by Joe Buff
More antiship missiles leaped from beneath the surviving Harriers' wings, and homed on the German warships. More missiles left the surviving ships and tried to home on the Harriers and Challenger. More enemy five-and eight-inch shells landed in the water close to Jeffrey, and the whole hull shuddered and the grating he knelt on jumped. Enemy antitorpedo defenses flashed and raised more fountains.
Jeffrey's ADCAPs reached the frigates and triple eruptions heaved; brutal concussions rolled across the Sound. Spent cannon brass rained from the sky, heavy and white hot. Shattered aircraft, friendly and enemy, also rained from the sky.
At last all six German warships were dead, settling in the water under merciless geysers of flame, or engulfed in searing fireballs as main magazines blew up. Jeffrey saw Harriers launching yet more missiles, and the naval guns on the Danish coast were pulverized.
Challenger came up on the hulks of the frigates and corvettes. Jeffrey gave quick conning orders to bypass the wreckage. He ducked as ammo cooked off and burning debris whizzed by. He choked on the acrid, stinking smoke, burning fuel oil and cordite and metal, burning rubber and plastic and flesh. The smoke coming from the fire inside the sail was thicker too, blending with the diesel exhaust from Jeffrey's smoke screen. Harriers began to drop depth charges well in front of Challenger. They went off in yet more muddy fountains of watery rage, and sometimes there were secondary explosions: naval mines. The Harriers were clearing a path for Jeffrey's ship.
* * *
Challenger was through the choke point, out of the Sound, into the Kattegat at last. The bottom dropped off quickly here, not by much but enough. The Harriers' flight leader came back. He skillfully drew up right next to the sail. He pointed straight down, then to the north, then made a shoving gesture: "Go! Go!" Jeffrey understood: Submerge, maintain flank speed. The Harriers would follow his wake hump, and take care of surface and airborne threats.
Jeffrey gave the pilot a thumbs-up. He ordered Meltzer to slow, so they wouldn't hit terrain as they dived. Jeffrey deployed the bridge cockpit's streamlining clamshells over his head — they were holed by enemy rockets, too. He went through the bridge hatch and dogged it shut.
He looked at the messenger standing at the base of the ladder, below the second hatch in the trunk. Jeffrey coughed on more acrid smoke, coming from inside the sail.
"Dive the ship! Dive! Dive!"
Jeffrey felt the ship nose down. He clambered below and dogged the lower watertight hatch, as water sprayed into the sail trunk through a leak. The trunk flooded, but the fire inside the sail was snuffed.
As Jeffrey reached the CACC, Kathy Milgrom announced, "Loud underwater explosions bearing two five zero! Range approximately one hundred thousand yards! Assess as ISLMM mine warhead detonation, and large secondary blasts!"
"Very well, Sonar." Something trying to cut Challenger off, a warship racing from Kiel, had just been sunk.
"Sir," Meltzer reported, "the ship is at periscope depth."
"Chief of the Watch, retract the foreplanes. Secure the diesel and lower the snorkel mast. Helm, ahead flank smartly. Follow the path through the Kattegat we took with that Delta four."
Meltzer acknowledged.
Challenger was going much too fast to use the LMRS. Jeffrey took his seat. The ship vibrated heavily as the propulsion plant worked hard. The pumpjet cavitated heavily at such shallow depth.
"Fire Control, we'll have to rely on our remaining anti-torpedo rockets if we trip a CAPTOR mine. Let's hope the Harriers can stay with us long enough." Bell agreed. At flank speed — fifty knots on a good day — it would be two and a half hours to the Norwegian Deep. The Deep formed the gaping maw at the south end of the Norwegian Trough, well inside the Skagerrak, where the seafloor plunged to almost twenty-five hundred feet.
Another air-dropped depth bomb went off ahead of the ship — but how many could the Harriers possibly have?
Jeffrey called up the tactical plot. The air battle raged chaotically, almost impossible to follow by passive sonar. For now, there were no surface threats or enemy submarine contacts held, but sonar performance degraded badly at flank speed. There was extra-heavy flow noise from the holes in Challenger's upper works; Kathy's people tried to filter it out.
Ilse came into the CACC, looking somewhat refreshed from her nap. She took her place at a sonar console. Kathy announced a Harrier was deploying a towed noisemaker sled, well ahead of the ship, to sweep for mines and to decoy Axis torpedoes. Jeffrey hadn't heard of this tactic before.
