by Joe Buff
“But—” Maybe the Germans did have a well-placed spy, and knew the maneuvers were a trick and just ignored them.
“This is highly classified. You and Sessions are not to relate this to anyone else in the crew.”
“But the men, I mean Lieutenant Milgrom too…especially her, as Sonar…they’ll be very concerned to see us take such chances, going so fast. What am I supposed to tell them?”
“Tell them you’re the captain,” Wilson snapped, “and they’re supposed to obey your orders.”
Jeffrey hesitated. “Yes, sir.”
Wilson shuffled papers on his desk. “I said before, that’s all.”
Jeffrey turned to leave.
“Commander Fuller,” Wilson called after him.
“Commodore?”
“Have me informed when we draw level with the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“And tell someone to bring me another guest chair. I can’t have my flagship staff sitting on filing cabinets.”
THIRTEEN
Night of the first day at sea, one hundred miles east of the mouth of Chesapeake Bay
“COMMODORE IN CONTROL,” the messenger of the watch announced.
“As you were.” Wilson came over and stood next to Jeffrey. Jeffrey, after a pleasant catnap, was expecting him. Challenger made flank speed, as ordered, vibrating steadily as the propulsion plant worked hard. Consoles squeaked gently in their shock-absorbing mounts, and mike cords near the overhead swayed back and forth. A boyish part of Jeffrey really enjoyed seeing and hearing these little signs of how fast his ship was going.
“Status, Captain?” Wilson asked.
“We’ve been following the edge of the continental shelf, sir. The north side of the Gulf Stream throws off meanders and eddies here. Horizontally, vertically, they form temperature and salinity cells that distort and attenuate sound.”
“Why did you pick eleven hundred feet as your depth?”
“In case someone does get a whiff of us, they’ll think we’re a steel-hulled sub.”
“Bring the ship to these coordinates. Slow to ahead one-third when you’re twenty minutes out.” Wilson handed Jeffrey a piece of paper.
Jeffrey raised his eyebrows. Wilson wanted a spot farther south, off North Carolina’s Cape Fear. But the location was miles more away from the land, in very deep water, since the coast here ran southwest. They’d have to cut diagonally through the whole width of the Gulf Stream.
“Why there, Commodore?”
“More eddies and meanders on the far edge of the stream. We have a rendezvous.”
Jeffrey was surprised. This was the first he’d heard of it. “With what ship?”
“No ship. A minisub.” Challenger was sailing with her in-hull hangar empty, since the Advanced SEAL Delivery System mini she’d taken with her to Germany had had to be jettisoned in combat.
“The mini’s one of ours?”
“Yes, an ASDS.”
“Purpose of rendezvous, sir?”
“Pick up the crewmen we left behind, and keep the mini.”
Jeffrey read the coordinates to his assistant navigator, a senior chief at the digital plotting table near the back of the control room. The chief recommended a course. Jeffrey gave the helm orders.
The helmsman for this watch acknowledged—Tom Harrison again. Challenger banked into the turn, still making a noisy flank speed.
Then Jeffrey started to wonder. “Commodore, do we need an ASDS where we’re going?” If the minisub was carrying eight of Jeffrey’s crew, there’d be no room in it for SEALs.
“Got your torpedo tubes working yet?”
“Not yet.”
They were nearing the rendezvous. Jeffrey gave the order to reduce speed. The vibrations died down, and the ride became very smooth. The ship felt oddly sedate, after hours of tearing through the ocean at more than fifty knots. With much reduced self-noise, it was time for a thorough sonar sweep. Jeffrey turned to Kathy Milgrom. She sat nearby with her back to him, at the head of a line of sonar consoles along the control room’s port side; thanks to advances in miniaturization and fiber-optic data fusion, Sonar no longer had a separate room.
It took some time to perform the sweep and analyze the data. Challenger turned slowly in a wide circle, to expose her hydrophone arrays on every compass bearing.
When the gradual circle was almost complete, Jeffrey drew a breath to tell the helmsman to resume course.
Kathy tensed in her seat before Jeffrey could speak. She looked his way. “New broadband contact, Captain. Ahead of us.”
“Classify it?”
“Difficult in these conditions, sir. The signal surges and fades. Designate it Master One.”
