by Joe Buff
"Fire Control, Bridge."
"Bridge, Fire Control, aye."
"X0, I want to make some radar decoys. Take our radar reflectors and mount them on blocks of Styrofoam."
"Understood," Bell said. The radar reflectors were aluminum shapes with many right angles. Used on the surface in friendly waters, they helped the SSN show clearly on navigation radars, so she wouldn't be run down by a careless merchant ship.
"Confirm how many non-nuclear Tomahawks we have in the VLS." Jeffrey had lost count.
"Two land-attack, sir. That's all."
And they had two more in the torpedo room, which could be fired from there.
"Fire Control, target the suspected cable landing sites for the German hydrophone lines in our path."
"Which ones, Captain?"
Jeffrey reached for his computer, then realized it was wrecked—also from that antitank rocket blast. "Send me another laptop."
A new messenger handed one up, and Jeffrey plugged it in.
He called up the map with its classified data. "Fire Control, the ones on Anholt Island, Laesø Island, then Saeby, then Hirtshals." That would take Challenger through the Kattegat, and halfway through the Skaggerak if they were lucky. But there were more hydrophone nets between Hirtshals and the North Sea, and no more land-attack Toma-hawks.
•
Before Bell could open fire, Jeffrey sensed—more in his gut than his ears—hard explosions in the distance to the west. Visibility was clear again, but he didn't see any flashes, just the amazing aurora still dancing overhead.
Face it, without this solar storm we'd never have even made it into the lab, let alone had the slightest prayer of
making it home. . . . Weather has always been a critical factor in battle; now that includes weather on the sun.
"Bridge, ESM." Electronic Support Measures called again.
"ESM, Bridge, aye."
"Captain, that big air battle is heating up, and coming closer." Two more VLS doors popped open. Jeffrey ducked below. Through the hatch he heard the roar of their boosters. He went back up and watched till the boosters separated, and the missiles rushed into the dark. Two more Tomahawks broached the water, from the torpedo tubes this time, and again their boosters roared. Then boosters fired on the land to the west and raced into the sky: antiaircraft missiles, pursuing the Tomahawks. The choke point out of the Sound lay shortly ahead, barely three nautical miles wide between Helsingør in Denmark and Halsingborg in Sweden. The Germans would be marshaling forces there for sure, or planting more mines, or both, to lay an impassable roadblock. Jeffrey knew that if he took the Swedish side of the channel now, with the Axis in hot pursuit, he'd draw both Swedish and German fire.
Jeffrey ducked as something roared at him out of the west. It was a pair of jet planes. They turned hard south, then waggled their wings as they receded. Jeffrey waved: Allied air cover at last.
The two aircraft came back. Their noses sparkled and red streamers darted out—they were German. Jeffrey ducked once more as 20mm cannon shells hit the water. The pilots corrected their aim, walking the tracers toward the ship. Jeffrey dashed below and dogged the hatch. He heard whacks and bangs as shells hit the side of the sail. His ship was all out of Stingers, and Polyphems were useless against fast movers like these jets.
Jeffrey clambered down the sail trunk ladder, then dogged the second hatch. More cannon shells impacted.
"Bridge, Fire Control," Bell called in Jeffrey's headphones.
"I'm not on the bridge."
"Sir, we've lost the other periscope mast, and the ESM mast and the radio mast." Challenger was blind and deaf, except for her sonars. And at flank speed on the surface, her sonars were almost blind.
"V'r'well," Jeffrey said. "I'm going up again."
"Bridge, Sonar," Kathy said. "Self-check indicates sail-mounted mine avoidance sonar, and under-ice sonar, are destroyed."
Jeffrey flung open the hatch. The sky was crystal clear now. The approaching air battle had definitely arrived. Aircraft tore in every direction, and dogfights raged at every altitude. Jeffrey saw tracers etching the sky. Missiles streaked like shooting stars. Airplanes exploded and wreckage pelted the sea. Above it all, the powerful aurora danced mockingly, from the zenith overhead to the horizon on every side, insensate and uncaring.
The combined roar of all the turbojets on full military power was so intense, Jeffrey was reduced to typing messages to Bell on his laptop. Bell answered the same way. Bell gave him an updated tactical plot. Modern Brandenburg frigates and more Class 130
corvettes were charging through the choke point directly ahead. There were three of each detected so far. Another squadron of Tiger helos was closing in from the west. Jeffrey tossed one radar decoy to port, and hoped the improvised counterweight would make it land in the water right side up. He counted to five and also threw the other decoy to port. The Class 130's each had eight Harpoons.
