by Joe Buff
Ilse just hoped they knew what they were doing.
Besides, fair is fair. The look-forward Mouse Roar pings helped Challenger, too. Her mine-avoidance hydrophones on the front of the sail intercepted them, so the CACC crew could watch the bottom for obstructions without radiating.
Ilse checked the nav chart again. They'd just skirted several known wrecks to starboard, and the Stora Middlegrund shoal lay further off in that direction. Above her head, the Delta hissed and whirred and thrummed. Again she thought of all those hydrogen bombs.
"Captain," Sessions said from the nav table, "pings stolen from the Mouse Roar indicate several more wrecks to starboard and port, dead ahead and not on our charts." Bottommapping for navigation was his job.
"Confirmed," Kathy said. "Wreck seeping and settling noises."
"Very well, Nav and Sonar." Jeffrey called up the virtual imagery. "Detritus from a recent Royal Air Force raid, maybe." He saw a hummock, a bump, in the bottom terrain — overhead clearance would be tight.
Challenger topped the hummock.
"Captain," Sessions shouted, "more debris dead ahead inside the shipping lane!"
Jeffrey saw it, too. "Helm, can we maneuver past?"
"Negative," Meltzer said. "Insufficient lateral clearance due to wreckage."
"Master thirty-four blade-rate unchanged," Kathy said.
"He isn't slowing," Bell said. "He has plenty of room."
"Sir," Meltzer said, "our momentum's too great. Advise back two thirds smartly or we'll hit an obstruction!"
Jeffrey thought fast. A quick reverse would make the pump-jet cavitate. The Delta would hear. He studied the screens.
"Maintain course and speed. Take us through. We can make it."
"Captain," Bell said. Jeffrey ignored him.
Meltzer and COB struggled at their controls. There was barely six feet between Challenger's sail and the Delta now. There was less than that between Challenger's keel and the mass of tangled steel.
Water squeezed between the two subs' rounded bows forced Challenger down. Meltzer pulled up to keep from shredding the sonar dome and making a terrible datum. Challenger bucked hard.
Jeffrey saw COB reach for the collision alarm. "Belay that!" Too much noise.
Challenger's sail, hardened for under-ice operation, kissed the Delta's belly with a thud. Jeffrey's heart almost stopped. He waited for damage reports. He waited for the Russian captain to react: All he need do was dash to one side and signal for help. The Swedes and Germans would finish Challenger off.
"No blade-rate or aspect change on the Delta," Kathy said.
"We're past the obstructions," Sessions said.
Jeffrey shook his head, more wide awake than he ever wanted to be. "They must have thought they hit some bobbing debris, neutrally buoyant like waterlogged wood, missed by the Mouse Roar."
In unison, twenty people in the CACC breathed again.
Jeffrey told himself this was Challenger's first collision at sea. "Assistant Navigator, record in the deck log that I take full responsibility for this mishap. Note that the helmsman and chief of the watch did their jobs well."
Jeffrey went back to watching his screens. He wondered how Devron TWELVE — Challenger's squadron — and Group TWO — the commanding rear admiral — and the higher-ups would react to this part of his patrol report… assuming he lived to file one. Jeffrey blushed. What would Captain Wilson think?
* * *
Half an hour later, Kathy reported, "Master thirty-four aspect change. Master thirty-four is turning to starboard." Jeffrey eyed the chart. "Don't follow. The water there's too shallow."
"Why's he heading that way?" Bell said. "The route through the Great Belt channel's twice as long as the run due south."
"Helm, make turns for four knots. Let the Delta pull away from us." Meltzer acknowledged. Jeffrey heard the boomer's twirling screw slice overhead. His rudder would come very close to Challenger's sail.
"I think, XO," Jeffrey said when the Delta was past, "he's not going to St. Petersburg after all. He's heading for Kiel."
Bell sputtered. "What's a Russian boomer doing visiting one of the biggest German naval bases?"
"I doubt it's a transfer of ownership. The Russians wouldn't go that far…. No, I'll bet some of her missile silos are full of high-value cargo. Strategic metals, spare parts for the Russian weapons the Germans have already bought. "
"They expect to keep this a secret?"