Another airplane crashed, somewhere to starboard. Another, somewhere to port. Above the sound of Challenger's flow noise, another ISLMM went off at the mouth of the Great Belt. Kathy announced a huge twin secondary blast, same bearing and range: assessed as a German destroyer, its main magazines blowing up. But there'd be more such ships pursuing Challenger, far more than there were mine warheads in Jeffrey's improvised barrier.
CHAPTER 25
TWO HOURS LATER
In the CACC rigged for black, Jeffrey wore burn ointment on his face, but under it his cheeks blistered. His left leg ached, and his whole chest was sore, in spite of the mild painkiller and anti-inflammatory the first aid people had supplied. Jeffrey hardly noticed his physical discomfort; a new surge of adrenaline coursed through his blood. The next choke point was coming, the constriction that marked where the Kattegat ended and the Skagerrak began. To port of Challenger lay Skagen, at the northeast tip of Denmark, surrounded by treacherous shoals. To starboard, still, loomed Sweden. At least her neutrality prevented the Germans from going nuclear here. The water near Challenger was two hundred fifty feet deep.
Kathy reported the last remaining Harrier pilot was jettisoning his noisemaker sled. He went for altitude. He veered east. Jeffrey knew that, rather than return to the U.K. when he reached bingo fuel, the pilot had stayed as antimine escort as long as he possibly could. Now, flying on the vapor in his tanks, he sought internment in Sweden, and Jeffrey silently wished him Godspeed. Dogfights raged again in the distance, but neither side had local air superiority now.
Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to slow to ahead one third. He ordered COB to deploy the LMRS. As Challenger slowed through thirty-two knots, her pump-jet vibrated — a mechanical transient datum that couldn't he helped. Kathy announced several German warships rounding the head-land at Skagen, charging toward Challenger from further out in the Skagerrak. Jeffrey ordered Bell to launch a brilliant decoy, set to run northeast at fifty knots, then parallel to the Swedish coast, to imitate Challenger trying to outflank the Germans.
The frigates and corvettes took off northeast, also at flank speed, which for them was thirty or thirty-three knots. The way past the choke point was clear. The LMRS showed no new mines on the track Jeffrey planned to take.
It was too easy. Those warships should've split up, with some prosecuting the fifty-knot contact and the rest of them guarding the gap.
Jeffrey realized he was being suckered. The Norwegian Deep was no place of refuge. He remembered the newsreel, Deutschland triumphant, the underground U-boat pen. It was hours now since the blast at Greifswald.
Eberhard. It had to be. Kurt Eberhard was waiting for him in the Norwegian Deep.
Ilse held hard to her armrests as Challenger's bow nosed into a steep down-bubble. She tilted sideways uncomfortably in the rig for black.
"Helm," she heard Jeffrey's voice say in the dark, "make your depth twenty-three hundred feet. Chief of the Watch, engage nap-of-seafloor cruise mode. Maintain bottom clearance one hundred feet."
Ilse slaved one of her console screens to COB's forward-looking gravimeter view. She watched as the ship dove into the Norwegian Trough. The bottom dropped off rapidly. Ilse saw huge boulders go by, embedded in the muck. She knew they'd been transported here on glacial icebergs; when the icebergs melted, the boulders sank.
Ilse helped Kathy update their sound propagation models, as real-time data poured in on temperature and salinity outside the hull. Challenger's course was three one five, nort
hwest, to the deepest part of the Norwegian Deep. But this was also taking the ship right at the coast of occupied Norway; freshwater river runoff, and the steep terrain rise at the far wall of the Trough along the shoreline, would affect target detection and counterdetection in tricky ways.
"Captain," Lieutenant Sessions said from the nav console. "Next course leg, recommend turn left on two three zero in three nautical miles."
"Nay."
Ilse glanced at her speed log window: still making fifteen knots. She called up the navigation chart. She overlaid the data COB had gathered through the LMRS on the way into the Skagerrak, two days ago that seemed like two years. The ship was following an Axis submarine safecorridor — a two-day-old corridor; soon their data on the corridor would peter out. The LMRS worked in front of the ship again, ten thousand yards off, scouting for mines and enemy hydrophones, helping Challenger feel her way.
Jeffrey said they were comparatively safe for now — the real threat would be Deutschland later. If this crapshoot through an Axis mine field was "safe," Ilse didn't want to think about later.
