Authors: Joe Buff
Challenger
’s bow sphere emitted an earsplitting screech, a burst of sonic power so loud it came back through the hull and nearly deafened most of the crew. The screech began to rise and fall in tone, like a whale call. It ended abruptly, with a sudden silence that seemed a portent of doom. Milgrom’s people hunched over their sonar consoles.
The ping was on its way, a spreading blast front of pure acoustic power—a mix of changing frequencies to cut through ocean reverb, optimized by the most advanced signal processors known. Designed to pick out a target whether it was moving or still, to sense its speed and even give its size and shape and which way it was heading…Impossible for the stealthiest sub in the world to cloak itself entirely or suppress a telling echo.
Sound traveled through seawater at almost a mile every second, five times as fast as through air. Even so, it would take half a minute for any real target return to come back.
Jeffrey forced himself to keep breathing evenly. Next to him, as fire-control coordinator, Lieutenant Commander Bell looked prepared and eager to unleash the forces trapped within tiny atoms, and give birth to brand-new underwater suns, to destroy the
von Scheer
with unspeakable violence and kill every person aboard her.
The Axis started this,
Jeffrey told himself.
Now it’s our turn to help finish it.
“New active sonar contact!” Milgrom shouted. “Bearing zero eight five, range thirty thousand yards! Course zero nine zero, speed thirty knots!…Depth eleven thousand feet, hugging the bottom!”
“Identify!” Jeffrey ordered.
“Contact consistent with Orpheus datum. I merge and designate the contact Master One. Master One identified as the SMS
Admiral von Scheer
.”
“Fire Control,” Jeffrey snapped. “Firing point procedures, Mark Eighty-eights in tubes one through eight, target Master One.”
“Solution ready,” Bell recited. “Ship ready…Weapons ready.”
“At five-second intervals, match generated bearings and
shoot.
”
“Unit from tube one fired electrically,” Bell said. “Good wire to the weapon.” The Mark 88s were wire guided.
“Unit is running normally,” Milgrom reported. Sonar, by listening, made doubly sure the torpedo was running true.
“Unit from tube two fired electrically. Good wire.”
“Unit is running normally.”
And on and on the litany went as
Challenger
launched eight wide-body, deep-capable nuclear fish at the
Admiral von Scheer.
“Reload all tubes, Mark Eighty-eights Mod Twos. Set warhead yields to maximum.”
One full kiloton each.
Bell, Weps, and their people got busy.
Jeffrey studied the tactical plot.
Challenger
had gained on the
von Scheer
’s projected position, but
Challenger
’s torpedoes were dashing ahead and gaining on the
von Scheer
much faster.
Without needing to be told, Bell had his weapons technicians spread the charging, fully armed weapons apart—to catch the
von Scheer
in a pincers and make it harder for her to evade or destroy Jeffrey’s fish.
Jeffrey’s eight reloads were all positioned by the tube breach doors, for him and Bell to enter their special weapons arming codes. Soon all tubes were ready to shoot another massive salvo. It was high time to update the firing solution. At flank speed, with
von Scheer
so quiet, Milgrom still held no passive contact on Master One.
“Sonar, go active.”
The overpowering bow-sphere blast this time was like a shout from an angry dolphin. The undulating whistles and clicks were designed to look past
Challenger
’s own noisy Mark 88s in the water and pound the
von Scheer
’s hull and sail and control planes and pump jet with an inescapable fist of pure sound.
Once more Jeffrey waited for the data to come back. While he fidgeted impatiently he brought up that picture he had of Ernst Beck and windowed it onto his now-crowded console.
You know I’ve got you cold, Herr Korvettenkapitan Beck. Watcha gonna do next?
Ernst Beck listened on the sonar speakers. The all-too-familiar engine noise of eight inbound enemy torpedoes bounced off ridges and escarpments and came in through his ship’s hydrophone arrays. The other bounces of increasing, gaining noise, of
Challenger
herself tearing after
von Scheer,
emphasized the energy of Jeffrey Fuller’s pursuit. The time for sneaking and guessing was over. There was nothing subtle about what was going on now, nor anything the least bit quiet or stealthy about what would happen quite soon.
