by Joe Buff
CHAPTER 42
E rnst Beck listened in disbelief as Werner Haffner reported a series of cruise-missile launches directly ahead, shallow, amid the Valdivia Seamounts. “Is it some kind of trick?” he asked. “A new type of noisemaker, to act as a decoy?”
Haffner replayed the recording of the launch noises on the sonar speakers. Beck listened to each set of watery whooshes and rumbles, each booster rocket suddenly cut off, the diminishing whine of each jet engine as it receded into the distance, and the final hard splash as each discarded booster hit the surface at hundreds of knots. He counted a salvo of eight torpedo tube launches, then twelve vertical-launch-system shots.
An ELF radio message from Berlin soon confirmed that radio transmissions had been intercepted from the launch location right before the launches, on two different bands. One transmission suggested a two-way floating wire antenna in use. The other was a high-baud-rate antenna—presumably a handshake and an error check.
“I can’t imagine any decoy that can do all that,” Stissinger said.
“Concur,” Beck said.
“Could it be a different submarine, not Challenger?” von Loringhoven asked.
“I don’t think so. The Allies would give Challenger a clear playing field, to avoid sonar contact confusion or any risk of friendly fire. And we expected Challenger to be in the Valdivia Seamounts by now.”
“Then why would they launch missiles when they must know we’re very near?”
“Baron, I’m sure they were ordered to from above. The course of the missiles, toward the southern flank of the Allied pocket, suggests the land offensive has opened and the Allies are in dire straits. The convoy is still very far from landing any reinforcing troops or tanks or ammo.”
“That’s good to hear.” Von Loringhoven smiled.
Beck nodded. “Let’s take care of Jeffrey Fuller once and for all.”
Beck glanced at his chart and at the gravimeter. The closest edge of the seamounts was almost in maximum Sea Lion range. But even at seventy-five knots, it would take a Sea Lion half an hour to cover those thirty-five sea miles from the von Scheer.
Beck decided to wait to get closer. He intended to use more off-board probes to feel around for Challenger. If that didn’t turn up anything, he would fire Sea Lions from closer in, to force a response. The same seamount maze that von Scheer could use in order to disappear from Jeffrey Fuller might just as nicely serve as a way to box Fuller in.
Let me see. Eight Sea Lions approaching the Valdivias from different bearings…Yes, he’d have to shoot back or go to flank speed, or both, and either way I’ve got him.
I’ve got him because I hold one decisive advantage. Challenger cuts her guidance wire to a weapon every time she shuts the outer torpedo tube door to reload. Von Scheer has better tube architecture. We can fire repeated salvos through a tube and not cut any wires…. Our fire-control systemsare designed to control more eels in the water at once than we can even fit aboard. And our technicians are highly trained in handling such a weapon-rich environment. It was hard for Beck to not feel smug.
“Torpedoes in the water,” Haffner screamed. “Eight torpedoes in the water, inbound at our depth and pinging! New sonar contact, submerged, flank-speed tonals, Challenger! Challenger’s relative bearing is steady, range is closing fast!”
Beck watched his tactical screens in shock. Mark 88s were coming at von Scheer in a wide fan spread, converging from every point on the compass between east and northwest. The Mark 88s were attacking at seventy knots. Challenger was charging at Beck, right behind Fuller’s torpedoes.
“Hydrophone effects!” Haffner yelled. “More torpedoes in the water. One, two, three…six, eight more torpedoes in the water, pinging!”
Jeffrey gripped his armrests as Challenger made her rough flank-speed vibrations. The final death ride had begun.
His plan was very simple. Hodgkiss’s orders pushed Challenger into another odd reversal of roles: it was she, not the von Scheer, who had needed to come shallow to conduct a missile launch. Forced to make lemonade from this unexpected lemon, Jeffrey saw a way his Tomahawk strike could help him trap the von Scheer: such a conspicuous datum, exactly as Admiral Hodgkiss said, would make very sure Ernst Beck knew precisely where Jeffrey was. Rather than have to think up some credible ploy of his own, the missile launch—under the present strategic circumstances—was believable by itself. The datum would strongly confirm Beck’s likely hunch about Jeffrey’s next tactic, that Challenger would make a stand amid the Valdivias. Beck’s recollection of Jeffrey’s final gambit the last time they clashed, before Christmas, would work to Jeffrey’s advantage now.
