by Joe Buff
Crewmen mimicked hissing and booing the villains.
“‘Separately,’” Jeffrey continued, “‘reliable up-to-the-minute intelligence sources in-country confirm no German nuclear warheads are on the loose….’ God be praised for that.”
There was a chorus of sober amens.
Jeffrey cleared his throat again, and held up the message at arm’s length as if it were a formal proclamation. “‘The Brazilian Congress, meeting in special session, has unanimously approved President da Gama’s request for a declaration of war against the Berlin-Boer Axis. Brazil is now one of the Allied Powers. The western side of the Atlantic Narrows is solidly in friendly hands…. Argentina remains neutral, at least for now, while taking active steps to fully restore democratic order and good public health. Her troops on the Brazilian border are standing down.’”
“This is just fabulous, Captain,” Bell exulted. “We whupped the Axis decisively in the whole South American theater!”
“Let’s not take too much credit, XO.” Jeffrey glanced around his control room. “You did great, people. But remember, plenty of others played a big part too. And we still have unfinished business. Major unfinished business.”
“Von Scheer.”
“We’ve taken away Beck’s purpose for being near South America. We need to do one more thing here now, XO.”
“Sir?”
“Give him a very compelling reason to go somewhere else.”
“Besides the convoy?”
Jeffrey nodded. “He needs to first make very sure he reaches the convoy undamaged…. Sonar.”
“Captain?” Milgrom said.
“If we ping on maximum power in the deep sound channel, say at a depth of five thousand feet, how far off do you think the von Scheer’s acoustic intercept might hear us?”
“Let me run a calculation, sir.”
“And if we move south at flank speed, could von Scheer’s signal processors know it from the Doppler effects of multipath sound-ray traces and reverb and so on? Could they tell our depth, within a thousand feet or so?”
“I’ll assume their capabilities are similar to ours.” Milgrom worked her keyboard. The senior-chief sonar supervisor looked on. He suggested some tweaks to the modeling. Milgrom glanced up from her console. “Six hundred miles, at least, Captain. And yes, if we’re making fifty-three knots at five thousand feet when we ping they’d know.”
“Good. Then they’ll have no doubt whatsoever we’re really Challenger.” Jeffrey double-checked the nautical chart windowed on his console screen. “That should be more than enough to do it.” And we’ll be safely outside the von Scheer ’s missile range. “Ping once now in normal search mode, just in case there’s a U-boat around, or an Argentine diesel sub that didn’t get the word the Buenos Aires coup is off.”
A high-pitched screech went out through the water. Jeffrey waited for possible target echoes to come back.
“No submerged contacts,” Milgrom stated.
Jeffrey gave helm orders to Meltzer.
“Ahead flank, aye,” Meltzer acknowledged in his thick Bronx accent. “Make my depth five thousand feet, aye.” He turned his engine order dial. “Maneuvering answers, ahead flank, sir.” He pushed his control wheel forward gently. Challenger’s bow nosed down, then leveled off. “My depth is five thousand feet, sir.” Challenger’s speed continued mounting steadily.
“Very well, Helm… Now we let the von Scheer know we’re coming, in no uncertain terms. Sonar, make some noise.”
The sonarmen got their equipment reconfigured. Soon an almost deafening deep rumble, like a foghorn, pierced the hull from the big sonar sphere at the bow. It made the deck and the very air in the control room seem to hum, above the vibrations and shaking Challenger always made at flank speed. Jeffrey’s toes tingled, and his clothing rippled oddly against his skin.
“No new sonar contacts, Captain,” Milgrom reported routinely after a while. “All active surface contacts within our detection range already held on one or more passive arrays.”
“Very well, Sonar. Keep it up.” Low-frequency sound waves had the longest range before the underwater signal died off. Jeffrey’s intent was not to find Beck but shoo him away with finality — before Berlin could do something insane.
Between the powerful blasts, Jeffrey turned to Bell. “XO, back to my stateroom for a minute… Nav, take the conn.”
Sessions acknowledged.
