by Joe Buff
The even-numbered tubes were reloaded. Beck and Eberhard entered their passwords and turned their keys; the weapons were armed.
Suddenly Haffner at sonar shouted, "Inbound torpedo has come through the whiteout!
Bearing one six two! Torpedo is one of our Sea Lions!"
It must have been damaged by blast, its safeties and guidance awry
"Sea Lion has gone active! Sea Lion range-gating on Deutschland!"
"Snap shot, tube five, one six two, los!"
Beck launched the countershot. It would be barely in time, if that Sea Lion was preset at one KT—without the wire he couldn't tell its yield, let alone control it. Deutschland still raced north, depth now fifteen hundred meters. Eberhard ordered more noisemakers fired. The errant weapon ignored the distractions. Noisemakers were almost useless this deep: the pressure.
It was time to detonate the defensive countershot from tube five. Beck punched the commands. "Unit from tube five has—"
The blast force struck. The noise was indescribable.
"Another inbound weapon bearing two nine one!" Haffner shouted. "A Mark eighty-eight very close! Near-field effects!"
"Range too short for a countershot!" Beck yelled above the cacophony. "We'd be wrecked by our own eel! We're too deep for effective antitorpedo rocket fire!" The motor exhaust would be strangled: again, the pressure.
"Verdammt," Eberhard cursed. "Make sure we take Fuller with us! Snap shot, tubes two, four, six, and eight, diverging spread northwest through southwest. Los!" The Sea Lions leaped from the tubes. "All weapons fired!" The inbound Mark 88 came closer and closer. Its dingggs came through the hull. Ernst Beck waited to die. He thought of his wife and sons—he felt sad and angry. Something struck Deutschland's sail a jarring blow.
"Mark eighty-eight propulsion noise has ceased," Haffner shouted.
"No apparent damage!" the copilot said.
"Assess inbound torpedo as a dud." But this was no new lease on life, Beck knew; it simply meant more killing. "Get the port-side tubes reloaded now." Challenger raced for the ridge. Meltzer pulled her nose up sharply to climb the face of the basalt formation. Jeffrey watched his screens. Tubes three and five were reloaded.
"Four inbound torpedoes in the water!" Kathy said. "Contacts held on wide aperture arrays. Two weapons off our starboard quarter, two off the port quarter, closing in passive search mode." Brilliant decoys wouldn't work: At five thousand feet deep, they'd implode.
Jeffrey and Bell armed the weapons in three and five as fast as they could, and launched them as countershots. Jeffrey ordered a turn due north, down in the valley behind the ridge. The four Sea Lions closed in hot pursuit.
More weapons went off in the distance—at what targets, real or false, Beck couldn't tell. Deutschland still fled north, to put distance between her and the tortured nuclear battlefield. Another weapon might come through the whiteout any moment. One did, much too close. Eberhard ordered a counter-shot. The inbound weapon blew before the outbound one could intercept—the blast struck Deutschland at short range. Unsecured objects in the Zentrale flew. Fluorescent lightbulbs burst. The command console died, and the backup analog speed log showed Deutschland losing way.
"Give me damage reports," Eberhard snapped.
Intercoms blinked and phone talkers shouted all at once. Beck reached for the call from Engineering.
"Excessive-shock reactor scram. Propulsion power lost. Control circuits may be damaged, safe restart will take ten minutes."
Deutschland coasted to a halt. Around her the ocean fulminated. Somewhere out there, Beck knew, more torpedoes plowed through the sea, searching for something to destroy.
"Autoloader bearing pin has sheared," the phone talker yelled. "Port-side torpedo autoloader out of action."
Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to slow, to try to make less noise, to hide. Challenger was shielded from the worst of the whiteout to the east by the intervening ridge crest. Maybe the inbound torpedoes would run right past him in the chaos.
Challenger's latest two antitorpedo shots went off beyond the ridge. The shock waves bent over the crest, and rattled the ship. It was impossible to tell if there were still incoming weapons.
Jeffrey ordered Kathy to have her people listen hard, for signs of Deutschland or her torpedoes.
