Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

Someone very senior decided to leave the capital less protected, to try to aid my ship. . . . But it’s touch and go as to whether the Raptor icons will get to the cruise-missile icons and stop them in time.

  As if the U-boat captains were reading Jeffrey’s mind and wanted to shake his confidence, the radio reported that four more cruise missiles had been launched. Jeffrey watched his screen. Their course was the same as the previous four, as if they too were chasing Challenger.

  “Nav, Bridge.”

  “Bridge, Nav, aye,” Sessions answered.

  “Give me a course to the deepest water we can reach in ten minutes at present speed.” On the surface, at flank speed, Challenger did over twenty knots—but energy wasted by wave making kept her from going nearly as fast as when submerged.

  Jeffrey lifted his left earcup and strained to listen to the open air. He heard the sound of water churning up and over Challenger’s forward hull, hitting the support legs of the camouflage cover and swirling past the base of the sail. He heard the whistling of the wind over the Plexiglas windscreen and also through holes in the camouflage cover; panels knocked loose on the cover banged as Challenger rolled. The entire cover made a constant wooden creaking noise. But no guns fired, no antimissile missiles launched. Jeffrey knew that cruise missiles and Raptors were in a race beyond the horizon. He asked himself over and over if those missiles were aimed at what the enemy now knew to be Challenger, or if they followed a different approach course to have a better chance of clobbering the dry dock they didn’t realize he’d left.

  “Bridge, Nav.”

  “Nav, Bridge, aye.”

  “Course to deepest location is zero-nine-zero, Captain.” Due east. “Be advised that that is close to the previous rendezvous point between Ohio and her captain’s minisub.”

  “Understood. Ohio should be well south now, near her rendezvous with us. I see no added hazard of proceeding on zero-nine-zero.”

  “Bridge, Control, concur,” Bell said. He’d been listening in; his station at the command console was only a few feet forward of Sessions’s digital plotting table.

  “Helm, Bridge, left five degrees rudder, make your course zero-nine-zero.”

  Meltzer acknowledged, from down in the control room with everyone else.

  Even with the gentle rudder turn, at high speed and with her camouflage cover Challenger heeled dizzyingly.

  Crap. My speed. Small container ships don’t move this fast. If the Axis know anything, they know I’m not what I seem.

  “Control, Bridge, prepare to submerge the ship.” Bell acknowledged. “Phone talker,” Jeffrey said to the youngster crouched beside him under the clamshell half, “when I order all stop, go below.” The enlisted phone talker nodded.

  “Control, Bridge, have men standing by at all hull hatches. When I order all stop and our way comes off, have them come up fast and uncleat the camouflage cover. Once they retract the cleats, they go below and dog the hatches.”

  “Bridge, Control, when our way off, uncleat the cover, go below, and dog hatches, aye.”

  Jeffrey watched his console. Raptors were picking off the Axis cruise missiles, but there were still too many missiles in the air. The missiles had not changed course. Challenger would be well inside the search cones of their sensors soon. They’ll come in right above the wave tops, straight at me at five hundred knots. I won’t even see them till the final seconds of my life.

  Jeffrey had no weapons for defending against threats that moved so fast. Challenger reached the place Sessions had chosen for diving.

  The seafloor’s barely deeper than my ship is tall. Let’s pray the Axis warheads aren’t designed to go off underwater.

  “Helm, all stop. Back two thirds until our way comes off, then all stop.” Backing—throwing the pump jet into reverse—halted the ship more quickly, since her hull had great momentum.

  Meltzer acknowledged. The phone talker rushed below. The pump-jet wash churned forward from the stern, then ceased.

  Challenger was a stationary target, with a radar cross section larger than a barn.

  Jeffrey heard hull hatches popping open, and unseen crewmen raced to unfasten the camouflage cover. He heard wet ropes being cut with axes. The men went below and the hatches slammed shut.

  “Chief of the Watch, Bridge, submerge the ship! Dive, dive!”

  COB warned that the bridge hatch was still open. Jeffrey overrode the rules—this was an emergency crash dive. He heard air start to rush through the open ballast tank vents atop the hull, fore and aft. He could also hear, below, the electronic diving klaxon, and COB’s voice announcing the dive on the 1MC.