“Submerged?” Could be it’s the minisub.
“Wait one.” Kathy talked with her sonar chief. He spoke with the enlisted technicians. They studied their screens and listened on headphones.
“Master One is submerged,” the sonar chief said confidently.
“The minisub must be out of position,” Jeffrey said. “Good thing we found it.” Maybe the mini had a navigation error that brought it here. Such things do happen.
“Negative,” Kathy said. “Master One is not a minisub.”
“I got tonals!” a sonarman shouted. “No, wait, it’s gone.”
“Play it back,” Kathy ordered. She and the chief put on headphones. She typed on her keyboard, and Jeffrey saw the frequency spectrum of the contact’s noise. “Captain, it’s nuclear powered.”
Jeffrey nodded. “Must be the fast-attack that dropped off the mini, going back to Norfolk.”
“I can’t be positive, sir.”
Jeffrey waited and waited for more information. Technicians intently worked their gear. Kathy and her senior chief murmured in consultation.
Jeffrey forced himself to be patient. He knew Kathy Milgrom had been in combat on HMS Dreadnought since the very start of the war. He knew firsthand, from Challenger’s mission to Germany, that she was a more than capable officer.
“Got ’em again,” the sonarman exclaimed—with relief, and professional pride.
Jeffrey opened his mouth to offer a compliment.
The young man jolted like he’d gotten an electric shock. His voice rose two octaves. “Master One is hostile! Confirmed! Classify as a definite Amethyste II!”
Jeffrey was wide awake. Everyone sat up much straighter. The Amethyste IIs were German, captured from France. They were state-of-the-art, and deadly.
“Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey snapped, “sound silent general quarters. Man battle stations antisubmarine.” COB acknowledged.
The word passed quickly, and more men ran to the control room. The compartment became a sea of hurrying figures in blue cotton jumpsuits, squeezing past each other purposefully. Some men grabbed seats and powered up their consoles. Others stood in the aisles. The phone talker took his position, put on his rig, and did a communications check.
“COB,” Jeffrey said, “get me a torpedo tube, fast.”
“I better go down there, Captain.”
“Do it.” A senior chief took over from COB in the left seat at the ship-control station. Harrison still had the right seat as helmsman. Jeffrey saw Harrison shift in his chair. He flexed his fingers as he gripped the control wheel. Sure. He’s nervous.
I’m nervous too.
Jeffrey set his jaw in firm concentration.
Bell dashed in in his boxer shorts, barefoot and rubbing sleep from his eyes, and sat down next to Jeffrey. At battle stations, Bell was fire-control coordinator. Sonar and weapons reported to him.
Commodore Wilson came in, followed by Sessions. Wilson wore a bathrobe and slippers. Sessions stuffed his khaki shirttails into his pants by the navigation console.
“What is it?” Wilson snapped.
Jeffrey told him.
“Evade it.”
“That’s my intent.” Jeffrey turned to Bell. “Fire Control, can you give me the enemy’s course?”
&nb
sp; Bell got an update from the fire-controlmen who sat to his right.
“Not yet, Captain. Sparse data. The contact seems to bounce around a lot because of the eddies. We’re in bad water, sir, sound paths get twisted all over the place.”
“Range? Speed? Anything?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Evade it,” Wilson repeated, coldly.
Jeffrey needed to make a decision, with very little to go on. He figured the Amethyste II was waiting for a juicy target—a big, noisy carrier—to come out of the Norfolk, Virginia, naval base, heading for the North Atlantic battle front. Jeffrey would distance himself from Norfolk and hence from the enemy sub.
“Helm, right ten degrees rudder. Make your course one three five.” Southeast.
Harrison acknowledged. He sounded calm enough, but his rudder work was still clumsy under pressure.
The new course should give Kathy better sonar data. It pointed Challenger’s port wide-aperture array directly toward Master One. The wide arrays, attached along both sides of the hull, could do powerful things with advanced signal processing.
“Fire Control,” Jeffrey urged, “get me a firing solution, just in case.”
“Still working, sir,” Bell said. It was strange to see him sitting in his underwear, taller than Jeffrey, fit but not as muscular. Bell might just as well have been wearing a formal dress-mess tuxedo, for all the difference it made to his manner and bearing.
