by Joe Buff
I’m conscious of this transformation within me. I’m grateful for the moral load it took off my mind.
Beck smiled a predatory smile. “Baron, we’re going to send Captain Fuller a little surprise.”
“Torpedoes in the water,” Milgrom shouted. “Two, three, four torpedoes in the water at our depth, passing below our northern off-board probe! Four more torpedoes in the water under our southern probe!”
“Torpedo headings?” Jeffrey snapped. “Weapon types?”
“Torpedoes now rounding north and south faces of Wust Seamount at seventy-five knots. Torpedoes inbound at Challenger. Torpedoes are Axis nuclear Sea Lion units!”
Hostile inbound weapon icons popped onto the tactical plot.
Shit. Beck knew I was here. He’s smarter, more aggressive than I thought.
He’d supposed to act like a boomer captain, hiding and protecting his ship till it’s time for him to launch.
But he’s fighting like a fast-attack commander, a good one — sneaky, hard-hitting, outpsyching me from the start.
The gravimeter told Jeffrey he was badly boxed in: Immediately behind Challenger, a cluster of seamount peaks rose straight up almost three miles high.
“Inbound torpedoes now held as direct path contacts on both port and starboard wide-aperture arrays!”
Beck had Challenger caught in a vise. There was no place Jeffrey could run: seamounts in front and behind, four atomic torpedoes charging at him fast from the right and four more from the left. Noisemakers were useless this deep, strangled by the weight of miles of seawater pressing down. Challenger’s brilliant decoys had a crush depth similar to her off-board probes — at fifteen thousand feet they’d implode in the tubes the moment the pressure was equalized.
In the control room, Jeffrey felt many pairs of eyes glance his way. Those faces showed everything from panic to dependency, to an almost childlike faith that the captain — their father figure in a crisis — would find some way for them to survive.
All these thoughts and glances happened in fractions of a second.
“Fire Control,” Jeffrey rapped out, “firing point procedures, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights in tubes one through four. Set warhead yields to maximum.” One kiloton each.
“Preset!” Bell shouted.
“Snap shots, tubes one through four, fan spread, due north, shoot.” A snap shot lacked a firing solution, but launching fish this way, unprogrammed, saved precious time.
Four Mark 88s dashed from the tubes and into the sea. “Tubes one through four fired electrically!”
“All units running normally!”
The four Mark 88 fish ran through the mountain pass, toward the Angola Basin, trailing their guidance wires.
“Helm, ahead flank. Thirty degrees right rudder. Make your course due north.”
Meltzer acknowledged. Challenger turned north and gained speed.
“Fire Control, aim one Mark Eighty-eight at each of the inbound Sea Lions to the north. Set them to blow by timer within kill range of those enemy weapons.”
“The weapons may try to evade.”
“Not in this narrow pass. They’ve got no more maneuvering room than we do.”
“Lost the wire, LMRS from tube eight,” a fire-controlman yelled. Challenger’s hard turn north had overstrained the fiber-optic tether to the probe that Jeffrey had holding to the south side of the Wust Seamount.
“My course is due north, sir!” Meltzer shouted.
“Very well, Helm!”
The ride became rough as Challenger’s speed built up toward fifty knots.
“Sonar,” Jeffrey snapped, “any more torpedoes inbound? Any contact on von Scheer?”
“Negative,” Milgrom said. “Negative.”
“Shut the outer doors, tubes one through four and seven and eight.”
“Lost the wires, all empty tubes!”
“Fire Control, tubes one through four and seven and eight, reload, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights!”
Bell relayed commands. Jeffrey pictured everything as below, at the special-weapons control console and inside the huge but cramped torpedo room itself, Lieutenant Torelli and his men were hard at work. He prayed there were no malfunctions or mistakes.
Jeffrey eyed the tactical plot. Four torpedoes were coming straight at him from directly ahead. His own atomic fish charged in their direction at a net closing speed of almost a hundred and fifty knots. Jeffrey charged after his own fish, doing fifty knots himself. Four enemy torpedoes gained at him from behind, at a net closing speed of twenty-five knots.
