Authors: Joe Buff
Meltzer pulled back his wheel, and
Challenger
’s bow nosed up.
She charged into the curtain of reverb, countless collapsing bubbles of steam, invisible whirlpools, and monstrous thermal and turbulence updrafts and downdrafts.
Sitting beside him, Bell pointed at Jeffrey’s waist. Jeffrey remembered to buckle his seat belt just in time.
Challenger
twisted and turned like never before. She needed every foot of added clearance from the bottom. The noise was now so loud it no longer registered. The ship’s instruments showed that the vibrations and flexing of the hull itself, and inside, were stronger than ever. But Jeffrey was so physically numbed it hardly seemed to matter. He eyed the gravimeter carefully and gave thanks it didn’t care about the noise. He gave thanks to God and the contractors that the device was still even functioning.
At the proper moment he issued more helm orders. This time he typed and sent them through the LAN. But he had trouble holding his hands to the keyboard. His vision was so blurred he could barely see the keys. He had little control of his fingers as he tried to type. Finally he hunted and pecked a barely intelligible message: “left10° rudder. Curs 030.” He hit
ENTER
.
Challenger
turned left as she rounded the south edge of the Walvis Ridge, where the deep-water pass let out onto the Cape Plain. She headed hard almost north-northeast, along the ridge.
The mountain pass and all its noise and buffeting quickly fell behind. Conversation was possible again. Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to bring the ship back into the ridge topography quickly, and resume nap-of-seafloor cruising at the ship’s top quiet tactical speed, twenty-six knots. Trailing a towed array in such broken terrain was impractical—it would get snagged and ruined or lost. But Jeffrey ordered Milgrom and her people to use the wide-aperture arrays and bow sphere to search passively for any signs of enemy subs or their torpedoes. He had the photonic sensors at bow and stern activated in passive-image intensification mode to help Meltzer and Sessions navigate amid the uneven, unweathered volcanic crags and ravines—and also to help the fire controlmen scan for possible mines. Glows and flashes from riled biologics gave barely enough light to see.
Milgrom reported intermittent contact on a clutch of
von Scheer
’s Sea Lions, rushing belatedly south through the pass and continuing on into the Cape Basin. They were pinging, and eventually turned back north toward the ridge, but
Challenger
was well shielded by intervening terrain. Bell said these Sea Lions posed no threat.
Bell was also busy handling damage control and crew injury reports. There were several broken bones, concussions, and very bad cuts; the corpsman and his assistants were swamped with patients on the wardroom operating table and in the enlisted mess triage and treatment area. A number of systems—mechanical and electronic—were down or impaired, but backups or bypasses were covering the major problems.
Jeffrey waited for Bell to take a pause in the assessments he was making and the orders he was issuing—he didn’t want to distract his XO—and meanwhile he allowed his own head to clear up more.
“That was a close one,” he said when Bell was free for a moment; he was too shaken up and relieved to keep such strong emotions bottled inside.
“Why did you send all your offensive fish north, Captain?”
“I wanted Beck to think I was using them to screen us as we came up through the pass that way.”
“That’s why you turned back south?”
“I thought it would be what he’d least expect, and would pull him north away from us.”
“Why didn’t you stand and fight? Go back west and search for Beck and engage him?”
“We’re in a weird role reversal, XO. As an SSGN captain, he’s supposed to be the hunted. But he came hunting
us
. Instead of him mainly needing to preserve his ship as a force in being,
we’re
the ones who have to favor self-preservation for now.”
“Captain?”
“The one thing we
can’t
afford to do is let him get past us alive, between us and the northeastern terminus of the ridge. His top quiet speed is faster than ours, and in such rugged terrain we might never be able to find him again. Then he’d have a clear shot at his most high-value targets. Even if he exposes himself by going shallow to launch, we can’t count on being precisely there to sink him in time.”
“I only half follow you, Skipper. I did remind you last week he came to
von Scheer
fresh from being first officer on a ceramic-hulled fast-attack. And also fresh from a long-running battle with
you,
so he knows your style.”
