habits well, Baron.”
“This is what I do for a living.”
“Where exactly are you going, then?”
“To a big house, on the pampas.” The fertile prairies of Argentina.
“A big house? You make it sound like a children’s story.”
“Sorry, that’s an expression in Spanish. It means a mansion, a villa. On a working cattle ranch. Owned by a native Argentine, a wealthy friend from when I was stationed in Buenos Aires. Outwardly, my visit is merely a gesture of friendship to a neutral being persecuted by a mutual enemy, the United States abetted by Brazil. The foreign aid you’ll deliver via minisub, the German-made bombs, won’t be sent ashore until long enough after our faked American blast that everything will appear as fully legitimate — so the scheme should make you feel better, Captain, not worse.”
Beck nodded; he couldn’t deny the awful logic of one appalling act designed to justify the other.
“By that time as well,” the baron went on, “and through the selfsame enabling event of the pseudo-American blast, our local friends will have seized control of Argentina’s armed forces and the central government.”
“It’s all so Byzantine.”
“That’s how these things work.”
“If you say so.” Events are moving too fast.
Beck knew his hesitation had to be obvious.
“Think how this will benefit your career,” von Loringhoven said. “It can’t be easy for you, as the son of a dairy farmer. Unless you achieve great victories in battle, and implement grand strategies so ‘Byzantine’ as you call them, you’ll never earn a von after your name if the kaiser still smells cow manure beneath your fingernails.”
“I don’t give a damn about titles.”
“Such titles are hereditary. Do it for your sons.”
Beck sat and pondered. To go backward now would be cowardice and treason. To go forward might well bring prestige and great social advancement, but at the cost of countless innocent lives.
I need more time to deal with this.
“The time approaches,” von Loringhoven said. “Let’s open the envelope, shall we, and then get Lieutenant Shedler in here?”
Beck stood up. He felt something inside him yield and break. There was a terrible sinking in his stomach and chest.
But the feeling of falling inside himself wasn’t endless. It rebounded swiftly, as if his innermost being had hit a core of hardened steel. “I’ll go through the act, Baron. Only make no mistake.”
“Yes?”
“I completely despise you.”
“So long as we achieve what our country asks of us in South America, you’re welcome to detest me as much as you like.”
“All this just rolls right off your back, doesn’t it?”
“I take that as a compliment. No sarcasm intended. You have your talents and I have mine.”
“Suppose this Jeffrey Fuller is smarter than you think? Suppose he’s hunting for us, here, in these waters, now? What if they know we’re giving atom bombs to Argentina? What if they even know we stole one of theirs from that destroyer hulk?”
“Lucky guesses, compromised codes, double agents are always threats. You think High Command are amateurs? Open your safe. Contingency plans for every scenario wait in there for you, and for your kampfschwimmer team. Sink Challenger off Latin America, now, so far from the convoy? Why, then that much the better for you and all your descendants, Captain von Beck.”
CHAPTER 29
The sea was warm and sunlight dappled the surface overhead. Jeffrey — refreshed by another catnap — breathed underwater through his Draeger, embraced by the sea. Felix and a SEAL chief were his dive buddies. He watched for a moment as a large ocean turtle swam by above him, silhouetted by the sun; it paddled rapidly, as if it was in a great hurry. Jeffrey floated effortlessly, weightless, letting his body relax. He drew air in and out of his rebreather mouthpiece rhythmically and evenly. Felix did a last equipment check, gave him a macho thumbs-up, then unclipped the six-foot lanyard attached to Jeffrey’s waist. Jeffrey looked down thr
ough his dive mask and watched. Beneath him was Challenger — from an angle, an aspect, he’d never seen before. The top of her sail was barely thirty feet beneath the surface. She was almost at periscope depth, as shallow as she dared go — just shallow enough for Jeffrey’s pure-oxygen rig not to give him convulsions.
Felix and the chief swam down through the open upper hatch atop the sail. The lower watertight hatch was closed, of course, and would be opened only after the flooded sail trunk was pumped dry. The sail of a nuclear submarine was rarely used as a lockout chamber. But the capability was there. Doing it this way kept the main bulk of the ship as far beneath the waves as possible.
Challenger was a huge black shape, longer than a football field and more than forty feet in diameter. Jeffrey couldn’t see as far as the bow or the stern. The water here was murky as he gazed down, alive with tiny organisms, clouded by their waste, and further obscured by silt from rivers swollen by the rainy season. As he observed her from outside, breathing through his Draeger, Jeffrey felt a mix of pride and concern. He remembered that more than ten dozen people worked inside that looming pressure hull. He prayed that they’d be safe, and he’d be reunited with them soon under favorable circumstances.
Challenger had come close inshore off the coast of Brazil, up on the continental shelf — the water beneath her keel right now was only three hundred feet deep. She was following a safe corridor arranged by President da Gama’s senior naval staff, as laid out in the instructions from Admiral Hodgkiss. This side trip hadn’t helped the schedule any, but the minisub lacked the required range and was much too slow to be of use. Jeffrey’s ship, under Bell’s command, was already running hours late; the atomic torpedoes in all eight tubes had been replaced with conventional ADCAPs.
Jeffrey saw the sail cockpit’s outer streamlining clamshells swing closed. Even this nearby, his ears could register no sounds as Felix and his chief locked back into the ship.
Isolated so suddenly, left all by himself in a state that verged on sensory deprivation, he was struck by a surge of paranoia. What if it’s all a giant trap? Challenger ’s pinned against the coast and the bottom, and now she’s half disarmed.
