Seas of Crisis

by Joe Buff

  Wild Boar and Cheetah also continued the pursuit, and the combined task force gradually neared the eastern end of the Canada Abyssal Plain.

  “We’re moving into the endgame phase,” Jeffrey said out loud, to no one in particular. He gulped down the last of what he thought must be his twentieth mug of coffee since reboarding Challenger; he used it to wash down the last of a ham and cheese sandwich, one of his favorite snacks when he was in the throes of deep fatigue during combat.

  But he’d never pushed himself this hard for so long.

  I’m too wired out, and stretched too thin. I need to wrap this chase up soon and send the Russians home happy. The only problem is, I haven’t figured out yet how to pull the rabbit out of the hat, and make the Amethyste sink while Carter escapes.

  Jeffrey stood in the aisle next to Bell and stared at the pair of tactical plots.

  “Commodore,” Bell said, “the assistant nav reports that at present speed, assuming no further misbehavior by the Russians, we’ll reach the location of the genuine Amethyste’s wreck in two hours. May I ask your intentions?”

  “If I knew them, I’d tell you.”

  Bell frowned. “Sir, with respect, if we just keep running east we’ll hit the line of Canadian islands and whatever friendly subs could get in position. If Carter keeps on going, and the waiting American and Canadian boats don’t open fire, the Russians will know something’s up. The distances are too great, and the closing speeds too high, for the submarines out in front of us to coordinate something with Carter fast enough to be effective and put one over on the Akulas.”

  “I know. I asked for those subs to keep Meredov and his cronies from getting suspicious, since if I really wanted the German destroyed that’s one order I’d certainly give. It’s what Commander, U.S. Pacific Fleet would tell Commander, Submarines, Pacific to do anyway.”

  “Concur.”

  “But it’s up to us to fool the Russians.”

  “Sir, I know you do your best work under pressure, but the margins in time and space are getting narrow.”

  “Yup. They sure are.”

  “Do you want to order Harley to make another feint north? If we add some zigs and zags now, it could buy you an extra hour, maybe more.”

  “No. Good idea, but it only postpones the inevitable.”

  “Then what do you intend?”

  “Let me think.”

  “Yes, Commodore. Of course.”

  Jeffrey looked at the tactical plots, the two different versions of reality displayed side by side, just as Meltzer had suggested so many mugs of coffee ago. The plots faded in and out of focus again. Jeffrey began to zone out altogether. Then he realized that he’d induced a state of near self-hypnosis.

  Schizophrenia. That’s what I told myself at the start. If I stared at these two plots long enough I’d give myself schizophrenia.

  Jeffrey was feeling mentally punch-drunk. What the hell does schizophrenia have to do with submarines?

  An hour went by, then more. And then he saw it. The win-or-lose gambit that would determine now and forever who won this crazy endgame—America or Germany, the truth or a very big lie. Just about the biggest big lie in military history.

  He cleared his throat and spoke with new vigor. “Captain, man silent battle stations.”

  “Man silent battle stations, aye, sir. Chief of the Watch, on the sound-powered phones, man silent battle stations.”

  “Man silent battle stations, aye,” the senior chief acknowledged. He spoke to the phone talker, and the order was relayed throughout the ship. Bell’s control room first team began to arrive. COB looked like he’d been showering—his hair was still wet and his Latino skin had a rosy tinge from vigorous use of a scrub brush. Patel appeared, his facial features softened as if by sleep, but he sharpened up quickly. Meltzer and Torelli dashed in together, brushing crumbs off their clothes and still chewing the last bites of food—they’d been snacking in the wardroom. Finch, O’Hanlon, Sessions, and over a dozen technicians and chiefs arrived in a flood. Soon COB reported that the ship was at battle stations.

  “Make signal to Carter, ‘Man silent battle stations. Prepare to receive my orders for final melee.’ ”

  Sessions acknowledged, typed, and reported that Harley had received and understood the message.

  Jeffrey turned to the Ru-ling. “Make signal to Wild Boar and Cheetah. ‘Man silent battle stations. Prepare to receive my orders for final melee.’ ”

  The Ru-ling acknowledged, then the Russian captains did.