“Yeah. And you were right, XO. Absolutely right…So I need to be more unpredictable…. We can afford to drawthings out a bit, I think. We
need
to, for now.”
“How does that help us, sir?”
“Trade space for time and get the feel of Beck and his ship. See better how
he
likes to fight…We know Beck has to work his way northeast along the ridge. He’s got hundreds of miles to cover before he’s close enough to the convoy to launch. Meanwhile let’s act like we’re feeling defensive, cowed.”
“What do we do?”
“Retreat. In the only direction we can. Northeast along the ridge toward Africa.”
S
till no sign of
Challenger
or her wreckage,” Stissinger said two hours later.
Instead of responding, Ernst Beck studied the live-feed laser line-scan video coming in from his off-board probes. He’d sent them ahead of
von Scheer
as expendable scouts in case Jeffrey Fuller survived and was waiting in counterambush for him nearby.
Beck saw piles of freshly broken boulders, a result of the avalanches triggered inside the Walvis Ridge mountain pass. The water was clouded with sediment and rock dust, kicked up by the nuclear blasts. He also saw fragments of dead sea creatures drift through the field of view from the probes: shredded deep-sea jellyfish, broken body parts from strange siphonophores—snakelike beings covered with thousands of stinging tentacles for capturing prey and dozens of small translucent stomachs for digesting. Some of the stomachs he saw were still intact and held food. Beck noticed a colony of blackened starfish, all unmoving on the bottom, charred by the radiant heat of the blasts. He saw demonfish, naturally black, with hideous faces and huge fangs that made them look like something out of a horror movie. Except the luminous barbs near the mouths of these demonfish didn’t glow, and they floated upside down—dead.
Von Scheer
came out of the pass heading south. Beck gave helm orders to turn the ship northeast to avoid the antisubmarine perils of the wide-open and almost bottomless Cape Basin. He had the copilot use the remote-controlled probes to search the ridge terrain just northeast of the seamounts that guarded that side of the pass.
The wait for some report was tense and frustrating, but necessary.
Von Loringhoven came over. “You realize, don’t you, that if he decided to run, he’s getting away.”
“It isn’t about him, Baron. It’s about us. Whether we get to launch our missile salvos soon enough. If we’ve scared Jeffrey Fuller off, and we can get in range of the convoy safely and then make a good escape, so much the better. We’ll be free to concentrate on hunting and killing
Challenger
after that.”
“Agreed,” von Loringhoven said.
“But none of that has happened yet.”
“So what do you intend to do?”
“We need to continue up the ridgeline at a good pace. Let me show you what I mean…. Einzvo?”
“Captain?”
“Have Sonar take the conn for a moment. Join me and the baron at the navigation table.”
Young Werner Haffner took Beck’s seat. He seemed honored to have the duty at such an important time. Beck smiled to himself. Haffner’s boyish enthusiasm was a welcome tonic.
As he matures, if he survives, he’ll make a good submariner indeed.
Stissinger paced aft and stood with Beck and von Loringhoven at the plotting table. Beck explained to the navigator what he wanted to see.
A display appeared of the now-familiar land and undersea terrain in this theater: the western African coast, the Walvis Ridge, the Angola Basin, the Bight of Guinea–St. Helena chain of seamounts to that basin’s north, and the Cape Basin to the Walvis Ridge’s south.
An animation appeared, showing the convoy moving toward the shore of the Allied pocket in the Congo Basin.
Beck cleared his throat. “The convoy’s base course is roughly east. Our own base course, because of the ridge, has to be more like northeast. To converge on the convoy before it’s too late, we need to better the convoy’s average speed by almost fifty percent.”
The animation began again, with the convoy moving at twenty knots and the
von Scheer
making the same twenty knots. The icon of the
von Scheer
closed the range to the convoy as it moved up along the ridge on the chart—but not fast enough.
The animation repeated, with
von Scheer
doing thirty knots. Now a red circle around the own-ship icon showed the range of her Mach 2.5 cruise missiles—five hundred miles; a green line marked the atomic rules-of-engagement two-hundred-mile limit from land. At thirty knots, the red circle enveloped a big part of the convoy before the convoy reached the two-hundred-mile limit.
