Tidal Rip (19 page)

Jeffrey greeted the two-man crew of his minisub—a junior officer and a senior chief—then went into the mini’s transport compartment and took a catnap. He woke when he felt the minisub maneuvering for the docking inside
Challenger
’s pressure-proof in-hull hangar, behind her sail.

The mini’s crew went through final mating and lockdown procedures. The big doors of the hangar swung closed. Ambient sea pressure around the mini was relieved. The crew undogged the bottom hatch and opened the top hatch of
Challenger
’s mating-trunk air lock. Jeffrey quickly climbed down the steep steel ladder. Minisub maintenance technicians were ready with tool bags to climb up.

Jeffrey came out of the air lock into a narrow corridor inside his ship. His executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Jackson Jefferson Bell, was waiting for him.

“Welcome back, Captain,” Bell said.

“Good to see you again, XO.” The two men shook hands firmly and warmly.

“How’s the baby?” Bell’s wife had given birth to their first child, a son, a couple of months before.

“Great, sir.” Bell grinned. To Jeffrey he was a changed man since becoming a father, somehow more mature and mellow, and more involved with life. Jeffrey felt a bit jealous.

“Lieutenant Willey has the deck and conn,” Bell said. Willey was the ship’s engineer.

“The crew has a basic idea of our mission parameters?”

“Yes, sir. I was briefed by Commodore Wilson’s deputy and also had a private talk with commander, Sub Group Two.” He referred to the rear admiral commanding the three New London fast-attack squadrons—Wilson’s boss. “I’ve told the men about the convoy sailing for the Central African pocket, sir, and our role to seek and destroy the
Admiral von Scheer
.”

“Good. Let’s make the CACC our first stop.” CACC, command and control center, was the modern name for a submarine’s control room.

Jeffrey followed Bell down the corridor. The lieutenant commander was a couple of inches taller than Jeffrey was, fit but not as muscular, and a couple of years younger. Bell’s walk was confident. His posture projected pent-up positive energy. He was clearly pumped from having been in command of the ship in Jeffrey’s absence. Jeffrey smiled to himself.
I’m gonna need Bell’s skills and support more than ever, on
this
mission.

Crewmen Jeffrey went by perked up when they saw their captain. He smiled and gave them quick hellos.

It’s good to be back.
Jeffrey took in the familiar sights, sounds, and smells of his command. The flameproof linoleum tiles on the deck. The imitation-wood wainscoting that covered the bulkheads. The bright red fire extinguishers and axes. The gentle breeze of coolness through the ventilator ducts. The triangular Velcro-like pads on the deck that marked valves for the emergency air-breathing masks. The long and narrow pipes along the overheads, with clusters of fittings for those valves—and all the other exposed bundles of pipes and wires and cables flowing like purposeful rivers everywhere.

Bell had put the ship at battle stations for the rendezvous, just in case. Jeffrey squeezed past damage-control parties stationed in the corridors. Again he greeted his crew. Some wore thick and heavy firefighting gear. Most of the men were barely out of their teens.

The control room was rigged for white—normal daytime fluorescent lighting. Jeffrey stood in the aisle. Lieutenant Willey sat at the two-man desk-high command workstation in the center of the compartment. Bell sat down in the other seat, as fire-control coordinator. The overall atmosphere was one of concentration and great care: although
Challenger
was still in heavily patrolled home waters, an enemy threat could appear at any time—an Axis submarine, a mine, anything. Jeffrey let Willey retain the conn. He told him to go deep and head due south at the ship’s top quiet speed: twenty-six knots.

Jeffrey liked the lanky and straight-talking Willey. He had been an engineer himself, on his own department-head tour, between his stint at the Pentagon and his more recent planning assignment at the Naval War College. Like many nuclear submarine engineers, Willey had an air of intensity and overwork. Besides his turns on watch as officer of the deck and conn in the CACC, he was responsible for a million details of keeping
Challenger
’s entire propulsion system in good shape. Willey’s turf was the whole back half of the boat, from the reactor compartment to the hot and cramped engine room and turbogenerator spaces to the pump jet behind the stern. He had broken a leg in combat on
Challenger
’s first war patrol in December, but that hadn’t stopped him—leg in a cast and all—from going right back out with Jeffrey on their next emergency assignment. By now, Willey’s leg was well healed.

