by James Rosone
The American shook his head. He wasn’t going to talk.
Van Rossum could see two of his soldiers were still searching through the room. Another team member was now moving down the hallway to check on the other offices. Standing up, van Rossum looked at one of the younger soldiers next to the sergeant. He aimed his silenced pistol at the soldier’s leg and fired a single shot.
The young soldier let out a bloody scream as the bullet tore through his knee.
His other comrades and the sergeant cursed at him as they struggled against their restraints.
Van Rossum calmly walked over to the injured soldier and placed his boot on the wound, which was now bleeding heavily. As he applied more pressure, the soldier continued to scream in agony.
“Where is the detonator?” demanded van Rossum.
“You can’t do this! You’re a signatory to the Geneva Convention. You can’t torture or execute prisoners!” growled the soldier through gritted teeth.
Laughing at the comment, van Rossum leaned down to the wounded soldier. “Those rules are for America, not the rest of the world. Now, tell me where the detonator is, or I’m going to keep shooting all your knees out, and then I will work my way down to your ankles.”
Now the soldiers looked nervous as they glanced at each other. Finally, one of the soldiers yelped, “It’s in the customs office a hundred meters beyond our building.”
“Shut the hell up, soldier!” barked the sergeant angrily, but it was too late. He’d given up the goods.
Reaching a hand up to his throat mic, van Rossum lightly depressed the talk button. “Beta Team, the detonator is located in the customs building,” he whispered in Dutch. A few minutes went by before they heard the first shots of the war.
*******
The team approaching the customs office building ran into a roving patrol and was forced to engage them. With the element of surprise blown, the four-man team bum rushed the building. They broke through the front door and made a mad dash through the building, hoping to find the soldiers inside before they could blow the bridge.
When the sergeant leading that team entered the main room of the building, they were met with a barrage of bullets from the defenders. The commandos pulled back inside the hallway before one of them threw a fragmentation grenade in. That grenade was quickly followed by two more, and in seconds, they heard three loud explosions. The commandos rushed in, their rifles at the ready as they sought out the soldiers who’d been shooting at them. When they came around the corner, they spotted an American soldier lying on the floor, his left leg practically ripped off. Arterial spray shot out of the wound with each heartbeat.
One commando saw that the soldier had a devilish grin on his face. His left hand held the detonator while his right hand turned the crank. In that split second, the Dutch commando feared they had just failed their primary mission. But when he didn’t hear a loud thunderous boom, he suddenly held out hope that maybe, just maybe, the other team that was on the bridge itself had found the charges and disabled them before they could be blown.
When the American soldier also realized that he hadn’t heard an explosion, his expression completely morphed. He showed a mixture of sorrow and failure.
I kind of feel sorry for him, the Dutch commando thought. Not only was the man dying, but he had let down his fellow soldiers. Rather than leaving the man there to bleed to death, the commando fired a single shot to the man’s head, killing him instantly.
The rest of the Dutch commandos hurried to establish a defensive position around the buildings they now controlled, while the main body of their armored force raced across the bridge to help them secure the area for the rest of their division.
It had taken the Dutch commandos all of ten minutes to capture the position and disarm the charges on the bridge. With the Blue Water Bridge now under their control, dozens of Boxer armored personnel carriers and CV90 infantry fighting vehicles rapidly transported the men and women of the 44 Pantserinfanteriebataljon Regiment into the American city of Port Huron.
Following hot on their heels was the 11th Airmobile Brigade, part of the joint German-Dutch Division Schnelle Kräfte. It was now going to be a race against time to get the division across the border to find, fix, and then destroy the 1st Cavalry Division in Michigan.
*******
January 11, 2021
20 Miles off the Coast of Virginia Beach
Looking at his watch, Fregattenkapitän Ernst Hardegen saw it was now 0734 hours, precisely four hours and forty-two minutes after they’d received the coded message ordering them to begin Operation Paukenschlag. After spending days getting into position, they had finally been given the go order.
In a way, it saddened Hardegen that it had finally come to this. Like the other sailors and ship captains he had talked to, he had hoped the politicians would find a way to handle their disagreement without resorting to violence. Sadly, as he had been taught at the academy, war was just an extension of a political dispute—and this disagreement had been simmering just below the surface between the rest of the world and the American President for some time.
Shaking his head briefly, he couldn’t help but smile at the operational name chosen for this mission. It was the same operation name used during World War II, when the German U-boats had aggressively sunk American merchant ships right off the East Coast. Now, some seventy-eight years later, his submarine, the U-34, was going to carry out the exact same mission.
It couldn’t have come at a better time, either. While they had spotted a number of very tempting merchant ships they could quickly sink, Hardegen wanted to save the element of surprise and his limited number of torpedoes to attack a more valuable target. For the past two days, they had observed a number of high-value US Navy ships leave the port of Norfolk to make their way out into the Atlantic. These ships were forming up to create a more significant force that he knew would ultimately sail toward the rest of the combined UN naval fleet that had recently left Iceland to head toward America. It was shaping up to be the great battle for the North Atlantic.