  Jeffrey locked the clamshells closed above his head. He detached the bridge display screen, cradling it under one arm. He clambered through the upper sail-trunk hatch. He could feel that the ship was taking forever to start to submerge. He dogged the hatch, then hurried down the ladder to the lower hatch. He pictured the inbound missiles, each a hungry, flying shark.

  Chapter 10

  Jeffrey took his place at the control-room command console. The control-room lighting was red, standard at night. The ship at last was submerged, with the Seabees’ cover jettisoned. Bell sat next to Jeffrey, and assumed the XO’s usual role as battle stations fire control coordinator. A lieutenant (j.g.) took over as officer of the deck; he was responsible for machinery status inside the ship, so Jeffrey and Bell could concentrate on the picture outside, and tactics.

  COB and Meltzer sat side by side at the ship control console on the forward bulkhead of the control room. Jeffrey had Meltzer steer Challenger north at five knots, to put distance between the ship and the now-conspicuous floating camouflage cover—but without raising an obvious surface hump or wake turbulence that the enemy could home on. With the ship’s hull so near the swells and the sky, this was a real possibility.

  Jeffrey glanced at a chronometer, then at the vertical large-screen tactical plot on the forward bulkhead. The cruise missiles had been thinned out by the Raptors, but a small group was barely two minutes away.

  We need to hunker down. It’s just too shallow here.

  “Helm,” Jeffrey ordered, “all stop.”

  “All stop, aye, sir.” Meltzer turned the engine order telegraph, a four-inch dial on his console. A pointer on the dial responded. “Maneuvering answers, all stop!”

  “Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey said, “on the sound-powered phones, rig for depth charge.”

  COB acknowledged. The word would pass quickly and quietly through the whole ship this way in a matter of moments. “Rig for depth charge,” as a modern expression, was used to warn the crew to hold on tight and be prepared for incoming fire.

  Jeffrey needed to do something to steady his nerves in the few endless seconds remaining until the missile impact on or near the camouflage cover. He felt his heart pounding, and could just imagine what some of the others were going through right now—especially the new people. His important passengers weren’t in sight: Felix and the SEALs were assigned to damage-control parties forward. Gamal Salih and Gerald Parker waited in the wardroom farther aft, to help as first-aid orderlies. They could all be too busy, soon.

  Jeffrey stood to make himself more visible, and peered around to inspect his control-room crew. They’d been reassured when he returned from the bridge in one piece, and they’d gotten themselves submerged okay, and now he was there with them as protector and authority figure.

  The starboard side of the control room held a line of weapons and fire-control consoles. Since Challenger was much too close to shore to use her nuclear torpedoes, the weapons officer, Lieutenant Bud Torelli, supervised the weapon-systems technicians in person. Torelli had a special-weapons console outside the torpedo room, for positive control when nukes would be fired.

  The port side of the compartment held a line of seven sonar consoles. Royal Navy Lieutenant Kathy Milgrom sat at the head of the line. Neither tall nor slim, she spoke with a Liverpool accent that Jeffrey enjoyed hearing. Like many of Challenger’s c
rew of 120, Milgrom wore eyeglasses—submariner eyeglasses, with narrow frames and small lenses, designed to fit under an emergency air-breathing mask. Jeffrey thought the eyeglasses combined with her build made Milgrom look owlish. As Jeffrey always reminded—corrected—himself, owls were birds of prey who hunted by night. Lieutenant Milgrom was extremely good at her job.

  The thing that was missing from the newest control rooms were periscopes; instead, photonics mast imagery would be displayed on high-definition full-color monitors around the compartment.

  “New passive sonar contact,” Milgrom called out. “Airborne, short range, closing fast on bearing—”

  A punishing crack hammered the hull. It hurt Jeffrey’s ears and almost knocked him from his feet. The crew all braced themselves. Aftershocks and reverberation made Challenger shake, as remnants of the airborne blast force echoed through the shallow water between the bottom and the surface and then back again. Mike cords hanging from the overhead jiggled; the fluorescent light fixtures, suspended from spring-loaded fittings, swayed and cast moving red shadows. Construction dirt and dust—missed by the harried cleanup workers—were thrown into the air. Jeffrey grabbed a stanchion by the overhead and held on tight. Times like this, I miss old-fashioned periscopes. They were great for grabbing. He tried not to cough from the dust.

