Thunder in the Deep cjf-2

by Joe Buff

  Jeffrey watched his tactical plot. Both his ADCAPs converged on Master One, pinging, getting echoes off the back of Deutschland's pump-jet. The kill radius of the incoming 65 would touch Challenger any second… but it also still touched Deutschland. The 65 kept closing.

  "Fire Control, show me the kill zone at their minimum yield, one-tenth KT." Bell typed; the circle shrank by half, to a diameter of less than five thousand yards. At that yield-setting, Eberhard was safe; Challenger wasn't. Jeffrey watched the screen. Challenger charged at fifty-three knots, the fastest she'd ever gone. The deck vibrated roughly. Console mountings jiggled; spring-loaded fluorescents bounced and squeaked.

  "Incoming weapon is in one-tenth KT lethal range." If I've guessed wrong…

  "Master One is launching noisemakers;" Kathy reported. "Second torpedo in the water, same bearing as Master One. Incoming, another sixty-five."

  "Stand by on the AT rockets." There was nothing more Jeffrey could do…. The first 65 kept closing and closing. Jeffrey held his breath — was it nuclear? It got so close Bell destroyed it with two antitorpedo rockets; Challenger was pummeled by the blasts. It was conventional after all, but its high-explosive load was triple an ADCAP's. More than enough to kill us all if just one 65 connects. How many does Deutschland have?

  The sea was rent by gigantic detonations, both close and further away, as more AT rocket warheads burst and set off torpedoes sympathetically. Challenger shimmied and rocked.

  Deutschland and Challenger kept exchanging salvos, even as Deutschland fled and Challenger chased; both ships defended themselves with antitorpedo rockets. Again and again the ocean heaved.

  Both ships charged northwest as fast as they could, following the Trough around the southern coast of Norway. Deutschland would soon reach her own flank speed. Jeffrey knew from Intel her top quiet speed was faster than Challenger's — was her flank speed faster, too? Jeffrey tried to herd Deutschland toward the left side of the Trough, the nearer side.

  The ships were separated now by barely two thousand yards, too close for Deutschland to go nuclear even if Eberhard wanted to.

  Deutschland launched four more 65's. Challenger fired another nonnuclear ADCAP — Jeffrey was down to only two remaining.

  Two 65's veered left and hit the wall of the Trough intentionally. They blew and started an underwater landslide. Boulders disappeared from the gravimeter as they fell. They threatened to hit Challenger, and her AT rockets were no help. That clever bastard.

  Meltzer had to veer right to evade the avalanche; rubble pelted the hull. Deutschland gained a hundred yards of precious separation. Bell destroyed the last incoming 65's, but now was down to the last of Challenger's rockets. Deutschland fired more AT rockets, and intercepted Challenger's latest ADCAP.

  There were no more torpedo engine sounds. The high-explosive skirmish was over, a draw. Meltzer held Challenger in Deutschland's baffles; their utmost speeds were almost perfectly matched. Still both ships charged northwest.

  ON DEUTSCHLAND

  Ernst Beck watched his screens as data poured in from Weapons and Sonar. "Last conventional sixty-five destroyed by enemy AT rockets."

  Beck glanced at Kurt Eberhard. Even in the rig for black, he knew his captain was livid.

  "We're out of high-explosive torpedoes, and we're stuck in a high-speed stern chase. Fuller is too close for me to use atomic warheads, even if the verdammt Axis ROEs would let us now. We've no choice but-to get well away from Sweden as fast as we can. …And he has no choice but to stay with us, or we'll get adequate separation to open fire first, before he's far enough away from Norway to shoot back."

  "Concur, sir," Beck said. This whole situation was an accident of geography — but as always in war the geography, and the rules of engagement, were real. Axis ROEs did not protect occupied countries from fallout; Allied ROEs did.

  Eberhard palmed the intercom mike with a feral grin. "Time for competitive speed trials, Einzvo. Let's see if we can outrun Fuller. Engine Room, Captain, push the reactor to one hundred fifteen percent."

  Beck watched his speed log. Slowly the ship sped up, then held at 53.3 knots. The ride was surprisingly smooth, except for the usual fishtailing.