“Chief of the watch,” Jeffrey told COB with immense satisfaction, “secure from battle stations.”
Ernst Beck sat alone in his stateroom with the doors locked, both the one into the passageway and the one into the head he shared with von Loringhoven.
On his desk was the latest ELF message from Berlin. Like all ELF messages, it was short. The alphabetic cipher blocks conveyed, in essence, “Proceed at once Africa. Attack enemy convoy soonest possible.”
Beck was greatly relieved, but his relief went only so far. He was trading one form of Armageddon for another — the battle against Challenger would be violent, high-risk.
But he now had to inform his guest, the baron: Von Scheer was ordered away from South America immediately, leaving that whole continent untouched by nuclear fire.
Before Beck could stand to go talk to von Loringhoven, his intercom light blinked.
“Captain.”
“Sonar, sir,” Werner Haffner said. “Distant acoustic intercept contact bearing north. Extreme detection range, source submerged. Depth and speed of contact confirm positive identification, USS Challenger, heading our way at flank speed.”
Beck rushed into the Zentrale, took the conn, and issued helm orders to turn due east and evade.
Jeffrey and Bell sat down, and Jeffrey turned his laptop on again. This time he called up a large-scale nautical chart of the whole South Atlantic, with the bottom terrain highlighted.
“I have a search plan, XO. It’s simple. I’m completely changing tactics.”
“Tell me more, Skipper. More ass-backward Mahan?”
“No. Ass-backward Jeffrey Fuller.”
“Huh?”
“You said it yourself before. Searching for von Scheer on the way over here, we struck out completely.”
“Yes.”
“Now that Sonar’s making doubly sure the von Scheer’s on the run, you realize, don’t you, XO? We’ve scored a strategic and tactical victory against her without ever firing a shot. Without ever even holding sonar contact once in this theater…”
Bell gazed at the overhead for a moment, digesting this, then tapped his fingers to his lips, digesting it more. “You know, Captain, you’re right! This has to be one for the history books. A masterstroke of thinking outside the box!”
Jeffrey was feeling rather pleased with himself. As he gradually had time to reflect on it, the magnitude of what he’d accomplished was almost frightening.
I’ve also made some key people in Berlin extremely angry at me, in a different and worse way than ever before…. Those people have long memories. This frightened Jeffrey too.
He took a deep breath, and let it out. “Anyway, here’s my new search plan.”
“Keep going active as we transit east?”
“No. We already played that particular hand at the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks, and you see where that got us against Ernst Beck. Ditto for searching on passive with our fancy triple fiber-optic towed array.”
Bell nodded. “Shot nerves and ulcers for a week. Empty hours of worry for the safety of our families back home.”
Jeffrey smiled. “Now we intentionally avoid all contact with the von Scheer as we cross the South Atlantic. We waste no time on search tactics during the transit. Instead we make flank speed as much as possible, and hide in the bottom terrain on the way. In the meantime, I’m making you command duty officer.” Effectively, acting captain. “I’ll be on vacation.”
“Sir?”
“For the next two days I plan to relax. Catch up on sleep, eat regular meals, watch a movie or two in the enliste
d mess, and hang out with the crew. Maybe even sit in on one of the training classes, pick up some of the nuts and bolts to broaden my mind, who knows? There’s a cool book I want to finish, something Felix recommended, by this famous surreal Argentine writer, Borges.”
“Reasoning behind all this, sir?”
“My intention is to swing north well away from von Scheer’s probable track, and do an end around, and ambush him from in front when I’m nice and refreshed.”
Bell looked at the laptop. “But the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is huge, sir! There must be two thousand miles of broken terrain he could hide in, running north-south, to take the relief convoy from the rear from almost anywhere.”
“Except with the geography, that isn’t what he’ll do.”
“Sir?”
“He needs to move carefully, to be on the lookout for us. Since he seems to know how Orpheus works, he’ll also have to go very slow, or go very shallow, whenever he nears an old phone cable. All this will limit his mean speed of advance, correct?”