“Inbound torpedoes are spreading out, Captain,” Stissinger reported.
Beck watched his tactical plot. “As expected, Einzvo.”
“Can’t you go any faster?” von Loringhoven demanded.
“
Yes,
I could go faster. Thirty knots is our top quiet speed, Baron. More than that, we begin to make much more noise. We give
Challenger
a continuous passive sonar contact to track, which sharpens the enemy’s firing solutions and takes away options from
us
.”
Just then an earsplitting whistle hit the ship, with palpable physical force—the control room was filled with the siren call of a determined and deadly opponent. The whistle was overlaid with piercing clicks, like stones hurled against the hull—a small hint of worse things to come.
“Contact on acoustic intercept!” Werner Haffner shouted by rote. “Unable to suppress ping echoes off our stern!”
“Very well, Sonar,” Beck said, blasé—he surprised himself. He realized his newfound command persona was fast kicking into gear and felt rather pleased with himself. Even amid mortal threats from outside, and even in such close confines with the shaky nerves of his inexperienced crew, Beck was finding the inner strength to lead his men.
They need a father figure now above all else, to reassure them—like frightened children—that everything will be all right…. And being a good father is one thing I do know plenty about.
Beck and Stissinger watched
Challenger
’s first salvo of torpedoes draw closer. Because of the ranges involved, even with the high-speed Mark 88s, it would be minutes before they got in lethal range.
“Noisemakers, Captain?” Stissinger prompted.
“Not yet.”
“Launch counterfire?” All eight of the
von Scheer
’s tubes were loaded with deep-capable Sea Lion nuclear eels;
eel
was German slang for “torpedo.”
Beck watched his screens. “Not yet.”
“What are you waiting for?”
von Loringhoven said. “We have eight atomic weapons on our tail!”
“Watch closely. You might actually learn something.”
“Order flank speed! They’re moving more than twice as fast as us!”
Beck shook his head.
“But—”
“Baron, if this game is too hard on your pampered constitution, I suggest you retire to your cabin for a nice lie-down and keep out of my way. I must warn you, though, don’t expect pleasant dreams. The ride is about to become much louder and rougher than anything you ever imagined.”
This time it was Beck who sneered—again he surprised himself. But now that battle was joined, the gap between atomic combat veteran Beck’s sum total of experience, and the cushy life von Loringhoven had led, seemed truly unbridgeable. Beck considered ordering the baron to his cabin right now.
No, let him stay where I can
see
his fear and suffering. Let this be my revenge on him for the terrible things I must do later. Let my crewmen also see his panic and his sweat, as a portal through which to find their own bravery.
“Sir,” Stissinger said, “we should launch our counterfire.”
Beck gave no answer. His ship continued her fast but quiet thirty-knot course due east.
“Evasive maneuvers at least, sir? Make a knuckle in the water?”
Beck looked at the loyal but untested Stissinger. He’d never fired a nuclear weapon in anger, just in a simulator. He’d never been shot at for real, only in training drills.
The captain smiled. “Thank you, Einzvo, but I think not.”
Stissinger was going by the textbook, and doing it well—but men like Beck and Fuller had thrown out the textbook months before.
Beck returned to observing the tactical plot. “Show me the enemy warhead kill zones against us.”
“At what yield, sir?” Stissinger said.
“The maximum for Mark Eighty-eights. I’m sure he’ll use the maximum.”
“One-tenth kiloton.”
Beck nodded.
Little disks appeared around each inbound torpedo symbol. They represented the radius within which their warhead detonations would inflict fatal damage on Ernst Beck’s ship at her present depth. The disks still had some time before they were dangerous to the
von Scheer
. Though water was very rigid and dense, so that blast force traveled great distances, the warhead yields were small, and the
von Scheer
was very shock hardened…. And blast force in deep water died off inversely with the cube of the range: ten times as far from ground zero meant only one-one-thousandth the impact. Even a megaton hydrogen bomb set off in the sea could just kill a steel-hulled sub out to a dozen miles or so.