Then Jeffrey, his ultimate commitment already made in agreement with Bell, threw the whole rule book away. Whether or not it’s true, Ernst Beck, keep thinking I’m predictable and—as captains going head-to-head—you’re better than me.
The von Scheer had been moving slowly, for tactical caution and for stealth. Challenger built up full momentum, with her reactor pushed to 120 percent—by hiding just beyond the north side of the Walvis down on the very bottom. This gave Jeffrey good acoustic masking until he was ready to turn and rush up over the top of the ridge. He used the active pinging by his first fish to find the von Scheer, then ordered Meltzer to bear down on her relentlessly.
Now that he’d caught the von Scheer by surprise, his salvos of Mark 88s would force Beck south, out of the protection of the Walvis Ridge and into the Cape Basin, where there was nowhere for either ship to hide.
Jeffrey smiled. To hell with caution. To hell with stealth. Just keep on believing I’m bluffing, Beck. And then I’ll see you in hell.
Beck ordered salvos of Sea Lions fired at Challenger’s torpedoes in self-defense. Even with the Mark 88 guidance wires cut, their active pinging would let them home on Beck’s ship.
Beck fired other Sea Lions at Challenger, but Fuller already had more weapons in the water. Still Fuller charged right at von Scheer.
Beck ordered the pilot to turn the von Scheer south and make flank speed. He needed to buy space and time in order to give his defensive countershots enough room so they wouldn’t take von Scheer with them when they blew.
Challenger’s bow sphere went active. It must have been set on maximum power. A strident screech pierced the water and the von Scheer’s hull. The noise sundered the air in the Zentrale, rising and falling in pitch, setting Beck’s nerves on edge as if fingernails had dragged on a blackboard. It made it hard for him to think.
He wanted to retaliate, but Challenger was coming at him from behind, in that arc where his own bow sphere was useless.
Fuller has to have planned it this way.
He’s using his active sonar as a psychological weapon.
The worst of it is, it’s working.
The sonar noise was drowned out only when atomic torpedo warheads began to detonate. The von Scheer was kicked hard in the stern. Now Beck began to understand what Fuller and Challenger had gone through back in the mountain pass. Warhead concussions and fireball pulsations, bounces of shock fronts off the surface and the bottom and the ridge, pounded the von Scheer like the Roman god Vulcan working at his forge.
Still heading south into very deep water, Beck knew he had to continue to flee. The massive blasts and aftershocks did more than deafen his crew and damage his vessel. They blinded all his sonar arrays. It became impossible to know what was happening back behind the ship.
One leaker, one Mark 88 making it through Beck’s Sea Lion defensive barrage, could catch the von Scheer and put her on the bottom in pieces.
Still the blasts and hammer blows went on. The port-side torpedo autoloader jammed. Broken parts sprayed flammable hydraulic fluid, and firefighters raced to smother the fluid with foam before it ignited.
Overhead light fixtures shattered. Cooling-water pipes cracked. Consoles went dark, and software systems crashed. The control room filled with the burned-plastic reek of smoldering electronics. The crewmen raced to don their emergency
air-breathing masks. Beck and Stissinger glanced at each other worriedly through their masks. A chief helped the fumbling von Loringhoven get his mask on properly and plugged its hose into the overhead supply pipe.
“He’s going to kill us all!” von Loringhoven shouted. His voice was muffled through his mask, and he was barely audible above the noise.
“No!” Beck yelled. “I know him! That’s what he wants us to think!”
Von Scheer had reached flank speed, over forty knots. But Beck knew Challenger was ten or twelve knots faster, and he realized by now that her warhead yields had been upgraded to a full kiloton. We’re in a stern chase, and he’s gaining…assuming he’s still back there at all.
Beck ordered the pilot to turn east, just enough so the port wide-aperture array could hear back the way von Scheer had come.