“Correct. But Beck will be bitterly furious now, and ruthlessly driven to score big kills and get in his last licks!”
“By the time he’d reach that part of the ridge starting from Argentina, the convoy would be much more than five hundred miles beyond it. His supersonic cruise missiles won’t have the range…. So he’ll have to head here.” Jeffrey tapped the map with a pencil. “The Walvis Ridge. A lengthy undersea offshoot of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Mountains and fissures that slice up toward the southern flank of the Congo-Basin pocket like a dagger.”
Bell looked at the map and worked his jaw. “I think I see what you’re getting at, sir.”
“Both sides of the Walvis Ridge are very deep and wide and flat. The Cape Plain just to its south, the Angola Basin right on its north. So the Walvis is narrow and straight. All this’ll channel Beck quite nicely for us as he chases the convoy.”
Bell pondered. “The overhang of Saharan Africa corrals the convoy from one flank. You’re saying he can’t go for the convoy’s rear, that with the time and distance involved it’s too far north from Buenos Aires? So he’ll go for its southern exposure, closest to friendly waters off greater South Africa?… I concur. The way the Walvis slants northeast, it’ll let Beck make up for lost time and bring him in good missile range of all our ships, right outside the two-hundred-mile limit. He goes nuclear and plasters our convoy hard at the very last minute.”
“If Beck gets that far. We’ll be waiting for him at the southwest end of the ridge, where it first branches off from the Atlantic’s central tectonic spreading seam. Here.” Jeffrey touched the exact spot on the chart. “South of this flyspeck of land, the tiny Tristan da Cunha Island group. This is where we cut the von Scheer off. This is where we fight the endgame, deep and using nuclear fish two thousand miles from Africa.”
CHAPTER 38
Jeffrey’s vacation at sea had come to an end. He was marking its close with a long hot shower, after a final good night’s sleep. Jeffrey thought back on the past two days, during which he’d forced his mind to stay in low gear and mingled with his crew — doing things for once in spite of the war, rather than because of it.
One high point had been that, by coincidence and because of the lull, two of his enlisted men finished their qualifications: they’d earned their Silver Dolphins. The presentation to the honorees, by their captain, was a cherished tradition — and always a festive occasion too. Jeffrey had most of his crew, including available officers and chiefs, crammed into the enlisted mess for the ceremony. He gave a speech, read passages from the stirring memoirs of great submariners from times and wars past, and urged everyone on to bigger and better efforts as a team.
The occasion, and his vacation in general, were marred for him by only one thing, and it came from outside the hull. The closer Challenger got to Africa, the more clearly and loudly passive sonar picked up the noise of the convoy battle. Some blasts could be identified as nuclear torpedoes. Bigger ones were airdropped atomic depth charges. Others, milder, were cruise-missile airbursts, their energy passed through the water.
There was no way for Challenger to judge who was winning. The convoy escorts or the U-boats? The land-based antiship cruise missiles, or the naval and air-force suppressive counterstrikes against the mobile launchers and their radars and command-and-control? All Jeffrey and his people knew was that the fighting was growing more vicious, more destructive, as the convoy drove unflinchingly closer to land to relieve and reinforce the beleaguered Allied-held Central African pocket. But the convoy formation was surely more and more ragged, the escort ships increasingly worn down. The sudden arrival of a super-stealthy SSGN fresh on the scene, with a massive salvo of nuclear-tipped supersonic cruise missiles attacking from the convoy’s vulnerable southern flank, might tip the balance decisively — in the wrong direction.
Certainly, if I fail to protect the convoy from the von Scheer here and now, not only will the war effort suffer badly but I’ll be personally finished, disgraced — prior Medal or not.
The navy was Jeffrey’s chosen profession, his livelihood, his calling. He also knew that even if he survived this war and the Allies won, dealing with the aftermath emotionally would be difficult. The best way, for him, to make sense of the chaos and sacrifice and slaughter, to heal the mind-tearing randomness of who lived and who died, would be to stay on active duty. The best way he knew to honor those who’d fallen would be to carry on in uniform himself, on their behalf. Yet all that might be ripped from him by brutal Washington politics, his career truncated by factors beyond his control. He’d be cast up on the beach forever, bereft, just as his father, Michael Fuller, had cautioned. The thought of that pained Jeffrey far more than the thought of being killed.