"My depth is twenty-three hundred feet, sir," Meltzer announced.
"'Well the Helm."
Challenger leveled off.
Ilse heard a pop and roar on her headphones.
"Surface impact datum," Kathy called. She gave the bearing and range — it wasn't close. " Assess as a fighter shot down…. No ejection seat hitting the water."
"Very well, Sonar…. Fire Control, your assessment?"
Bell cleared his throat. "Neither side has control of the air, sir. It matters less and less to us as we go deeper."
"Concur," Jeffrey said. "If you were Deutschland, where would you wait?"
"Where their ROEs let them go nuclear, Captain. Two hundred miles from Sweden. That's just before Stavanger, up the Norwegian coast, where the smooth shoreline first breaks up into hundreds of miles of islands and fjords."
"I concur, sir," Kathy said. "If I were Captain Eberhard, I'd wait near Stavanger. The seafloor there rises slowly to seven hundred feet and the coast to our right is a sheer cliff dropping into the Trough. Good conditions to capture our flow noise and tonals, while they lurk and listen."
"Then what do you think, XO? We go shallow? Sneak out of the Trough and try to outflank through the North Sea?"
"We can't afford more exposure in water a hundred feet deep, Captain. We'll be too exposed to enemy surface and airborne sea-denial forces, and we'd have to move very slowly. As the magnetic storm wears off, running shallow becomes too dangerous."
"Concur," Jeffrey said. "We need to stay as deep as possible, which is just what the Axis wants. We'll run into Deutschland head-on. With us on the move, she'll have the advantage of greater stealth. If we just sit in one place and try to hide, we put off the inevitable, and make everything worse…. Sonar, can you compensate for the collision damage to our port wide-aperture array?" That burning frigate, back at the south end of the Sound, had scraped and dented the hull-mounted hydrophones.
"Negative, sir. Substantial degradation in both gain and directivity."
"Then we need to stay on the left side of the Trough. Use it to shield our weaker side, and do our correlogram and instant-range-gate searches with the starboard array."
"Concur, sir." Kathy's throat sounded tight.
"There's no point in dawdling, people. We just give Eberhard more time to lay deployable hydrophone lines and perfect his sonar ray traces. Helm, make top quiet speed, twenty-six knots." Meltzer acknowledged.
Kathy turned to Ilse. "There's something you should know," Kathy said in an undertone.
"My fiancé. I said his destroyer was vaporized."
"I remember…. You think it could happen to us?"
"Not that…. I didn't tell you… it was Deutschland that nuked his ship. Eberhard did it to him."
* * *
Ilse ran more calculations — as Challenger worked her way north. The ship nosed up, and Ilse eyed the gravimeter screen. Challenger followed the bottom as the seafloor rose off Kristiansand, Norway. Ilse switched to the large-scale navigation chart. The water depth would decrease gradually, then plateau for a while at fifteen hundred feet. They were one hundred miles from Sweden now; a while to go till Stavanger and the moment of truth with Deutschland. Jeffrey and Bell conferred, plotting strategy. Their tone, Ilse noticed, was much more collegial than during Challenger's frustrating hunt for the 212 and 214 U-boats, before reaching Texas.
Ilse went back to listening on her headphones. A gale had blown in on the surface. Above the noise of wind and crashing waves, Axis frigates pinged. They dropped depth charges at random, and launched torpedoes at random, and Challenger struggled to hide. Here the freezing Nordic Current ran deep, under the last dregs of the warmer Gulf Stream from the Dover Strait. As a result the thermocline was drastic, the sonar layer almost impenetrable. Challenger's out-of-phase emissions, from her active wide arrays and piezorubber tiles, helped suppress hull echoes. Enemy helo-borne dipping sonar probed deep, but too far away to be a threat — the helos lacked the electrical power, so their transducers lacked the punch, the effective range.
The LMRS was being recovered, to get another battery charge; the ship slowed to four knots. Kathy's people tried to use acoustic illumination from surface noise now, to detect mines ahead of Challenger. It might work, it might not. They might still be in an Axis safety corridor, they might not.
Ilse jolted. She heard an awful scream on her headphones.
"Torpedo in the water!" Kathy shouted. "Incoming torpedo bearing two four zero!"
"Fire Control," Jeffrey snapped, "stand by on the anti-torpedo rockets. Sonar, what's the weapon?" Had they tripped a CAPTOR mine after all? Had they crossed a fiber-optic listening grid too close, and vectored in a 212 or a Pubis?