Haffner and his men worked hard to filter out the noise and clean up the signals. The hissing and whooshing of air-breathing masks, including Beck’s own, added to the other noise and made the scene seem mad. But Beck knew the lunacy was all too real.
Beck waited for a report from Haffner. Challenger had probably turned away, to continue the cat-and-mouse stalking as the acoustic catastrophe outside the hull died down. If Fuller got too close, he wouldn’t be able to fire at Beck—his own weapon explosions would fracture Challenger’s hull right along with von Scheer’s. Three kilometers down, Beck knew, Fuller’s only high-explosive torpedoes, his ADCAPs, were far below their crush depths.
“Flank-speed tonals and flow noise, Captain! Challenger still in pursuit!”
Beck cursed; Fuller was gaining on him. He ordered another salvo of Sea Lions fired. They had to run out in front of the ship and then loop behind to reach their target. This cost him precious space and time.
More Mark 88s went off. They had been set on lower yields, probably a tenth of a kiloton, to knock down Beck’s Sea Lions without damaging Challenger too badly.
Beck ordered the pilot to turn slightly, again. Immediately Haffner reported eight Mark 88s in the water, tearing after von Scheer at almost thirty knots net closing speed. Challenger resumed her brain-shattering sonar harassment.
Beck ordered the pilot due south. He ordered Stissinger to launch eight more Sea Lions. Stissinger yelled that the work was badly slowed because of the jammed autoloader and slippery firefighting foam, laced with oily hydraulic fluid, that was sloshing on the torpedo-room deck.
Beck ordered Stissinger to the torpedo room to take charge and steady the men. More A-bombs went off. The intercom circuits failed; the phone talker said his line had gone dead; the on-board fiber-optic LAN went down. The lights dimmed suddenly—and Beck was out of touch with the rest of his ship.
Soon a messenger came forward from Engineering, breathless from running in a heavy compressed air pack. He said an auxiliary turbogenerator was on fire and the main propulsion-shaft packing gland was leaking. The engineer requested permission to use the main batteries to drive the firefighting pumps and bilge pumps aft. Beck knew that to draw current from the main propulsion turbogenerators would slow the ship, the last thing he could afford. And draining the battery ran the risk that von Scheer might not be able to restart her nuclear reactor, in case the reactor scrammed because of blast shock or an electrical problem.
Beck began to think he was losing the fight. Jeffrey Fuller seemed fixated on taking both crews to their graves.
And Beck realized that, from a strategic point of view, it did make sense, like an exchange of queens in a grand-master chess tournament.
An even trade. The balance of power of undersea forces, Allied versus Axis, is maintained—at a lower level for both sides—but the crucial Allied relief convoy is spared my salvo of missiles.
It was then that Ernst Beck knew for sure that, this time, Jeffrey Fuller wasn’t bluffing.
The lights were dim; smoke filled the air and everyone wore their air breather masks. Challenger had taken a terrible beating, but still the speed logs all read 53.3 knots—and still she was gaining on the von Scheer.
“New mechanical transients, Captain.” Milgrom projected her voice through her mask. “Assess as firefighting and bilge pumps running on von Scheer.”
Jeffrey turned to her. “Could it be faked?”
“Negative. We’re in their baffles. They don’t have an array to project false sounds in this direction.”
“What else?”
“Heavy banging and clanking, sir, as if crewmen are making numerous hasty repairs.”
“Very well, Sonar.”
Jeffrey turned back to Bell. They met each other’s eyes through their masks.
“We’ve clobbered them good,” Bell said.
“They’re still making flank speed,” Jeffrey said. “They still have nuclear weapons aboard. They’re a functional fighting machine, XO. Our duty is to destroy them. If we back off now, we regress to our previous tactics, trading blow for blow from a distance. We need to get so close Beck’s own defensive Sea Lion blasts would kill his ship if our shots fail. That’s our only formula for guaranteed success.”
“Understood.”
Even through the mask, he heard infinite sorrow and regret in his XO’s voice. “Reload another full salvo of Mark Eighty-eights,” Jeffrey ordered.