German intelligence had sent him a coded message a day ago that the carrier Truman was getting ready to leave Norfolk to join the other two carriers already present in the mid-Atlantic. With this piece of critical intelligence, he’d positioned his sub in what he believed would be the most likely path the American carrier would take to join up with the rest of its fleet. He hoped he was right—they wouldn’t be able to chase after the ship if he’d positioned them in the wrong spot.
Hours after they’d received their attack order, Hardegen had started growing impatient. A few days ago, they had watched the Ford and the HW Bush carriers head out to sea. They’d had to let them sail past as they hadn’t yet received their attack orders. Now, with the orders finally in hand, it was eating him up as he sat there, silently waiting in anxious anticipation for the Truman to get underway and head toward him.
Just when he thought his sub had missed out on the opportunity to sink something of great value, they spotted it—the white whale.
“Sir—the drone shows the Truman passing Cape Henry Lighthouse as it heads out to sea!” exclaimed a very excited drone operator.
Hardegen smiled. They had launched their tiny little reconnaissance drone the day before—it was a huge risk to use it, but without it, he really wouldn’t have had much warning of where the carrier was heading.
The Libelle or Dragonfly drone was a small submarine-launched UAV prototype that the German Navy had been developing for the better part of six years. It shot out of the small communications tube near the conning tower of the sub to the surface. Once the encased package bobbed up on the surface of the water, its protective shell casing popped open and inflated a small circular landing pad. The UAV’s systems then turned on and its quadcopter wings unfolded and activated. Once the UAV had taken off and reached an altitude of fifty meters, a pair of short, stubby little wings on the bottom of the UAV unfolded to provide the quadcopter with additional lift
.
More importantly, the little wings were covered in the most advanced solar cells available, which would ensure that the device’s lithium-ion batteries stayed charged. Theoretically, the small drone could stay aloft on battery power alone for as long as sixteen hours, but only if it turned off its electronics. The theory was that the subs could use the electronic suite of the drone to help them better coordinate an attack during the day and then place the drone in a stationary hibernation mode during the evening hours to conserve its battery.
Trailing just below the water, the U-34 had a small communications buoy that would drag just below the waves, just high enough to still receive microbursts of data from the Libelle. Hardegen felt his pulse race as he realized that this little device was going to be the key to helping him place his sub in the correct position to land what he hoped would be a death blow to the Truman.
Hardegen walked over to the drone operator’s desk so that he could view the feed for himself. He saw the US warships fan out and form up their protective bubble around the carrier. He also observed four different anti-submarine warfare helicopters go to work. Like a sheepdog, these helicopters and destroyer escorts would do their best to keep the wolves like him away from their charge.
While he didn’t want to view this opportunity as a suicide mission, Hardegen knew it was incredibly difficult to attack a carrier. Not because the ship was believed to be unsinkable, but because of the sheer amount of ASW support the ships tended to be protected by.
The German Navy didn’t exactly have a lot of submarines to lose in a war with the US, nor did his crew want to die in vain. It was hoped these Libelle drones would be the game-changing technology that would aid them in doing what no other navy had done since World War II—sink an American aircraft carrier.
Weighing these options, Hardegen settled on a plan to let the American carrier essentially travel to within ten kilometers of their position. This way, they could guide their Seehecht torpedoes in toward the carrier at a slow speed to minimize their noise and, hopefully, their chance of detection. Then, when they had gotten in good and close, they’d cut the Seehecht torpedoes loose to run at full speed, in this case, fifty knots. This would leave the carrier with virtually no time to react, and the ensuing chaos of countermeasures and torpedoes would make it incredibly difficult to identify where the torpedoes had been fired from. If this worked, they’d be able to slip away to fight another day and celebrate their victory.
Seeing that the American carrier was still roughly thirty miles away and running through their zigzagging pattern, Hardegen knew they had time to get themselves in position. Slowly and steadily, using their air-independent propulsion system, as opposed to their diesel engine, they silently got themselves into the best possible firing position with the help of their UAV.
“Sir!” called out one very nervous-sounding technician. “Our towed array has detected a Virginia-class attack submarine no more than 10,000 meters to our port side, above the thermal layer.”
For what felt like an eternity, they held their breath, waiting to see if they’d been detected before they were able to carry out their attack. When they didn’t hear the sound of an American torpedo heading toward them or the sound of its sonar going active, they breathed a collective sigh of relief. They had now entered the carrier’s protective bubble.
Ten more minutes went by as the carrier continued to zigzag in their direction, oblivious to the danger they were sailing into as they now closed the distance to just under ten kilometers.
“Captain, the carrier distance is 9,800 meters. We have a firing solution plotted for torpedoes one through six. We’re ready to fire when you order,” the subs weapons officer announced. Hardegen noticed that sweat had started to form on this man’s forehead, despite the cool temperature of the room.
Everyone in the confined space of the control room looked at each other nervously. The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife as the crew almost held their breath, waiting for the order that could very well end their lives.