  “I think we’ve worn down and lulled the Amethyste’s poor German skipper long enough. Captain Bell, the key to beating an opponent who might go nuclear, using only high-explosive ordnance ourselves, is to stick to the fundamentals.”

  “Commodore?”

  “Surprise, and overwhelming firepower.”

  A half-hour later, all the orders were relayed and acknowledged. All the torpedo tubes and weapons in them were ready.

  “Make signal to Carter,” Jeffrey ordered, “ ‘Implement. Repeat, implement.’ ”

  On both tactical plots, Carter-Amethyste continued to behave as before, steaming east at twenty-five knots just below the reach of summer ice keels. But for the first time in two days, the tactical plots showed very different symbols.

  On the real plot, the icon that was Carter stayed on track but changed into the icon representing a brilliant decoy, programmed to act and sound like the Amethyste. The icon for Carter split off and turned south, slowed to fifteen knots to stay quiet while getting out of the way, steaming south toward distant Alaskan territorial waters. On the fake plot, the one from the combined task force perspective—the Russian point of view—the icon steaming east continued to show the actual Amethyste. There was no icon there for Carter.

  “Ru-ling, make signal to Wild Boar and Cheetah. ‘Prepare to open fire.’ ”

  Both Akula-IIs acknowledged quickly, their captains eager to go into action and share credit for an actual combat kill—not just a paper score in some training exercise.

  Jeffrey kept a careful eye on the chronometer. Everything had to be coordinated to the second.

  Now. “Ru-ling, make signal to Wild Boar and Cheetah, ‘Open fire. Repeat, open fire.’ ”

  The Ru-ling typed. The Russian captains didn’t even bother acknowledging.

  “Hydrophone effects!” O’Hanlon shouted. “Multiple torpedoes in the water! UGSTs!”

  “Captain Bell, open fire. Launch the decoys in tubes seven and eight.”

  Bell began to issue his orders. Soon Challenger had eight units in the water, rising toward shallow depth from below the twenty high-explosive UGSTs launched by the Russians—a full salvo from each Akula-II.

  Jeffrey watched the tactical plots. As he’d ordered, everything was targeted at the Amethyste. The Russian torpedoes began to spread out, horizontally and vertically, to leave the German no room to run—even accounting for several inevitable Russian torpedo malfunctions.

  Not much longer. His heart raced. If the timing was off, if the coordination between Carter’s and Challenger’s decoys wasn’t precise enough, if any of them broke down or had a programming input error or a software bug—or if Bell’s units from tubes seven and eight were destroyed by shocks from the real weapons that they absolutely had to stay near—the whole grand deception scheme would collapse. If so, the next overwhelming Russian salvo would be aimed at Challenger, and would be nuclear.

  Wild Boar and Cheetah between them could fire twenty nukes at once. Challenger only had eight tubes. Her better speed and crush depth would be no help against so many twenty-kiloton fission warheads. Russian nukes would surely get through, while none of her puny one-kiloton Mark 88 fish would reach the Russians. Challenger and all aboard her would die. The enraged Akulas would hunt down Carter and then go home and report the terrible truth of American treachery.

  Apocalypse Soon, Apocalypse Later, Apocalypse Now.

  The decoy that was the Amethyste began to give off the sounds o
f noisemakers and jammers. Already making flank speed, this was all her imaginary captain could do. According to Jeffrey’s endgame scheme—reinforced by him scolding the Russians about having given away the UGST’s special capability—the Germans had figured out, from seeing the search pattern used by the four torpedoes the day before, that the Russian weapons possessed some way to successfully search for a nuclear submarine hiding quiet and still against the ice. The Russian captains might wonder why the German captain didn’t return fire, but decoys couldn’t launch convincing phony torpedoes—and real torpedoes from Carter had entirely different sound signatures from the weapons used by Amethyste-IIs. Decoys from Carter pretending to be German weapons, coming at the Russians, would never fool them, and would leave irrefutable physical proof that the pseudo-Amethyste was really American.