This’ll be close. The timing has to be perfect.
“Units from tubes one through four have detonated!” Bell shouted.
The signals, through the fiber-optic cables, moved at the speed of light. The noise and shock force, Jeffrey knew, moved only at the speed of sound in water. The ranges were so short, his time to live or die so fleeting now, that the fiber-optic signals beat the blast fronts on their race to Challenger by much too little time to think.
Four one-kiloton nuclear blasts went off at once ahead of Challenger. An all-consuming demon of painful decibels and shaking smashed at the ship from every side. Challenger continued her hard sprint forward, into the midst of Jeffrey’s self-made thunder in the deep. Noise battered the ship in every octave, and vibrations tore at her with every resonance period from high to low. They made Jeffrey’s feet and buttocks jar and ache like pins and needles. They made his teeth chatter as Challenger shook, and his skeleton seemed to rattle inside his body. Challenger rose and fell like a roller coaster as Meltzer and COB fought to regain control.
Crewmen’s arms and legs flailed as they tried to cover their ears and open their mouths — to relieve the pressure against their eardrums from the cacophony outside.
Then the aftershocks and blast reflections began to hit.
The four fireballs pulsated as they plunged for the surface. Each time they collapsed and rebounded, more noise and more hard punches were thrown at Challenger.
More noise and pounding reflected off the seamount walls to right and left. The roller-coaster ride went on. The deck — alive with buzzing and humming that came right up through Jeffrey’s legs and into his genitals — seesawed as the ship’s nose bucked.
“The gravimeter,” Bell shouted.
Jeffrey forced his eyes to focus. Gouges and scars appeared in the seamount walls to either flank. Avalanches, triggered by the forces of the blasts.
Above all the other noise and shaking, Jeffrey felt sharp, hard blows. Falling boulders, bouncing off our hull. One hit on our vulnerable stern parts and we’re finished.
The vessel shimmied and yawed. Sloshing ocean, kicked up by the avalanches.
Damage reports poured in, and repair crews went to work as best they could — so far, nothing fatal to Challenger’s ability to fight. But reloading the tubes was slow going.
“Assess enemy inbound weapons from north destroyed!” Bell shouted above the continuing racket. “Four torpedoes to the south still closing!.. Inbound torpedoes have gone to active search!” The surviving Sea Lions had started to ping.
Jeffrey checked the speed-log gauges — the digital readings and backup analog dials agreed. Challenger’s speed was fifty-three knots, everything she had.
Torelli signaled he was waiting.
Jeffrey and Bell entered their special-weapons arming codes.
“Make tubes one through four and seven and eight ready in all respects including opening outer doors.”
Jeffrey ordered the Mark 88s in tubes one through four fired as countershots against the weapons to the south.
The fish dashed from the tubes, spread out, changed course, and ran off back behind Challenger.
Jeffrey pondered his options. He was about to enter the wall of tortured water ahead of the ship, where her first four torpedoes had gone off. Four more were about to detonate behind him, unless those inbound Sea Lions got Challenger first — which was a very real risk since the engagement distances had grow
n so tight.
“Firing-point procedures, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights in tubes seven and eight! Set warhead yields to maximum!”
“Ready!” Bell acknowledged.
“Snap shots, loop north of the Wust Seamount and then course two seven zero.” West. “Preset units for active search when steady on two seven zero.” The units would ping with their own built-in target homing sonars.
“Preset!”
“Shoot.”
“Tubes seven and eight fired electrically!”
“Units running normally!”
These two fish will hunt for von Scheer, give Ernst Beck something to worry about.
“Units from tubes one through four have detonated!”
My defensive countershots, against those four torpedoes closing from the south.
The blast forces hit at once from directly behind, while the brutality of the first four blasts ahead had barely diminished.
The awful punishment renewed: noise, vibrations, crew injuries, ship damage. Pitching, rolling, yawing, heaving.
Jeffrey was nearly deaf already, but the shocks and aftershocks and blast reflections never let up. There was terrible pain in his ear canals and a silvery whistling and ringing in his head — it got worse and worse as the punishment went on. Still, he forced himself to think.