Von Loringhoven watched all this. “Very clear explanation. It seems at thirty knots, which I believe is your top quiet speed, we should achieve our goal.”
“It isn’t quite that simple. We need to allow extra time for appropriate caution and self-defense. And we need to allow for the flight time of our missiles. Even at Mach Two point five, hugging the wave tops, it takes about fifteen minutes to achieve their maximum range. Baron, in fifteen minutes a nuclear-powered supercarrier going all out can cover ten or more sea miles, wider than the lethal burst zone of our missile warheads. So we have to build into their flight paths autonomous searching-strategy patterns, unless we can receive good and accurate targeting data in advance. And those patterns looping and zigzagging after their prey use up even more time.”
“So why don’t we get the data?”
“We’d need a high-baud-rate radio link. To download firing solutions for a hundred-plus missiles is a complex and painstaking task. To get that link established, without a kampfschwimmer team on an island and an acoustic connection into the water to us, we’d have to come to periscope depth and raise a mast ourselves, well in advance of when we launch. The Allies already know we’re somewhere in the Walvis Ridge, thanks to the mushroom clouds above the surface marking our skirmish with
Challenger
. It’ll be bad enough with the datum we make as our missiles all take to the air.”
“You’re saying we need to fire our missiles half blind, to have the best chance to survive to fire them at all?”
“Yes. Thus we need to get as close as humanly possible to the convoy, and that burns up even
more
time.”
“What is your intention now?”
“I know Fuller well enough to know he won’t give up until one of us is destroyed…. Navigator, overlay the Subtropical Convergence.”
The navigator typed some keys. A broad and fuzzy yellow ribbon snaked along the map. It crossed the Walvis Ridge at an angle, three hundred sea miles northeast of the mountain pass that
von Scheer
had just left behind. Beck pointed to that spot, where the Subtropical Convergence intersected the Walvis Ridge.
“Fuller has the same information we do. He can read the same maps. His natural impulse and best strategy is to set up another ambush for us,
here
.” He tapped that spot on the chart. “The same confusing sonar and oceanographic conditions we used to our advantage as we crossed the South Atlantic from the Rocks to Mar del Plata apply at this point equally well.” In the hemisphere-girdling zone where frigid currents from Antarctica clashed and merged with warm ones from the equator.
“If he hides inside the convergence,” Stissinger said, “we might be able to sneak past him.”
“So he’ll either wait for us in front of the convergence, or behind it,” von Loringhoven said.
“The question is which,” Beck said, “in front or behind? Fuller needs to slow us down as much as possible. He knows, so far, that each of our direct encounters has been indecisive, a draw. The Rocks, and then this Walvis pass. Therefore, he’ll wait in the ridge terrain for us
behind
the convergence.”
“Why behind?” the baron asked.
“May I?” Stissinger said.
Beck smiled and nodded. He noticed that Stissinger had been following his lead for the past few days, accepting the baron’s presence without rancor—and allowing their passenger-guest to join in some command discussions as a useful third voice.
Stissinger really is the perfect einzvo: loyal and very capable, yet also keenly adaptable to changing conditions on the ship—responsive without being prodded as my own political thinking and the social dynamic evolve.
“If
Challenger
waits for us on the closer side of the Subtropical Convergence, Baron,” Stissinger explained, “Jeffrey Fuller runs a serious risk. If we break contact for just a short while, say using the extreme acoustic sea state of torpedo blasts, the convergence gives us sanctuary. It’s an ideal place for confusing sound-propagation qualities to offer us excellent cloaking, even from active pinging by a desperate
Challenger
. We’ll have gotten between Fuller and the convoy.
But,
if Fuller seeks to engage us next on the
far
side of the convergence, that sanctuary becomes irrelevant. If we try to use it then, we run the wrong way,
farther
from our priority target, the Allied convoy. And we still have to come back and fight our way past Fuller all over again.”
“Your logic seems inescapable,” von Loringhoven said.