"They know about the solar storm, too," Jeffrey said. "Any spy satellite that didn't shut down by now would've fried…. By the time this storm is past, he'll be underway again, either back into the North Sea or submerged in the Baltic proper."
"It's outrageous," Bell said. "How can they call themselves neutral, pulling an act like this?"
"Their H-bombs and ICBMs, that's how."
"Sirs," Kathy said, "think of Churchill and Roosevelt, with Lend-Lease before Pearl Harbor."
Touché, Jeffrey thought. While still officially neutral, FDR gave the Brits fifty old destroyers.
"Meanwhile, folks, we just lost our umbrella, and we have thirty miles to go before we can drop off the minisub…. Plus, as a belligerent, we're violating Swedish neutrality ourselves."
Jeffrey ordered the helm to hold position on autohover. Now that the Delta was clear, he wanted time for the sonar and target tracking teams to update the tactical plot.
"New contact on the bow sphere and starboard wide array," Kathy said. "Range and bearing consistent with Master thirty-four."
"What is it?"
"A ship's whistle, sir." A foghorn.
"Good." Fog meant visibility would be poor. "We'll give the fog more time to thicken." Jeffrey was suspicious. Except for the Delta, and an unknown German warship distant and drawing away from Challenger, it was too quiet up there.
"Sir," Kathy said. "New passive contact on the port wide-aperture array… Surface contact, in our baffles, contact held by echoes off the shore."
"Where is it?" Jeffrey said.
"Wait, please…. Best estimate bearing three eight five, range four thousand yards. Signal strength increasing."
"She's awful close," Bell said.
"Can you classify the contact?"
"Wait, please," Kathy said, working frantically with her sonarmen. "MTU and MWM diesel engines now. Assess as a Class three-fifty-one minesweeper control ship, sir, and a triplet of Troika HL three-fifty-one remote-controlled minesweeping drones."
"The drones have magnetic minesweep solenoids," Bell said. "Retrofitted with minehunting sonar, too. Also able to trail two antimine paravanes."
"They're making sure the channel stays clear," Jeffrey said.
"They must have left the occupied Danish coast after the Delta passed through."
"Hmmm," Jeffrey said. "Are they following the Delta? Maybe they only trust the Russians so far."
"No, sir," Bell said. "Fire control indicates contacts not pursuing Delta's track. They're coming in our direction, speed nine knots."
They'll be on top of us in barely ten minutes. They can't possibly miss us…. Are they purposely trying to flush us?
There was nowhere for Challenger to dodge aside here. She had to move forward, at least as fast as the minesweeper, which was faster than Jeffrey — submerged in such shallow water — really dared go. He prayed, then ordered Meltzer to speed up. The minesweeper didn't react.
* * *
Two hours later, alone in her stateroom, Ilse stripped naked. She began to don her clothing for the raid: a fresh pair of panties and bra, South African manufacture. Thick wool socks and long underwear, top and bottom, U.S. Navy issue. Over that went her jet black dry suit, except for the SpecWar combat booties and flameproof gloves and thermal hood. She left the front of her dry suit partly unzipped. Cold as Ilse felt, she held off bundling up or she'd work up a sweat. Later, wet underwear could cost her her life.
On second thought, Ilse pulled on the gloves — her hands were ice cubes. At least they weren't shaking, yet.
She took one last long look at the photo of her family, taped to the bulkhead inside her rack. She wondered if there was an afterlife.
* * *
Jeffrey sat at the command console, all suited up. Meltzer, relieved by the relief pilot, was in the captured minisub.
Jeffrey knew he'd be finishing the startup checklists there, with the help of Challenger's chief Gerling — German language specialist. Clayton and Montgomery stood in the CACC aisle, hard to make out in their dry suits and face paint in the rig-for-black. From sonar and LMRS data, Jeffrey understood now why it had been so quiet thirty miles back. To port, the west, lay Denmark's huge Sjaelland Island. To starboard, east, loomed the continental land mass of Sweden. Between them waited the Sound, the path into the Baltic. The entrance to the Sound was barely six thousand yards wide. This choke point was heavily defended by both the Germans and the Swedes — which hadn't been in any Intel brief.