  As the reverbing thunder from outside continued, a terrifying kaboom battered the ship and everyone and everything inside. The pain in Jeffrey’s eardrums was intense. The surrounding sea was so disturbed by the nearby airborne detonation that Challenger lurched this way and that as the ocean around her sloshed. Jeffrey’s hand, from gripping the overhead fitting, felt pins and needles—even though the entire compartment was shock isolated from the hull by rubber pads and oil-filled cushions and mechanical pivots, for quieting.

  Once more echoes and aftershocks banged away at the hull. COB and Meltzer struggled at their controls, to keep Challenger from hitting the bottom or broaching. But there wasn’t much they could do rapidly when the ship wasn’t moving; she lacked any lift on her bow planes or stern planes.

  Jeffrey waited for the next eruption. In these conditions, Challenger’s powerful sonars were no use in giving any warning.

  Nothing more happened. Now Jeffrey noticed that the deck, and console screens and keyboards, and peoples’ hair, were covered with bits of colored plastic.

  Leftover crimped insulation from a month’s work on the electrical wires. Hidden behind or under things, hurled up by the bashing we took.

  More time passed. It was possible that some missiles had taken a dogleg course, so they wouldn’t all arrive together.

  Still nothing happened.

  “Captain,” Milgrom reported, “acoustic sea state diminishing.” The noise outside was dying away. “New passive sonar contact on the port wide-aperture array. Assess as multiple fighter aircraft flying in formation. Contact fading rapidly.” Milgrom gave the bearing, and Bell gave the contact’s estimated course. Appropriate icons appeared on the tactical plot—the Raptor squadron, flying back to Washington together.

  “I think that’s that,” Jeffrey said. “Chief of the Watch, on the sound-powered phones, maintain battle stations. Specify battle stations antisubmarine.” The 1MC wasn’t used submerged, in wartime conditions, for quieting. Jeffrey turned to Bell. “Fire Control, I smell something fishy.”

  Before Bell could open his mouth, Milgrom broke in.

  “Captain, new passive sonar contact on starboard wide-aperture array.” The wide-aperture arrays were sets of three rectangular hydrophone complexes, mounted along the ship’s hull, one set each on her port and starboard sides. Because they were two-dimensional and rigid, unlike a towed array, and their spacing gave a much broader maw to catch sound waves than Challenger’s bow sphere, the wide-aperture arrays were extremely sensitive. Special signal-processing algorithms could use their data to do an extremely powerful surveillance of the seas outside.

  “Sir,” Milgrom said, “contact is signal from a friendly, disposable acoustic-link modem.” A small, programmable, underwater buoy, which repeatedly transmitted a message by secure, covert, extremely high-frequency sound. The sound was low power, and shifted around many times per second in the two thousand kilohertz band—a hundred times above the limit of human hearing. Despite this, modems could have ranges of tens of miles. The frequency-agile design made it almost impossible for an enemy not possessing the proper specifications to even detect the transmission: It jumped much faster than the minimum time interval over which an enemy sonar system had to hear a steady tone before calling it signal rather than noise without overwhelming false-alarm rates. Decoding the transmission was a separate problem, assuming a hostile detection could ever be made.

  “Message decrypted by radio room. Message is from USS Ohio, Captain. Relaying now to your console in plain text.” All done through the fiber-optic LAN.

  “Very well, Sonar.”

  Jeffrey sat and windowed the message in a corner of his main screen.

  The message was from Captain Parcelli. It was more than an hour old. Jeffrey waved for Bell to lean over and read it with him. They both got the idea pretty quickly, and gave each other meaningful, worried, annoyed looks. They went back to reading, and finished.