Ernst Beck racked his brain for a way to survive this suicide charge by Challenger. The fire and flooding in Engineering were serious, even if the influx past the main shaft packing gland was muted by the fail-safe design of the seals. Von Scheer’s torpedo room was still in bad shape, even with Stissinger down there helping.
Only a lucky shot would get through Challenger’s defensive Mark 88 salvos—and the range between the two ships was getting so short that soon a single atomic torpedo from either one would kill them both for sure. It seemed that only some other lucky stroke, such as a major breakdown on Fuller’s ship, could save Beck’s own.
And right now I don’t feel lucky. Then Beck had a desperate idea.
“Pilot, forty degrees up bubble. Make your depth nine hundred meters.”
Von Scheer’s nose soared for the sky. If Beck looked straight ahead, he saw the deck and not the forward bulkhead now. He was forced back against his headrest, and the ship went shallower fast. Because she was neutrally buoyant, literally floating while down in the sea, this rise toward the surface required no fight against gravity: unlike an airplane, a submarine could pull up hard without sacrificing forward speed.
“Von Scheer has pulled a steep up-bubble,” Bell yelled.
“Collision alarm! Forty degrees up-bubble, smartly!”
The alarm was a shipwide warning for the crew to grab something, fast. Meltzer pulled back hard on his wheel. The control-room deck became a hillside. Jeffrey and Bell were tilted steeply in their seats.
Bell turned to Jeffrey and yelled, “What is he doing?”
“Going shallow enough that his noisemakers and decoys work! And so his high-explosive Series Sixty-five torpedoes can function!”
“But we can stop his Sixty-fives with our antitorpedo rockets if we go shallow!”
“Maybe not! And shallow relieves his rate of flooding!”
Jeffrey tried to put himself in Ernst Beck’s shoes.
What manner of man is this guy? How driven is Beck to succeed and survive? How far out on the risk-taking envelope is he truly willing to go to accomplish his mission?…How willing is he, really, to die?
“Sonar!”
“Captain!”
“Status of mechanical transients on von Scheer?”
“Bilge and firefighting pumps! Hammering noises, and power tools now!”
“He’s leveling off!” Bell shouted.
Jeffrey eyed a depth gauge: 3,000 feet—900 meters. “Helm, zero bubble! Make your depth three thousand feet!”
Before he could shoot, von Scheer launched four more Sea Lions. They looped around and charged at Challenger.
Jeffrey ordered Bell to fire four Mark 88s to destroy them, and four more at the von Scheer.
“He’s still full of fight, sir.”
“So am I, but him I’m not so sure. Watch what happens now.”
The four inbound Sea Lions spread out. Bell had his men direct one Mark 88 at each inbound weapon. Bell had the warheads set at lowest yield, and blew them barely outside lethal range of Challenger. Beck made defensive countershots too, also at low yield, and they detonated a split second after Challenger’s.
Challenger was punished hard. A wall of noise and bubble clouds stood between Challenger and von Scheer.
“Helm, all stop!”
“Sir?” Bell yelled as the ocean outside fulminated.
“We don’t know what’s on the other side of that curtain now! With noisemakers and decoys, and up-close conventional Series Sixty-five shots, and with all the atomic reverb as distracting background noise, he can start a game of hide-and-seek and maybe get in a lethal sucker punch!” Jeffrey drew deep breaths inside his mask.
“Our job is to destroy him!”
“Our paramount job is protecting the convoy! If we stay on this side of the wall of new blasts, we do that! We’ve already done that! We go through there blind, with Beck having all these new options, we stand to lose both Challenger and the convoy!”
“But—”
“If he wanted to accept the double kill, he’d’ve doubled back at us and it would all be over by now! He wants to live. Nuclear blasts to blind us, then noisemakers, decoys, to get us all confused about his location and course and depth so he sneaks away!”
“And then goes after the convoy?”
“No. We can easily stay between him and the convoy! We’re faster and we’re less damaged! He could see and hear all that for himself!…We’ve forced him so far south he’s much farther away from his missile launch point than before! He has to know he’ll never get past us like this!”
“Why don’t we keep shooting at him with nukes?”