Tidal Rip (40 page)

“Axis?”
Please, God, give me a target,
any
target so I can score a kill.

“Infrasonic tonals indicate engines of British manufacture…. Contact tentatively identified as Brazilian Navydiesel submarine recharging its batteries.”

“Very well, Sonar.”

There was still no sign of the
Admiral von Scheer,
and no message from Norfolk.

Two hours later, Jeffrey almost nodded off as Bell stepped aft to use the head; Lieutenant Sessions came over from the navigation console to fill in for Bell.

Jeffrey watched and listened as COB, sitting at the ship-control station, spoke to the control-room phone talker. COB asked the phone talker to contact the maneuvering room and request Lieutenant Willey to come forward to discuss some engineering details. Jeffrey thought the details seemed minor, but he trusted COB implicitly—and he knew he needed to delegate, not interfere.

Jeffrey decided that his tight, aching stomach might be ready to handle more caffeine and asked the teenage messenger of the watch to get him a mug of hot coffee from the wardroom, loaded with milk and sugar. COB heard this and asked the messenger to wait. He said he’d go aft soon himself and he’d take care of it.

Jeffrey went back to staring at his screens.

Bell returned from the head; he resumed as fire control and general keeper-of-eyes-on-things. Willey arrived from aft, looking a bit puzzled.

COB stood up and stretched, glancing at his commander. “Captain, I think I want to go over this with you first, in private.”

Since Willey was right there, and Willey was senior to Sessions, Jeffrey told Willey to take the conn in his place while Sessions retained the deck. The watchstanders acknowledged, and Jeffrey led COB aft the few paces to the captain’s stateroom.

COB closed the door behind them.

“What’s up?” Jeffrey asked. He caught a glimpse of himself in his dressing mirror. His face was haggard and drawn, and his beard stubble was heavy. As if to emphasize the point, his stomach picked that particular moment to growl, loudly.

“Skipper,” COB said firmly, “there are times when I just gotta say what I gotta say.”

“COB?”

“You need to eat and you need to sleep just like the rest of us.”

Jeffrey opened his mouth to object but COB cut him off.

“Let’s leave aside the question of who really outranks whom, a commander or a master chief. Someone needs to tell you this. Whatcha gonna do,
fire
me for it? Bust me to seaman second class?”

“COB, you know you always have my attention. You don’t need to rub it in like that.”

“See? You’re even
touchy
now, and you’re supposed to be the meanest sumbitch in town in any nasty fight…. Go tothe wardroom immediately. Eat a decent meal and skip the coffee. Then come back here and lie down for a solid six hours at least.”

“But—”

“Sir, we’ll all be right outside! If something happens we’ll get you!”

Jeffrey stood up straighter. COB had made his point. “Aye aye, Master Chief. Tell Lieutenant Willey he retains the conn. He knows the plan. He knows where to find me.” Jeffrey looked at COB and smiled—with relief and gratitude. “You clever old sea dog you. Now I see why you brought the engineer forward.”

Alone in his cabin, Ernst Beck prepared for bed. He welcomed the chance to escape, from his workload and from his overbearing passenger, Baron von Loringhoven.

Beck’s sleep was troubled. He kept waking from vague but disturbing nightmares. He would roll over and fall asleep again, but only for a short while.

Then Ernst Beck had a different sort of dream. He was age ten, and home with his mother and father on their prosperous dairy farm in Bavaria, in the scenic rolling foothills of the mighty snowcapped Alps, near historic and cosmopolitan Munich. In the dream they were finishing dinner, time for dessert, and Beck’s mother had baked a pie that looked and smelled delicious.

Ernst Beck woke in a cold sweat after this dream, soon enough to remember it very vividly. He felt homesick, nostalgic, almost heartbroken for that simple, innocent, and happy time forever lost in the past.

Throwing off the soggy covers, he began to get up; he knew that sleeping now was useless.

As his right foot hit the floor, Beck realized something and almost gasped. To make doubly sure, he rushed to open his laptop and called up a nautical chart. The SEAL setup on the Rocks that Shedler had described in some detail after the battle—the satellite dish and the cables running down into the water—was there for a
reason
. It couldn’t be coincidence. It
had
to be cause and effect.