  This was a loophole in Jeffrey’s strategy that he’d simply have to live with—or die with: the German captain would not return fire. Maybe he’d used up his few torpedoes and decoys days ago, approaching Russia, his weapons load drastically reduced to make room for so many commandos. Maybe he’d had a mechanical breakdown in the torpedo room. Or maybe he realized, with the geometries of torpedo maximum ranges versus ship flank speeds, that his countershots had no chance of being effective.

  One tactical plot showed twenty-eight torpedoes quickly catching up with the Amethyste. The other plot showed twenty-six torpedoes and two decoys. Everything depended on those decoys doing exactly what Jeffrey needed them to do, exactly when he needed them to do it. They were the last two Mark III brilliant decoys Challenger had. They were preprogrammed, and fully autonomous once launched, with no guidance wire and no way to recover them. If something went wrong and they ran astray they’d be more forensic evidence unmasking Jeffrey’s elaborate subterfuge. The consequences will be far worse than Russians calling me a liar.

  Challenger’s Mark 88 fish, launched from tubes one through six, were faster than the UGSTs, making almost seventy knots. Though they’d been fired from much deeper depth, they reached the target first. Jeffrey had counted on this. It was essential that Carter’s decoy be pulverized, but Challenger’s decoys had to survive because their indispensable tasks were yet to come.

  Torelli crossed himself, and ordered his people to detonate their warheads via the fiber-optic guidance wires. Their massive high-explosive warhead charges caused tremendous, thundering blasts. Russian torpedoes began to explode right behind them, some command-detonated through intact guidance wires, others because the nearby blasts touched off their warheads sympathetically or spoofed their arming software, and a few because they’d been programmed for contact-fusing against anything solid they hit—including ice bummocks. Challenger was buffeted by many shock waves and strong turbulence.

  Did the brilliant decoys survive? Months of mission preparation, weeks of hard work and bloody sacrifice and terrible risks, all came down to the next few moments. And then it happened. The blasts, echoes, and protesting ice cap were drowned out by a much louder sound, the unmistakable implosion of a submarine hull. A shower of wreckage of all shapes and sizes made flow noise as it fell, thudding into the seafloor.

  The real tactical plot showed that these last effects were coming from Bell’s two deep-capable decoys, emitting a modified rendition of a recording of the real Amethyste’s death here two weeks before. As they dove for the bottom themselves, the decoys spread apart to give a better illusion on Russian sonars of a three-dimensional debris cloud forming.

  The Mark III decoys still had crucial work to do. Jeffrey’s acoustic smoke-and-mirrors ploy wasn’t finished. The Mark IIIs were in the water, they’d eventually exhaust their fuel and might be found, and they needed a damned good excuse for being there.

  Both decoys went silent, and rose back to Challenger’s depth. They returned toward her, then altered their courses and headed in opposite directions, north and south. They began to sound and act like Challenger making flank speed—as if just launched to draw off return fire aimed at Jeffrey’s task force.

  So convinced were the Russian captains of the danger of German torpedoes—last gasps from the now-dead Amethyste, possibly nuclear, undetected while inbound through the deafening sea—that Wild Boar and Cheetah launched decoys, too.

  But no German torpedoes emerged from the echoes and reverb and roiling clouds of bubbles and tumbling, shattered pack ice.

  “Ru-ling, signal Wild Boar and Cheetah. ‘Good shooting and well done.’ ” Both Russian captains acknowledged with thanks.

  Epilogue

  Two weeks later

  Jeffrey sat alone in the Oval Office with the President of the United States, wearing his dress blue uniform with medals. The two men had had long talks before, starting the day that the President awarded Jeffrey his first, unclassified Medal of Honor.

  The President was a retired four-star general, who liked to say he was hardly the first senior military leader to rise to the elected civilian rank of commander in chief—look at George Washington, or Eisenhower, to name just two. He’d taken a shining to Jeffrey, especially since he kept delivering important successes in this war. November was the next presidential election, which he reminded Jeffrey of whenever they met, as if suggesting there might be opportunities someday beyond the U.S. Navy for a war hero of Jeffrey’s caliber. The President would be running for his second term; his winning depended on how the American public perceived the war to be going. Jeffrey was helping keep alive the aura of inevitable triumph and peace.