  Since Parcelli’s ship, as a former boomer, was half again as long as Jeffrey’s, this gave the wide-aperture arrays she’d been equipped with—late in her conversion to an SSGN—even more sensitivity than Challenger’s. After Parcelli rejoined Ohio his sonar people detected the Axis missile launches, much farther inshore than American fast-attack submarines had expected, from what Admiral Hodgkiss had said in his final briefing. Parcelli decided to engage the enemy, as the best available platform within effective striking distance. His nuclear-powered sustained flank speed was almost twenty-five knots, faster by several knots than the enemy class 212s at their very fastest. And the class 212 diesel boats, with only fuel-cell air-independent propulsion and storage-battery power available while running well submerged, could keep to their top speed for only short bursts of time.

  Even Ohio was noisy at flank speed, especially carrying minisubs with their extra flow noise, and Parcelli intended to use this to charge the launch point of the cruise missiles, then offer battle with the two U-boats. His assessment was that they would have brought a few torpedoes, to fire at targets of opportunity, so they would accept battle, and close the range on Ohio. Once within torpedo striking distance of each other, Parcelli intended to suddenly slow, then use his ship’s superior quieting, her vastly superior sonars and signal-processing computers, her much larger stock of decoys and countermeasures compared to the little 212s—and other systems advantages—to destroy the U-boats. The message ended by suggesting a revised rendezvous point, well to the north, near where the U-boats would be found. The exact location was specified in the message by an offset to the original classified location, to reduce the already slim chance of an enemy reading the message and arranging an ambush.

  Jeffrey fought to keep himself under control. He felt his face turn crimson.

  Bell said it for him, by typing on the console so no one would hear. “Looks like we have a real cowboy on our hands, Skipper!” Bell quickly erased the message.

  Jeffrey nodded, tight lipped, not trusting himself to speak.

  Parcelli had disobeyed orders and was endangering his ship against targets that were not his to attack. Ohio was not expendable in this context. Parcelli was even exposing himself to friendly fire—his hunt would surely take him outside today’s secret Allied submarine safe corridors.

  He’s trying to rack up some kills early on, to lord it over me for the rest of the mission.

  I cannot allow this. Period.

  “You said you smelled something fishy, sir?” Bell prodded.

  “Uh, yeah. Thanks, XO.”

  One thing Jeffrey couldn’t do as task-group commander was lose his temper. He would deal with Parcelli in good time.

  “The Two-twelves, XO. Never min
d how they sneaked so close to Norfolk.” If they had a month or more to cruise along at four or five knots from the coast of occupied France, and drift with undersea currents, or hide under surface storms or neutral merchant ships and so on, I can see that they might have done it stealthily enough. “The Germans know we put in at Newport News for repairs, that much we couldn’t hide. It’s even possible they’d originally been dispatched to go after a supercarrier leaving port, or some other high-value target, but then Challenger entered the picture, so their orders were changed by ELF.”

  “Concur, Captain. With you so far.”

  “And part of the why of them sneaking so near is obvious, now that we’ve got twenty-twenty hindsight from that close shave just now.”

  “Shorter flight time for their missiles. Less inertial navigation drift, for a better precision assault on our dry dock. And as we saw for ourselves, a lot less margin for our side to man the defenses. . . . We never spotted a hint of the smoke screen we were promised.”

  Jeffrey nodded. “And leave out how they knew exactly when to launch, what day, what hour. It can’t be just coincidence. It has to be from signals intercepts, or something they saw on spy satellites, or word they got from informers or moles. We’ll hash that through with Mr. Parker and Captain Parcelli later. Another aspect of why is much more relevant, here and now.”

  “Sir?”

  “If they come well inside the two-hundred-mile limit, they know we won’t use nukes against them. That greatly evens the odds, in a sub-on-sub or sub versus antisubmarine battle.”

  Bell caught on immediately. “As witnessed by the lack of success of our maritime patrol aircraft and the ASW helos.”

  “Right. The announced Axis ROEs mean they won’t use nuclear weapons within the two-hundred-mile limit of the U.S. homeland either . . . assuming the U-boats obey the ROEs even if facing certain death, or their ROEs haven’t been secretly changed.” Jeffrey watched Bell grimace. “There’s another scary thing, XO.”

  “Captain?”

  “Fuel endurance. By coming this close, and assuming it wasn’t a one-way suicide mission, which I seriously doubt, ’cause that’s not their culture, they added almost two thousand miles to their round-trip home. The class Two-twelves can’t handle that.”