  "Sir," Beck said. "Allied nuclear torpedo warhead yields are smaller than ours. Challenger's can be set as low as one-one-hundredth kiloton. If we draw apart too late, when we're far enough from Norway, they'll gain adequate separation for a shot at us before we can shoot back."

  "Don't you think I know that?"

  Beck studied the large-scale nautical chart. The Trough followed the Norwegian coast, north-northwest and then north, for two hundred fifty miles. Only then would Deutschland and Challenger reach open, truly deep water: the Norwegian Sea.

  "Einzvo, I intend to follow the left-most safe corridor in the Trough. We need strong echoes from the escarpment wall, with short time delay, to keep an eye on Challenger astern."

  "Concur, Captain." This was no time or place for a towed array. "Sir, enemy appears to have ceased firing."

  "Out of conventional ammo, just like us…. Einzvo, what's enemy speed?"

  "Fifty-three and one tenth knots."

  "Separation?"

  "Their bow dome to our pump-jet, eighteen hundred meters."

  "With a speed difference of one-fifth knot, it'll be hours before either of us can open fire without a self-kill."

  Beck nodded. "At least our close proximity discourages surface forces from interfering."

  Eberhard pounded his console in undisguised anger. "It's an outrage our weaponry is so limited. Our Sea Lions are all nuclear, and the yields are much too large!"

  "Captain, no one envisioned a scenario like this."

  "The torpedo designers should be court-martialed and shot. When we return to base, I'll make sure that's what happens."

  Beck shuddered. Eberhard would do it, too. Then Beck realized something. "Sir, Challenger may have more high-explosive torpedoes, saving them for some contingency"

  "If so, Fuller's smarter than I thought. But he's not smart enough to get them past our antitorpedo rockets."

  CHAPTER 26

  TWO HOURS LATER, ON CHALLENGER

  Jeffrey sat at the command console, starting on another mug half full of coffee. The vibrations at 53.1 knots were so extreme, a full cup would've splashed. Jeffrey glanced around the CACC. His dark-adapted eyes showed some console seats were empty; the crew was having breakfast, or grabbing catnaps, or using the head, in shifts, of sheer necessity.

  On the tactical plot, Deutschland raced through the Trough ahead of Challenger. Eberhard's ship was everso-slightly faster, and the separation grew to twenty-eight hundred yards. The enemy was in the sweet spot of Challenger's bow sphere — advanced signal processors filtered out the own-ship flank speed flow noise. Jeffrey could see from the tonals and broadband how hard Deutschland's power plant was working. He could see from his status screens the strain on Challenger's systems, too.

  "Captain," Sessions said. "Advise we are two hundred nautical miles from Sweden."

  "Very well, Nay."

  If we have a propulsion failure now, it's all over.

  This was the moment Jeffrey feared. He turned to Bell, and tried to study the other man's face by the glow from the screens. "Here Eberhard can go atomic anytime he likes."

  Bell shook his head. "We're too close behind him, sir. With a tenth-KT warhead, he'll want eight thousand yards between, at least, or he'd suffer serious damage."

  "It's not that simple, XO. He could loop a weapon back behind us, outside our AT rocket range, then catch us from astern, more or less right now. We'd be in the lethal envelope; he wouldn't be." AT rockets only reached out to one thousand yards.

  "Er, concur, sir. Sorry, I wasn't thinking…. But wait, it's not that simple either, Captain. A loop-around shot, set to come at us from behind, would have a long run to detonate, and a net overtaking speed of only twenty-some knots. He'd give us too much time to think, and we might fire a nuke right up his stern, an
d kill him for sure."

  "You're right. Against our tenth-KT max-yield warhead, he'd be a goner. Even if he fired a nuclear torpedo to try to smash ours, with these geometries his own blast would take him with it… And if we tried to loop a unit ahead, to catch him from off his bow; he'd have plenty of time to turn back at us and we'd just waste the weapon, we'd have to safe and abandon it."

  Jeffrey took a deep breath. ROEs, geometries, geography, and tactics. It was mindbending, an unforgiving mental and physical marathon that could have at most one winner. This was undersea — warfare at its best and worst.