Challenger sat in seventy-six feet of water, bottomed in the sand. She hid against a muddy shoal littered with wrecks both old and new, wooden-hulled and steel. The ship's propulsion was shut down, for both quiet and cooling, since there was nowhere she could run if found out anyway.
Jeffrey sighed to himself. War-fighting is like a tournament with sudden-death elimination rules. One misstep and you're out — permanently…. Well, we're sure committed now.
SIMULTANEOUSLY, AT TRONDHEIM IN NORWAY
Ernst Beck stood on Deutschland's quarterdeck. It was really just the rounded top of the hull behind the sail, with a nonskid coating, by the torpedo loading hatch. The naval brass band — hastily assembled when the zip announced, by undersea acoustic link, that she was coming in — paused for the moment. Captain Eberhard — ode down the brow and onto the concrete pier, as the strains of the martial tune echoed inside the giant _ underground space. He was off to make his demands of the yardmaster, for rushed repairs and a weapons reload. They had to get underway again very quickly: Challenger was coming.
This installation Deutschland visited was constructed by the Norwegian Navy, during the arms race after the war scare in Asia five years before. It was completed just in time to be grabbed by the Kaiserliche Marine — the Imperial German Navy — at the start of the real war in Europe. Built into the side of a granite mountain, thirty sea miles up a fjord, this was far more than a hardened dry dock. It was an entire subterranean submarine base. Norway had been an active part of NATO; some pens were large enough for the U. S. Navy's Seawolfclass. These accommodated Deutschland comfortably, too.
Ernst Beck watched as several of his wounded men were helped up the inclined ladder through the open loading hatch. He and Jakob Coomans gave them a hand. These, the ambulatory cases, made it down the brow on their own, to be met by nurses and orderlies. They were taken away in a battery-powered jitney, to the base hospital on the upper level. Next were the stretcher cases. An ambulance took them away. The band struck up again, this time a funeral dirge.
Beck glanced at the Class 212 in the next pen. Her crew, two dozen officers and men, stood on the pier at attention now. They looked clean, well rested, excited — their first mission?
Men from Deutschland's crew, some wearing beards, now began to bring up the body bags. Beck watched the proceedings silently. His jaw and throat ached from grief. It was hard to hold back tears. He saw dignitaries at the edge of the dock surreptitiously wipe their eyes.
"Look at them," Coomans said under his breath. He pointed with his gaze to the 212's crew. They were tall, and slim, and most of them blond. Handsome, Beck told himself, almost beautiful in dress uniform. Each time another body emerged from Deutschland's hull, they snapped a salute and held it till the corpse was off the brow.
"They look eager enough, and proud," Beck said.
"Fools. That captain is young enough to be my son. What does he know, what do any of them know, of mortality and death?"
"They see the bodies."
"They see glory and honor. They don't see cause and effect."
"They're ready to rack up some tons, after the fine example we set. It's their duty."
"Do they have any idea how many people we've killed, murdered, to score those tons? Have they any idea the odds they'll ever make it back in that suicide machine?"
The 212 did seem tiny next to Deutschland.
Beck watched as the fourth body bag came up the ladder. He knew it was the man he had cut free in the torpedo room.
"Twenty percent," Beck said. "Last brew-up, their great-grandfathers' time, the survival odds were twenty percent."
"Look at them," Coomans said. "They're bloody children."
Soon the grim ceremony on Deutschland was complete. The deck hands went back to work.
The band began to play again. This time it was a celebratory, triumphal march — a tune premiered at Wilhelm IV's coronation.
"They change gears just like that," Coomans said. "It's all sheet music to them, I suppose."
"They huff and puff and work their fingers. They go home and sleep in a safe, warm bed, probably not alone. Look at them, the Kaiser's tootlers, how chubby they are, how soft their faces! They wouldn't last one day on patrol. It's an insult for them to be here."