  Jeffrey asked about the amnesty offer to the Axis leaders that was supposed to follow the raid in Siberia; sneaking home submerged until just yesterday, and closely sequestered for security since then, he’d had no access to news reports.

  The President told him that the South African reactionary leaders, seeing Germany evacuating North Africa after a recent, major defeat there, read the handwriting on the wall and jumped at the chance. They were already in Paraguay, which had agreed to grant them asylum, and a new interim government had been rushed into place. Jeffrey thought this was outstanding.

  “I’m declaring next Monday a national holiday, V-A Day,” the president said with a grin. Victory in Africa. “It takes time to plan the parades and celebrations.”

  But the advanced German nuclear sub that had been undergoing repairs in South Africa, the ceramic-composite-hulled Admiral von Scheer, had put to sea and evaded the Allied blockade and was on the loose somewhere. This put a bit of a damper on things. The German dictatorship refused to even consider an amnesty. They vowed to fight to the end at all costs, making threats about new weapons and alliances that would drive the Allies back and force an armistice favorable to Germany. The President declined to go into further details.

  Jeffrey asked about his former lover Ilse Reebeck, and the status of the Axis mole. The president said that Lieutenant Reebeck had been known all along to be innocent; her arrest over a month ago was a ruse to help catch the mole. She’d just returned to her native Johannesburg, and was serving on a reconstruction and reconciliation commission under UN auspices. The real traitor had been identified, and confessed in return for the death penalty being commuted to life without parole. Jeffrey didn’t need to know who the mole was, except it wasn’t a senior official after all. It was a secretary who did it for the money.

  Jeffrey’s parents waited elsewhere in the White House, as did Dashiyn Nyurba and his parents, and Captains Bell and Harley and their parents and wives and kids, and Sergey Kurzin’s parents. For security, Secret Service agents made sure that no one saw them. None of the relatives had any idea what their sons, husbands, or fathers had done to earn a meeting with the President, or how two of them were injured or killed—if secrecy held up as it needed to, they’d never find out, either.

  “I think this sets a record,” the President said. “Four Medals of Honor in one day. The toughest part for me is always giving one posthumously.”

  “I never got to know Colonel Kurzin, sir, but what I did see impressed me.”
/>   “Too bad you can’t tell that to his folks.”

  “Yes, sir. I know.” He looked at his hands, confused by mixed emotions. Jeffrey himself was receiving his second Defense Distinguished Service Medal, unclassified, for his superb management of a complicated mission that involved as much diplomacy as combat tactics, some of it public knowledge already.

  Someone knocked on the door. “Come!” the President yelled.

  It was the White House Chief of Staff. “Sir, the Russian Ambassador is here.”

  “Show him in.” The President and Jeffrey stood.

  Jeffrey had never met the Russian ambassador before. The man was short and fat and jolly. Some of that good mood, Jeffrey assumed, came from the suddenly improved relations between the United States and Russia. Some of it, though, seemed the man’s natural personality.

  The ambassador held a small velvet case in one hand.

  “May I?” the ambassador asked the President.

  “Please.”

  Jeffrey got the impression that the two had already talked about this, and something was being stage-managed here. An official White House photographer entered the room, followed by Jeffrey’s parents, who walked over and stood next to him. They both were beaming. Jeffrey’s father elbowed him proudly in the ribs.

  “Captain Jeffrey Fuller,” the ambassador said very formally, “it is my great privilege, in the name of the grateful people of my country, to award you this highest recognition that the Motherland has to give, the Gold Star Medal of the Hero of the Russian Federation.”

  Glossary

  Acoustic intercept: A passive (listening-only) sonar specifically designed to give warning when the submarine is “pinged” by an enemy active sonar.

  Active out-of-phase emissions: A way to weaken the echo that an enemy sonar receives from a submarine’s hull, by actively emitting sound waves of the same frequency as the ping but exactly out of phase. The out-of-phase sound waves mix with and cancel those of the echoing ping.