Each Brandenburg also had eight Harpoons, plus quadruple torpedo tubes with thirty-two Mark 46's aboard, and two state-of-the-art NH-90 antisubmarine helos. They also had active antitorpedo defenses—mortars and explosive
nets—powerful against conventional fish, especially in such shallow water. Jeffrey had few high-explosive ADCAPs left, and only four Polyphems. He had no ISLMMs, no antiship Tomahawks. The Brandenburgs' total load of torpedoes wildly outnumbered Challenger's antitorpedo rockets. The water was barely sixty feet deep—it was impossible to dive. The cleared channel was narrow again, its flanks studded with mines—it was impossible to turn away.
"Target the Brandenburgs with three ADCAPs," Jeffrey typed in despair. "Target the Tigers with Polyphems. Fire at will."
This was. Challenger's last stand, and it was hopeless, and Jeffrey knew the Germans knew it. His brilliant decoys and noisemakers would be useless against enemy wireguided Mark 46's, with the frigates holding visual contact on his ship like this. Jeffrey was forbidden to use nuclear munitions so close to neutral and occupied land, even in self-defense or self-destruction: The ROEs were inviolable.
Another aircraft exploded and fell from the sky. It crashed into the sea near Challenger. Friend or foe? Jeffrey couldn't tell. Flaming avgas marked its grave. Jeffrey saw no chutes. Still tracers and missiles ripped the air high above. Aircraft twisted and turned, and their cannon stuttered, and turbojets roared.
"Bridge, Sonar," Kathy Milgrom typed. "Eight torpedoes in the water. Mean bearing three five one, constant bearing, closing." Two of the Brandenburgs had fired a full salvo from their quadruple launchers, and would be racing to reload. The third Brandenburg was holding their first salvo in reserve.
"Helm, try to comb their tracks," Jeffrey typed. "Fire Control, arm the antitorpedo rockets." They were carried in nonreloadable launch tubes in the hull.
"XO," Jeffrey typed, "begin destroying crypto gear. Shred Top Secret documents. Jettison through the trash ejector."
Jeffrey saw hot-white flames to the west—incoming antitank rockets. Swelling glows to the north—inbound Harpoons. Quick, sharp flashes to the northwest—naval guns, more shells targeting Challenger.
Jeffrey felt the taste of defeat, more bitter than he imagined it could ever be. He saw more flames to the west, streaking through the sky, more incoming fire. He'd failed his crew and Ilse, and failed his country. Tears came to Jeffrey's eyes for everything he'd lost.
Above the cacophony all around he heard a different noise, a powerful whine. Were transport helos coming with Kampfschwimmer, to fight their way aboard? In despair Jeffrey turned with his binoculars. What he saw brought different tears to his eyes. Two dozen Royal Navy Sea Harriers came in fast from behind him, right above the waves. Their wings were heavy with antiship and antiaircraft missiles, and electronic warfare pods, and depth charges and smart bombs.
Their flight leader drew level with Challenger's sail on the starboard side. He kept pace with the ship perfectly, so near that Jeffrey could touch his wing tip. Jeffrey waved. The pilot saluted. The Harriers attacked.
Everything happened at once. Missiles streaked in all directions like a meteor swarm. Their smoky trails crisscrossed, lit by fires and flashes on every side. Decoy flares burned and silvery decoy chaff blossomed in the air. Antitank rockets streaked past Challenger's sail; one missed Jeffrey's head so close its engine exhaust burned his face. Another hit the sail port side, and more smoke spewed from the hole. Enemy helos, and Harriers, were hit by incoming missiles. They burst into flames and crashed into the sea. Enemy warships began taking hits.
Enemy Harpoons roared by, tearing momentary gaps in Challenger's trailing smoke screen, then disappeared. Tracer rounds stitched the sky. More helos were hit, and their rocket pods ignited and flew everywhere like angry bees; their torpedo loads went up in volcanoes of torpex and fuel. Vicious fountains of dirty water towered high, as antitorpedo rockets ripped through the sea and stopped incoming Mark 46's; enemy antiaircraft fire stopped another incoming Harrier. Conventional jets still tangled high above. Jeffrey knew an electronic warfare battle savaged the invisible ether, equaling in violence the battle he could see.
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 extraheavy 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.
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, Deutschl
and 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, northwest, 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.