Jeffrey knew the stakes were just as high, both strategically and personally, for Ernst Beck as they were for him. The enemy captain had failed off South America. As Bell warned Jeffrey two days ago, the German would be fired up, red-hot, burning for achievement and revenge — and he would make very sure that this time he didn’t fail.
Jeffrey said one final heartfelt prayer that he’d guessed right, that the von Scheer would come along the Walvis Ridge. Then he turned off the shower and toweled dry. As he dressed he glanced at his bed.
Depending on how things go, the next sleep I ever see might well be my and my entire crew’s eternal rest.
Jeffrey remembered what Admiral Hodgkiss had told him in the beginning: In a one-for-one exchange against the von Scheer, to defend the convoy and assure the relief of the Congo-Basin pocket, Challenger and all aboard her were expendable.
Jeffrey had his ship at battle stations. All compartments reported manned and ready in record time. Everyone in the control room shared the electric feeling, a mix of excitement and stress: the final showdown was about to unfold, in an ongoing clash with the mighty von Scheer that already was Challenger’s longest continuous engagement during the war — and probably with the highest stakes the crew had ever fought for.
Jeffrey called his weapons officer, Lieutenant Torelli, to take the conn. He asked Lieutenant Willey, the engineer, to send one of his junior officers forward to act as fire control.
“XO, Sonar,” Jeffrey said, “join me and Lieutenant Sessions at the navigation plotting table. It’s strategy time.”
Bell and Milgrom gathered with Jeffrey and Sessions at the back of the control room. They grouped around the desk-high digital navigation console. The assistant navigator, a senior chief, worked with the enlisted men on the vital task of tracking the ship’s exact position and warning of navigational hazards.
“Show me a chart of everything,” Jeffrey said, “from the whole west coast of Africa out to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.”
The assistant navigator worked his keyboard. The chart appeared on a wide-screen display. Land edged the top and the right side of the picture — there was an upside-down L-shaped bend in the very long African shoreline, at Cameroon. Jeffrey and his officers leaned closer to study the
chart; these caucuses always helped his people bond.
The ship was at a depth of ten thousand feet, in the foothills of the Walvis Ridge. The control room was rigged for red. Preparing for an attack, the compartment was crowded. Almost two dozen people manned every console seat or stood in the aisles. There was a heavy sense of expectation, a strong drive to contribute to the larger fight. Noise came over the sonar speakers, amplified from in the distance.
“Listen to that,” Sessions said.
Far to the north, the convoy battle raged. Dozens of cargo ships and warships of every type — and navy auxiliaries ranging from deep-draft fleet-replenishment oilers to ammunition carriers — churned and throbbed and growled their way through the sea. Active sonars on the hulls of frigates and cruisers pinged from the surface. Dipping sonars lowered from antisubmarine helos probed above and below the thermal layer. Almost countless SSQ-75 active sonobuoys pinged from deep on the ocean floor. Friendly fast-attack subs worked hard too, unheard and unseen. The air battle over the ocean, and inland past the African shore, Jeffrey could only guess at and try to picture in his mind. The shattering fear and stark terror of all the combat, the fury and the agony, he could only project from memories of his own exposure to war.
“The antisubmarine searches are intensifying,” Milgrom said.
Jeffrey tried not to think about the suffering of troops and civilians, trapped in the pocket for almost nine months. Malnourished, wounded, badly short of medical supplies, ravaged by emerging new strains of Lassa fever, O’nyong nyong fever, hemorrhagic fever, cholera, those people needed help soon. The eastern flank of the pocket was protected by natural barriers: the Great Rift Valley was the best antitank trap in the world. The north-south string of Lake Tanganyika, Lake Victoria, Lake Turkana, and lesser lakes, halted any major enemy troop advance.