Jeffrey went back and forth between checking the status of the ship’s important systems with Bell on Bell’s display screens, and greeting—and sizing up—the other main members of his battle-stations team.

Challenger
’s chief of the boat, whom everyone called COB—pronounced “cob”—sat in the left seat of the ship control station at the front of the control room. COB was a salty master chief of Latino background, built like a bulldog, with a leadership style to match. COB came from a clan of Jersey City truckers, but he liked to brag that as the black sheep of the family, he instead had gone to sea. COB was—among many other things—effectively head foreman and shop steward for all of
Challenger
’s enlisted people. He was in charge of their training, morale, and discipline. The oldest man aboard, in his early forties, COB’s many years of navy service gave him potent credibility. Now, at the ship-control station, he managed the ship’s ballast and trim tanks, compressed air banks, pumps of all types including the powerful bilge pumps, and the hydraulic systems. COB constantly scanned his dials and readings and indicator lights. Flow diagrams and schematics danced on his screens. He worked switches to fine-tune things, as slight differences in temperature and salinity in the surrounding water altered the water’s density, and with it
Challenger
’s buoyancy—her tendency to rise or sink.

Next to COB sat the battle-stations helmsman, Lieutenant(j.g.) David Meltzer. Meltzer was a tough kid from the Bronx who always walked with his chest puffed out, as if he were asking the world to give him something even more interesting and hard to do. Meltzer spoke with a heavy Bronx accent he made no effort to disguise and wore a class ring as a Naval Academy graduate. Jeffrey thought very highly of him. Meltzer sometimes acted as the pilot of
Challenger
’s minisub; in the past few months, he had driven Jeffrey, Ilse Reebeck, and a team of Navy SEALs to and from land combat more than once. Meltzer was cool under fire. As helmsman, he controlled
Challenger
’s depth, course, and speed, based on helm orders from whoever had the conn—the job was not an easy one, when combat called for fast and tight maneuvers of the nine-thousand-ton vessel in close proximity to bottom terrain.

On the control room’s port side was a row of seven sonar consoles, each with two large screens, one above the other, a computer keyboard, track marbles, and sets of special headphones. At the front of the row sat Royal Navy Lieutenant Kathy Milgrom, an exchange officer, and also part of a controversial experiment. Before the war broke out, the Royal Navy began placing women in fast-attack sub crews. This was partly an outgrowth of European Union court rulings about equal rights in all military combat units. It was, to some, a natural extension of the Royal Australian Navy’s success with coed crews on their
Collins
-class diesel subs, going back more than a decade. And maybe most important, to its proponents, and especially now with this war, using women on the UK’s nuclear submarines doubled the available supply of talented people.

Kathy Milgrom was especially valuable to
Challenger
because she’d served as HMS
Dreadnought
’s sonar officer. The ceramic-hulled
Dreadnought
had been operational months before
Challenger
completed post-shakedown maintenance and workup training. Milgrom was in the thick of the fighting in the North Atlantic, starting in the summer of the previous year, whereas Captain Wilson took
Challenger
into battle—with Jeffrey as his XO—for the first time last December. With the brain trust Lieutenant Milgrom represented, from her working directly with Ilse Reebeck on sound propagation and oceanographic nap-of-seafloor tactics in very deep water, she’d be a vital resource to
Challenger
in their hunt and showdown with the
von Scheer
. Jeffrey gave silent thanks to the British commodore who’d recommended her temporary transfer, and to the U.S. Navy brass who, with some note of caution, had approved it.

The sonar chiefs and enlisted technicians had no trouble accepting Milgrom’s leadership as sonar officer and did everything possible to meet her very high standards of job performance. Right now every sonar console was manned. Keyboards clicked, and sonarmen listened intently on their headphones, as waterfall displays cascaded slowly down different screens. Other screens showed jagged graphs that squiggled constantly, or confettilike charts of scalloped arcs and sine curves. All this told Jeffrey that
Challenger
’s hydrophone arrays were working hard to pull in even the subtlest noises from outside. Advanced signal processing software gave meaning to the incoming jumbles of multitudinous sound waves that wafted past the ship from everywhere.