“Helm! Right ten degrees rudder, make your course one eight zero!”
Meltzer turned his head toward Jeffrey as his bloodless hands gripped the control wheel. His lips moved, but Jeffrey couldn’t tell what his own helmsman said — the noise, the deafness, were winning. Jeffrey realized both men simply could not be understood verbally.
Jeffrey used sign language. He mimed holding the control wheel, then mimed turning it right. He held up all ten fingers. Ten degrees. He pointed at a gyrocompass and held up one finger, then eight, then touched index finger to thumb to form a zero. Course one eight zero. South.
Meltzer nodded and went to work.
In the churning, surging, hellish Jacuzzi now swirling in the deep-water pass — between crumbling seamounts and opposite walls of million-degree atomic bubble clouds and multikiloton turbulence — Challenger altered course. The ship banked into a turn to the right, as sharply as Jeffrey dared at flank speed. Challenger swung back the way she’d just come, still moving as fast as she could.
Jeffrey leaned toward Bell. He had to bellow at the very top of his lungs. “Reload tubes one through four and seven and eight, Mark Eighty-eights!”
Bell nodded. The wait seemed endless; at last the reloading was done.
Jeffrey issued more orders. He sent two more snap shots after his two already in the water: north and then west around the Wust Seamount again, to also hunt on their own for von Scheer.
“Why not south for those two?” Bell shouted. “Pinch him from both sides like he just did to us?”
“You’ll see.”
“Aye aye!”
“Sonar!” Jeffrey yelled.
Milgrom didn’t respond.
Jeffrey unbuckled his seat belt and struggled toward her. He gripped stanchions on the overhead to steady himself. Aftershocks and body blows came as each throbbing fireball finally broke the surface far above; hard pounding continued from avalanche rocks and viciously stirred-up water. The pummeling almost threw him from his feet. Sharp console edges and metal equipment seemed to beckon for his head and for his groin.
Jeffrey grabbed the back of Milgrom’s seat as Challenger rolled and bucked yet more. “Any inbound torpedoes?” he yelled in her ear.
“Impossible to tell!” she shouted back.
Meltzer turned toward Jeffrey. Meltzer pointed at a gyrocompass. His course was steady on one eight zero, due south.
Jeffrey forced his way back to his seat. He ordered Bell to reload tubes seven and eight, and make tubes one through four and seven and eight ready for snap shots.
Jeffrey watched the gravimeter and the confused, outdated tactical plot. He had Challenger heading straight for the wall of acoustic and hydrodynamic chaos from his own most recent atomic Mark 88 blasts.
Jeffrey used his console keyboard to send a message to Engineering through the ship’s LAN. “Push the reactor to one hundred fifteen percent.” The control-room phone talker was lying on the deck, stunned and with a bloody nose — and conversation through the sound-powered phones or intercom was impossible anyway.
A quickly typed message came back: “115 %, aye.” The ship picked up a few tenths of a knot.
“Helm!” Jeffrey shouted.
Meltzer turned.
Jeffrey pointed up. He gave hand signals for one, then two, then zero, then zero, then zero. Make your depth twelve thousand feet. He needed to take Challenger away from so close to the seafloor terrain.
Meltzer pulled back his wheel, and Challenger’s bow nosed up.
She charged into the curtain of reverb, countless collapsing bubbles of steam, invisible whirlpools, and monstrous thermal and turbulence updrafts and downdrafts.
Sitting beside him, Bell pointed at Jeffrey’s waist. Jeffrey remembered to buckle his seat belt just in time.
Challenger twisted and turned like never before. She needed every foot of added clearance from the bottom. The noise was now so loud it no longer registered. The ship’s instruments showed that the vibrations and flexing of the hull itself, and inside, were stronger than ever. But Jeffrey was so physically numbed it hardly seemed to matter. He eyed the gravimeter carefully and gave thanks it didn’t care about the noise. He gave thanks to God and the contractors that the device was still even functioning.
