Tidal Rip (27 page)

“I really wish you’d stop doing that,” Beck said.

“I apologize again, Captain. I’m just beginning to grasp how many unwritten rules there are to proper etiquette aboard a submarine. You were right, of course, to tell me that I am not now in an embassy or at a diplomatic reception.”

“Speaking of which, Baron, I am formally inviting you to dine with me and my officers in the wardroom tonight…. I’m sure security won’t be compromised. If anything, by hiding from everyone and eating alone, you’re only drawing the wrong sort of attention to yourself.”

“Thank you, Captain. I would be honored to join you and your officers for dinner.”

“Good. Now. I’ve been told by the kampfschwimmer chief that one of the warheads retrieved is in usable-enough condition that we can continue on our way.”

“Excellent.”

“It is thus time to open the next envelope with my orders.”

Von Loringhoven nodded. “At your convenience, Captain.”

Hmm. The guy does seem to be showing a little respect and humility now. Maybe there’s hope for him after all.

Beck opened his safe and retrieved the latest envelope. Each time, the package grew thinner and lighter, but he could tell there were several more layers of sealed orders within orders.

Ernst Beck read. “Ach.” He had to grin. “This is all nicely thought out. There’s some risk, especially for the kampfschwimmer, but less than I expected for
von Scheer
.”

“You see now why the Russians turned toward Nova Scotia. We want the Americans to think you’re aiming to catch the convoy from behind, from the north.”

Beck nodded. “And the strongest convoy defenses will be protecting their eastern flank, standing between the cargo ships and the hostile Euro-African coast as they head for the Congo pocket.”

“Precisely. And to throw ourselves against the Americans’ strongest defenses is foolish.”

“And thus we cut ahead and attack from where they least expect and they’re least prepared. From their
front,
from south of the convoy, and with accurate firing solutions from very long range…I want to check a nautical chart.” Beck switched on his laptop, connected to the
von Scheer
’s onboard fiber-optic local area network. “Look with me, Baron.”

Von Loringhoven came around to Beck’s side of the little fold-down desk.

“Right here is the place.” Beck tapped a spot on the map with his light pen. “Of course, we still have details to work out, but we have several days to get there…. I suggest, Baron, that you and I both make up for our sleep deficit. I’ll have a messenger fetch us a good meal now, then wake us both in time for dinner.”

“Delightful.”

Beck used his intercom to dial the wardroom pantry chief. They spoke briefly. Beck hung up.

“Fresh ham, hot carrots, also fresh, and freshly baked bread, for two, is on the way. Eat with me here, Baron.”

“With pleasure.”

“Excuse me for a moment while I speak to the einzvo.” Beck stepped out of his cabin and walked the few paces to the Zentrale. The acting weapons officer had the deck, while Stissinger kept an eye on things. Beck approached Stissinger.

“Our guest has accepted the invitation to dine in the wardroom tonight.” He touched the side of his nose, knowingly, and saw an answering sparkle in Stissinger’s eyes.

“We’ll make a good shipmate out of him yet, Captain.”

Beck gave the weapons officer and navigator orders to get the
von Scheer
under way, toward the craggy, broken bottom terrain of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: “Nap of seafloor cruising mode. Mean speed of advance twenty-five knots. Base course southwest until we reach the east side of the main ridge flank, then base course south. Maintain rig for ultraquiet.”

Both men acknowledged; Stissinger calmly monitored their performance. Beck returned to his cabin. Von Loringhoven sat there patiently.

Beck started to clear the papers and computer from his desk. But first, he took one more look at the nautical chart on the laptop screen. “A clever stratagem,” he said expansively, “and a good choice. A useless menace to navigation, hundreds of miles from land. A perfect place to set up a land-based satellite downlink station, and an undersea acoustic link to talk to us while we can hide…. My only trouble isthe real estate belongs to a neutral country.”

“Don’t concern yourself,” von Loringhoven said. “Efforts are under way that ought to remove that worry from your mind.”

“Specifics?”

“Not yet.”

“Funny, I somehow knew you’d say that.” Both men chuckled, sharing a good laugh for the first time since they’d met.

Beck looked at the map a final time, examining their destination. “Desolate, unoccupied, a radioactive wasteland now. It’s the last place I’d ever think to choose…which is probably exactly why Berlin chose it. And it
is
so centrally located.” He turned off his computer just as two messmen arrived with the meal trays.