  "Hmmm," Bell said. Jeffrey could see he was thinking hard. "Are you suggesting, sir, we take Eberhard with us if he does shoot now?"

  "Consider the alternative, XO. We die, he lives. The U.S. is left with no ceramic-hulled nuclear submarine. With the new SSGN they're building, and Deutschland, Germany has two."

  "Captain, would you take him with us now? I'd have to strongly object. We're barely thirty miles from Stavanger, and the gale is blowing toward the city. The population is fifty thousand Norwegians. The fallout—"

  "I know, XO. I'd never ask you to concur and launch a weapon here." It would be in blatant violation of the ROEs.

  "In another hour we draw abreast of Bergen, sir. The population there is a quartermillion-plus."

  "I know, XO. I know"

  There was no choice but to continue the desperate stern chase, and try to stay as close to Deutschland as possible, for as long as it took to get far away from Norway, and pray Eberhard couldn't open fire till Jeffrey could shoot back with nukes.

  * * *

  Ernst Beck returned from using the head. A messenger brought him a fresh mug of tea. He savored the drink, the sweetness of the sugar on his tongue, the way the hot liquid dispelled the stale, metallic taste in his mouth. Deutschland fishtailed again, and he almost burned himself. He put the mug in his cup holder.

  Eberhard sat at the command console next to Beck, drawing arcs and measuring distances with his light pen. "This is most unsatisfactory, Einzvo."

  "Captain?"

  "I need some way to lengthen the odds in our favor, or this action may become a double kill. Deutschland is far too valuable an offensive weapon to be expendable in exchange for Challenger."

  "Concur, sir." What else could Beck say?

  "At this rate it will still be hours before we're far enough away from Fuller to hit his ship down her throat from a safe distance. Before we can, he'll have separation for a lethal shot at us with his lower-yielding weapons…. It's unclear if we'll gain the separation we need to open fire before we both gain the Arctic Circle, at which point Fuller gets the ROE freedom he needs."

  Beck knew the American captain and executive officer had to be thinking the same things. All either ship could do was pour on the speed. If and when the water got much deeper, slight differences in pump-jet efficiency might reveal themselves, due to greater sea pressure, and colder water going through the steam condensor cooling loops.

  Secretly, Beck prayed their stern chase did reach the Norwegian Sea. He thought of what the fallout from an atomic blast could do this close to Norway, with the water less than three hundred meters deep. The tons and tons of radioactive steam. The effect of iodine 131 on children and expectant mothers. The effects of unfissioned uranium, and plutonium by-products and worse, on innocent people's lungs and bones and blood…. There were German citizens in Norway, too, and occupation forces, caught in this terrible conflict. Beck's country didn't need more casualties for military hospitals' overcrowded radiation wards.

  But what was the alternative? If they reached the Norwegian Sea before achieving good separation, Challenger could sink them.

  Eberhard told Beck to take the conn. The captain was going to his stateroom for a quick smoke and a piss.

  Beck sat morosely at the command console, asking himself how this situation could ever have arisen. Not the fight between Challenger and Deutschland, but the whole war. What madness could ever tempt self-appointed national leaders to risk destroying the world, just to satisfy grandiose, self-referential dreams? All the people had to do was say No. Hadn't they learned that the hard way, in self-immolation under the Nazis?

  Obviously not. Perhaps those who'd shared those awful memories firsthand couldn't pass on the warning strongly enough. Perhaps with the passing away of so many veterans, widows, orphans, and Holocaust victims, Germans forgot too much.

  Beck shook his head to try to clear his mind of such troubling thoughts. He wished he could have another private talk with Jakob Coomans, to cheer himself and regain perspective, but he knew that wouldn't happen till the confrontation with Challenger was resolved. Beck almost wished he could share Eberhard's hate of this Jeffrey Fuller — it would make the needed mental savagery come to Beck much easier. Beck knew himself too well: He was a man who found it hard to hate.

  Beck called up the navigation charts, to lose himself in shop talk in his mind. He watched the gravimeter, as the left wall of the Trough raced by. He eyeballed the different system status screens. He thought of old battles fought near here, Nelson at Copenhagen two centuries ago, Dogger Bank and Jutland in the Great War, the destroyer fights in the fjords at the outbreak of World War II, then the German attacks on the Russia-bound Allied convoys.

