by Joe Buff
Jeffrey grabbed the handset. “COB, I need another tube, now.”
“We’re doing everything we can, sir! We got wounded down here! We got men working block and tackle loading the weapons….”
Jeffrey clicked off.
“Helm, right full rudder, make your course one five zero.” South-southeast, directly away from the Tirpitz.
Harrison acknowledged, shouting, and his voice cracked. The ship turned, banking too hard. Harrison lost control, and Challenger went into a snap roll — she’d heeled so much from the turn, her rudder began to act like sternplanes, forcing her down in a flank-speed dive. She plunged below three thousand feet before Harrison could recover.
If we had a steel hull, Jeffrey knew, we’d’ve gone right through our crush depth.
COB called on the intercom to complain about the wild maneuvers. They made it that much harder for his men to do their work.
“Get that unit loaded, COB, and load another as soon as I shoot.”
The second Shkval was louder and louder. At last tube three was reloaded. Jeffrey and Bell armed the nuclear fish. Jeffrey ordered it fired. The unit rushed at the incoming Shkval. The Shkval kept rushing at Challenger. This time the range to intercept was barely outside the Shkval warhead’s kill radius against Challenger.
Bell detonated the wire-guided torpedo as a preemptive blast to smash the Shkval. The Mark 48’s maximum yield was a tenth of the Shkval’s. But the desperate interception was so close to Challenger, the shock force was almost unbearable. The ship was slammed from astern. Challenger bucked and heaved hard. Objects broke loose and flew around the control room. Sonarmen’s headphones were knocked from their heads. The vibrations were so vicious Jeffrey’s vision was blurred.
As the reverb cleared, Kathy shouted that another Shkval was already in the water. Jeffrey waited impatiently while another nuclear Mark 48 was loaded by hand in his only working torpedo tube. He ordered it fired at the incoming Shkval, and ordered another fish loaded.
Again Bell smashed the inbound Shkval, too close, and once more Challenger rocked. Once more things broke loose and crewmen were injured.
Again torpedomen rushed to load another Mark 48. Again the Tirpitz launched another Shkval. Jeffrey reached for the handset. “COB, we need to get that tube reloaded faster.”
“We’re trying, Captain!” COB panted from exertion. In the background, over the handset, Jeffrey could hear clanks and thunking as the men struggled with block and tackle; he heard the torpedomen grunt and curse as they worked.
At last the unit was ready in the tube. Bell fired. The interception range was getting closer and closer to Challenger.
Jeffrey realized this engagement was a battle of attrition: an endurance contest trading blow for blow. But the enemy captain must see I’ve got a very slow rate of fire. How many Shkvals does the Tirpitz still have? How long can my men keep loading and firing like this, with just one tube and by hand, before they all drop from exhaustion?
How much more punishment like this can Challenger take?
Again Bell smashed the inbound Shkval, much too close to Challenger. Once again Challenger rocked, worse than before. Sweating, swearing men rushed to load another fish. Again the Tirpitz fired.
They’re shooting their Shkvals faster than we can shoot back. We lose more ground with every salvo. Our margin to intercept each inbound weapon wears thinner and thinner — soon it will be lethally small.
“Tube three ready in all respects!” Bell shouted.
“Tube three shoot!”
Another atomic fish leapt from the tube, and turned, and charged the Shkval as Challenger tore in the opposite direction.
But the German captain was smart. This time he’d set his Shkval, with its much bigger warhead, to blow before Bell’s fish could get in range.
The blast was so loud it went past Jeffrey’s real ability to hear. There was just a terrible pressure in his head and a painful dissonant ringing. The sharp force of the blast caught Challenger’s hull and pounded Jeffrey’s feet and bruised his ass. Crewmen were knocked to the deck, and some were knocked unconscious. Light fixtures shattered, console screens darkened, locked cabinets burst open. Manuals and clipboards and metal tools became projectiles. Chips of paint and particles of heat insulation, and leftover construction dirt, were thrown into the air. Jeffrey felt the grit in his eyes and he coughed as he breathed it in.
Jeffrey’s hearing came back slowly. As the numbness in his battered brain subsided, he saw Bell waving urgently to get his attention. The phone talker also was yelling something, and Jeffrey’s intercom light flashed.
