Authors: Joe Buff
“Sir?”
“For the next two days I plan to relax. Catch up on sleep, eat regular meals, watch a movie or two in the enlisted mess, and hang out with the crew. Maybe even sit in on one of the training classes, pick up some of the nuts and bolts to broaden my mind, who knows? There’s a cool book I want to finish, something Felix recommended, by this famous surreal Argentine writer, Borges.”
“Reasoning behind all this, sir?”
“My intention is to swing north well away from
von Scheer
’s probable track, and do an end around, and ambush him from in front when I’m nice and refreshed.”
Bell looked at the laptop. “But the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is huge, sir! There must be two thousand miles of broken terrain he could hide in, running north-south, to take the relief convoy from the rear from almost
anywhere
.”
“Except with the geography, that isn’t what he’ll do.”
“Sir?”
“
He
needs to move carefully, to be on the lookout for
us
. Since he seems to know how Orpheus works, he’ll also have to go
very
slow, or go very shallow, whenever he nears an old phone cable. All this will limit his mean speed of advance, correct?”
“Correct. But Beck will be bitterly furious now, and ruthlessly driven to score big kills and get in his last licks!”
“By the time he’d reach
that
part of the ridge starting from Argentina, the convoy would be much more than five hundred miles beyond it. His supersonic cruise missiles won’t have the range…. So he’ll have to head
here
.” Jeffrey tapped the map with a pencil. “The Walvis Ridge. A lengthy undersea offshoot of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Mountains and fissures that slice up toward the southern flank of the Congo-Basin pocket like a dagger.”
Bell looked at the map and worked his jaw. “I
think
I see what you’re getting at, sir.”
“Both sides of the Walvis Ridge are very deep and wide and flat. The Cape Plain just to its south, the Angola Basin right on its north. So the Walvis is narrow and straight. All this’ll channel Beck quite nicely for us as he chases the convoy.”
Bell pondered. “The overhang of Saharan Africa corrals the convoy from one flank. You’re saying he can’t go for the convoy’s rear, that with the time and distance involved it’s too far north from Buenos Aires? So he’ll go for its southern exposure, closest to friendly waters off greater South Africa?…I concur. The way the Walvis slants northeast, it’ll let Beck make up for lost time and bring him in good missile range of all our ships, right outside the two-hundred-mile limit. He goes nuclear and plasters our convoy hard at the very last minute.”
“
If
Beck gets that far. We’ll be waiting for him at the southwest end of the ridge, where it first branches off from the Atlantic’s central tectonic spreading seam.
Here
.” Jeffrey touched the exact spot on the chart. “South of this flyspeck of land, the tiny Tristan da Cunha Island group. This is where we cut the
von Scheer
off.
This
is where we fight the endgame, deep and using nuclear fish two thousand miles from Africa.”
J
effrey’s vacation at sea had come to an end. He was marking its close with a long hot shower, after a final good night’s sleep. Jeffrey thought back on the past two days, during which he’d forced his mind to stay in low gear and mingled with his crew—doing things for once in spite of the war, rather than because of it.
One high point had been that, by coincidence and because of the lull, two of his enlisted men finished their qualifications: they’d earned their Silver Dolphins. The presentation to the honorees, by their captain, was a cherished tradition—and always a festive occasion too. Jeffrey had most of his crew, including available officers and chiefs, crammed into the enlisted mess for the ceremony. He gave a speech, read passages from the stirring memoirs of great submariners from times and wars past, and urged everyone on to bigger and better efforts as a team.
The occasion, and his vacation in general, were marred for him by only one thing, and it came from outside the hull. The closer
Challenger
got to Africa, the more clearly and loudly passive sonar picked up the noise of the convoy battle. Some blasts could be identified as nuclear torpedoes. Bigger ones were airdropped atomic depth charges. Others, milder, were cruise-missile airbursts, their energy passed through the water.