On a signal from her captain, the 212's crew rushed aboard her with military precision. Most of the men went below. Others took up the lines. Quickly the 212 started to move. The traction engines were towing her to the blast door interlocking. Once there she'd submerge, then transit through the deep fjord underwater. She'd come out in the Norwegian Trough, the same way Deutschland came in.
Beck made eye contact with her captain on the 212's bridge. He threw the man a salute. " Where are you headed?" he shouted.
"Nach England!" To England.
"Good luck!"
"And to you, Herr Korvettenkapitan! Again, congratulations on your new record!"
Beck turned away to get to work. As the 212 drew past Deutschland's stern, he glanced at the back of the captain's head.
The man sounded confident enough, Beck told himself. But then, heading out, they always did.
And the band played on.
CHAPTER 18
FIVE MINUTES LATER. AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE SOUND, IN THE CAPTURED GERMAN MINISUB
Ilse stood behind Chief Montgomery as he piloted the mini. Outside the hull, small warships' screw-props swished, turbines sang, piston engines pounded, and active sonars whistled and chirped. Ilse's hair brushed the overhead; like Challenger's ASDS, the German minisub was barely eight feet high on the outside.
The control compartment was rigged for red. Lieutenant Meltzer, in the right seat, served as copilot: off watch, the last few days, he'd drilled to learn the German vessel's systems. Switches and knobs were labeled or tagged in English for him.
Ilse glanced to her right. Jeffrey squeezed in next to her, half-standing behind Meltzer. Clayton and the enlisted SEALs and gear were in the transport compartment aft.
Ilse had a bad feeling. She wondered if she'd have to watch Jeffrey die, or one of the others. She wondered if the human soul is real, and whether it would have time to leave her body in that millionth of a second if she needed to set off an atom bomb in her lap.
She tried to shake her sense of foreboding.
Everyone studied the data on the mini's wide-screen displays. The mini sat on the bottom, in front of the choke point into the Sound. Threat icons littered the tactical plot and the nay chart.
"Mines, nets, wrecks, patrols," Jeffrey said. "German or Swedish, take your pick."
"We're a German mini," Meltzer said. "Maybe we should go through on the occupied Danish side." If Meltzer was nervous, it didn't show, except that his Bronx, accent was thicker.
"Problem with that," Montgomery told him, "is we'll be challenged. We don't have the current recognition codes for here."
"What about down the middle?" Ilse said. "It's the deepest part, and the seam between the two countries' forces, right?" She liked the tight-knit feeling of this foursome, heading into danger together, improvising a
s they went. Bonding.
"We could draw fire from both sides," Jeffrey said. "Which leaves Swedish waters," Ilse retorted. "You really think that's a better choice?"
"It's the least bad of the three. These minis were sold to the Axis by Sweden. Maybe they'll leave us alone."
"I dunno, Skipper," Montgomery said.
"Look," Jeffrey said. "In fourteen hours, tops, ARBOR's computer worm at the lab goes dormant again, assuming internal security doesn't find it first. After that, there's no way we'll ever get inside."
Montgomery picked up the mike to the transport cornpartment. He asked one of the enlisted SEALs to come forward. Montgomery turned to Jeffrey. "He speaks a little Swedish."
Meltzer stiffened. "Hydrophone line dead ahead."
"I see it," Montgomery whispered.
Jeffrey watched that screen, slaved to the mini's chin-mounted photonics sensor. The moored Swedish hydro-phone heads showed all too clearly on the bottom, swaying gently in the image-intensified moonlight.
"Dense mine field to port," Meltzer said. "Big wreck right to starboard. We can't maneuver to avoid."
"Think they can hear us?" Montgomery said. He tapped the screen, one of the hydrophones.
"If we're close enough to see them through this turbidity," Ilse said, "they're close enough to pick something up from the mini. Main screw blade-rate, side thruster flow noise, machinery hum, something."
"Pull back?" Montgomery said. "Try again from more in-shore?"
"No," Jeffrey said. "Keep going or they'll be suspicious." Montgomery worked his control joystick and the throttle.