“A Mark forty-eight has broken loose in the torpedo room!” Bell shouted in Jeffrey’s ear.
The noise and shaking and aftershocks of the Shkval blast went on and on. Jeffrey answered the intercom. It was COB, repeating Bell’s terrible news, telling Jeffrey there was no way they could load the one working tube. In the background, over the handset, Jeffrey heard desperate orders, and shouting, and agonized screams.
“Get more damage-control teams in there!” Jeffrey said to Bell. Jeffrey turned to the phone talker. “Medical corpsman to the torpedo room on the double!”
Jeffrey waited. He forced himself to sit and exude a sense of control and let his crew do their jobs.
Jeffrey squeezed his armrests involuntarily, and just rode the ship.
Challenger shimmied and rolled, fighting her way through troubled water, still making flank speed. Jeffrey knew each shimmy and roll would throw that errant fish in the torpedo room even more, as it darted and veered and banged around, literally like a loose cannon.
“Weapon in torpedo room is fractured!” Bell reported.
Then Jeffrey heard the thing he dreaded most. “Weapon’s fuel is leaking, Captain. Fuel leak in the torpedo room!”
“Countermeasures tubes are inoperable,” the chief at the ship-control station yelled, almost as an afterthought.
“We’re defenseless,” Wilson said. “One more Shkval and we’ve had it.”
“This can’t be happening,” a fire controlman whined.
“Cut it out,” Bell told him. “I’m too underdressed to die.” Bell was still wearing his boxer shorts.
Crewmen laughed at Bell’s remark, but Jeffrey knew the laughs verged on hysteria. The wait for the next incoming Shkval was driving everyone mad. “We’ve been in worse fixes than this,” Jeffrey said in a loud voice to Bell. Jeffrey tried to sound much more blasé than he felt, pretending to make idle conversation, to reassure and steady his men.
Bell nodded, his neck muscles visibly tight. The control-room crew grew silent.
Jeffrey listened to the ocean around them boil and roar, from all the effects of the nuclear blasts that had already taken place.
Another aftershock from the most recent Shkval hit Challenger.
The phone talker looked up, very alarmed. “Fire, fire, fire in the torpedo room. Fuel spill in torpedo room has ignited.”
Jeffrey turned to Bell, and the two men made eye contact. Bell’s face said more than words could: there were fifty weapons on the holding racks around that fire, with tons of volatile fuel, and tons more of high explosives and a lot of fissile material.
“Get down there, XO. Take charge at fighting the fire.” Jeffrey dearly wanted to rush to the torpedo room himself. But his job as captain required that he remain in the control room, to stay in overall charge of the ship and maintain the big tactical picture. He caught himself squeezing his armrests in a death grip as he sat there. He forced his fingers to lighten up by a supreme exercise of will.
Jeffrey deeply trusted Bell. But Jeffrey knew Bell’s efforts would only prolong the inevitable — any moment Tirpitz would set loose another Shkval. There was nothing Jeffrey could do now about it but make Challenger continue to flee, and the Shkval, once launched, would gain on Jeffrey’s ship at an inescapable 250 knots net closing speed. Everybody, including Commodore Wilson, knew this simple, cold-blooded fact.
At th
e first word of the fire, the crew had begun to grab their emergency air-breather masks. They plugged them into the air manifolds in pipes that lined the overhead. The control room filled with eerie hissing and whooshing, as people inhaled and exhaled through the valves of their masks — and waited to die. Jeffrey felt an icy emptiness in his chest — never one for denial of harsh realities around him, Jeffrey finally started to run out of hope. He caught a whiff of acrid, toxic fumes, spreading from the torpedo-room fire. Before he had his mask fully on, Jeffrey also smelled urine. Someone, in panic, had wet himself — Harrison, at the helm.
Bell doggedly fed Jeffrey progress reports through the intercom. He’d put on a flameproof suit and was supervising near the fire. Bell’s voice was hoarse from bellowing orders over the noise and pandemonium. He sounded muffled through the breather mask of a portable respirator pack. From exertion and overexcitement, Bell panted raggedly.