Occasionally something would streak diagonally across a waterfall display like a shooting star or comet. Jeffrey knew these were nearby overflying aircraft. Murmuring came from the sonarmen, and Milgrom and her senior-chief sonar supervisor spoke as new contacts were reported and then classified.

The last main player in Jeffrey’s control-room team was
Challenger
’s navigator, Lieutenant Richard Sessions. Jeffrey walked to the rear of the control room, where Sessions worked at the digital navigation plotting table. Sessions came from a small town in Nebraska. His hair and clothing always tended to look a little sloppy no matter what he did, but there was nothing sloppy about his work. He and his assistants precisely monitored
Challenger
’s position on a large-scale nautical chart. This chart, on the big horizontal main navigation computer screen, also showed the day’s top-secret Allied submarine safe corridors. From time to time, Sessions recommended course corrections to Lieutenant Willey to make sure the ship stayed well inside these corridors and thus avoided friendly fire—unstable deep-sea currents and underwater storm fronts could make the ship’s position drift. Willey would relay conning orders to Meltzer at the helm. Meltzer acknowledged and worked his split-yoke control wheel.

On the navigation display, Jeffrey eyed the trace of
Challenger
’s course since departing New London. He had some questions for Bell about that. Bell was busy talking to the fire-control men and weapons technicians, who manned consoles along the control room’s starboard side. Some of these consoles tracked all the different sonar contacts held by Kathy Milgrom’s people, and projected their future positions compared to
Challenger
’s while simultaneously feeding data to the main situation plot on Bell’s and Willey’s screens.

In actual combat Jeffrey would sit where Willey was sitting. The master plot showed estimated range and bearing to each contact, the contact’s likely course and speed, whether it was airborne or on the surface or submerged, and also marked the time and place of its closest approach to
Challenger
—the latter was vital to avoid any risk of collision. The plot was busy with icons for merchant ships, warships, and planes.

Bell’s weapons officer, Lieutenant Bud Torelli—called Weps for short—worked at a special console on a lower deck near the torpedo room. This separation from Bell was intended to enhance the safety and surety both of handling the atomic warheads at all times, and of launching their torpedoes properly in battle. Torelli kept in constant touch with Bell by intercom and sound-powered phone and fiber-optic LAN as needed.

Jeffrey saw Bell was drilling his weapons-systems specialists, having them practice on the friendly surface contacts by pretending to aim mock weapons at each one.
This is where everything comes together,
Jeffrey told himself.
In the days to come, getting in the first shots and not missing will decide if I succeed or fail.
The real-time linkage—between raw data from sonar and accurate knowledge of a target’s range, course, and speed—depended on powerful target-motion analysis algorithms, some of which used math so advanced it was classified.
The validity of this information hinges on the skill of almost every person in the CACC.
Reliable data was essential to placing warheads on a moving target quickly and unerringly—a good firing solution was the only way to score a kill.

The dependability of my ship, her stealth, her power to take damage and stay in the fight depend on every person in the crew.

Jeffrey looked around the control room one more time. He pictured the bustling activity elsewhere aboard. Junior officers, chiefs, and enlisted personnel supported the three department heads—Willey, Sessions, and Torelli—and filled places in the watch, quarter, and station bill throughout the vessel. There were 120 people in
Challenger
’s crew.

Speaking of my crew, and of getting under way from New London…

Jeffrey asked Bell to come with him to the captain’s stateroom.

First, Bell spoke to the CACC phone talker and modified the drill. “XO is a casualty. Continue targeting exercise.”

The phone talker spoke into his bulky sound-powered mike without missing a beat. “Fire-control coordinator is down.” The youngster listened on his headphones as a phone talker on a lower deck responded.

The CACC phone talker repeated what he’d heard. “Weapons officer reporting to CACC smartly. Assistant weapons officer is manning special-weapons console.”