Something detonated against the opposite side of the ridge—again, the warhead's force bent up and over the crest. The gravimeter showed gaps in the ridge: an avalanche. The local seismic seawave struck, knocking Challenger askew The ship rolled and bucked until Meltzer and COB got her righted again.
A torpedo came over the top of the ridge off Challenger's stern. It pinged, then pinged again—Kathy heard the echoes above the landslide; it was close.
Jeffrey ordered flank speed.
Bell fired the 88 in tube seven as a countershot.
The Sea Lion warhead went off first, off the port quarter, then the blast reflected off the ridge and back again from starboard. Jeffrey's skeleton tried to fly apart inside his body. He tasted copper—his gums bled, gouged by a capped tooth.
Challenger coasted to a stop.
Propulsion power was lost. Jeffrey grabbed the red handset for Damage Control back aft. Willey said there was a fire
in Engineering, then the line went dead. Jeffrey ordered everyone to don their emergency air breather masks. He waited for the phone talker to report—the sound-powered phones were backup for the intercom. Jeffrey knew the news would not be good. Damage that halted the ship always had to be serious. Here, it could be their undoing. Ernst Beck made his way aft, past damage control parties at work. He passed the wardroom and mess, where first-aid men treated the injured. He had no time to stop and give encouragement or comfort. He noticed the ship's lay preacher, himself a first-aid tech, making his rounds.
Beck went through the heavy watertight door, into the spotless stainless steel corridor leading beyond the reactor. With all the shielding and massive machinery surrounding him now, the noise outside the hull seemed less.
Beck glanced to his right. In there, beyond the shielding, the core lay dormant, boron carbide control rods thrust between the zirconium-clad uranium-235 plates. Pressurized water still circulated, carrying off thermal energy as short-half-life by-products decayed. But there was nowhere near enough heat to generate steam to drive main turbines, or even auxiliary equipment. Without the turbines spinning, there was no current from the turbogenerators. Without that current, the permanent-magnet propulsion motors were still. The ship could hardly surface
and run on emergency diesel here. All power had to come from the batteries. The batteries were needed to restart the reactor, once the safeties triggered by the battle shock were reset, and the fast-unscram procedures were complete. But the batteries were also needed to run the combat systems, which used very high electrical demand. Time was of the essence.
Beck went through the watertight door at the far -end of the corridor. He was in the engine room now—it was hot and humid here, and much too quiet. The engineer stood and supervised, as senior enlisted technicians and junior officers checked the status of control circuits and equipment. Others studied readings from the reactor core, of temperatures and neutron flux.
Everyone worked confidently and efficiently. Beck was hardly needed. He watched as the first group of control rods was lifted, by just enough to enter the restart power range. The operators went through their automated checklists. One Leutnant zur See flipped through thick hard-copy reference manuals, independently verifying key parts of on-line procedure.
The engineer nodded, satisfied. "Very well, Reactor Operator. Lift the next control rod group to restart-level power." This step also went well.
Beck palmed an intercom mike and reported to Eberhard. Eberhard ordered Beck to the Zentrale. Eberhard told him Coomans had gotten the port-side torpedo autoloader working again.
SIMULTANEOUSLY, ON CHALLENGER.
Jeffrey fidgeted as he watched his automated damage control displays. He drew a breath arid
exhaled. Around him twenty other air masks hissed and whooshed. Jeffrey was still so used to being at the scene in drills or combat—with
Commander Wilson in charge in the CACC—it was emotionally trying to just sit and wait.
But Jeffrey trusted Bell, his XO now back aft; Jeffrey made himself relax. He told himself he still had a ways to go to learn the captainly ways Commander Wilson had long since mastered.
"Captain," the phone talker said. His voice was muffled through his mask. Jeffrey looked up. "Damage Control reports fire extinguished, sir."
"How long to propulsion restart?"
The phone talker relayed the question.
"Five minutes till the ship can answer Maneuvering bells."
"Very well." Jeffrey knew there was no point in asking Willey to hurry—he already was. When would another torpedo come over the ridge?
"Call the XO forward," Jeffrey said.
"Aye, aye."