There was no way for
Challenger
to judge who was winning. The convoy escorts or the U-boats? The land-based antiship cruise missiles, or the naval and air-force suppressive counterstrikes against the mobile launchers and their radars and command-and-control? All Jeffrey and his people knew was that the fighting was growing more vicious, more destructive, as the convoy drove unflinchingly closer to land to relieve and reinforce the beleaguered Allied-held Central African pocket. But the convoy formation was surely more and more ragged, the escort ships increasingly worn down. The sudden arrival of a super-stealthy SSGN fresh on the scene, with a massive salvo of nuclear-tipped supersonic cruise missiles attacking from the convoy’s vulnerable southern flank, might tip the balance decisively—in the wrong direction.
Certainly, if I fail to protect the convoy from the
von Scheer
here and now, not only will the war effort suffer badly but I’ll be personally finished, disgraced—prior Medal or not.
The navy was Jeffrey’s chosen profession, his livelihood, his calling. He also knew that even if he survived this war and the Allies won, dealing with the aftermath emotionally would be difficult. The best way, for him, to make sense of the chaos and sacrifice and slaughter, to heal the mind-tearing randomness of who lived and who died, would be to stay on active duty. The best way he knew to honor those who’d fallen would be to carry on in uniform himself, on their behalf. Yet all that might be ripped from him by brutal Washington politics, his career truncated by factors beyond his control. He’d be cast up on the beach forever, bereft, just as his father, Michael Fuller, had cautioned. The thought of that pained Jeffrey far more than the thought of being killed.
Jeffrey knew the stakes were just as high, both strategically and personally, for Ernst Beck as they were for him. The enemy captain had failed off South America. As Bell warned Jeffrey two days ago, the German would be fired up, red-hot, burning for achievement and revenge—and he would make very sure that this time he
didn’t
fail.
Jeffrey said one final heartfelt prayer that he’d guessed right, that the
von Scheer
would come along the Walvis Ridge. Then he turned off the shower and toweled dry. As he dressed he glanced at his bed.
Depending on how things go, the next sleep I ever see might well be my and my entire crew’s eternal rest.
Jeffrey remembered what Admiral Hodgkiss had told him in the beginning: In a one-for-one exchange against the
von Scheer,
to defend the convoy and assure the relief of the Congo-Basin pocket,
Challenger
and all aboard her were expendable.
Jeffrey had his ship at battle stations. All compartments reported manned and ready in record time. Everyone in the control room shared the electric feeling, a mix of excitement and stress: the final showdown was about to unfold, in an ongoing clash with the mighty
von Scheer
that already was
Challenger
’s longest continuous engagement during the war—and probably with the highest stakes the crew had ever fought for.
Jeffrey called his weapons officer, Lieutenant Torelli, to take the conn. He asked Lieutenant Willey, the engineer, to send one of his junior officers forward to act as fire control.
“XO, Sonar,” Jeffrey said, “join me and Lieutenant Sessions at the navigation plotting table. It’s strategy time.”
Bell and Milgrom gathered with Jeffrey and Sessions at the back of the control room. They grouped around the desk-high digital navigation console. The assistant navigator, a senior chief, worked with the enlisted men on the vital task of tracking the ship’s exact position and warning of navigational hazards.
“Show me a chart of everything,” Jeffrey said, “from the whole west coast of Africa out to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.”
The assistant navigator worked his keyboard. The chart appeared on a wide-screen display. Land edged the top and the right side of the picture—there was an upside-down L-shaped bend in the very long African shoreline, at Cameroon. Jeffrey and his officers leaned closer to study the chart; these caucuses always helped his people bond.
The ship was at a depth of ten thousand feet, in the foothills of the Walvis Ridge. The control room was rigged for red. Preparing for an attack, the compartment was crowded. Almost two dozen people manned every console seat or stood in the aisles. There was a heavy sense of expectation, a strong drive to contribute to the larger fight. Noise came over the sonar speakers, amplified from in the distance.
“
Listen
to that,” Sessions said.