Beck was surprised at his own inner calm as he ran through these cold-blooded facts. But calm was one key part of his plan. He watched the icon on his display that represented
Challenger
. He listened to her noise coming over the speakers.
Who knows himself and the other man better, Captain Fuller, you or me?
Who remembers more from the last time we met? Who more clearly understands the crucial differences now?
And who learned the most from our previous battle? The victor or the vanquished, you think? I do believe that failure is a sharper, keener tutor than success.
“Master One still maintaining constant course and speed, sir,” Bell reported.
“No countermeasures? No decoys? No torpedoes launched?” Jeffrey was puzzled—a sensation he
really
didn’t like.
“Negative, Captain.”
“He
has
to have heard us pinging.”
“I concur.”
“So what’s he up to?” Jeffrey’s common sense set off alarm bells in his head. Beck
must
be up to something. The German’s total lack of reaction to the surprising presence of Jeffrey’s ship and then to
Challenger
’s aggressive pinging, and now Bell’s full salvo of oncoming nuclear fish, was the last thing he had expected.
“Sir,” Bell warned, “there’s so little we know about the
von Scheer
’s design. He may have a nasty trick up his sleeve.”
“Like what, XO?”
“He’s much too quiet at thirty knots for that to be his flank speed. He’s holding something back.”
“You mean you think he might be faster than us?”
“Maybe.”
“Sonar.”
“Captain?”
“What’s
von Scheer
’s stern look like? One propulsor or two?”
“One large pump-jet propulsor, sir.”
“How many nuclear reactors?”
“Captain?”
“The Russians often use two on their bigger submarines, right? We know the Axis gets help on propulsion plants from Moscow. Does
von Scheer
have a single reactor, or two?”
“Wait, please,” Milgrom said.
Jeffrey turned to Bell. “What’s your guess?”
“He might have two.”
“I know he
might
have two. I need a specific best guess.”
“One big propulsor seems to suggest one single big reactor.”
Jeffrey bobbed his head around as if he was thinking about what Bell said and wasn’t sure if he agreed with his XO or not.
“Sonar?” he pressed. He felt worried and impatient.
“Impossible to tell number of Master One reactors on-line from the sound profile available.”
Jeffrey looked at Bell. “So he may be running at whatever top quiet speed he can get out of just one reactor, with another held in reserve, idling in quick-start-up power range. He might suddenly throw both on-line at full power and zoom away from us.”
“But from our
torpedoes,
sir?” Bell said. “The Mark Eighty-eights do seventy knots.”
Jeffrey fought hard not to lose his temper as he went on: “And the Russian Shkval undersea rocket torpedoes do two hundred knots. And we know even back in the Cold War, the Russians worked on slippery long-chain polymers they’d squirt from the front of the bow dome to lower hull friction in order to help them outrun inbound fish.”
Bell nodded reluctantly. “So at least for short periods, sir, the
von Scheer
might be able to run at seventy knots.”
Something in Jeffrey’s spirit sagged. “If that’s true, we’ve already lost this contest. If Beck is waiting for just the right moment to shove all his throttles hard against the firewall, and he really is able to sprint that fast, we don’t have a weapon aboard that can stop him.”
“Our Tomahawks do hundreds of knots.”
“You know they’ve all been loaded just for high-explosive land attack.”
Bell stared at his screens. Jeffrey realized his XO had run out of useful ideas. He felt his own throat start to go dry; he had to pucker to summon saliva. A few uncomfortable minutes passed.
“Sonar, Fire Control,” Jeffrey said, “any change whatsoever on Master One?”
“Negative, sir,” Milgrom said. “No change in tonals, no mechanical transients at all.”
“Contact’s course and speed continue steady, sir. Due east at thirty knots.”
Jeffrey looked at the tactical plot. His eight atomic weapons were drawing closer to the
Admiral von Scheer
. Very soon they’d be in lethal range, and Ernst Beck had to know it, and Ernst Beck wasn’t doing anything to save himself.
Unless he has a way to sprint even faster than my torpedoes. Is he rubbing it in now, reading my mind, and showing me his contempt?…Or does he have a whole new secret weapon, and he knows that I don’t know it, and he’s not the least bit worried about me
or
my inbound fish?