Bell was there in moments, slightly breathless from his dash in a heavy air pack. Jeffrey made a point of thanking Bell for his help.
"Navigator," Jeffrey said, "take the conn.*
Sessions unplugged his mask, came to the command console, and plugged in again. "This is the navigator. I have the conn."
The watchstanders acknowledged through their masks.
Jeffrey cleared his throat, and pointed around the CACC. "XO, Sonar, Oceanographer, Assistant Navigator. Strategy session at the plotting table." Everyone took deep breaths, pulled on intercom headphones, put their masks back on, and used duct tape to get good seals; the local CACC intercom circuits were working. They joined Jeffrey at the horizontal nav console, and plugged back in. The assistant navigator, a senior chief, brought up a large-scale nautical chart.
"We've broken contact with Deutschland," Jeffrey said. "Now, fight or flight?"
"Deutschland has more options than we do, sir," Bell said. He pointed to the digital chart.
"They can try to come after us, or evade. If they want to evade, they can head northeast, into the Barents Sea, and take refuge in Russian waters."
Jeffrey nodded. The Joint Chiefs' global ROEs forbade American warships from entering the Barents Sea, to avoid a confrontation with Russia that might escalate.
"They could go southeast," Kathy said, "back the way we came, to Norway or the Baltic.
. .. They could even run the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. Gap, sir, into the North Atlantic, and head for a base in France, or threaten our convoys again."
"Concur," Jeffrey said. "And if they head north under the ice cap, they can sneak up over the top of the world and try to run the Bering Straits, on the Russian side, and break into the Pacific past Alaska. From there they could go anywhere."
"We have only one real choice," Bell said. "Under the ice cap we might blunder into Russian SSNs, guarding their boomers, and anything could happen. The friendly waters right off Northern Greenland and Arctic Canada are much too shallow anyway. That leaves the GIUK Gap for us. Into the North Atlantic and home, or temporary refuge in Great Britain."
"Not the latter," Jeffrey said. "We're too tempting a target. I don't want to bring danger following us to the British Isles, with atomic weapons so recently fired."
"I have to agree," Kathy said. "Although there's the same problem with going to the U.S. East Coast. I mean, triggering a nuclear exchange at a base or near the shore . At least we'd have the whole Atlantic for defensive measures first. Losing an Axis tail, linking up with Allied surface and airborne and undersea forces . . ."
"I concur with Sonar," Ilse said. "If we transit the Atlantic, we give time for heads to cool. We can try to avoid something awful in direct retaliation for the Greifswald raid." Jeffrey nodded. Ilse and Kathy had an important point. The U.K. was smaller in size and population than the U.S., and the Brits were hurting bad in this third Battle of the Atlantic. The U.S. could take more damage and keep up the fight. Cold-blooded, but there it was.
"All right," Jeffrey said. "But let's get back to the main question. We know we want to destroy Deutschland. Do we try to do it now and here?"
"Captain," Bell said, "you started this by asking if we wanted to escape."
"I don't think we have an alternative, XO. Deutschland and the Axis high command can't afford to let us get away, because of the model missile and the hard drives. Eberhard's most likely decision is to continue pursuit."
"Assuming he isn't badly damaged," Ilse said.
"Yes, assuming that. Even if he doesn't regain contact soon, he'll be somewhere in our rear, hunting us. As we approach the GIUK Gap, we may encounter one or more Axis Amethyste II's on barrier patrol. They'll know the Gap's our only practical escape route, too."
"A pair of those in front," Bell said, "and Deutschland behind . . . I don't like those odds one bit."
"Nor do I," Kathy said. "Any datum we made, fighting other German SSNs, would draw Deutschland immediately. There's partial deep sound channel coupling through both passages in the Gap."
Jeffrey'd already made up his mind, but it was good to hear the others check his thinking and agree.
"Now, how do we find Deutschland before she finds us?" "Captain," the phone talker called, "Engineer reports, Ready to answer all bells."
"Very well," Jeffrey said. "End of briefing. I have the conn. . . . Helm, ahead one third. Make your course zero two five."