Bell said men were rushing to rig hoses and set up the fire-fighting foam. Meanwhile others did what they could with carbon dioxide extinguishers, with chemical powder extinguishers, with anything they had. It was difficult to work in the huge but cramped torpedo room, with clearance between the rows of holding racks barely as wide as one man’s shoulders. Down on their hands and knees, avoiding the hot spots of burning fuel, dodging the leaky Mark 48 that still ran loose, slowed the men down badly. Bell said the deck was slippery with blood. The heat was intense and the smoke was thick and a weapon would cook off soon.
Jeffrey was out of alternatives. Defeat tasted rancid and foul. It seemed to force its way down his throat, cutting like broken glass.
Jeffrey heard another roar outside the hull. Here it comes.
“Shkval in the water!” Kathy screamed.
This is it, Jeffrey told himself. All we can do is keep running, and that thing is six times faster than we are. The only question is, will the Shkval kill us before our own torpedo room blows up?
Jeffrey looked around him. Most of the crewmen were barely half his age. They were much too young for their lives to end like this. He saw some of them holding their heads in despair, others pounding their consoles in impotent rage, others piously crossing themselves. He wished he could think of a way to somehow offer them final comfort.
“Captain,” Kathy shouted through her mask, “Shkval signal strength is not increasing!.. Captain, assess Master One’s Shkval is on a hot run in the tube! Assess the Shkval on von Tirpitz is malfunctioning!”
“On speakers!”
There was a rumbling explosion in the distance, then a louder, heaving blast, then a whole series of sharp detonations.
“Assess weapons in Master One’s torpedo room have cooked off!”
Jeffrey listened to the horrible sounds as Tirpitz died. He heard a last dull boom as the enemy sub sank through her crush depth, when the unflooded parts at the back of the German submarine caved in.
“XO reports fire in our torpedo room is extinguished!” the phone talker yelled. “Fire relight watch is set!.. Corpsman states no fatal injuries! No radiological leakage from damaged weapons!”
Jeffrey felt the weight of a thousand worlds lift from his shoulders. Challenger and her people would survive, at least until the next fight.
But he’d never felt so small, so inconsequential. Jeffrey hadn’t won this battle. It was the enemy who’d lost. Over a hundred men on Tirpitz paid the ultimate price for playing with undersea fire, using such high-risk weapons as the Shkval. There could be little satisfaction in this sort of victory, only a humbling realization of the role of sheer luck in war, and a recognition of one’s own personal insignificance.
Kathy, and Commodore Wilson, and the rest of Jeffrey’s crew all felt it too. There was no jubilation at the destruction of Master One, no cheering, no celebrating the kill. Just the noise of twenty air-breather masks, overly rapid hiss-whooshing, as everyone hyperventilated from fear and now giddy relief. Everybody was very quiet, turned inward, as each person in their own way tried to deal with having faced their own mortality, having really thought, having known, that they would die.
FOURTEEN
Simultaneously, on Voortrekker, in the eastern Indian Ocean
Gunther Van Gelder felt relaxation and inner joy, as much as this was possible for a sailor at sea in a war. He had the conn in Voortrekker’s control room, and Jan ter Horst was asleep.
Voortrekker was doing what she did best, moving quietly near the ocean floor in water three kilometers deep — snaking through the massifs and fissures of the Mid — Indian Ocean Ridge. These endless undersea volcanic mountains and valleys formed the ideal landscape in which Voortrekker could hide. To Van Gelder, watching the stark, razor-sharp faults and escarpments go by on the ship’s gravimeter display, it was the ideal place for him to sightsee.
The ship made only seven knots, for safety as well as for stealth. A remote-controlled off-board probe was deployed well ahead of Voortrekker, scouting for enemy mines and hydrophone grids. The probe used special cameras to study the bottom in Voortrekker’s path, and Van Gelder watched the images raptly.
Starfish in large groupings waved their arms on the ground. Huge jellyfish rippled by in the slow and steady bottom current. Other deep-sea creatures, with hideous black faces or bodies too weird to describe, came to examine or challenge Voortrekker’s probe. Diffuse glows, bright swirling starbursts, stabbing flashes of sheet lightning, all lit up the scene, in shades of otherworldly blue and electric white and vivid yellow. This was bioluminescence, Van Gelder knew. The ocean all around him, even this deep, was alive.