  Deutschland fishtailed again.

  Beck had an idea. It was his duty to report it, though now he hated himself, and did so all too easily.

  Eberhard came back.

  CHAPTER 27

  TWO HOURS LATER, ON CHALLENGER

  After a quick snooze and a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs, Ilse sat at her console. She was sifting through Cold War-era data from the Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Command. If the situation weren't so scary, it would have been fun — quite a switch from the tropics at Durban. For one thing, up here past 60° north latitude, there was little bioluminescence — the water was too cold. Ilse and Kathy had discussed using the ship's photonics sensors to trail the glow of Deutschland's wake if Challenger lost contact. It wouldn't work.

  The seafloor was getting much deeper — one thousand feet and dropping to twelve thousand over the next few hours — but the sound speed profile prevented strong convergence zones and deep sound channels from forming. Again, the water in the top few thousand feet was just too cold. Again, the search to recapture a contact once lost would be hard — and Deutschland, if lost, might well find Challenger first. Ilse knew they'd get no help from NATO's North Atlantic SOSUS hydrophone nets; the Axis had nuked the SOSUS at the very start of the war.

  Ilse listened on her headphones for a moment. The gale raged topside. It would probably reach force ten-fifty-knot winds and fifty-foot waves — as they approached the winter Icelandic standing low-pressure weather system. This gale infused the sea with acoustic illumination, and encouraged both ceramic SSNs to hug the bottom for stealth; the seafloor here was smooth. The strengthening gale would also make it harder and harder for surface and airborne antisubmarine forces to function effectively. If Deutschland won the duel with Challenger, she'd escape Allied retribution — in the Norwegian Sea, Eberhard could vastly outdive any steel-hulled sub sent to attack him.

  "The magnetic storm is getting worse," Kathy said.

  "I know."

  "NASA needs a new category," Kathy said. "G six." — "Beyond 'extreme.' Try 'cataclysmic.' "

  Kathy hesitated. "I keep thinking about Roger."

  "Your boyfriend?"

  "He died up where we're headed. Last summer. The battle for Jan Mayen Island."

  Ilse nodded grimly. The island was a nuclear wasteland now.

  "Vaporized. His whole ship was vaporized. A cruise missile from Deutschland. I started having nightmares about it. I keep seeing him on the bridge, and then there's a flash, and his body boils away."

  "Stop," Ilse said. She hesitated. "I know it hurts. I'm having nightmares, too." That was one main reason why she hated having to sleep.

  Something appeared on the broadb
and waterfall display.

  "Overflight," Kathy called out. "Low altitude, west to east. Mach point-eight-five turbojet, assess as an Allied ship-launched Harpoon."

  "Very well, Sonar," Lieutenant Bell said. He had the conn while Jeffrey got some rest. More Harpoons went by, also launched in the shallow North Sea off to port, aimed at something amid the Norwegian islands and fjords to starboard. "The shooting's started again," Ilse said.

  More transients appeared on the waterfall, slanting sharply in the opposite direction.

  "Overflights, supersonic, east to west," Kathy said.

  Ilse listened. Each transient sounded the same, a sonic boom followed by a roaring, tearing noise that surged, then faded.

  "Rocket-assisted projectiles," Kathy called out. "Norwegian coast artillery. Assess as Bofors rapid fire one-twenty-millimeter guns." Manned by German crews.

  "V'r'well," Bell said. "Surface forces skirmishing around our stern chase with Deutschland again."

  Ilse knew no major warship afloat could keep up with their sustained fifty-three knots, especially in such rough seas. She knew none dared launch an undersea weapon for fear of hitting the wrong SSN. It was as if the ships and planes above Ilse were fighting a separate war.

  The sonar tech next to her sat up straighter, and spoke to Kathy on a private circuit. Kathy sat up straighter, too.

  "Aspect change on Master One. Master One is turning right!"

  "Helm, don't lose them." Bell grabbed an intercom mike. "Captain to Control."

  Jeffrey showed in seconds.

  "What is it?"

  "Deutschland's up to something, sir. They've turned toward the middle of the Trough. New course zero three zero."