“Fire Control, sir,” Kathy broke in. “We’ve got more detailed tonal data. Advise this Amethyste II is the von Tirpitz.”
Bell raised his eyebrows. “Captain, that’s the one that launched those Mach eight missiles at New York.”
Jeffrey had a flashback, him and Ilse atop the Empire State Building. He frowned. This is personal now.
“But what’s it doing here?” he asked pointedly, disturbed. “Intelligence said it evaded our forces that counterattacked and snuck back to Europe badly damaged.”
“No evidence of damage in the tonals, Captain,” Kathy said. “We’ve a definite match to the New York event’s datum on the von Tirpitz.”
“So much for intelligence,” Wilson said. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Phone talker,” Jeffrey said, “ask COB how they’re doing.” Jeffrey had to have the ability to defend himself.
“Torpedo room reports they need another few minutes.”
That’s not what I wanted to hear. If Master One’s captain was willing to carry liquid-hydrogen-fueled cruise missiles, then what other awful weapons does he have aboard?
Jeffrey could only wait: for his ship to put some distance between him and the Tirpitz, for Bell to figure out the Tirpitz’s depth and course and speed, and for COB to get a tube in order for Jeffrey to fight if forced to. Unfortunately, the acute need for stealth meant that Challenger had to move slowly, and the men in the torpedo room dared not bang against the hull.
Jeffrey made a conscious effort to keep from fidgeting in front of his crew. He was inherently a man of action. He disliked unavoidable idleness, this inevitable part of undersea warfare that required he hold for better data and better position before having something specific to do.
Jeffrey pictured the von Tirpitz lurking out there somewhere near, her hull containing a hundred-plus well-trained German officers and men who’d do their damnedest to sink Challenger if given the slightest chance.
Each second felt like an hour.
A sonarman shattered the edgy silence. “Hydrophone effects!” he screamed.
“Classify,” Kathy ordered, very coolly.
“Underwater missile booster engine firing!”
“Where?” Jeffrey demanded.
“Source is Master One,” Bell said.
Crap. “Put it on speakers.” A rumbling roar filled the air.
“Main missile engine firing!” The roar got deeper and louder.
“It’s a Shkval, Captain,” Kathy reported. “Constant bearing and depth, signal strength increasing. It’s aimed at Challenger!”
The Tirpitz found us. With these quirky sonar conditions, we just weren’t quiet enough.
“Helm, ahead flank.”
“Ahead flank, aye!” Harrison turned the engine order telegraph, a four-inch dial on his console. “Maneuvering answers, ahead flank!” Challenger sped up.
Jeffrey fought to keep himself from cursing aloud. The Shkval undersea missile-torpedoes were Russian, sold to the Axis. They rode through the water in a vacuum bubble caused by their own speed. They could do three hundred knots, and nothing could escape them.
Jeffrey grabbed an intercom handset.
“Get me COB…. COB, we’ve got a Shkval on our tail. We have to get a tube working so we can launch counterfire.”
“Any minute, Captain, I’ll give you tube three.”
“We don’t have minutes, COB. We barely have seconds.”
Jeffrey put down the mike. He could picture the harried activity, as men struggled with parts and tools inside the torpedo tube. The ship topped forty knots, fast on the way to fifty. The flank speed vibrations resumed. Challenger shivered and quaked, as if to somehow shake off the Shkval, as if the ship herself felt fear.
Jeffrey listened as the Shkval roared and roared on the speakers, a mindless machine that ate up the distance relentlessly. Jeffrey began to order countertactics he knew would probably fail. Shkvals were nuclear armed. It didn’t need to get close to do Challenger terrible damage. Jeffrey thought of the fallout any atomic blast would create. Thank God we’re far from the East Coast now, and the winds are blowing farther out to sea.
“Helm, make a knuckle.” The ship banked hard to port and then to starboard. It left a turbulent spot in the water, which an enemy weapon just might think was Challenger. The deep roar of the Shkval kept getting louder.
“Helm, left fifteen degrees rudder. Make your course one one zero.”