At the proper moment he issued more helm orders. This time he typed and sent them through the LAN. But he had trouble holding his hands to the keyboard. His vision was so blurred he could barely see the keys. He had little control of his fingers as he tried to type. Finally he hunted and pecked a barely intelligible message: “left10° rudder. Curs 030.” He hit ENTER.
Challenger turned left as she rounded the south edge of the Walvis Ridge, where the deep-water pass let out onto the Cape Plain. She headed hard almost north-northeast, along the ridge.
The mountain pass and all its noise and buffeting quickly fell behind. Conversation was possible again. Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to bring the ship back into the ridge topography quickly, and resume nap-of-seafloor cruising at the ship’s top quiet tactical speed, twenty-six knots. Trailing a towed array in such broken terrain was impractical — it would get snagged and ruined or lost. But Jeffrey ordered Milgrom and her people to use the wide-aperture arrays and bow sphere to search passively for any signs of enemy subs or their torpedoes. He had the photonic sensors at bow and stern activated in passive-image intensification mode to help Meltzer and Sessions navigate amid the uneven, unweathered volcanic crags and ravines — and also to help the fire controlmen scan for possible mines. Glows and flashes from riled biologics gave barely enough light to see.
Milgrom reported intermittent contact on a clutch of von Scheer’s Sea Lions, rushing belatedly south through the pass and continuing on into the Cape Basin. They were pinging, and eventually turned back north toward the ridge, but Challenger was well shielded by intervening terrain. Bell said these Sea Lions posed no threat.
Bell was also busy handling damage control and crew injury reports. There were several broken bones, concussions, and very bad cuts; the corpsman and his assistants were swamped with patients on the wardroom operating table and in the enlisted mess triage and treatment area. A number of systems — mechanical and electronic — were down or impaired, but backups or bypasses were covering the major problems.
Jeffrey waited for Bell to take a pause in the assessments he was making and the orders he was issuing — he didn’t want to distract his XO — and meanwhile he allowed his own head to clear up more.
“That was a close one,” he said when Bell was free for a moment; he was too shaken up and relieved to keep such strong emotions bottled inside.
“Why did you send all your offensive fish north, Captain?”
“I wanted Beck to think I was using them to screen us as we came up through the pass that way.”
“That’s why you turned back south?”
“I thought it would be what he’d least expect, and would pull him north away from us.”
“Why didn’t you stand and fight? Go back west and search for Beck and engage him?”
“We’re in a weird role reversal, XO. As an SSGN captain, he’s supposed to be the hunted. But he came hunting us. Instead of him mainly needing to preserve his ship as a force in being, we’re the ones who have to favor self-preservation for now.”
“Captain?”
“The one thing we can’t afford to do is let him get past us alive, between us and the northeastern terminus of the ridge. His top quiet speed is faster than ours, and in such rugged terrain we might never be able to find him again. Then he’d have a clear shot at his most high-value targets. Even if he exposes himself by going shallow to launch, we can’t count on being precisely there to sink him in time.”
“I only half follow you, Skipper. I did remind you last week he came to von Scheer fresh from being first officer on a ceramic-hulled fast-attack. And also fresh from a long-running battle with you, so he knows your style.”
“Yeah. And you were right, XO. Absolutely right… So I need to be more unpredictable…. We can afford to drawthings out a bit, I think. We need to, for now.”
“How does that help us, sir?”
“Trade space for time and get the feel of Beck and his ship. See better how he likes to fight… We know Beck has to work his way northeast along the ridge. He’s got hundreds of miles to cover before he’s close enough to the convoy to launch. Meanwhile let’s act like we’re feeling defensive, cowed.”
“What do we do?”
“Retreat. In the only direction we can. Northeast along the ridge toward Africa.”
CHAPTER 40
“Still no sign of Challenger or her wreckage,” Stissinger said two hours later.
Instead of responding, Ernst Beck studied the live-feed laser line-scan video coming in from his off-board probes. He’d sent them ahead of von Scheer as expendable scouts in case Jeffrey Fuller survived and was waiting in counterambush for him nearby.