On both trays were two shot glasses filled with schnapps.

Beck raised the first glass. “To a successful voyage, and now to a nice long well-earned nap.”

Von Loringhoven raised his glass. “To a successful voyage, and to more good work by our kampfschwimmer.” He downed his schnapps in one gulp.

For a moment, Beck thought there was a soulless predatory look in the other man’s eyes. It sent a chill up his spine, enough to ruin the feeling of warmth brought on by the schnapps.

Von Loringhoven raised his second glass. “To our destination, our ear to Berlin’s sea-surveillance satellites, the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks.”

CHAPTER 16

F
our days later, near the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks, Jeffrey stood in the aisle in
Challenger
’s control room. A main display screen on the forward bulkhead, above COB’s and Meltzer’s ship-control stations, showed him and everyone else the big picture.
Challenger
lurked deep in the western foothills of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, eleven thousand feet down. Farther west was the flat and open Ceara Plain, four thousand feet even deeper than that, off the northeast coast of Brazil.
Challenger
’s minisub lingered shallow, near the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks. The mini was careful to keep a direct acoustic line of sight to Jeffrey’s ship, southwest of the Rocks.

The two vessels communicated by covert undersea acoustic link, which transmitted voice or data by a series of digitized pulses. The pulses were incredibly short, at frequencies extremely high and changing thousands of times each second—so the likelihood of intercept by an enemy was very low. The range of the link was up to thirty nautical miles, depending on local oceanographic conditions.

Most of the Orpheus setup work was complete. Robotic undersea vehicles, launched from
Challenger
and controlled by the ship’s technicians or by specialist SEALs in the mini-sub, had tapped into the undersea telephone cables. Thin wires from those taps were strung to a place by the Rocks, in sheltered water one hundred feet deep. SEAL divers had rigged those wires into an anchor and relay station, ready for use by men at Orpheus consoles in the minisub, and ready for linkage by fiber-optic to a satellite transceiver site that the SEALs would create on the Rocks.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Milgrom reported, “Lieutenant Estabo is calling from the minisub. He indicates he’s ready to transfer to the Rocks.”

“Ask him how Orpheus is performing so far.”

“Wait one, sir.” She spoke into her microphone and listened on her headset. Classified signal-processing software encoded and decoded the two-way conversation and generated the sonar pulses
Challenger
sent to the minisub; the mini had identical software, though her sonar arrays were simpler and less powerful.

“Sir, his men are just now calibrating the consoles. Lieutenant Estabo prefers to establish the satellite link with Norfolk first, to double-check each other using raw incoming Orpheus data.”

“Very well. Tell him to proceed.”

Milgrom spoke into her mike, then signed off. To deliver Felix to the Rocks, the mini would have to move in closer, and the line of sight, the acoustic link, to
Challenger
would be blocked.

Jeffrey looked at the main display once more. Bell had the conn, and Jeffrey glanced over the man’s shoulder at the tactical situation plot. Something just didn’t add up.

“XO, Sonar, I want you both in my stateroom.”

Officers traded places as Bell passed the conn to Lieutenant Sessions. One senior chief, the assistant navigator, took over for Sessions. Another senior chief, the sonar supervisor, sat in for Milgrom. Bell and Milgrom followed Jeffrey to his stateroom.

“What’s the matter, Skipper?” Bell asked. He stood, because Jeffrey was standing. Milgrom stood too, and frowned, because Jeffrey was frowning.

“Sonar, when was the last time you heard a nuclear detonation in the North Atlantic?”

“Days, sir. We’ve heard hardly any since departing New London.”

“And how long has the relief convoy been under way?”

“About a week,” Bell said. “Pretty much the same as us.”

“And where is the convoy right now?”

“Right now? Streaming down toward the Atlantic Narrows.”

“We’re just picking up traces of their signature, sir, on our wide-aperture arrays,” Milgrom said.

“A week. Why haven’t the U-boats attacked?”

Milgrom and Bell looked at each other. Bell spoke for both of them. “I guess we’ve all been wondering, Captain.”

“And our latest intelligence download from Norfolk confirmed what our sonars have heard. Or haven’t heard.”

Milgrom and Bell nodded; when
Challenger
went shallow to launch the minisub with Felix and his men, Jeffrey had used his floating wire antenna to grab short text messages from headquarters. Jeffrey summarized what he’d been told then.