Meltzer acknowledged.
"XO, I intend to proceed five nautical miles up this canyon, turn to starboard, and take a peek back over the ridge."
Beck was leaning over Werner Haffner's sonar console when the Zentrale phone talker spoke.
"First Watch Officer, sir, the engineer's compliments, and reactor is in full-power range. Ship is ready to answer all bells."
Beck went back to his own console, now rebooted, and repeated the message to the captain, who'd surely heard the talker himself—but this was procedure.
"Very well," Eberhard said.
Beck saw Eberhard was examining the large-scale nautical chart. Eberhard typed, and the same image came on Beck's screen.
"So, Einzvo? What would you do now?"
"If I were Challenger, sir, I'd head southwest, toward one of the passages between Greenland and Iceland and Scotland."
"Yes, that's his obvious egress path. Your sonar search plan?"
"Sir, Challenger will surely continue to hug the terrain, for acoustic masking."
"Tell me something I don't know."
Beck swallowed. "I suggest we first proceed to the top of the nearest ridge, then listen with the advantage of height and concealment." The series of parallel ridges ran northsouth; the nearest lay just west of where Deutschland and Challenger had had their inconclusive nuclear skirmish.
"What makes you think that will work?"
"Challenger is in a bind, sir. If she goes fast she'll make more noise, and we'll detect her from a distance." The noisy damage to her rudder, from the surface battle in the Sound, had been impossible to miss. "If she goes slow, she'll be closer, and that much easier to localize."
"Pilot," Eberhard said, "steer two zero five." To the south-southwest. "One-third speed ahead."
"Steer two zero five, jawohl. One-third speed ahead,
jawohl." Coomans glanced at Beck for a moment, as if to give him a mental shrug. Beck was miffed. Eberhard hadn't even replied to Beck's suggested plan.
"Sir, may I ask your intentions?"
"Work our way further south at the near side of the nearest ridge line. Then proceed to the crest at four knots."
Ilse and the others sat in their air breather masks, with intercom mikes underneath. She heard Sessions report they'd made the progress north that Jeffrey wanted.
"Very well, Nay," Jeffrey said through his mask. "Helm, make your course zero six zero.
" To the east-northeast. "Make turns for five knots." Ilse watched her gravimeter screen, -set to the forward-looking view. Challenger drew closer to the talus slope at the western base of the volcanic ridge line. The ship put on a stee
p up-bubble as Meltzer took the slope. On the display Ilse saw the ridge flank passing under her, very close.
She looked down at the deck, and reminded herself that all this imagery was real. The ridge was there outside the hull. The jagged basalt was right there under her feet. She glanced at own-ship's depth; the two-tons-per-squareinch sea pressure was also real. She switched to the bird's-eye view gravimeter mode. It showed the ridge from above, with Challenger's position marked. The own-ship icon slowly scaled the ridge, at an angle.
The gravimeter could see through solid rock—and through the boiling ocean of a sonar whiteout. The display showed the other side of the ridge, and the floor of the Shetland Channel just beyond. Ilse wondered what waited out there. To the gravimeter, a moving SSN would be invisible.
Beck watched his screens as Deutschland slowly climbed the east face of the ridge. Beck saw something on the sonar readouts.
"Hole-in-ocean contact on starboard wide-aperture array!" Haffner shouted. "Ambient sonar contact as well! Near-field effects."
"It's Challenger," Beck said. The two ships had met head-on at point-blank range.
"Pilot," Eberhard snapped. "Flank speed ahead!" "Reactor check valve transients directly to starboard!"
Haffner shouted. "Tonals imply Challenger accelerating. .
Aspect change! Signal drawing toward our baffles."
"She's turning to try to follow us," Beck said.
"Not she. He. Fuller. Pilot, starboard thirty rudder."
They'd found Deutschland, and Deutschland had found them. Ilse held on as Challenger banked steeply into a very hard turn to starboard, building up momentum as she went. The deck began to vibrate as the ship fought for flank speed.
"Contact still held on Master One," Kathy said. "Relative bearing is constant."
"We're in a turning dogfight," Jeffrey said.