Beck now understood how the Allies, how
Challenger,
had located his ship near the Rocks in the Atlantic Narrows so easily and precisely. And he recognized what he had to do to keep them from finding him and his ship the same way again.

My unconscious mind took facts and processed them and made connections while I slept.

On the chart on his laptop screen he saw the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks and the east-west ridge on which they lay. The chart also showed the undersea phone cables, as nautical charts usually did.

Through the LAN, Beck downloaded from stored data the exact pattern of the enemy SSQ-75 sonobuoys dropped north of the Rocks during the battle. He overlaid this on the nautical chart.

The fit was too perfect for there to be any other explanation.
They were trying to get me cornered between two cables, to force me to flee over one or the other.

It was the
cables.
It was somehow all about the
cables.

Beck knew the countermeasure was simple, now that he understood the danger. Whenever his ship neared another such old cable on a chart, he’d have to go shallow or go very slow…. Annoying, but a minor inconvencience to beat the Allies’ high-tech trick.

CHAPTER 26

J
effrey awoke refreshed from his long nap and took a very hot shower. He decided to use his privilege as captain and let the steaming water run for two whole minutes continuously.
No quick on-off conserve-the-water navy shower for me today.

Then he shaved, an unpleasant business, as the razor snagged on two-days-plus worth of stubble. He donned clean khakis and checked himself out in the dressing mirror: he was transformed, in appearance and mood.

Now
this
is how a warship’s commanding officer is supposed to look.

Jeffrey went into the control room with a much lighter step than when he’d left it eight hours before. Now, instead, the prospect of more cat and mouse with
von Scheer,
of more stalking and shooting with Korvettenkapitan Ernst Beck, excited him. A thrill of adrenaline rushed through his body.

The weapons officer, Lieutenant Torelli, had the deck and the conn. Jeffrey eyed a ship’s clock. It was before midnight, local time. The watch was about to change, as it did every six hours around the clock, day in, day out, whenever the ship was under way but not at actual battle stations.

In the control room, which was rigged for red, Jeffrey greeted Torelli. Weps was fairly new to the ship, having first come aboard for
Challenger
’s previous mission the month before. Jeffrey found out fast, then, that he was a good department head, knowledgeable and yet eager to delegate, crisp and attentive to duty under fire, and great fun to share a beer with while relaxing in home port. Torelli was single, in his late twenties, from a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee. He came across as arrogant until you got to know him. He also seemed like a hard-ass toward his men, until you heard how he mentored them so well as individuals in private.

Jeffrey told Torelli he intended to take the conn once he familiarized himself with the ship’s present status. He then wandered purposefully around the compartment, studying different men’s console displays: sonar, weapons, navigating, ship control.

“Very well,” he said to Torelli. “I have the conn.”

“You have the conn.” Torelli slid over and Jeffrey sat down.

“This is the captain. I have the conn.”

“Aye aye,” the watchstanders acknowledged. Soon the entire watch rotated. A talented lieutenant (j.g.) from Engineering came forward.

Jeffrey settled in at the command workstation conning officer’s console. The lieutenant (j.g.) from Engineering sat next to him, serving as officer of the deck. The OOD’s job was—among other important things—to oversee machinery operations and related procedures inside the ship. This left Jeffrey undistracted, free to monitor the larger picture and make the big decisions on how
Challenger
should fight.

Jeffrey scrolled through the digital log from the previous watch for the sonar department. The sonarmen had detected a number of loud explosions in the distance, back toward North Africa. These were all identified as tactical nuclear detonations on and under the sea.

The battle between the relief convoy and Axis forces is definitely heating up…. Still no hint of a contact on the
von Scheer.

Then Jeffrey had an awful thought. His feeling of being transcendently
alive
at the prospect of combat quickly wilted.

He turned to the messenger of the watch. He tried to keep his voice even. “Where’re the XO and Sonar?”

“XO’s sleeping, sir. Lieutenant Milgrom is using the enlisted mess to do a training drill for some of her people.”

“Get them, smartly.”

“Aye aye.” The messenger, a very young enlisted man still pimply-faced from acne, hurried aft.

Milgrom arrived in seconds. Bell showed up a minute later, stuffing his shirttails into his pants. He fast went from drowsy to alert when he read Jeffrey’s expression.