Voortrekker passed another black-smoker hydrothermal vent field. Van Gelder heard it rumbling and gurgling on sonar, and sent the probe closer to look. Again, here was life. Primordial microbes fed a teeming community of albino crabs and giant clams and thick red-blooded tube worms.
Until recently, only a handful of scientists had visited places like this. Few men and women had ever seen firsthand what Van Gelder was seeing. To be here now, to witness such things with his own eyes, made Gunther Van Gelder feel himself a very privileged man.
On Challenger, after the rendezvous with the minisub
The ASDS minisub was safely stowed in Challenger’s in-hull hangar bay. The mini’s passengers were shaken up by the nearby Challenger-versus-Tirpitz fight, but they were otherwise unharmed. Once again, Challenger rushed along at flank speed, heading south-southwest inside the Gulf Stream. Jeffrey sat in his stateroom, pecking away at his laptop — commanders who neglected admin and paperwork might not get their fourth stripe. Jeffrey paused, agonized, typed another sentence, shook his head, deleted it, and sat there. His heart sank. The more he thought about his tactics against the von Tirpitz, the more he thought he’d never get that fourth stripe in any case, because he didn’t deserve it.
Maybe the higher-ups were right, sending Commodore Wilson along as a nursemaid. Idly, and forlornly, Jeffrey wondered how many more millions of innocent fish and whales and dolphins he’d helped kill in this latest battle. Challenger’s crew was shielded from radiation sickness by all the water between her and the bursting warheads, and by the thickness of her hull, and the ship could quickly leave the contaminated area. The local sea life was stuck, and the effect of the war on the seafood industry and beachside resorts was devastating already.
Someone knocked. It was Bell, there to present his regular evening report.
“Sorry, XO, I lost track of the time.”
“No problem, Skipper.”
“Come on in. Sit.”
Bell made himself comfortable quickly; he seemed matured, more well-anchored internally, and more outwardly positive about life since becoming a father. Jeffrey envied him these things.
Bell filled Jeffrey in on the status of the cleanup and repairs in the torpedo room. It would take a lot of work to custom-machine replacement parts to get the torpedo autoloader functioning again. The countermeasures launchers — which took up half the space in the medical corpsman’s cubicle back near the enlisted
mess — also needed more time to be made serviceable after the battle damage.
Jeffrey got up and shut the door and sat down again. “How are the wounded doing?”
“Our one potential crisis, sir, is the man whose arm was crushed by that loose torpedo. Circulation past the shoulder is not good. With what little more the corpsman can do for him here, he might lose the arm.”
“Amputate?”
Bell nodded.
“Then we need to get the guy to a proper hospital…. With a minisub in our hangar now, maybe we can drop him off, covertly. I’ll talk to the commodore.”
“It would be important for morale for you to do something, Captain. Nobody wants to see the guy get gangrene and get sent home to his family maimed.”
Jeffrey hesitated. “XO, what’s your read on morale in general?” Jeffrey knew morale in war was a very volatile thing. Submarine crews, living in such close quarters, felt a strong sense of community and reacted emotionally as a group. To be at their best, they needed steady support and constant input of encouragement and good news. Jeffrey already intended to tour the ship again this evening, for exactly that purpose.
“Actually, sir,” Bell said, “morale went from somewhat bad to rather good in a hurry, because of the Tirpitz.” Bell smiled. “The men think you’re a lucky captain, Captain. They’re happy to be sailing with you now.”
Jeffrey frowned. “What’s the emphasis on the ‘now’ part?”
Bell took a deep breath. “The guys were troubled to see us ordered to leave dry dock before we were ready, missing qualified men and stuck with two dozen clueless replacements. They thought we were taking too many chances, and we wouldn’t come back.”
Jeffrey grunted. He couldn’t entirely disagree with their reasoning. “But you say morale is up?”
Bell nodded.
Jeffrey didn’t want to come across to Bell as insecure, but he was puzzled. “Explain the mechanics of this to me.”
“Our meeting the Tirpitz at all was a sheer coincidence, one-in-a-million odds. The fact the score came out Challenger one, Tirpitz nothing, when Tirpitz had us dead to rights, was also pure random chance.”