“The convoy escorts picked up a few false contacts, dropped high-explosive torpedoes or depth charges, and then nothing. No confirmed contacts, no confirmed kills…They blew up biologics by mistake, or bleary-eyed observers were just seeing things, or nervous sonar techs heard sounds that weren’t there.”

Milgrom and Bell nodded again, reluctantly.

“Don’t you see what’s happening?”

“Sir?”

“Atlantic Fleet’s whole take on the shape of the battle has been all wrong.
The defensive tactics, the carrier and escort dispositions, everything, they’ve been all wrong
.”

Bell nodded.

Milgrom glanced at the XO. Her face turned grim. “The Axis have been one step ahead of us the entire time, haven’t they, sir?”

Jeffrey looked into space and worked his jaw. “For a solid week the carrier battle groups and escorting ships and fast-attacks have been at general quarters almost nonstop. Their antisubmarine helos and aircraft have been flying patrols on high alert around the clock. Men and women will be exhausted, close to dropping on their feet, from lack of sleep and interrupted meals. Equipment will be worn down more and more, to the point where critical failures are almost imminent, from the aggressive operational tempo. Crews on the merchant ships will be going crazy from the endless waiting game…. And nobody’s sunk one single U-boat. And I think I know exactly why.”

“Yes, sir,” Milgrom said; she obviously realized why too.

“The
real
battle, the battle the Axis intend to fight exclusively on their own terms, hasn’t even started yet. Their submarines are massed much farther south that we expected.”

Bell looked. “You mean—”

“Yup. In a day or so, the convoy starts to go through the Atlantic Narrows. The Axis knows we’re coming, and they know our ships can’t hide. Then, for another entire week, the convoy and escorts try to run the South Atlantic. The carrier battle groups and our available fast-attacks are mostly deployed for a fight in the
North
Atlantic, that was supposed to have come from the
east,
from Europe, already. Now they’re out of position to give good mutual support against a massed threat to the south. If they come steaming through the Narrows one at a time, they’ll get torn to pieces. Think about it.”

“Oh, God,” Bell said.

“To the west, thousands of miles away, will be the neutral, unhelpful shores of South America. To their east and then their north will loom the bulge of occupied North Africa, menacing the convoy’s left flank the whole way. To the south, against their
other
flank, are Boer home waters.”

“I see what you’re leading to, Captain,” Milgrom said.

“
That’s
where they’ll strike.
That’s
what they’ve been waiting for all along, sitting fat and happy and stealthy and rested and fresh. The convoy-versus-U-boat fight won’t be in the North Atlantic at all. It’ll be in the one place where the enemy holds every card, geographically, logistically, strategically…. They’ll have mobile antiship and antiaircraft cruise-missile launchers moving along the coast, shooting and scooting, working in concert with the wolf packs. The whole fight will be on the last leg of the convoy’s journey, in the
South
Atlantic, with the tail of support for U.S. forces stretching back six or seven thousand miles, stretched to the breaking point.”

Bell hesitated. “What should we do? Reposition the ship? Is all of this work by the Rocks just a waste?”

Jeffrey stood there in his stateroom with the door closed. “XO, I wish I knew.”

CHAPTER 17

E
rnst Beck sat alone and lonely at the head of the wardroom table. Two great men looked down at him, one alive and one dead.

To his left, on the bulkhead in an expensive gilt-edged frame, hung an oil painting of the new kaiser, Wilhelm IV. To Beck’s right, on the opposite bulkhead, hung a portrait of his ship’s namesake, Admiral Reinhard von Scheer—commander in chief of the High Seas Fleet at the height of World War I.

Reinhard von Scheer wore a thin black mustache; the hair at his temples had started to gray; his eyes were dark and piercing. The artist of the portrait had captured von Scheer’s expression skillfully, and brought the man forever to life. Von Scheer’s intelligent face was poised somewhere between a dissatisfied frown and a benevolent smile. The smile looked like it was just on the verge of winning out over the frown. From history, Beck knew the admiral had been daring but prudent, inventive but cautious, a brilliant tactician under fire…and an iron-willed opportunist who at Jutland—Skagerrak to the Germans—damaged a vastly superior British force and then escaped against all odds with his own squadrons mostly intact.