“Left fifteen degrees rudder, aye! Make my course one one zero, aye!” A turn left, east-southeast. Jeffrey would try to jink out of the weapon’s path, to force it to lead the target. This might confuse its sensors, and buy him precious time. It also led the weapon farther away from the land.
“Fire Control, launch noisemakers and acoustic jammers.”
“Noisemakers, jammers, aye!” Loud gurgling, and an undulating siren noise, were heard now on the speakers. There was also the roar of the Shkval, deeper in tone as it came up to maximum speed, plus a nasty hiss from flow noise as Challenger herself reached fifty knots. The gurgling and sirens subsided, as Challenger’s countermeasures were quickly left behind.
Jeffrey picked up the handset again. “Maneuvering, Captain. Push the reactor to one hundred fifteen percent.”
Challenger sped up slightly, and the flank-speed vibrations grew much rougher. Jeffrey bounced in his seat. The ship kept racing through the ocean, heading east-southeast at over fifty knots. The Shkval was following them around through the turn, closing by more than the length of a football field every second. It ignored the knuckle and countermeasures.
The data for weapons status on Jeffrey’s console showed torpedo tube three turn green.
“Tube three is operational,” Bell said.
“Tube three, load a nuclear Mark 48, set warhead to maximum yield.” Challenger’s Improved Advanced Capability Mark 48 torpedoes were good, but the latest version’s top speed was seventy knots—barely a quarter of the Shkval’s.
Bell and Jeffrey did the procedures to arm the atomic warhead; Challenger’s torpedo-room hydraulic autoloader, repaired in New London dry dock, seemed to be working well. It better keep working or we’re dead.
Jeffrey felt an iron determination to survive. To defeat this enemy ambush he had to strike back fast and hard. “Make tube three ready in all respects including opening outer doors!”
“Ship ready. Weapon ready. Solution ready,” Bell said.
“Tube three, Master One, match sonar bearings and shoot.”
“Tube three fired electrically.”
“Unit is running normally!” a sonarman said.
“What are you doing?” Wilson said. “You aimed at Master One, not the Shkval.”
“The unit will first pass near the Shkval. The Amethyste’s captain’ll think it’s my defensive shot at his missile, and he’ll be lulled. We have to return fire, to distract him and keep him from sending off a message. If he knows we’re Challenger…”
Wilson stayed quiet.
Good, this is my fight. Jeffrey’s ship kept driving through the sea. The enemy Shkval kept following.
“Range to incoming Shkval?”
“Ten thousand yards,” Bell said. Five nautical miles. If its warhead yield was one kiloton, standard in Axis torpedoes, the blast would be in lethal range at four thousand yards.
With these speeds and distances we have less than a minute to live.
“Fire Control, more noisemakers and jammers.”
“Noisemakers, jammers, aye.”
“Tube three, load a brilliant decoy.”
“Tube three, decoy, aye.”
“Set decoy course due north, flank speed, running depth same as ours.”
“Due north, flank speed, same depth, aye.”
“Make tube three ready in all respects including opening outer doors. Tube three, brilliant decoy, shoot.”
“Tube three fired electrically.”
“Decoy is operating properly!”
Challenger kept fleeing. The propulsion plant worked its heart out. The noise of the Shkval on the sonar speakers was almost deafening now. Jeffrey was taking an awful gamble, that the seeker head at the tip of the enemy rocket would home on the decoy and not his ship. He was taking another awful gamble, that his own atomic fish would force the Tirpitz’s captain to take defensive steps, and buy COB time to give Jeffrey another working tube.
The universe shattered in an unimaginable thunderclap, and Challenger was pummeled as if by the fists of an angry God. Mike cords, light fixtures, consoles, crewmen, everything rattled and jarred.
“Shkval has detonated!” Bell shouted. “Decoy destroyed!” The Shkval had gone for the brilliant decoy after all.
The Shkval’s nuclear blast reflected off the surface and the bottom, pounding Challenger more and more. Kathy turned off the speakers. Endless reverb sounded right through the hull. There were brutal aftershocks, as the fireball of the nuclear blast thrust upward for the surface. The fireball fell in on itself against the undersea water pressure, rebounded outward hard, fell in again and rebounded, over and over. Each rebound threw another hammer blow.