"Gas-turbine-powered, strong tonals, a heavyweight… A Russian export wide-body Series sixty-five!"
"Deutschland," Jeffrey stated, "here. She's the only thing the Germans have that fires a sixty-five." Dammit. Jeffrey's mind raced.
"Sixty-fives are nuclear-capable," Bell said — Jeffrey didn't need the reminder. Ambushed. Out-psyched by that bastard already. Was Eberhard ruthless enough to go nuclear so close to neutral Sweden?
"Captain," Bell said. "Urge snap shot and turn away." Antitorpedo rockets were useless against a nuclear fish — their motors burned out well inside the atomic warhead's kill radius.
Jeffrey gave the snap shot orders for a high-explosive ADCAP fish. He had Bell launch a brilliant decoy, too. The 65 ignored the decoy.
"Helm, ahead flank smartly, make your course two four zero." Jeffrey wasn't turning away.
"Sir," COB said, "advise LMRS has not been recovered."
"Jettison the recovery gear."
The ship accelerated hard.
"Captain," Bell said, "we're aimed right at the inbound weapon.
Jeffrey smiled. "I know, XO." The ROEs forbade a nuclear countershot here, and running away toward Sweden was a losing proposition in more ways than one. Bell knew it, too — he gave Jeffrey a quick glance, but it showed a predatory eagerness for battle, not disapproval. Bell had clearly learned a lot in independent command of Challenger; his run into the Baltic on the surface was as "cowboy" as anything Jeffrey had ever pulled.
"Sonar, do you hold contact yet on Deutschland?" The ride began to get rough as Challenger built up speed.
"Negative, Captain. No tonals or flow noise."
Jeffrey had Bell fire another high-explosive ADCAP snap shot, straight ahead on two four zero; Challenger could launch weapons from any point in her speed envelope — but so could Deutschland. Jeffrey told Bell to have his first ADCAP go active.
"Unit is pinging…. No target return."
Jeffrey forced himself to count to ten. He glanced at Bell.
"Still no target return, sir. No Doppler whatsoever."
"Then Deutschland's hovering bows-on to us, canceling the echo." Challenger reached thirty-two knots, on her way to fifty fast
. "He must have swum out his weapon at stealth speed on a random starting dogleg."
The pump-jet shook, but held together; the worst of the shaking died down.
"Concur," Bell said. "Inbound torpedo range now ten thousand yards. Net closing speed one hundred twenty knots." The torpedo's speed plus Challenger's. Jeffrey picked up the intercom mike for Maneuvering. "Push the reactor to one hundred twelve percent."
"Captain," Bell said, "unit from tube one still holds no target."
"Reload all empty tubes, conventional ADCAPs." This would take a while, and Challenger had very little time. Bell acknowledged.
"Oceanographer, match the gravimeter display with our most fine-detailed nautical chart. Find me something on the bottom that's not supposed to be there."
"Aye, aye," Ilse said.
"Hurry. Show me what you've got."
"Two mass concentrations, possible wrecks or SSNs, here and here." Ilse's light-pen markings showed on Jeffrey's and Bell's screens.
"Fire Control, when ready aim an ADCAP at each point." The ship's slow rate of fire was really hurting now. Still, Challenger charged at the incoming 65.
"One minute to incoming nuclear sixty-five lethal range if set on maximum yield," Bell said.
"Still no contact on Deutschland," Kathy said. This is getting dicey. Is that 65 nuclear?
"Sir!" Ilse said. "One mass-con fading! Conjecture it's in motion now!" The gravimeter couldn't track a moving object.
"Concur," Kathy said. "Broadband contact bearing two five zero, range fifteen thousand yards. Designate as Master One…. Mechanical transient, reactor check valves. Master One is Deutschland, going to flank speed."
But they'd need time to accelerate from a dead stop and then reverse course. That's what Jeffrey was counting on.
"Maneuvering, Captain, push the reactor to one hundred fifteen percent…. Helm, put us in Deutschland's baffles if you can. Try to stay right on her ass." Deutschland knew the safe corridors, and at flank speed she'd act as minesweeper for Challenger — if Challenger survived long enough to get that close. If Challenger didn't survive, the closer Jeffrey could get to Eberhard, the more likely Deutschland might be damaged by her own atomic fish….