Far to the north, the convoy battle raged. Dozens of cargo ships and warships of every type—and navy auxiliaries ranging from deep-draft fleet-replenishment oilers to ammunition carriers—churned and throbbed and growled their way through the sea. Active sonars on the hulls of frigates and cruisers pinged from the surface. Dipping sonars lowered from antisubmarine helos probed above and below the thermal layer. Almost countless SSQ-75 active sonobuoys pinged from deep on the ocean floor. Friendly fast-attack subs worked hard too, unheard and unseen. The air battle over the ocean, and inland past the African shore, Jeffrey could only guess at and try to picture in his mind. The shattering fear and stark terror of all the combat, the fury and the agony, he could only project from memories of his own exposure to war.
“The antisubmarine searches are intensifying,” Milgrom said.
Jeffrey tried not to think about the suffering of troops and civilians, trapped in the pocket for almost nine months. Malnourished, wounded, badly short of medical supplies, ravaged by emerging new strains of Lassa fever, O’nyong nyong fever, hemorrhagic fever, cholera, those people needed help soon. The eastern flank of the pocket was protected by natural barriers: the Great Rift Valley was the best antitank trap in the world. The north-south string of Lake Tanganyika, Lake Victoria, Lake Turkana, and lesser lakes, halted any major enemy troop advance.
But the western flank of the pocket, anchored on the lowlands of the South Atlantic shore, was vulnerable and exposed in the face of modern combat bridging equipment and armored vehicles—based on the Russian model—designed for crossing rivers under fire. If the coastline was pinched off, hospital ships would lose friendly harbors in which to moor, and their guaranteed safe passage at sea would be useless.
A distant rumble sounded through the water, rising to a crescendo that died off abruptly—a nuclear blast. Then another crack of thunder pulsed through the sea, and then another.
“I never get used to that sound,” Bell said.
Somewhere out there, ships and aircraft and subs and enemy subs continued their battle of attrition, wearing one another down, inflicting and taking losses. Modern Axis U-boats prowled and risked death to score kills. Equipped with air-independent propulsion, or even with nuclear power, and armed with atomic torpedoes, they posed a deadly threat. Sometimes the port wide-aperture array, aimed toward the battle as
Challenger
steamed northeast, detected other active pings: U-boats, cornered in end-stage melees, sacrificing themselves to try to sink an Allied ship that cost twenty times as much to build and held a hundred, two hundred times as many people aboard.
Another sharp crack sounded, seeming closer than the others. Jeffrey saw his crewmen flinch, more from sympathy or concern, or out of hate.
Jeffrey felt the pressure of command leadership on his shoulders. It seemed to rival the pressure outside, squeezing
Challenger
’s hull: two tons for each square inch.
“They need our help,” he told the control room at large in his best, most steely voice, “and I intend to see they get it. A swarm of
von Scheer
’s missiles coming over the horizon would spoil the rest of their day. I intend to see the
von Scheer
never lives to launch her missiles.”
There was a murmur of agreement, of readiness among the crew. They began to merge their identities into one collective whole. The enlisted men, in their blue cotton overalls, began to act as what they called themselves with pride: “blue tools,” well-trained cogs in Jeffrey’s machine. Each officer was now an extension of the captain’s own combat mental process, honed to his or her duties by endless drills and indoctrination, tempered in previous battles with Jeffrey acting as their boss. The chiefs, the down-to-earth and salty foremen of the ship, the guys who “had the answers,” supervised their sections and made very sure all orders were translated into concrete and well-executed tasks.
Jeffrey cleared his throat and pointed at the northern part of the large-scale chart, at the ocean south of North Africa. Bell, Milgrom, and Sessions listened carefully.
“This line of seamounts up here slants down from the Bight of Biafra all the way to St. Helena. Most of those peaks are shallow enough for a U-boat to use to hide. The range of subsonic cruise missiles launched from the overhanging North African coast covers the whole Gulf of Guinea and extends way down to
here
.” Jeffrey traced his index finger along a red arc on the chart, a thousand miles below the enemy-occupied shoreline that ran left to right—west to east—from Liberia past Ghana to Nigeria. “Those cruise missiles happen to cover the Bight of Biafra seamounts and almost reach St. Helena. That gives important air support to the U-boats. It creates a bastion for them, subject to real risk only from our fast-attack submarines.”