Hardegen bit his lower lip and nodded at the information. His stomach was tied in knots as the stress of the moment continued to build and build. They had already opened the torpedo doors an hour ago in anticipation of this moment. He wanted them to be as silent as possible leading up to the actual launch. While they might have detected one enemy submarine, that didn’t mean there weren’t more out there, ready to pounce on them at the slightest bit of noise they made.
Looking at his weapons officer, Hardegen ordered, “Fire tubes one through five. Make your depth four hundred meters and come hard to port, forty degrees. Make your speed ten knots.” Hardegen wanted to save one of the torpedoes just in case they still needed it.
Within seconds of their torpedoes being fired, the DM2A4 Seehecht torpedoes, Germany’s most advanced torpedo ever, accelerated at a silent and modest speed of twenty knots toward the great white whale. For nearly two minutes, the weapons closed the distance between them and their unsuspecting prey. Then, it was like a switch was turned on. The carrier went from traveling roughly twenty knots in a zigzag pattern to accelerating to its maximum speed as it sought to put as much distance between itself and the newly identified threat.
“Bring the torpedoes up to full speed!” Hardegen ordered.
It was now a race against time to close the distance and hit the ship before it was able to run away from the threat. At this point, the carrier’s best defense was to turn in the opposite direction and open its engines all the way up, which it did. With an operational range of sixty kilometers and maximum speeds of fifty knots, Hardegen was confident their torpedoes would win this race.
Once the carrier had gone to full speed to try and outrun the torpedoes, it deployed its Nixie torpedo decoy in hopes of being able to lure one or more of his torpedoes away. Hardegen walked over to the enlisted man guiding the torpedoes and watched as the man successfully steered them away from the decoy, keeping them locked on to the carrier.
The distance had now closed to less than 3,000 meters. At this range, the torpedoes went active with their own sonar as the targeting computer sought to get a picture of the hull of the ship it was heading toward. In seconds, this targeting computer ran through its stored data of known ships, identified the target as an American supercarrier and locked on to the most likely kill spot under the hull of the vessel.
When the Seehecht torpedoes got to within 2,000 meters of their target, the torpedoes’ engines automatically kicked into their final stage and accelerated from fifty knots to sixty-five knots as they closed in for the kill. Hardegen held his breath.
Steadily, one by one, the five torpedoes made their way under the hull of the ship before exploding as they reached their marks. With each successive explosion, it sent a massive overpressure of water jets up through the lower two or three decks of the carrier. The ripple effect of the eruptions were so powerful, they briefly lifted the carrier a couple of inches up before gravity slammed the behemoth hard against the cavity of air and water below the hull of the ship, cracking the keel. When the Truman smacked into that vacuum below it, the carrier’s hull fractured in dozens of places, ripping new fissures and cracks across nearly every deck of the ship.
For the briefest of moments, Captain Hardegen and his crew were elated as they listened to the massive explosions ripple through the water and the loud growing sound of the ship’s hull as it began to break apart. They had succeeded in doing something no other submariner had ever done, hit an American aircraft carrier with a modern-day torpedo.
However, in their brief, albeit quiet celebration, they suddenly detected that an American torpedo had been fired at them.
“Enemy torpedo in the water!” shouted the sonar technician.
Unbeknownst to the crew of U-34, the Virginia-class submarine that had sailed past them earlier had detected them when they’d fired their torpedoes. The sub had turned around and closed in on their last known position as it hunted for them. While the Germans
had been so intent on guiding their own torpedoes to the carrier, they had failed to detect the sub that had found them.
Before anyone in the German sub could react, the American torpedo slammed into their own hull, splitting the submarine in half. The last thought to pass through Captain Hardegen’s mind before the control room was flooded with the icy water of the Atlantic was of his last family dinner with his beautiful wife and four children.
*******
“Torpedoes in the water!” shouted a petty officer from the underwater threat station of the Truman’s CIC.
“Deploy the Nixie! Ahead flank speed and take evasive maneuvers,” shouted the officer on the deck.
The battle station’s Klaxon sounded as the ship’s pilot announced emergency maneuvering. The carrier instantly turned hard to starboard while the engines jumped to one hundred percent. Despite the massive size of the carrier, its 260,000-horsepower engines spun its four propeller blades at such a rate that the carrier actually lurched forward as it moved from twenty knots to over thirty-five in less than a minute.
The captain of the ship, Brandon Reynolds, dashed into the CIC. “What the hell is going on?” he shouted. He grabbed for something to keep himself from falling over from the force of the sharp turn.
“Incoming torpedoes, heading 221, 11,000 meters and closing in quickly,” shouted the underwater threat officer.
“Damn it! Get with our escorts and tell them to get a helo over to where those torpedoes probably came from and find that enemy sub,” Captain Reynolds ordered.
If they could find and sink the enemy sub swiftly, they might be able to take them out before they could guide their torpedoes in for the kill—at least, so he hoped.
For the next seven minutes, the ship continued to race as rapidly as it could away from the underwater threats as they hoped and prayed the torpedoes would go for the Nixie. When the torpedoes blew past the Nixie, Reynolds knew they were in trouble.