“People, we have a problem. I think it fell through a crack, all the way up the line.”

“Sir?” Bell and Milgrom said together.

“The
von Scheer
. She’s about the size and shape of one of our boomers?”

“So far as we know, Captain,” Bell said.

“Or one of our boomers converted to SSGNs?”

Bell and Milgrom nodded reluctantly. They saw where the captain was going with this.

“So on ambient or hole-in-ocean sonar alone, we really can’t tell the
von Scheer
from one of our own
Ohio
-class boats?”

“We’d need to get close enough to get good tonals, sir,” Milgrom said, “to rule out that possibility. Yes.”

“Not quite,” Bell said. “We’d have their depth and speed. The
Ohio
ships can’t go below about a thousand feet, and can’t go past something like twenty-five knots, max. Anything deeper or faster has to be the
von Scheer
.”

“But shallow and slow, a contact could be friend or enemy, correct?” Jeffrey said. “Shifting our operational area to South America throws a wrench in the works. We don’t have any data on our own boomers’ patrol boxes. We don’t have up-to-date data on their or the SSGNs’ en route safe corridors in this part of the ocean either.”

“It would compromise security to give out too much of that info, Skipper,” Bell said. “When we left Norfolk we didn’t have a conceivable need to know. It’s the same old thing, moles and spies and code breaking. This go-round, they might cost
us
the war.”

“These are special circumstances,” Milgrom said. “Perhaps if we made the request, Captain, Strategic Command would give us what we require.”

Jeffrey frowned. “To ask, we’d need to radiate. We radiate, we make a datum that could get us killed…. And then there’s the very real likelihood our request will be denied…. No, we can’t risk it.”

Bell worked his jaw, thinking hard. “So if we see something huge out there, moving slow and shallow, we need to get in really close to make sure it’s the
von Scheer
and not a friend.”

Jeffrey nodded.

“What about Russian boomers or SSGNs?” Milgrom asked. “They’re very large.”

“They’re all in their bastions, way up north, playing pure defense. That’s one problem we
don’t
have.”

“Would
von Scheer
really go shallow and slow?” Bell asked. “To fool us like that, Captain?”

“Beck can’t hide in the bottom when the Brazil Basin’s abyssal plain goes down twenty thousand feet or more in places. What’s his next-best choice?”

Milgrom and Bell looked at each other. Milgrom said it for both of them. “Ape an
Ohio
to throw us off.”

“And at eight hundred feet or whatever,” Jeffrey said, “with the water so deep, Orpheus is useless. Even when he steamed right over one, Beck’s hull and the telephone cable would be something like four miles apart.”

Jeffrey saw Bell and Milgrom’s faces fall as he made that last, unpleasant statement.

The intercom from the radio room blinked. Jeffrey picked up his handset. “Captain.”

“Sir,” the lieutenant (j.g.) communications officer said, “an ELF message now coming in with our address.”

“What’s it say? I’ll hold.”

Jeffrey glanced at Milgrom and Bell. “Another ELF message.”

Bell got excited, then confused. “An Orpheus contact report? But you just—”

Jeffrey cut him off as the radio room had more.

“Come to floating-wire-antenna depth,” the lieutenant(j.g.) read off the message’s cipher-block meanings. “Do not radiate. Imperative; no recourse. Commander, Atlantic Fleet sends.”

“Very well.” Jeffrey hung up the mike.

“XO, take the conn. Bring us up to floating-wire-antenna depth. Then trail the wire. I’ll be in the radio room.” He ran his eyes over the tactical plot once more. “Have the messenger knock if you run into the slightest trouble out here.”

Jeffrey went to the rear of the control room, to the radio room. The door was posted with dire security warnings—most of the crew were never permitted access. He punched in the combination to the lock and entered.

The compartment was small and crammed with electronic equipment and men. Here were all the transmitters and receivers
Challenger
could use, covering radio bands from deep-penetrating ELF extremely low frequency, up to SHF super-high frequency used for satellite communications. The radio room also contained
Challenger
’s encrypting and decrypting gear. This hardware and software, including onetime-use code keys and very advanced data-scrambling routines, were some of the most highly classified materials on the ship.